Undernews For 28 June 2009

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28 June 2009
FLOTSAM & JETSAM

INDENTURED LIBERALS & INDEPENDENT PROGRESSIVES
Sam Smith

Barack Obama didn't kill liberalism; he's just doing a nice job of burying it. The end of liberalism as a meaningful ideology came with the nomination of Bill Clinton. The argument was - although hardly phrased so accurately - that it was far better for liberals to dump their policies and become the indentured servants of an elected Democrat than to continue to press for their beliefs and miss out on all the power and the parties.

This same willingness to go with icons rather than ideas drove liberals quickly into the Obama camp, especially since he had the added advantage of looking the way he was supposed to believe.

It was apparent from the start, however, that Obama wasn't what the liberals thought. During the campaign, for example, I listed over two dozen positions and statements of Obama's that clearly were in conflict with what liberals once believed.

But of course, belief was no longer the issue. Liberalism had long ago become more of a secular church than a cause, and based more on socio-economic demographics than on actual politics. To the extent it had issues, these issues were, like abortion and gay rights, ones that appealed to its core demographics. Long gone was the liberal concern for doing the most for the most; economic issues had faded; and the base that had helped build the New Deal and Great Society were now dismissed as red necks, racists, gun nuts and crazy church goers.

The factor of class was both immense and silent. But you could tell it by listening to liberals talk. The little folk had simply disappeared from their concerns.

Thus it is that we came to have a Democratic Congress and president that pressed a bailout for bankers with virtually no help for homeowners, who promised to leave one war but then escalated another and who couldn't bring themselves in majority to support the sort of universal healthcare the rest of the western world had long adopted.

As Glen Ford of the Black Agenda Report put it the other day: "The first Black president has racked up some impressive victories. Barack Obama has quarantined single-payer healthcare advocates, crushed dissent against the war in Congress, and transferred more money to the finance capital class than at any time in planetary history. Not bad for just five months in office."

Liberals became part of the new center right; they became the modest conservatives the Republican reactionaries had kicked out of their own party. Instead of going to hell noisily in the manner of Rush Limbaugh, you were to proceed thoughtfully, cautiously, and in a measured manner inspired by a thoughtful, cautious, and measured president. But we are still going to hell.

Tom Hayden caught a moment of the measured madness, noting in the Nation:

"MoveOn.org resumed its historical antiwar stance this week, symbolically breaking with the Obama administration for the first time.

"After being criticized for abandoning the antiwar stance that won it millions of activist supporters, the organization sent targeted mailings supporting the demand for an Obama administration exit strategy report contained in HR 2404, by Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts. . .

"Despite its modest nature, MoveOn's entry into the debate could be an important factor in legitimizing antiwar criticism of the Obama policies among Democrats. Antiwar sentiment at the grassroots is smothered by the unwillingness of several organizations to openly oppose the war escalation, despite their roots in the antiwar movement against Iraq.

"The silent organizations thus far include Democracy for America and its founder, Howard Dean, Ben Cohen's True Majority, and the Obama campaign's offshoot, Organizing for America. The Feminist Majority even supported the $80 billion war supplemental with an amendment supporting women's programs in Afghanistan."

This lethargy, cowardice and compliance to the top dogs has been repeated with issue after issue. The sell out on the bailout and single payer perhaps top the list, but the failure of liberals to defend public education from control freaks like Arne Duncan or Obama' replication of the Bush war on civil liberties, while getting less attention, are just as bad.

If liberals had paid more attention to what the far right was up to, rather than just using it as a punching bag to make themselves feel better, they might have noticed that the GOP reactionaries hardly ever caved into their party's mainstream. Instead they redefined that mainstream. Liberals, on the other hand, surrender before they even enter the ring.

Our political labels are largely assigned for us by the media. There is thus hardly an inch of space allowed between center right liberalism and socialism. Proposing policies of the sort that gave America its greatest days over the past century is dismissed as radical.

But that doesn't change reality, which is that the liberal power brokers are essentially following traditional conservative policies, that Obama is the most conservative Democratic president since Woodrow Wilson, and that there is a growing gap between what liberals are today and what they were when they were truly making a better America.

That doesn't mean there isn't an alternative. It would help if we made a clear distinction between indentured liberals and independent progressives - a major difference being that the latter understand that ideas are still more important that icons.

To an independent progressive, the issue is not support of Obama but a set of policies that Obama may or may not support. My scorecard, for example, finds me agreeing with Obama about 30% of the time, which is pretty dismal, especially when you consider that it is among the alienating 70% that much of American history will be written. And why is Obama so alienated from the progressive path (and so much more so then when he was just representing Illinois in the Senate)? Simply because he is driven not by conscience but by calculation. And in Obama's calculations, liberalism now equals zero.

The media insists that we define what is happening in terms of whoever is in the White House. Here's how I put it in "Shadows of Hope" fifteen years ago:

"Congress has lost power relative to the White House not merely for various political reasons, but because 535 legislators are simply too many for the media to handle. TV, in particular, treats politics much as it does wide screen movies; it snips off the right and left sides until the frame fits comfortably within the more equilateral shape of its eye. The edges of our experience are lost and we find ourselves staring at a comfortable center -- which in the case of politics, means we find ourselves endlessly watching the President while much of the rest of American democracy passes unnoticed.

"This preoccupation with the presidency not only exaggerates the importance of the position, it distorts the constitutional division of political power, denigrates the significance of state and local government and creates pressures for presidential action when such action may be neither wise nor even lawful. We can not, even out of seemingly harmless celebrity worship, imbue our president with supra-constitutional virtues or powers without simultaneously damaging the Constitution and the democratic system it was established to protect.

