Montessori Seniors Class 2010

2010-02-09T05:55:00.000-08:00

Top Defense Officials Seek to End ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
WASHINGTON — The nation’s top two defense officials called Tuesday for an end to the 16-year-old “don’t ask, don’t tell” law, a major step toward allowing openly gay men and women to serve in the United States military for the first time.

“No matter how I look at the issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens,” Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

As a murmur swept through a hearing room packed with gay rights leaders, Admiral Mullen said it was his personal belief that “allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do.”

He is the first sitting chairman of the Joint Chiefs to support a repeal of the policy, and his forceful expression of his views seemed to catch not only gay rights leaders but also Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is the committee’s chairman, by surprise.

Mr. Levin, who has long supported ending the law, told Admiral Mullen that his testimony was “eloquent” and praised him for leading on the issue.

In 1993, Gen. Colin L. Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the time, opposed allowing gay men and lesbians to serve openly but supported a compromise, which was the “don’t ask, don’t tell” bill passed by Congress. Under the policy, gay men and lesbians may serve as long as they keep their sexual orientation secret.

In contrast to Admiral Mullen, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates was more cautious, even as he acknowledged that the question was not whether the law would be repealed but how the Pentagon might best prepare for the change.

Early in his testimony, Mr. Gates made clear that he was acting at the behest of President Obama, who reaffirmed his opposition to the existing law in his State of the Union address last week. Mr. Gates then threw the final decision back to the legislative branch.

“We have received our orders from the commander in chief, and we are moving out accordingly,” Mr. Gates told the committee. “However, we can also take this process only so far, as the ultimate decision rests with you, the Congress.”

Any change in the policy would not come any time soon, the two officials made clear. Both Admiral Mullen and Mr. Gates told the committee that there would be a Pentagon review, taking up to a year, to study how to implement any change before they expected Congress to act on a repeal.

Passage of repeal is far from assured, judging from the negative reaction from some Republicans on the committee, most notably Senator John McCain of Arizona, who pronounced himself “deeply disappointed” in Mr. Gates.

Mr. McCain said Mr. Gates’s testimony was “clearly biased” because of his not-if-but-when comments. He added that while the law was not perfect, its repeal was too much to ask of a military that is already under stress fighting two wars.

Gay rights leaders pointed soon afterward to comments Mr. McCain made in 2006 on “Hardball” on MSNBC about his willingness to change the policy if Pentagon leaders called for repeal. “The day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, ‘Senator, we ought to change the policy,’ then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it,’ ” he said then.

To explain the apparent discrepancy, Brooke Buchanan, a spokeswoman for Mr. McCain, said that the senator thought Admiral Mullen was speaking personally, not on behalf of the Joint Chiefs, and that once a Pentagon review was complete, Mr. McCain would listen to military leaders as a whole.

To lead the review, Mr. Gates appointed a civilian and a military officer: Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon’s top legal counsel, and Gen. Carter F. Ham, the commander of the United States Army in Europe.

In the interim, Mr. Gates announced that the military was moving toward enforcing the existing policy “in a fairer manner” — a reference to the possibility that the Pentagon would no longer take action to discharge service members whose sexual orientation is revealed by third parties or jilted partners, one of the most onerous aspects of the law.

Mr. Gates said that he had asked the Pentagon to make a recommendation on the matter within 45 days, but that “we believe that we have a degree of latitude within the existing law to change our internal procedures in a manner that is more appropriate and fair to our men and women in uniform.”

Mr. Levin said he was considering introducing an amendment to this year’s defense authorization bill that would call for a moratorium on discharges under the existing law.
Mr. Gates said the review would examine changes that might have to be made to Pentagon policies on benefits, base housing, fraternization and misconduct, and would also study the potential effect on unit cohesion, recruiting and retention.

For further information, Mr. Gates said he would ask the RAND Corporation to update a 1993 study on the effects of allowing openly gay men and lesbians to serve. That study concluded they could do so if the policy was given strong support from the military’s senior leaders.

On one thing, Mr. Gates, Admiral Mullen and Republicans on the committee agreed: many gay men and lesbians are serving honorably and effectively in the military today, despite a policy that has led to more than 13,000 discharges, including those of much-needed Arabic translators.
“I have served with homosexuals since 1968,” Admiral Mullen told the committee. He added, “Everybody in the military has, and we understand that.”

Gay rights groups embraced the comments from Admiral Mullen and Mr. Gates, even as they criticized the Pentagon review as moving too slowly.

Polls now show that a majority of Americans support openly gay service — a majority did not in 1993 — but there have been no recent, broad surveys of the 1.4 million active-duty personnel.
General Ham, an Iraq veteran, is unusual among top military officers for speaking out about his struggles with post-traumatic stress after witnessing the devastation when a suicide bomber blew up a mess tent on an American base near Mosul, killing 22 people, including 14 United States service members. Mr. Johnson, a former assistant United States attorney, previously worked for the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.

After reading the text of the law, do you believe that this law should be repealed? Why or why not?

The presence in the armed forces of persons who demonstrate a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts would create an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion that are the essence of military capability. […]

A member of the armed forces shall be separated from the armed forces under regulations prescribed by the Secretary of Defense if one or more of the following findings is made and approved in accordance with procedures set forth in such regulations:

(1) That the member has engaged in, attempted to engage in, or solicited another to engage in a homosexual act or acts. […]

(2) That the member has stated that he or she is a homosexual or bisexual, or words to that effect. […]

(3) That the member has married or attempted to marry a person known to be of the same biological sex.

Second post of new year.

2010-02-02T05:53:00.000-08:00

What should Obama's New Year's Resolution be?

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2010/02/01/business/1247466823688/obama-on-the-budget.html

Interactive Budget

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/01/us/budget.html?ref=politics

Chris Asks Question

2010-01-25T09:23:00.000-08:00

class poll

2010-01-21T09:48:00.000-08:00

Build television sms voting polls at Poll Everywhere

Gay Marriage

2010-01-12T06:18:00.000-08:00

Does a state have a right to exclude a group of individuals from state functions based on race, gender, religion, nationality, or seuxal orentation?

Article here

14th Amendment - All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Heroin Hero

2010-01-11T09:07:00.000-08:00

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg defends pamphlet for heroin users
By Trish LaMonte
January 06, 2010, 9:20AM

New York City's "10 Tips for Safer Use" pamphlet on heroin.New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is defending a decision by the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to print a pamphlet for heroin users, which offers information on how to prepare drugs carefully and how to care for veins to avoid infection.

"I would certainly not recommend to anyone that they use hard drugs or soft drugs," Bloomberg said on Monday. "But our health department does have an interest in if you're going to do certain things to get you to do it as healthily as you possibly can."

Tips in the booklet include: "Drop the cotton directly into the cooker. Don't touch it!" and "Warm your body (jump up and down) to show your veins."

John Gilbride, New York's top official with the Drug Enforcement Administration, calls the brochure a 'step-by-step instruction on how to inject a poison.'

The 17-page pamphlet also offers information on HIV testing and the dangers of sharing needles. It has been in circulation since June 2007, but the city has faced increasing pressure over the past few days to withdraw the publication.“You’re spending taxpayer money and getting a how-to guide for first-time users,” said City Councilman Peter F. Vallone Jr., a Democrat from Queens. Vallone said he plans to meet with the city's health commissioner this week to encourage him to withdraw the pamphlet.

WCBS: See the heroin pamphlet (PDF)
NY Times: Public officials attack New York's heroin pamphlet
NY Post: NYC narcotics prosecutor blasts 'heroin how-to' pamphlet
CNN: NYC heroin pamphlet - is it a help or a how-to guide?

2010-01-07T09:09:00.000-08:00

Thomas Friedman Identified the suicide bombers father as a hero do you agree with his opinion?

Article here

Why do you thin there are so many negative responses to Thomas Friedman's article?

Read them here (http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/opinion/06friedman.html)

Security vs. Liberty

2010-01-05T06:11:00.000-08:00

By listing 14 countries that the US will increase airline security from how will that change flying?

Is making a list of suspect countries profiling?

Are we at war with these countries?

Should US citizens be guaranteed the highest level of security on every flight? How are we willing to pay for this?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/us/05tsa.html?hpw

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/world/europe/31terror.html?_r=1&ref=us

Uganda and our money!

2010-01-04T12:28:00.000-08:00

Article :

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/world/africa/04uganda.html?em

After reading this article and listening during class think about the following questions?

Should the US continue to give foreign aid to a country that violates human rights?

Should the US accept money from a foreign country that violates human rights?

What action should the US take in regards to Uganda?

Filibuster

2009-12-21T12:14:00.001-08:00

After watching the following videos and reading the article from class, why are the Democrats passing bills in the wee hours of the morning?

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/12/21/health.care.senate.vote/index.html

Coppenhagen Confrontations

2009-12-17T11:42:00.001-08:00

Why are young people being arrested by the hundreds in the city of Copenhagen?

How are the movie "The 11th Hour" and this artcle from class related?

2009-12-15T10:15:00.001-08:00

Do students have a right to a free and public educaton?

How might NYC schools change if bussing is no longer supplied by the MTA for free?

Medical USE or an excuse for ABUSE?

2009-12-11T05:40:00.001-08:00

Should states retain the right to decide the use of illeagal drugs for medical purposes?

ECONOMICS BOOK

2009-10-26T11:04:00.001-07:00

"People cannot eat machinery or factory buildings. That is why poor countries should concentrate on agriculture and leave manufacturing to the industrialized nations."

EXPLAIN WHY YOU AGREE OR DISAGREE.

2009-10-26T11:02:00.001-07:00

What the president cannot do...

2009-09-22T05:54:00.000-07:00

CBS report

Watch CBS Videos Online

IN CLASS ARTICLE "Healthcare a Right or a Privilege?"

World Journalism Prep teacher suggests this article from the Heritage Foundation.

The Blitz

2009-09-21T05:52:00.000-07:00

Why is the president flooding Sunday morning with his message?

Click Here

Racisim or Distraction?

2009-09-17T07:08:00.000-07:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

White House Response

Maureen Dowd's Opinion Piece

How should the office of the president respond to Maureen Dowd and former president Jimmy Carter?

In your opinion does this arguement have any validity?

Will this derail the healthcare reform bill?

Healthcare Speech

2009-09-14T12:55:00.000-07:00

Re-watch the president's speech on healthcare. What are his goals? Ask a registered voter what they think of the president's plan.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/09/10/us/politics/20090910-obama-health.html#

click here

9/11

2009-09-13T11:31:00.000-07:00

After reading Illness Persisting in 9/11 Workers, Big Study Finds write a brief reflection. How has money played a role in the care of 9/11 cleanup victims? Who is at fault for the illness? What changes in finance need to be made to correct the problem? Is health care a federal, city or individual responsibility? If you would like to read a follow up article just published on the Times website before you write click here.

Who should pay for the healthcare of 9/11 workers?

Who is responsible for this issue?

Does the US government have a responsibility to care for the sick?

Do people have a right to healthcare?

Senior Class 2010

2009-09-10T05:51:00.001-07:00

Your first assignment:

After reading the article Bringing School to the Information Age (hyperlinked here) browse through the previous postings and comments on this blog.

Is this format and classroom structure suitable to your learning style?

What benefits can this format present to a classroom?

What drawbacks do you foresee?

What Color is that Baby?

2009-05-12T07:03:00.000-07:00

How does race play a role in the news we see and read?

FCC this

2009-05-10T07:04:00.000-07:00

Is the governement responsible for the television programs being braodcast into your home?

Whose job is it to monitor children in front of the tv?

Should we Save the GOP?

2009-05-08T07:06:00.000-07:00

What does George Washington say about our party system?

What role does a political party play?

Can we survive without the Republican Party?

How might the Democratic Party react to the destruction of the Republican Party?

Honk if you "Choose Life" !

2009-05-01T05:10:00.001-07:00

Should states be allowed to bar certain politically charged statements on license plates?

Who owns license plates? (keep in mind in NYS you must return them)

Is this a 1st Amendment issue?

How have the lower courts ruled?

Is Adam Liptak showing his bias in this article?

What further questions do you have for the author?

Article

Obama's First 100

2009-04-30T03:18:00.001-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/04/29/us/politics/200900429_OBAMA_100DAY.html#

Why has the name of the super flu changed?

Listen again to the first 6 mins of his speech, what has the government done to protect us further from this outbreak?

Listen again to the first and second question he is asked, is the media giving too much attention to St. Francis Prep's swine flu?

Profiting from the FLU? SWINE or AVIAN

2009-04-27T10:13:00.001-07:00

OBAMA+ LUGAR 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/06/opinion/06obama.html?pagewanted=print

INVESTING IN BIOTECH 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/07/us/politics/07obama.html?pagewanted=print

SWINE FLU 2009

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/health/policy/28health.html?ref=health

(note the section of the Times the above article appears on)

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/swine-flu-a-cause-for-panic/?hp

Is there cause for concern according to these three articles?

Should we be concerned about policy makers investing in private companies?

How are policy makers using fear?

What seems to be the link between Obama and the Flu?

How can a "Swine Flu" in Queens become a billion dollar money maker for investors?

What is something you heard in class today that you would like to know more about?

(eg. blind trusts, the 1976 Ford Inoculation Blunder, the Great Influenza of 1918, telecommunications nationalization agenda or anything?)

NEW AUDIO FILE

Friday- Deinstitutionalization

2009-04-24T07:50:00.001-07:00

http://www.helium.com/items/837637-assessing-the-affects-of-the-deinstitutionalization-movement

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=527&invol=581#section1

The number of beds for mentally ill patients since 1950 has dropped considerably, why has this happened?

What is the importance of the Olmstead decision?

What role might the Olmstead decison have played in the artcile Apeksha brought to our attention on Monday?

Mom on Fire!

2009-04-22T05:21:00.001-07:00

Questions we can ask the class would be :

1. Do you think it's necessary that there should be background checks at a shooting range?
2. Should they be using real bullets ?
3. Should there be better security at the shooting range ?
4. Do you think the women herself should have special care and maybe have documented papers with her saying she had an attempted suicide..or mental case?
5. Was it okay for the son to even consider going to the shooting range with his mom due to prior events ?

Article http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6062648.ece

Iowa Bans the Ban

2009-04-07T05:35:00.001-07:00

What does the phrase "equal protection under the law" mean? Will this impact other states to reverse decisions?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/04/us/04iowa.html?scp=3&sq=supreme%20court&st=cse

PROM

2009-04-03T06:52:00.001-07:00

Should schools be held respoonsible for events at after prom or pre prom parties?

Are school giving tacit consent to illeagal activity?

Full story

BAILOUT THE AUTO INDUSTRY

2009-04-01T06:55:00.000-07:00

Obama's Bail out plan

What stepts is Obama taking to help the US auto industry?

What are our options?

OBAMA'S Secret Letter.

2009-03-03T07:22:00.000-08:00

Is president Obama compromising our safety by offering to withdraw missles?

Should letters like these be made public?

How might the Iranian press use a story like this to their advantage?

Article

Obama's Priority Speech

2009-02-26T08:35:00.000-08:00

Speech and Transcript

Do you agree with the president's priorities?

What will change in the next two months?

How will this plan effect you directly?

Cartoon

2009-02-25T05:49:00.000-08:00

Chimpanzee Stimulus Article and cartoon.

Should the media be censored?

Does this cartoon serve its purpose?

If you were editor of a newspaper would you allow this to be printed?

How might the cartoon violate the First Amendment?

AMERICAN DREAM

2009-02-12T10:02:00.000-08:00

ARTICLE

How has the relationship between workers and management changed since this movie?

Give examples.

GREAT HORMEL VIDEO

FEBRUARY!!

2009-02-05T05:03:00.000-08:00

Obama's OP-ED

Should sitting presidents write OP-ED pieces for newspapers?

How do presidents in ther first 100 days in office use thier popularity to push an agenda?

How did FDR use his popularity?

What about JFK?

"All this will not be finished in the first 100 days. Nor will it be finished in the first 1,000 days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin."

- JFK Innaugarational Address.

Ethics Questions.

2009-02-04T05:40:00.000-08:00

What problem does a president who sets the bar high for ethics have?

Why not higher lobbyists?

What about smart lobbyists?

Article

A Team of Whizzes

2008-12-02T08:46:00.000-08:00

By BOB HERBERT

Barack Obama appears to have put together an extraordinarily competent team to cope with the crises abroad and at home — and to begin cleaning up the mess of the past eight years.
So why do I have this uneasy feeling?

Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, Eric Holder, Rahm Emanuel, Larry Summers ...
Competence is clearly trumping ideology in the next administration, and lord knows after two terms of Bush & Co. it’s time to get back to the idea of smart, capable people advising the president and executing his policies.

What I wonder is whether the members of this team, in addition to their grasp of the issues and success at achieving power, have a real feel for the needs of the people they are supposed to be representing.

I don’t doubt that they have the best of intentions. But the people at the pinnacle of power in Washington are encased in a bubble that makes it extremely hard to hear the voices of those who aren’t already powerful themselves.

On Monday, the president-elect introduced a national security team that will face a nightmarish array of challenges: the promised drawdown in Iraq; a worsening situation in Afghanistan; the crisis unfolding in India and Pakistan; and so on.

But it also has a responsibility to look out for the members of the military who are exhausted from years of valiant service. Many have served three and four (or more) tours in combat, and many thousands have been wounded in mind and body and are having a difficult time putting their lives back together.

So a challenge as important as the challenges in Iraq and Afghanistan is to send the message — and make it stick — that more Americans need to share in the sacrifices required to keep the nation and its interests secure.

President-elect Obama campaigned on the mantra of change. For years the federal government catered increasingly to the interests of the wealthy and the powerful. This reached a destructive crescendo when the ideologues and incompetents of the Bush administration came to power.
That is what needs to change.

Will this new Obama team, as brilliant as it appears to be, begin addressing on day one the interests of those who are not rich and who have not had the ear of those in power?

I think about the cops and firefighters and factory workers and schoolteachers and hospital aides and bank tellers and truck drivers who are having trouble making ends meet, hanging onto their homes, sending their children to college.

Will this new administration really be looking out for them?

One of the reasons the economy is so deeply in the tank is that ordinary Americans have not received a fair share of the economic advances of the past several years. You don’t hear much about this. Americans have been working harder and harder, and more and more efficiently (we are now the hardest working people on the planet, having passed the Japanese in this category), but ordinary workers have not been paid for this enhanced productivity.

As my colleague at The Times, Steven Greenhouse, pointed out in his book “The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker,” published earlier this year:

“Even though corporate profits have doubled since recession gave way to economic expansion in November 2001, and even though employee productivity has risen more than 15 percent since then, the average wage for the typical American worker has inched up just 1 percent (after inflation).”

That was part of a pattern of gross unfairness that has been unfolding for some three decades. No wonder people have depleted their savings and maxed out their credit cards.

The crisis now, of course, is not that wages are stagnant but that the jobs themselves are disappearing. It’s not just change that the nation needs, but big change.

President-elect Obama has talked of a “new dawn of American leadership.” Three-quarters of a century ago, Franklin Roosevelt promised a New Deal and said his biggest task was “to put people to work.”

That’s as appropriate a cue as any for the next president. I hope Mr. Obama’s “new dawn” portends more than just a few nibbles around the edges of change. We need change that brings about more shared sacrifice in wartime and tough times, and a more equitable distribution of the nation’s resources all the time.

I want to know who in the Obama administration will be listening to the young girl on the South Side of Chicago whose future is constrained by a lousy public school, and the factory worker in Toledo whose family’s future has been trampled by unrestrained corporate greed and unfair trade policies.

All the evidence is that the next administration will be competent and smart as hell. Now I’d like to know for whom they plan to deliver.

How is the new administration going to listen to the people's concerns?
How might surrounding himself with Washington's Elite backfire?
Is the average person going to be represented in government? Do we want the average person represented?
Are the American people smart enough to truely govern themselves?

Bans in 3 States on Gay Marriage

2008-11-07T09:38:00.000-08:00

By JESSE McKINLEY and LAURIE GOODSTEIN

SAN FRANCISCO — A giant rainbow-colored flag in the gay-friendly Castro neighborhood of San Francisco was flying at half-staff on Wednesday as social and religious conservatives celebrated the passage of measures that ban same-sex marriage in California, Florida and Arizona.

In California, where same-sex marriage had been performed since June, the ban had more than 52 percent of the vote, according to figures by the secretary of state, and was projected to win by several Californian news media outlets. Opponents of same-sex marriage won by even bigger margins in Arizona and Florida. Just two years ago, Arizona rejected a similar ban.

