Tourette's Du Jour

Gang rape is a spectator sport.

2009-11-02T13:08:00.000-08:00

Watch almost any movie these days and you become the spectator in the sexual victimization of women. It ain't about the love, nor is it about honest sexual desire, it's all about objectification. 'Baby, You ain't come a long way, yet.'
This is a cultural phenomena we all play a role in creating. This attack was not sexual in nature, this was a violent hate-crime using female sexuality as a weapon to dehumanize a 'representative' of an oppressed class.

The first step is to addressing this issue is to acknowledge the underlying value choices we all make. The more folks talk about the commodification of sexuality, the more we will be able to consciously decide whether this is what we most value.
I carefully use the words 'commodification of sexuality' rather than 'objectification of women' because people of all genders suffer when we deny our humanity to focus so intensely on our sexuality. Make-up, 'fashion', 'sexy' lingerie are simply the American/Western version of the burka -- sexual signifiers that overwhelm the power and integrity of the person within.

tell me a story? Pleasssssssssssse!!!!

2009-10-22T16:43:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time there was a little girl who lived in a big city far away. No matter how she tried, love was hard to find. She would see someone that was fun to look at but when she got close their feet were too big, or hair grew out of their noses, or their mommy's were too close or too far away. The worst that might happen is she would love them but then they would discover that her feet were too small, or there were two hairs that grew out of her belly button, or that they didn't like the color of her eyes as much as they thought they should have.

She was certain she would never find love and if she didn't find love she would never be happy. She didn't understand that being happy would make her irresistible to love. She didn't understand that Father Time had a plan and that what she thought she wanted wasn't what she wanted at all. Life is about swimming in the waters of time but not drowning.

Every fish is perfect for the purpose it was made. Every person lovable to just the right person at just the right time. And what's really funny it that there are soooo many 'just the right persons,' if you give yourself time. It's easy to want what's not available, it's hard to be happy right now, especially when everyone else seems so happy.

It didn't seem fair to the little girl but Father Time smiled at her just the same and told her everything was working out just as it should. If only she would let herself be happy, nothing else would really matter, and all that she wanted, and especially all that she needed, would come her way at just the right time.
love and kisses.
the end

Local Racism, 2004

2009-09-08T16:16:00.000-07:00

This was spray-painted on the front windows of the newspaper office after word spread through the community that reporters from the Contra Costa Exclusive were covering incidents of racism in Martinez, California, in 2004.

Race Haters: A small and ordinary city confronts the great American problem.
By Fred Dodsworth (This originally ran in the Contra Costa Exclusive, now defunct, June, 2004)

Painter Dan was troubled. Well past mid-life, with gray hair and a tan, worn face that traced the roads he’d traveled around the U.S. Daniel Johnson came home to Martinez having seen the larger world. These days he was quick to tell even strangers his hometown wasn’t well. It was too small. He didn’t like the new people. He wasn’t so sure about his old friends.

Sitting out on the plaza between Starbucks and Bank of America, sipping a cup of coffee, Dan was man who had a need to talk. On one sunny day he decided to talk about his good and old friend Dennis Davis. Davis owned J&D Embroidery, a small shop on the edge of town that had contracts with both the City of Martinez and the Martinez Unified School District. Davis also taught girl’s golf at Alhambra High School, and had done so for years. Among other logos, for a small fee J&D embroidered Nazi symbols on baseball hats: SS Boys, with Hitler’s Storm Trooper’s twin lightening bolts substituting for the SS. It seemed incongruous to Johnson that the local high school golf coach would sell such a hateful symbol, even to kids.

