For a variety of reasons I have decided to end this blog and start over tomorrow, at
HugoZoom.Blogspot.Com.

The archives will stay(as long as Blogger allows it.).

If you're one of the (handful of) people who've read me here I'd like to thank you,
and invite you to follow me there.

Read This story!!

From what I’ve seen of the UK’s Sunday Mail, it’s about as serious a journalistic enterprise as our People magazine. Nevertheless, it should warm the hearts of civil libertarians everywhere that the Mail is defying a German court’s order that they refrain from publishing allegations about Chancellor Gerhard Schoeder’s hanky panky with a German tv personality(or “television presenter” as the Brits say.). Our president only wishes he had German courts here to muzzle the press-- although sadly it seems he really hasn’t needed this of late, US mainstream journalism seeming only too cowed and happy to muzzle itself.

N.B. The last I checked I haven't seen the actual story, only the story about the story on BBC News. My link doesn't seem to be working. It's at www.sundaymail.co.uk, if you're curious.

Courtesy Tom Paine.Com,
by way of Maru the Crankpot:

"...CNN, America's premier showcase for international news, struck the Serbian journalists as jingoistic, amateurish, shallow, and speculation-crazy, especially when compared to the generally calm and thoughtful BBC. As for the Fox News Channel, its daily fare sounded suspiciously like the rabidly nationalistic, pro-Milosevic propaganda the Serbs are still trying to flush out of the system here." - Russ Baker

OFF MESSAGE:
Condaleeza Rice's statement concerning affirmative action:
"When the President decided to submit an amicus brief, he asked for my view on how diversity can be best achieved on university campuses.
"I offered my view, drawing on my experience in academia and as provost of a major university. I agree with the President's position, which emphasizes the need for diversity and recognizes the continued legacy of racial prejudice, and the need to fight it.
"The President challenged universities to develop ways to diversify their populations fully.
"I believe that while race neutral means are preferable, it is appropriate to use race as one factor among others in achieving a diverse student body."

O.K. She says that she agrees with dubya's position, but she feels that it is "appropriate to use race as one factor among others to achieve a diverse student body." But that's precisely the University of Michigan's position. They use a numerical formula in which race counts for a maximum of 20 points, where a perfect score, as it were, is 150--and most competitive candidates earn at least 100 points. Let's see; 20/150 points works out to approximately 13.33 per cent of the factors used by UM.

We're Left They're Wrong links to this Atlantic article referring to a five question poll the Clinton campaign did in 1996, in which they predicated their polling on respondents' attitudes towards sex, the assumption being that sexual attitudes were a more salient predictor of party affiliation then every other variable besides race. The problem, as I see it, is the social conservatives, like older people* are far more likely to vote, as are more-well-heeled persons.


*and of course many are both.

[this post has been ammended(2006), primarily for clarity. I believe that "WLTW" is defunct.]

Yahoo's news item-related message boards tend to be populated with mainly, well, yahoos.People with questionable language skills who want us to bomb this or that foreign country into the stone age and are sick and tired of of those whiny liberals going on about... Well, you get the idea.

However, apropo of Bush's challenge of affirmative action at Michigan, I came across this post from "Wayne X":

Bush couldnt spell affirmative action
The main dilemma that affirmative action faces is the lack of comprehension by the general population. This misinterpretation of the goals of affirmative action has led to creation of myths. Many of the notions misuse the principles of fairness, social color-blindness, and equality, as Ms. Plous from the American Psychological Association explains in her Ten Myths About Affirmative Action essay. Additional research from the American Psychological Association is summed up in a brief article entitled, "Ignorance plagues Affirmative Action" One of the most striking discoveries of the 15 year study was that 40 percent of the participants "had no idea what [affirmative action] is ," or is not. It is not surprising that negative connotations attached to the racially exclusionary aspect of affirmative action be prevalent among those not eligible for participation. One such myth about affirmative action is that it hurts the status of Anglo-Americans and Asian-Americans. Although individuals may be affected through the logistics of affirmative action, looking at the population as a whole, the Anglo-American male still maintains society's structural power while the Asian community is fully represented in academic institutions as government studies show. One may note that these communities will fair better socially due to their large representations in well respected occupations. Another key misconception about affirmative action is that it lends to selection of mediocre candidates. This belief is based upon low test scores presented by the candidate who most probably comes from a low-income environment, which provides inadequate learning facilities. The myth does not take into consideration, what the candidate's potential might be had his/her background been more consistent with the average (male Anglo) person. Therefore, affirmative action addresses the general equality and fair treatment of oppressed minority populations.It is "fairness for equality" principle of affirmative action which is often overlooked. The discussion may be facilitated with the use of a progressive tax example. A lower paid citizen should pay a lower tax percentage than a citizen which gets paid more in order to maintain an equivalent tax amount paid by both of them. This method illustrates the priniciple of fairness. Applying the analogy to the academic arena, affirmative action equalizes and provides fair judging of a minority's performance on standardized tests, which often assume that all schools offer equal curriculums. The desicion making process now allows for an analysis of the candidate's overall performance and background, who most likely is worthy of an opportunity to prove him/herself as MIT Research concludes. In view of the effects that misunderstanding the intentions of affirmative action can produce, full comprehension of the matter is required.