The across-the-board sweep, coupled with passage of a measure in Arkansas intended to bar gay men and lesbians from adopting children, was a stunning victory for religious conservatives, who had little else to celebrate on an Election Day that saw Senator John McCain lose and other ballot measures, like efforts to restrict abortion in South Dakota, California and Colorado, rejected.

“It was a great victory,” said the Rev. James Garlow, senior pastor of Skyline Church in San Diego County and a leader of the campaign to pass the California measure, Proposition 8. “We saw the people just rise up.”

The losses devastated supporters of same-sex marriage and ignited a debate about whether the movement to expand the rights of same-sex couples had hit a cultural brick wall, even at a time of another civil rights success, the election of a black president.

Thirty states have now passed bans on same-sex marriage.

Entire Article

How McCain, Obama would do as commander in chief

2008-10-30T09:03:00.000-07:00

Washington

What kind of commander in chief would Sen. John McCain or Sen. Barack Obama be?

National security issues loom large for the next president: He will have to manage the drawdown of thousands of American troops in Iraq, oversee the deployment of thousands more in an increasingly violent Afghanistan, and assess whether to grow the military to cope with the war on terrorism.

On these issues, the advantage might seem to be all on the side of Senator McCain, a war veteran.

But former defense officials, as well as active-duty and retired officers, say that the military – whose rank and file are perceived to vote Republican – sees positives and negatives in both candidates.

McCain’s big advantages are his experience and his familiarity with the military, but Senator Obama’s may be a greater willingness to listen to Pentagon advice.

That could be important because the past eight years under the Bush administration, especially the decision to invade Iraq, has left some Pentagon officers feeling ignored.

“Senior military officers have carried out orders they didn’t agree with all their professional lives,” says Dennis Blair, who retired as a four-star admiral in 2002 and who served in senior defense jobs during two administration transitions. “All they want is for their best military advice to be considered, and then they will salute and execute their orders. It’s pretty easy for an incoming administration if they are smart enough, to give them a chance.”

McCain’s strengths in the national security realm could be a weakness if he comes at the Pentagon with too many preconceptions, say former defense officials. The Pentagon may also be an ideal place for him to display his “maverick” approach.

“He is a reformer, and he will try to make sure there is a minimum of bureaucracy and a maximum of efficiency,” says Rep. Duncan Hunter (R) of California.Obama, perceived as a “listener,” is considered a national security neophyte who will need to make forceful decisions based on the advice he receives to establish his credentials within the Pentagon.

[Entire Article]

Funny?

2008-10-29T10:16:00.000-07:00

Doubting Democracy

2008-10-28T05:48:00.000-07:00

After reading [article] what claims does the author make about our current political system?

Are you concerned about voter fraud?

Are you concerned about voter suppression?

What can we do to prevent such a dilema?

Mayor’s Tactics Are Alienating Some Big Allies

2008-10-23T05:13:00.000-07:00

By MICHAEL BARBARO

In his aggressive pursuit of a third term, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has begun to alienate some of his fiercest supporters, who say that his hardball tactics are undercutting his well-earned legacy as a reformer and an anti-politician.

In dozens of interviews, former aides to the mayor, elected officials, good-government advocates and voters said they have become deeply disillusioned by the way Mr. Bloomberg is corralling support to rewrite the city’s term limits law, which New Yorkers have endorsed twice in citywide referendums.

Over the last three weeks, the mayor and his aides have silenced a potential critic of his third-term bid with the promise of a plum position on a government committee, pressed groups that rely on his donations to speak on his behalf and cajoled union leaders to appear on camera endorsing his agenda.

Those tactics are expected to deliver a victory on Thursday when the City Council votes on whether to allow Mr. Bloomberg to seek a third term. But many of those interviewed say the horse-trading and arm-twisting he has used in pursuing that term are at odds with his claim to being above the fray of rough-and-tumble politics.

“This is the first move that really pushes the boundary of what he can get away with,” said David Garth, a top political strategist in Mr. Bloomberg’s 2001 campaign for mayor. “This is not a good-government move, and Mike knows it.”

Another Bloomberg admirer, Councilwoman Gale A. Brewer, who has sided with the mayor on important issues like raising property taxes and his bid to impose a congestion pricing fee, said she and her Upper West Side constituents “love the mayor, but are against this process.”

Mr. Bloomberg, who once called an attempt to ease term limits “disgraceful,” is pushing legislation that would allow him, council members and most other elected city officials to serve three consecutive four-year terms rather than two. Allies say he has enough support to pass it on Thursday.

If he does prevail, the victory may carry a cost to his reputation.

The disenchantment with Mr. Bloomberg runs especially deep among his former aides and advisers at City Hall. In interviews, five of them said they had been surprised and unsettled by the mayor’s tactics. “It stinks of clubhouse politics,” said one former aide. “It’s not like him.”

Another said that when former Bloomberg staff members meet for drinks these days, and the topic turns to his third-term bid, “people roll their eyes and say they are glad to not be there anymore.”

The aides said that they had adopted Mr. Bloomberg’s vision and enlisted in his administration because they believed he was a transformational figure in New York politics.

Richard D. Emery, a civil rights and election lawyer who in the late 1980s helped dismantle the city’s Board of Estimate, which controlled much of the city’s spending, has strongly supported Mr. Bloomberg, describing him as a “terrific politician because he is not a politician.”

“Up until now, he has been a paradigm of what a municipal mayor should be,” Mr. Emery said, but watching Mr. Bloomberg’s heavy-handed approach to remaining in office has left him disaffected, he added.

“He is becoming a typical hack, playing the same old games,” he said. “It’s tragic and it’s sad.”

Friends who originally urged Mr. Bloomberg to seek a third term said he has been taken aback by the depth of the opposition, which has prompted him to engage in a bruising political style he is not entirely comfortable with.

“It has required slightly sharper elbows than anyone would have liked,” said one friend, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “This is not how he prefers to do business. He is not particularly happy with the situation.”

Mr. Bloomberg seems outwardly unperturbed by the criticism, casting his decision to seek a third term as an honorable act of public service. “There is nothing better than to try to make a difference, and if the public wants me, I would be honored to do it for four more years,” he said.

Asked if his aggressive campaign could injure his reputation, he said friends regularly told him that “if you walk away now, you can walk away with a stellar reputation as the world’s greatest mayor.”

“Even if it were true,” he said, “how can you walk away from something when you know there’s going to be tough times? The challenge is to do it now.”

Those frustrated by Mr. Bloomberg’s conduct acknowledge that he is well-equipped to manage New York City in a financial crisis, but they are dismayed by his decision to bypass voters, who remain in favor of the current term limits, according to polls.

In a torrent of e-mail messages and phone calls to members of the Council, voters have voiced their objections. Of the 600 messages sent to Ms. Brewer, for example, 75 percent oppose Mr. Bloomberg’s proposal, she said, even as they praise Mr. Bloomberg for his record on education, crime and city services.

“Power corrupts and as we are seeing now, he is not immune to this common human trait,” said one e-mail message, which added, “I do believe that Michael Bloomberg has done a good job.”

“He’s making a mockery of the system,” said another constituent, who noted that “he has been a relatively good administrator for the city.”

Aides to the mayor said the concept of a Bloomberg third term was supported by a large but silent group of New Yorkers who are not motivated to write their council members.

Jason Post, a spokesman for the mayor, said, “Remaining popular was not on his mind” when he decided to seek a third a term, “nor was it when he made decisions like supporting congestion pricing or the smoking ban.”

Mr. Bloomberg has been harshly criticized for striking a deal with Ronald S. Lauder, the billionaire cosmetics heir whose well-financed campaign helped create term limits in 1993. Fearing that Mr. Lauder would oppose him, Mr. Bloomberg promised to appoint him to a charter revision commission that could restore the two-term limit in 2010 and put the issue up for a voter referendum.

David Yassky, a council member from Brooklyn and a close ally of the mayor, said his constituents “very much don’t like the way he is going about changing term limits, and they especially don’t like the feeling that this is a deal among a narrow group of people. That sentiment is near universal.”

Mr. Yassky said 85 percent of the roughly 800 constituents he has heard from object to the mayor’s plan, even though they hold the mayor in high regard and dislike term limits. Like Ms. Brewer, Mr. Yassky has called for a referendum, rather than legislation, to decide whether to change term limits.

Many who are unhappy with the term limits campaign complain that Mr. Bloomberg and the City Council have only held two public hearings about the legislation and are quickly scheduling a vote on the bill in the midst of an intense presidential campaign and an economic crisis.

At those hearings, Mr. Bloomberg’s aides and allies asked groups that have received hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of his private donations to testify on his behalf, and allowed supporters to fill seats with people who did not plan to testify.

The mayor’s office said opponents employed similar tactics during the contentious hearings.

Mr. Bloomberg appeared to antagonize his critics over the last few days by saying he did not listen to any of the testimony and by describing many of the speakers at the hearings as “people who emote.” A majority opposed Mr. Bloomberg’s legislation.

Mr. Garth, the political consultant who worked for Mr. Bloomberg, said New Yorkers were discovering that a mayor they revere as the consummate political outsider is capable of disappointing them. “A part of Mike was always too good to be true. The guy makes very few mistakes for a mayor of a city like this. He has been unbelievably successful.”

Still, “there is an arrogance about the mayor, and people resent that.”

Do these type of settings change public opinion?

2008-10-17T05:58:00.000-07:00

DEBATE 1

2008-10-02T15:03:00.000-07:00

What questions were being asked of the candidates?

What is something you learned from this debate about each candidate?

Will the debates change your opinion of the candidates?

CLICK HERE FOR THE NYTIMES INTERACTIVE DEBATE

Bush and Candidates to Meet on Bailout

2008-09-25T06:00:00.000-07:00

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

WASHINGTON — President Bush appealed to the nation Wednesday night to support a $700 billion plan to avert a widespread financial meltdown, and signaled that he is willing to accept tougher controls over how the money is spent.

As Democrats and the administration negotiated details of the package late into the night, the presidential candidates of both major parties planned to meet Mr. Bush at the White House on Thursday, along with leaders of Congress. The president said he hoped the session would “speed our discussions toward a bipartisan bill.”

Mr. Bush used a prime-time address to warn Americans that “a long and painful recession” could occur if Congress does not act quickly.

“Our entire economy is in danger,” he said.

On Capitol Hill, Democrats said that progress toward a deal had come after the White House had offered two major concessions: a plan to limit pay of executives whose firms seek government assistance, and a provision that would give taxpayers an equity stake in some of the firms so that the government can profit if the companies prosper in the future. Details of those provisions, and many others, were still under discussion.

Mr. Bush’s televised address, and his extraordinary offer to bring together Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, and Senator John McCain, the Republican, just weeks before the election underscored a growing sense of urgency on the part of the administration that Congress must act to avert an economic collapse.

It was the first time in Mr. Bush’s presidency that he delivered a prime-time speech devoted exclusively to the economy. It came at a time when deep public unease about shaky financial markets and the demise of Wall Street icons such as Lehman Brothers has been coupled with skepticism and anger directed at a government bailout that could become the most expensive in American history.

The administration’s plan seeks to restore liquidity to the market and restore the economy by buying up distressed securities, many of them tied to mortgages, from struggling financial firms.
The address capped a fast-moving and chaotic day, in Washington, on the presidential campaign trail and on Wall Street.

On Capitol Hill, delicate negotiations between Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and Congressional leaders were complicated by resistance from rank-and-file lawmakers, who were fielding torrents of complaints from constituents furious that their tax money was going to be spent to clean up a mess created by high-paid financial executives.

On Wall Street, financial markets continued to struggle. The cost of borrowing for banks, businesses and consumers shot up and investors rushed to safe havens like Treasury bills — a reminder that credit markets, which had recovered somewhat after Mr. Paulson announced the broad outlines of the bailout plan last week, remain under severe stress, with many investors still skittish.

Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and chairman of the banking committee, said a deal could come together as early as Thursday. “Working in a bipartisan manner, we have made progress,” the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and Representative John A. Boehner, the Republican leader, said in a joint statement.

“We agree that key changes should be made to the administration’s proposal. It must include basic good-government principles, including rigorous and independent oversight, strong executive compensation standards and protections for taxpayers.”

Mr. Bush used his speech to signal that he was willing to address lawmakers’ concerns, including fears that tax dollars will be used to pay Wall Street executives and that the plan would put too much authority in the hands of the Treasury secretary without sufficient oversight.

“Any rescue plan should also be designed to ensure that taxpayers are protected,” Mr. Bush said. “It should welcome the participation of financial institutions, large and small. It should make certain that failed executives do not receive a windfall from your tax dollars. It should establish a bipartisan board to oversee the plan’s implementation. And it should be enacted as soon as possible.”

The speech came after the White House, under pressure from Republican lawmakers, opened an aggressive effort to portray the financial rescue package as crucial not just to stabilize Wall Street but to protect the livelihoods of all Americans.

But the White House gave careful thought to the timing; aides to Mr. Bush said they did not want to appear to have the president forcing a solution on Congress.

On Capitol Hill, Mr. Paulson, facing a second day of questioning by lawmakers, this time before the House Financial Services Committee, tried to focus as much on Main Street as Wall Street.
“This entire proposal is about benefiting the American people because today’s fragile financial system puts their economic well being at risk,” Mr. Paulson said. Without action, he added: “Americans’ personal savings and the ability of consumers and business to finance spending, investment and job creation are threatened.”

But it was the comments of Mr. Paulson, a former chief of Goldman Sachs, about limiting the pay of executives that signaled the biggest shift in the White House position and the urgency that the administration has placed in winning Congressional approval as quickly as possible.

“The American people are angry about executive compensation, and rightly so,” he said. “No one understands pay for failure.”

Officials said the legislation would almost certainly include a ban on so-called golden parachutes, the generous severance packages that many executives receive on their way out the door, for firms that seek government help. The measure also is likely to include a mechanism for firms to recover any bonus or incentive pay based on corporate earnings or other results that later turn out to have been overstated.

Democrats were also working to include tax provisions that would cap the amount of an executive’s salary that a company could deduct to $400,000 — the amount earned by the president.

At the same time, Congressional Democrats said they were prepared to drop one of their most contentious demands: new authority for bankruptcy judges to modify the terms of first mortgages. That provision was heavily opposed by Senate Republicans.

In addition, Democrats also are leaning toward authorizing the entire $700 billion that Mr. Paulson is seeking but disbursing a smaller amount, perhaps only $150 billion, to start the program, with future funds dependent on how well it is working.

Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the lead negotiator for Congressional Democrats, said they also planned to insert a tax break to aid community banks that have suffered steep losses on preferred stock that they own in the mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

That change is in addition to others that already have been accepted by Mr. Paulson that would create an independent oversight board and require the government to do more to prevent foreclosures.

IN CLASS DISSCUSSION:
-Should Obama and McCain cancel the scheduled debate?
-Why might/might not the candidates meet with President Bush?

-Should executives at companies have salaries lowered after they are bailed out by the government?

-Alex D- It doesn’t make sense to bail out failing companies, wouldn’t they just make less money?

-(Class consensus) If we let companies go bankrupt, economy will crash, jobs will be lost, wages down, more debt.

-Is putting taxpayer money into buyout a temporary fix up or a solution? –Mr. Brown
-Stricter laws on businesses, make us seem communist, because government controls business. –John Ray

-McCain may be trying to block debate because Obama has advantage on National television, also to show he cares about the economy. If Obama doesn’t want to cancel, he can be accused of not caring enough about the economy. –Matt F.

-There’s a lot of days from now till the election, things will change. - Alex D.

-McCain IS ready for the foreign policy debate, he said he was. –Apeksha

-I believe that it’s all a part of the political campaign, when McCain cancels the debate. –Rajvir

-McCain does care and he is showing that. –Sanaa

-Can Congress change recess? –Alex

-A debate is only one day, Great Depression wasn’t fixed in one day. We need to know the plans of the economy from the candidates NOW. –John Ray

-Obama should us this economic recession to show what he can do about the economy.- Amir! (yes he spoke)

-Karamvir- McCain is trying to put Obama in a bad situation where he has to react.

-Weeks ago, the republicans and McCain were telling us that there was nothing wrong with the economy, now look at what happened. It’s all a part of his Maverick reputation where he stands pat on issues and comes across as courageous yet stubborn. –Matt F.

-Debate only takes a few hours, why can’t McCain take the time to just do the debate then get back to Congress to work on the bill? –Hemant

-The Republicans should have done something about the economy already. –John Ray

New York City May Raise Property Tax

2008-09-23T19:13:00.000-07:00

By David W. Chen and Michael Babaro
September 23rd, 2008
The New York Times

-Bush approves $1.5 trillion into economy, value of dollar goes down, prices go up.

Why are property taxes increasing in New York City?
Who might oppose such an increase?

Potter: I DON’T KNOW
Matt B: increases are from money made from taxes
Sanaa: tax raise= prices of goods and gas go up, citizens will want a pay raise
Mr. Brown: If you raise taxes, why don’t wages go up?
Matt B: $400 to families is a diversion from tax hikes
Kaitlyn: public transportation prices going up, there will be more bikes as people try to save money.
John Ray: property taxes effect everyone that owns property. Prices could level out.
Mr. Brown: Pensions, retirement, city employees could be hurt by property tax increases.
Apeksha: Everybody moves to Florida. Why can’t we just make the economy like it was in 2000?

Illness Persisting in 9/11 Workers,

2008-09-11T05:04:00.000-07:00

By ANTHONY DePALMA

The largest health study yet of the thousands of workers who labored at ground zero shows that the impact of the rescue and recovery effort on their health has been more widespread and persistent than previously thought, and is likely to linger far into the future.

The study, released yesterday by doctors at Mount Sinai Medical Center, is expected to erase any lingering doubts about the connection between dust from the trade center and numerous diseases that the workers have reported suffering. It is also expected to increase pressure on the federal government to provide health care for sick workers who do not have health insurance.
Roughly 70 percent of nearly 10,000 workers tested at Mount Sinai from 2002 to 2004 reported that they had new or substantially worsened respiratory problems while or after working at ground zero.

The rate is similar to that found among a smaller sample of 1,100 such workers released by Mount Sinai in 2004, but the scale of the current study gives it far more weight; it also indicates significant problems not reflected in the original study.

For example, one-third of the patients in the new study showed diminished lung capacity in tests designed to measure the amount of air a person can exhale. Among nonsmokers, 28 percent were found to have some breathing impairment, more than double the rate for nonsmokers in the general population.

The study is among the first to show that many of the respiratory ailments — like sinusitis and asthma, and gastrointestinal problems related to them — initially reported by ground zero workers persisted or grew worse in the years after 9/11.

Most of the ground zero workers in the study who reported trouble breathing while working there were still having those problems up to two and a half years later, an indication that the illnesses are becoming chronic and are not likely to improve over time. Some of them worked without face masks, or with flimsy ones. “There should no longer be any doubt about the health effects of the World Trade Center disaster,” said Dr. Robin Herbert, co-director of Mount Sinai’s World Trade Center Worker and Volunteer Medical Screening Program. “Our patients are sick, and they will need ongoing care for the rest of their lives.”

Dr. Herbert called the findings, which will be published tomorrow in Environmental Health Perspectives, the journal of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, “very worrisome,” especially because 40 percent of those who went to Mount Sinai for medical screening did not have health insurance, and will thus not get proper medical care. The Mount Sinai results found, as studies done by the New York City Fire Department also have, that those who showed up in the first hours and days after the twin towers collapsed have the worst medical problems. Seventy percent of the workers in the study arrived at the site between Sept. 11 and Sept. 13.

Mount Sinai’s screening and monitoring program, which excludes New York firefighters, who are tested in a separate program, run by the New York Fire Department, covers law enforcement officers, transit workers, telecommunications workers, volunteers and others who worked at ground zero and at the Fresh Kills landfill, where debris was taken.

Members of the New York Congressional delegation, who have been fighting to get the federal government to recognize the scope of the health problem created by toxic materials at ground zero, saw the Mount Sinai study as proof that the federal government has been too slow to address the issue.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who participated in the news conference at Mount Sinai yesterday morning, along with Representatives Jerrold Nadler and Carolyn B. Maloney, said that the results made the need for federal assistance for treatment more critical than ever.

“This study, I hope, puts to rest any doubt about what is happening to those who were exposed,” said Mrs. Clinton, who was among those who pushed for $52 million in federal funding for health treatment for the ground zero workers, the first treatment money provided by the Bush administration. “This report underscores the need for continued long-term monitoring and treatment options — they go hand in hand,” she said.

Several members of the delegation are scheduled to meet in Washington tomorrow morning with Michael O. Levitt, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, to press for more aid.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, speaking at a news conference at City Hall yesterday, questioned the conclusiveness of the study, saying that statistics could suggest a connection between events, but not prove a direct link.