Skateboarding by as Johnson spoke was a tall, thin, powerfully built man of indeterminate age. CoCoNut, as Stephen Payne called himself, wore no more than a pair of raggedy shorts and a sleeveless, open front vest that fluttered behind him. He was stained with dirt that hadn’t seen soap in days. He could have been 20. He could have been 45. His eyes were pinpoints and his lips stretched in a smiling grimace tight across his teeth. Tattoos covered his chiseled chest and drum-tight belly. In a large curve over his left breast was the word ‘Contra,” over his right “Costa.’ His abdomen said ‘County.’ The back of his left arm featured “Wermacht” in old German script. The back of his left arm, “Weiss.” White Power.

CoCoNut raced up and down Main Street Martinez on his skateboard, pirouetting between cars, leaping curbs and skittering sideways in loud, grand sweeping arcs. Stopping to chat with high school kids and tattered, burned-out human wreckage alike, he would infrequently reach inside his vest and from a small pocket extract something and hand it over discreetly. The fragile old lady’s who strolled Main Street with canes for support gave CoCoNut wide berth.

White Power, White Pride, White Race, Peckerwood, Woodpeckers.
Scattered widely about Contra Costa County are such tattoos, and more. Martinez, as county seat, home of the County Jail and the County’s Superior Court, had more than its fair share of such tattooed lost souls. Alhambra High School students speak about the young athlete with a Nazi Swastika visible on his arm. During this year’s Opening Night at Alhambra, an origami display featured swastikas. Kids sign their yearbooks with swastikas. The Assistant Principal and the Superintendent of Schools separately admit that occasionally swastikas get scrawled on school property along with Jewish student’s names. And baseball hats with such hateful symbols are confiscated, the administration says.

Made to order by J&D Embroidery Shop in Martinez, the SS-Boys logo refers to Adolf Hitler’s hated and feared secret police. The Nazi regime was responsible for the deaths of over 25 million people during WWII, including an estimated 12 million European Jews. Today, American neo-Nazis use such symbols to intimidate ethnic minorities. The owner of the shop taught golf classes at the high school.

“You should have been here last week,” said an administrator who didn’t want her name in the paper. “I threw out a huge box full of hats with much worse stuff than that.”

Nicole Bristol, 15, knows the pain such symbols cause. A cute short young lady with a shy demeanor and reddish hair, Bristow attended Sequoia Middle School in Pleasant Hill. After being subjected to hate-language from kids in her seventh and eight grade classes simply because she’s Jewish she decided to home-school.

"I was really isolated,” Bristow said. “I had one friend, and she was teased too. They called us dykes and Jews. We were scared."

Alicia Kane, Jenny Jorgensen, Angelina Martinez, Ashley Greene, Jessica Ellingson have known each other “since we were babies.” The young ladies attend Alhambra where they say pernicious racism is a pervasive and on-going problem.

“The school really did try to stop it, because you can't wear Confederate flags. You can't wear symbols or colors or bandannas. But some teachers they don't even try because it's like, ‘What's the use?’ ”

The young women believe teachers should educate students about different cultures, and lead class discussions about racism. But in the end they’re not sure how much difference teachers can make when so many children are imbued with racist beliefs by their parents.

“I don't believe in tolerance because tolerance is acceptance. You can't accept hate,” said Martinez Police Chief David Cataia. “Parents need to educate their children, and children need to understand, hate is not accepted.”

In early May a fight broke out at the Martinez Marina Park. Rumors of the impending violence had run rampant throughout the community all day. A group of Black teens and young adults and a group of White teens and young adults gathered in the late afternoon, trading insults, some of a racial nature. The Martinez Police stood by until the law was broken when the two men came to blows. The fistfight was very short. The first punch that connected took out 21-year-old Jesse Lucero’s three front teeth.

The young black man responsible was arrested and Jesse was carted off to the hospital.
Jesse and his mother Kim Lucero insisted they were only at the park for a late afternoon family picnic, but Jesse changed his story several times. After saying he was just there for a family picnic, he said he was there to defend the honor of a neighborhood girl (who is White) from disrespect by a young Black man. Later he said the fight was actually a battle between two towns: Pittsburg and Martinez. Despite the obvious inference that Martinez was a White Town and Pittsburg was a Black Town, Jesse insisted the fight was not racially motivated.