I felt compelled to post a reply that he was wasting his time with that bunch, as his erudition was mostly wasted on that lot .

Avedon Carol of The Sideshow has an interesting post referencing an interesting interesting times post(sorry) which suggests that Tony Blair has consciously chosen to play the role of European lapdog for Bush(my term, not theirs) because he's trying to contain dubya, to keep him from making the situation viz Iraq more incendiary. And here I thought that was Colin Powell's job. Given the unpopularity of Bush's upcoming war with the Brits, this may make some sense.
* * *
(Incidentally, I may have linked incorrectly to The Sideshow in the past, as I just noticed that her permalinks are to be found at the beginning of a post, not at the end, as they are with Blogger. Ms. Carol was gracious enough to link to me Sunday( 1.12.03), (and mentioned that I need to put spaces between sentences-- I think I may have found the problem-- posting via Netscape 4x, which makes letters look farther apart than they are, at least on my 15" screen. I still prefer Netscape 4x's e-mail editor to Netscape 7's, or to any iteration of Outlook Express. If I knew a way to graft it on to MS IE 6 I could do with one browser. Maybe I should give that Irish kid a ring.) And I still need to repost my 2002 archive, although I'm thinking of jettisoning a bunch of it.)

You Go, Joe
Salon.com's Joe Conason observes that yesterday's USA
Today/CNN/Gallup poll shows dubya's numbers coming down to earth(the USA Today headline notes that his 58 per cent favorability rating is his lowest since 9.11.)

As USA Today quite correctly notes, 58 per cent is still a pretty robust number, and higher than Reagan's in the third year of his first term. But perhaps more significant were the specific subcategories:

what group does Bush generally favor?
by more than 2 to 1, the respondents said the wealthy(56 per cent) over the middle class(24 per cent).

do you favor Bush's handling of the economy?
was a dead heat at 48 approve vs. 47 disapprove.

When they were asked about what issue would be most important to them, the economy or terrorism, the participants chose the economy by a 53 to 32 margin. But I seem to remember that particular question coming out roughly the same in October 2002, and you know of course about the following month's election results.

GE Striker Dies After Being Hit by a Police Car
from Looksmart.com News:

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) -- A picketing worker was
struck and killed by a police car Tuesday as
thousands of General Electric Co. employees
across the country began a two-day strike to
protest higher health insurance costs.

Union leaders said about 20,000 members of the
International Union of Electronic
Workers/Communications Workers of America
and the Electrical Workers union took part in the
walkout at 48 locations in 23 states. The
affected plants manufacture everything from
consumer appliances to jet engines.

A few hours into the strike, Kjeston "Michelle"
Rodgers, 40, was hit outside a GE plant in
Louisville as the eight-year employee walked
with a picket sign before daybreak. The car was
from the police department in nearby Hollow
Creek, officials said...

A very amusing Tom Tomorrow comic re the conquest of the moon, via Atrios(Eschaton)

Oh Yeah,THAT Deficit:

ABC's the note is often worth a look. In a recent piece they discuss Bush's so-called stimulus package in a piece called "Attention: deficit disorder"(January 10), in which they offer this:
One expert suggested "the White House has understated its dividend tax proposal by as much as 50 percent, because administration forecasters have not sufficiently accounted for the cost of one obscure provision that effectively grants a capital gains tax cut when investors sell stock in companies that elect not to pay dividends."

"Treasury officials said their estimates are accurate."

We ask, in an objective journalistic sort of fashion: where is the Concord Coalition? Where is Ross Perot? Where is the demand for accountability over President's raiding the lockbox and running deficits...


This made me curious, so I checked out the Concord Coalition's website to see if they did have anything to say on the subject.
Their position paper asks:


Are the new tax cuts justified by a new and more favorable reassessment of the budget’s long-term outlook?


and their answer: Absolutely not.