“I don’t believe that you can say specifically a particular problem came from this particular event,” he said. Nonetheless, Mr. Bloomberg announced that the city would create a screening and treatment program for anyone exposed to the trade center dust or fumes.

The Mount Sinai study, released yesterday, which covers 9,442 workers who met the screening program’s eligibility criteria and agreed to have their health data included, focused on respiratory problems because doctors believe those illnesses are the first to surface. Of those studied, 46.5 percent reported symptoms like chest tightness, shortness of breath and dry cough that generally affect the lower airways of the lungs.

And 62.5 percent reported upper-respiratory symptoms like sinusitis and nose and throat irritations. (The study did not include cases of cancer reported by workers and their relatives.)
The doctors said that the persistent nature of the respiratory symptoms raised troubling questions about the workers’ long-term health. Dr. Philip J. Landrigan, a founder of the screening program at Mount Sinai and an author of the new study, said that the toxic nature of the trade center dust had led doctors to conclude that there would be serious health issues for years to come, especially for workers who were exposed to the heaviest concentrations in the early days after the terrorist attack.

“This was extremely toxic dust,” Dr. Landrigan said, noting that some samples showed the dust to be as caustic as drain cleaner. The dust also contained innumerable tiny shards of glass, which could get lodged in the lungs, and a stew of toxic and carcinogenic substances, like asbestos and dioxin, that could potentially lead to cancer decades from now.

With the expanding dimensions of 9/11 health problems, concern is also growing about the cost of health care for responders, particularly the 40 percent who either never had health insurance or who lost employer-provided coverage after they became too sick to work.

Dr. Landrigan declined to estimate what the total cost might be, saying only “it will be very expensive.”

Dr. John Howard, who was named the federal 9/11 health coordinator in February, has already said that the $52 million the federal government has appropriated for treatment late last year is inadequate. He said in an interview yesterday that the new study will very likely mean that the gap between funds and the need for them is going to grow.

But he said the solid medical data from Mount Sinai would help him make the case that more needs to be done. He said that there was little doubt that if a third of the people in the study showed abnormal breathing, similar problems exist among the entire population of 40,000 rescue and recovery workers.

“These are just the kind of facts that are important in making a logical argument that the funding needs to be adjusted,” said Dr. Howard, who is also the director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

Mount Sinai officials said they would release a study of mental health effects on ground zero workers soon. They also are planning to begin a statistical program this fall to examine the occurrence of cancer, lung diseases and other ailments among that group. That information will then be compared to national rates to see if there is a higher-than-expected incidence of those diseases.

Voter Registration by Students Raises Cloud of Consequences

2008-09-09T17:47:00.000-07:00

By TAMAR LEWIN

The widespread practice of students’ registering to vote at their college address has set off a fracas in Virginia, a battleground state in the presidential election.

Late last month, as a voter-registration drive by supporters of Senator Barack Obama was signing up thousands of students at Virginia Tech, the local registrar of elections issued two releases incorrectly suggesting a range of dire possibilities for students who registered to vote at their college.

The releases warned that such students could no longer be claimed as dependents on their parents’ tax returns, a statement the Internal Revenue Service says is incorrect, and could lose scholarships or coverage under their parents’ car and health insurance.

After some inquiries from students and parents, and more pointed questions from civil rights lawyers, the state board of elections said Friday that it was “modifying and clarifying” the state guidelines on which the county registrar had based his releases.

Student-registration controversies have been a recurring problem since 1971, when the 26st Amendment lowered the voting age to 18 from 21, and despite a 1979 ruling by the United States Supreme Court that students have the right to register at their college address.

Virginia is not the only state with murky guidelines. South Carolina’s voter-registration site, for example, says students who want to register to vote at their college address must demonstrate “a present intention to remain in the community.”

“There’s no issue for snowbirds who live in Iowa but fly to Florida for the winter,” said Sujatha Jahagirdar, program director of the Student Public Interest Research Group’s New Voters Project. “One demographic group, like students, shouldn’t have to overcome a special hurdle to vote. We impose all the responsibilities of citizenship on students, and we have to provide them with the privileges of citizenship, too.”

Ms. Jahagirdar said Virginia’s warnings were profoundly misleading. “We have been registering young voters for 25 years,” she said. “We registered 500,000 young voters in 2004, the majority on college campuses, and we’ve never heard of a single one who lost health insurance, scholarship or tax status because of where they registered to vote.”

In Virginia, the county registrar first issued an alarming release on Aug. 25, and two days later a slightly toned-down version using language taken directly from the state Board of Elections’ Web site.

That site says students can determine their legal residence, but advises them to consider certain questions. “Are you claimed as a dependent on your parents’ income tax return?” the site asks. “If you are, then their address is probably your legal residence.”

The site also tells students to check whether their coverage under their parents’ health or automobile insurance, or their scholarship, will be affected by changing their residence.
Civil rights lawyers say these guidelines are problematic and could infringe on students’ rights.
“What the state Board of Elections has on its Web site, to me, sounds like it is discouraging students from registering at their school address,” said Jon Greenbaum, director of the Voting Rights Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

Indeed, the Montgomery County registrar, E. Randall Wertz, said several students had canceled their local registration over their worry about the possible consequences. Mr. Wertz said he had issued the release to try to dispel confusion and explain what he believed to be the consequences of choosing a college address as a primary residence.

“My understanding of state law has been that by declaring you’re voting here, you’re saying this is your primary residence, your domicile, and that while you can have many abodes or residences, you can only have one domicile,” Mr. Wertz said. “And if this is your primary residence, you have to register your vehicle here, charge your driver’s license to here and so on. That’s been the interpretation at state training sessions.”

Kevin Griffis, the Obama campaign’s Virginia spokesman, said the release appeared to be a good-faith effort to convey state guidelines, not a politically motivated effort to stop voting by students.

Mr. Wertz said the initial release had been written by an intern whom he asked to summarize the guidelines. Although the second release used the state’s precise language, he said, it still left room for confusion. In other counties, registrars have refused to accept dormitory addresses as residences. But so far, the state has not set clear standards.

“Different registrars around the state interpret it differently,” he said. “We’ve asked for more guidance from the state legislature, but they haven’t wanted to deal with it.”

Mr. Greenbaum’s Voting Rights Project has been involved in other student-registration cases. Last fall, in Statesboro, Ga., in a hotly contested city council race, there were challenges to the registration of about 1,000 Georgia Southern University students who had used dormitory addresses. “We threatened suit, but the issue went away when they figured out that the challenges weren’t going to affect the results of the election,” Mr. Greenbaum said.

In 2003, in Waller County, Tex., the district attorney wrote a column in a local newspaper threatening to prosecute students at Prairie View A&M, a historically black university, for illegal voting. The project sued, and the district attorney backed down.

In the 1970s, that same county required Prairie View students who wanted to register to fill out a questionnaire asking, among other things, whether they owned property in the county, had an automobile registered there or belonged to any church, club or organization unrelated to the college. A challenge to that practice led the Supreme Court to uphold students’ rights to vote at their college address.

Plain Speech

2008-09-04T04:50:00.000-07:00

ST. PAUL — Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska introduced herself to America before a roaring crowd at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday night as “just your average hockey mom” who was as qualified as the Democratic nominee, Senator Barack Obama, to be president of the United States.

An hour later Senator John McCain, a scrappy, rebellious former prisoner of war in Vietnam whose campaign was resurrected from near-death a year ago, was nominated by the Republican Party to be the 44th president of the United States after asking the cheering delegates, “Do you think we made the right choice” in picking Ms. Palin as the vice-presidential nominee?
The roll-call vote made Mr. McCain, 72, the first Republican presidential candidate to share the ticket with a woman and only the second presidential candidate from a major party to do so, after Walter F. Mondale selected Geraldine A. Ferraro as his running mate for the Democratic ticket in 1984.

But the nomination was a sideshow to the evening’s main event, the speech by the little-known Ms. Palin, who was seeking to wrest back the narrative of her life and redefine herself to the American public after a rocky start that has put Mr. McCain’s closest aides on edge. Ms. Palin’s appearance electrified a convention that has been consumed by questions of whether she was up to the job, as she launched slashing attacks on Mr. Obama’s claims of experience.

“Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown,” Ms. Palin told the delegates in a speech that sought to eviscerate Mr. Obama, as delegates waved signs that said “I love hockey moms.” “And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves. I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities.”
As the crowd cheered its approval, Ms. Palin went on: “I might add that in small towns we don’t quite know what to make of a candidate who lavishes praise on working people when they are listening, and then talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns when those people aren’t listening.”

Ms. Palin was referring to Mr. Obama’s experience as a community organizer in Chicago before he served in the Illinois legislature and was elected to the United States Senate in 2004 as well as comments he made at a fundraiser in California about bitter rural voters who “cling” to guns and religion.

The address by Ms. Palin, 44, who stunned the political world last week as Mr. McCain’s pick for a running mate, took place before a convention transformed from an orderly coronation into a messy, days-long drama since the McCain campaign’s disclosure on Monday that Ms. Palin’s 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, was pregnant. Since then there have been a host of other distractions, including Hurricane Gustav, questions about how thoroughly Mr. McCain vetted what people close to his campaign have called the last-minute pick of Ms. Palin, and charges from Mr. McCain’s top aides that the news media has launched a sexist smear campaign against his running mate.

“I’m not a member of the permanent political establishment,” Ms. Palin said in her remarks. which took aim at the news media as the crowd began lustily booing the press. “And I’ve learned quickly, these past few days, that if you’re not a member in good standing of the Washington elite, then some in the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone. But here’s a little news flash for all those reporters and commentators: I’m not going to Washington to seek their good opinion; I’m going to Washington to serve the people of this country.”

Ms. Palin spent the first part of her speech introducing her family one by one to the crowd, including her husband, Todd. “We met in high school, and two decades and five children later he’s still my guy,” Ms. Palin said.

Ms. Palin also displayed humor in one of her biggest lines of the night when she said that “the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull” was “lipstick.”

Ms. Palin’s speech was the big draw of a convention night notable for not a single mention from the stage of the unpopular president, George W. Bush, who addressed the delegates Tuesday via satellite from the White House after the hurricane forced him to cancel his appearance.

Ms. Palin’s speech came after Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York launched a withering attack on Mr. Obama as part of a relentless assault by Republicans arguing that Ms. Palin, the former mayor of a town of less than 7,000 people who has been governor of Alaska for 20 months, had a more impressive résumé than Mr. Obama.

“She already has more executive experience than the entire Democratic ticket,” said Mr. Giuliani, one of three former rivals of Mr. McCain for the nomination, including former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts and former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, who took on Mr. Obama in speeches Wednesday evening.

“Barack Obama has never led anything, nothing, nada,” Mr. Giuliani said, then launched an attack on people who have questioned whether Ms. Palin will have enough energy to focus on the vice presidency as the mother of five. “How dare they question whether Sarah Palin has enough time to spend with her children and be vice president,” Mr. Giuliani said. “How dare they do that? When do they ever ask a man that question?”

The criticism of Mr. Obama reinforced new television commercials by the McCain campaign that similarly belittled the Democratic nominee’s experience. The campaign and its surrogates also took on what they called biased and sexist coverage of Ms. Palin.

In her address, Ms. Palin criticized Mr. Obama on foreign policy and national security issues as she tried to display comfort on those areas. She also embraced one of Mr. McCain’s favorite mantras this summer, “drill now,” a call for more offshore oil exploration as a solution to record-high gasoline prices.

“Our opponents say, again and again, that drilling will not solve all of America’s energy problems, as if we all didn’t know that already,” Ms. Palin said. “But the fact that drilling won’t solve every problem is no excuse to do nothing at all. Starting in January, in a McCain-Palin administration, we’re going to lay more pipelines, build more nuclear plants, create jobs with clean coal and move forward on solar, wind, geothermal and other alternative sources.”

The speech was the first public emergence for Ms. Palin since arriving here Sunday, two days after Mr. McCain named her as his running mate. Ms. Palin has spent her time in a hotel suite with her husband, Todd, and their five children preparing for her speech and the questions on foreign policy, national security and family matters that she will face from the news media when the McCain campaign makes her available to reporters. Their son Track, 19, deploys overseas for the Army next month.

Democrats, who have held much of their fire this week as the Republican melodrama has played out in Minnesota, criticized the convention as failing so far to address the concerns of ordinary Americans.

“You did not hear a single world about the economy,” Mr. Obama told an audience on in New Philadelphia, Ohio, before Ms. Palin’s speech. “Not once did they mention the hardships that people are going through.”

Mr. McCain landed in Minneapolis on Wednesday afternoon and was greeted on the tarmac by Ms. Palin, her family and his family in a striking multigenerational tableau, 16 strong, with the youngest member Trig Palin, Sarah Palin’s 4-month-old, who has Down syndrome. Later, in Mr. McCain’s appearance at the convention, he praised the Palins as “a beautiful family.”

Delegates said they were enthralled by Ms. Palin. "I think she’s great; she’s giving it back to the Democrats for all the sorry things they’ve said about her and about America," said Anita Bargas, a delegate from Angleton, Tex. "She’s a conservative, and she has a great sense of humor."

With Ms. Palin facing a torrent of inquiries from reporters, Mr. McCain joined other Republicans in assailing news outlets when he told ABC News in an interview on Wednesday that “Sarah Palin has 24,000 employees in the state government” and was “responsible for 20 percent of the nation’s energy supply.” He added that he was entertained by the comparison of her experience to that of Mr. Obama and that “I hope we can keep making that comparison that running a political campaign is somehow comparable to being the executive of the largest state in America.”

WELCOME CLASS of 2009

2008-09-01T18:26:00.000-07:00

The new reality is that the public-education system is no longer the only, or the paramount, place where we go to learn.

printer-friendly version

by James Daly

For more than 150 years, the local public schools were our community's temple of knowledge. They dutifully gathered, assimilated, and dispensed the wisdom of thousands of years of insight and learning to the eager (and sometimes not-so-eager) ears and eyes of fidgeting youth. Once you left the school's care, however, as a young adult, you were pretty much on your own to track down the information and wisdom that would lead to a more enriched mind or pocketbook.
Then something dramatic happened. In 1989, researcher Tim Berners-Lee was noodling around in his Swiss lab, working on a way for his colleagues to share ideas electronically on different networks using an odd jumble of computers. He came up with an online knowledge-sharing device: the World Wide Web. By the mid-1990s, new Web browsers produced by companies such as Netscape and Microsoft made sailing through the sea of online information simple; Berners-Lee had inadvertently kicked open a door to the world's knowledge.
T hen came the crackling summer of 1995. While a staggering heat wave scorched the country -- New York City had a record-setting streak of twenty-four consecutive days with no precipitation, while out in the Great Plains, a freight train derailed when the tracks warped in 112-degree heat -- Netscape planned something even hotter: It went public. When that offering happened on August 9, the company's stock and its fortunes skyrocketed. Where there is money to be made (and Netscape was making billions), inventiveness and ambition followed.
The rest of the story, writ in large neon letters, has been a redistribution of knowledge that has essentially turned our world upside down and inside out (or is it the other way around?). In the past decade, the easy access to nearly any piece of information imaginable has become an expected part of our daily life. We've been Googled and YouTubed and iPodded so completely that the names of these very companies have seared into our cerebral cortex, even becoming verbs ("Did you google it?") in our daily chatter.
What happened with our schools? Not much. They continued to plod on gamely, passing out paper-based textbook after paper-based textbook, keeping their rooms and halls nearly free of the technology saturating their students' lives. The public-education system was a modern-day Rip Van Winkle, dozing peacefully beneath its educational elm while the distance increased between the technology that schools provided and the daily reality of the world students live in.
Subtly, but inexorably, schools -- or, for that matter, libraries -- were no longer the key holders to the temple of knowledge. A millennia-old arrangement of information distribution disappeared in the time it took for a newborn to reach fifth grade.
The new reality is that the public-education system is no longer the only, or the paramount, place where we go to learn. Most likely, the average child did his or her first Google search on a home computer. For many kids, they probably first logged on to a network (most likely AOL or Yahoo!) remotely, using a portable PC a parent brought home from the office. Their first online chat was more likely to happen at home while the child was enjoying Club Penguin than it was in English class.
This shift represents a fundamental restructuring of what public education is all about. Schools must now jump into the river of information provided by business, international groups, and the media and step into a new role: assembler of the collective intellect. Educators must help students sort out the insightful from the ludicrous, assisting them in their new role as capable and critical thinkers. Schools should not shun the seemingly endless variety of outside information sources, but should instead see them as new sources of inspiration for their daily lessons.
In an age when the flow of information was limited and controlled, schools were worthy gatherers of knowledge. That world is gone. Public education has entered a new phase, and it's time for it to catch up to the students it's charged with teaching.

Editor in Chief James Daly

This article was also published in Edutopia Magazine, July 2007

Justices Agree on Right to Own Guns

2008-04-07T09:08:00.001-07:00

Article Here

With the right to bear arms being revisited by the Supreme court, how can we ensure the crime with guns will decrease with stricter laws?

If everyone had access to guns would the crime rate drop?

Are trigger locks the answer to protect accidents int he home?

Do criminals have an advantage during a home invasion?

Spitzer

2008-03-17T09:18:00.000-07:00

Should we hold our politicians up to a higher standard? When people in power break the law should the consequences be harsher?

Why is prostitution leagal in Nevada and not NY? What laws did Spitzer break? Will this play a role int he upcoming election?

Leah's Article

LEO CREATES A TRAFFIC JAM

2008-03-14T09:25:00.000-07:00

Wesley asked the class if animal cruelty should be considered a misdemeanor or a felony. How has the media and the economics of "no-fault" insurance played a role in this man's life?

Were there laws broken by the dog's owner? If you were the defense attorney what might you have mentioned in your case?

Animal Rights Debate?

2008-03-12T07:19:00.001-07:00

Animals Rights ?

How might this debate have gone better? What needs to happen to make student presentations work more smoothly?

Michael Vick

2008-03-10T08:06:00.000-07:00

Here is the article

Should dog fighting be a government regulated activity?

Where are dogs’ rights in the Constitution?

If dogs are considered property why are there laws protecting them?

Is it ok to destroy your own property?

Obama and Hillary

2008-03-07T06:27:00.000-08:00

read article

Has the negative campaign affected your views on the candidates?

Has the negative campaign affected who you are voting for in the upcoming presedential election?

Do you believe the negative campaign has altered the image of the democratic party? If so is it negative or postive?

WHY HILLARY WILL LOSE?

I WILL VOTE MCAIN

CUBA and Castro

2008-03-03T08:41:00.000-08:00

According to the article we read in class and Matt's presentation has Fidel Castro done a "good" job running the Cuban government?

If you had the chance to run a governement how might you run things differently than Castro?

Did Fidel Castro make a wise decision for CUba by appointing his brother as the new leader of Cuba?

CASTRO SLIDESHOW

NYTIMES ARTICLE

On a side note, many of your classmates will be presenting materials for the next few lessons. What can they learn from Matt?

1 in 100 U.S. Adults Behind Bars, New Study Says

2008-03-02T04:23:00.000-08:00

Published: February 28, 2008

By ADAM LIPTAK

For the first time in the nation’s history, more than one in 100 American adults is behind bars, according to a new report.

Nationwide, the prison population grew by 25,000 last year, bringing it to almost 1.6 million. Another 723,000 people are in local jails. The number of American adults is about 230 million, meaning that one in every 99.1 adults is behind bars.

Incarceration rates are even higher for some groups. One in 36 Hispanic adults is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2006. One in 15 black adults is, too, as is one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34.

The report, from the Pew Center on the States, also found that only one in 355 white women between the ages of 35 and 39 are behind bars but that one in 100 black women are.

The report’s methodology differed from that used by the Justice Department, which calculates the incarceration rate by using the total population rather than the adult population as the denominator. Using the department’s methodology, about one in 130 Americans is behind bars.

Either way, said Susan Urahn, the center’s managing director, “we aren’t really getting the return in public safety from this level of incarceration.”

But Paul Cassell, a law professor at the University of Utah and a former federal judge, said the Pew report considered only half of the cost-benefit equation and overlooked the “very tangible benefits — lower crime rates.”

In the past 20 years, according the Federal Bureau of Investigation, violent crime rates fell by 25 percent, to 464 for every 100,000 people in 2007 from 612.5 in 1987.

“While we certainly want to be smart about who we put into prisons,” Professor Cassell said, “it would be a mistake to think that we can release any significant number of prisoners without increasing crime rates. One out of every 100 adults is behind bars because one out of every 100 adults has committed a serious criminal offense.”

