Wampum

I'm getting a chuckle out of the somewhat self-inflicted vapors of some bloggers over the Clinton campaign's lastest paid media outlay -- the 3am ad. If "it" happens while the kids are awake, then either (a) Canada has just invaded, or (b) Uruguay is melting. Most of the world is many, many time zones away from where ever one is. My wake-up in Delhi skype home was to MB at bed time, and my bed time skype home always caught MB making coffee and toast. Between us in timezones is either Pakistan melting or shedding its own murderous cowboy, Afghanistan in bloom (poppies) or boom (not), Iran, the former Soviet-stans, some wicked interesting, the Persian Gulf, the Zionist Entity, Moscow, and the European Market. Looking the other way, also into every North American's night-time dreams, is Burma, Beijing, Indonesia, the Asian Market, and just as much pre-dawn fun. Did I forget North Korea???

Here's a game to play. It's 3pm and the phone rings in the Oval. Where is "it" and what is "it".

Points for originality and verve.

Posted by EBW at 10:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Fairly frequently, we're questioned by fellow travelers as to how we came to live the vagabonding life we now lead. I think at this point, I can recite my schtick in my sleep; how, from my experience as an armchair econoblogger, I realized the housing market was about to pop, and, having foolishly opted for an ARM due to our subprime FICO scores, knew that we needed to cash out at peak, and before reset, so as to not lose the extensive sweat equity we'd built up in our 1913 American Foursquare. How some homes similar to our which went on the market the week after ours sold (after only ten days and three offers) are still for sale, three years later. Even Eric, who kindly refrains from critiquing my inability to balance our checkbook, now agrees that my instincts were well founded. He even asks my advice on investment possibilities.

So I wasn't surprised that two of my favorite econoblogger sites, Calculated Risk and the Big Picture, have been talking up the jingle mail theme for months now, and have both pointed out the creation of YouWalkAway.com, a website that promises, for $995, to help underwater homeowners to walk away from their mortgages. This morning, over a month after blog readers were introduced to YouWalkAway.com, the New York Times discovered it.

My prediction is that left econoblog readers will come out of the pending recession/depression well ahead of their counterparts who depend upon the Times/WSJ/WP/[insert favorite MSM outlet.]

Posted by MB Williams at 08:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

His bio can be found here. It is an impressive read.

We've added categories for Nader/Gonzales, and for McCain.

Posted by EBW at 11:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If the Indian vote in the early primary contests was anything near the African-American vote, if Santa Fe and Albuquerque, not Reno and Las Vegas, were the third cache of mid-winter voters to open and consume, to analytically crack the bones and suck out the marrows -- canvas, message, poll, vote, spin -- then everyone, non-Indian as well as Indian, would be thinking through the meanings of this:

Obama's campaign said he believes tribal gaming should be decided on a case-by-case basis with consideration for the wishes of the states involved¹.

The most exculpatory construction, to which Molly Ball devotes several paragraphs, is that the Obama inner-circle of 2007 hadn't given any thought to the issue and recycled the non-surprising policy of most non-Indians in state-level electoral politics -- state's rights, not in the 10th Amendment sense of a covert undermining of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but the even more corrosive sense of nullification of the first Indian Nonintercourse Act (Act of July 22, 1790, 1 Stat. 137) and its sequella, 25 U.S.C. § 117, which hold that a sale of Indian lands was not valid unless "made and duly executed at some public treaty, held under the authority of the United States." Oklahoma after the 1906 Act. All of Indian Country from 1947 to 1961.

Howard Dean, while governor of Vermont, used state money to lobby the BIA to reject or delay the application for Federal Recognition made by the Swanton Band of Abenakis. His administration argued in state, and federal courts, for Vermont's jurisdictional exclusion of any Tribal standing in the state or the federal courts. That came back to haunt him in the New Mexico and Oklahoma primaries, which in the '04 cycle were neither early nor late, where he was defeated by the candidate I advised, Wes Clark, who was unconditionally for the Nixon model (the Gold Standard for the Tribal-Federal relationship) -- Self-Determination.

But what if the Obama inner-circle of 2007 had considered Indian Gaming, not as a policy problem, but as a political tool, a device to motivate demographics that reject "special rights", and who may not be able to reject "special rights" such as Affirmative Action, or Non-Discrimination, or Disabilities, could safely go after Indian Gaming as unfair, unequal, un ... American.

Does anyone have any indication that the Obam a inner-circle of 2007, or the Obama inner-circle of 2008, has a policy position on the Federal-Tribal relation, a policy position that envisions substantive changes to the contours created by a hostile Court over the past three decades?

If not, then its time to click through to a 10 minute read on the use of a political tool, a device to motivate demographics, by the Obama inner-circle in late 2007 and early 2008, and reflect on what this means, for Tribal Executives looking at either a McCain, or an Obama Administration, and for the fragile coalition of the historically disadvantaged who simply must have accommodation, or sink back into the conditions that caused Truman to send federal troops to Little Rock. Via Avadon, who's hesitation to post this is surprising. Sean Wilentz's piece in TNR, How Barack Obama played the race card and blamed Hillary Clinton.

Now reflect on the Land-into-Trust issue, the likely trajectories of the USET tribes, the California gaming and not-yet-gaming tribes, the Great Lakes and Upper, Middle, and Lower Mississippi gaming, and not-yet-gaming tribes, the Oklahoma tribes, and the Federal-Indian policy goals, and political goals, of an Obama Administration formed by the past, and present Obama inner-circle. Will the non-gaming issues like gas, oil, coal, and mineral rights, or energy corridors, be treated any differently?

Posted by EBW at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Periodically MB asks me what are my differences with Juan Cole. I reply that for Juan, the firing of Qassam rockets, powered by sugar and potassium nitrate (the same fuel mix I used as a teen rocketeer), with payloads of TNT and urea nitrate (which I passed on), ranges less than 10km, and payloads of less then 10kg, from Gaza, or the firing of 122 mm Katyusha artillery rockets, ranges less than 30km, and payloads less than 30kg, from ad hoc launch points in Lebanon, are sufficient to excuse or justify or ... limited and unlimited response by a sophisticated combined-arms military with effectively infinite depth.

Juan calls them terrorists. I call them opfors.

We don't talk alot about WK2. We don't talk about the balance of forces. We don't talk about what happened twenty five years ago as if it happened in someplace under a "friendly regime", attacked by a Soviet proxy. Or as a failed attempt at "popular liberation" by armed forces, Soviet proxy or organic to some remote, exotic peoples. We don't even talk about what happened twenty five years ago as if it were "terrorism", state-sponsored or otherwise.

A few days ago Tim Giago wrote No celebrating at Pine Ridge Reservation. Tim grew up in Wounded Knee. However, no where in his thousand words is there an awareness that a military operation was planned, and executed, within the boundaries of his childhood.

To Tim, his childhood was flooded by foreigners who had no claim on the boundaries of his childhood. I know I could have written a similar piece too, 99 people out of 100 can't trace their ancestry in California to when the Lembkes came to grow beans in pre-irrigation Los Angeles. But I don't think I ever have, or ever will. Age is experience remembered, not title to land.

Not long after, Richard Powers wrote a reply Defending the AIM occupation.

This is where I have to raise something, an empty hand will suffice, and point out that no one is writing history, Tim, and everyone, including myself, are writing politics. The AIM/NAIM split is still present, and even those who damn both the AIM/NAIM factions, can damn the pre-split AIM/NAIM, and external to that is the tribal vs (the 4th) pan-tribal conflict, and even beyond that is the ... are urban mix-bloods Indians question.

I fall somewhere within that mass of fissures of a thousand practices of accommodation and resistance.

Richard correctly places WK2 in a militarized context. There was a "dirty war". About a company strength of men and women were killed by gunfire during the sporadic exchanges of fire. Most of the casualties were inflicted by the US and its proxy, the Dick Wilson "Guardians of the Oglala Nation", whom we all called "GOONS", then and now.

Richard also correctly places Tim's piece in a larger universe of Anti-AIM writings, and he also correctly places the composition of the pre-split AIM's cadres, armed and unarmed, in the pan-Indianism of 1969-1971 occupation of Alcatraz. A Cherokee died at the Knee. A Mic'mac also died at the Knee.

Tim errs, whether he rejects that, inherently armed pan-tribalism, or the present legalistic pan-tribalism, in alienating the armed, unarmed, and other, including non-Indian, who came -- from most directions -- into the boundaries of his childhood. Wounded Knee does not belong to those who camp, or throw up buildings, roads, and business on a massacre site. Monk's Mound does not "belong to" the Indian living closest to it, and if it does, "accommodation and resistance" does not encompass the totality of continuity and transcendence.

Tim supports Chad Smith. I don't. But that is just theft and graft over several administrations. Not life, and death, in and around Pine Ridge, the Rosebud, and so on.

Posted by EBW at 11:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Darryl Pearce was a regular commenter here. He made made several nominations during the Koufax Awards, and never for his own blog, but for talkleft, horseass, Jesus' General, Crooks an Liars, Daily Kos, Orcinus (expert and single-issue), BagNewsNotes (best post, wider recognition), echidne of the snakes.

He contributed $$ to MB's campaign for the Maine Legislature, and cheered her on with a chorus of "hip,hip Hurrah!, hip,hip Hurrah!, hip,hip Hurrah! when she posted the Election Day post-mortem, after a loss of 25 votes.

He contributed $$ to our fundraising in our 4th year of doing the Koufax Awards, pushing us over $1,000 in a thread which invented disenvowelment for a Wampum troll.

He left us this comment:

The way many republicans and their ilk spit out the words "liberal" and "democrat" as epithets, curses, or worse--well, there seems to be a group of people with an inherent, emotional need to bully others.

--ventura county, ca

My own highly-functioning autistic (Asperger's?) son wandered off when we visited relatives at Big Bear Mtn in California... in November for Thanksgiving.

We found him in the market about a 1/2-mile from the cabin... eating popcorn.

He is now 18 and we're trying to get him into an ASL class at college. And we're trying to get him to pass the written portion of the California driving exam....

...hang in there!

--ventura county, ca

The last entry of Fuming Mucker: A curmudgeon amongst tyrannies, conspiracies, thieveries and charities is here. Darryl's passing is noted in several other blogs he contributed to over the years, Duncan Black's, Avedon Carol's, and others.

Posted by EBW at 09:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe is going to allow Magic Lantern for a very small number of anti-terrorism investigations.

The Austrian government is looking at the possibility of allowing remote keystroke logging as well, but as the writers at le Monde point out, its in the United States where the use of similar technical mechanisms is most common.

If you're wondering why undetectable remote keystroke logging hasn't turned up a single 101st Fighting Keyboarder banging out "kill some domestic enemies" screeds or a single AutoAdmit stalker of female law students, so am I.

Posted by EBW at 07:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Obama does not represent me. From the Boston Globe (via Avedon, who seems pretty peeved as well):

"Let me tell you something. There's nothing liberal about wanting to reduce money in politics. That is common sense. There's nothing liberal about wanting to make sure [our soldiers] are treated properly when they come home . . . . There's nothing liberal about wanting to make sure that everybody has healthcare. We are spending more on healthcare in this country than any other advanced country, but we've got more uninsured. There's nothing liberal about saying that doesn't make sense, and we should so something smarter with our healthcare system."

Yes, I am a liberal. And proud of it.

Update: It seems JFK understood the meaning:

What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label 'liberal'? If by 'liberal' they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer's dollar, then...we are not that kind of 'liberal.' But if by a 'liberal' they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people--their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights and their civil liberties--someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a 'liberal' then I'm proud to say I'm a 'liberal.'

I wonder if Teddy Kennedy is rethinking his endorsement of the man who runs from the "label" his brother proudly embraced.

Posted by MB Williams at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

General Musharaff may resign before the restored judiciary (60 justices and the Chief Justice) are re-instated, which now seems a certainty as members of the PML-Q in the Senate are now forming a "forward block" (split from the party leadership) and joining the PPP+PML-N+ANP. When the justices and the CJ are re-instated, General Musharaff's "re-election" last November will be nullified, leaving him ... in need of a non-governmental job.

Just like the election in Gaza, Bush and Rice have gone overboard to keep Musharaff after 3/4ths of a 40% turn-out voted to dump him.

Robert Gates is in New Delhi, along with 50 of his closest fiends from the DoD and the Iron Triangle. via Dawn:

Speculation is rife that Mr Gates will be offering the Indian Navy the soon-to-be decommissioned USS Kitty Hawk aircraft carrier if the Indian Navy agrees to purchase 65 of the newest model Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornets to be operated off of it.

The Indian Air Force (IAF) is expecting to purchase almost 130 new fighter aircraft, with Boeing and RSK-MiG both in the field of six contenders. A comment reported from Tuesday's interaction in Delhi saying that Mr Gates "made it clear that India and the US military-to-military ties will continue independent of the civil nuclear agreement" may hold the key to the high pressure parleys between the two sides.

For an intelligent shoppers comparison of the RSK-MiG vs F/A-18E/F, I suggest Venik's Aviation. Venik has prices.

Posted by EBW at 01:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Today Olympia Snowe, Bill Nelson, the most conservative Democrat in the Senate, and Ted Stevens, the guy who made "intertubes" famous, introduced a bill "aimed at ending the deceptive practice known as phishing".

The dumb way to proceed is to attach some liability to the actual practice of phishing, from the banal stuff like putting "looks similar" characters in a domain name, like the famous crylic "a", so that urls that look like "paypal.com" go to someplace novel, where credit cards are harvested, to the slightly less banal stuff like putting html glop into "html enhanced email" and urls that look like "paypal.com" also go to someplace novel, where credit cards are also harvested, and lots more variations on the theme of misdirection.

