Saturday, June 28, 2008

Q: Why Is Chris Hayes Like The Wu Tang Clan? (1:14 pm)

A: Well, yes, I’m sure he too has admired the Hudson while he’s dustin’, but more to the point, he also knows what it’s like to have wanna-be hacks ridin’ on the jock of a true innovator. To wit, from today’s Washington Post:

The e-mail landed in Danielle Allen’s queue one winter morning as she was studying in her office at the Institute for Advanced Study, the renowned haven for some of the nation’s most brilliant minds. The missive began: “THIS DEFINITELY WARRANTS LOOKING INTO.”

Laid out before Allen, a razor-sharp, 36-year-old political theorist, was what purported to be a biographical sketch of Barack Obama that has become one of the most effective — and baseless — Internet attacks of the 2008 presidential season. The anonymous chain e-mail makes the false claim that Obama is concealing a radical Islamic background. By the time it reached Allen on Jan. 11, 2008, it had spread with viral efficiency for more than a year. …

Allen set her sights on dissecting the modern version of a whisper campaign, even though experts told her it would be impossible to trace the chain e-mail to its origin. Along the way, even as her hunt grew cold, she gained valuable insight into the way political information circulates, mutates and sometimes devastates in the digital age.

It would’ve saved everybody a lot of time (and a superfluous WaPo feature) if, in January, someone had handed Dr. Allen a two month-old copy of the Nov. 11, 2007 issue of The Nation.

posted by Brian Cook | 1 comment

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Southeast Asia’s unwelcome people (10:53 am)

The Hmong people, who mostly reside in Southeast Asia, have long suffered persecution in Laos. In the ’60s and ’70s, many Laotian Hmong collaborated with the CIA to fight the communist Pathet Lao. When the Pathet Lao took control of Laos in 1975, the Hmong were singled out for revenge. Since then, thousands of Laotian Hmong have sought refuge in the jungle and across the border in Thailand. The Thai government, however, does not recognize them as refugees.

Last week, 5,000 Laotian Hmong attempted to march from a Thai refugee camp to Bangkok. Their aim? To draw attention to their plight and Bangkok’s practice of forcibly returning Hmong to Laos. Thai authorities have responded by rounding up thousands of Hmong. On Sunday, 800 Lao Hmong refugees were forcibly returned to Laos by the Thai government, which intends to conduct further repatriations “in the coming days,” according to Medicins Sans Frontieres.

Earlier this month, bipartisan legislation was introduced in the U.S. Congress calling upon the Thai government to stop repatriations and the Laotian government to cease its persecution of the Hmong.

Al Jazeera English has this story on the Hmong refugees’ miserable state:


posted by Mark Berlin | start the discussion

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Truly Unadulterated Good News (4:30 pm)

This New York Times article leaves me speechless:

In a deal that environmental groups said would be the largest ecological restoration in the country’s history, a plan for the state to buy the nation’s largest producer of cane sugar was announced Tuesday by the governor and officials of U.S. Sugar Corporation.

Governor Charlie Crist of Florida, with Robert H Buker Jr., the chief of U.S. Sugar, held up an agreement struck between the state and the sugar producer.
The intention is to restore the Everglades by restoring the water flow from Lake Okeechobee, in the heart of the state, south to Florida Bay. That flow had been interrupted by commercial farming and the Everglades have suffered as a result.

Under term of the tentative deal, U.S. Sugar would continue farming and processing for six more years before closing the business and allowing 187,000 acres of land to return to its natural state. For its part the state would pay U.S. Sugar $1.7 billion.


For a born-and-raised Floridian like myself, I can’t begin to explain how absolutely mind-blowing this news is. Big Sugar’s sordid role in not only destroying the Everglades (by discharging massive amounts of phosphorous), but also actively obstructing any and all real attempts to help the Everglades recover from that devastation cannot be overemphasized. (See this classic and comprehensive Harper’s piece from 1999, for one example, or, for a shorter, but still admirably comprehensive take, this blog post.) From the state’s Everglades Forever Act in the early 90s to the federal government’s Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan first put together in 2000, Big Sugar’s tactic has been to delay, obstruct and hamstring any real reform efforts. That one-half of the two major Floridian sugar cartels ( the Fanjul brothers are the other) is about to be taken over by the state…well, it boggles the mind.

