Children’s Defense Fund: “Number of black children in extreme poverty hits record high; tax cuts for the rich will erode safety nets for children even further.” Read the .pdf of the full report here.

“During this crisis patriotism as practiced in the United States reached alarming levels of intolerance and violence. The right of the other to dissent was unceremoniously thrown aside. If we take what happened to the Dixie Chicks as an example, one is hard-pressed to justify or even comprehend the incident. One of the ladies said she was ashamed of Bush being from her home state of Texas. She said it while performing on a stage in London. Had the Chicks been living under Saddam, we know a priori what would have happened. But knowing they lived in the United States one thought that the debate would have maintained a semblance of civility.

Instead, they were attacked, taken off radio stations, and callers to the same stations spewed so much venom that it inevitably culminated in on-the-air death threats. Obviously, democracy is skin deep. I thought it was just foreigners like me who received death threats and viruses through their emails. I was wrong. This raises another issue: Could the Homeland security people tell the world why such people were not apprehended? Those who threaten to kill someone for reasons of ideology or a point of view are terrorists. No argument there. In this time of high security alert, it is amazing that such people get away with it. In all honesty, it is not very different from any petty dictatorship where the party clique and those close to power can do what they like when the rest are robbed of their basic rights.” — Mohammed al-Rasheed, Arab News (Saudi Arabia)

Unicast introduces screen-filling online ad format designed to open between same-site page views. Ad Age

Play it online for endless hours of fun.

Terrible name, intriguing idea — ride your bicycle on the water with an ‘inflatable bicycle boat’ that fits in a backpack, weighs 25 lbs., and installs in 10-15 minutes, allowing you to clock 6 mph in the water. It basiclly consists of two inflatable pontoons and a propeller-rudder assembly operated by the bicycle’s steering and pedals. The floats inflate with pedal power.

It is proposed by a British psychiatrist in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease (Maltby J, Houran J, McCutcheon LE.: A clinical interpretation of attitudes and behaviors associated with celebrity worship. J Nerv Ment Dis. 2003 Jan;191(1):25-9) that excessive worship of celebrities be afforded disease status in its own right.AlterNet Unsurprisingly, he attributes this trend to the dominance of media culture and the breakdown of family structure in modern society. I would just point out, hater of proliferating idiosyncratic diagnostic categories that I am, that there are a number of existing psychiatric diagnoses of which this would more properly be considered a subset — in cases where it deserves being called psychopathology rather than a societal problem at all.

Flag-O-Rama!:

Before you send me hate mail: I am proud of my country and the freedoms I enjoy. However, ever since the terrorist acts of 9/11, I’m seeing the American Flag being marketed to consumers in every possible way, on every possible item. Bumper stickers, decals, commemorative plates, t-shirts, car antennas, screensavers, e-mails, billboards, grocery bags, toys…the list is endless, and they bear the flag for no other reason than to make money and prey on our patriotic spirit. The Marketing Scum know that consumers are quick to embrace trends, especially if it makes them feel better about themselves, and so it’s no wonder that the flag is being slapped on everything imaginable. (People seem to think that waving a flag makes them better Americans. It doesn’t. Patriotism is more a matter of community than a matter of how many and how high we wave our flags.) So before you send me hate mail for this page, consider sending hate mail instead to those companies who exploit the U.S. Flag to fatten their bank accounts. This site is a satire of this kind of exploitation, and I hope you can appreciate the humor. If not, then there are plenty of other sites out there to look at!

Reactor experts around the country hope that there is something unique about Reactor No. 1 at the South Texas Project here. If not, the little crust of white powder that technicians found at the bottom of the reactor vessel, a discovery that has brought operations here to a halt for the indefinite future, could be the beginning of a broad problem for the nuclear power industry. NY Times

Not to mention anyone living in the vicinity of one of these plants.

Chad Barlow, in his impassioned support of war [Some War Is Necessary, February 14], repeats the myth that peace activists “SPAT ON our soldiers returning from Vietnam.” It’s a great story, but like many right-wing myths (e.g., the story of feminists burning bras), it is simply not true.

Jerry Lembcke, an associate professor of sociology at Holy Cross College, did an exhaustive search in the process of writing his 1998 book, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam. He found not a single case of a returning Vietnam veteran spat upon by antiwar activists. The relation between Vietnam veterans and the peace movement was generally good, since the antiwar people saw the mostly working class vets as just as much victims of the war machine as the Vietnamese peasants. We should remember that in that war, as many as 550,000 GIs went AWOL or deserted. A Harris Poll in 1971 showed that only 1% of the veterans encountered hostile reactions when they came home, and they did not think the antiwar movement was hostile to them.

The Voice News,

Winsted CT [via Bifurcated Rivets]

“Iranian Sina Motallebi has been held by the authorities on, so far, unspecified charges and now fellow web users are banding together to press for his release.” BBC. Here’s the petition.