Ms. Urahn said the nation cannot afford the incarceration rate documented in the report. “We tend to be a country in which incarceration is an easy response to crime,” she said. “Being tough on crime is an easy position to take, particularly if you have the money. And we did have the money in the ‘80s and ‘90s.”

Now, with fewer resources available, the report said, “prison costs are blowing a hole in state budgets.” On average, states spend almost 7 percent on their budgets on corrections, trailing only healthcare, education and transportation.

In 2007, according to the National Association of State Budgeting Officers, states spent $44 billion in tax dollars on corrections. That is up from $10.6 billion in 1987, a 127 increase once adjusted for inflation. With money from bonds and the federal government included, total state spending on corrections last year was $49 billion. By 2011, the report said, states are on track to spend an additional $25 billion.

It cost an average of $23,876 dollars to imprison someone in 2005, the most recent year for which data were available. But state spending varies widely, from $45,000 a year in Rhode Island to $13,000 in Louisiana.

The cost of medical care is growing by 10 percent annually, the report said, and will accelerate as the prison population ages.

About one in nine state government employees works in corrections, and some states are finding it hard to fill those jobs. California spent more than $500 million on overtime alone in 2006.

The number of prisoners in California dropped by 4,000 last year, making Texas’s prison system the nation’s largest, at about 172,000. But the Texas legislature last year approved broad changes to the corrections system there, including expansions of drug treatment programs and drug courts and revisions to parole practices.

“Our violent offenders, we lock them up for a very long time — rapists, murderers, child molestors,” said John Whitmire, a Democratic state senator from Houston and the chairman of the state senate’s criminal justice committee. “The problem was that we weren’t smart about nonviolent offenders. The legislature finally caught up with the public.”

He gave an example.

“We have 5,500 D.W.I offenders in prison,” he said, including people caught driving under the influence who had not been in an accident. “They’re in the general population. As serious as drinking and driving is, we should segregate them and give them treatment.”

The Pew report recommended diverting nonviolent offenders away from prison and using punishments short of reincarceration for minor or technical violations of probation or parole. It also urged states to consider earlier release of some prisoners.

Before the recent changes in Texas, Mr. Whitmire said, “we were recycling nonviolent offenders.”

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER:

What role does the economy play in sentencing of individuals?
How are some states dealing with increasing prison populations?
What point was the author trying to make by mentioning Drunk Drivers in Texas?
According to the article is the justice system blind to race and ethnic backgrounds?

Can we fix it?

2008-02-25T20:23:00.000-08:00

Who has access to creating media?

How does the media change the political process?

What questions do we need to ask ourselves when viewing various forms of media?

How have various media outlets entered themselves into the political discussion?

YES WE CAN video

John Harwood

Will I Am interview

Two Articles on National Election

2008-02-13T02:46:00.000-08:00

Article # 1

Article # 2

After reading these two articles:

Does a close and heated primary help or detract from a political party? What are your predictions for the national election? How has the focus of each canidate shifted? Give specific examples from either the disscusion in class or the articles linked above.

Registering to Vote

2008-02-11T20:11:00.001-08:00

How did it feel to register to vote?
Why is it important to vote?
What is your responsibility to the democratic process?

What can we do?

2008-02-04T03:18:00.000-08:00

Hello everyone! Though they’re all grown up now, my sons’ friends still call me Mrs. C. and I live in South Florida (hate to rub it in, but as I write this, the temperature outside is a toasty 72 degrees and the sun’s not even up yet!. A comment on my blog from your teacher led me here and before I go any further, I just want to say how very proud I am of all of you! Your comments here merely confirm what I’ve believed all along – young people do get the fact that we are all our "brother’s keeper!”

Your teacher has truly done an excellent job of engaging you guys in some living American History! As Margaret Mead said, “For the very first time the young are seeing history being made before it is censored by their elders.” Spike Lee’s “When the Levees Broke” bears that out. Like you, I watched the documentary, but it was back on the first anniversary of the storm in 2006. I’d like to take up some space here if I may, and share a newspaper column I wrote about two months after seeing it:
===================================
"A Year After Katrina, Entire Gulf Coast Neighborhoods Are Still Uninhabited."

Watching the HBO documentary, “When the Levees Broke," I was taken aback by the enormity of emotions that had obviously lain dormant as I’d gone about my everyday life from August 29, 2005 to August 29, 2006. Glued to the tube for the entire four hours and fifteen minutes, the sheer genius that is Spike Lee allowed the story to tell itself. If his aim was to elicit support by infuriating the masses, shaming them to care or inspiring them to act, he achieved it - with me.

I just could not wrap my brain around the fact that almost a year later it seemed nothing at all had been done in this major U.S. city. I was certainly infuriated as so many people, most of whom looked like me, were left hanging by a system of government more concerned with bureaucracy than responsibility. I was equally ashamed at how anesthetized the souls of many of us had become, our compassion measured by how much we could or could not relate. All I could think was, “There but for the grace....”

On the way to rage, though, something wonderfully inspiring happened. I realized how proud I was of the resilience of a people ignored by those elected and selected to serve them. I was humbled by the resolute spirit with which they could still see a future in the midst of such devastation. And as they expressed their disappointment and utter disbelief - uncensored - I felt an odd sense of joy at the no-holds-barred freedom losing everything had given them. It triggered that familiar “quiet riot” feeling I get deep in the pit of my stomach when something patently wrong needs to be in some way addressed. And in that moment, I decided it was time for me to go and see for myself.

I volunteered to gut houses with Habitat for Humanity who’d taken over an abandoned school for their operation. Situated in the very devastated St. Bernard Parish in Violet, LA, the aptly named, Camp Hope offered basic living necessities fashioned from whatever had been donated and constructed by the ingenuity of its inhabitants. Communal living at its best! I went to bed early, nervously anticipating the 6 a.m. call to action, worrying whether these 50 year-old bones could stand up to the task.

There was no way I could have been prepared for what I saw though we’d gotten the “Katrina A Year Later” orientation the evening before. I was at once overwhelmed and invigorated as we rolled up to our first house in a somewhat affluent neighborhood. The two-story home had at least 10 rooms, three full baths, two kitchens and a pool in the backyard facing a canal. Out of all those rooms, the amount of salvageable items could fit on the hearth of the fireplace. The debris pile rose to the height of the first story and wrapped around the corner. Completely gutting someone’s home seemed to me like a surgery that ended in death. You save what is vital hoping it can be used again and send the remains for burial - only in a landfill instead of a cemetery plot.

If the house had not yet been touched, flood-soaked furniture and personal items were the first order of business. After countless wheelbarrow trips to the pile, layers of mud were shoveled out so we could get to the carpeting that lay underneath. I’m here to tell you, there’s nothing like the smell or feel of what we fondly referred to as “Carpet Juice” all over your clothes as you threw it on the pile.

Swollen drywall crumbled to the touch as we tried to remove it in sheets from the studs. Refrigerators had to be sealed shut with duct tape before moving so the putrid stench of rotten food mixed with flood waters didn’t seep through your mask causing the inevitable dry-heaves or worse, the real thing. We were on constant look-out for snakes, rats and those Brown Recluse spiders for which the rubble had provided a year’s worth of safe haven.

Like most of you, I’ve seen the aftermath of hurricanes. Hurricane Hugo rocked my home of Charleston, SC with four feet of water inside my mother’s dining room. And that was after climbing six steps up to the porch! Hurricane Andrew decimated Homestead rendering the home on the base where I’d raised my sons during their early years unrecognizable. And yes, I’ve seen the waterlines, the FEMA trailers and the work some of my friends had begun after the wrath of Hurricane Wilma. But in none of these catastrophes did I see neighborhood after neighborhood so eerily and entirely empty, a whole year later.

My initial motivation for writing this column was an attempt to solicit volunteers. I thought, “Who better to ask than those who had some idea of what it was like?” But after talking about it with a few people, I knew it was more important to share what impacted me most and let the chips fall where they may.

I’ve posted photographs of my experience at http://home.bellsouth.net/p/PWP-livinginthelight. They tell a far more powerful story than I ever could. Hopefully, they will bring the magnitude of this loss back into focus and help keep the citizens of this forgotten city in your thoughts and prayers.
===================================
Almost all the people with whom I volunteered those two weeks in September were from AmeriCorps -young people just like you. And when I went back in October on a rebuilding project, the same was true (Props to the men of the NYC Fire Department though, they were everywhere!). Your History teacher is 100 percent correct - you guys CAN be the change you want to see in the world. It really is all up to you. I’m going to keep checking back to see what you decide.

THE AUTHORS BLOG

Katrina Fact Sheet

More Levees

2008-01-30T07:08:00.000-08:00

What language has been used by the national media to describe the citizens displaced by Katrina?

If the story could be re-written what might the media need to change?

Is Spike Lee being fair?

What elements of persuasion does he use to get his point across?

Who does he place in view of the camera on?

When commenting please remember:

Identify yourself, respond to others questions, and acknowledge the insight other students had on the topic.

Teaching the Levees

2008-01-16T17:26:00.000-08:00

Hurricane Katrina caused America to take pause and challenged our government's values.

What does it mean to be a citizen? What type of citizen are you?

What is the role of government?

Should the federal government help the less fortunate or provide a safe atmosphere to allow people to become fortunate?

Obviously there were some mistakes made by the federal government.

Have we learned from the mistakes? In the aftermath of Katrina were decisions made based on race? class? Or need?

Now that we have all seen the Spike Lee documentary what is our responsibility?
What should we do?

Kemi's Link http://www.albany.edu/~dlafonde/Global/citizenship.htm

JOHN WHITE

2008-01-04T16:13:00.000-08:00

http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-opfocus5518442dec30,0,182822.story

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/ny-limill1211,0,1911067.story?coll=ny_breaking_500

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/ny-limill1212,0,1976604.story?coll=ny_breaking_500

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/ny-limill1128,0,2304290.story?coll=ny_breaking_500

Click on the links above, or copy, and paste the links above into your browser. Read the articles. Then answer the questions below in the form of a paragraph.

1. What role, if any, do you think race played in this trial?
2. Do you think race SHOULD have played a role in this trial?
3. Do you think the outcome of the case would have been different, if the races of the people involved were reversed? Why?
4. Do you believe that John White received a fair trial?
5. What other actions could/should Mr. White or Mr. Cicciaro have taken in this case?

CLICK HERE TO COMMENT

In Witness Killing, Prosecutors Point to a Lawyer

2007-12-22T08:06:00.000-08:00

United States Attorney’s Office

Deshawn McCray was fatally shot on a Newark street before he could testify for the prosecution in a cocaine-selling trial.

Published: December 21, 2007

NEWARK — For prosecutors in New Jersey, much about the 2004 murder of Deshawn McCray was all too familiar: Yet another key witness in a major drug case had been shot dead before he could testify in court.

Skip to next paragraph

Disturbing Twist

This is the seventh article in a series examining the problem of witness intimidation in New Jersey.

Keeping Witnesses Off Stand to Keep Them Safe (Nov. 19, 2007)

Few Choices in Shielding of Witnesses (Oct 28, 2007

In Prosecution of Gang, a Chilling Adversary: The Code of the Streets (Sep 19, 2007

Fearful Witness Faces Trial for a Murder Seen, Then Unseen (July 29, 2007)

A Little Girl Shot, and a Crowd That Didn’t See (July 9, 2007)

With Witnesses at Risk, Murder Suspects Go Free (March 1, 2007)

Enlarge This Image

Ronald Wittek/European Pressphoto Agency

Prosecutors claim that Paul Bergrin, a defense lawyer, facilitated the murder of Mr. McCray.

Mr. McCray was expected to testify against Mr. Bergrin's client William Baskerville, who was accused of selling cocaine.

Hakeem Curry, top, and William Baskerville.

But there was one aspect of the killing that especially alarmed and infuriated prosecutors. They believed that a defense lawyer — a former prosecutor — had played a role in facilitating the murder.

The United States attorney has said that that lawyer, Paul Bergrin, relayed Mr. McCray’s identity to friends of one of his clients, a gang member who was facing life in prison on drug charges. The prosecutors said he had even met with members of his client’s gang in person to make clear what was at stake.

“No Kemo, no case,” Mr. Bergrin told the gang members, using Mr. McCray’s nickname, according to testimony in federal court this year.

Three months later, Mr. McCray was shot in the head by one of the gang members on a Newark street.

“Paul Bergrin was a pivotal part of the conspiracy to kill Kemo McCray,” an assistant United States attorney, Joseph Minish, said in court. “Without him, it would not have taken place.”

Prosecutors will not speak publicly now about Mr. Bergrin. They have never charged him in connection with the killing or in any other case in which witnesses might have been intimidated or harmed. They have indicated that problems with safeguarding key evidence — including a wiretapped conversation involving Mr. Bergrin — have left them unable to pursue a prosecution.

But for law enforcement officials in New Jersey who have struggled to combat the widespread problem of witness intimidation, the claims about Mr. Bergrin amount to a particularly disturbing twist on a growing threat.

Mr. Bergrin, in an interview, denied any involvement in knowingly endangering a witness. He said that he had never met with gang members, and that anyone who claimed that he conspired to harm a witness was lying.

“I had nothing to do with the homicide of any witnesses whatsoever,” said Mr. Bergrin, who continues to practice criminal defense law in New Jersey. “I would never partake in any kind of action related to that kind of conduct.”

Law enforcement officials in New Jersey, though, have long been concerned about cases involving Mr. Bergrin’s clients, many of them gang members.

In one case, murder charges against Mr. Bergrin’s client were dropped after a prosecution witnesses was killed. In another murder case and a shooting case, charges were reduced after witnesses were intimidated and recanted their previous statements. And in 2005, a witness against one of Mr. Bergrin’s clients in a murder case changed his story after the defendant’s relatives gave him $1,050 in Mr. Bergrin’s office — and later pleaded guilty to making the payment.

Mr. Bergrin was not present in the office at the time, and he said he had no knowledge of any such payment. “There was never any allegation that I was involved,” he said.

The only legal or professional scrutiny Mr. Bergrin is currently known to face, in fact, is in New York City, where prosecutors have charged him with running New York Confidential, a brothel that charged $1,000 an hour.

The office of the Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, has accused Mr. Bergrin of taking over the business from a former client and using it to offer sexual favors to unnamed New Jersey law enforcement officers and jail guards — people who were in a position to keep him informed about what inmates might be planning to cooperate against his clients.

Mr. Bergrin has pleaded not guilty. His lawyer, Gerald Shargel, called the charges “nonsense.”

The possible role of defense lawyers in the intimidation of witnesses has angered prosecutors in New Jersey for years, and has recently attracted the interest of state legislators.

For their part, prosecutors say they have grown weary of a familiar sequence of events: Shortly after they provide defense lawyers with copies of a witness’s statement, as they are required by law to do, the threats, warnings and outright attacks begin.

In gang cases prosecuted in cities including Trenton, Newark and Camden, it is not unusual for a witness’s statement to be photocopied within days of being turned over to the defendant’s lawyer, and then be posted on telephone poles or circulated throughout the neighborhood.

State officials are hoping to offer witnesses greater protection, state officials are pushing for laws to restrict the information released to lawyers for certain criminal defendants.

A bill now being considered by the State Legislature and supported by the state attorney general would require that prosecutors handling gang cases turn over only a witness’s name, and make it a felony for defense lawyers to provide their clients with addresses or other identifying information.

“The defendants have a right to know the evidence against them,” said Assemblywoman Bonnie Watson Coleman, a sponsor of the bill. “But witnesses have a right not to be harassed.”

But even supporters of that measure concede that it will be of limited value because many gang crimes occur in neighborhoods or drug organizations so tightknit that all it takes to locate a witness is a name — or a nickname.

Mr. Bergrin, 52, built a reputation as something of a legal maverick as he moved from prosecutor to defense lawyer.

After a decorated career in the Army infantry, he was a prosecutor for the United States attorney’s office in New Jersey and the Essex County prosecutor’s office, preparing his cases with a ferocity that impressed his colleagues and intimidated his opponents. Mr. Bergrin — the son of a Brooklyn police officer and a graduate of law school at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. — bragged that as a prosecutor he won convictions on every homicide case he handled.

He entered private practice sometime before 1990, and since then, Mr. Bergrin’s client list has allowed him to move through divergent worlds. He has represented celebrities like Queen Latifah; soldiers accused of murdering Iraqi detainees; Angelo Prisco, a Genovese crime family boss; and a former Mrs. New Jersey, who was accused of passing $70,000 in bad checks.

And he has won acquittals in more than a dozen murder trials, a track record that has made his name familiar along Newark’s streets and cellblocks.

Mr. Bergrin’s dealings with those clients has provoked criticism from prosecutors and police officials who say he has become far too close to the accused drug dealers and gangsters he represents.

Mr. Bergrin defends his work.

“When you represent thousands of individuals, have had hundreds of homicides and violent crimes, you can’t be held responsible for every time a witness gets talked to or intimidated or threatened,” he said.

In Mr. McCray’s case, the events leading to his slaying began in November 2003, prosecutors have said, when Mr. Bergrin met with a client named William Baskerville, who had just been arrested on charges of selling more than 50 grams of cocaine.

The prosecutors’ charges about Mr. Bergrin emerged at Mr. Baskerville’s trial. Mr. Bergrin had been removed as his lawyer, but he was a central character in the story prosecutors told in court.

Court records and telephone logs show that shortly after visiting Mr. Baskerville in jail, Mr. Bergrin called Hakeem Curry — Mr. Baskerville’s cousin and Newark’s most powerful heroin distributor — and told him the identity of the prosecution’s star witness.

“I got a chance to speak to William, and he said the informant is a guy by the name of K-Mo,” Mr. Bergrin told Mr. Curry, according to a transcript of the conversation, which was taped.

Later that week, according to prosecutors, Mr. Bergrin met with Mr. Curry and two other relatives of Mr. Baskerville’s to discuss the case. One of the gang members who prosecutors said was present at the meeting was Anthony Young.

Mr. Young testified that Mr. Bergrin had warned everyone at the meeting that if Mr. McCray were to take the stand, Mr. Baskerville would almost certainly be convicted of charges that would bring a mandatory life sentence. Based on Mr. Bergrin’s statement, Mr. Young testified, Mr. Curry’s organization paid him $15,000 to kill Mr. McCray because “he has to be pushed, he has to be handled, we have to knock him off.”

In the weeks that followed, Mr. Baskerville bragged to fellow inmates that he had sent word to have his witness killed, they testified. On March 3, 2004, as Mr. McCray and his stepfather were walking back from a Newark convenience store, Mr. Young ambushed them.

Three bullets struck Mr. McCray in the head. Mr. Young, who confessed and cooperated in Mr. Baskerville’s prosecution, was sentenced to life and avoided a possible death sentence. At Mr. Baskerville’s trial, the prosecutor, in his summation, said of Mr. Bergrin, “Don’t think, ‘How could a lawyer do this?’ I hope you’re not thinking that. He was in on it, ladies and gentlemen. There is no doubt about it.”

Mr. Bergrin said that he was bewildered by the United States attorney’s assertion that he had sought to have Mr. McCray killed. He said he had spoken to Mr. Curry about the case only at the request of his client’s mother, who had informed him that Mr. Curry was her son’s cousin.

“I was just relaying the strengths and the weaknesses of the case with my client’s relative because of his close relationship,” Mr. Bergrin said.

But federal officials have described Mr. Bergrin in open court as the “house counsel” of Mr. Curry’s drug organization, which they said was responsible for more than 80 percent of the heroin distributed in Newark. Dealers who worked for Mr. Curry have testified that Mr. Bergrin was equal part lawyer and friend whose main duty was to monitor all the cases to be certain that no one cooperated with prosecutors.

The United States attorney for New Jersey, Christopher Christie Jr., has not brought charges against Mr. Bergrin, partly because an assistant prosecutor did not properly safeguard the tapes of wiretapped conversation involving him, meaning that they may not be admissible as evidence in court.

“Any suggestion that I tried to prevent people from cooperating or had other motives is absolutely false,” Mr. Bergrin said. “I work incredibly hard on all of my cases and am available at all hours of the night to represent my clients.”

Should witness lists be withheld in gang related cases?

Wider Spying Fuels Aid Plan for Telecom Industry

2007-12-19T11:29:00.000-08:00

By ERIC LICHTBLAU, JAMES RISEN and SCOTT SHANE

Published: December 16, 2007

This article is by Eric Lichtblau, James Risen and Scott Shane.