The better way to proceed is to reduce the time each phish pitch can work from the weeks-to-days, which is the present operational art, to minutes, which is both technically possible, and administratively possible. In fact, it is something I've been working towards for several years (phish is only a recent use of domain names and network addresses for black-hat fun and profit), and encouraging the institutional framework that can cause such a reduction in the time-to-live for crap that drops into your inbox or otherwise arrives at your mouse's nibbly nose via one of a number of behavior profiling applications (aren't ads kwel?) would be wicked useful.

The interesting challenges are things like double-fast-flux, where the name servers for the urls used by the thousands of attack assets for "where the money goes" are rotated across many name servers and many, many more hosts and ... all wicked quick. We can effectively engage that too, and with relatively thick fingered and clumsy policy tools, as simple as putting a fee on name server changes, a fee as small as a penny, in addition to the smarter bits we use to measure it.

Registrars sell domain names. Registries publish domain names. We operate on a time-scale of seconds to minutes, and we can, if ICANN (our regulator, your incorporated-in-California 501(c)(3) successor-in-interests to DARPA, ARPA, the NSF and the Department of Commerce) assists us, do to the use of domain names for spam, phish and lots of other applications of idle hands and criminal minds, what the simple application of a 20 cent fee did to the domain tasting sub-industry (another industrial strength scam, on trademarks and typos generally, all fueled by Google Ads (aren't ads kwel?).

My point here is the same point I made over a decade ago to the then Chief Scientist at the NSA, geeks beat heat. He took my point, which is why there is a Computer Emergency Response Team, to ask us what to do when something really awkward happens. Phish isn't really awkward, its just a big heap of small robberies.

We know (a) that what was unorganized crime using computers, aka "cyber-crime", is now organized. In fact, there is a market for attack assets, just like there is a market for AK-47s and RGPs. We know (b) that gaming the system can be fixed. We know (c) that very, very few computer scientists want to work with or for John Ashcroft or Alberto Gonzales or Michael Mukasey, and that the "other side of the shop" went non-linear under Donald Rumsfeld et seq., and everything under DNI Mike McConnell is "complicated" by pervasive wiretap, about which we have spoken authoritatively in RFC 2804 IETF Policy on Wiretapping.

But it takes non-dumb on the public policy side of the table. That was the most attractive bit about the idea of Larry Lessig running for the seat vacated by Tom Lantos' death. Someone in the lower body who actually has clue, not about real estate or used cars or banks or big law, but about the anomaly we call the net.

I can't help but think of the anti-internet-gaming bill introduced by the GOP member from the IA 2nd. Null content but lots of happy applause. Punished credit card companies for doing what credit card companies weren't doing anyway. Bag of hammers dumb.

Here's the lnk to Olympia's technology staffer's latest PR gimmik.

Posted by EBW at 11:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Via outages:

=======
Grid status:
An apparent massive equipment failure at a Florida Power & Light substation in the Miami area triggered the two nuclear reactors at the company's Turkey Point to halt. The Fla Nuclear Commission confirmed this. The shut reactors caused sub grids 4,5, 6, 7 and 8 to drain power from up state and west state, as the Dade/Broward counties have a high demand. Restoration time update: between 06:00 and 07:00 PM near to normal operation is expected.

There was indeed a squad off McDill in the air near the coastal plant, but that's a daily routine. There is NO reason to assume this has anything to do with the reactor closing.

Rgds
FTM/Ray Jones

=======

Contrary to news reports on CNN and AP there were NOT eight nor five reactors affected. We haven't got that many:) The Crystal River reactor and St. Lucie twin reactors (fossil and gas) have not been affected, though all have noticed the drain dip of course.

Operations at Turkey Point is now near back to normal with less than 100,000 customers state wide to be restored. Full completion expected around 07:00 PM this evening.

Rgds
FTM/Ray Jones

=======

See also: Florida Power and Light

Posted by EBW at 09:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I found the quote below in the comments section of Frank Rich's latest diatribe against Senator Clinton. I guess it sums up my current ambivalence.

The analysis of Clinton's mistakes seems to be correct. It doesn't make Obama anymore appealing to me. Personally, I (non-New Age, foreign-born, history sensitive) don't need "hope, inspiration, unity, etc." talk from someone who can't grasp the concept of universal health care, even if he maneuvers well. I don't need Obama to outmaneuver me, just to represent.

-- anna, New York

Posted by MB Williams at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Step one on the path to a 1U in a rack "away".

Posted by EBW at 12:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Origanlly posted on July 6, 2004. If we'd known then, what we know now, that MoveOn and SEIU wouldn't endorse Edwards, that Florida would be repeated in Ohio, that all those flashes, Dean (ok we knew that by February) Lamont, any of the specials, in fact, the entire '06 miracle, wouldn't throw as much light as the steady candles of the Catholic Workers or the American Friends Service Committee ... well, we might be changed by that knowledge.

North Korea and Iran are treated as a nuclear ensemble in the common-to-both-parties political lexicon. I'm going to try and seperate out the Iran part, and try and delineate that part of the JRE text that differs from the standard Axis-of-Evil text. New readers please keep in mind that I write about Iran from time to time, in a series called Return of the ... One True King. A link to the last part is here.

In his major primary piece on pre-emption and nukes, the only "justification" offered by the Bush/Cheney administration for its Iraq War with any theoretical legs, Edwards thoughtfully listed the Soviet-era warhead inventory management problem first.

60 percent of Russia's nuclear material remains unsecured. That country has 20,000 nuclear warheads and enough material to produce 60,000 more Hiroshima-size bombs.

Edwards' first "post-Soviet" talking point is establishment of a new Global Nuclear Compact (GNC) to reinforce the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The implementation language is overtly multi-national and repeats the explicit mechanism of assistance for peaceful use in exchage for strict controls over waste and reprocessing of the Clinton/Gore administration. While not explicitly a UN or an existing Treaty Organization, "leading nations" and nuclear technology overlaps with the Permanent Members of the Security Council, which means France, the Federation of Independent States, and China, as well as Japan and Germany. Broadly, an approach distinct from the Bush/Cheney record, and one Tehran appears to seek.

Edwards' second "post-Soviet" talking point is a UN Security Council vehicle to make economic sanctions easier to apply when the requisit condiditions arise. The "carrot and stick" approach of the GNC institutionalized by the primary Treaty Organization. Again, an approach distinct from the Bush/Cheney record, and one Tehran appears to seek.

Edwards' third "post-Soviet" talking point is to triple the spending on securing the "loose nukes in the former Soviet Union", and to end development of two new weapons technologies -- "bunker buster" nuclear weapons and anti-ballistic missiles. This is as anti-Bush/Cheney as one can imagine, and Tehran has no interest in "loose nukes in the former Soviet Union" finding any use in West Asia.

Edwards' fourth "post-Soviet" talking point is to strengthen our intelligence capability, and no sane person in Tehran or anywhere else wants to see another US military adventure based upon bad intelligence. This approach is inconsistent with the administrations punitive and criminal outing of working WMD covert intelligence officers.

Edwards' fifth "post-Soviet" talking point is creating a high-level NPT role in the administration. Again, a position Tehran is more likely to appreciate than the current incoherence and outing of working WMD covert intelligence officers.

Having less time than Professor Cole to write (I've a housefull of unruly post-vacation weasels to mind and lots of washing to attend to, not to mention paid work) my Edwards-and-Iran thinking is that he's wicked better than the BC04 war-rhetoriticans. Granted, the US-Iran war hasn't happened, yet, but the insane desire for war has been bubbling under the surface of both states since the fall of Reza Shah and Jimmy Carter, and it is only one accidental or one calculated act away. As Vice-President of the United State, John Edwards seems more unlikely than most to succumb to the lure of the ongoing phoney war with Iran, let alone let the fiction escape from its confines and consume whole armies and cities, as the phoney war with Iraq has. I will sleep better at night when he is Vice President.

Afternote: Since "breach of the NPT" gets so much attention in the Axis-of-Evil demonology, it is useful to read Article X of the NPT:

1. Each Party shall in exercising its national sovereignty have the right to withdraw from the Treaty if it decides that extraordinary events, related to the subject matter of this Treaty, have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country. It shall give notice of such withdrawal to all other Parties to the Treaty and to the United Nations Security Council three months in advance. Such notice shall include a statement of the extraordinary events it regards as having jeopardized its supreme interests.

Posted by EBW at 10:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

From the SCOTUSBlog:

In the Rhode Island land dispute case, the Court will be ruling on whether, after Congress extinguished a tribe's title and interests to land, the Secretary of Interior may nevertheless create "Indian country" status and place disputed land in trust for the tribe's benefit. The Secretary in 1998 approved the Narragansett Indian Tribe's application to have a 31-acre parcel of land owned by the tribe and located in Charlestown, R.I., to be taken into trust for the tribe.

The three cases are expected to go over for argument to the Term starting on Oct. 6.

This case has very serious implications: Scores of tribes were declared "extinct" in the last 300 years, only to be "re-recognized" either by the BIA or Congress.

More from the AP (via Indianz.com):

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court agreed Monday to resolve a dispute over the federal government's ability to take land into trust for American Indian tribes.

Indian rights groups fear that the case involving the Narragansett Tribe in Rhode Island could undermine tribal land across the country. The justices will hear the case in the fall.

The state argued that a 1934 federal law prevents the government from taking land into trust for tribes recognized after the law took effect, unless Congress specifically authorized it. The Narragansetts became a federally recognized tribe in 1983.

The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston rejected the state's claim.

At issue is whether a 31-acre lot in Charlestown purchased by the Narragansetts should be subject to Rhode Island law, including a prohibition on casino gambling, or whether the parcel should be governed by tribal and federal law.

The dispute dates to 1991, when the Narragansetts purchased the land to build an elderly housing complex, which remains incomplete.

The state objected when the tribe asked the U.S. Department of the Interior to take the land into federal trust, which would place it largely under tribal and federal control.

Update for our POA readers: The SCOTUS refused Blanchard v. Morton School District:

It denied review of a claim that parents be allowed to sue for damages under an 1867 civil rights law to enforce their right to a free public education for their disabled child.

Posted by MB Williams at 03:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Every once in a while a mailing list I subscribe to explodes. In the past 24 hours the NANOG list exploded over the YouTube in Pakistan event.

Here's the most accessible technical presentation I'm aware of yet, Martin Brown's Pakistan hijacks YouTube at the Renesys blog.

Highly recommended.

Posted by EBW at 01:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's good to know that we non-aligned interests here at Wampum are not alone in finding the Clinton-Obama infighting rather revolting. From my favorite capital eschewing marsupial:

who needs repubbblicans when we can fight with ourselves? or, can't we all just get along? we have said several times before we don't have a dog in the clinton-obama fight.

but we have to say that we are most unsettled by manifestations of that fight that have been creeping more and more into otherwise reasonable people who write here in blogtopia, and yes, we coined that phrase.

we don't mind when bloggers, who have chosen one side or another, point out various insufficiencies and hypocrisies on the part of the opposing candidate; that is, after all, why bloggers blog.

but as of late people whom we admire and respect have begun silly sniping towards each other, simply because of what has been said on blogs about the two dem candidates.

and folks aren't just pointing out bad logic or inconsistent arguments; there are a lot of personal digs being thrust about. things have gotten so bad that it's almost as if we don't even need the hardly-ever-right wing bloggers as targets for our wrath. it seems that we'll all be happy hating other progressives, simply because of whom they endorse for the dem nominee.

Eric and I are down to our last two episodes from the seventh season of the West Wing. If the melodrama in the lefty blogosphere doesn't end soon, I'm pulling out seasons one through six and a pox on both campaigns' houses.

Posted by MB Williams at 01:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Imagine having a cabinet level post for disarmament. New Zealand has one, Phil Goff is the current Minister for Disarmament, and he announced today that 82 of the 122 countries represented at the conference this week signed the draft treaty banning cluster munitions.

Now independent of whether or not the US inventory of cluster munitions are banned under both the Geneva Conventions Protocol I, Article 85 and Protocol II of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, there is the assertion routinely offered, this week by Janine Burns, who does PR for the US embassy in Wellington, for military utility and legal necessity:

The United States shares in the humanitarian concerns that have been raised about cluster munitions but is opposed to any ban on them because of their demonstrated military utility,

The U.S. is concerned that any criminalization of cluster munitions would harm NATO and coalition joint operations and interoperability, and could adversely affect humanitarian missions by militaries.

The United States stockpiles over one billion submunitions in weapons currently in service. Nearly three-quarters of this stockpile of submunitions are contained in MLRS rockets and 155mm artillery projectiles. Given reported failure rates, a stockpile of that size creates the specter of well over 100 million explosive duds, each posing a danger to civilians similar to antipersonnel landmines.

A typical fire mission of 36 MLRS rockets could produce an average of 1368 unexploded submunitions. A battalion-2 (24 cannon firing 2 rounds each for a total of 48 rounds) with a 95 percent submunition reliability produces, on average, 212 unexploded submunitions, per football field sized area.

In a nutshell, cluster munitions are anti-personnel mine delivery systems. Anti-personnel mines are no longer legitimate weapons, so cluster munitions are also no longer legitimate weapons. That won't slow supermen like the current SecDef, but command level officers have to plan for manuver and tempo in an UneXploded Ordinance (UXO) environment, and some even think about the field after the battle moves on, or ends, and year after year, UXOs lop the limbs off of civilians.

Even the writers for The West Wing have worked the military value of landmines into their material. But what is the real value of an area denial munition? Does anyone think that US national policy is made, or unmade, but the presence or absence, of systems designed to scatter 3lb bomblets over 40 acres, leaving on the order of 1,000 unexploded bomblets per 40 acres of "area denied"?

What is Ms. Burns really saying when she refers to each of "joint operations and interoperability", and "humanitarian missions"? What do you think are the actual exculpatory circumstances, the legal use cases for, the real value of, an area denial munition?