Now, I’m sure U.S. Sugar is probably fleecing the state on this deal. If I had to guess—-and this is only ungrounded (but logical) speculation on my part—-they’ve done the math and realized that they don’t have many productive growing years left. Cane farming is...   read more

posted by Brian Cook | 4 comments

Friday, June 20, 2008

FISA amendments pass (1:52 pm)

The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 passed moments ago in the House by a vote of 293-129.

Joining the significant majority were House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and House Intelligence Committe Chairman Silveste Reyes. An angry John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, opposed it.

The bill will in practice provide legal immunity to telecommunications companies that participated in President Bush’s Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP) through a provision that will result in the dismissal of lawsuits that might have shined some light on the particulars of the administration’s warrantless wiretapping activities. It does mandate an Inspector General report on the particulars of TSP, but whether that mandate survives the president’s signing statement pen remains to be seen.

During the floor debate, most Democrats who supported the legislation pointed to a provision that makes FISA the exclusive arbiter of the nation’s wiretapping activities—a provision which will allow the supporters of the bill to express their shock and disappointment when this or any future president decides to ignore the law anyhow.

Now the bill moves over to the Senate where all of these, and other provisions will be debated further.

posted by Brian Beutler, Media Consortium | start the discussion

Thursday, June 19, 2008

FISA, Compromised (12:41 pm)

After Democrats stood their ground and refused to pass a series of draconian FISA amendments in February, negotiations over the wiretapping law went behind closed doors. In the months since then, news reports have occasionally suggested that another Democratic party sell-out was imminent, only to be superseded by other reports indicating that negotiations were ongoing. Until today.

A few moments ago, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer released what he refers to as a “bipartisan” “compromise” bill: The FISA Amendment Act of 2008, which he authored along with Jay Rockefeller, Kit Bond, and Roy Blunt (respectively, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Intelligence committee, and the House Minority whip). The word “bipartisan” is technically indisputable. The word “compromise”, by contrast, is a total farce.

The most controversial elements of the February legislation were provisions that would have allowed the White House to wiretap American citizens without a warrant, and that would have immunized telecommunications companies from participating in the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program back in the halcyon days when warrantless wiretapping was unquestionably illegal.

Here’s how the new bill deals with the immunity question.

Notwithstanding any other provision of law, a civil action may not lie or be maintained in a Federal or State court against any person for providing assistance to an element of the intelligence community, and shall be promptly dismissed, if the Attorney General certifies to the district court of the United States in which such action is pending that…the assistance alleged to have been provided by the electronic communication service provider was in connection with an intelligence activity involving communications that was authorized by the President during the period beginning on September 11, 2001, and ending on January 17, 2007.
That’s the game. Non-profit groups like the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation can sue the telecoms if they want, but if Attorney General Michael Mukasey says “presto”, the lawsuits must be dismissed.

As for the nitty gritty of surveillance powers the bill authorizes, here’s what the ACLU says: “This bill allows for mass and untargeted surveillance of Americans’ communications…. The process by which this deal...   read more

posted by Brian Beutler, Media Consortium | start the discussion

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

White House attorneys and American torture (3:57 pm)

Divulged in memos, but largely undiscussed at yesterday’s bombshell Senate Armed Services hearing about the origins of American torture was a September 25, 2002 meeting at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba between Major General Michael Dunlavey — who at the time was overseeing interrogations at the detention facility there — and several of the administrations top lawyers, including Jim Haynes, then general counsel to the Department of Defense, John Rizzo, acting CIA general counsel, David Addington, counsel to the vice president, and Michael Chertoff, then head of the Criminal Division at the Department of Justice.

The trip report is suspiciously short. It notes for the most part that the group received “briefings on Intel successes, Intel challenges, Intel techniques, Intel problems and future plans for facilities,” and that they participated in “private conversations.”

But, through interviews with Dunlavey and Lieutenant Colonel Diane beaver, author Philippe Sands got to the bottom of that trip. In his new book, Torture Team, Sands writes that the Washington gang came down, in part, to learn how the military was treating a suspect named Mohammed al-Qahtani. “They wanted to know what we were doing to get to this guy,” recalled Dunlavey. Beaver said that the message was loud and clear: do “whatever needed to be done.” In Sands words, “a green light from the very top — from the lawyers for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the CIA.