WASHINGTON — For months, the Bush administration has waged a high-profile campaign, including personal lobbying by President Bush and closed-door briefings by top officials, to persuade Congress to pass legislation protecting companies from lawsuits for aiding the National Security Agency’s warrantless eavesdropping program.

But the battle is really about something much bigger. At stake is the federal government’s extensive but uneasy partnership with industry to conduct a wide range of secret surveillance operations in fighting terrorism and crime.

The N.S.A.’s reliance on telecommunications companies is broader and deeper than ever before, according to government and industry officials, yet that alliance is strained by legal worries and the fear of public exposure.

To detect narcotics trafficking, for example, the government has been collecting the phone records of thousands of Americans and others inside the United States who call people in Latin America, according to several government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the program remains classified. But in 2004, one major phone carrier balked at turning over its customers’ records. Worried about possible privacy violations or public relations problems, company executives declined to help the operation, which has not been previously disclosed.

In a separate N.S.A. project, executives at a Denver phone carrier, Qwest, refused in early 2001 to give the agency access to their most localized communications switches, which primarily carry domestic calls, according to people aware of the request, which has not been previously reported. They say the arrangement could have permitted neighborhood-by-neighborhood surveillance of phone traffic without a court order, which alarmed them.

The federal government’s reliance on private industry has been driven by changes in technology. Two decades ago, telephone calls and other communications traveled mostly through the air, relayed along microwave towers or bounced off satellites. The N.S.A. could vacuum up phone, fax and data traffic merely by erecting its own satellite dishes. But the fiber optics revolution has sent more and more international communications by land and undersea cable, forcing the agency to seek company cooperation to get access.

After the disclosure two years ago that the N.S.A. was eavesdropping on the international communications of terrorism suspects inside the United States without warrants, more than 40 lawsuits were filed against the government and phone carriers. As a result, skittish companies and their lawyers have been demanding stricter safeguards before they provide access to the government and, in some cases, are refusing outright to cooperate, officials said.

“It’s a very frayed and strained relationship right now, and that’s not a good thing for the country in terms of keeping all of us safe,” said an industry official who believes that immunity is critical for the phone carriers. “This episode has caused companies to change their conduct in a variety of ways.”

With a vote in the Senate on the issue expected as early as Monday, the Bush administration has intensified its efforts to win retroactive immunity for companies cooperating with counterterrorism operations.

“The intelligence community cannot go it alone,” Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed article Monday urging Congress to pass the immunity provision. “Those in the private sector who stand by us in times of national security emergencies deserve thanks, not lawsuits.”

Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey echoed that theme in an op-ed article of his own in The Los Angeles Times on Wednesday, saying private companies would be reluctant to provide their “full-hearted help” if they were not given legal protections.

The government’s dependence on the phone industry, driven by the changes in technology and the Bush administration’s desire to expand surveillance capabilities inside the United States, has grown significantly since the Sept. 11 attacks. The N.S.A., though, wanted to extend its reach even earlier. In December 2000, agency officials wrote a transition report to the incoming Bush administration, saying the agency must become a “powerful, permanent presence” on the commercial communications network, a goal that they acknowledged would raise legal and privacy issues.

While the N.S.A. operates under restrictions on domestic spying, the companies have broader concerns — customers’ demands for privacy and shareholders’ worries about bad publicity.

In the drug-trafficking operation, the N.S.A. has been helping the Drug Enforcement Administration in collecting the phone records showing patterns of calls between the United States, Latin America and other drug-producing regions. The program dates to the 1990s, according to several government officials, but it appears to have expanded in recent years.

Officials say the government has not listened to the communications, but has instead used phone numbers and e-mail addresses to analyze links between people in the United States and overseas. Senior Justice Department officials in the Bush and Clinton administrations signed off on the operation, which uses broad administrative subpoenas but does not require court approval to demand the records.

At least one major phone carrier — whose identity could not be confirmed — refused to cooperate, citing concerns in 2004 that the subpoenas were overly broad, government and industry officials said. The executives also worried that if the program were exposed, the company would face a public-relations backlash.

The D.E.A. declined to comment on the call-tracing program, except to say that it “exercises its legal authority” to issue administrative subpoenas. The N.S.A. also declined to comment on it.

In a separate program, N.S.A. officials met with the Qwest executives in February 2001 and asked for more access to their phone system for surveillance operations, according to people familiar with the episode. The company declined, expressing concerns that the request was illegal without a court order.

While Qwest’s refusal was disclosed two months ago in court papers, the details of the N.S.A.’s request were not. The agency, those knowledgeable about the incident said, wanted to install monitoring equipment on Qwest’s “Class 5” switching facilities, which transmit the most localized calls. Limited international traffic also passes through the switches.

A government official said the N.S.A. intended to single out only foreigners on Qwest’s network, and added that the agency believed Joseph Nacchio, then the chief executive of Qwest, and other company officials misunderstood the agency’s proposal. Bob Toevs, a Qwest spokesman, said the company did not comment on matters of national security.

Other N.S.A. initiatives have stirred concerns among phone company workers. A lawsuit was filed in federal court in New Jersey challenging the agency’s wiretapping operations. It claims that in February 2001, just days before agency officials met with Qwest officials, the N.S.A. met with AT&T officials to discuss replicating a network center in Bedminster, N.J., to give the agency access to all the global phone and e-mail traffic that ran through it.

The accusations rely in large part on the assertions of a former engineer on the project. The engineer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said in an interview that he participated in numerous discussions with N.S.A. officials about the proposal. The officials, he said, discussed ways to duplicate the Bedminster system in Maryland so the agency “could listen in” with unfettered access to communications that it believed had intelligence value and store them for later review. There was no discussion of limiting the monitoring to international communications, he said.

“At some point,” he said, “I started feeling something isn’t right.”

Two other AT&T employees who worked on the proposal discounted his claims, saying in interviews that the project had simply sought to improve the N.S.A.’s internal communications systems and was never designed to allow the agency access to outside communications. Michael Coe, a company spokesman, said: “AT&T is fully committed to protecting our customers’ privacy. We do not comment on matters of national security.”

But lawyers for the plaintiffs say that if the suit were allowed to proceed, internal AT&T documents would verify the engineer’s account.

“What he saw,” said Bruce Afran, a New Jersey lawyer representing the plaintiffs along with Carl Mayer, “was decisive evidence that within two weeks of taking office, the Bush administration was planning a comprehensive effort of spying on Americans’ phone usage.”

The same lawsuit accuses Verizon of setting up a dedicated fiber optic line from New Jersey to Quantico, Va., home to a large military base, allowing government officials to gain access to all communications flowing through the carrier’s operations center. In an interview, a former consultant who worked on internal security said he had tried numerous times to install safeguards on the line to prevent hacking on the system, as he was doing for other lines at the operations center, but his ideas were rejected by a senior security official.

The facts behind a class-action lawsuit in San Francisco are also shrouded in government secrecy. The case relies on disclosures by a former AT&T employee, Mark Klein, who says he stumbled upon a secret room at an company facility in San Francisco that was reserved for the N.S.A. Company documents he obtained and other former AT&T employees have lent some support to his claim that the facility gave the agency access to a range of domestic and international Internet traffic.

The telecommunications companies that gave the government access are pushing hard for legal protection from Congress. As part of a broader plan to restructure the N.S.A.’s wiretapping authority, the Senate Intelligence Committee agreed to give immunity to the telecommunications companies, but the Judiciary Committee refused to do so. The White House has threatened to veto any plan that left out immunity, as the House bill does.

“Congress shouldn’t grant amnesty to companies that broke the law by conspiring to illegally spy on Americans” said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies in Washington.

But Bobby R. Inman, a retired admiral and former N.S.A. director who has publicly criticized the agency’s domestic eavesdropping program, says he still supports immunity for the companies that cooperated.

“The responsibility ought to be on the government, not on the companies that are trying to help with national security requirements,” Admiral Inman said. If the companies decided to stop cooperating, he added, “it would have a huge impact on both the timeliness and availability of critical intelligence.”

SHOULD immunity be granted to companies who broke the law in the past to "help fight terrorism"?

SHOULD the government take full responsibility for the leak of information?

Lockdown Disscussion

2007-12-17T13:22:00.000-08:00

How is our school being treated in the eyes of the media? What suggestions do you have to prevent something like this from happening again? Should both the 15yrd old and the 16yr old be treated the same way in the eyes of the law? Why are they being treated differently?

CBS report

Video

NY1 REPORT

NEWSDAY

Daily News

Aliens, Elvis and the FBI

2007-12-14T17:16:00.000-08:00

Today we had a special guest speaker from the Federal Bureau of Investigation talk to us about the importance of completing college. The one thing that stuck out most to me was when special investigator Robert Lally explained that "The choices we make now academically could be forgiven when seeking employment, but the personal choices we make (behavior and drug use) are not so easily forgiven. "

What is something that surprised you about our talk today?

What is something you would like to know more about?

Retroactively, Panel Reduces Drug Sentences

2007-12-12T17:35:00.000-08:00

By DAVID STOUT

Published: December 12, 2007

WASHINGTON — The agency that sets guidelines for federal prison sentences voted unanimously on Tuesday to lighten punishments retroactively for some crimes related to crack cocaine, a decision that could eventually affect about 19,500 inmates and mean freedom for some within months.

The 7-to-0 vote by the United States Sentencing Commission was intended to help narrow the stark disparity that has existed for two decades between sentences for crack cocaine and those linked to the powder form of the drug, a disparity written into law two decades ago when it was widely assumed that crack was more dangerous than the powdered drug.

Since then, experts have concluded that there are more similarities than differences, and many people involved in sentencing have lamented the fact that black people are disproportionately affected by crack-related sentences. Statistics show that about 85 percent of the federal inmates behind bars for crack offenses are black.

“At its core, this question is one of fairness,” said one commission member, Judge William K. Sessions III of the United States District Court in Vermont. “This is an historic day. This system of justice is, and must always be, colorblind.”

The decision — which does not affect mandatory minimum sentences imposed by Congress — will become effective on March 3, at which point many inmates will be eligible to petition a judge to be resentenced under the new guidelines. The delay will give prison administrators and other correctional administrators time to prepare for a surge of applications.

Hard numbers are elusive, but statistics kept by the commission suggest that, on average, an eligible prisoner might have his sentence reduced by 17 percent, and that about 3,800 inmates would be eligible but not assured of release in the next year. But, addressing concerns about public safety, commission members emphasized that judges, newly empowered by a pair of Supreme Court decisions on Monday, will have wide discretion over which inmates will be granted leniency.

Notwithstanding his own remark about the commission making history, Judge Sessions suggested, and the other commission members agreed, that it was up to Congress to rewrite what it did two decades ago. Reacting to images — or perhaps anecdotes — about the evils of crack, and the street crime it was presumed to stoke, the lawmakers enacted penalties that many have called draconian, treating crack-cocaine offenses far more harshly than ones involving powdered cocaine.

Several commission members said the perception over the years that crack-related prosecutions had affected black defendants and their relatives far more than white people was having a corrosive effect on the criminal justice system, influencing juries, potential witnesses and law enforcement officers as well as defendants.

The vote was followed by applause by relatives of prisoners who attended the session. But the decision to apply retroactivity does not mean a “get-out-of-jail-free card,” as one panel member put it.

In addition to the 19,500 prisoners who may become eligible for early release sooner or later, there are 16,000 to 17,000 people incarcerated for crack-related crimes who have virtually no hope of a break. Some of them were given the absolute minimum term in the first place, and so have nothing to gain. Other were arrested with huge amounts of crack, or deemed career offenders, and sentenced to long terms with no hope of leniency.

The Bush administration restated its opposition to making the lighter sentences retroactive. “Our position is clear,” Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey said Tuesday at a news conference.

That stance was repeated at the commission meeting by Kelli Ferry, an assistant United States attorney in Virginia who is an ex-officio member of the panel, asserting that the prospect of a large number of prisoners being released posed “significant safety risks for the communities to which they will be returned.”

Drug offenders make up a high percentage of the roughly 200,000 federal inmates. About 60,000 prisoners are released in a typical year, and some 63,000 new inmates take their place.

Cocaine-related offenses are covered under state as well as federal law. A typical prisoner in the federal system was a street-level trafficker — not a kingpin — who dealt in crack when there was little or no public tolerance for drug peddlers, even those with previously clean records.

Iralee Johnson of Orange, N.J., and the 16-year-old granddaughter she is raising, Secoya Jenkins, attended the hearing in the hope that the commission would give a break to Secoya’s mother, Nerika. She was convicted of conspiring to distribute crack in Philadelphia and has been in prison more than a decade.

Ms. Johnson blamed her daughter’s fall on “bad company” and said she had “learned her lesson,” after serving nearly 11 years. Her relatives said she was a first-time nonviolent offender who had just earned an associate college degree.

Because Congress has declined to take up legislation that would reduce or eliminate mandatory minimum prison terms for drug offenses, the sentencing commission can only offer leniency administratively, without setting aside the mandatory minimum terms imposed by Congress.

The commission put new guidelines into effect on Nov. 1, after a 180-day waiting period expired without Congress doing anything to stop them. But the effects were relatively modest: reducing the average sentence for crack possession to 8 years 10 months from 10 years 1 month, for instance.

One commission member, Judge Ruben Castillo of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, reminded the audience that the commission first recommended in 1995 that the sentencing disparity involving crack and powdered cocaine be erased in the absence of any data that it made sense.

“No one has come before us to justify the 100-to-1 ratio,” Judge Castillo said, referring to a provision of federal law that imposes the same 10-year minimum sentence for possessing 50 grams of crack and for possessing 5,000 grams of powder cocaine.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said he was pleased with the commission’s action.

“Nearly 20,000 nonviolent, low-level drug offenders will be eligible for a reduction in the excessive prison terms they received in the past because of the unacceptable disparity in the sentencing guidelines between crack cocaine and powder cocaine offenses,” Mr. Kennedy said. “Those who break the law deserve to be punished, but our system says that punishment must be proportionate and fair. The current sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine is neither.”

The commission chairman, Judge Ricardo H. Hinojosa of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas, reflected at Tuesday’s meeting on the perspective he has acquired in 25 years on the bench. “I didn’t think sentencing would be as difficult as it is when you actually have to do it,” he said.

C.I.A. Chief Cites Agency Lapse on Tape

2007-12-10T17:32:00.000-08:00

By MARK MAZZETTI

Published: December 13, 2007

WASHINGTON — Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, acknowledged on Wednesday that the C.I.A. had failed to keep members of Congress fully informed that the agency had videotaped the interrogations of suspected operatives of Al Qaeda and destroyed the tapes three years later.

Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director, after appearing before members of a House committee on Wednesday.

General Hayden’s comments struck a different tone from a message he sent to C.I.A. employees last Thursday, when he said that Congressional leaders had been informed about the tapes and of the “agency’s intention to dispose of the material.”

Emerging from a closed session with members of the House Intelligence Committee, General Hayden said Wednesday that “particularly at the time of the destruction, we could have done an awful lot better at keeping the committee alert and informed.”

After a hearing that lasted nearly four hours, Representative Silvestre P. Reyes of Texas, the committee’s chairman, called parts of General Hayden’s testimony “stunning” and said lawmakers were just at the beginning of what would probably be a “long-term investigation.”

Government officials said Wednesday’s session was far more contentious than General Hayden’s classified briefing to the Senate Intelligence Committee a day earlier. They said lawmakers had grilled the C.I.A. director about the accuracy of the statement he sent to agency employees after learning that The New York Times was preparing to publish an article about the tapes. As General Hayden noted publicly after the Senate hearing on Tuesday, the tapes were destroyed before he arrived at the C.I.A. in May 2006.

The Senate and House committees are expected now to turn their focus to officials said to be directly involved in the decision, including Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., who has been described by intelligence officials as having authorized the destruction of the tapes while he was head of the agency’s clandestine branch in 2005. One Congressional official said the House panel was likely to call Mr. Rodriguez as a witness next week.

Congressional investigators are particularly interested in advice the C.I.A. received from White House lawyers over a two-year period, from 2003 to 2005. Government officials have said that White House aides advised the C.I.A. to preserve the tapes, but the exact guidance they gave remains murky.

Some in Congress are curious to know why, if Mr. Rodriguez had really ignored White House advice not to destroy the tapes, he was apparently never reprimanded.

Also on Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a motion in a federal court in New York asking a judge to hold the C.I.A. in contempt for flouting a 2004 court order that it said required that the agency retain and identify all material related to the treatment of detainees in C.I.A. custody.

Intelligence officials have said that the tapes, documenting the interrogations of the suspected Qaeda operatives Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, were made in 2002 and destroyed in November 2005.

In the A.C.L.U. case, the court ruled in September 2004 that several government agencies, including the C.I.A, must produce all detainee documents. Those documents that are classified, the court ruled, must be identified in a written log and the log must be submitted to the judge for review.

Some legal experts said that the C.I.A. would have great difficulty defending what seemed to be a decision not to identify the tapes to the judge, and the subsequent decision to destroy the tapes.

“Where the court ordered them to search and enumerate the records at issue, they had a clear duty to do so,” said Meredith Fuchs, general counsel at the National Security Archive, a research group in Washington that frequently files Freedom of Information Act requests for national security documents.

On Wednesday, Senator Richard J. Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, asked Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, General Hayden and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to expand the inquiry to examine whether security services in other countries might have taped interrogations of terrorism suspects sent abroad by the C.I.A.

David Johnston contributed reporting.

A Hoax Turned Fatal Draws Anger but No Charges

2007-12-05T10:36:00.000-08:00

By CHRISTOPHER MAAG
Published: November 28, 2007

DARDENNE PRAIRIE, Mo., Nov. 21 — Megan Meier died believing that somewhere in this world lived a boy named Josh Evans who hated her. He was 16, owned a pet snake, and she thought he was the cutest boyfriend she ever had.

Peter Newcomb for The New York Times
Tina and Ron Meier with a photo of their daughter Megan, 13,

who killed herself last year after an online romance ended.

Josh contacted Megan through her page on MySpace.com, the social networking Web site, said Megan’s mother, Tina Meier. They flirted for weeks, but only online — Josh said his family had no phone. On Oct. 15, 2006, Josh suddenly turned mean. He called Megan names, and later they traded insults for an hour.

The next day, in his final message, said Megan’s father, Ron Meier, Josh wrote, “The world would be a better place without you.”

Sobbing, Megan ran into her bedroom closet. Her mother found her there, hanging from a belt. She was 13.

Six weeks after Megan’s death, her parents learned that Josh Evans never existed. He was an online character created by Lori Drew, then 47, who lived four houses down the street in this rapidly growing community 35 miles northwest of St. Louis.

That an adult would plot such a cruel hoax against a 13-year-old girl has drawn outraged phone calls, e-mail messages and blog posts from around the world. Many people expressed anger because St. Charles County officials did not charge Ms. Drew with a crime.

But a St. Charles County Sheriff’s Department spokesman, Lt. Craig McGuire, said that what Ms. Drew did “might’ve been rude, it might’ve been immature, but it wasn’t illegal.”

In response to the events, the local Board of Aldermen on Wednesday unanimously passed a measure making Internet harassment a misdemeanor punishable by up to a $500 fine and 90 days in jail.

“Give me a break; that’s nothing,” Mayor Pam Fogarty said of the penalties. “But it’s the most we could do. People are saying to me, ‘Let’s go burn down their house.’”

St. Charles County’s prosecuting attorney, Jack Banas, said he was reviewing the case to determine whether anyone could be charged with a crime. State Representative Doug Funderburk, whose district includes Dardenne Prairie, said he was looking into the feasibility of introducing legislation to tighten restrictions against online harassment and fraud.

In seventh grade, Megan Meier had tried desperately to join the popular crowd at Fort Zumwalt West Middle School, only to be teased about her weight, her mother said. At the beginning of eighth grade last year, she transferred to Immaculate Conception, a nearby Catholic school. Within three months, Ms. Meier said, her daughter had a new group of friends, lost 20 pounds and joined the volleyball team.

At one time, Lori Drew’s daughter and Megan had been “joined at the hip,” said Megan’s great-aunt Vicki Dunn. But the two drifted apart, and when Megan changed schools she told the other girl that she no longer wanted to be friends, Ms. Meier said.

In a report filed with the Sheriff’s Department, Lori Drew said she created the MySpace profile of “Josh Evans” to win Megan’s trust and learn how Megan felt about her daughter. Reached at home, Lori’s husband, Curt Drew, said only that the family had no comment.

Because Ms. Drew had taken Megan on family vacations, she knew the girl had been prescribed antidepression medication, Ms. Meier said. She also knew that Megan had a MySpace page.
Ms. Drew had told a girl across the street about the hoax, said the girl’s mother, who requested anonymity to protect her daughter, a minor.