There is a claim that this is a substantive issue where Obama is on the right side of the issue, and Clinton on the wrong side of the issue. Those who value such a claim may not want to reflect on whether the hypothetical executive Obama would sign, or veto, a bill to destroy an inventory of over one billion submunitions, and limit the role of MLRS rocket and 155mm gun tube artillery in combat arms. It is one thing to vote "correctly" as a Senator on treaty language that won't become law until Bush is a memory, and another to say "Open Season" to all the Iron Triangle lobbyists, elected or media-gifted, and meet them on the battlefield of ideas during the mid-terms, or on the re-elect calendar. Fundamentally, is a candidate of Wall Street really going to pull down the pillars of overwhelming firepower against dispersed soft targets? The defining characteristic of anti-colonial forces is the ability to field dispersed low armor, low armed forces.

How did Hillary's health care plan do in the first 100 days of Clinton I? Care to wager an arm, or a leg?

Posted by EBW at 06:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Lest We Remember: Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys

A simple technique for looking for memory leaks is applied to the problem of determining memory persistence, with the novel assistance of a sharp thermal gradient. Not as photogenic as the liquid oxygen meets oxidants experiments (how to put a backyard barbie into low neighborhood orbit), but there are some pictures.

Enjoy. Something to keep in mind when entering or exiting a "cryptographically challenged jurisdiction" with a laptop at the approach of a White Shirt armed with ... only a can of compressed air.

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We took this photo a year ago. Last night we set up in the same spot, in the dark, by memory. Always fun when backing a 30' trailer. The little photon source is the moon. The current night sky is sweeping storm clouds, and patches of brilliant starts, winds above 20kts and temps below 40^o. We've had 24 hours of high winds, rain and mists.

The truck's fuel pump decided today was a good day to die, so it's sitting outside some garage, contemplating Orion or whatever it is that cars and trucks contemplate at night.

The bottom has fallen out of the Yucca Valley residential property market as well, like that of Riverside, Orange, and San Diego counties. The locals think they've seen the worst and we don't want to make the ones we talk with think otherwise, by several more years of what's already happened.

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The NPR coverage yesterday simply mentioned "an island" ... and I'd forgotten I knew that Diego Garcia is leased by the US. One of the many things I learned in the hours after the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004.

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Another gem from the anonymous blogger at Dawn -- Need of the hour. In this piece the surface of what I've been writing about since January, 2005, the unresolved structural problem of the relation between Baluchistan and the Punjabi State, and attendant economic problems (who gets access to Gwadar Port and the Sui gas field, the unnecessary military execution of Nawab Akbar Bugti ... The PML-Q "won" in Baluchestan, but the local parties boycotted the election, and had Akbar Bugti not been murdered, and had he contested the election, neither the PML-Q, or the PPP, or even the PML-N would have shown more than a seat. Anyway, enjoy. I know I do. For any read who's forgotten, all the hydrocarbons in PK are in Baluchistan, some of which was part of Oman up until quite recently, and the rest is as close to Tehran as it is to Islamabad.

I wish Shaheen Sehbai was still editing the South Asian Times. His work was outstanding.

There has been much of talk about the need for a government of "national consensus" to deal with the major issues confronting the country. Asif Zardari has said that the federation is under threat due to the discontent of minority groups. He insists that only a national government can alleviate the situation.

At the moment, there is talk of a three-way alliance between PPP, PML-N and ANP. The parties with the strongest showings in Sindh, Punjab and the Frontier would thus be represented in the central government. But such a situation would exclude Baluchistan, where the PML Q, consigned to the opposition benches in the National Assembly, has maintained its position as the largest party.

There is a pressing need to give the Baluchis a strong voice in any future set-up. The Baluchi people have been in a state of agitation, angry at the exploitation of their natural resources and exclusion from the mega-development projects taking place in their own province. The establishment has only been able to control the situation through the ruthless use of military force, killing former Chief Minister Nawab Akbar Bugti when he openly rebelled against the government.

The PML Q's position in Baluchistan, however, is already looking shaky. It has already lost two legislators in the province, one to an unfavourable vote-recount and the other to a heart attack. The PPP is actively seeking to woo independents and members of the PML-Q, some of whom have already expressed an interest in working with the PPP. If the PPP succeeds in forming the government in Baluchistan, its strong position in the centre would allow it to effectively protect the province's interests. One can only hope, for the sake of Pakistan's unity, that the Baluchi people's grievances are quickly redressed.

Posted by EBW at 04:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The latest entry from Dawn's blog:

February 18 marked a return to accountability and democracy for the Pakistani people. However, not everyone in Pakistan was given the opportunity to express their political will. The Federally Administered Tribal Areas are home to an entire community of people living within the geographical boundaries of Pakistan, who do not receive the benefits of statehood and are restricted from fully participating in the political process.

Education within the region is abysmal. Less than five per cent of women in the region are literate. Economic opportunities are similarly scarce. Up to 60 per cent of the population lives below the national poverty line, relying on subsistence farming for their basic needs. With no other way to generate revenue, many turn to smuggling contraband such as opium and weapons.

The economic and political isolation of the region has created a vacuum which has been filled by radical elements from Pakistan and abroad. In desperation the Musharraf government chose military rather than political engagement in Waziristan. However, as evidenced by the Sinhalese government in Sri Lanka, the suppression of a disenfranchised minority is bound to be a failure in the long term. The whole-scale isolation of an entire community from the Pakistani state does not bode well for the health of our political system. What is needed is constructive engagement and a reintegration with Pakistani politics and economics.

How does the emergency unravel? Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, who's still under house arrest, telephoned the Sindh High Court general body meeting to notify the newly-elected National Assembly that the Proclamation of Emergency and Provisional Constitutional Order of Nov 3, 2007 are unconstitutional.

Those watching Mushy and the PPP-PML-N aren't watching the hotest pot on the fire, which is the lawyers and civil society.

has warned the newly-elected National Assembly against endorsement of the Nov 3, 2007, proclamation of emergency and the Provisional Constitution Order promulgated under it.

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Maybe if some of the big box blogs read us little guys, they'd have a clue as to why Arizona Congressman Renzi has been indicted.

From Wampum, April 25th, 2007:

The facts surrounding the Renzi situation are somewhat complicated, but here's the gist: Renzi's former business partner owned 400+ acres of land along the environmentally-endangered San Pedro River which Renzi suggested be part of a federal-private land swap, a swap which would allow relatively unrestricted private industry copper mining by Resolution Copper Co., a joint venture between Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton, in the Apache Leap area of Arizona. Once Renzi made the suggestion, his partner was able to sell the land at a premium, to investors, which included former DoI secretary Bruce Babbitt, interested in its use in a different land swap.

Still following all this? A more in-depth discussion from last year can be found here.

Renzi was the original sponsor of the legislation on the Resolution Copper land swap, but by mid-2006, he'd developed a case of cold-feet, as the San Carlos Apache Tribe expressed concerns that the transfer of the federal land into private hands would curtail their access to ancestral sacred sites and acorn gathering areas. While industry and most state and local politicians urged the tribe to accept the purported concessions by Resolution, tribal leaders refused to move on the subject until after tribal elections in November...

Just to make the case more intriguing, as I mentioned in the above post, it might be tied to the firing of USA Paul Charlton.

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Juan Cole's got a longish piece anyone who doesn't already know the history of Pakistan's civilian and military governments could read and benefit from. Its a rebuttal of John McCain's (and a host of others) ideas about Pakistan, but serviceable as a nutshell political history. Here's the link.

The unfortunate thing about reaming McCain for having been a party to the creation of present (nice photo of Reagan and the pre-cursors to the Afghan Taliban in the White House) is that ... it is a real challenge to discern the differences between McCain, Clinton and Obama on how they frame issues -- all three are Neo-Cons, or trapped in the Neo-Con web of lies.

If you are able to read French, there's three pages of analysis in yesterday's Le Monde, untroubled by any of the artificial favors of koolaide being sloshed around the media outlets and what used to be blogs (now campaign new-media properties) -- Primaires américaines : "le néoconservatisme continue à structurer la pensée des candidats".

Rather than translate, which is a lot of work, cause I can't keep myself from rewriting, I'll steal three happy paras from the WaPo which Cole links to, to show the truth of the assertion that there isn't any distance between Obama's "strikes" and Bush's "strikes". Of course, in Juan's view, this is exculpatory rather than damning. In my view the opposite is true. So (drumroll, circus tent voice) ...

Which of the following is preferable:

In the predawn hours of Jan. 29, a CIA Predator aircraft flew in a slow arc above the Pakistani town of Mir Ali. The drone's operator, relying on information secretly passed to the CIA by local informants, clicked a computer mouse and sent the first of two Hellfire missiles hurtling toward a cluster of mud-brick buildings a few miles from the town center.

The missiles killed Abu Laith al-Libi, a senior al-Qaeda commander and a man who had repeatedly eluded the CIA's dragnet. It was the first successful strike against al-Qaeda's core leadership in two years, and it involved, U.S. officials say, an unusual degree of autonomy by the CIA inside Pakistan.

Having requested the Pakistani government's official permission for such strikes on previous occasions, only to be put off or turned down, this time the U.S. spy agency did not seek approval.

That's the choice shared by McCain, Huckabee, Clinton and Obama. How about this:

In the predawn hours of Jan. 29, Abu Laith al-Libi was served with an arrest warrant issued by the North Waziristan criminal courts in Mirumshah [Miran Shah]. The warrant was served by a police officer from Mir Ali, the second largest town in North Waziristan, where Abu Laith al-Libi was in hiding.

The arresting officer was supported by a joint force composed of the Darwesh Khel tribal militia, acting under the authority of the Waziri Jirga and the North West Frontier Corps, acting under the authority of the Pakistani state. Abu Laith al-Libi was taken into custody and transported to Mirumshah for arraignment.

The arrest of Abu Laith al-Libi is the latest in a series of arrests of fugitives under the Collective Responsibility Acts in the Frontier Crimes Regulation.

One answer just bumps the rungs of the chain of command ladder, as everyone who's served in wartime knows, the other has another outcome. One is wicked flashy, and costs a lot of tax dollars that get spent in a couple of safe-Republican districts, and a lot more tax dollars that get spent in the logistical tail across monarchies and dictatorships, and generate excellent-dude kerpowie eye-candy for the safe-Republican media outlets, and the other doesn't have those ... partisan characteristics.

Seen any law-and-order candidates lately?

Its something to keep in mind, unless the French have it totally wrong, and LE PAKISTAN, BAPTÊME DU FEU DU FUTUR PRÉSIDENT is simply a cocktail party gag.

Posted by EBW at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Final NA Results by map

Posted by EBW at 09:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A little over 24 hours ago, before the early returns were in, enough to give the first contours of the outcome, when massive vote fraud was till a very real possibility, vote fraud sufficient to keep the MMA and PML-Q parties in power, the writer at Dawn's blog wrote this:

Can elections ever be construed as free and fair if a certain segment of society is prevented from partaking in them? In case you are wondering which segment I'm referring to - the correct answer is women.

Of course less the 40% of the electorate actually did vote, but the largest hidden vote suppression is the suppression that doesn't require that names be dropped from the rolls, or that voters be turned away from the polling station, its the suppression that the voter is less than equal, that nothing is on the ballot that actually matters, and that the personification of liberation by the ballot has been shot and bombed in plain sight.

Only 40% of the electorate in Pakistan is literate, and that's males and females, averaged. Parties use symbols. One uses a lantern, to symbolize the light that could come to Pakistan.

Others writing about the election:

Juan Cole published a medium sized piece this morning with analysis and copy also from Dawn.

The Cursor has two paras of links, none to South or West Asian source. I don't read the cursor, but others do.

William Harting has a piece at one of Josh Micah Marshall's sites, unfortunately, its again sources far from Asia and mostly cover for Joe Biden's most recent offer to increase the US contribution to Pakistan without specific condition, specific like engage in disarmament with India or increase the funding of girl's eduction.

That's about it in the greater leftish blogodome for PK coverage.

Posted by EBW at 06:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This morning, the Huffington Post reported Ms. Obama's remarks thusly:

"For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country," she told a Milwaukee crowd today, "because it feels like hope is making a comeback."

Which, frankly, doesn't sound as bad as when I heard only the initial clause. However, the Telegraph has this quote, which feeds my sense of dread:

Speaking at a rally in Milwaukee, she said: "Hope is making a comeback and, let me tell you, for the first time in my adult life I am really proud of my country. Not just because Barack is doing well, but I think people are hungry for change."

Ironically, Fox solves the mystery of the discrepancy.

Barack Obama's wife, Michelle, is under fire for leaving the impression that she hasn't been proud of her country until now, when Democrats are beginning to rally around her husband's campaign.

Speaking in Milwaukee, Wis., on Monday, she said, "People in this country are ready for change and hungry for a different kind of politics and ... for the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback."

Greeted with rousing applause after making the comment in Milwaukee, Obama delivered an amended version of the speech later that day in Madison, Wis.

"For the first time in my adult lifetime, I'm really proud of my country ...not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change," she said. "I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction and just not feeling so alone in my frustration and disappointment."

Essentially, she said it not once, but twice, in one day. Oy vay.

I have issues with both campaigns, as I've made very clear over the past year. This is just sloppiness. Please, Ms. Obama, don't feed the Rove machine.

Posted by MB Williams at 03:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I still view Chris Bowers' "take my baseball and bat and go home" statements regarding PLEOs as pretty silly, but then I've made stupid statements regarding not ever, ever, ever voting for Clinton/Obama/Cthulhu, an action I know to be very unlikely come November. However, Bowers' latest post on is spot on, and should be required reading for even Obamabots and Clintonistas.