That message was crucial, because just one week later, on October 2, nine people, including Beaver and CIA attorney John Fredman convened at Guantanamo for a “Counter Resistance Strategy Meeting”, where they discussed the implications of the green light, asking questions like, What techniques can we use? and, What constitutes torture? The answers — written up in meeting minutes and obtained by the Senate Armed Services committee — are pretty straightforward.

“We may need to curb the harsher operations while ICRC [the International Committee of the Red Cross] is around. It is better not to expose them to any controversial techniques,” Beaver told the group.

One attendee, Dave Becker, who oversaw interrogations for the Defense Intelligence Agency, noted, “We have reports...   read more

posted by Brian Beutler, Media Consortium | start the discussion

Checking Out: Displacement in the Fast Lane? (2:30 pm)

Forget “paper or plastic.” How about “man or machine”?

Since 1998, retail self-checkout options have been attracting customers who favor speed and convenience over the traditional human checkout option. (In Chicago, for example, nearly 93 percent of Jewel-Osco grocery store locations now offer self-service options.) A 2007 report by Tennessee-based IHL Consulting Group credits continued customer satisfaction with self-checkout alternatives to these two time-sensitive factors.

Retailers like the self-checkout option not only because it can cut costs. Offering customers a greater role in shopping, it turns out, can secure customer loyalty. In a 2008 survey conducted by NCR, the Dayton, Ohio-based company whose NCR FastLane™ technology revolutionized retail self-service in 1998 (and whose partnership with the US Military developed the Eagle Cash program), 85 percent of consumers noted they choose one retailer over another because they offer self-service options. The fast lane now seems as much of a selling point as a retailer’s hot new item or best deal.

Yet fast-lane fanfare begs an important question: What of the worker? The checker? The teller? Do self-checkout options displace hard-working, diligent employees, many of whom have no other employment prospects outside the retail sector? Melissa Jankiewicz, 20, a Front End Cashier and Guest Service Representative at a Menards in southwest Chicago, says:

I see four self-service lanes in a store and can only wonder about the four people who could’ve used those jobs. I think that these machines are very capable of displacing workers, especially those who work as full-time cashiers. It appears to me that the better these machines are developed, the more they’ll be utilized in retail space, meaning that more cashiers are going to be out jobs.

In Chicago, Local 881 of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) says it safeguards workers against the fast lane. Both Local 881, the collective bargaining representative for 36,000 workers primarily in Illinois and Northwest Indiana’s retail food and drug industry, and the UFCW have actively tried to preserve and protect jobs affected by self-scanners and similar equipment. Says Elizabeth Drea, Public Relations Coordinator for 881:

There is language in most...   read more

posted by Brian Allen Anderson | start the discussion

Barack Obama, s’il vous plait (1:02 pm)

Obama’s candidacy may mean as much to France’s black population as to America’s, according to this thoughtful and surprising NY Times article, which taught me this:

…it’s against the rules for the government to conduct [French government] surveys according to race. Consequently, nobody even knows for certain how many black citizens there are. Estimates vary between 3 million and 5 million out of a population of more than 61 million.

But, a few days after dozens of teenagers battled police in a minority suburb, and three years after weeks of riots in Parisian suburbs and beyond, the French reality doesn’t seem as colorblind as its ideal:

Since it abolished slavery 160 years ago, the country has officially declared itself to be colorblind — but seeing Mr. Obama, a new generation of French blacks is arguing that it’s high time here for precisely the sort of frank discussions that in America have preceded the nomination of a major black candidate.

I don’t think this campaign season’s discussion of race has been particularly “frank,” but if these stats are accurate, France needs that kind of discussion as much as we do:

…one black member representing continental France in the National Assembly among 555 members; no continental French senators out of some 300; only a handful of mayors out of some 36,000, and none from the poor Paris suburbs.

To this may be added Cran’s [a black organization devised not long ago partly to gather statistics the government won’t ] findings that the percentage of blacks in France who hold university degrees is 55, compared with 37 percent for the general population. But the number of blacks who get stuck in the working class is 45 percent, compared with 34 percent for the national average.

posted by Jeremy Gantz | start the discussion

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