"Besides, our presidential fetish badly skews our view of our country and the changes occurring within it -- not only elsewhere in government but beyond politics entirely. It trivializes our own collective and individual roles in creating social and political change. And, conversely, it can create the illusion of great change when far less is really happening."

Independent progressives understand this instinctively and struggle - with sadly little help - to help keep our eyes on the real game, which is the change that is occurring as a result of the political puppet show we watch on the nightly news yet which are usually ignored or treated as of minimal importance. An example: the foreclosure crisis is enormous but you would never know it listening to the news or the Democrats.

You can tell independent progressive groups because they will actually challenge the Democrats in power on their policies. They will oppose imperial wars even if a Democrat is leading them. They will fight the coddling of the welfare fathers of Wall Street even if the chief coddler doesn't look the part. They will worry about how our politics affect the weak and not just the comfortable, and they will spend more time opening doors for the powerless than in cracking glass ceilings for the few.

No one in the conventional media is going to tell you about these distinctions, but they are real. The independent progressive story is not about how bad some reactionary politician or commentator is, but how good we all could be if we did things differently and if we pursued real policies of true worth rather than worshiping false heroes.
FIREFIGHTERS ARE NOT LAW CLERKS
We ran this earlier this month but, in view of the Supreme Court decision, are running it again

Sam Smith

The real problem in the Ricci v. DeStefano case is neither the white nor the black firefighters but the law and its technocratic application. For the past six years - as the lawyers have had their fun - no one of either ethnicity has been promoted in the New Haven fire department.

This is not a good way to run a fire department or improve ethnic relations. Yet because we have become so accustomed to depending upon legal and technocratic solutions to our problems, because so many assume that verbal skills equal pragmatic competence, few even bother to ask whether there might be a better approach to such situations, such as mediation and arbitration or subduing our obsession with tests.

I was never a firefighter but I was the operations officer on a Coast Guard cutter that handled aids to navigation and heavy weather search & rescue. Among the men on our ship were a number who hadn't even completed high school. I knew this not because they were any less competent but only because they were studying for the GED and had asked me for help. And at the top of the list of qualified officers on our ship was not this Ivy League educated product of crash officer candidate training (including 40 tests in 13 weeks) but two warrant officers - enlisted men who had fleeted up to officer status through their experience and performance far more than their test taking skill.

If these officers had been trying to get promoted in the New Haven Fire Department, their experience and performance would have been submerged in examinations designed by large corporations profiteering on government and business assessment addiction. It is, after all, so much easier to read a test score than to judge the true nature of someone's performance.

Which is why we are giving up educating our kids in favor of just preparing them for tests. And which why our public vocational training is so poor. We assume everyone is going to be a law clerk or other desk bound manipulator of words and data.

But running a ship or being a firefighter is quite a different matter than being school superintendent, politician or lawyer.

As Joseph Conrad noted, "Of all the living creatures upon land and sea, it is ships alone that cannot be taken in by barren pretenses." Firefighters similarly deal daily with unforgiving reality. Yet these days they also face exams that, in the case of the New Haven firefighters, cost some of them upwards of a $1,000 for study materials, tutoring and similar preparation. As the white firefighters put it, "We gave up three months of our lives to intense study and preparation during the three-month study period preceding the exams. We studied many hours a day and rarely saw or spent little time with our families and friends during this period. Some of us took leave from second jobs, or our wives did so to assume childcare responsibilities while we studied, so the economic loss was even greater than the out-of-pocket costs of the exams."

The black applicants struggled, too. Said Donald Day, former regional director of the International Association of Black Professional Firefighters, "Historically, as African-Americans, we don't do as well on strictly written exams." Reported the New Haven Independent, "Oral exams are fairer, he argued, but they're also more expensive to administer. He said that written exams can't really determine who will make a good leader. 'Some of the worst officers you/ve ever had were book smart officers.'"

To get some idea of what these guys were up against, I checked out one of the cram programs firefighters use. Bearing in mind that you are looking to hire someone who can get you out of a smoked filled, fifth floor bedroom, consider the following test taking advice:

|||| When evaluating answer choices, the words to be on the lookout for are the little words that tend to either "harden" or "soften" statements. Words which "harden" statements, and make them difficult to defend, are strong words like: all, every, always, will, must, certainly, invariably, surely, no one, ever, any, no matter, nothing, etc. Words which "soften" statements, and make them easy to defend, are words like: some, many, sometimes, may, possibly, generally, probably, usually, often, can, could, might, occasionally, etc. . .

When answering test questions, you must base your answer solely on the information contained in the test question. The test for a Firefighter requires no previous knowledge of the job. The test questions do not have to reflect the way the job is really done or the actual procedures of the Fire Department. . .

Problems arise when a person who is familiar with procedures of the fire department encounters a test question based on something that contradicts actual practices. It is in this kind of situation that you must ignore actual practices and answer on the basis of what the test question says. For example, you might know that kitchen stove fires are usually extinguished with a portable fire extinguisher; but a test question might describe a stove fire being put out with a fire hose attached to a hydrant. In this kind of test situation, never mind the actual practice; go by the information in the question. . .

A skillful test maker tries to make two or three of the answer choices look very good. All the answer choices may contain some truth, which make them tempting. Or all may look wrong. But the test maker has to have put some detail into the "fact pattern" of the question to justify the claim that one of these answers is better than the others. If reviewing the answer choices themselves has not helped, the clue to which answer is correct is likely to be in the question stem or "fact pattern" rather than in the answer choices. So go back to the question stem and the fact pattern the look for the deciding factor. ||||

This is not advice for someone seeking to clerk for a judge or win some cable quiz show but for someone who is expected to stop fires and save lives. Yet, "the test questions do not have to reflect the way the job is really done or the actual procedures of the Fire Department." And: "Problems arise when a person who is familiar with procedures of the fire department encounters a test question based on something that contradicts actual practices. It is in this kind of situation that you must ignore actual practices and answer on the basis of what the test question says."