Maine is a multi-tiered state. In 2004, both Eric and I were elected as delegates (he for Kucinich, me for Edwards) at the local caucuses in February. Our state convention, however, wasn't until late May. Less than half of the elected delegates even showed up in Portland (Maine is a medium sized state,) and even fewer alternates. Most town and city delegations just appointed random people to fill out their delegations. No one even monitored for whom anyone voted, or even if you voted. Delegate selection to the national convention was even more disconnected from the original grassroots process, as most candidates for delegate began campaigning weeks before the convention and focused their platforms not on their preferred national candidate, but their own personalities. Almost anything could have swung these delegates, as most were state and local politicians (with aspirations) or seasoned political hacks.

Before Eric left for India, we'd just finished, for the first time since it aired on TV, the sixth season of the West Wing. Real life imitates art.

Posted by MB Williams at 12:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Toast. Gigabit taps in the exchanges and black backhaul capacity a significant fraction of backbone capacity, but to have standing, a plaintiff must prove a communication has been intercepted. Toast.

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I've pretty much pledged to stay out of the remaining fight for the Democratic nomination and thus will focus my political energy on November. So while my pointing out the latest Rasmussen poll of Florida may appear to focus on "electability" in November, it's actually about what happens in Denver in August:

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey in Florida shows John McCain holding a six-percentage point lead over Hillary Clinton and an even larger lead - sixteen percentage points - over Barack Obama. It's McCain 49% Clinton 43% and McCain 53% Obama 37%. This dynamic is the opposite of what we have found in most other states where Obama typically outperforms Clinton in general election match-ups.

The Florida results for a Clinton-McCain match-up are fairly similar to other battleground states -- the race is competitive, Clinton does better among women than men, and McCain leads among unaffiliated voters.

However, the poll contains hints that suggest the controversy over Florida's convention delegates may be hurting Obama. Most notably, just 55% of Sunshine State Democrats say they would vote for Obama over McCain. Thirty-one percent (31%) say they would vote for McCain. These results are especially striking given that Obama leads McCain among unaffiliated voters in the state.

As Eric pointed out a few weeks back in this post, while we all like to believe every Democratic vote counts, the fact is, only those in a handful of states will determine the next occupant of the Oval Office come January, 2009. One of those states is Florida. If McCain carries Florida, then the Democratic nominee will have to carry both Ohio and Pennsylvania. It would be much easier to have Florida "in play", tying up GOP resources, rather than placing it firmly in the red column.

Yes, Florida and Michigan were bad boys - they didn't play by the rules set up by Governor Dean, and he was right to give them a big time out. And, if the Obama victory trend continues, the Credentials Committee in Denver will have slightly more Obama supporters seated than Clinton supporters, providing Obama with the might to deny Clinton of the majority of delegates she won in both primaries. But Obama should urge his supporters on that committee to seat the Florida and Michigan delegates, even if it makes his coronation more difficult. Come November, we need every Democratic vote in those handful of states. Is he leader enough to think about what he can do for his Party, not for what his Party can do for him?

Posted by MB Williams at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The people in the NWFP voted out of power the religious parties. I don't expect that this fact will make it to the foreign policy talking heads inside the beltway, but it means that the Pashtun resistance to the Punjabi military isn't about Islamic fundamentalists vs secular modernists. That isn't the only take-away. Is the Pashtun resistance to the NATO military a conflict between Islamic fundamentalists and secular modernists?

According to Geo TV, the combined total for the PML-N and the PPP is 139 seats, more than half of the 272-seat National Assembly, with the PPP winning 77 seats, and the PML-N winning 62 seats. The PML-Q managed to win only 34 seats.

Dawn's blogger writes:

The general mood in Pakistan is buoyant. The streets in Karachi, Lahore and Rawalpindi are filled with youthful supporters and party activists, cars blaring traditional party music and walls coloured in PML (N) and PPP flags.

The remaining biggies? Is the PPP+PML-N+minor-parties coalition a simple or two-thirds majority? On that question hangs impeachement. Will the judiciary be restored? On that question hangs the legality of General Musharaff's re-election.

Posted by EBW at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Results for 125 out of 272 constituencies are in.

Nawaz Sharif's PML-N picked up 50 seats.

Benazir Bhutto's PPP picked up 39 seats.

Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi's PML-Q only managed 18 seats.

Smaller parties and independents also managed 18.

Update: Results for for 179 out of 272 constituencies are in.

The PML-N has won 56 seats.

The PPP has also won 56 seats.

The PML-Q has managed just 21 seats.

Posted by EBW at 12:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Eventually MB's work on the larger cloud of corruption within the DOJ, the DOI, the MMS, and of course, the BIA, will reach the point where more interesting things are possible than just a braziltelecom user's midnight download of 3,815 entries out of wampum's vault -- not the usual spider indexing.

So I'm interested in the Gag Order that Jeffery White ordered on the 15th in the US District Court for Northern California. h/t Avedon.

You might think that "law" that results in ICANN accredited domain name registrars, a California LLC in particular, getting a TRO to take down a website that hosts leaked memos, memos like the ones that come our way, from somewhere, or "heavily redacted", come from FOIA filings by CREW and others, would be of interest to the civil libertarians of the ICANN policy domain.

One of the more amusing things that happened at the New Delhi ICANN meeting was when Robin Gross made the following utterance:

>>ROBIN GROSS: I just wanted to second what Adrian said and also take issue with the choice of this venue. I'm considerably concerned about an organization that calls itself "inclusive and bottom-up" et cetera, et cetera that would select a venue and all the surrounding venues where less than 1% of the world's population can even afford to be in the room. That's unexcusable. That's unconscionable.

We were in India, a country with 11 official scripts and 22 official languages, next to Pakistan with some of the same, and some different, ditto for Iran and Afghanistan, and looking in the other direction, Bengaladesh, Burma, Cambodia, Laos, ... and we were there to work on getting more than ASCII [a-zA-Z][0-9] and "-" into the DNS, what we call LDH for lettersdigitshyphen, and Robin was going non-linear -- "That's unexcusable. That's unconscionable." -- because the Taj Palace room rate, like all the five-stars in the diplomatic enclave of New Delhi (construction going on like Beijing '08 for the '10 Commonwealth Games) is around $500/night. Delhi is full of family hotels, we booked a floor at a room rate of $50/night.

The previous night I'd the pleasure of words with Ms. Gross, who is certain that "free speech" requires that the names of all Indian tribes, like "Cherokee" or "Lakota" be free for unlicensed commercial users like auto companies. She never got beyond the phrase "free speech", and "first come, first served".

So not only are kwel words about exotic people and their culture the property of the first person with $6.20 each, but Asians don't need scripts to allow languages to allow meaningful words as domain names more than they need cheaper room rates in five-star hotels (which tossed in the meeting rooms and the meals as well).

At least her term expires this year. Compared to Norbert Klein, also a Non-Commercial User Constituency rep, who single-handedly brought the Internet to Cambodia, she's the protagonist from "Legally Blond", but without fashion sense or common sense.

But the take away is that to the North American representative to the policy making body for generic top-level domains isn't interested in illegal wiretap in North America, or suppression of websites in North America that host documents that governments and corporations want suppressed, by courts of law in North America, she just wants "Lakota" to be free to the first buyer with six dollars and change, for large values of "Lakota".

She'd her moment of clarity. I understand that Michelle Obama just had one too. She's ashamed of her neighbors.

Posted by EBW at 06:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Polls closed 2:45 minutes ago.

Dawn is live blogging the vote. See blog.dawn.com.

Early returns show the PML-Q losing nearly every seat contested by the PPP.

The South Asian media hasn't got anything up on their main sites.

Updates as usual.

1. Sheikh Rasheed Ahmed (PML-Q) is trailing behind Javed Hashmi (PML-N) and second place Sardar Shuakat Hayat (PPP) in Rawalpindi. He's been minister of railways in the Musharaff government, has won seven prior elections, and is a "close confident" of the General.

2. Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain (PML-Q), and party chairman, has lost one of his two current parliamentary seat to a candidate from the PPP.

3. Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain (PML-Q), and party chairman, has lost the other of his two current parliamentary seat, also to a candidate from the PPP.

Posted by EBW at 03:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As Wampum has reported for years, EPA is as corrupt as they come:

Did politics trump environmental law in smelter?
Les Blumenthal; lblumenthal@mcclatchydc.com
Published: February 17th, 2008 06:02 PM

WASHINGTON - Though the dumping stopped more than a dozen years ago, no one is sure who will clean up the 26 billion pounds of hazardous waste from a Canadian smelter that has turned the reservoir behind Eastern Washington’s Grand Coulee Dam into an environmental nightmare.

The dispute has plowed new legal ground and threatened cross-border retaliation. It also prompted a heated clash between federal regulators in Seattle and Environmental Protection Agency and Justice Department lawyers in Washington, D.C., amid allegations of interference by political appointees with ties to the mining industry.

The wrangling could stretch on for years. By some estimates, the environmental mess, one of the worst in the nation, could cost $1 billion to clean up.

For nearly a century, slag from the Canadian smelter in Trail, B.C., 10 miles north of the border, was disposed of in the Columbia River.

Gradually, such heavy metals as arsenic, cadmium, mercury, copper, lead and zinc leached out of the slag and accumulated in Lake Roosevelt, the 150-mile-long reservoir behind Grand Coulee Dam.

Officials in the EPA's Seattle regional office sought to hold the owner of the smelter, Teck Cominco Metals Ltd., responsible. So far, U.S. courts have agreed. A ruling from a federal appeals court, which the Supreme Court recently let stand, for the first time held a foreign company like Teck Cominco liable under the U.S. Superfund law for cross-border pollution.

Read the whole article, depressing though it is.

Posted by MB Williams at 01:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Let's begin a recall of some of John McCain's actions as chair of the Senate Indian Affairs investigation into Jack Abramoff. From his own state's paper:

McCain says inquiry focusing on lobbyist, not on lawmakers

Billy House and Jon Kamman

The Arizona Republic

Apr. 28, 2005 12:00 AM

WASHINGTON - Sen. John McCain on Wednesday said that his Senate Indian Affairs Committee's investigation into disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff's dealings with Native American gaming tribes will not delve into the conduct of lawmakers who may be linked with those activities.

"The responsibilities of my committee are to investigate allegations that have been brought to us which are fairly well substantiated as rip-offs of tribes," said committee Chairman McCain, R-Ariz.

"That's the responsibility of the Indian Affairs Committee. And that's the limits of the Indian Affairs Committee. If there are questions about the ethical behavior of others, we have a (Senate) Committee on Ethics. That's their responsibility."

Scandals surrounding Abramoff, once recognized as one of the top lobbyists on Capitol Hill, have mushroomed since revelations emerged a year ago about how he and public relations associate Michael Scanlon collected $82 million from six tribes to protect or restore tribal gambling operations.

The pair's activities also are the focus of a criminal investigation and federal grand-jury inquiry.

Among findings of the Indian Affairs committee were that the tribes made millions of dollars in political contributions at Abramoff's direction and that a number of members of Congress or their staffers also have taken trips paid for by Abramoff or tax-exempt organizations for which he was a board member or directed with his wife.

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, took several trips abroad, including one on which he golfed at the famed St. Andrews course in Scotland. Ohio GOP Rep. Bob Ney also accepted a golfing trip to St. Andrews .

Also, several representatives, including Republican J.D. Hayworth of Arizona, failed to report some of the fund-raising assistance arranged in their behalf by Abramoff.

The House ethics committee was paralyzed this year over an impasse on changes of rules, but GOP Speaker Dennis Hastert backed off Wednesday, allowing the panel to decide whether to look into representatives' dealings with Abramoff.

Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., was the object of criticism for having accepted more than $100,000 in political contributions from Abramoff tribes and backing a move to build a $3 million school for one of them, the wealthy Saginaw Chippewas of Michigan.

At Abramoff's urging, tribes also donated at least $300,000 to the Council of Republican Environmental Advocates, or CREA, which has ties to high-level Interior Department officials, including Interior Secretary Gale Norton.

The department, which oversees Indian affairs, is the subject of an internal investigation into whether CREA lobbied officials on behalf of Abramoff's interests.

McCain said his committee plans to hold a third public hearing soon on matters involving Abramoff.

During Wednesday's committee hearing on the broader topic of regulation of Indian gaming, the Interior Department's inspector general, Earl Devaney mentioned that "greater care must be exercised by gaming tribes."

Recall that former Colorado Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, chairman of the Committee, was a close associate of Italia Federici, having served on the board of one of her early Colorado-based "charities", the Republican Patrons of the Arts. He was also at the very private cocktail party in March, 2001 set up by Federici, celebrating Gale Norton's confirmation as Secretary of the Interior. Jack Abramoff also attended.

McCain suppressed all information regarding the close ties between Campbell and Federici, and thus, Abramoff.

Ben Nighthorse Campbell is currently a lobbyist for Holland & Knight.

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As absurd as "President's Day" is under the rule of the Unitary Executive, and how Washington's, and Lincoln's, flaws and virtues as Constitutional executives are lost under the bland paste of "Presidents' Day", there is some fun to be had and for those lucky enough to have a paid holiday, or simply unemployed and able to pay the phone bill and not yet have hocked the PC, as public libraries are shuttered when the working and work-seeking poor are idled. Here are some:

Chris Clark's hard-boiled rabbit is a joy.

Susie Madrak's Hillary Rodham Wicked: The Musical is ... what else? ... wicked good.

Posted by EBW at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Three platforms in crib:

• 5 Es -- employment, energy, education, environment and equality -- PPP
  
• "RESTORE" -- Restoration of (pre-Nov 3) judiciary, democracy and the (pre-Oct 1999 coup) 1973 constitution, Elimination of military's rule in politics, Security of life and property, Tolerance, Overall reconciliation, Relief for the poor, and Education and employment -- PML-N
  
• 5 Ds -- democracy, development, defence, devolution and diversity -- PML-Q
  

In the last few hours Chaudhry Asif Ashraf, a candidate of the PML-N, for the Punjab provincial assembly was shot to death, and nine other party worker were wounded by an armed group in Lahore. Another armed group engaged a polling office of the PML-N at Lahore, killing one party worker and wounding several others.

