Wampum

The 30th meeting of ICANN is being held this week at the Hilton Hotel at Los Angeles International Airport, and today UNITE HIRE! Local 11 is picketing this particular Hilton property -- the Hilton LAX -- for unfair labor practices. I spoke with Kristin Winn, one of the organizers, before crossing the picket line, and I was surprised to learn that ICANN's president had already agreed not to continue to use the Hilton LAX for future meetings until the labor dispute is resolved. Basically, hotel workers are more likely (48%) to be injured than the average for the service sector, and injuries have gone up 210% for housekeepers, and 38% for all workers, at the Hilton LAX, since the beginning of 2003. Good for Paul Twomey (who's parents are sitting next to me, which may explain why he's being good).

I picked the photo because so much of ICANN's public policy problem space is about the laws (or their lack) for national namespaces (ccTLDs), a not inconsiderable number of which are either run on shoestrings, and sometimes quite creative shoestrings, e.g., Namibia (.na), or are run by commercial operators who's primary public policy goal is contract renewal and monopoly profit extraction (NeuStar and .us, Verisign and .tv, etc.). Why is this like this year's best and brightest of port-a-potties? Consider the policy around the WHOIS service? In how many national jurisdictions can personal privacy be reduced to input for mechanically harvested addresses for the purposes of SPAM targeting? The corollation between WHOIS and SPAM is beyond debate but ... trademark and law enforcement's best-and-brightest are concerned that anyone may be a trademark terrorist (a happy collision of their core claims), so everyone must surrender their contact information.

Potty policy.

The real issues before ICANN are structural change, the use of scripts other than ROMAN (actually a restricted set of US-ASCII) in the root and in the existing second-level namespaces, e.g., .com, .net, .org, .de, .fr, the 3rd round of new gTLDs (reminder, the 1st round was .biz, .info, .name, .coop, .aero, .museum, the 2nd round was .cat, .jobs, .travel, .mobi) and changes to the process of evaluating new gTLD applications and its budget and planing processes.

The enduring organizational tensions are between US governmental control (the annual agreement renewal) and multi-governmental control, between governmental control and other sources of authority for the formation of policy, between Verisign and not-Verisign, and between IP claims on the namespace and any other use of the namespaces. Its likely that you are "other".

The 31st meeting will be held in New Dehli in February, the 32nd in Paris in June.

How many scripts are used by governments in India? How many scripts are used by Indian governments in the Americas?

Posted by EBW at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I stopped working with a camera after reading it. There are two photographs making the rounds, associated with some legend or another, each of which appear to rest on, or rather, spring fully formed from, one or two foreheads, none of which I'm moved by ... I mean, where was the Boffins' Mess, let alone the O-Club or the perimeter wire or ... well, who cares?

More important than the photos of the day are the photos of yesterday. Please, please, please, click through and spend a delicious half hour reading this and this and this.

Then perhaps today's photo op will seem ... like just an op.

Posted by EBW at 11:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Jebheye Mosharekate Iran-e Eslaami (Islamic Iran Participation Front), which was headed by Mohammad Reza Khatami (the brother of Mohammad Khatami, the fifth President of Iran) until the election of Mohsen Mirdamadi, at the prior congress, just held their 10th Congress.

All the obvious reasonable things were said, about temporary suspension of enrichment, about anti-semitism and the Shoah, about Iraq, about the tea in China, but the most important thing was left unsaid. What will George Bush and Dick Cheney do to keep their man -- Ahmadi-Nejad -- and the conservative parties -- the Abadgaran, the followers of Yazdi, factions of the Revolutionary Guards -- in control of the 8th Majlis and the Iranian State?

Their biggest electoral political problem in obtaining a working plurality in the 8th Majlis is to counter the advantage Bush/Cheney will give 7th Majlis incumbents.

Ideas anyone?

Posted by EBW at 02:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm reading through Kevin Gambrell's testimony in the Cobell trial, and it's really fascinating. I've argued for years that the lessees are terrified that Congress and/or the Courts will turn to them in order to determine how much money should have ended up in Trust coffers, as it will show they underpaid their leases for years, just as they did on federal non-Indian land. But Gambrell offers up a third way to help in the accounting, which could be particularly helpful in those cases where the original documents just happened to be destroyed by the US Government. From the transcript: (Q's are Cobell attorneys, A's are from Gambrell.)

Q. When you discussed, in response to the judge's question, how the unitization works, was allocation an important issue?

A. Allocation is extremely critical in unit allocation. It is the essence of getting payment correctly to individual Indian owners, tribes, states, federal programs, and private landowners. Without it, you cannot allocate monies properly.

Q. Could you explain how the allocation process works?

A. Allocation process goes all the way back to the lease instrument. In order to get money correctly to an individual, you have to understand every aspect of the lease instrument in terms of: Is it unitized, does it commingle, what is the size of the property, what type of production comes off that property; to, when it goes through the system, is it a correct royalty rate, is it going to the correct owners, is there probate backing up those owners? And when you do that, you have to look at source documents, and you have to do third party verification.