Somehow I feel a lot less safe.

The New Haven case is a mess caused by infatuation with the law, mistaking verbal dexterity for practical skill, and an obsession with examinations. It has protected neither people's safety nor their civil liberties.

It would, for example, be interesting to know how much has been paid lawyers (especially white ones) in this case, because I suspect it might have supported increasing the number of job openings so that black firefighters could have been hired along with the higher scoring whites. As older white officers retired, the bubble could deflate again. Black mayor Walter Washington used this approach to integrate the whole DC government during the 1970s and no one got mad. Mediation might have worked out a deal where most of the whites got promoted along with some of the blacks, with the remaining whites with passing scores being placed at the top for the list for the next promotion.

Such approaches could have gotten New Haven through its immediate crisis, which it could avoid repeating by developing a much fairer way of choosing officers for its fire department.

A successful multiethnic community is one that works well for everyone. It is not one in which government puts members of one of the most honorable trades at each other's throats.

PAGE ONE MUST
INMATE TELLS ABOUT AMERICA'S SECRET PRISONS
AMY GOODMAN: The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit against Attorney General Eric Holder and the Federal Bureau of Prisons challenging the legality of two secretive prison units in Indiana and Illinois. The prisons, known as Communication Management Units, are designed to severely restrict prisoner communication with family members, the media and the outside world.

The prisons were opened by the Bush administration with little public scrutiny. The first CMU was opened in 2006 in a special isolated wing of the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. A second CMU was opened last year in Marion, Illinois.

Most of the prisoners held in the CMUs have been Muslim men, but the units have also held several non-Muslim political activists, including environmental and animal rights activists.

The government has provided little information about the special prison units. A search on the Bureau of Prisons website yields just one document even mentioning the program. The ACLU lawsuit marks the first high-profile legal challenge to the prisons.

While President Obama has pledged to close Guantanamo and secret overseas prisons, he has said nothing about these secretive prison units known by some prisoners as "Little Guantanamo."

Today we speak to Andrew Stepanian, an animal rights activist who was held at the CMU in Marion, Illinois. He is believed to be the first prisoner released from a CMU. . .

AMY GOODMAN: Describe what it was like there.

ANDREW STEPANIAN: The Communications Management Unit is a prison within the actual prison. It's set up in the former hole of the United States Penitentiary, which was the first supermax prison in the federal penal system in the United States. . .

The unit doesn't have normal telephone communication to your family. The unit doesn't have normal visitation, like you would be able to communicate with your family or embrace them or hug them. These are restraints that are normally put on people that are considered to be the most violent and have the most egregious offenses. And yet, in this case, almost every person that was at the CMU was either a minimum-security case or, at most, a medium-security level, which gives you all the freedoms of being able to walk around a room normally with your family, spend about eight hours in a normal visiting day, say, walking around a patio or sharing snacks from a vending machine. These are the normal visits that a prisoner would be able to experience. These normal visits are denied.

Normal phone calls, usually 300 minutes a month for an average inmate, are denied. Instead, you have to make an appointment to make one phone call a week, and that needs to be done with the oversight of a translator, a live monitor and someone from Washington, DC. . .

Most of the men that are in these units are Muslim. I, myself, am not Muslim. From what I observed, about 70 percent of the men that were there were Muslim and had questionable cases that were labeled as either extremist or terrorist cases. But when I grew to meet them, I realized that the cases were, in fact, very different, and their personalities affected, you know, my judgment of them to think that they're better people than that.
BLOOMBERG TO NYC HOMELESS: FIND SHELTER OR LOSE YOUR SHELTER
Change - Despite a 2004 pledge to dramatically reduce homelessness, the number of homeless families in New York City is at an all time high.

To address the problem, city officials are seeking approval for a new set of policies to shorten the length of time families utilize the city's shelter system, including financial incentives for shelters and stricter shelter rules and regulations. While many recognize the need to free up shelter space for the influx of clients, others question the approach of "evicting" families and children who have nowhere else to go.

Under the new rules, nonprofit organizations contracted through the city will provide shelter beds at a rate of about $100/day. After a family has been in shelter for six months, the daily rate decreases, giving shelters an incentive to move that family out of the shelter before they can get comfortable.

The proposed changes also include stricter shelter rules, with more serious consequences for non-compliance, including being ejected from the shelter. . . Advocates for the homeless called the city's plans mean-spirited, and warned that they would threaten the safety of families, especially children, forced to leave the shelter with no place to go.
OBAMA MAY RAISES TAXES ON MIDDLE CLASS TO PAY FOR HIS INSURER FRIENDLY HEALTH PLAN
Washington Post - President Obama's top political adviser declined yesterday to rule out the possibility that the White House would agree to a tax hike on health insurance plans that would hit middle-income Americans. Speaking on ABC's "This Week," David Axelrod declined to repeat Obama's "firm pledge" during the campaign that families making under $250,000 would not see "any form of tax increase, not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes." Instead, Axelrod said the president has no interest in "drawing lines in the sand" on the issue of how to pay for the costly health reform plan making its way through Congress.
HONDURAS COUP LEADER TRAINED AT NOTORIOUS U.S. SCHOOL
Democratic Underground - The crisis in Honduras began when the military refused to distribute ballot boxes for the opinion poll in a new Constitution. President Zelaya fired the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Romeo Orlando Vasquez Velasquez, who refused to step down. The heads of all branches of the Honduran armed forces quit in solidarity with Vasquez. Vasquez, however, refused to step down, bolstered by support in Congress and a Supreme Court ruling that reinstated him. Vasquez remains in control of the armed forces.