Jemima Khan, the former wife of Imran Khan, has an interview with Mushy The politics of paranoia in The Independent on Sunday. A teaser:

The likely winners, boosted by the "martyr factor", are likely to be the PPP, followed by the party led by ex-prime minister Nawaz Sharif, the PML-N. There will have to be some uncomfortable but expedient alliances between sworn enemies. Sharif jailed Zardari. Musharraf jailed and exiled Sharif, Musharraf jailed Zardari, Zardari's wife jailed Sharif's father. Sharif brought corruption charges against Zardari's wife after she brought charges against him. And so on. It would be amusing to see this group all wrangling with each other for power, if only the consequences were not so dire.

Also worth reading is the re-working of a piece she's supposed to have written for The Independent on Sunday, an interview with Mushy. I can't find the original, but here's the link to the reworking of it in Dawn -- Musharraf predicts majority seats for PML-Q, MQM.

Joe Biden, Chuck Hagel and John Kerry are in Islamabad to observe the election. I hope they have the sense to do some reading.

US coverage? The NYTimes is aware there is a PPP, a PML-N, and a PML-Q, however, their narrative is the "fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the region", so as far as the Gray Lady is concerned, what began as a fight against al-Qa'ida and the Taliban in the NWFP hasn't become a Pashtun uprising against the Punjabi army, and the majority sympathy is with the Pashtuns. The LATimes is aware there is a PPP, but not much else. So much for press coverage of the central front in the war on mumbleisms.

Posted by EBW at 11:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In the '04 cycle Wes Clark could have come to Maine and talked to the men and women in the Guard who'd garrisoned Abu Gharib. He wouldn't have won the '04 primary, but the '08 primary would be different if there had been a retired four star general and former Supreme Allied Commander Europe who did more than just hang around DC and wait for a break, because, if nothing else, torture is an ineffective interrogation technique.

In the '06 off-cycle John Baldacci could have used his powers under Art. 1, Sec. 8, cl. 16 of the US Constitution and talked to the men and women in the Guard who'd garrisoned Abu Gharib. He still would have won the '06 general election, but the '08 primary would be different if there had been a governor who conducted an independent investigation of the greatest war crime committed by troops under US command since Major Colin Powell's "whitewashing" or the atrocities of My Lai, because, if nothing else, torture is contrary to the discipline prescribed by Congress.

But nothing happened, and John McCain gets to milk the Hanoi Hilton story for another cycle, uncomplicated by Abu Gharib.

Personally I'm looking forward to Errol Morris' film. I want to see how effective he is using art to reflect life, and like the episodes of West Wing we watch with a mix of affection and longing, I want to imagine that something, rather than nothing, actually happened.

Posted by EBW at 10:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This photo was banned by Alexandr Sokolov from an exposition of Russian art held in Paris last October. It sold in Madrid for 16,000 euros.

Posted by EBW at 02:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Asif Ali Zardari and Nawaz Sharif met for lunch yesterday at Sharif's home outside of Lahore, their second lunch date this week. My impression is that there will be a coalition PPP - PML-N majority, two of the four possible post-election outcomes. Vote-rigging blocked their parties from obtaining a majority in the 2002 elections, and the PML-Q (pro-Mushy) "won" and held power until 2007, until replaced by a "caretaker" government. A repeat of the 2002 vote-rig covers the other two possible post-election outcomes.

There were bombings and shootings during the day yesterday, the largest was the bombing of a PPP rally at a candidate's home in Parachinar in the Kurram tribal agency (in the NWFP), wounding 90 and killing 40. Both the PPP and the PML-N canceled their final events in Lahore, advantage PML-Q, which oddly benefits from every breakdown in security for its electoral rivals.

Posted by EBW at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of this Sunday's editorials at The Times of India, my breakfast read for the past week.

Land. Water. Minerals. Guns. They are all connected. In India's heartland, after the last metalled [paved] road has turned into a dirt track, there are villages where people have not seen tap water and electricity. They have never met a doctor or gone to school. They live in the middle of dense forests, sharing space with dangerous animals. They live on fertile land, but there is never enough food in their stomachs. Hunger they are familiar with and now they are simmering with anger. They realise that they were never given a chance to live with dignity.

They are India's original inhabitants - the indigenous people we call the tribals [Adivasi]. Now, they are caught in a deadly crossfire between the rebels who claim that they are waging a war on their behalf and the State that says it's trying to protect them from the Maoists' [Naxalites] mindless violence.

Not sure whom to believe, the tribals are confused. And they wonder why there hasn't been any change in their lives for such a long time.

In Chhattisgarh, the state with the highest tribal population in the country, even basic civic amenities like roads, health centres and education facilities are lacking. Even the areas in the grip of violence are beyond the reach of the police forces. The wells here are dry. The land is parched. The roads are dusty. The people are famished.

It's the same story in Jharkhand. Even after seven years of its creation, more than 80% of the tribal villages in Jharkhand are without roads, electricity, potable water and health centres.

There is no irrigation facility in more than 90% of the state. No wonder when the Maoists walk into a village and talk of revolution, people listen to them. No wonder when people hear about the mining companies coming and taking away their mineral wealth, they are enraged.

They want their land back. They want their forests intact. And they don't want others to exploit their minerals. When they see everything slipping away from their hands, they turn to guns.

Posted by EBW at 09:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Those of you looking for extra-jurisdictional hosting, in Canada or Mexico, the European Union, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, ... leave a note in comments. I'm moving Wampum, and I'll be happy to share what I already know about hosting service providers and colo (self-hosting) providers.

Keep in mind what extra-jurisdictional hosting does mean -- your colo or hosting provider won't receive a covert warrentless "national security letter", your provider won't receive a federal, or state subpoena, and your provider's network provider(s) won't have a black tap and back-haul to an undisclosed location for real-time "sampling".

There will still be illegal intercept, but it will occur only in the US, were writers and readers are unable to use networks except those in which illegal intercept has been accomplished by force majeure.

I've been hosting Wampum, the Koufax Awards, and intermittently, some other blogs, along with the Draft Gore 2008 site, and some other campaigns (with actual candidates!!!) on the Wampumpeag servers for several years -- a mix of Movable Type, Wordpress, Mediawiki, Drupal, ...

Another area to consider as a change in how we write and read is whether we use public encryption to re-assert a right of personal and political privacy.

Posted by EBW at 08:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In 1968 Richard Nixon was able to capture a demographic that had been out of the reach of the GOP since the Civil War. In 1969 Kevin Phillips wrote "The Emerging Republican Majority", disclosing the script:

The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.

In 1984 the largely unionized auto workers in Macomb County, Michigan, just north of Detroit voted 66% for Ronald Reagan. In 1960 the same county voted 63% for John F. Kennedy. We still use the term "Reagan Democrat" for white working-class Northerners, who voted RNC in 1980 and 1984. In the Fall we'll find out if the rejection of a progressive, pro-labor candidate by organized labor in the Nevada caucus was a rejection of identification with the very poor and the unemployed, or just a difference over hair style, skin pigment, or gender, among three members of the mid-six-figure-incomes class.

I'm not amused by the dog whistle:

"[OBAMA] I understand that Senator Clinton, periodically when she's feeling down, launches attacks as a way of trying to boost her appeal," he told reporters. h/t to Suburban Guerilla

I don't mind the many-bags-of-hammers-dumbness of the "Hope" lockstep lineup of what were blogs and are now campaign properties. This November is the sell-by date on their version of The Rapture. What I mind is the probability that the cool kids in one primary campaign have just created a new structural alignment, activating the enormous closet misogynist male, and female demographic latent in one party, and in this, and subsequent Novembers, transferring it to the other party.

Posted by EBW at 07:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

The phone at San Diego County's Sweetwater Campground worked fine until yesterday. Then it was administratively failed. This afternoon a contractor came out and removed the equipment. We chatted briefly, as he loaded the last of the structure into his truck.

The end of an era. I suppose they'll keep their jail contracts, there's wicked good money in overcharging a population that has to go LD to family and friends, not to mention members of the defense bar, or courts' clerks, for case management.

Posted by EBW at 06:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Putchist-in-Chief is leaving another mark on the treaty system. The decision to use an Aegis SM-3 to try to shoot down US 193.

Note well: The funded arms control community has been non-reactive.

What next? A "robust penetrator" test at Kwajilan?

Cernig's comment at Arms Control Wonk are interesting, as is the surrounding orbital and hydrazine commentary.

The notion that on the order of 60 million Pentagon dollars is being effectively spent to ameliorate a public health hazard is beyond comic. There is so much public health hazard that 60 million Pentagon dollars could be allocated to reduce with astronomically greater probabilities of technical success, and successful public health outcomes in the presence of technical success, that this rational fails to address. Like inventory reductions, or non-proliferation verification, or ... agendas outside the policy scope of the Regime.

Posted by EBW at 05:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Actually, there are many Muslims in India, as well as many Sikhs. Delhi is a cosmopolitan city. Watching the Pakistani news outlets and the Indian news outlets (between the scads of channels devoted to either singing and dancing romantically, or singing and dancing spiritually, or just plain old every-day-is-Sunday TV preachers) was interesting. Everyone is dancing on, or around, the question of what General Musharaff will do after the PML-Q is trounced.

Just as the November election will be about Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, and the remainder of the primary race will be about Ohio and Texas on March 4th, and Pennsylvania on April 22nd, the election in Pakistan is all about the Punjab.

The PPP is sweeping the rural areas of the Sindh and the MQM is holding its edge in the Sindh's urban areas. Polls have the PPP at 40 and the MQM at 16 of the directly elected national seats.

The Balouch and Pakhtun nationalist parties are boycotting the election, leaving the pro-regime MMA to take some seats in Balochistan, and the PPP, PML-N and PML-Q to take the balance of the Balochistan's directly elected national seats.

In the North West Frontier Provice, where everyone from Wes Clark to Barak Obama has proposed parachuting in the Saudi Army, or the Utah National Guard, to Hunt for Red Ossama, the MMA has collapsed and Jamaat-i-Islami is now canvassing openly. Again, polling data has the PPP and the ANP (Awami National Party) spliting most of the NWFP's directly elected national seats.

But the Punjab elects 148 of the 272 directly elected seats, so to repeat the obvious, the "national election" in the Punjabi state and its occupied peripheries, governed by the Punjabi Military, is really all about the Punjab, about the balance of forces within the Punjabi state.

Its a three-plus way. The PPP is running on "revenge through democracy" and is running second in the major cities, Nawaz Sharif's PML-N is ahead in the urban areas and picking up surprise seats in Rawalpindi. Rural Punjab is divided, with candidates formerly members of the MMA now scattered to PML-N, PML-Q, the PPP, and the MMA. Like the democratic primaries to date, accumulating delegates with no strategic advantage to either remaining active candidate, the post-election construction of a majority coalition is the only issue. Will the PPP have enough to form a majority without another major party partner, the PML-N in particular? No one asks if the MNA and the PML-Q will have a majority, except through vote fraud.

Major Party Websites:

• PPP, leader: Benazir Bhutto (assassinated)
  
• PML-N, leader: Nawaz Sharif
  
• PML-Q, leader: Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi [Musharaff]
  
• MMA, leader: General Musharaff
  

As an exercise, color in the blank outline map according to the authoritative news available to you.

Remember, the title for this series is "Is Pakistan?", and related to the question "What will Mushy do if?" is the question "What will Georgie do when?"

Answers in comments.

Posted by EBW at 03:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You'll want to read Josh's pieces from Thursday. Mughnieh: Liberator of Lebanon or Opportunistic Terrorist ?.

Mughnieh was born in 1962 in the southern Lebanese village of Teir Dibba. He grew up in Beirut's southern suburbs where as a teenager he joined Force 17, the elite unit of the Fatah faction headed by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

After Israeli forces expelled the Palestinians from Beirut during the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Mughnieh joined a group of Shiite Islamists then coalescing under Iran's guidance in the Bekaa Valley. The group became Hizbullah and Mughnieh, despite his youth, was considered one of its most capable figures.

In addition to the 1983 attacks in Beirut, in 1985 Mughnieh led the hijacking of a TWA airliner in Beirut in which a US Navy diver was killed. He is also alleged to have run the networks of kidnappers who snatched dozens of foreigners in Beirut in the mid- to late 1980s.

I'm not going to write about the deranged joy in the Israeli press, Pakistan and the pending 8th Majlis in Iran are much more important than the assassination of a general officer of an armed organization who has not had an operation role since Ronald Reagan was president. But this guy should have been teaching, like others before him, the operational art behind his successes in the early 1980s, at Leavenworth.

Of course, its a godsend for people like Olmert, and Bush, who are looking for cover and the joy of counter-fire as an excuse for follow-on forces.

Posted by EBW at 01:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

A few days ago, I was complaining about near-record heat. Then yesterday, we had this hit us:

Snowstorm Shuts San Diego Mountain Road
Associated Press

SAN DIEGO (AP) - A California mountain highway near the Mexican border is closed because of a surprise snowstorm that stranded as many as 500 motorists.

Fire officials say Interstate 8 was shut down Thursday afternoon in the coastal mountains of eastern San Diego County. Snow and ice have caused numerous fender-benders and stopped vehicles in their tracks.

Authorities say only minor injuries were reported. There is no word when the road will reopen.

Authorities are sending in snow plows and other vehicles to rescue motorists.

About 30 people have been taken to a casino and fire station that are serving as shelters.

Interstate 8 is the main East-West highway from San Diego east -- to the rest of the continent. It's no "mountain highway", and the pass at 4000 feet is significantly lower than a lot of interstate highway passes in California. I took the kids on a drive on 8 last week after dropping Eric off at the airport, out to the Anza Borrego Desert. It's about 15 miles east of our campground.