They are a bit more equivocal about the dividend tax cut, suggesting that "a more effective and equitable approach than making dividends tax free for individuals would be to make them deductible as a corporate expense."
Just how this would make the tax code more equitable is beyond me. Foolish sort that I am, I still believe my scheme(from my January 8th post), or something similar for taxing capital gains and dividends is the best approach.

However, apropo of The Note's question, I want to know,
Where are the democrats? And how come no one, on the left or right, has said anything about dubya's campaign 2000 promise to create a 10 per cent tax bracket for the working poor? (Roughly, the people in the "bottom half" of the 15 percent tax bracket.)If you look at the IRS's Publication 17 chart in the back for the 2000 and 2001 editions, you see that all the tax brackets except the 15 percent tax bracket showed some reduction. Democrats should make hay and embarass ole boy by bringing this up, and perhaps also embarass the fawning media into doing their job and trotting out some clips of dubya talking about it three years ago. As I recall, the only democrat who called for a reduction in the 15 percent tax bracket in 2001 was, well, Bob Toricelli. (He suggested the creation of a 12 percent tax bracket.)

Wince if you must, but at least he spoke up. I'll admit I haven't perused all of the five thousand plus(?)
political web logs out there (hey, who has?),but I've seen quite a few, and to the best of my knowledge no one on the bloggy left has said anything about this.
Now, if I can only figure out a way to get Howard Dean to start talking about a ten percent tax bracket... he would be the perfect dem to do this in part because of his stand on repealing the previous(2001) tax cut. The democrats, if they only stopped being timid enough, could cobble together a winning message if they said, simply:


Look: Clinton raised taxes on the affluent and the economy boomed. And, however briefly,
the federal budget deficit disappeared, for the first time in over 30 years. So now we propose
lowering taxes on working class and middle class tax payers( i.e. those presently in the 15
per cent and 27.5 percent tax bracket) and simultaneously raising taxes on people in the higher
tax brackets back to where they were in the Clinton 90s-- because IT WORKED.

A 16 year oldIrish youth named Adnan Osmani(!) won some contest for young Irish scientists with his superfast browser. From the article:

He said he was still in a state of shock as he had not expected to win and had only told three of his teachers last week about his competition entry.

"I thought I might get a good place."

He wants to study computer engineering in Harvard University and eventually set up his own Internet or computer company.

"Winning is a nice boost to my university application," he said.

I just came across this editorial in The Nation by Ronnie Dugger of the Texas Observer regarding Ralph Nader and the Green Party. I tend to think that Nader's candidacy in 2004, if he does indeed run again, will be comprable to Perot's in 1996-- greatly diminished compared to what it was four years earlier-- although if we have another ultra-narrow margin between the two major candidates, it would still have plenty of impact on the outcome.

Time for a mini-break from politics:
here are some interesting links I've chanced upon recently--
Interrace Haven,
"Illegal" Online Books,
Pirate Radio,
PopPolitics.Com,
not to be confused with:
Farai Chideya's Pop and Politics.Com..
You may have seen Chideya occasionally on MSNBC.

(Oh, okay, a little politics...)

CONGRATULATIONS, TOUGH GUY
As you may know, North Korea has pulled out of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Will anyone in the US mainstream press suggest that perhaps they felt

A. Threatened by that childish "Axis of Evil" speech from 1 year ago, or

B. Emboldened to do so by dubya's own unilateral withdrawal from a nearly 30-yr old non-proliferation treaty with Russia(concerning long-range ICBM's)?

When will people see what a dangerous knucklehead our president is? Why can't Colin Powell just give Bush and Rumsfeld and Cheney some toy swords and tell them to go play in the back yard so he can run the presidency in their absence? I wish it were funny.

"LIST, LIST, O LIST!"
a proto-Nielsen sampling of politics on the net(US only),courtesy Soundbitten.com

Another swell pic of a livid dubya.

I am writing this partly as a response to a post by Eschaton from earlier this week.One of the problems with the semantics of Class Warfare is the curious fact that it is mainly used to cow others(ie, dems) by the ones who are waging it. (Freud had a name for the neurotic trait of accusing others of possessing the fault that you in fact have, but I can't remember what it was. Projection, I think. Anyway, I digress.) For my part, I would like to see all dividend and capital gains taxed as straight income for distributions taken, say, in under 2 years from date of purchase, with a sliding scale reducing by 10 per cent a year the tax on long term investments. (90% of your tax rate on capital gains/dividends taken in more than 2 years but less than 3 years, 80 per cent for capital gains/dividends held for more than 3 but less than 4 years, up to 50 per cent. In other words, keeping the tax on dividends, the same as regular income unless they're reinvested. Applied to options as well, this sort of thing could also be touted as a way to make varmint CEOs (somewhat) more accountable.
1.distribution taken in less 2 years: 100%
2." "more than 2 years- less than 3 years- 90%
3."""" more than 3 years--less than 4 years-80%
4."" "" more than 4 years--less than 5 years-70%
5."" "" more than 5years--less than 6 years-60%
6."" "" more than 6 years---> 50%