Q. What do you mean, first of all, by source documents?

A. Well, for example, if you look at an allocation to an individual Indian, in order to get to that allocation, I have to go all the way back to the unit agreement. And I have to look at an exhibit called Exhibit B within the unit agreement, that talks about the complete breakdown of every ownership type within that unit, because I may have 30 percent owned by federal, 20 percent by Navajo Tribal, 30 percent by Navajo allotted, and maybe 20 percent by private landowner. I have to go all the way back to that document as a primary source to get to the payment to the individual Indian. And then I have to go to the royalty rate, and then I have to go to the probates and look at probates, gift deeds, living wills, et cetera, in order to get to the complete payment out to the allottee.

1 Q. That sounds like a cumbersome process. Is it?

A. It's very complex. If you were to look at this type of system in a private landowner's case, oil and gas industry hires land people, they pay them very well, in the $200,000 range, to go back and do this title research to find out who gets paid, how much they get paid, how do you allocate, et cetera. It also requires, in the private sector, a legal
opinion from an attorney that's certified, that says that the title in the allocations are certified correct, and the division of interest will pay out correctly. It requires an extensive amount of work. It requires very high level land people and attorneys to do this type of work.

Q. Is that what you did at the FIMO office when you were running the FIMO office?

A. Repeat that.

Q. Is that what you did at the FIMO office when you were running the FIMO office?

A. Yes, that was part of what I did, and my staff did.

Q. Do you have any knowledge as to whether or not this was done by MMS or anyone else outside of the FIMO office with regard to individual Indian mineral or oil and gas lands?

A. No, I'm not. We were in a unique position. We had every agency within our office, so we looked at everything from the lease agreement itself, the BLM-approved communitization

A. We brought it to the attention of MMS many times, and asked that MMS make corrections on the reports, in which case often they did.

Q. If you didn't rely on the MMS database, what did you rely on?

A. We relied on our own internal databases that we developed with companies, and we relied on companies' reports directly going to us.

Q. So is it correct, then, that you relied on third party information?

A. We relied on third party and primary source data.

Q. Are third party documents important to determining accuracy with regard to mineral and oil and gas leases?

A. Absolutely.

THE COURT: Would you call that a leading question?

MR. GINGOLD: I apologize, Your Honor.

BY MR. GINGOLD:

Q. Why would you need to rely on third party data?

A. We rely on third party databases because we don't always trust what an operator tells us. We have companies that produce oil. They tell us one thing on their inventory and what they sold; and then we go to a transporter, and we find that the information is different, that they picked up more oil than the4 company reported. And so we do rely on run tickets from trucking transportation companies, and gas pipeline companies that transport gas, to verify production.

Q. What is a run ticket?

A. Run ticket?

Q. Yeah, what is it?

MR. KIRSCHMAN: Your Honor, objection. Outside the scope of this case. This is asset management. This is talking about what private companies do. This is not about a historical accounting.

THE COURT: Well --

MR. GINGOLD: Your Honor, may I?

THE COURT: No, we touched on this yesterday. I don't want to overdo this. I mean, you're right that this is, going forward, an asset management more than it is historical accounting, but frankly, it helps for me to kind of fill in the picture of what is known and what is not known, and what can be verified and what can't be verified. So a reasonable amount of this, I'm going to allow. Go ahead.

MR. KIRSCHMAN: Thank you, Your Honor.

BY MR. GINGOLD:
Q. What is a run ticket, Mr. Gambrell?

A. A run ticket is a statement that is often signed by a transporter and an operator when oil leaves a tank. What they do is, they measure the oil in the tank when it's full, and then it fills up the truck, and then they measure the tank when the truck is filled. And between the full measurement before the truck filled up and the truck measurement after the truck fills up is the quantity of oil that leaves the lease.

Q. And how is that related to the income produced from oil and gas or mineral leases?

A. Anything to do with income depends on the volumes that are sold off the lease. You cannot determine the monies going to individual Indians if you do not know what was sold.

Posted by MB Williams at 01:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

The plaintiffs (Indians) pulled out their big guns yesterday Tuesday, and the testimony was stunning. Indianz.com (the only media resource I know of which is truly covering this landmark trial), has the story. First up was DoI field solicitor Robert McCarthy:

An Interior Department attorney who has been locked out of his office at the Bureau of Indian Affairs accused the agency on Tuesday of failing to account for millions of dollars in trust funds.

After a stint in Oklahoma, field solicitor Robert McCarthy went to work for the BIA in Palm Springs, California, over three years ago. He said he quickly learned that the agency didn't have a way to track more than $30 million in annual lease payments owed to members of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians.

"The agency had a very poor system of record-keeping and was grossly mismanaging the leases ... and was generally not enforcing the leases," testified McCarthy, one of the witnesses for the plaintiffs in the Cobell trust fund lawsuit.

Enforcement was so lax that it was impossible to tell whether Agua Caliente landowners received the right amount of money for the use of their land and whether they received it on time, McCarthy said. The BIA essentially relied on the word of developers, private parties and outsiders.

"I saw files that were years in default," McCarthy said of leases that weren't enforced.