The storm was a freak - no one predicted more than a few fog-produced drizzles, and yet, for three hours, we experienced rapidly dropping temperatures and torrential downpours. Torrential. We watched the snowline drop on weather.com, as the entire region east of us turned from green to pink on the radar within an hour. Today, the sun was back out, temps up to 60, though a frost warning has been issued for tonight. Just freaky weather all around.

Posted by MB Williams at 08:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We'd two taxis to take the six of us -- Werner, Marcus, Elmar, Jordi, Normand, Amadeau and I, from the five star back to our modest hotel in in the Chaina Market area of Karol Bagh. Our drivers were from Himachal Pradesh, in the Western Indian Himalayas, and it was late, and they got lost (as did we, by this point we should have had the route down cold), and The Family Restaurant was closed, so we drove on a bit to a nearby Deccan restaurant.

The owner, looking as Deccan as his staff, chatted with us. We were French speaking (along with Catalan, German, and English) so he spoke to us in French, as well as English. He was from Punduchery, so his parents were French nationals until 1955, then dual nationals, India and France, and so he was a French national, as well as an Indian national.

The first world war did not start in August, 1914. The first world war took place between 1756 and 1763. Anglo-Americans know it as the French and Indian War. In Europe it was the Seven Years War. For us it was the end of the Beaver Wars, and for the French on the Back of the Turtle, and the French in India, it was the end of an era. The second capture of the Fortress of Louisbourg, the defeat of Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham, and in French India, the defeat of Lally at Vandavasi and the seige, and reduction, of Punduchery.

Many people from the south come to Delhi and stay, and eat, at Deccan guest houses and Deccan restaurants. And for this evening, he was our host. Dinner was 60 rupies, vegetarian, and wicked good.

My last night in Delhi the taxi queue lottery at the conference hotel awarded me one of the previous night's drivers, and with his assistance, I found Pashmina similar to the photo above.

Posted by EBW at 08:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My last three days in New Dehli were my most comfortable days. I'd a room that was quieter and I was sleeping nights, and the work at the conference was going well. One morning the driver misunderstood which five star hotel he was supposed to deliver us to -- the Taj Mahal hotel or the Taj Palace, several kilometers distant. It was educational, like every prior wrong turn, and we glimpsed the Presidential Palace through the trees.

In the evenings we ate at family restaurants in the Chaina Market area of Karol Bagh, and walked back to our hotel down quiet streets. We felt safer than we'd felt walking around the prior conference hotel venue -- the up-scale hotels at LAX. We reached agreement how to handle variants in Farsi and Arabic for a particular label, and four of us started work to replace something fundamentally broken that has constrained how scripts are used in labels. We're Iranian, Pakistani, Indian (dots) and Indian (feathers).

Other than explaining that the "war of movement" (Summer-Fall of 1914) aka "the early contests", are different from the "war of attrition" (Winter 1914 - 8 August 1918) aka "now till the convention (modulo Texas)", and different from the general campaign, and different from the post-election legal effort to protect the vote, I had a week without the Hero Twins or their supporters. My co-workers seem to have understood me when I said the American Left had lost its candidates, and all that was left was cannibalism and witch hunts for orthodoxy in a Party that appears to be following the French to electoral defeat.

Outside one can glimpse the issues -- development in India and China, lack of development in Africa, the shoot-down of USA 193 link, link and link, as creeping militarization of space.

The return leg of the flight passed again over Afghanistan, then turned north and went directly over the pole, in darkness, so what sea ice there is this season couldn't be seen, then south to Chicago.

Posted by EBW at 06:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Of course, the reason people have stopped paying their mortgages is not because they don't have the money, but because bloggers are just so negative. From Reuters:

Countrywide says foreclosure rate at new record
Reuters
Friday, February 15, 2008; 8:46 AM

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Countrywide Financial Corp, the largest U.S. mortgage lender, said on Friday foreclosures and late payments rose in January to the highest on record, reflecting the nation's deepening housing and credit crunch.

The foreclosure rate for the 9.02 million mortgages on which Countrywide collects and processes payments roughly doubled to 1.48 percent from 0.77 percent a year earlier, and rose from December's 1.44 percent.

Delinquencies rose to 7.47 percent of unpaid balances from 4.32 percent a year earlier, and 7.20 percent in December. Countrywide services $1.48 trillion of home loans.

Countrywide also said it funded $21.9 billion of home loans in January, down 41 percent from $37.1 billion a year earlier, and 6 percent from December's $23.4 billion.

Posted by MB Williams at 05:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sometimes the best posts from the bestest bloggers show up in their comments. This, from Tanta at Calculated Risk, sums up my feelings exactly:

My question, is it possible for you to do a write-up as to what the solutions to end the housing mess.

Tanta writes:

I am not especially convinced there are any "solutions."

There are possible interventions. Most of them fail to impress me because they don't get nearly enough purchase on the problem for the price tag they present. Not the dollars--in most cases the dollars are not that big an issue in the grand scheme of things. It's the maintenance of moral hazard for lenders and builders that they represent. I am less concerned with the moral hazard to homeowners than many other people are because I don't happen to be convinced that borrowers really understood that they were taking excessive risk in the first place. It isn't moral hazard if your speedometer is broken and you think you're driving the speed limit. It's a problem, yes, but it's a different problem.

So the interventions I have been most interested in are 1) cram-downs for principal residences and, to a lesser extent, 2) tax exemption for debt forgiveness, although I would prefer to see that limited to FC/short sale, with deferral only (not outright exemption) for modifications. I think these balance the moral hazard problems and, in the case of BK law changes, help prevent a recurrence of this nightmare (if lenders know they can be crammed down, they should behave rather more rationally when they make the loan). These interventions ease the stress on financially floundering borrowers without attempting to prop up home prices in bubble markets.

But I do not present that as a "solution," because it isn't. We are just going to have to live through it. People need income that can keep up with housing prices (or housing prices that limit themselves to available income) and lenders need to make some kind of profitable capital investments for some purpose other than exclusively residential mortgages. Until that macro-economic problem gets addressed, nothing is going to stop a long RE bust/credit crunch.

I hope that doesn't sound like a cop-out, but the reason I have been jumping up and down over this for the last several years is because bubbles like this create unsolvable problems. I wouldn't have been so frightened if I thought there had always been a way to put this genie back into the bottle.

I can think of a number of long-term regulatory changes that would in my view improve the state of mortgage lending/selling/servicing, keep the industry much healthier in the long haul, and make it less prone to future bubbles. I'm not even sure it's worth trying to talk about that right now. Everyone is focussed on "solving" this particular "mess" to think in terms of the long horizon. I come from the "kick them while they're down" school of regulatory politics that says you'll never have a better chance of pushing through responsible regulation than when they're collapsed at your feet begging for mercy. If you focus simply on shoring them up, without demanding a regulatory regime in exchange for it, you'll never get your regulatory changes, because if it works, they become strong and healthy again and will defeat any attempt to add "burdens" to their business. In that regard, anything you do to juice up the players, absent tougher regulation with teeth, is just going to come back to haunt you.

It is however an election year, so I might as well talk to my credenza.
Tanta | Homepage | 02.15.08 - 9:28 am | #

Posted by MB Williams at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Back when I was econoblogging a good deal of the time, I found the Commerce Department's EconomicIndicators.gov to be a very useful site, a place to find most of the monthly and quarterly economic statistics in one handy place. Of course, if you're expecting the economic news to be bad, kill the messenger; I noticed this announcement at the site when I dropped by today:

Due to budgetary constraints, the Economic Indicators service (http://www.economicindicators.gov) will be discontinued effective March 1, 2008.

Posted by MB Williams at 07:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Every morning I leave a very modest hotel and travel across New Delhi, sometimes in a three-wheeled open taxi, others in a closed car. The conference hotel is not very modest. It is the pick of the Ministry of Telecommunications.

The Delhi Sustainable Development Summit started while I was somewhere over the North Atlantic, between Labrador and Norway, on a flight that took me over Greenland and Iceland. It came to an end while I was working on issues relating to the Internet, minutia no wampum reader is likely to ever think about, things like clarifying the correctness of the semantics of inet_addr(), which I suppose I deserve (see link), or the fact that entries in ISO 3166 are not necessarily "countries", nor are they necessarily "territories", which involves groveling about in code tables and updates, and finally, whether an "internationalized domain", whether the ASCII label originated from a table entry in ISO 3166 or from the US Doc (.com, .net, .org), or from the ICANN "new gTLD process", is operated by one, or several registry operators, was an unexplored assumption.

I wish I were contributing even half as significantly as this small list of minutia to the Delhi Sustainable Development Summit. It follows on the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC, and the 13th COP (conference of parties) held at Bali in December 2007, venues where Al Gore was "a contributor".

Yesterday the headline in Le Soir in Bruxelles, which I read in New Dehli, was the mention that thousands of people die from pollution each year in Belgium. Every evening leaving the island of green and quiet of the first class hotel and returning across Dehli to a vastly more modest hotel, my eyes fill with grit and I pass a half hour with the fumes and dust of third world metropolis. The connection between global warming, fossil fuels (types, mode of use, gas and particulate combustion by-products), public health, and poverty is obvious.

Climate change, carbon, this isn't just about penguins and polar bears sometime over the event horizon rainbow. Its about cities gasping for air, and water, and while the rich, those with health care, can eke out a living, even a beautiful life, down the wealth curve to the walking poor its just days taken from our lives.

h/t to Susie for Al Gore.

Posted by EBW at 09:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We came to San Diego this year because of the purported "temperate" winter weather. Not too hot (like Arizona), not too cold (like Maine.) The average high temperature for this date is 70 degrees. Today, it is 85, closing in on the 1971 record of 87 degrees.

Eric, on the other hand, is experiencing record cold temps in New Delhi. 3.5C, or so he Skyped me last night. The cherry blossoms have popped, and it's as green as Ireland due to all the rain we've had this winter (after last year's record low precipitation.) Weird all around.

Posted by MB Williams at 04:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I decided two months ago to put off law school until 2009, mostly out of concern the "subprime" problem was not contained, and would spill over into other credit areas. The NYTimes, so it seems, is just waking up.

According to Susie, the Wall Street Journal named student loans as being sucked into the breach as well.

Posted by MB Williams at 09:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If I wasn't already heavily invested in tin-foil, I'd run right out an buy Reynolds stock. From the Miami Herald (h/t Avedon):

Top lawyer faces money-laundering charges
BY JAY WEAVER

Ben Kuehne, a widely respected Miami lawyer whose clients have included former Vice President Al Gore and other major politicians, surrendered Thursday on federal criminal charges for his behind-the-scenes role in a complex international drug-trafficking case.

An indictment, unsealed at his morning court appearance, charges Kuehne in a money-laundering conspiracy with approving tainted legal payments by an accused Colombian drug kingpin to his defense attorney in Miami.

The fee payments turned out to be illegitimate because they allegedly came from drug proceeds in violation of federal law, federal prosecutors said.

...

Justice Department officials allege that Kuehne broke the law in 2002-03 when he vouched for millions paid by one-time Medellín drug lord Fabio Ochoa Vasquez to his high-profile trial attorney, Roy Black.

Kuehne's research gave Black the confidence -- in the form of legal opinion letters -- to accept payments totaling $3.7 million in fees and $1.3 million in expenses from Ochoa, according to several sources. Kuehne earned a portion of the expense payments -- $220,000 to $260,000 -- from Black for vetting Ochoa's payments.

Kuehne's Washington attorney, John W. Nields, declined to comment before Thursday's court appearance. The Justice Department, which is handling the investigation, also declined to comment.

Kuehne's indictment, which had been sealed since late October, shocked many of his peers in South Florida's legal community because he is widely known as a brainy lawyer with the utmost integrity. He is past president of the Dade County Bar Association and a member of the Florida Bar Board of Governors.

...

Federal prosecutors face a formidable challenge in proving the case against Kuehne. They will have to prove that Kuehne knew Ochoa's money came from the sale of family assets to drug-trafficking associates -- or that he avoided that knowledge through ``deliberate ignorance.''

Ironically, the investigation first focused on Black following Ochoa's conviction at his 2003 trial in Miami. But authorities dropped their interest in Black and shifted to Kuehne, who became the target because his buffer-like role insulated Ochoa's defense attorney from any criminal liability for accepting the fees.

...

Before Ochoa's trial, Kuehne had met with federal prosecutors in Miami to discuss the controversial fee issue in the hope of creating a ''zone of comfort'' -- although they never agreed to give him a stamp of approval for Ochoa's payments to Black. At one point, U.S. District Judge K. Michael Moore considered appointing a public defender to resolve the problem -- but Black eventually stepped in with Kuehne's blessing of the payments.

...

The investigation into Kuehne -- along with two Colombian suspects named in the indictment -- was handled by the Justice Department in Washington because of a conflict of interest in the U.S. attorney's office in South Florida.

According to an emailed statement to Jeralyn Merritt at TalkLeft, Kuehne was not only involved in the 2000 Florida recount, but Ohio in 2004 as well:

In 2000, Ben served as National Counsel and Florida Counsel to Vice President Al Gore and the Gore/Lieberman Recount Committee during the Presidential Recount Litigation. His responsibilities included representation before Florida canvassing boards, litigation in both state and federal courts, participation in the recount trial, and preparation of briefs to the Florida Supreme Court, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and the United States Supreme Court.

During the 2004 presidential election, Ben was a Senior Counsel to the Kerry/Edwards Presidential Campaign, coordinating the Florida Legal Team in early voting and election day voting issues. Ben was prominent in uncovering abuse by the Department of Justice in commencing investigations of supposed election law violations in Ohio.

Ben Kuehne is one of the top, if not THE top, election law advocates in the country, and he has been sidelined by the Justice Department (Washington, mind you, as the Southern Florida USA wouldn't touch this, it seems) just in time for the November election. The indictment has been sealed since October - why the long wait?