Vasquez, along with other military leaders, graduated from the United States' infamous School of the Americas. According to a School of the Americas Watch database compiled from information obtained from the US government, Vasquez studied in the SOA at least twice: once in 1976 and again in 1984.

The head of the Air Force, Gen. Luis Javier Prince Suazo, studied in the School of the Americas in 1996. The Air Force has been a central protagonist in the Honduran crisis. When the military refused to distribute the ballot boxes for the opinion poll, the ballot boxes were stored on an Air Force base until citizens accompanied by Zelaya rescued them. Zelaya reports that after soldiers kidnapped him, they took him to an Air Force base, where he was put on a plane and sent to Costa Rica.

Congressman Joseph Kennedy stated, "The U.S. Army School of the Americas. . . is a school that has run more dictators than any other school in the history of the world."

According to School of the Americas Watch, "In 1975, SOA Graduate General Juan Melgar Castro became the military dictator of Honduras. From 1980-1982 the dictatorial Honduran regime was headed by yet another SOA graduate, Policarpo Paz Garcia, who intensified repression and murder by Battalion 3-16, one of the most feared death squads in all of Latin America (founded by Honduran SOA graduates with the help of Argentine SOA graduates)."

Honduran Gen. Humberto Regalado Hernandez was inducted into the SOA's Hall of Fame. School of the Americas Watch notes that he was a four-time graduate. . . .

School of the Americas Watch points out that this is not the first time the SOA has been involved in Latin American coups. "In April 2002, the democratically elected Chavez government of Venezuela was briefly overthrown, and the School of the Americas-trained Efrain Vasquez Velasco, ex-army commander, and Gen. Ramirez Poveda, were key players in the coup attempt."

According to School of the Americas Watch, "Over its 58 years, the SOA has trained over 60,000 Latin American soldiers in counter-insurgency techniques, sniper skills, commando and psychological warfare, military intelligence and interrogation tactics. Colombia, with over 10,000 troops trained at the school, is the SOA's largest customer. Colombia currently has the worst human rights record in Latin America."

SCHOOL OF THE AMERICAS WATCH
BOOKSHELF
SMASH THE CHURCH, SMASH THE STATE! THE EARLY YEARS OF GAY LIBERATION

Tommi Avicolli

Doug Ireland Gay City New s - Myth has it that the 1969 riots at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village were the first open queer rebellion against discrimination. Not so. In 1965, the first queer sit-ins on record took place at a late-night Philadelphia coffee shop and lunch counter called Dewey's, which was a popular hangout for young gays and lesbians, and particularly drag queens and others with gender-variant attire. The establishment had begun refusing service to this LGBT clientele.

As an April 25 protest rally took place outside Dewey's, more than 150 patrons were turned away by management. But four teens resisted efforts to force them out and were arrested, later convicted on charges of disorderly conduct. In the ensuing weeks, Dewey's patrons and others from Philadelphia's gay community set up an informational picket line protesting the lunch counter's treatment of gender-variant youth. On May 2, activists staged another sit-in, and the police were again called, but this time made no arrests. The restaurant backed down, and promised "an immediate cessation of all indiscriminate denials of service."

In August 1966, there was a riot at Compton's Cafeteria, a 24-hour San Francisco eatery popular with drag queens and other gender-benders (this was long before the word "transgendered" was in use), hustlers (many of them members of Vanguard, the first organization for queer youth on record, founded some months earlier), runaway teens, and cruising gays. The Compton's management had begun calling police to roust this non-conformist clientele, and one night a drag queen precipitated the riot by throwing a cup of coffee into the face of a cop who was trying to drag her away. Plates, trays, cups, and silverware were soon hurtling through the air, police paddy wagons arrived, and street fighting broke out. Some of the 60 or so rioting drag queens hit the cops with their heavy purses, a police car was vandalized, and a newspaper stand was burned down. The Compton's Riot eventually led to the appointment of the first police liaison to the gay community, and the establishment of the first known transsexual support group in the US.

These are just two of the many nuggets of little-known or forgotten queer history to be found in "Smash the Church, Smash the State: The Early Years of Gay Liberation," the new anthology edited by Tommi Avicolli Mecca, himself a veteran of the earliest gay liberation struggles, and today an activist, gender-bending performance artist, and writer well-known to San Francisco queers.
WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE ENERGY BILL
Rep. Dennis Kucinich - I oppose H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009. The reason is simple. It won't address the problem. In fact, it might make the problem worse.

It sets targets that are too weak, especially in the short term, and sets about meeting those targets through Enron-style accounting methods. It gives new life to one of the primary sources of the problem that should be on its way out - coal - by giving it record subsidies. And it is rounded out with massive corporate giveaways at taxpayer expense. There is $60 billion for a single technology which may or may not work, but which enables coal power plants to keep warming the planet at least another 20 years.

Worse, the bill locks us into a framework that will fail. Science tells us that immediately is not soon enough to begin repairing the planet. Waiting another decade or more will virtually guarantee catastrophic levels of warming. But the bill does not require any greenhouse gas reductions beyond current levels until 2030.

There are several aspects of the bill that are problematic.

1. Overall targets are too weak. The bill is predicated on a target atmospheric concentration of 450 parts per million, a target that is arguably justified in the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but which is already out of date. Recent science suggests 350 parts per million is necessary to help us avoid the worst effects of global warming.