Even when a payment was made, the BIA didn't always pass it on to the beneficiary, McCarthy testified. In one case, the BIA kept a trust payment of $130,000 in a "special deposit account" for over 25 years because the agency didn't know whose money it was.

...

Despite the apparent mismanagement, the BIA made money off of Agua Caliente landowners. "In virtually every case for virtually every type of administrative action," the agency charged a fee for its services, McCarthy said.

For example, a fee of 1 percent was applied to every single land sale, McCarthy said. In Palm Springs -- where real estate is big business -- this amounted to payments to the BIA that were as high as $60,000, according to one document entered into evidence.

But federal regulations limit fees for land sales to $22.50, McCarthy said. The regulations also cap fees for leases at $500, though that apparently wasn't followed in Palm Springs.

"Those fees are charged in Palm Springs on every lease," McCarthy told the court.

...

The situation prompted McCarthy to warn his superiors in the Solicitor's Office, the Inspector General and eventually Jim Cason -- the associate deputy secretary at DOI who was in charge of the BIA at the time -- about the problems in Palm Springs. "I was kicked out of my office after I made my disclosures," McCarthy told Judge James Robertson, who wondered why the solicitor was working from home -- with pay -- rather than at the BIA office.

"Everyone stopped talking to me," McCarthy added. "I was shunned."

And when McCarthy informed his superiors that he was going to testify in the Cobell trial, he was told he was going to be fired for allegedly disclosing confidential trust data to the media. The Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility group is defending McCarthy, who has filed appeals over his employment status.

...

After his direct testimony, McCarthy was treated in a hostile manner by Robert Kirschman, a DOJ attorney. Kirschman attempted to show that McCarthy tried to take sole credit for identifying the proper owner of the $130,000 trust payment, mischaracterized the way in which Agua Caliente leases are tracked and gave inaccurate information in the memo to Cason.

McCarthy appeared to withstand the scrutiny and Kirschman cut off his cross-examination after seeming to stumble on a question about fees. Kirschman also tried to make an issue out of a memo that he said McCarthy failed to provide to the court.

Next up for the Cobell plaintiffs was Albuquerque Bureau of Indian Affairs employee Mona Infield, whose responsibilities cover data recovery efforts:

Infield, a member of the Citizen Potawataomi Nation of Oklahoma, gave succinct but detailed testimony about trust accounting practices dating back to the 1980s. She spoke of outdated systems, missing computer records and a lack of enforcement.

"They were relying on an honor system to pay the royalties," she said of government agencies.

Infield concluded her testimony yesterday afternoon after DOJ attorneys declined to ask questions.

Up today is Kevin Gambrell, the former director of the Federal Indian Minerals Office in Farmington, New Mexico from 1996 to 2003. Gambrell testified before Congress regarding mismanagement of trust accounts, and was fired from his job for purportedly "destroying records." Gambrell maintains the documents were merely copies of originals properly recorded and stored by MMS.

PBS' Now recorded an interview with Gambrell in 2006. For a preview of what Gambrell might have to say today, read the transcript.

Correction: Gannett has also been following the story. In fact, Solicitor McCarthy faces dismissal for disclosing the extent of the mismanagement to Gannett earlier this year.

Update: I misread the original article in Indianz, and thus was a day off in my reporting. McCarthy and Infield testified on Tuesday, and Gambrell yesterday. I'm currently reading through the transcript.

In addition, Indianz.com is reporting both parties have rested their cases and have until Dec. 30th for closing arguments.

Posted by MB Williams at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Both France and the US ratified the 1984 Convention against Torture, so Rumsfeld's acceptance of French jurisdiction (trip to France to do a stand-up on the foreign policy rubber chicken circuit) leads to this -- French courts have jurisdiction to prosecute him for having ordered and authorized torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

Today the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) along with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), and the French League for Human Rights (LDH) filed a complaint with the Paris Prosecutor before the "Court of First Instance" (Tribunal de Grande Instance) charging former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld with ordering and authorizing torture.

Le Monde notes in dispatches that Le parquet de Paris a fait savoir en fin de matinée que la plainte était "en cours d'examen".

Posted by EBW at 09:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Leaving Monterey after visiting my mom and taking the kids swimming I spotted Tjatjakiymatchan (coyote in Rumsien Ohlone) working the field across from Olmstead Road and the airport. I pulled the truck over and we watched tatjakiymatchan hunt for mice and gophers.

Diane Watson blogs at HuffPo, she's written a half-dozen pieces since she started, and her latest is Jim Crow in Indian Country. It is an interesting piece.

Imagine yourself as an African American and resident of the State of Alabama in 1964, the year that President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the historic Civil Rights Act. And again imagine in 1964 that Alabama Governor George Wallace, in an act of defiance that not even he considered, introduced legislation to expel all African Americans from Alabama.

Now fast forward to the year 2007, over four decades later, when the citizens of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma voted last March to expel their black citizens in a manner that equaled if not surpassed the most vitriolic attacks against African Americans in the once segregated South.