Now that it's McCain the Extortionist, the Roverians will pull out all the stops to win in November. This is just a first step.

Update: Here's the indictment (.pdf). It's clearly Bush hack Alice Fisher's baby, but I'm curious about the background of Richard Weber, who, until his recent placement as head of the Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section, was Assistant USA in Fisher's old stomping grounds, the Eastern District of New York. I'll report back what I find.

Posted by MB Williams at 09:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The flight from O'Hare to New Dehli passed through Afghan air-space. I was surprised. The way-point near Moscow's air-space to avoid Iran wasn't surprising, but going through a war zone was.

Posted by EBW at 01:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

From The Green Papers

On 1 December 2007, the DNC determined that the date of Michigan's 15 January 2008 primary violated party rules and has decided to strip the state of its delegation. The determination was made official on 5 January 2008. Michigan had 128 pledged delegate votes (83 district, 28 at-large, and 17 PLEO) and 28 unpledged delegate votes (17 unpledged DNC members, 1 Governor, 2 Democratic U.S. Senators, 6 Democratic U.S. House Members, and 2 add-ons). Total delegate votes changed from 156 to 0.

Senator Clinton placed her name on the ballot.
Senator Obama did not, along with Senators Joe Biden, John Edwards, Governor Bill Richardson

Senator Clinton was selected by 327,419 of the voting Dems, 55.28% of those who cast a ballot.

As Joe Biden, John Edwards, Barack Obama and Bill Richardson followed the DNC's rules and did not allow their names to be placed on the ballot, and as the MDP discards write-ins, those candidates gave guidenace to their supporters to vote "uncommitted".

The "uncommitted" vote was 236,955 of the voting Dems, 40.01% of those who cast a ballot.

The "soft pledged" delegate count:

Senator Clinton: 79 (50.64%)
Uncommitted: 55 (35.26%)

Posted by EBW at 04:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I called my mom, to discover she'd written in Bloomberg on her Republican ballot. Not an unreasonable choice. Poor field however, came home to discover his SO was two sheets to the wind and working on the third sheet of O laide before the polls closed.

Posted by EBW at 04:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

link.

I'm not surprised to see that for Joe, neither the ground nor finance exist. We'd planned to hit every meat packing plant in Iowa, and Yucca Mountain activist in Nevada, and always take enough to beat the 15% floor and simply accumulate delegates. It can't make us better or smarter than he, he got the job and we got bumpkis, but its good to know how Joe sees the big picture.

Posted by EBW at 03:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Via Bloomberg:

Stockpiles of crude oil last week were 1.4 percent above the five-year average for the period, the department said. Inventories were 1.8 percent lower than the average two weeks earlier, according to the department. Gasoline supplies were 4.2 percent above the average and distillate inventories were 0.1 percent below.

Refineries operated at 84.3 percent of capacity, down 0.6 percentage point from the prior week, the report showed. It was the lowest rate since March 2006.

``The refinery numbers are the big story,'' said Brad Samples, commodity analyst for Summit Energy Inc. in Louisville, Kentucky. ``Refinery margins across the U.S. are really weak so refiners are reducing runs.''

Crude-oil imports jumped 4.6 percent to 10.5 million barrels a day, the highest since August, according to the report. Imports of petroleum products surged 26 percent to 4.22 million barrels a day, the highest since May.

Just a month ago, I was berated on lawschooldiscussion.org for arguing a recession was on the way. The 20-24 yr old crowd was truly in denial, possibly because their homes and jobs were not being foreclosed/downsided. What a difference a month makes.

Posted by MB Williams at 01:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A handy visual to remind us of what telecom immunity means.

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

The "soft pledged" delegate count for the Hero Twins as of Monday.

Senator Clinton: 352
Senator Obama: 351

The "soft pledged" delegate for the Hero Twins as of Wednesday.

Senator Clinton: 884
Senator Obama: 908

The progress of strategic alignments of A-listers to one, or the other, of the Hero Twins, and the daily announcements of their front pagers and diarists to one, or the other, of the Hero Twins, reminds me of friendly games of Milles Bourne. The milestones pass, but the players don't actually go anywhere, no matter how enthusiastic they are about their imaginary displacement.

Meanwhile, unobserved, PLEOs are being accumulated. 83 delegates will be allocated on February 12th in Virginia, proportional to the popular vote, but 18 PLEOs won't be selected until the state party convention on June 7th.

Posted by EBW at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by MB Williams at 10:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It hosts johnedwards.com, so it matters.

Update: 12 hours later 70.42.42.155 is responsive.

Posted by EBW at 08:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Mid-November my co-workers at CORE asked me over lunch about the election. I explained that it then appeared that Hilary Clinton had enough endorsements and polling numbers to win, but that the national numbers didn't mean as much as the local numbers -- the 1st, 2nd and especially 3rd CDs in Iowa, the southern third of New Hampshire, Clark County Nevada ... "But", they asked, "Who will win?"

I said we have proportional delegate accumulation in the Democratic Party's presidential primaries and caucuses, I think John Edwards will get above 15% in most contests, the American "left", and Obama and Clinton will split the "non-left", and how that split will go -- 40/60 or 50/50 or 60/40 -- will be mostly accident and opportunity, but it won't actually matter, because neither will accumulate enough delegates to win, so it will come down to super-delegates or a brokered convention.

My friends had flights to catch, so "super delegates" and "bound-till-which-ballot" were passed over in favor of coffee and dessert. Geneva is a beautiful city, with beautiful desserts.

This morning during a lull in our conference call someone asked about today and which one of the two remaining candidates I supported. I pointed out that the American "left" no longer had a candidate, and that after today we'd know about as much tomorrow as we did yesterday, the ratios of delegates not really being changed. My friend rejoined, "Yes, but better than a Republican." So I'd a chance to explain to my Swiss friend, that it really came down to the vote next November, but only in Florida and Ohio, and perhaps Pennsylvania, in European (but not Swiss!) terms, the vote in Germany or France, who becomes the next "President" of the European Union, because the rest of Europe, the other 25 countries, aren't competitive. Only in France and Germany was the balance of forces between the Liberals and the Socialists, in our moment of non-work chat hypotheticals, even.

After a moment he replied "So the series (of election outcomes) isn't going to converge?"

I left it at that, we got back to the work, and we'll be able to chat in New Dehli next week, but baring accident, no, the series isn't going to converge. The next call was about the economic news and the Euro to Dollar problem we face, all of our expenses (except me) are in Euros, and all of our income is in Dollars.

Posted by EBW at 06:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

From Indianz.com:

Bush administration seeks another cut in BIA budget
Tuesday, February 5, 2008

In the last budget of his administration, President Bush on Monday announced a cut of nearly $100 million to the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The fiscal year 2009 budget seeks $2.2 billion for the agency that serves more than 550 tribes and more than 1.6 million American Indians and Alaska Natives. The request represents a 4.4 percent decrease from current levels and a 5.1 percent decrease from last year's budget.

At a press conference in Washington, D.C., Secretary Kempthorne acknowledged the financial constraints facing the Interior Department. But he said the fiscal year 2009 budget includes increases to beef up law enforcement on reservations and improve education levels at BIA schools.

...

The only other area that saw a notable increase was economic development. The budget seeks $8.2 million, an increase of $2 million, for the BIA's guaranteed loan program, which helps tribes and Indian businesses.

That meant that reductions were seen in almost every part of the agency. There was a $27.6 million cut to school construction, $22 million cut to welfare assistance, a $12.5 million cut to roads maintenance, a $10.6 million cut for self-governance compacts, a $5.9 million cut to scholarships and adult education and a $2.3 million cut to tribal courts.

There were also three outright eliminations. The budget seeks to remove $21.4 million in Johnson O'Malley education grants, $13.6 million for the Housing Improvement Program and $9.8 million for Indian land consolidation.

Posted by MB Williams at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A relative called today, someone who'd been senior staff on Dodd's Iowa campaign, apropos of nothing in particular.

I've mentioned this paper before. Its only 10 pages of pdf, and accessible for non-specialists.

Posted by EBW at 11:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This was on buried behind the front page of the NYTimes this morning:

Proposed Military Spending Is Highest Since WWII
By THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON - As Congress and the public focus on more than $600 billion already approved in supplemental budgets to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and for counterterrorism operations, the Bush administration has with little notice approached a landmark in military spending.

The Pentagon on Monday will unveil its proposed 2009 budget of $515.4 billion. If it is approved in full, annual military spending, when adjusted for inflation, will have reached its highest level since World War II.

That new Defense Department budget proposal, which is to pay for the standard operations of the Pentagon and the military but does not include supplemental spending on the war efforts or on nuclear weapons, is an increase in real terms of about 5 percent over this year.

Overall since coming to office, the administration has increased baseline military spending by 30 percent, a figure sure to be noted in coming budget battles as the American economy seems headed downward and government social spending is strained, especially by health-care costs.

A little over three years ago I wrote these two posts: The Return of the Iron Triangle and The Return of the Iron Triangle, part deux. I think they're even more relevant today.

Posted by MB Williams at 01:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Can someone tell me how to get the webcast at this address from a Real Audio format into something I can edit (.mov, .api, etc.???)

Posted by MB Williams at 12:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

As there are no progressives currently accumulating delegates within the Democratic Party's caucuses, primaries, and conventions, we're Primary Free. We won't be sending absentee ballots back to Maine, and we won't be selected by any of our precinct's preference groups to be their committed delegates to the State convention, and we won't be voting to keep progressive planks in the State party platform.

And since Maine is now "comfortable Democratic", come November we don't have to hold our noses and vote the top of the ticket for any reason. But my point isn't personal.

These are the states who's electoral votes were in play, the 13 states where registration, persuasion, identification and GOTV execution did determine electoral vote outcomes, where the margin between the two major parties was 3% or less, in 2004:

1 Iowa
2 Ohio
3 New Hampshire
4 Wisconsin
5 New Mexico
6 Florida
7 Nevada
8 Pennsylvania
9 Minnesota
10 Colorado
11 Michigan
12 Maine
13 Oregon

But its much simpler than that. Maine and Oregon are no longer battleground states. Two out of three of Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania determines everything. In fact, if Pennsylvania isn't competitive, then it just comes down to the 2000 and 2004 contests -- Florida and Ohio. Win one and win. Lose both and lose.

Posted by EBW at 10:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A fourth submarine cable in the middle east was damaged Sunday between Haloul, Qatar and Das, United Arab Emirates.

This is in addition to the damage affecting the FLAG, SAE-ME-WE4, FALCON cables.

For those who's first issue is whether or not Iran is the target of a network partition, that is, of some physical plane "information operation", possibly from reading something at Slashdot, or at the Internet Traffic Report, the answer is "No".

This Thursday I leave for New Delhi. I'll be there for a week. About 20% of Iran's network capacity has been lost, which is a lot, but nothing like the loss for other areas formerly served by the severed cables, India lost 50%, Egypt 80%, or the total partition (100% loss) that occurred to Pakistan last year.

Resourcs: Todd Underwood's Renesys Blog, the SLAC E2E project, the NANOG list traffic, and far off friends.

In keeping with the "Blogroll Amnesty Day" theme, this data will self-distruct and probably cause irreparable harm to computers and domestic animals if linked to by amnesiacs.

Enjoy!

Mediterranean Cable Break, Mediterranean Cable Break, part II, and Mediterranean Cable Break, part III.

Effects of Fibre Outage through Mediterranean at the Internet End-to-End Performance Monitoring Project at SLAC.

Posted by EBW at 09:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This YouTube is awesome. Of course, I'll be humming the tune for the next day...

H/T twist at HousingDoom.

Posted by MB Williams at 09:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Patrick Barkman writes The Local Crank, which appears to be translated, in part, into dead tree. He ran for the Legis in 2002, a cycle before MB ran for the Maine House.

Stacy Leeds is posting again at Tsalagi Think Tank, after having been "off-line" for six months since Chad Smith won another term as Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation. I'm really looking forward to reading Stacy again.

Not everyone needs to see things just how I see things. A person can write "... Vine Deloria, Jr.'s excellent work on the fallacy of the alleged science of archaeology, "Red Earth, White Lies..." and go on to make literary art, which is what Pudgy Indian does, or do the shutterbug at a powwow and capture many daughters and sons in motion

Yazzie writes Tribal Employee, and simple things like "A lot of us Navajos on the reservation like to go to Giddy-up town (Gallup, NM) to go to Wal-Mart, to buy mutton, to do our laundry, etc." are so normal, and so far from the overheated frenzy of the dominant discourse.

Rob J. Peters writes a blog, Rob is also a Tribal Employee, and in the middle of union vote in his department at the Soaring Eagle casino. Highly recommended for anyone interested in understanding Tribal Government as an employer.

Bobbie Hart O'Neill, Annie, and BobbieoAZ write Native Unity, and have been doing so since Wampum was started, back in 2003. We share a keen interest in Section 368 rights-of-way, governmentally fronted by the DOE, the DOI, and the BLM, and in many other things.

That's enough for a start.

Posted by EBW at 09:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

During my last year of high school we'd a large scale project, to survey our community, then being "malled" for the first time, and while the tension between main street small independent business located on owned or long-term leased properties on and off of the main streets and the mall developers were obvious, we discovered something else. For the population at, or older than, retirement, schools were an expensive nuisance. It was something of a surprise to discover that those nice older people in their smallish, in-town houses built before our parents were born, pretty much wanted to drown the progeny of their progeny.

It would have made the last year of high school much more interesting if we'd shared our data. Driver's ed could have been a series of hilarious learning experiences involving kinematics, walkers and crosswalks, with liability picked up by the school district, that is, by the property tax payers.