2. The offsets undercut the emission reductions. Offsets allow polluters to keep polluting; they are rife with fraudulent claims of emissions reduction; they create environmental, social, and economic unintended adverse consequences; and they codify and endorse the idea that polluters do not have to make sacrifices to solve the problem.

3. It kicks the can down the road. By requiring the bulk of the emissions to be carried out in the long term and requiring few reductions in the short term, we are not only failing to take the action when it is needed to address rapid global warming, but we are assuming the long term targets will remain intact.

4. EPA's authority to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the short- to medium-term is rescinded. It is our best defense against a new generation of coal power plants. There is no room for coal as a major energy source in a future with a stable climate.

5. Nuclear power is given a lifeline instead of phasing it out. Nuclear power is far more expensive, has major safety issues including a near release in my own home state in 2002, and there is still no resolution to the waste problem. A recent study by Dr. Mark Cooper showed that it would cost $1.9 trillion to $4.1 trillion more over the life of 100 new nuclear reactors than to generate the same amount of electricity from energy efficiency and renewables.

6. Dirty coal is given a lifeline instead of phasing it out. Coal-based energy destroys entire mountains, kills and injures workers at higher rates than most other occupations, decimates ecologically sensitive wetlands and streams, creates ponds of ash that are so toxic the Department of Homeland Security will not disclose their locations for fear of their potential to become a terrorist weapon, and fouls the air and water with sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides, particulates, mercury, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and thousands of other toxic compounds that cause asthma, birth defects, learning disabilities, and pulmonary and cardiac problems for starters. In contrast, several times more jobs are yielded by renewable energy investments than comparable coal investments.

7. The $60 billion allocated for carbon capture and sequestration is triple the amount of money for basic research and development in the bill. We should be pressuring China, India and Russia to slow and stop their power plants now instead of enabling their perpetuation. We cannot create that pressure while spending unprecedented amounts on a single technology that may or may not work. . .

8. Carbon markets can and will be manipulated using the same Wall Street sleights of hand that brought us the financial crisis.

9. It is regressive. Free allocations doled out with the intent of blunting the effects on those of modest means will pale in comparison to the allocations that go to polluters and special interests. The financial benefits of offsets and unlimited banking also tend to accrue to large corporations. And of course, the trillion dollar carbon derivatives market will help Wall Street investors. Much of the benefits designed to assist consumers are passed through coal companies and other large corporations, on whom we will rely to pass on the savings.
POSTAL SERVICE WANTS TO CLOSE 3200 POST OFFICES
Money Central - Over the next three months, more than 3,200 post offices and retail outlets -- out of 34,000 -- will be reviewed for possible closure or consolidation. . . Not only have e-mail and electronic bill paying made for a skinnier mail stream, but the recession has caused a sharp pullback in advertising mail that has hurt the Postal Service even more.

In March, Postmaster General John Potter asked Congress for the right to reduce the mail week from six days to five, for a savings of $3.5 billion. . .

Every time a post office is slated for closure or consolidation, the Postal Service is legally obligated to inform its customers well in advance. "There's a very long process that they have to go through," says Mario Principe, the post office continuance consultant at the National League of Postmasters. That gives the communities plenty of time, usually at least two months, to stage a rescue

The Postal Service will typically send out a survey or host a town hall meeting before an endangered office closes. Perhaps the closing of a post office means too many lost jobs for an already-hurting community. The office might house the bulletin board that posts important community announcements. Or the next-closest post office may be really far away. If customers alert officials to such concerns, there's a better chance that their office will be spared. Appealing the closure decision to the Postal Regulatory Commission often works, too, though it's a step many communities don't know to take.

It's also important to check out why a post office is on the chopping block in the first place. Those under review this summer are mostly metropolitan branches or stations. But in the case of small post offices, federal law states that the reason can't be just that the office isn't bringing in enough revenue. If that's the only explanation given, then the Postal Service can't legally shut it down.
LIBERALS PUSHING THOUGHT CRIME BILL
Prison Planet - HR 1966 has cleared the House and now faces the Senate as S.909, the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act. The bill is expected to sail through the Senate as it did in the House. It will provide federal assistance to the states, local jurisdictions, and Indian tribes to prosecute hate crimes, and for “other purposes.†. . .

S.909 is a direct violation of the First Amendment. It allows the federal government to prosecute people involved in “hate speech†transmitted over television, radio, and the internet. The House version of the bill states:

"Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce [radio, TV, internet] any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both."

In other words, if a talk show host engages in “hostile†speech against a person or persons of the above mentioned federally protected group that talk show host will face federal prosecution and the prospect of a two year prison term.

Alexander Cockburn, Counterpunch - The Matthew Shepard Act is a ham-handed attempt to right injustice by establishing different legal treatment for some classes of crime victims. The proposed statute classifies as "hate crimes" attacks based on a victim’s actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability. America is well on its way to making it illegal to say anything nasty about gays, Jews, blacks and women. "Hate speech," far short of any direct incitement to violence, is on the edge of being criminalized, with the First Amendment gone the way of the dodo. . .

Suppose two fellows in a bar see a man come in and, later in the evening, beat him up. He turns out to be gay. Armed with the Hate Crimes Prevention Act if it becomes law, local prosecutors will have an incentive to pile hate crime charges on top of simple assault and thereby garner federal funding that will be available under the statute. The suspects then face an "enhancement" -several more years behind bars - for committing a hate crime. . . .

The problem with the Hate Crimes Prevention Act is that it creates a thought crime and also categories of crime victims for disparate treatment. Goodbye to equality under the law. How will a prosecutor prove that a lesbian was murdered because of her sexual orientation rather than because she refused to give the mugger her purse? . . .