Many Americans do not realize that some Native American tribes owned slaves of African descent. As an independently recognized nation in the 19th Century, the Cherokee Nation embraced and promoted African slavery, a position it maintained after removal to Indian Territory (present day Oklahoma) in the 1830s.

During the Civil War, the Cherokee Nation fought on the side of the Confederacy in order to preserve its southern slaveholding tradition of trafficking in the ownership and sale of black slaves. In fact, Stand Waite, the last Confederate General to surrender to the Union Army, was Cherokee.

The Cherokee Nation emancipated all its slaves in 1863. In 1866, the Cherokee Nation signed a new treaty with the United States Government that formally ended the practice of slavery and made the former slaves citizens of the Cherokee Nation. The Treaty of 1866 resulted in an amendment to the Cherokee constitution that same year, which read in part: "All native born Cherokees, all Indians, and whites legally members of the nation by adoption, and all freedmen (the term used for freed slaves of African descendants of the Cherokee Nation) shall be taken and deemed to be citizens of the Cherokee Nation."

Toward the end of the 19th Century, a distinction, a product of the new Jim Crow South and later codified in practice by the U.S. Government, had emerged between black freedmen Cherokees and those who were categorized as Cherokee by blood. The distinction is used today by the current Cherokee leadership that claims it is primarily concerned about preserving the Cherokee Nation's heritage for those who can prove that they have Cherokee blood lineage.

But such claims, as Professor Robert Warrior of the University of Oklahoma elegantly makes the case, "fail to rise to the level of those earlier Cherokees who understood that the tragic absurdity of reconciling a nation to its history of slavery requires wisdom and compassion, not insulting and ridiculous appeals to faulty membership requirements and the poses of victim-hood."

Today, the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma receives roughly $300 million a year in federal taxpayer dollars. The Cherokee Nation is also the beneficiary of a federal gaming franchise that is estimated to yield it another $300 million yearly. This is not an insignificant amount of money.

If the Cherokee Nation is allowed to pursue its current policy of expelling black descendants of the Cherokee Nation, black descendants obviously will not be able to receive federal assistance from the Cherokee Nation in the form of health, education, and housing assistance.

I do not believe that your or my taxpayer dollars should go to any group that practices discrimination. First and foremost, it is against the law. That is why I have introduced legislation, H.R. 2824, that cuts off all U.S. government relations with the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma until it agrees to accept the black descendants of the Cherokees as full participating citizens of the Cherokee Nation.

I respect the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma as a sovereign entity. But no sovereign nation, particularly one within the confines of the United States, should be given a free pass to exercise its sovereign rights to expel its citizens on the basis of ethnicity, class, or race. And when a nation violates its treaty obligations with the United States, Congress is obliged to take action.

Is she generalizing from the CNO to all tribes, including some California Tribes which have disenfranchised as much as a third of their citizens? Does she mean to take on the Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians? The Narragansett Tribe of Rhode Island? Any or all of the tribes between LA and LI? What are the rights of persons disenfranchised from Indian Nations? Does Santa Clara mean there is no procedural minimum for Tribal Governments contemplating or conducting mass disenfranchisements? Are the obligations of the Treaty of 1866 controlling or is that treaty to be discarded for some work of historical fiction from the last, or the next Rehnquist, controlling?

Is she generalizing from access to the ballot and the per-capita payments, the political enfranchise to access to the courts, the civil franchise? Does she mean to end the legal incompetency of Tribal Courts to hear claims against non-citizens, an incompetency based without nuance on "ethnicity, class, or race", for felony cases in the Major Crimes Act 1885, and reaffirmed in PL 280, and for civil and non-felony cases in Oliphant, reaffirmed in Laura and Duro right up to the present moment?

It is hard to imagine a single Indian standing behind, or in front, of Chad Smith, if those issues are being considered seriously by Rep. Watson.

By the bye, Robert Allen Warrior is worth reading for other reasons in addition to his recent contribution on this particular political controversy. Tribal Secrets is wicked good, good enough for a government reader, and far too good for Stanford.

Posted by EBW at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I am a seventh-grader at King Middle School. The media have really twisted around the facts about King's decision to provide birth control to a few students.

First, the school's ages go from 11 to 15. On TV, instead of showing all different age groups, the TV cameras show kids age 11.

The couple of kids at King who have asked for birth control are 14 or 15.

Also, just because King now has birth control doesn't mean that we are the only middle school in the United States to have sexually active kids or offer birth control.

Plus, the way that most of the students feel about the matter is that we might not be able to stop these students, but at least our school can help by keeping them safe from becoming parents at such a young age.

At King, when students need help, the teachers do all they can to be of assistance, and the birth control is just showing how much more the school cares about its students.

Reporters and cameras are constantly swarming around the school. It has made it difficult for the students to focus and get to and from school. I just hope that the chaos calms down soon, and that people start to realize that this is a good thing for King.

Rikki Morrow-Spitzer
Seventh-Grader
King Middle School
Portland

Posted by EBW at 09:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In May 2001 Jaswant Singh then foreign minister of India, departed from India's position of record for decades -- the Ronald Reagan-era US missile "defense" initiative would destabilise global security and lead to the militarisation of outer space. India's new position of record was support for the missile "defense" diplomatic campaign, a little over 100 days after Bill Clinton left office.