Eight years later Jarvis-Gann was on the ballot:

SECTION 1. (a) The maximum amount of any

on real property shall not exceed One percent (1%) of the full cash value of such property. The one percent (1%) tax to be collected by the counties and apportioned according to law to the districts within the counties.

Education in California plummeted, K-12 and in the Junior College, State Colleges, and University of California systems.

Property values in coastal Maine rose sharply between the mid-nineties and the mid-oughts. Between 1999 and 2000 the appraisal value of our house increased $35,000 -- 10% in one year. It was the same every year we owned that property, 10% a year. Even with an unchanged mil rate, our property taxes went up every year, as did our replacement-cost insurance, though our income did not. It was the same or worse all up and down the coast. People were being appraised out of their incomes, hence out of their homes.

Everyone could agree that the root cause was Massholes buying up property for summer homes, using the Masshole bubble market equity, forcing a Maine bubble. No matter what direction you bought, up coast, inland, out on the islands, the transaction itself caused values to inflate.

We'd the plague, the ad valorem plague, in its highly contagious form.

Edwards proposed to stop the foreclosures. MB was preparing a post explaining that she did not support John on this issue, even with the knowledge that the directly affected are not all yuppie flippers who rolled the dice one time too often, but that lenders targeted minorities and women for subprimes. More poor people are harmed by the inflated cost, that is, the hyper-profitability, of basic shelter, than are harmed by being converted back to being renters when their loans reset. Stopping the foreclosures would simply leave housing cost unchanged from the peak, or near peak, set by the ad valorem plague, and leave the hyper-profitability of basic shelter something every speculator, every investor, could count on, guaranteed by the Federal treasury.

Clinton proposes to stop the foreclosures. See above.

Obama's message of the moment is more hands-off. Help those who've been scammed, but nothing for the flippers, to the investor class go the spoils.

What all of these miss is that we'd a public cost increase no different from the private cost increases planned and executed by the executives of Enron, and the private cost increases planned and executed by the executives of Exxon, Mobile, and so on. The cost of local government has gone up, the amount of liability has increased, independent of income, particularly incomes not adjusted for cost of living increases, without a vote. Maintaining the hyper-inflation of valuation of shelter, fixer-uppers, entry-level, second property rentals, doesn't benefit first time house buyers or renters, and maintaining the hyper-inflated ad valorem tax doesn't benefit long-term mortgage payers and freeholders.

Our Republican friends are ever so quick to identify hidden taxes -- banning lead paint from use where children are present is a hidden tax on property owners who have to buy more expensive paint is one gem that comes to mind.

How about this one -- preventing foreclosures, bail-outs, interventions, etc., all maintaining the bubble, artificially elevate the cost of living, and in particular, artificially elevate the cost of government.

How about a policy other than a property tax stairway to heaven? With three of every five poor renters spending more than half of their income on housing, how about more public investment in shelter? How about a policy other than urban sprawl on the edge of the ever-expanding equity bubble, sucking up sewer, water, school, and fire district resources and driving up bonds as well as the ad valorem tax, like flu in a nursing home?

Build more ecologically sound housing or float more jumbo loans? Its a policy choice.

Tossed over the transom to the Nader 2008 Presidential Exploratory Committee, as there is no Democratic campaign left that offers an alternative to maintaining the status quo, and over the transom to the (currently) suspended John Edwards for President Campaign, who still have the shingle up: We're always looking for fresh ideas.

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

I came to blogging late, and simply did the technical backend of Wampum, and the Koufax Awards. The writers and the writings that Dwight and MaryBeth cared about, and cared for, were out of my ken. Eventually I started writing, and kept on writing, and added some links to Wampum's sidebar.

Blogrolls are a gift to the reader, what the writer reads, or they are a gift to other writers, recipricated intentionally, or accidentally, or not at all. They are statements of peers, of similarly situated writers. I wasn't pleased to see the ad networks "encourage" their properties to replace the pre-commercial blogrolls with recitations of their properties.

Doing the Koufax votes I became aware that the distribution of votes and referrers was highly correlated, which is what you'd expect if "go vote" appeared in a link, but that wasn't the correlation of interest. That was just the ordinary venality of self-promotion, and most of those who cared about the Koufaxes were vastly more gracious, or self-depricating, than venal.

What I observed was that ip addresses associated with votes for A-lister URLs in any category were statistically unlikely be associated with any other URLs in any other category, and absent from nominations except in clusters associated with their subsequent, also clustered first and final ballots. Addresses associated with votes for non-A-lister URLs in any categoty were statistically likely to be associated with other URLs in other categories as well as with nominations, and more uniformly distributed.

We were being increassingly presented with cohorts of ip addresses that associated with very few blogs, either in nominations or rounds of balloting. After removing the obvious intentional stuffed ballots, what remained was fairly disturbing. Readers of the A-list read, or value sufficiently to nominate and/or vote for, very little else.

We were aware of mailing lists that coordinated message, and mailing lists that coordinated promotion, and demotion, of writers and writings, of ad networks, and attempted to raise the ranking, and revenue, of their initiators.

Blogroll Amnesty Day externalized and formalized that seperation of "worth" from "non-worth". It removed the mask of civility.

While I'm at it, there is another change on the left hand side of the dial that sucks. In '06 cycle there were about a hundred progressive challengers to incumbents on Cynthia Pool's NovemberVictory mailing list. I was on that list since I ran a race in that cycle. It was wicked painful to watch them attempt to get some mindshare, because everything everywhere was all Ned Lamont. Marcos Moulitas, Jane Hampshire, John Arvosis, Jerome Armstrong, yatta yatta -- it was all Ned Lamont, all the time. The congressional candidates on NovemberVictory got nothing. Nothing.

I hadn't looked at the A-listers, the "new media" outlets (formerly blogs and bboards) operated by Marcos Moulitas, Jane Hampshire, John Arvosis, Jerome Armstrong, yatta yatta in so long I'd forgotten their page layouts or how they manage their free content. They're properties of the Obama and Clinton campaigns, and what passes for writing varies between cult enthusiasm and obsessive compulsive disorder.

There has to be a better alternative. Fortunately, there is.

Posted by EBW at 01:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

David Neiwert and Sara Robinson work. Their work is Orcinus, the only blog that Orcas regularly read, and then eat.

David and Sara are fundraising. We sent them $25, we hope others will too.

6.5k / 2 = 3.25k, 3.25k / 12 = 270, 270 / 30 = 9.

Nine dollars a day is what David and Sara gross from Orcinus. For writing about PNW shooters.

It is simply not enough.

Posted by EBW at 01:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This morning I clicked on this to listen to Bonior's postmortem -- I wanted to hear how Nevada came unglued after all the effort Edwards made over the past two-plus years for labor. It was the HERE half of UNITE HERE!, the hotel, restaurant and casino half, that refused to make an endorsement until after Iowa. The textile workers at UNITE wanted to endorse Edwards but the hospitality workers didn't.

The third segment of the show was Ralph Nader, who announced an exploratory the day John Edwards announced the suspension of his campaign.

I'm not ready to turn my face to the wall or do whatever it takes to become blissfully numb, and we've already been down the Gotta-Unite-Behind-the-Indian-in-High-Office road -- it has no peyote, no roadmen and no soul, and it's called Ben Nighthorse Campbell.

Al Gore is not running. Chris Dodd is not running. Dennis Kucinich is not running. John Edwards is not currently running.

Freedom is choice. Here's a link.

Posted by EBW at 07:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday, I wrote about former McCain nemesis Grover Norquist's capitulation to the Straight-Talk Express, clearly in exchange for McCain subverting the Senate Indian Affairs Committee investigation into Jack Abramoff, but I'd forgotten about the third Musketeer, Ralph Reed. Fortunately, at least one other blogger has McCain's SIAC misdeeds on her radar:

CNN's last debate before Super Tuesday gave overt preference to John McCain and Mitt Romney, while Ron Paul, and Mike Huckabee were given precious little time to speak.

This is the same CNN that has recently placed the former director of Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition, Ralph Reed behind a CNN news desk as a news analyst.

Such realizations were simultaneously odd and seemingly unrelated, until I looked closer at "Honest" John McCain, Candidate for President of the United States of America.

As chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, John McCain directed the Congressional investigation of the Indian gaming scandal which stole over $80 million from American Indian Tribes. The scandal led to the imprisonment of Lobbyist Jack Abramoff, Congressman Bob Ney (R-OH), and a number of other lobbyists and federal officials, yet some people criticized McCain for failing to call people like Ralph Reed (who were near the center of the scam) before the committee to testify.

As a result of this investigation, McCain refers to himself as an "agent of change," yet he limited the scope of the gaming investigation to lobbyists' improper gifts. Now if the lobbyists were guilty of giving improper gifts, trips and money, a natural follow-up question for McCain could have been, "who received those gifts?" Why were members of Congress (usually the recipients of such favors) not investigated? Why wasn't Ralph Reed brought before the McCain investigation? After all, wasn't he paid $4 million to shut down an Indian casino by Reed's friend and convicted felon, Jack Abramoff?

As I tried to answer my own questions, I found that McCains' reluctance to get to the bottom of the scandal is predictable, especially in light of how McCain has financed his political career.

Maybe Ralph Reed will raise such questions to McCain as a news analyst for "the most trusted name in news," CNN.

Why is Reed at CNN instead of in prison with Abramoff?

Posted by MB Williams at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The six of them had this schtick -- run something to save Bill Clinton's ass. Dance with Gore without ever getting to the sticking point of will-you-must-you-draft-you. A waste. A diversion from the declared progressive(s) in the race.

And today the six DLC (the next gen) endorsed the guy who thought that Donald Rumsfeld was mainstream, along with the vast majority of the Bush nominees. h/t Lambert @ Corrente

Posted by EBW at 02:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

And most likely, criminal.

First, a bit of a recap.

Back in 2004, despite NOT being the chairman of the committee, John McCain took control of the investigation on Senate Indian Affairs into Jack Abramoff's purchase of influence over Interior Department officials for his lobbying clients. In fact, McCain's announcement of opening the investigation sent then Chairman Ben Nighthorse Campbell into the emergency room with chest pains. See, Campbell knew Abramoff was key in a whole host of Republican scandals, and even scratching the surface was likely to send more than a few corrupt GOP partisans to jail. A few days after his heart-attack scare (turned out to be indigestion,) Campbell announced his retirement from the Senate. McCain, however, undaunted by his colleague's concerns, pressed ahead and subpeonaed nearly 20,000 emails and documents from Greenberg Traurig, Abramoff's lobbying firm. Abramoff, it turns out, was one of the Bush operatives behind the 2000 South Carolina smear campaign against McCain, and McCain has always been known to hold a grudge. It would take some mighty exceptional reparations to mitigate the sting of the 2000 campaign, and McCain soon found he held all the chips.

Less than two months after subpoenaing Abramoff's documents, and in the midst of George Bush's 2004 re-election campaign, McCain's chief adviser, John Weaver, met secretly with Karl Rove to "iron out their differences." McCain was apparently pleased enough with the negotiations to hit the campaign trail with Bush in June, a month after the Weaver-Rove meeting. At the same time, McCain began to quash the investigation into Abramoff in the Senate Indian Affairs committee. Within a few months, rumors abound that McCain was now Bush's chosen successor for 2008.

But even the title of heir apparent didn't completely wash away of the pain of 2000, especially when McCain realized that his long-time nemesis, Grover Norquist, was Abramoff's partner-in-crime. After the November election, McCain turned up the heat on Norquist, threatening him with subpoenas for documents and testimony before the Committee. Norquist just thumbed his nose at McCain, and in the end, must have held too many aces in his pocket, as McCain never called him before the committee, despite very damning evidence of criminal activity.

But it now appears the ever-defiant Norquist succumbed to extortion as well. This morning, I came across this tidbit buried in a NY Times piece on McCain:

Since his victory in the Florida primary, the growing possibility that Mr. McCain may carry the Republican banner in November is causing anguish to the right. Some, including James C. Dobson and Rush Limbaugh, say it is far too late for forgiveness.

But others, faced with the prospect of either a Democrat sitting in the White House or a Republican elected without them, are beginning to look at Mr. McCain's record in a new light.

"He has moved in the right direction strongly and forcefully on taxes," said Grover Norquist, an antitax organizer who had been the informal leader of conservatives against a McCain nomination, adding that he had been talking to Mr. McCain's "tax guys" for more than a year.

The conversion is complete. John McCain subverted justice to gain the crown. Long live the king.

(NB: Here is the longer version I wrote back in 2006, when I first discovered the Weaver-Rove meeting, incorporated into the larger issue of the Indian Trust scandal.)

Posted by MB Williams at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Eric can attest to my ranting and raving over how ineffective Bush's "subprime refinancing" plan would be when he unveiled it last fall. Of course I was right:

Feb. 1 (Bloomberg) -- President George W. Bush's proposal to help 1 million subprime borrowers avoid foreclosure with tax- exempt bonds has an obstacle: states don't want the risk any more than private lenders do.

The state housing agencies that are already offering mortgage refinancing options are turning away so many applicants that they've had no need to raise funds. Since New York said it would commit $100 million in July, three of the 500 loans envisioned have been made. Massachusetts extended four loans under a $250 million program started in August, and Ohio made just 36 of the thousands anticipated by Governor Ted Strickland.

The reluctance to lend threatens to undermine a pivotal part of the president's plan for alleviating the worst housing slump in 26 years. More than 50 percent of subprime borrowers are being rejected by state programs because their homes have lost too much value or they've accumulated excessive debt, estimates Geoffrey Cooper, emerging markets director at a unit of MGIC Investment Co., the country's biggest mortgage insurer.

"These things are basically public relations gimmicks,'" said Bruce Marks, chief executive officer of Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America. The Boston-based nonprofit organization negotiated an agreement with Countrywide Financial Corp., the biggest U.S. home lender, in October to modify rates and terms on $16 billion of subprime mortgages to prevent foreclosures.

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