“In 1952, a Roundup grocery store closed their doors because of a death in the family and was never opened until a few months ago… Over 50 years have passed! Everything was left, including all the memorabilia you would find in a 50s store… This will be the most interesting collectable auction you may ever attend…” [via boing boing] One of the amazing things about this is how the store ever ended up sealed for so long. Could family members with a long view have figured that they would make a mint on artifactual value one day? Could this start an investment trend if the auction is a success?

Dipping snuff and blowing bubbles in business school: “Of this everyone was certain: George W. Bush would never end up on the East Coast. He was going back to Texas.” Part of a multi-article profile from the Washington Post drawing on the recollections of, among others, his B-school girlfriend.

“France’s leading philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, says that American journalist Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan last year was killed because he knew too much.

In an interview with the BBC, Mr Levy said Mr Pearl had uncovered dangerous secrets about the involvement of Pakistan’s intelligence service with Islamic extremists.”

How does he know? ” Mr Levy, who recently returned from investigating the murder in Pakistan, was French President Jacques Chirac’s special envoy to Afghanistan.” BBC According to the article, Pearl’s captors realized that he recognized how poorly controlled Pakistan’s nuclear armaments were as well.

From Rafe Colburn: “I can say with certainty that I will not vote for John Kerry for the Democratic Presidential nomination because of his pathetic, anti-intellectual hatchet job on Howard Dean. He can feel free to argue with Howard Dean, but to have his flack say that Dean is unfit to serve as Commander in Chief for stating the obvious fact that our position of world primacy is not absolute and eternal is cheap, stupid, and insulting to anyone with half a brain. I realize this is politics we’re talking about here, but in my book, playing for the moron sentiment is a guaranteed vote loser.” rc3

‘To reporters familiar with other documents attributed to Saddam, neither the handwriting nor the signature appeared similar, but Al-Quds Al-Arabi said “sources close to Saddam” confirmed both were genuine.’

“Rise up against the occupier and do not trust those who talk about Sunnis or Shiites,” said the letter dated Monday — Saddam’s 66th birthday. “The only issue for your great Iraq now is occupation.

“There is no priority but to drive the infidel, criminal and cowardly occupier out. No hand has extended to him but those of the traitors and stooges.” NY Times

Chefs no doubt commit many sins, some even in the kitchen. Yet when I spoke recently to Jehangir Mehta, the pastry chef at Aix on the Upper West Side, I was hard pressed to square his easygoing modest manner with the man whose work has been vilified as sadistic and just plain weird.

His crime? Creating challenging desserts. Against the usual multitude of molten chocolate cakes, crème brûlées and apple tarts, Mr. Mehta travels into parts unknown, offering daring couplings that, if nothing else, unleash the Don Rickles fantasies that lurk inside every critic.

One dessert in particular, licorice panna cotta, inspired particular ridicule. “Somebody described it as tasting like tar, and you need to brush your teeth right away,” Mr. Mehta said. “Others have said it tastes like tobacco. NY Times

Nothing Could Have Saved Shuttle. NY Times

“Hong Kong fficials said here tonight that a dozen patients who had seemed to recover from SARS became ill again after leaving the hospital.” NY Times One of the implications is that patients may still be harboring the virus and therefore contagious after they seem to have recorvered and are returned to the community; there is no way of knowing without a diagnostic test for the viral cause. It is widely considered that public health measures such as screening of travellers and quarantine precautions are bringing the outbreak to a halt, but we might be seeing the calm before the storm.

“Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, told Congress today that the economy was poised to grow without further large tax cuts, and that budget deficits resulting from lower taxes without offsetting reductions in spending could be damaging to the economy. Opponents of the large cut favored by President Bush took Mr. Greenspan’s testimony as support for their position.” NY Times

“Ten days before Timothy J. McVeigh was executed for the Oklahoma City bombing, lawyers for F.B.I. laboratory employees sent an urgent letter to the attention of Attorney General John Ashcroft, saying a crucial prosecution witness might have given false testimony about the security of forensic evidence.

The accusations, which involved Steven Burmeister, now the F.B.I. laboratory’s chief of scientific analysis, were never turned over to Mr. McVeigh, though they surfaced as a judge was weighing whether to delay his execution because the government withheld evidence.” NY Times

A Yipster Museum in the Works? “Though it is not the original Yippie outpost in New York — that was on Union Square, where in the Vietnam era Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and others combined outrageous humor, theater and political protest — Mr. Beal’s building has a history. Yipster Times was published on the third floor. Aron Kay, known as Pieman for his preferred manner of greeting political figures, used to live in the basement.” NY Times That’s Saint Abbie, Saint Jerry and Saint Aron to you…

Toll at 12: “I continue to kill people,” he added. “I want to reach the number 20. Then I will feel good that I have completed my duty. Twenty will feel good. But if I kill more it will be even better.” NY Times

Happy May Day.