Today India's position of record returns to the vastly saner earlier position.

Posted by EBW at 01:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is running as paid media in a campaign in Tuscany, and picked up as earned media in the Italian press.

Posted by EBW at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Tom Allen keeps doing fund raisers with Madeleine Albright, for instance, this Friday at the Augusta Country Club, off Rt 202 in Manchester. Pity no one did a red handed photo with Albright.

Posted by EBW at 07:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Click and read.

Posted by EBW at 01:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Le Monde has two pages on the Revolutionary Guards. Pages 1 and 2.

For those who read French, recommended.

Posted by EBW at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Primary season in Persia in the '05 cycle began (for me) with Eric's Guide to Garbage, and going over the candidates (some of whom later dropped out to advance others, e.g., Ali Akbar Velayati (and others) to advance Rafsanjani (and others)) [November 15th, 2004]. Later in the cycle Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf tossed his considerable hat into the ring, and INRA polling data had a three-way tie for third place (Rafsanjani being first, Mehdi Karroubi second), between Ali Akbar Velayati, Mostafa Moin and Ali Larijani [March 17th, 2005]. Still later Velayati did drop out, specifically to advance former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani [April 11th, 2005], prior to the blow-up that lead Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei to direct the Guardian Council to reconsider the disqualification of former minister of science, research and technology Mostafa Moeen and Vice-President Mohsen Mehralizadeh [May 23rd, 2005].

Reading and re-reading Robert Tait's piece in today's Gruniad, that Velayati criticised Larijani's resignation, and a letter signed by 200 members of the 7th Majlis in support of Larijani, and a separate (or perhaps the same specified differently) letter from the Majlis' foreign and national security committee to Ahmadi-Nejad, that Larijani's resignation "put the country in danger", it still seems like politics rather than substantive policy.

I'm still of the ignorant opinion that its 8th Majlis electioneering, since all of the participants have a stake in the outcome of next March's election.

Posted by EBW at 11:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Rebecca Minnick, Robert O'Brien and Sarah Thompson. Those are the targets of the Portland Republican City Committee.

I wish I could write that I'm surprised by the political dumbitude but I'm not. Ben Meiklejohn is talking about a "compromise" to keep oral and trans-dermal hormone delivery systems which suppress ovulation, and in some cases menstruation, from girls until their 14th birthday.

Posted by EBW at 08:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It is beyond wicked difficult to reconcile this¹:

We have inherited a social system based on male domination of politics and economics. We call for the replacement of the cultural ethics of domination and control with more cooperative ways of interacting that respect differences of opinion and gender. Human values such as equity between the sexes, interpersonal responsibility, and honesty must be developed with moral conscience. We should remember that the process that determines our decisions and actions is just as important as achieving the outcome we want.

and this²:

To have public school officials making these types decisions and cutting the parents and guardians out of the process makes this even more insidious. This is more than just an embarrassment for Maine and Portland. It appears to be part of the larger agenda by secular progressives to lower our cultural standards, and they are using our young people to do so.

This irresponsible action is indicative of the erosion of our cultural values. To have public schools playing a lead role in this is an outrage, and sends exactly the wrong message to our young people. Republicans need leaders who are not afraid to stand up for our core beliefs and values and I look forward to engaging these types of issues head-on during my candidacy for Congress.

And yet, politically, they must be reconciled, as Ben Meiklejohn voted with John Coynie to prevent contraceptives from being distributed to sexually active teens attending King Middle School. Coynie is quoted as "birth control is a parent's responsibility", while Meiklejohn's quote is "the consent form is unclear", and they won't be targets for the recall petitions being circulated by the Portland Republican City Committee, with the over-the-top grandstanding of Dean Scontras, who's just looking to starve out the last primary candidates from the sane wing of the Maine Republican party.

When MB was walking about doing her early labor afoot at Maine Med five years ago prior to Kezzie's birth we met another woman also doing laps about the halls. She was 13, accompanied by her mother. She too was delivered of a healthy child.

Portlanders, please do what I'd do if I were in Portland this week, spend Wednesday evening, from 7:00pm to later at the Portland Arts and Technology High School (PATHS) located at 196 Allen Ave, between Woodford's and Northgate. Ask Zen Ben what he thinks Feminism And Gender Equity means.

¹ THE TEN KEY VALUES, 7. Feminism And Gender Equity, Maine Green Independent Party.
² Junk sexploitation email from Dean Scontras.

Posted by EBW at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Norman Baker (LibDem) is publishing his year of investigation into the death of Dr. David Kelly in The Daily Mail

The Strange Death Of David Kelly by Norman Baker, will be published by Methuen on November 12 at £9.99, copyright Norman Baker 2007. To order a copy (p&p free), call 0845 606 4206.

via co-conspirator Susie. Our prior art.

Posted by EBW at 12:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

According to Dr. Watson, Africans are significantly different from Caucasians. Charles Darwin held similar beliefs.