Advocates for the hate crimes bill insist that it deals only with crimes of violence and has nothing to do with limiting free speech or thought. But as Paul Craig Roberts, has pointed out on this site. "All laws are expansively interpreted. For example: The Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act [passed in 1970] was directed at drug lords. Nothing in the law says anything about divorce; yet it soon was applied in divorce cases."
CHARTER SCHOOLS RIGGING GAME
Washington Post - Some D.C. public charter schools continue selective admissions practices that discourage special-needs students from enrolling, and students citywide with possible disabilities still face delays in special education evaluations, a federal court monitor said this week.

"Charter schools . . . generally have not enrolled students with significant disabilities who required extensive hours of special services or education," the monitor, Amy Totenberg, wrote in a report prepared for a court hearing yesterday. . .

Charter schools, which receive public funding but are independently operated, have siphoned many students from the city's troubled public school system and have posted somewhat higher test scores than regular schools in recent years.

But Totenberg said some charter schools explicitly limit the number of hours of special education they will provide and counsel parents to enroll their children at regular public schools or at private or other public charter schools that focus on students with disabilities. D.C. law prohibits charter schools from asking about learning disabilities or emotional problems during the admission process. . .

About 23 percent of the 46,000 students in the D.C. public school system receive special education . . . By contrast, in the 2007-08 school year, 12 percent of the 21,800 students in D.C. public charter schools . . . received special education services.
IRAN UPDATE
William O.Beeman, 2005 - Continuing his series of articles aimed at exposing Washington's "foolhardy" policy regarding the Islamic Republic of Iran, American scholar and writer William O. Beeman says in its quest for regime change in Iran, the United Sates might have "already picked the new rulers of that country".

"The form of government would be a Constitutional Monarchy, with the Head of State being Reza Pahlavi, son of the former Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was deposed in the 1978-79 Islamic revolution, and Sohrab Sobhani as his Prime Minister", Mr. Beeman wrote.

NY Times interview with Raza Pahlavi, June 26, 2009 - You are said to be a leader of the Iranian exile groups working to overthrow the regime whose clerics and mullahs overthrew your father exactly 30 years ago in the Islamic Revolution and forced your family out of the country. What do you do on a day-by-day basis, exactly?

I am in contact with all sorts of groups that are committed to a secular, democratic alternative to the current regime. We believe in a democratic parliamentary system, where there's a clear separation between church and state, or in this case, mosque and state.

Has the American government aided you?

No, no. I don't rely on any sources other than my own compatriots.

But presumably you're working with American agents in the C.I.A. or elsewhere who have been trying to destabilize the Iranian regime for years.

Your presumption is absolutely and unequivocally false.

How did you end up settling in Bethesda, Md., with your wife and children?

It happens to be circumstantial. To me, it's a temporary place to live.

Why would you call your decades of living near Washington 'temporar'?

Because my desire has always been to permanently return to my homeland.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed victory over Mir Hussein Moussavi in an election that was widely condemned as fraudulent. What do you make of him?

The cry for freedom you hear in the streets of Iran right now is well beyond the fact of whether it's one candidate versus the other. It's about the fact that for 30 years they have been denied their most basic rights.

Many people believe that Moussavi would be more a more moderate president than Ahmadinejad. The same argument was made during the Soviet era, where one would argue that one person would be supposedly more moderate than the other. But at the end, they all represented a Communist, totalitarian system. I think that anyone the Iranian regime prescreens would not be a true representative of the nation.
OBAMAS FORSAKE ALL WASHINGTON CHURCHES FOR MILITARY CHAPEL AT CAMP DAVID
Time - For the past five months, White House aides and friends of the Obamas have been quietly visiting local churches and vetting the sermons of prospective first ministers in a search for a new - and uncontroversial - church home. . .

Now, in an unexpected move, Obama has told White House aides that instead of joining a congregation in Washington, D.C., he will follow in George W. Bush's footsteps and make his primary place of worship Evergreen Chapel, the nondenominational church at Camp David.. . .

Each week, regardless of whether the President is on-site, Evergreen Chapel holds nondenominational Christian services open to the nearly 400 military personnel and staff at Camp David, as well as their families. . .
POLICE BLOTTER
Colin Hickey, Morning Sentinel, ME - Police early Sunday morning arrested a 20-year-old man after he allegedly broke into and vandalized a North Riverside Avenue home only to leave his pants, shirt, sneakers and wallet at the scene. Christopher Edgecomb, of Mariaville, faces charges of burglary, aggravated criminal mischief and possession of alcohol by a minor. Waterville Police Sgt. Jeffrey Bearce said Edgecomb, who was intoxicated and covered with a pink substance believed to be Pepto-Bismol, later tried to escape while being booked at Waterville Police Department. . .

Tallahassee Democrat - A teller at the drive-through of the South Monroe Street Wachovia Bank received an unusual deposit Wednesday: $200 and a small plastic bag containing marijuana and cocaine. Cameron B. Jefferson, 38, was arrested on charges of possession of cocaine and possession of cannabis (less than 20 grams), Tallahassee Police spokesman David McCranie said. . .

Jefferson told Martinez that he sent the canister with $200, according to the report. He became frustrated that the transaction was taking so long and asked several times for his money back.

Jefferson told Martinez, "If you said I did it, then I did it," according to the report. When asked if he accidentally grabbed the plastic bag when putting his money in the canister, Jefferson said "I put it . . . " then refused to comment further.

Oregon Live - Calling 9-1-1 from McDonald's to complain about your hamburger order, will get you a warning. Call repeatedly, and you'll be eating in a cop car.