“The White House is battling to keep a report on the terror attacks secret. Does the 2004 election have anything to do with it?” — Ishkoff & Hosenball, Newsweek

. “Duh?” — FmH.

William Rivers Pitt: “A writer named Kelly Kramer recently compiled a ‘resume’ for George W. Bush. In it, she listed his central accomplishments. Among them are:

• Shattered record for biggest annual deficit in history;
• Set economic record for most private bankruptcies filed in any 12 month period;
• Set all-time record for biggest drop in the history of the stock market;
• First year in office set the all-time record for most days on vacation by any president in US history;
• After taking the entire month of August off for vacation, presided over the worst security failure in US history;
• In his first two years in office over 2 million Americans lost their jobs;
• Cut unemployment benefits for more out of work Americans than any president in US history;
• Appointed more convicted criminals to administration positions than any president in US history;
• Signed more laws and executive orders amending the Constitution than any president in US history;
• Presided over the biggest energy crises in US history and refused to intervene when corruption was revealed;
• Cut healthcare benefits for war veterans;
• Set the all-time record for most people worldwide to simultaneously take to the streets to protest a sitting American President, shattering the record for protest against any person in the history of mankind;
• Dissolved more international treaties than any president in US history;
• First president in US history to have all 50 states of the Union simultaneously go bankrupt;
• Presided over the biggest corporate stock market fraud of any market in any country in the history of the world;
• First president in US history to order a US attack and military occupation of a sovereign nation;
• Created the largest government department bureaucracy in the history of the United States;
• Set the all-time record for biggest annual budget spending increases, more than any president in US history;
• First president in US history to have the United Nations remove the US from the human rights commission;
• First president in US history to have the United Nations remove the US from the elections monitoring board;
• All-time US (and world) record holder for most corporate campaign donations;
• Biggest life-time campaign contributor presided over one of the largest corporate bankruptcy frauds in world history (Kenneth Lay, former CEO of Enron Corporation);
• Spent more money on polls and focus groups than any president in US history;
• First president to run and hide when the US came under attack (and then lied saying the enemy had the code to Air Force 1);
• Took the biggest world sympathy for the US after 911, and in less than a year made the US the most resented country in the world (possibly the biggest diplomatic failure in US and world history);
• With a policy of ‘disengagement’ created the most hostile Israeli-Palestine relations in at least 30 years;
• Fist US president in history to have a majority of the people of Europe (71%) view his presidency as the biggest threat to world peace and stability;
• First US president in history to have the people of South Korea more threatened by the US than their immediate neighbor, North Korea;
• Changed US policy to allow convicted criminals to be awarded government contracts;
• Set all-time record for number of administration appointees who violated US law by not selling huge investments in corporations bidding for government contracts;
• Failed to fulfill his pledge to get Osama Bin Laden ‘dead or alive’;
• Failed to capture the anthrax killer who tried to murder the leaders of our country at the United States Capitol building. After 18 months he has no leads and zero suspects;
• In the 18 months following the 911 attacks he successfully prevented any public investigation into the biggest security failure in the history of the United States;
• Removed more freedoms and civil liberties for Americans than any other president in US history;
• Entered office with the strongest economy in US history and in less than two years turned every single economic category straight down.

(…)

With all of this happening, and with no apparent way to reverse or blunt this course, wouldn’t it just be easier to give up?… The issue here is a simple matter of volume, and of hope. The list above is abridged, and grows exponentially longer by the hour. People of good conscience cannot surrender the struggle against this rising tide with all that is at stake.” truthout

Three weeks on, many in Baghdad feel angry, hopeless

With no law and no government, the people of Baghdad feel alone, afraid and angry.

Three weeks after Saddam Hussein’s overthrow, many parts of the capital still have no water or electricity, there are floods of sewage and only a trickle of convoys have made it through with urgently needed food and medical supplies.

American civilian administrator for Iraq Jay Garner told reporters on Wednesday that the situation was improving every day and that power had been restored to about half of the city. Reuters

“Have we become a country that wears its hypocrisy openly and proudly?” — Robert Steinback, Miami Herald

“So, to figure out why our adversaries are sometimes allies, here is a good rule of thumb. They are members of the axis of evil when they endanger our geopolitical interests. But not when they endanger women’s lives.” — Marie Cocco, Newsday [via walker]

“Congress may vote on the Climate Stewardship Act as early as mid-May when it begins debating energy policy. Introduced by Senate leaders John McCain (AZ) and Joseph Lieberman (CT), this historic bill is one of the most important chances we have to avert dangerous global warming. No environmental goal is more important for the 21st century. Become a Citizen Co-Sponsor.”