In the Indian Cloakroom, where we quietly celebrate our isolation for between 40,000 and 5,000 years, we do not ask what scientific Caucasians really think about human culture and the Holocene Division of Humanity.

Update: In a quote to the AP after the Times quote, Watson said "I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted as having said. There is no scientific basis for such a belief."

Posted by EBW at 11:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ari Larijani resigned today. In the last cycle he finnished 6th in the first round, with 1,740,162 votes and I was surprised when he joined Ahmadi-Nejad for a highly visible post. Color me surprised again.

My uninformed-guess-at-a-distance is that its not substantive w.r.t. the pilot production of LEU for fuel, either at the single in-country (and incomplete and idle) electrical generation reactor, or more likely (according to me anyway) the unfilled millions of SWU (red area) in the regional electrical generation reactor LEU fuel market.

My WAG is that the 8th Majlis election cycle just kicked off. By February of 2004 Persian politics was in total meltdown, and the ballots will go out in about 150 days, about when Super Tuesday used to happen, before someone got a bunch of state parties to front-load the hell out of the primary and caucus cycle. Coding this as nukes-only is like coding Dodd's popularity as a sudden party preference for white hair, and missing the FISA filibuster.

Posted by EBW at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Chris Dodd: on the retroactive grant of immunity to carriers for illegal wiretap

Bill Richardson: on the next Abu Gonzales, Abu Mukasey.

I think that reading the telephone book to stop FISA is wicked smart politics. I wish that Richardson would be as constructive, and order the NM National Guard back to New Mexico. Its not that it just takes one to win, its that it just takes one, no more, and no less, to start.

Posted by EBW at 02:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

From Scott Richard Lyons' (Leech Lake Ojibwe/Mdewakanton Dakota) editorial:

Acting and thinking as a nation means more than respecting one's treaties; it also means using national terminology and conceptual frameworks to characterize what is going on. For instance, it would be more appropriate to use the word ''denaturalization'' instead of ''disenrollment'' to accurately describe what is happening to the freedmen, who, after all, have long been citizens of the Cherokee Nation regardless of blood.

Denaturalization is legally losing your citizenship, and the idea didn't exist until World War I when France, Belgium, Italy and other European nations passed laws revoking the citizenships of ''enemies of the state.'' Those laws targeted individuals, but it wasn't long before ethnic groups were denaturalized, too. The Nazi Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped citizenship from non-''Aryans'' using a system that eerily resembles today's Indian blood quantum formulas. Four German grandparents made one a German, three or four Jewish grandparents made another a Jew, while one or two Jewish grandparents made one a ''mischling'' or mixed-blood. We all know how that social experiment ended.

From its inception, denaturalization has been considered a human rights issue of major importance because the global community generally loathes seeing citizenship revoked. Citizenships are considered permanent in ways that ''memberships'' are not. When a country club grants memberships to whites only, that's rightly decried as racism but not considered to be a national emergency. When a nation does the same thing to its existing citizens, it raises concerns about ethnic cleansing, refugees and other national matters.

Ethnic cleansing is the deportation of an ethnic population from a national territory, and the last time it happened at the Cherokee Nation it was called ''removal.'' If the freedmen were purged today, they wouldn't become ''non-Indians.'' All propaganda aside, Indian identity is not really in question here. It's citizenship. The freedmen would become refugees.

(HT Indianz.com)

Posted by MB Williams at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Rehnquist got his start in electoral politics doing voter challenge in Arizona. The drill is simple, you're the most legally educated person present (thanks to Stanford's affirmative action program for Anglophones), and the polling places are overwhelmingly Hispanic and Democratic, so you demand that each voter, each Hispanic voter, pass an illegal "qualification test" in English on some Constitutional minutia (can you name the third-through-eighth offices named in the Succession Act of 1949?) with some criminal penalty for voter fraud ready and waiting for those who fail and insist upon casting a ballot?

All you want is to knock out a few thousand voters and intimidate a few dozen groups of poll workers.

Hans von Spakovsky is the Bush Regime's nominee for the Federal Election Commission. He's that kind of guy.

Today's mouse exercise is to click here.

Posted by EBW at 02:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The link is to a review by Uri Avnery.

Posted by EBW at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The photo is from Le Monde.

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Of the 526 deputes present, 507 voted yes, 19 no, on the question of military incursions into American Occupied Iraq. We're thinking of sending Joe Biden a fez.

Posted by EBW at 11:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hossein Derakhshan ("Hoder") mentioned something recently that's been nagging me for years, and not too long after Juan Cole wrote a note to the same point. Hossein's piece is a critique of the Rafsanjanists, both in Iran and in exile. Juan's piece is a critique of the War Hawks who lead in funds raised in both the RNC and DNC presidential horse races.

Hossein is concerned that the Democrats are more sophisticated, and therefore more dangerous, than the simpler Republicans. Juan is concerned that the front-runners in both major parties are messaging "regime change" in Iran, that war with Iran is the litmus test of the 2008 cycle.