“Lori laughed about it,” the mother said, adding that Ms. Drew and Ms. Drew’s daughter “said they were going to mess with Megan.”

After a month of innocent flirtation between Megan and Josh, Ms. Meier said, Megan suddenly received a message from him saying, “I don’t like the way you treat your friends, and I don’t know if I want to be friends with you.”

They argued online. The next day other youngsters who had linked to Josh’s MySpace profile joined the increasingly bitter exchange and began sending profanity-laden messages to Megan, who retreated to her bedroom. No more than 15 minutes had passed, Ms. Meier recalled, when she suddenly felt something was terribly wrong. She rushed to the bedroom and found her daughter’s body hanging in the closet.

As paramedics worked to revive Megan, the neighbor who insisted on anonymity said, Lori Drew called the neighbor’s daughter and told her to “keep her mouth shut” about the MySpace page.

Six weeks later, at a meeting with the Meiers, mediated by grief counselors, the neighbor told them that “Josh” was a hoax. The Drews were not present.

“I just sat there in shock,” Mr. Meier said.

Shortly before Megan’s death, the Meiers had agreed to store a foosball table the Drews had bought as a Christmas surprise for their children. When the Meiers learned about the MySpace hoax, they attacked the table with a sledgehammer and an ax, Ms. Meier said, and threw the pieces onto the Drews’ driveway.

“I felt like such a fool,” Mr. Meier said. “I’m supposed to protect my family, and here I allowed these people to inject themselves into our lives.”

The police learned about the hoax when Ms. Drew filed a complaint about the damage to the foosball table. In the report, she stated that she felt the hoax “contributed to Megan’s suicide, but she did not feel ‘as guilty’ because at the funeral she found out Megan had tried to commit suicide before.”

Megan had mentioned suicide several times, her mother said, but had never attempted it, and no one who knew her, including her doctors, felt she was suicidal.

On the advice of F.B.I. agents who did not want the Drews to learn of their investigation of the hoax, Ms. Meier said, her family said nothing publicly about the case for a year. Today, the Meier and the Drew families continue to live four houses from one another on a winding suburban street.

“There are no words to explain my rage,” Ms. Meier said. “These people were supposed to be our friends.”

Is justice being served here? What recourse does the family have? What lesson is to be learned from this incident?

Extra credit if you also post here.

Effort to Limit Junk Food in Schools Faces Hurdles

2007-12-03T09:08:00.000-08:00

By KIM SEVERSON
Published: December 2, 2007

Whether the measure, an amendment to the farm bill, can survive the convoluted politics that have bogged down that legislation in the Senate is one issue. Whether it can survive the battle among factions in the fight to improve school food is another.

Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa and the chairman of the Agriculture Committee, has twice introduced bills to deal with foods other than the standard school lunch, which is regulated by Department of Agriculture.

Several lawmakers and advocates for changes in school food believe that an amendment to the $286 billion farm bill is the best chance to get control of the mountain of high-calorie snacks and sodas available to schoolchildren. Even if the farm bill does not pass, Mr. Harkin and Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, a sponsor of the amendment, vow to keep reintroducing it in other forms until it sticks.

They are optimistic about their chances because there is more public interest than ever in improving school food and because leaders in the food and beverage industry have had a hand in creating the new standards.

But that intense corporate involvement, along with exemptions that would allow sales of chocolate milk, sports drinks and diet soda, has caused a rift among food activists who usually find themselves on the same side of school food battles.

“This pits ideals about what children should eat at school against the political reality of large food corporations insisting their foods be available to children at all times,” said Marion Nestle, a professor at New York University and the author of two recent books on food politics and diet. “The activists want vending machines out of schools completely.” Dr. Nestle has taken no public stand on the measure.

The nutrition standards would allow only plain bottled water and eight-ounce servings of fruit juice or plain or flavored low-fat milk with up to 170 calories to be sold in elementary and middle schools. High school students could also buy diet soda or, in places like school gyms, sports drinks. Other drinks with as many as 66 calories per eight ounces could be sold in high schools, but that threshold would drop to 25 calories per eight-ounce serving in five years.

Food for sale would have to be limited in saturated and trans fat and have less than 35 percent sugar. Sodium would be limited, and snacks must have no more than 180 calories per serving for middle and elementary schools and 200 calories for high schools.

The standards would not affect occasional fund-raising projects, like Girl Scout cookie sales.
Although states would not be able to pass stronger restrictions, individual school districts could.
The rules have the support of food and drink manufacturers, including the American Beverage Association, which worked closely on the amendment with Mr. Harkin’s office and the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group that has been critical of the food industry.

“This whole effort has momentum because of the variety of interests that have come together who do not usually find agreement,” said Susan Neely, president of the beverage association.
Some parents and nutritionists are angry that states will not be able to enact even tougher limits.

“My little fights in school districts are just going to be harder and harder because they’ll say, Well, here are the federal guidelines,” said Dr. Susan Rubin of Chappaqua, N.Y., a nutritionist who helped found the Better School Food advocacy group.

“It’s crazy to think we are going to fix children’s health just by letting companies sell schoolchildren smaller portions of Gatorade and baked chips,” she said.

Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, has long been a critic of companies that produce food that she considers unhealthy and of government policy toward them.

That is why some of the center’s allies were surprised that Ms. Wootan had worked so closely with manufacturers on the standards. Conversely, she was surprised to find herself on the defensive for finally arranging food limits that actually have a good chance at becoming law.

“I do not understand why some groups would try to stand in the way of legislation that is going to get soda, snack cakes and other high-fat, high-salt food out of virtually all schools,” she said.

Who is responsible for this problem? What is Ms. Margo Wootan not understanding?

ps. Don't forget to vote in the poll in the top right corner!

Bangladesh, The US treads lightly.

2007-11-27T15:27:00.000-08:00

Ruth Fremson for The New York Times

A mosque in southern Bangladesh was not spared by a cyclone that struck on Nov. 15 and killed more than 3,000 people.

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

Published: November 24, 2007

DHAKA, Bangladesh, Nov. 23 — As an American warship with more than 3,000 troops arrived off the coast of Bangladesh to help deliver food, water and medicine to the most remote corners of this cyclone-battered country, United States military officials took pains on Friday to say they would not take any steps that might seem intrusive.

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

A Bangladeshi military copter carried aid to Nalcity Friday.

Speaking to reporters, Adm. Timothy J. Keating, the commander of American forces in the Pacific, said American troops would work alongside Bangladeshi troops and make joint decisions about where American military assets would be helpful.

“This is not a U.S.-only operation; it’s in support of Bangladeshi operations,” he said at a news briefing after meeting with Bangladeshi Army officials here in Dhaka, the capital. “We are not just going to come storming ashore.”

The approach illustrated how tricky it has become for American troops to deliver even humanitarian aid to a friendly Muslim-majority nation.

The Bangladeshi Army’s chief of general staff, Maj. Gen. Sina Ibn Jamali, acknowledged that there was “sensitivity” to American military involvement in the nation’s relief operations. He said the Americans had been invited because his own military-backed government lacked the aircraft, in particular, to distribute aid swiftly to areas that needed it most.

“They will be working with us, uniform and uniform,” the general said.

The Associated Press reported that members of a small Islamist group, Hizb ut-Tahrir, protested the American military presence after Friday Prayer at Dhaka’s largest state-run mosque.

The American vessel, Kearsarge, an amphibious assault ship equipped with 20 helicopters and three landing craft that can maneuver in coastal areas, was stationed Friday about 30 miles off the southern coast of Bangladesh.

United States military officials said that only a handful of American troops would be on Bangladeshi soil at any time, with most marines and Navy personnel staying aboard the Kearsarge and coming ashore to deliver supplies. Admiral Keating said the troops would stay as long as they were needed.

A second American ship was on its way, packed mostly with supplies. The Americans said they expected to start delivering aid as early as Saturday.

The Kearsarge arrived as aid workers warned of an imminent risk of water-borne disease from the Nov. 15 cyclone and, eventually, a worsening of childhood malnutrition, which already hovers around 48 percent, according to Unicef.

Although the cyclone’s death toll was put at nearly 3,200, according to Bangladeshi Army officials, with 1,700 more people still missing, the government estimated that the storm had affected more than six million Bangladeshis by destroying homes, fields and fish ponds.

The Bangladeshi military continued to ferry food and clothing to the cyclone zone. On Friday afternoon, a Russian-made Mi-17 helicopter made its last run to a small town called Nalcity, where the cyclone had uprooted tall trees, blown off tin roofs and flattened acres of rice fields.

The birds scattered and the dust blew furiously as the helicopter descended, bearing dried dates and biscuits as well as saris and lungis, the basic clothing for Bangladeshi women and men.

After reading the above story and looking at the CIA profile of Bangladesh why might helping this grief stricken country be an issue?

Dilemma: A Mother Torn From a Baby

2007-11-26T06:53:00.000-08:00

Mp3 of interview with reporter.

November 17, 2007

By JULIA PRESTON

Federal immigration agents were searching a house in Ohio last month when they found a young Honduran woman nursing her baby.

The woman, Saída Umanzor, is an illegal immigrant and was taken to jail to await deportation. Her 9-month-old daughter, Brittney Bejarano, who was born in the United States and is a citizen, was put in the care of social workers.

The decision to separate a mother from her breast-feeding child drew strong denunciations from Hispanic and women’s health groups. Last week, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency rushed to issue new guidelines on the detention of nursing mothers, allowing them to be released unless they pose a national security risk.

The case exposes a recurring quandary for immigration authorities as an increasing number of American-born children of illegal immigrants become caught up in deportation operations. With the Bush administration stepping up enforcement, the immigration agency has been left scrambling to devise procedures to deal with children who, by law, do not fall under its jurisdiction because they are citizens.

“We are faced with these sorts of situations frequently, where a large number of individuals come illegally or overstay and have children in the United States,” said Kelly A. Nantel, a spokeswoman for the agency. “Unfortunately, the parents are putting their children in these difficult situations.”

Yesterday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement released new written guidelines for agents, establishing how they should treat single parents, pregnant women, nursing mothers and other immigrants with special child or family care responsibilities who are arrested in raids.

The guidelines, which codify practices in use for several months and apply mainly to larger raids, instruct agents to coordinate with federal and local health service agencies to screen immigrants who are arrested to determine if they are caring for young children or other dependents who may be at risk. The agents must consider recommendations from social workers who interview detained immigrants about whether they should be released to their families while awaiting deportation.

The new guidelines were a response to intense criticism from officials in Massachusetts about one raid, at a backpack factory in New Bedford in March. They do not specifically address the American citizen children affected by raids, whose numbers have only become clear in recent months.

About two-thirds of the children of the illegal immigrants detained in immigration raids in the past year were born in the United States, according to a study by the National Council of La Raza and the Urban Institute, groups that have pushed for gentler deportation policies for immigrant families.

Based on that finding, at least 13,000 American children have seen one or both parents deported in the past two years after round-ups in factories and neighborhoods. The figures are expected to grow. Over all, about 3.1 million American children have at least one parent who is an illegal immigrant, according to a widely accepted estimate by the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington.

Under the 14th Amendment, any child born in the United States is a citizen and cannot be deported. But with very rare exceptions, immigration law does not allow United States citizen children to confer legal status on parents who are illegal immigrants, until the children are 18 years old. While the federal government does not keep statistics on the children of deportees, immigration lawyers said that most immigrants who are deported take their children with them, even if the children are American citizens.

“Children have no rights to keep family members here because they are citizens,” said Jacqueline Bhabha, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who specializes in citizenship law. When parents face deportation, she said, the law “penalizes United States citizen children by forcing them to choose between their family and their country.”

Ms. Umanzor, 26, was arrested in her home on Maple Street in Conneaut, Ohio, on Oct. 26 and was released 11 days later on orders of Julie L. Myers, the head of the immigration agency. While in detention, Ms. Umanzor did not see her daughter Brittney, who had been fed only breast milk before her mother’s arrest. Ms. Umanzor remains under house arrest with Brittney and her two other children in Conneaut, 70 miles east of Cleveland, under an order for deportation. Her lawyer, David W. Leopold, has asked that her deportation be delayed on humanitarian grounds.

Ms. Umanzor had been at home with two of her three children, both American citizens, when the immigration agents arrived, along with a county police officer carrying a criminal warrant for a brother-in-law of Ms. Umanzor who also lived in the house.

As the agents searched, Ms. Umanzor breast-fed her jittery baby, she recalled in an interview after her release.

The baby was born in January in Oregon, where Ms. Umanzor’s husband, also Honduran and an illegal immigrant, was working in a saw mill.

Through a quick records check during the raid, the immigration agents discovered a July 2006 order of deportation for Ms. Umanzor, who had failed to appear for a court date after she was caught crossing a Texas border river illegally.

The agents detained her as a fugitive. She was forced to leave both Brittney and the other American daughter, Alexandra, who is 3, since the agents could not detain them.

“Just thinking that I was going to leave my little girl, I began to feel sick,” Ms. Umanzor said of the baby. “I had a pain in my heart.”

Ms. Umanzor turned over her daughters to social workers from the Ashtabula County Children Services Board, who had been summoned by the immigration authorities. In all, the social workers took in six children who lived in the Maple Street house, including Ms. Umanzor’s oldest child, a son born in Honduras. They also included three children of Ms. Umanzor’s sister, an illegal immigrant who was at work that day. Four of the children were born in the United States.

In jail and with her nursing abruptly halted, Ms. Umanzor’s breasts become painfully engorged. With the help of Veronica Dahlberg, director of a Hispanic women’s group in Ashtabula County, a breast pump was delivered on her third day in jail. Brittney, meanwhile, did not eat for three days, refusing to take formula from a bottle, Ms. Dahlberg said.

After four days, the county released all six children to Ms. Umanzor’s sister, who managed to wean Brittney to a bottle.

On Nov. 7, after two dozen women’s health advocates and researchers sent a letter protesting Ms. Umanzor’s detention, Ms. Myers issued a memorandum instructing field officers “to exercise discretion” during arrests by releasing nursing mothers from detention unless they presented a national security or public safety risk.

In cases where the breast-feeding children were United States citizens and entitled to public services, Ms. Myers urged the officers to seek assistance from social agencies to “maintain the unity of the mother and child.”

In their study, released this month, La Raza, a national Hispanic organization, and the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington, examined three factory raids in the past year, in Greeley, Colo.; Grand Island, Neb.; and New Bedford. A total of 912 adults arrested in the raids had 506 children among them, three-quarters of whom were under 10 years old. About 340 of those children were born in the United States.

The study found that the children faced economic hardship after one or both of their bread-winning parents were detained or deported. Many families hid for days or longer in their homes, sometimes retreating to basements, the study reported. Although many children showed symptoms of emotional distress, family members were reluctant to seek public assistance for them, even if the children were citizens, fearing new arrests of relatives who were illegal immigrants.

Groups advocating curbs on immigration say that children of illegal immigrants cannot be spared the consequences of their parents’ legal violations just because they are American citizens.

“Children are not human shields,” said Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform. “Nobody wants to hurt anybody’s kids. But any time parents break the law, it has an impact on their children.”

Joseph Hammell, a lawyer from the Minnesota firm of Dorsey & Whitney who is conducting a separate legal survey of recent raids for the Urban Institute, noted that the authorities were guided by immigration law, which includes few of the protections for citizen children that are basic in family and criminal courts.

“In the context of immigration and deportation proceedings,” Mr. Hammell said, “we are completely out of step with our societal values of protecting the best interests of our children.”

Ms. Nantel, the immigration agency spokeswoman, said the primary responsibility for the plight of the American children of illegal immigrants rests with parents who violated the law. “It’s a challenging situation” for the agency, Ms. Nantel said. “It’s unfortunate that children are impacted negatively by the decisions of their parents.”

Look at the this interactive map: TO SEE MAP CLICK HERE

Why would immigrants risk being separated from their families and come to America?

Well- regualted militia

2007-11-21T17:39:00.001-08:00

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

How do you interpret the second amendment?

Why is there such a dispute over gun ownership?

Immigrant Drivers

2007-11-16T16:10:00.000-08:00

Should undocumented immigrants be allowed to carry state drivers licenses?

What are the arguments for and against this policy?

How do the presidential candidates feel about this issue?

Is this a topic that presidential candidates should be debating about?

Mcain

2007-11-15T18:05:00.000-08:00

What qualities are we looking for in a presidential candidate?

What is the importance of primaries?

What would be the one question you would ask the all the candidates that would help you make a decision as who you would vote for as president?

Depleated Uraniumn

2007-11-12T04:18:00.001-08:00

What issues does the documentary Poison Dust concentrate on? What point of view does the director have? What evidence is presented? What further questions might you have for the director? Was the documentary compelling? What is surprising about their website?

Veterans for Peace

2007-11-08T03:00:00.000-08:00

Veterans for Peace

Today in class we were honored to have to members of the Veterans for Peace organization join us about their experience in the military. Ms Groebner contacted the non-partisan speakers to share their experiences and choices they made during the 1960’s while the country was recruiting soldiers during our armed conflict in Vietnam.

Their message was simple. They cautioned our graduating seniors against the dangers of racism that had been instilled in them during basic training and spoke about the danger of not having an action plan after graduation from high school.

Compare what you heard in class to what we are reading about in class. What does it mean to be courageous.? What does it mean to be a patriot?

CLINTON Says Some G.I.'s in Iraq Would Remain

2007-11-03T08:56:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON, March 14 — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton foresees a “remaining military as well as political mission” in Iraq, and says that if elected president, she would keep a reduced military force there to fight Al Qaeda, deter Iranian aggression, protect the Kurds and possibly support the Iraqi military.

The Times's Michael R. Gordon and Patrick Healy interviewed Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton Tuesday. Following are excerpts from that interview:

Audio: Senator Clinton on Iraq (mp3)

Transcript of Interview With Senator Clinton (March 15, 2007)

Iraq

This is the first in a series of interviews with the 2008 presidential candidates in both parties about how they would handle the issues they would confront as president. Future articles will look at the positions of the other candidates on Iraq and on other national security and domestic policy matters.

In a half-hour interview on Tuesday in her Senate office, Mrs. Clinton said the scaled-down American military force that she would maintain would stay off the streets in Baghdad and would no longer try to protect Iraqis from sectarian violence — even if it descended into ethnic cleansing.

In outlining how she would handle Iraq as commander in chief, Mrs. Clinton articulated a more nuanced position than the one she has provided at her campaign events, where she has backed the goal of “bringing the troops home.”

She said in the interview that there were “remaining vital national security interests in Iraq” that would require a continuing deployment of American troops.

The United States’ security would be undermined if parts of Iraq turned into a failed state “that serves as a petri dish for insurgents and Al Qaeda,” she said. “It is right in the heart of the oil region,” she said. “It is directly in opposition to our interests, to the interests of regimes, to Israel’s interests.”

“So it will be up to me to try to figure out how to protect those national security interests and continue to take our troops out of this urban warfare, which I think is a loser,” Mrs. Clinton added. She declined to estimate the number of American troops she would keep in Iraq, saying she would draw on the advice of military officers.

Mrs. Clinton’s plans carry some political risk. Although she has been extremely critical of the Bush administration’s handling of the war, some liberal Democrats are deeply suspicious of her intentions on Iraq, given that she voted in 2002 to authorize the use of force there and, unlike some of her rivals for the Democratic nomination, has not apologized for having done so.

Senator Clinton’s proposal is also likely to stir up debate among military specialists. Some counterinsurgency experts say the plan is unrealistic because Iraqis are unlikely to provide useful tips about Al Qaeda if American troops end their efforts to protect Iraqi neighborhoods.

But a former Pentagon official argued that such an approach would minimize American casualties and thus make it easier politically to sustain a long-term military presence that might prevent the fighting from spreading throughout the region.

Mrs. Clinton has said she would vote for a proposed Democratic resolution on Iraq now being debated on the floor of the Senate, which sets a goal of withdrawing combat forces by March 31, 2008. Asked if her plan was consistent with the resolution, Mrs. Clinton and her advisers said it was, noting that the resolution also called for “a limited number” of troops to stay in Iraq to protect the American Embassy and other personnel, train and equip Iraqi forces, and conduct “targeted counterterrorism operations.”

(Senator Barack Obama, a rival of Mrs. Clinton, has said that if elected president, he might keep a small number of troops in Iraq.)

With many Democratic primary voters favoring a total withdrawal, Senator Clinton appears to be trying to balance her political interests with the need to retain some flexibility. Like other Democratic candidates, she has called for engaging Iran and Syria in talks and called on President Bush to reverse his troop buildup.