That's what happened to 23-year-old Jeremy Lloyd Martin early Friday after he allegedly called Clackamas County dispatchers several times, saying an employee at the McDonald's on Southeast 82nd Avenue at Sunnyside Road near the Clackamas Town Center had robbed him of $8 for not fulfilling his order correctly. Martin said he gave the worker $10, but only got one burger and fries.

Martin was repeatedly warned by dispatchers that he could get arrested for misusing 9-1-1, but he did not back down.

He threatened to sue if a cop didn't arrive.

Martin got his wish and was arrested, charged with improper use of a 9-1-1 system.

911 RECORDING
RECOVERED HISTORY: CREEKMORE FATH
One of those who helped your editor when he first arrived to cover Washington in 1957 has passed. Creekmore Fath - both a character and a man of character - was then in his 50s; I was 19. He was of a sort one doesn't find in the capital any more.

Washington Post - Creekmore Fath, 93, an Austin lawyer and one of the last of the FDR New Dealers, died June 25 of renal failure at his home in Austin. Mr. Fath held several positions in President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration and played a key role in several important Texas elections, including the controversial 87-vote "landslide" that sent Lyndon B. Johnson to the Senate in 1948.

In 1940, Mr. Fath left a fledgling law practice in Austin to become a staff attorney with a House committee chaired by Rep. John H. Tolan (D-Calif.) that was investigating the plight of destitute migrant workers.

Twenty-three years old and unfamiliar with the ways of Washington, Mr. Fath didn't know that he had signed on to work for a select committee slated to disband when a new Congress convened in 1941. When he found out, he suggested asking first lady Eleanor Roosevelt to testify before the committee as a way to generate publicity and keep the committee in business. He reminded committee members that she had expressed concern in her newspaper columns for the Okies and other Dust Bowl migrant workers.

"Okay, Creekmore, you take care of that," Tolan said. The veteran lawmaker laughed, and his fellow committee members laughed with him. They knew, as Mr. Fath did not, that no first lady had ever testified on Capitol Hill.

The next morning, Mr. Fath called the White House and talked to Malvina Thompson, Mrs. Roosevelt's secretary. "I told her I desperately needed to use Mrs. Roosevelt at a hearing in December, that I wanted to use her as the gimmick," he recalled.

Mrs. Roosevelt invited him to tea at the White House the next afternoon, and, after clearing it with her husband, she agreed to testify. The panel stayed in business, in large part because of her endorsement of its work.

Later, Thompson told Mr. Fath that Mrs. Roosevelt agreed to meet with him because he was the only one who had ever admitted that he wanted to "use" her. Thompson also told Mr. Fath that the first lady had said, "I wanted to meet him because he sounds like he's 14 years old.". . .

When Mr. Fath arrived in Washington, he was tall, prematurely bald and politically astute, and he soon developed a gravitas that inspired confidence. "Creekmore Fath has the best political judgment of anyone his age in Washington," President Roosevelt was quoted as saying.. . .

After turning down an offer to teach patent law at Yale University, Mr. Fath, at 30, took his wife with him back to Austin. He resumed his law practice and plunged into Democratic Party politics. He also announced for Congress as an unreconstructed New Dealer. He and his wife campaigned in a car with a canoe roped on top and painted with the slogan, "Fath for Congress . . . He Paddles His Own Canoe." He finished third in the primary. . .

Mr. Fath never liked Johnson, personally or politically, but in 1948, he agreed to help him in his U.S. Senate race against former governor Coke Stevenson. Mr. Fath considered the governor a racist.

Johnson won the Democratic primary by 87 highly questionable votes, and the outcome hinged on a notoriously corrupt South Texas county that reported election results late. A Johnson partisan told Mr. Fath: "Well, they were stealing in East Texas. We were stealing in South Texas. So God only knows who really won the election, Creek. But today, God was on our side by 87 votes."
BREVITAS
CRASH TALK

Robert Scheer, Alternet - Americans are now $14 trillion poorer. . . The Bush-Obama strategy of throwing trillions at the banks to solve the mortgage crisis is a huge bust. The financial moguls, while tickled pink to have $1.25 trillion in toxic assets covered by the feds, along with hundreds of billions in direct handouts, are not using that money to turn around the free fall in housing foreclosures. As The Wall Street Journal reported, "The Mortgage Bankers Association cut its forecast of home-mortgage lending this year by 27% amid deflating hopes for a boom in refinancing." The same association said that the total refinancing under the administration's much ballyhooed Home Affordable Refinance Program is "very low."

JUST POLITICS

LA Times - While Mark Sanford works to salvage his marriage, Republicans are facing the prospect of a different kind of breakup: religious voters walking out on the GOP. A series of sex-related scandals over the last few years has undercut the party's assertions of moral authority and, worse, may serve to reinforce the doubts that many evangelical voters have traditionally harbored about the unholiness of the political realm.. . . A sudden and overwhelming shift of Christian conservatives from the GOP to the more secular-minded Democratic Party appears unlikely. As Laura Olson, an expert on religion and politics at South Carolina's Clemson University, put it: "The Republican Party is still going to be, at a minimum, the lesser of two evils." But in politics, subtraction can be just as important as addition. If large numbers of evangelicals were to stay home on election day, or channel their activism into outlets other than politics, the GOP could suffer grave consequences; over the last generation, devout churchgoer voters have become an increasingly vital part of the shrinking Republican base.

Those beating up on Senator Roland Burris might be interested to know that Progressive Punch rates him the third most progressive member of the Senate.