Iran was the war Jimmy Carter declined. It is the war the "ultras", to adopt Selig Harrison's term in this month's Le Monde Diplomatique, are in bi-partisan agreement to embark upon, at some unspecified date in the post-election future.

Here is a litmus test. Check the pH of your candidate of choice:

Iran is a legitimate, democratic, and sovereign state

There are three claims: (i) legitimate, (ii) democratic, and (iii) sovereign. Which does your candidate of choice contest, and what is the gravaman of the candidate's claim?

Which of (i) does s/he prefer? The royalist claims of Reza Pahlavi, aka "His Imperial Majesty Reza Shah II"? The resistance claims of Massoud and Maryam Rajavi? After all, the standard PMOI/MEK text that the West needs to go to war with Iran in order to install the MEK in power. Those two sets of claims exhaust the expat claims to delegitimate the Islamic Republic, leaving only ... the political movements, secular reform and clerical reform, of Mostafa Moin and Mehdi Karroubi, respectively, and former Presidents Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami ... each of whom supports claims (i), (ii), and (iii).

Perhaps (ii)? So the major gains made by the Reform slate in the December 2006 municipal elections, winning or controlling over 250 town or city councils, pasting Ahmadinejad's "Sweet smell of service" slate, or the win by independent and reform candidates to the open seats in the 7th Majlis, or the lead the Qom Theological Society Teachers slate obtained over Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Theological Schools and Universities Experts slate, the high point of which was the 400,000 vote margin Akbar Hashemi Bahramani Rafsanjani obtained over the next highest candidate, with Ahmadinejad's candidate, Mohammad Taqi Mesbah Yazdi, placing 6th, and almost not being elected to the Assembly of Experts at all, are gefilte fish?

That leaves (iii).

In case I've lost anyone, is there a Democrat competing in the current DNC primary and caucus cycle who messages that US -- Iran relations will, under his or her watch, be relations between two legitimate, democratic, and sovereign states?

If not, then Hoder is right, and Juan drew the Iran Hawk line too high, and ... the Iran War will not be prevented by impeaching Bush or Cheney or pinioning their wings until noon, January 20th, 2009. Merely delayed.

About 150 members of Congress signed a letter in 2002 attempting to get the Rajavi cult off the Foreign Terrorist Organization list. I'm looking for the names and I'll publish them when I find it.

Posted by EBW at 11:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Susie Madrak (Suburban Guerrilla) needs help. Please give what you can.

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John Doolittle, nine-term incumbent and Abramoff prosecution target raised $50,000 in 3Q07, his primary opponent Maj. Eric Egland (R-Freeper), doing his first run at doors, raised $80,000, and Charlie Brown got a very respectable $212,000 for his second run at the 04 doors.

Remember, its a 10+ red district.

Posted by EBW at 10:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In spite of the fact that Belgium hasn't had a government for 128 days now, the socialists (left) and the liberals (right) have managed to work out a budget compromise, and free dental care will be available through age 15, three more years than at present.

What a funny little country and what a funny little political class.

Posted by EBW at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's our home.

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The FSB (ex-KGB) isn't commenting, but a spokesperson for Vladimir Poutine's administration (aka "the Kremlin") disclosed to AFP that they have been informed of a plot to kill the President during his scheduled visit to Tehran.

More as this develops.

Posted by EBW at 03:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

from HR 6, as amended by the Senate

(2) alternatives for --

(A) designing a pilot program to determine the feasibility of using renewable electricty to power electric vehicles as an adjunct to a renewable fuels mandate;
(B) allowing the use, under the pilot program designed under subparagraph (A), of electricty generated from nuclear energy as an additional source of supply;

This is the Vermont Yankee cooling structure last August.

Posted by EBW at 11:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

This:

Les communistes indiens restent hostiles à un accord nucléaire avec les Etats-Unis

... are opposed to uranium mining or rad waste dumps ... yeah, even the stoics on the Diné Tribal Council voted to cut the Americans off ...

Oh. Dots. Not Feathers. Oh well. Maybe next time. But while we're here, India doesn't move without its Communists, and they don't want to be sucked into the Bush Zone just for a few fuel loads they could buy with different currencies from Moscow or Europe or even ... Iran.

Chalk up another strategic victory for the NeoCons. They've put Russia back in the black on carbon dollars, opened the West and Central Asian, as well as the Latin American national defense markets to Rosoboronexport, crashed the dollar, and, well, you know the rest. They didn't just lose Turkey this week, They threw away the largest democracy in the world too.

Posted by EBW at 10:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

What are the odds that one dollar in five contributed to the Florida Republican Party during the past quarter came from the Palm Beach Kennel Club, Mardi Gras Gaming, and the Jacksonville and Hollywood dog tracks?

Marco Rubio, Republican from West Miami, and Speaker of the the Florida House, is leading the Republican House Caucus on the issue of gaming in Florida. Indian gaming in Florida. He's wicked opposed to it.

Now recalculate your odds. Did they change?

Posted by EBW at 02:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've posted Spanish language news copy from El Universal (Mexico City) at DG08. Call me a fool, but this line, the last from Univision's coverage, caught my eye. Su mujer, Tipper, con la que ha tenido cuatro hijos, está siempre a su lado en los actos públicos.