But while Mrs. Clinton has criticized Mr. Bush’s troop reinforcements as an escalation of war, she said in the interview, “We’re doing it, and it’s unlikely we can stop it.”

“I’m going to root for it if it has any chance of success,” she said of Mr. Bush’s plan, “but I think it’s more likely that the anti-American violence and sectarian violence just moves from place to place to place, like the old Whac a Mole. Clear some neighborhoods in Baghdad, then face Ramadi. Clear Ramadi, then maybe it’s back in Falluja.”

Mrs. Clinton made it clear that she believed the next president is likely to face an Iraq that is still plagued by sectarian fighting and occupied by a sizable number of American troops. The likely problems, she said, include continued political disagreements in Baghdad, die-hard Sunni insurgents, Al Qaeda operatives, Turkish anxiety over the Kurds and the effort to “prevent Iran from crossing the border and having too much influence inside of Iraq.”

“The choices that one would face are neither good nor unlimited,” she said. “And from the vantage point of where I sit now, I can tell you, in the absence of a very vigorous diplomatic effort on the political front and on the regional and international front, I think it is unlikely there will be a stable situation that will be inherited.”

On the campaign trail, Mrs. Clinton has repeatedly vowed to bring the war to a close if the fighting were still going on when she took office as president. “If we in Congress don’t end this war before January 2009, as president, I will,” she has said.

In the interview, she suggested that it was likely that the fighting among the Iraqis would continue for some time. In broad terms, her strategy is to abandon the American military effort to stop the sectarian violence and to focus instead on trying to prevent the strife from spreading throughout the region by shrinking and rearranging American troop deployments within Iraq.

The idea of repositioning American forces to minimize American casualties, discourage Iranian, Syrian and Turkish intervention, and forestall the Kurds’ declaring independence is not a new one. It has been advocated by Dov S. Zakheim, who served as the Pentagon’s comptroller under former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. Mr. Zakheim has estimated that no more than 75,000 troops would be required, compared to the approximately 160,000 troops the United States will have in Iraq when the additional brigades in Mr. Bush’s plan are deployed.

While Mrs. Clinton declined to estimate the size of a residual American troop presence, she indicated that troops might be based north of Baghdad and in western Anbar Province.

“It would be far fewer troops,” she said. “But what we can do is to almost take a line sort of north of — between Baghdad and Kirkuk, and basically put our troops into that region, the ones that are going to remain for our antiterrorism mission, for our northern support mission, for our ability to respond to the Iranians, and to continue to provide support, if called for, for the Iraqis.”

Mrs. Clinton described a mission with serious constraints.

“We would not be doing patrols,” she added. “We would not be kicking in doors. We would not be trying to insert ourselves in the middle between the various Shiite and Sunni factions. I do not think that’s a smart or achievable mission for American forces.”

One question raised by counterinsurgency experts is whether the more limited military mission Mrs. Clinton is advocating would lead to a further escalation in the sectarian fighting, because it would shift the entire burden for protecting civilians to the nascent Iraqi Security Forces. A National Intelligence Estimate issued in January said those forces would be hard-pressed to take on significantly increased responsibilities in the next 12 to 18 months.

“Coalition capabilities, including force levels, resources and operations, remain an essential stabilizing element in Iraq,” the estimate noted, referring to the American-led forces.

Mrs. Clinton said the intelligence estimate was based on a “faulty premise” because it did not take into account the sort of “phased redeployment” plan she was advocating. But she acknowledged that under her strategy American troops would remain virtual bystanders if Shiites and Sunnis killed each other in sectarian attacks. “That may be inevitable,” she said. “And it certainly may be the only way to concentrate the attention of the parties.”

Asked if Americans would endure having troops in Iraq who do nothing to stop sectarian attacks there, she replied: “Look, I think the American people are done with Iraq. I think they are at a point where, whether they thought it was a good idea or not, they have seen misjudgment and blunder after blunder, and their attitude is, What is this getting us? What is this doing for us?”

“No one wants to sit by and see mass killing,” she added. “It’s going on every day! Thousands of people are dying every month in Iraq. Our presence there is not stopping it. And there is no potential opportunity I can imagine where it could. This is an Iraqi problem; we cannot save the Iraqis from themselves. If we had a different attitude going in there, if we had stopped the looting immediately, if we had asserted our authority — you can go down the lines, if, if, if — ”

Questions from class:

1. What is Hillary Clinton's position on troop deployment in Iraq?
2. Will this be a voting issue for the next election?
3. What should be our next step in Iraq?

Lower Standards for our Military

2007-10-29T09:08:00.000-07:00

How will the recruiting practices of the US Army effect the overall condition of our military?

Why are less High School Grads joining the military?

How can recruiters attract more High School Grads?

Check out Article here!

Homeless vets, from Vietnam to Iraq

2007-10-24T15:47:00.001-07:00

Director’s note: When I Came Home is a documentary which follows the lives and struggles of several homeless veterans, including those who have recently returned home from the war in Iraq. The film examines the factors which led over 150,000 Vietnam veterans from the battlefield to the street and asks the question: Will what happened to Vietnam veterans happen to a new generation of soldiers? The film also focuses on the veteran-led movement which is fighting to end this national disgrace.

When I Came Home is a work-in-progress. Follow the making of the film on director Dan Lohaus’ GNN blog.

School Policy

2007-10-23T15:09:00.000-07:00

PORTLAND, Me., Oct. 19 — Carissa Porcaro, a student at King Middle School here, did not hide her feelings about the Portland school board’s decision to let the independently operated clinic at her school provide girls access to prescription contraceptives.

Wearing a sticker with the words “I’m against giving out birth control” written in black marker, Carissa, 13, said she did not think the school should make the drugs available. Her mother disagrees.

“She thinks it’s really good,” Carissa said after school on Friday. “I think it’s stupid because what people are saying is that it’s O.K. to be sexually active.”

Two days after the school committee voted 7 to 2 in favor of adding prescription contraceptives to the services offered at the health clinic, the issue continues to draw fervent support and ardent opposition in this city of 64,000, the largest in Maine.

“I think it’s a great idea,” said Cathleen Allen, whose son is enrolled at King. “Someone is finally advocating for these students to take care of themselves.”

Ms. Allen added, “It’s an eye-opener for all of us, but when you look at the facts, why not?”

Bishop Richard J. Malone of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland is calling on the school committee to rescind its decision, as have the state and city Republican Parties. The city party is also pushing a recall for members who voted in favor.

Nick McGee, the city’s Republican Party chairman, said of the policy, “It is an attack on the moral fabric of our community, and a black eye for our state.”

On Friday, John Coyne, chairman of the school committee and one of the two members who voted against the plan, said he wanted the panel to reconsider the program. Mr. Coyne said that parents should have the option to enroll their children in all aspects of the clinic except reproductive health treatment, and that parents should be made more aware of the state’s confidentiality laws.

“I still don’t feel comfortable with this,” Mr. Coyne said. “There’s no talk about the health issues and the possible long-term ill effects on these young ladies.”

The school’s clinic functions much like a physician’s office and has been offering condoms and testing for pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases since 2000. It also offers dental, mental health and basic care.

The clinics at Portland high schools have offered oral contraceptives for years, said Douglas S. Gardner, the city’s director of health and human services. Health officials decided to extend the policy to middle school after learning that 17 middle school students had become pregnant in the last four years, seven of them in the 2006-7 school year.

“These kids are far too young to be sexually active,” Mr. Gardner said. “You can’t argue that any differently. But there is a small group of kids, and thankfully it’s a small group, who are reporting that they are sexually active, and we need to do all we can to protect them.”

The Portland clinic is not the first in the country to offer such services. Four middle schools in Seattle offer reproductive health care through city-administered health centers, said James Apa, communications manager for Public Health-Seattle and King County. Clinics in six Baltimore middle schools offer access to oral contraceptives, said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, the city’s health commissioner, who said the program had helped to decrease teenage pregnancy rates.

Nationally, about a quarter of school-based clinics, most of them in high schools, provide some type of contraception, according to the National Assembly on School Based Health Care. Less than 1 percent of schools provide prescription contraception, said a spokeswoman for the organization, Divya Mohan, who said most were high schools. She declined to give the number of middle schools that provided prescription contraception.

Parents in Portland who want their children to have access to the clinic must sign a waiver each year that details the services it offers. Under state law, reproductive health, mental health and substance abuse issues are confidential between medical provider and patient, regardless of the patient’s age.

Of the 500 students at King, 135 have permission to use the clinic, said Principal Michael McCarthy. Of those, five students, all of whom were 14 or 15, reported being sexually active in the last school year. One became pregnant. King is the only one of the city’s three middle schools that has a health clinic.

Postpubescent girls will be able to gain access to prescription contraceptives only after undergoing counseling and being examined by a physician or nurse practitioner who can prescribe oral contraceptives, Mr. Gardner said. The clinic is likely to start prescribing contraceptives at the end of the year, officials said, after parents sign a new waiver.

Students will then be written a prescription for oral contraceptives or be given them at the clinic, depending on each student’s situation. For students who are written a prescription, the school will often try to find a financing source, such as the state’s Medicaid program.

Kitty Purington, whose daughter attends King, says she had mixed feelings about the decision to provide contraceptives to middle school students but thought it was the right one.

“It brings home the fact that my 13-year-old daughter has friends and people around her who are sexually active,” Ms. Purington said. “But at least it’s a good alternative in a not-so-good situation. No one is going to stand up and cheer that 12- and 13-year-olds are having sex, but it’s not anything new.”

How do the cities of Baltimore, Portland, Seattle and NYC differ in their policy in regards to matters of birth control?

Find policies of the cities, and compare to Maine's Middle School policy.

Brown v BOE

2007-10-21T04:38:00.001-07:00

What type of citizens did we wittiness in the class documentary?

How has the country changed since Brown v BOE?

How is QHST integrated?

Injured Iraq Vets Come Home to Poverty

2007-10-14T17:15:00.000-07:00

By BRIAN ROSS, DAVID SCOTT and MADDY SAUER
Oct. 14, 2004 --

Following inquiries by ABC News, the Pentagon has dropped plans to force a severely wounded U.S. soldier to repay his enlistment bonus after injuries had forced him out of the service.

Army Spc. Tyson Johnson III of Mobile, Ala., who lost a kidney in a mortar attack last year in Iraq, was still recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center when he received notice from the Pentagon's own collection agency that he owed more than $2,700 because he could not fulfill his full 36-month tour of duty.

Johnson said the Pentagon listed the bonus on his credit report as an unpaid government loan, making it impossible for him to rent an apartment or obtain credit cards.

"Oh man, I felt betrayed," Johnson said. "I felt, like, oh, my heart dropped."

Pentagon officials said they were unaware of the case until it was brought to their attention by ABC News. "Some faceless bureaucrat" was responsible for Johnson's predicament, said Gen. Franklin "Buster" Hagenbeck, a three-star general and the Army's deputy chief of staff for personnel.

"It's absolutely unacceptable. It's intolerable," said Hagenbeck. "I mean, I'm incredulous when I hear those kinds of things. I just can't believe that we allow that to happen. And we're not going to let it happen."

The Department of Defense and the Army intervened to have the collection action against Johnson stopped, said Hagenbeck.

"I was told today he's not going to have a nickel taken from him," he said. "And I will tell you that we'll keep a microscope on this one to see the outcome."
'Not So Good'
Hagenbeck also pledged to look into the cases of the other soldiers ABC News brought to the military's attention, including men who lost limbs and their former livelihoods after serving in Iraq.
"When you're in the military, they take good care of you," said the 23-year-old Johnson. "But now that I'm a vet, and, you know, I'm out of the military -- not so good. Not so good."

Johnson had been flying high last September, after being promoted from Army private first class to specialist in a field ceremony in Iraq. Inspired by his father's naval background to join the military after high school, Tyson planned a career in the military and the promotion was just the first step. But only a week after the ceremony took place, a mortar round exploding outside his tent brought him quickly back to Earth.

"It was like warm water running down my arms," he said. "But it was warm blood."

In addition to the lost kidney, shrapnel damaged Johnson's lung and heart, and entered the back of his head. Field medical reports said he was not expected to live more than 72 hours.

With the help of exceptional Army surgeons, Johnson survived. As he recuperated, however, Johnson faced perhaps an even greater obstacle than physical pain or injuries -- the military bureaucracy.

Part of the warrior ethos, the soldier's creed of the U.S. Army, is to "never leave a fallen comrade."

"And it doesn't just pertain to the battlefield," Hagenbeck said. "It means, when we get them home they're a part of the Army family forever."

But Johnson now lives in his car. It is where he spends most of his days, all of his nights, in constant pain from his injuries and unwilling to burden his family.

Better Off Dead?

Stories like Tyson Johnson's are not unique.

Many of the severely wounded soldiers returning from Iraq face the prospect of poverty and what they describe as official indifference and incompetence.

"Guys I've met, talking to people, they'd be better off financially for their families if they had died as opposed to coming back maimed," said Staff Sgt. Ryan Kelly, who served as a civil affairs specialist for the Army while in Iraq.

On July 14, 2003, the Abilene, Texas, native had been on his way to a meeting about rebuilding schools in Iraq when his unarmored Humvee was blown up. A piece of shrapnel the size of a TV remote took his right leg off, below the knee, almost completely, Kelly said.

Kelly attests to receiving excellent medical care at Ward 57, the amputee section of Walter Reed, but said he quickly realized that the military had no real plan for the injured soldiers. Many had to borrow money or depend on charities just to have relatives visit at Walter Reed, Kelly said.

"It's not what I expected to see when I got here," he said. "These guys having to, you know, basically panhandle for money to afford things."

No Answer

Perhaps as a sign of the grim outlook facing many of these wounded soldiers, Staff Sgt. Peter Damon, a National Guardsman from Brockton, Mass., said he is grateful for being a double amputee.

"Well, in a way, I'm kind of lucky losing both arms because I've been told I'll probably get 100 percent disability," he said.

Damon, a mechanic and electrician, lost both arms in an explosion as he was repairing a helicopter in Iraq. He initially woke up in the hospital worried and anxious to learn that both forms of livelihood were taken away from him.

"Now what am I doing to do?" Damon said, faced with the prospect of supporting his wife, Jennifer, and two children. "I can't do either, none of those, with no hands."

The military fails to provide a lump sum payment for such catastrophic injuries. And Damon still has not heard from the military about what they plan to give in terms of monthly disability payments.

The last time Damon asked about the payments, he was told by the military that his paperwork had been lost.

"And then when I went to go back to inquire about it again, just to ask a question, I just wanted to see if they had found my paperwork, I was told I had to make an appointment and to come back five days later," he said.

A thick book of federal regulations specifies the disability rate based on how many limbs were amputated and precisely where.

The percentage rates were set during World War II.

Jennifer Damon said the shock of her husband returning with no arms has been replaced by the fear of destitution, as well as a frustration over her husband's final discharge. Like his disability benefits, Peter's release is being held up by the lost paperwork and unanswered phone calls.

"It's hard to understand," she said. "I mean, I need him more than they need him right now. It's been a long time. You've had him for a long time. I want him back."

A Failing System?

Staff Sgt. Larry Gill, a National Guardsman from Semmes, Ala., wonders whether his 20 dutiful years of military service have been adequately rewarded.

Last October, Gill injured his left leg when on patrol during a protest outside a mosque in Baghdad. A protester threw a hand grenade which left Gill, a former policeman, with leg intact, though useless. He received a Purple Heart from the military, but no program, plan or proposal of how to make a living in civilian life.

"It's not fair, and I'm not complaining," Gill said. "I'm not whining about it. You know, I just, I just don't think people really understand what we're being faced with.

Gill expects he will have to sell his home, the dream house he and his wife, Leah, designed and built, where they raised their children.

"I've never questioned my orders," he said. "I've slept with rats and stood in the rain and wondered why I was standing in the rain, and, you know, for my children to have to do without based on a lack of income from me, it's frustrating."

Leah Gill agreed. "I just don't feel we should have to uproot because of an injury that he received while he was serving the country," she said. "It shouldn't come down to that."

Gill and the others in Ward 57 have had their pictures taken frequently with visiting politicians.
"Where are the politicians? Where are the generals?" he asked. "Where are the people that are supposed to take care of me?"

Help and care will be forthcoming, promised Hagenbeck.

"There in fact was a plan," he said. "But again, it was not integrated in a seamless fashion that it needed to be. And that was not even, really, to be honest with you, recognized probably until sometime about a year ago. And these soldiers actually brought it to our attention about the transition problems."

The military would do a better job of taking care of their own, Hagenbeck said, though the system in place was often unwieldy, outdated and inadequate.

"Oh, there absolutely has been problems in the past," Hagenbeck said. "And they're in -- even with some of our soldiers today. Some missteps have been made. And they have not been taken care of the way they should have been taken care of."

Loyal Soldiers

help these neglected soldiers, Hagenbeck said, the military created an advocacy program this past April called Disabled Soldier Support System, or DS3. The network is set up to fight for a soldier's benefits and entitlements, ease transition to civilian life, and deal with any other problems facing a disabled soldier, according to Hagenbeck.

But still there are soldiers like Johnson who fall through the cracks.

His mother, Willie Jean Johnson, worries her son may hurt himself.

"He's not going to say anything bad about the Army," she said. "I have never heard him say anything bad about it. But you can see the hurt in his eyes. You can see the hurt from his heart in his eyes."

Johnson said he usually keeps to himself, preferring to protect his son from seeing him in his current state. "I'd rather be to myself than to flare at somebody else and, you know, and hurt someone that I know I really love," he said.

One year after nearly being killed in combat, the Pentagon has yet to send Johnson his Purple Heart medal.

The Pentagon collection notices, however, arrive without fail.

As to Kelly's discovery that he and his wounded comrades had to beg and borrow to pay for their loved ones to visit while they recuperate, Hagenbeck said a new policy went into effect this weekend to alleviate part of the problem.

"There was no system in place to support them in their needs. And I'll be honest with you, until it came to our attention, to people that were paying attention, and then those that wanted to help, that obstacle was there," Hagenbeck said.

Incredibly, these soldiers remain dedicated to the military despite all they have endured.

"Even though the way I'm being treated, you know, as a vet, I'd still go back in," Johnson said. "I would."

"I love being a soldier," Kelly said. "I don't regret what happened. If I had to go back to Iraq knowing that there was that chance of losing my leg, I'd do it. Because that's what the nation asked me to do."

Jessica Wang contributed to this report.

Update:
Following the airing of this report on PrimeTime Live, Congressman John Dingell (D-MI), a former infantryman, wrote a letter to the Pentagon demanding a progress report on the recently implemented Disabled Soldier Support System and further assurance that all wounded and disabled vets would be financially and otherwise assisted in making the transition to civilian life. "I am astonished by this story and disappointed," Dingell wrote, "that we are failing to fulfill our nation's duty to care for our injured veterans."

How might the Justice Oriented citizen react to such an article? How might a participatory citizen react? What are you going to do with this information?

Suggestions

2007-10-13T12:16:00.000-07:00

What do we do from here?

Slavery Lesson

2007-10-06T06:44:00.000-07:00

http://wcbstv.com/local/slavery.slave.labor.2.312697.html

CALDWELL, N.J. (CBS) ―
Two local middle school teachers are in hot water after assigning students a controversial project on slavery that's angered parents.

Over 100 sixth graders at Grover Cleveland Middle School in Caldwell spent several days last week taking part in an assignment where they used terms like "build a plantation" while completing their "Lap of Luxury" social studies project.

The project instructed students to create an advertisement defending the use of slave labor to run a newly built plantation in South Carolina. Students are told to come up with a '"catchy" name for the plantation and give three reasons why slave labor is the "best idea" and to add illustrations.

One student, who is not being identified because of his age, read to CBS 2 what he wrote for the assignment: "Slave labor is the way to go because slaves aren't paid, so all money is profit."
Parents are astonished by the assignment's nature.

"It's really offending," said Tyiesha Hameed, whose child is one of the only eight black students who attends the school. "There's so many other ways and tools to show our kids how to learn and teach them in reference to slavery."

One question parents and officials are asking is whether the 11- and 12-year-olds even understand the lesson which was given to them.

"The students have to use their creative spirits to create justification. That gets the mind pretty worked up, and it embeds some things in their process that will be there for forever," said James Harris, president of the New Jersey NAACP chapter.

Casey Shorter, the school's principal, said he didn't find out about the project until after he spoke with a concerned parent. "Our intent was not to be insensitive. After reviewing the assignment and listening to feedback, from an administrative and teaching perspective, we determined it was insensitive and inappropriate. And we will eliminate it from the curriculum," he said.