LOCAL HEROES

Washington Post - In two recent rulings and interviews, a federal judge in the District and one in Iowa said they had policy differences with Congress and a judicial commission that they said did not go far enough to change the guidelines for crack sentences in 2007. From now on, the judges wrote, they will calculate sentences for crack offenders by using the more-lenient sentencing guidelines for powder cocaine crimes. Recent Supreme Court rulings and supportive statements from top Justice Department officials paved the way for the judges' decisions. Nonetheless, such unilateral action from the bench is unusual. Legal scholars said the decisions highlight the judiciary's irritation at the slow pace of sentencing reform as Congress considers the first major revision of crack statutes in decades.

JUSTICE & FREEDOM

Change - On the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, police in Fort Worth, Texas violently raided a gay bar known as the Rainbow Lounge, arresting nearly half a dozen people and showing that the more things change in this country, sometimes the more they stay the same. Count the Fort Worth Texas Police Department as the most clueless and insensitive police departments around. . . Police brushed this off as a normal bar check, to make sure patrons were not breaking the law and that no minors were in the crowd. But . . . police showed up with zip cuffs and paddy wagons, which sure as hell sounds like they were trying to re-create Stonewall some 40 years ago.

ECO CLIPS

Tree Hugger - By then end of this century, somewhere between 3,800-5,200 square miles of coastal land around New Orleans are likely to be submerged as global sea level rise outpaces the rate of sediment deposited by the Mississippi river, an area much larger than previously predicted. That's the word coming from researchers Michael Blum and Harry Roberts
They conclude that "significant drowning is inevitable" and that land areas now below 1 meter in elevation will become open water or marsh. . .

MID EAST

Haaretz, Israel - A West Bank checkpoint managed by a private security company is not allowing Palestinians to pass through with large water bottles and some food items, Haaretz has learned. The company stops Palestinian workers from passing through the checkpoint with the following items: Large bottles of frozen water, large bottles of soft drinks, home-cooked food, coffee, tea and the spice zaatar. The security company also dictates the quantity of items allowed: Five pitas, one container of hummus and canned tuna, one small bottle or can of beverage, one or two slices of cheese, a few spoonfuls of sugar, and 5 to 10 olives. Workers are also not allowed to carry cooking utensils and work tools.

MEDIA

Yeas & Nays, Washington Examiner - John Hodgman's routine at the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association dinner last weekend got mixed reviews from the Washington elite - but not by YouTube viewers.As of Sunday afternoon, Hodgman's standup bit from the weekend prior had garnered 380,884 hits on the video-sharing site. Contrast that to President Barack Obama's remarks, which had earned less than half of that, at 153,115. In fact, Hodgman's performance topped Obama's remarks at May's White House Correspondents' Association dinner (302,349 hits) and Wanda Sykes' standup routine there as well (190,674).

HEALTH

NY Times - [The Nastional Cancer Institute] has spent $105 billion since President Richard M. Nixon declared war on the disease in 1971. The American Cancer Society, the largest private financer of cancer research, has spent about $3.4 billion on research grants since 1946. Yet the fight against cancer is going slower than most had hoped, with only small changes in the death rate in the almost 40 years since it began.One major impediment, scientists agree, is the grant system itself. It has become a sort of jobs program, a way to keep research laboratories going year after year with the understanding that the focus will be on small projects unlikely to take significant steps toward curing cancer. "These grants are not silly, but they are only likely to produce incremental progress," said Dr. Robert C. Young, chancellor at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia and chairman of the Board of Scientific Advisors, an independent group that makes recommendations to the cancer institute.

YOUTH

Scientific Blogging - University of Minnesota Medical School researcher Iris Borowsky, M.D., Ph.D., and colleagues found that one in seven adolescents believe that it is highly likely that they will die before age 35, and this belief corresponded to more adolescents engaging in risky behaviors. . . Those who engaged in risky behaviors such as illicit drug use, suicide attempts, fighting, or unsafe sexual activity in the first year were more likely in subsequent years to believe they would die at a young age. Vice versa, those who predicted that they'd die young during the first interview were more likely in later years to begin engaging in these same risky behaviors and have poor health outcomes. Notably, these teens were significantly more likely to be diagnosed with HIV/AIDS just six years later, regardless of their sexual preference. "While conventional wisdom says that teens engage in risky behaviors because they feel invulnerable to harm, this study suggests that in some cases, teens take risks because they overestimate their vulnerability, specifically their risk of dying," Borowsky said. "These youth may take risks because they feel hopeless and figure that not much is at stake."

BELIEFS

Pew - The United States is on the verge of becoming a minority Protestant country; the number of Americans who report that they are members of Protestant denominations now stands at 51%. Moreover, the Protestant population is characterized by significant internal diversity and fragmentation, encompassing hundreds of different denominations loosely grouped around three fairly distinct religious traditions -- evangelical Protestant churches (26% of the overall adult population), mainline Protestant churches (18%) and historically black Protestant churches (7%). While Americans who are unaffiliated with any particular religion have seen the greatest growth in numbers as a result of changes in affiliation,

BACKYARD GREENS

Portland Press Herald - Three years after first winning seats on the Portland City Council, the Green Independent Party can claim some success in pushing its agenda through City Hall. Political observers say the three Greens on the council have proved to be effective consensus-builders on their core issues, such as reducing the city's energy usage and revamping land-use and transportation plans to encourage more housing downtown and less reliance on automobiles. "These are the guys who are moving and shaking," said Christopher O'Neil, the Portland Community Chamber's liaison to City Hall. "There is some question among Portlanders as to whether Portland should be moving or shaking, but the fact of the matter is ... they are the ones driving the agenda."

FURTHERMORE. . .

Another excellent Electric Politics interview, this time with former National Security Council staffer and foreign policy guru Roger Morris.

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