MB and I both thought of Jim Capozzolla in the last 24 hours. Jim would have really savored the reversal, by a higher court, the fashion and good taste ruling rendered in the Summer and Fall of the first Year of the Zeros by the Alpha Girls.

Chuck Schumer is running a test-the-party-pulse using the DSCC's website. Click through and v-sign. Its not a simple senatorial "Congrats Al" thing, or a cynical "update the ATMrootz database", though these are present also. Its a check, what is the pulse of the party?

Personally, I've put on a Gathering of Nations CD and gave the player a little juice, or as Jonah says "Up Vol!"

Posted by EBW at 09:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Remember the CONELRAD ALERTS? The Duck and Covers? The real currency of the Cold War?

All that stands between us and that old bad land is the current Soviet Premier. Nick Sarkozy, formerly of Paris, now Kennebunkport, is trying to keep up. He's trying to come to grips with the fact that the current Soviet Premier isn't rolling over on the Iran War fiction, or on scraping the ABM Treaty.

Posted by EBW at 11:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

MR. GINGOLD: Your Honor, thank you very much. On behalf of 500,000 current Individual Indian Trust beneficiaries and an extremely dedicated litigation team, we thank you very much for the time this Court has spent in the short period that it has had available to prepare for this proceeding, which this Court noted has been a long time coming. And we thank you very much for that. And this courthouse -- this Court, the District Court, is one of the few sanctuaries that our clients have found in 120 years. So we thank you very much for that.

There are three things that I agree with what Mr. Kirschman said this morning. One is, the government filed the July 2, 2000 plan; is the other is, the government filed their July 6th, 2000 plan; the other is, what they've been doing is a litigation support accounting plan, and they are estimating and projecting probabilities as to what might have occurred in certain accounts. Other than that, Your Honor, I disagree completely with what was represented to you this morning.

The reality is, the litigation support accounting plan is a plan based on documentation in the administrative record that is designed for one purpose: To limit the liability of the United States government. That's why it is called the Litigation Support Accounting plan; that is what is being done. It is not an accounting that has been declared by this Court, it is not an accounting duty that the United States government has owed our clients since the government first exercised control over our clients' Trust lands, the natural resources, and the funds and proceeds generated therefrom.

The United States Supreme Court, in Mitchell II has determined the Trust duties of the United States government, specifically with request to the Individual Indian Trust, in 1983. Whereas here, the government has exercised control, and continues to exercise control, all traditional Trust principles apply to the government's management of the Trust.

Therefore, with all due respect to Mr. Kirschman, this is not an APA case. We understand the tension in the Court of Appeals opinions. How those tensions are ultimately explained, Your Honor, I think is anyone's guess at this point in time. But what is abundantly clear is this is not an ordinary Administrative Procedure Act case, this is not an ordinary Trust case. Your Honor, this is not an ordinary Trust.

When the United States government established this Trust, it did not settle the Trust, notwithstanding what our august colleague has suggested. The lands were not lands owned by the United States. The resources were not resources owned by the United States. The lands were principally held by the tribes on reservations pursuant to treaties that went back decades before the Trust was established in 1887.

What happened with regard to the Allotment Act, Your Honor, which was the General Allotment Act of 1887, was that the reservations were broken up. Approximately 40 percent of the land owned by the tribes was reserved for the tribes in Trust. 40 percent was reserved for the individuals. This is all west of the Mississippi. And another 20 percent was available for whatever the United States government wanted to do, whether it wanted to provide the land to homesteaders for various companies that were developing the large cities out west, for railroads, or anything else.

So Your Honor, this Trust was not settled by the United States government. The land was contributed to the Trust, which was owned legally by the Indians. The money that was generated from those lands were monies of the Indians. The Trust duties are duties that are established in accordance with Trust law.

Congress established the Trust; it did not settle the Trust. The United States government is the trustee; the Interior Department is not. The Secretary of the Interior and the Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs are among the trustee delegates who have been charged with the fiduciary duty to manage the Trust in accordance with Trust law. The Secretary of the Treasury is another trustee delegate.

What this Court has held, and what the Court of Appeals has affirmed, is that there is a fiduciary duty that preexisted the 1994 Trust Reform Act. And again, that duty, in accordance with Mitchell II, began at the time the government exercised control of the lands. The exercise of control was decided by the Supreme Court in two principal ways: Whether it's by statute and regulation; or, in the absence of statute, by practice.

The practice element was determined in 2003 in the United States Supreme Court case involving the White Mountain Apache Tribe. The government contested both the Mitchell II decision, and it contested the White Mountain Apache, and the government lost in both. The government took the position that duties -- this was a bare Trust, not a true Trust. The duties did not apply

In reality, the Supreme Court said no, that's not true. The duties do apply. And unless Congress specifically to the contrary limited those duties, they applied as they would apply in traditional Trust law.

Your Honor, statutes were enacted subsequent to 1887: In 1889, statutes were enacted with regard to the duty to account for proceeds of