Such a scheme might seem radical, given that it essentially does away with our current way of figuring capital gains taxes, but it would do two useful things: 1. Reward "buy-and-hold", low-turnover, long-term investment stategies, and
2. Address the inflation penalty built into the capital gains tax on equities sold being held for many years.

The latter, under the guise of "inflation-indexing" of capital gains, has been a preoccupation of the right for some years now. Finding some mechanism to at least partially address this should be a legitimate area of concern for the democrats, who have an unfortunate habit of dealing with tax policy republican issues by avoiding them, like the passivity the dems have shown in addressing the shoring up of social security, counting on the current miserable performance of the stock market to save them from the burden of aggresively refuting social security privatization, as if the issue has magically gone away for good. Now democrats have an opportunity to
refute another, more spurious preoccupation of the right, the "double-taxation" supposedly inherent in individuals having to pay taxes
on dividends, because the money was already taxed when General Electric or whoever paid their corporate income taxes.

My understanding is that self-employed small business owners who are incorporated may be taxed twice per se, but they represent a very small number of people who can legitimately say they are being taxed twice, as contrasted with the legions of well-heeled stock-holders who have been conditioned by years of self-righteous right-wing blather to fume at how they shouldn't have to pay taxes on their capital gains and dividends-- "taxed twice" is a canard for this group, who are in the majority. It would behoove the democrats to draw this distinction, and not be so fearful that they will be accused of waging class warfare if they do. Besides, for those afore mentioned self-employed and incorporated folks, you mustn't forget that when they pay corporate taxes they can deduct their salaries as business expenses. And although they generally can't deduct 100% against the tax, there are numerous other deductions that they can take, like depreciation of assets, which they otherwise wouldn't be able to take as mere employees for hire. Also, if you are your own boss you have a vested interest in keeping your "employee's" tax burden low you can "pay" yourself an absurdly low salary for tax purposes, especially if the corporate side of your ledger says that you won't get much of a deduction for the grand salary You Know You Deserve. The president is touting abolishing the dividend tax as a boon for seniors, even though the majority of dividend collecting seniors who are currently paying taxes on their divdends are earning over $70,000/year in retirement. Or to put it another way--this particular tax gimmie, which accounts for around 300 billion of Bush's stimulus package won't help the old people who perrenially make the mortality statistics when found frozen in their apartments one whit, although it might increase the strain on social services from which they might benefit, at least through one more republican winter.

I have been trying to catch up on my reading, which includes this article from the Dec 23rd NY Times. I wish I could say that I'm sufficiently up to speed re XML to fully understand the implications. I already understand the implications of putting Poindexter in charge of the TIA.

"I'm Not As Dumb As Gephardt."
Daschle has just announced that he's not going to run for president after all. Good. Maybe(unlike Gephardt) he's decided that he actually lost some credibility by appeasing the right, and that the damage can be fixed, for both the Democratic party and for himself. His statement suggests this, but it's too soon to tell. Maybe we'll see more Lexus n' muffler photo-ops, and the like. Yeah, I know it was cheesy, but I liked it.

I found this link courtesy the Sideshow. I've heard the anecdote about how dubya continued to read to the kids for another half-hour after he heard about the first tower, but still find it a little hard to believe. Then again, how could you possibly hope to confirm such a screwy story?

As you probably know, ex-minority house leader Dick Gephardt announced his candidacy for prez in '04.
Gephardt's candidacy is interesting because of his reputation for being "too liberal" for mainstream America, besides his also being known for endorsing the look-at how-well-we-accomodate-dubya strategy to regaining the house(and what a smashing success that was...). It amazes me that Gore was criticized repeatedly by mainstream news media for tacking populist left in the past two years, and therebye-- we are told-- abandoning the centrist/DLC principles we all know he REALLY stands for-- but Gephardt's rallying of dems for the so-called patriot act and open-ended resolutions of force hasn't generated similar scrutiny for his abandoning whatever paleoliberal principles he allegedly REALLY stands for. Perhaps it will in the primaries. The more I think about it the more I think that Gore did indeed have a tough time of it with the press.