Citing privacy issues, Shorter would not say what he's done with Dana Howarth and Beth Rutzler, the two language arts teachers who created the controversial "Lap of Luxury" project. He adds this is actually the second year that the teachers have given the assignment.

Report Says Firm Sought to Cover Up Iraq Shootings

2007-10-03T06:39:00.000-07:00

By JOHN M. BRODER
WASHINGTON, Oct. 1 — Employees of Blackwater USA have engaged in nearly 200 shootings in Iraq since 2005, in a vast majority of cases firing their weapons from moving vehicles without stopping to count the dead or assist the wounded, according to a new report from Congress.
In at least two cases, Blackwater paid victims’ family members who complained, and sought to cover up other episodes, the Congressional report said. It said State Department officials approved the payments in the hope of keeping the shootings quiet. In one case last year, the department helped Blackwater spirit an employee out of Iraq less than 36 hours after the employee, while drunk, killed a bodyguard for one of Iraq’s two vice presidents on Christmas Eve.

The report by the Democratic majority staff of a House committee adds weight to complaints from Iraqi officials, American military officers and Blackwater’s competitors that company guards have taken an aggressive, trigger-happy approach to their work and have repeatedly acted with reckless disregard for Iraqi life.

But the report is also harshly critical of the State Department for exercising virtually no restraint or supervision of the private security company’s 861 employees in Iraq. “There is no evidence in the documents that the committee has reviewed that the State Department sought to restrain Blackwater’s actions, raised concerns about the number of shooting episodes involving Blackwater or the company’s high rate of shooting first, or detained Blackwater contractors for investigation,” the report states.

On Sept. 16, Blackwater employees were involved in a shooting in a Baghdad square that left at least eight Iraqis dead, an episode that remains clouded. The shooting set off outrage among Iraqi officials, who branded them “cold-blooded murder” and demanded that the company be removed from the country.

The State Department is conducting three separate investigations of the shooting, and on Monday the F.B.I. said it was sending a team to Baghdad to compile evidence for possible criminal prosecution.

Neither the State Department nor Blackwater would comment on Monday about the 15-page report, but both said their representatives would address it on Tuesday in testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, whose Democratic staff produced the document. Based on 437 internal Blackwater incident reports as well as internal State Department correspondence, the report said Blackwater’s use of force was “frequent and extensive, resulting in significant casualties and property damage.”

Among those scheduled to testify Tuesday are Erik Prince, a press-shy former Navy Seal who founded Blackwater a decade ago, and several top State Department officials.

The committee report places a significant share of the blame for Blackwater’s record in Iraq on the State Department, which has paid Blackwater more than $832 million for security services in Iraq and elsewhere, under a diplomatic security contract it shares with two other companies, DynCorp International and Triple Canopy.

Blackwater has reported more shootings than the other two companies combined, but it also currently has twice as many employees in Iraq as the other two companies combined.

In the case of the Christmas Eve killing, the report says that an official of the United States Embassy in Iraq suggested paying the slain bodyguard’s family $250,000, but a lower-ranking official said that such a high payment “could cause incidents with people trying to get killed by our guys to financially guarantee their family’s future.” Blackwater ultimately paid the dead man’s family $15,000.

In another fatal shooting cited by the committee, an unidentified State Department official in Baghdad urged Blackwater to pay the victim’s family $5,000. The official wrote, “I hope we can put this unfortunate matter behind us quickly.”

The committee report also cited three other shootings in which Blackwater officials filed misleading reports or otherwise tried to cover up the shootings.

Since mid-2006, Blackwater has been responsible for guarding American diplomats in and around Baghdad, while DynCorp has been responsible for the northern part of the country and Triple Canopy for the south.

State Department officials said last week that Blackwater had run more than 1,800 escort convoys for American diplomats and other senior civilians this year and its employees had discharged their weapons 57 times. Blackwater was involved in 195 instances of gunfire from 2005 until early September, a rate of 1.4 shootings a week, the report says. In 163 of those cases, Blackwater gunmen fired first.

The report also says Blackwater gunmen engaged in offensive operations alongside uniformed American military personnel in violation of their State Department contract, which states that Blackwater guards are to use their weapons only for defensive purposes.

It notes that Blackwater’s contract authorizes its employees to use lethal force only to prevent “imminent and grave danger” to themselves or to the people they are paid to protect. “In practice, however,” the report says, “the vast majority of Blackwater weapons discharges are pre-emptive, with Blackwater forces firing first at a vehicle or suspicious individual prior to receiving any fire.”

The report cites two instances in which Blackwater gunmen engaged in tactical military operations. One was a firefight in Najaf in 2004 during which Blackwater employees set up a machine gun alongside American and Spanish forces. Later that year, a Blackwater helicopter helped an American military squad secure a mosque from which sniper fire had been detected.
Blackwater has dismissed 122 of its employees over the past three years for misuse of weapons, drug or alcohol abuse, lewd conduct or violent behavior, according to the report. It has also terminated workers for insubordination, failure to report incidents or lying about them, and publicly embarrassing the company. One employee was dismissed for showing signs of post-traumatic stress disorder.

The Senate on Monday gave final approval, 92 to 3, to a defense policy bill that included the establishment of an independent commission to investigate private contractors operating in Iraq and Afghanistan. The bill, which must be reconciled with a House version, faces a veto threat because it includes an expansion of federal hate-crimes laws.

Supreme Court Faces an Array of Divisive Cases

2007-09-30T16:10:00.000-07:00

By LINDA GREENHOUSE

WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 — The Supreme Court has so many polarizing cases on the docket for its new term that the deep ideological divisions that characterized the last term are all but certain to remain on display after the justices reconvene on Monday.

The conservative majority under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. drove the court to the right in a series of high-profile rulings during the term that ended in June. That performance, as well as a series of books and articles by and about justices, has placed the court in an unusually bright spotlight as the new term opens.

The conservative bloc will not necessarily prevail in every important case. For example, the Bush administration is clearly on the defensive as the court prepares to hear a third-round challenge to policies governing those held as enemy combatants at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

But the conservative justices clearly have the upper hand in the all-important task of shaping the court’s docket, a process that in effect shapes the country’s immediate legal agenda. They demonstrated their power last week in accepting 19 new cases, an unusually large number, including an employer’s appeal in a racial discrimination case that could provide a vehicle for limiting remedies available under one of the country’s oldest civil rights laws.

The question in the latest case involving the Guantánamo detentions is whether Congress properly stripped the federal courts of jurisdiction to hear challenges brought by the detainees. The justices had seemed willing to steer clear of the issue in April, when they declined to hear appeals from two groups of detainees.

But the day after the term ended, they reversed course and agreed to hear the cases, an action without modern precedent. Because the reconsideration required the votes of five justices, instead of the four ordinarily needed to grant a case, the development strongly suggested that a majority of the court retains concerns about the current regime for determining and challenging the detainees’ designation as enemy combatants. The Bush administration lost two earlier rounds at the court, in 2004 and 2006.

Among the new cases the justices granted last week was a challenge to a state law requiring voters to provide photo identification in order to cast a ballot, an issue that has divided legislators and judges along party lines throughout the country. Republicans generally stress the importance of preventing voter fraud, while Democrats view these increasingly popular measures as creating unwarranted barriers to voter access. Although the justices granted the case at the request of the Indiana Democratic Party and the American Civil Liberties Union, the action could well prove to be an example of “watch out what you wish for” if the result is to uphold the statute at issue and to encourage other states to follow Indiana’s lead.

The justices also took up a highly visible death penalty case, a challenge to the particular lethal injection method that is used in most states. While the validity of capital punishment, or even of lethal injection, is not at stake, the case will require the justices to take a position on the current meaning of the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. It is far from clear whether a majority of the justices will read the Constitution as mandating one chemical formulation versus another.

The discrimination case the justices granted on Tuesday, which has attracted almost no notice, could nonetheless produce an important shift in the court’s approach to interpreting statutes. The question is whether a law that bars racial discrimination in business dealings, including employment, also prohibits retaliation against those who complain about discrimination.

Ordinarily, the court grants cases only to resolve conflicting interpretations in the lower courts. But in this instance, every federal appeals court to consider the issue has agreed that the statute does apply to retaliation. For the court to grant a case in the absence of a lower-court conflict — as it did in the case decided in June that invalidated voluntary integration plans in two public school systems — is often an indication that the case has been added to the docket as a vehicle for advancing a particular agenda.

The federal law at issue in the new case was originally part of the Reconstruction-era Civil Rights Act of 1866. Known now as Section 1981, it does not mention “retaliation.” Neither do most other anti-discrimination laws. In the past, that has been no barrier to the court in finding that protection against retaliation is inherently part of protection against discrimination.

But support on the court for an approach that goes beyond the margins of the constitutional text has been shrinking. Two years ago, the court ruled by a vote of 5 to 4 that Title IX, a law that bars sex discrimination in schools, also covers retaliation. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote the majority opinion. It is likely that her successor, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., would have been among the dissenters.

Given that the new case, CBOCS West, Inc. v. Humphries, No. 06-1431, does not meet the court’s most important criterion for review, it is likely that a new majority granted it in order to cut off the retaliation claim and perhaps also to issue a broader ruling against finding rights that are not spelled out in statutes.

Here are details of other important cases for the new term.

Detainees

A year ago, in response to the court’s most recent ruling in favor of a Guantánamo detainee, the Republican-controlled Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, providing that “no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction” to consider a detainee’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus. Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who was then chairman of the Judiciary Committee, voted for the measure, but he has filed a brief telling the justices he believes it is unconstitutional.

The Constitution authorizes Congress to suspend the “privilege” of habeas corpus only at times of “rebellion or invasion.” Under the Supreme Court’s precedents, a suspension at other times may nonetheless be permissible as long as adequate alternate procedures exist for challenging a conviction or sentence. So the question in these cases, Boumediene v. Bush, No. 06-1195, and Al Odah v. United States, No. 06-1196, is whether the justices will deem the limited procedures available to the detainees to be adequate.

Voting Rights

Challengers to Indiana’s two-year-old voter identification law, which requires current government-issued photo ID, call it the “most onerous” such law in the country. Voters lacking the proper identification have 10 days to obtain it in order for their provisional ballots to be counted.

A federal appeals court upheld the law, finding that it would prevent fraud while not keeping many people from the polls. The plaintiffs maintain that the poor and elderly would face a disproportionate burden. The underlying question is how the justices will evaluate the competing interests of preventing fraud and protecting access. The cases are Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, No. 07-21, and Indiana Democratic Party v. Rokita, No. 07-25.

Criminal Law

The lethal injection case, Baze v. Rees, No. 07-5439, challenges the use of the most common three-drug lethal injection “cocktail,” which is conceded to place some inmates at risk of severe pain. The Kentucky Supreme Court concluded that the risk was not “substantial” enough to make the particular combination unconstitutional.

The question for the justices is what standard courts should use in evaluating the evidence from which to draw a conclusion on constitutionality, especially in light of evidence that pain can be avoided through a different combination of drugs and attention to a reliable level of anesthesia.

The court will also hear two more cases that address the question of judicial discretion in federal criminal sentencing. The question in Gall v. United States, No. 06-7949, is the justification a judge must provide in issuing a sentence that differs substantially from the one called for by the federal sentencing guidelines. Kimbrough v. United States, No. 06-6330, addresses judicial discretion to mitigate the harsh sentences required for offenses involving crack cocaine.

Federalism

The Texas courts have refused to accept a directive from President Bush to bypass procedural obstacles and grant a new hearing to a Mexican death-row inmate, following a 2004 World Court decision that the inmate’s rights under an international treaty were violated when he was not given the chance to meet with Mexican officials. The case, Medellín v. Texas, No. 06-984, presents unusual issues of state-federal relations.

Justices to Enter the Debate Over Lethal Injection

2007-09-28T08:11:00.000-07:00

By LINDA GREENHOUSE

WASHINGTON, Sept. 25 — The Supreme Court on Tuesday stepped into the debate over whether the most commonly used drug “cocktail” used to execute prisoners on death row is so likely to produce needless pain and suffering as to be unconstitutional.

The justices agreed to hear an appeal by two men on Kentucky’s death row who argue that the combination of three drugs amounts to cruel and unusual punishment, in violation of the Eighth Amendment.

The case, which comes at a time when challenges to lethal injections have effectively stopped executions in a growing number of states, will be argued in January or February and decided by early next summer. While it is pending, judges around the country are certain to be asked to bar executions in those states that are not already under an official or de facto moratorium.
In 2004, while the Supreme Court was considering an ultimately successful challenge to the execution of juvenile killers, judges blocked all such executions.

Of the 38 states with the death penalty, 37 use lethal injection — all except Nebraska, which still uses the electric chair. Lethal injection was adopted in the 1980s as a more palatable alternative to electrocution, but it has proven increasingly troublesome. Leading medical organizations have told their members not to participate, and lawyers for death-row inmates have produced evidence showing that in the absence of expert medical attention, there is a substantial risk of error in administering the combination of anesthesia and paralyzing drugs necessary to bring about a quick and painless death.

Litigation over the issue has brought executions to a halt in nine states: California, Delaware, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Tennessee, according to lawyers at the Death Penalty Clinic at the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California.

The issue in the case, Baze v. Rees, No. 07-5439, is not whether lethal injection, in the abstract, is constitutional or unconstitutional; the question is more specific and less conclusive than that. It is, rather, the standard by which courts are to evaluate the evidence that lethal injection, predictably and with some regularity, goes wrong: that a paralyzing drug can leave an inadequately anesthetized inmate with the ability to feel severe pain as another drug stops the heart, but without the ability to move or call for help.

There have been other problems with lethal injection as well. Four months ago, an execution in Ohio was delayed 90 minutes as medical workers struggled to find a vein in the prisoner’s arm into which they could insert the shunts to carry the intravenous lines.

Under the Supreme Court’s precedents on prison conditions, inadequate medical care is not deemed to violate the Eighth Amendment unless it is the product of “deliberate indifference.” Under the court’s death penalty precedents, a method of execution must not be “contrary to evolving standards of decency” and may not inflict “unnecessary pain.”

In rejecting the challenge to lethal injection last year, the Kentucky Supreme Court found that the method did not present a “substantial” risk of pain and suffering, and so met these constitutional standards. “The prohibition is against cruel punishment and does not require a complete absence of pain,” the state court said.

In their appeal, the two inmates, Ralph Baze and Thomas C. Bowling, represented by the Kentucky Public Advocate’s office, said the Kentucky court failed to consider that the risk of pain was “unnecessary,” in that alternative methods of lethal injection could eliminate the chance that inmates would remain conscious but paralyzed. They urge the justices to incorporate “unnecessary risk” into the standard for evaluating lethal injection.

The three chemicals used for lethal injections are sodium thiopental, which renders a person unconscious; followed by Pavulon, which paralyzes the muscles, including those that control breathing; followed by potassium chloride, which causes cardiac arrest. Lawyers have argued that the second drug could be eliminated and that a less painful drug could be substituted for the third.

The Kentucky attorney general’s office, in urging the justices to turn down the appeal, argued that the fact that the three chemicals were so widely used demonstrated that the protocol was acceptable. “Condemned inmates will never run out of ideas for changes to the procedures, drugs or equipment used during lethal injection,” the state said, warning that the Supreme Court would go “down an endless road of litigation” if it accepted the case.

The two inmates were convicted of separate, unrelated crimes: Mr. Baze for killing a sheriff and deputy sheriff who were trying to serve him with a warrant, and Mr. Bowling for killing a couple whose car he had damaged in a parking lot.

In two earlier cases on lethal injection, the Supreme Court removed procedural obstacles to bringing such cases but did not deal directly with the constitutionality of the method. But those two rulings led to an explosion of litigation.

The only time the court ever ruled directly on a method of execution was in 1878, when it upheld the use of the firing squad. In 1999, the justices agreed to hear a challenge to Florida’s use of the electric chair, but the state substituted lethal injection for electrocution before the case could be decided.

In 1972, the court struck down all existing death penalty statutes, but in 1976 allowed executions to resume under newly written laws that gave jurors more precise guidance in an effort to make death sentences less arbitrary. There have been 1,097 executions since then, with Texas accounting for 403. There have been 40 executions this year, 24 of them in Texas.

Here's the latest update!

Black Youth, Conviction in Beating Voided, Will Stay Jailed

2007-09-24T03:12:00.000-07:00

By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 21 — A court in the central Louisiana town of Jena denied on Friday a request that one of six black teenagers arrested in the beating of a white youth be released from jail.

The ruling came one day after thousands of demonstrators marched through the town to protest law enforcement’s treatment of the defendants.

The decision involved Mychal Bell, 17, the only one of the six yet to stand trial. Mr. Bell was convicted of aggravated second-degree battery this summer, but the conviction was thrown out last week by a Louisiana appeals court, which ruled that he had been mistakenly tried as an adult.

In a closed juvenile court hearing on Friday, Mr. Bell’s lawyers sought to get him released while the local district attorney appeals last week’s ruling.

Citing juvenile court confidentiality rules, Mr. Bell’s lawyer, Lewis Scott, declined to say what had occurred at the hearing, as did an assistant to Judge J. P. Mauffray Jr.

But Darrell Hickman, a lawyer for another of the accused, was at the courthouse in Jena on Friday and confirmed that the judge had refused to free Mr. Bell. “It’s frustrating, that’s what it is,” Mr. Hickman said.

Mr. Hickman said he did not know why the judge was keeping Mr. Bell in jail. In addition to the beating, in which the white youth, Justin Barker, was knocked unconscious and kicked, Mr. Bell has a criminal record that includes arrests for battery and property damage. And another lawyer in the case said Mr. Barker faced medical bills totaling $14,000 as a result of the attack.

The protests in the case have centered on the fact that all but one of the defendants were originally charged with attempted second-degree murder, though those charges were later reduced.

While Mr. Bell remained in jail, a white teenager found himself newly in trouble. On Thursday the police in Alexandria, La., near Jena, arrested that youth, Jeremiah Munsen, 18, after they found hangman’s nooses draped from the back of his pickup truck while he drove near a crowd of people who had taken part in the protest at Jena earlier in the day.

Mr. Munsen was charged with inciting a riot and driving while intoxicated, The Associated Press reported.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gZLLBBDfbQ

orielly on Jena

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpsp5onTJR8

Cnn

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ok5p6iDz-eY

Bush 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsiPfWU4LyQ

Bush part 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=982-4AoFl5o

NBC NEWS

Watch all the videos.

How are they different?
What does the public have to say about this event?
How does the article distributed in class differ from the videos?
What really happened?
Which of the above video clips seems to be the most accurate?

Where do we get our news from?

TASERED

2007-09-20T19:58:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Swg4E2FzTzE
democracynow.org

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkjyKDtbCcI
cnn

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JHfW1zDMSQ
first advocate

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Awxc6Yq7YJc

dennis miller

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HikH0jjp6s

bill oreilly

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QTr-UPpqfA

hardball

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_IexfMaDXc
wolf biltzer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QnEs7QOYE0
last advocate

Watch all the videos.

How are they different?
What does the public have to say about this event?
How does the article distributed in class differ from the videos?
What really happened?
Which of the above video clips seems to be the most accurate?

Where do we get our news from?

How are individuals supposed to express anger at the elected officials?

Our Leader.

2007-09-17T02:50:00.000-07:00

Mr. Bush shared with the nation his interpretation of General Petraus' report. What seemed to be the focus of his speech? What is something that you agree with that the president said? What question would you have for the president after hearing this speech? Has this speech changed your mind or re assured you of our current position in Iraq?

Cell Phone Ban

2007-09-14T05:08:00.000-07:00

Who has juristiction over the school discipline code?

Are students "rights" being violated?

How can rules and laws be changed?

Read article here.

Many Wives

2007-09-10T18:32:00.001-07:00

Should we always be judged by our peers? What seems to be the issue int he polygamy case? Does Warren Jeff have a right to practice his religion?

Article here

9/11 Illness

2007-09-06T17:26:00.000-07:00

After reading Illness Persisting in 9/11 Workers, Big Study Finds write a brief reflection. How has money played a role in the care of 9/11 cleanup victims? Who is at fault for the illness? What changes in finance need to be made to correct the problem? Is health care a federal, city or individual responsibility?

If you would like to read a follow up article just published on the Times website before you write click here.

Stanley also linked a more controversial article on the same topic from the NY POST.

Senior Class 2008

2007-09-04T17:37:00.000-07:00

Your first assignment:

After reading the article Bringing School to the Information Age (hyperlinked here) browse through the previous postings and comments on this blog.

Is this format and classroom structure suitable to your learning style?

What benefits can this format present to a classroom?

What drawbacks do you foresee?