“These kids are not realizing what they're getting into,” said Jesse’s mother, Kim. “What they don't realize is Pittsburg's down here to show up for a fight. Nobody from Martinez showed up. Pittsburg's got big balls right now. They got guts. Think about it. They came here. Nobody from Martinez can even support their own town. So they had free run of Martinez.” She chuckles mirthlessly.

“And who did the police go after? The Martinez kids. So you know, Pittsburg's like, ‘Hey, we can go and do whatever the hell we want now.’ ”

Alhambra High School students pose giving a Nazi salute while congregating in the parking lot of a nearby convenience store.

An old Claudia Shear interview, for Kimberly Vergez

2009-08-25T16:09:00.000-07:00

Dirty Blonde, playing Mae West
By Fred Dodsworth, special to the SF Examiner
May 13, 2001

Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers, femme fatales and mamma mia's in our lives. Today's Q&A is Claudia Shear who wrote and stars in Dirty Blonde -- a tale of adulation, adoration and self-acceptance featuring iconographic proto-femme Mae West. Dirty Blonde plays at Theatre on the Square through June 17th.

Fred Dodsworth: We live in a world in which women are expected to behave in certain ways and…
Claudia Shear: Do you think that’s true? It’s certainly less true then when Mae West was alive. There’s no question with things like divorce and child custody and salaries and discrimination that it isn’t a little better now. As far as the way women behave… (pause) it’s not like women aren’t able to do what they want. Women are able to be shocking now in a way Mae West couldn’t have done. It’s just that Mae West was more shocking because there were stronger rules, it was a more Puritanical time.
You know William Randolph Hearst helped destroy her career. His papers refused to take advertisements for her pictures. One of his editorials asked, “When will Congress do something about Mae West?” He was very influential in creating a backlash against her and of course he was part of the whole thing with the Hayes Commission and the decency code. They cut her scripts to shreds. They weren’t letting her be funny anymore.

Dodsworth: What do you mean by funny?
Shear: Dirty! Funny! Raunchy! Bawdy! Suggestive!
By the time she got to “Belle of the 90s,” she had a line like “I wouldn’t touch him with a 10-foot pole” and they made her cut it. They were so afraid of what people were going to say. This is a woman who was arrested and sent to jail, who did a play called “Sex,” did a play with gay men. Her films were wildly successful but there were a lot of people who were very shocked.

Dodsworth: Shocked by what?
Shear: She has sex all the time. She is clearly a prostitute. She ends up with a guy. The Hayes Censorship Act says a life of crime must always be punished but she kills somebody in “She Done Him Wrong.” In “I’m No Angel,” she’s hustling guys but she ends up as a rich socialite. Married, happy ever after? This is not the message they wanted to send.
And she’s clearly a woman who’s not a virgin, who’s having sex all the time, who likes it a lot, who is aggressive about it, assertive about it. You can understand why this was upsetting people.

Dodsworth: But that was before the “Decency Act.”
Shear: It was Mae West movies and the Fatty Arbuckle case that shocked people and they cracked down.

Dodsworth: The Fatty Arbuckle case happened here in San Francisco.
Shear: One of the greatest travesties of justice in the history and who did it? William Randolph Hearst. Fatty Arbuckle was acquitted after three trials and the jury gave him an apology! But by then he was destroyed. Nobody would hire him. There was no question he never killed the girl. It was a salacious news item. Hearst saying look at these disgusting people, look at their disgusting orgies. Hearst was one of the greatest hypocrites that ever walked this planet.

Dodsworth: I don’t actually think that our times are that different.
Shear: I agree with you actually. “A plus ca change, plus ca meme chose.”

Dodsworth: But to me the more interesting issue is how women are demonized.
Shear: Mae West was definitely demonized by Hearst but the thing is that she liked being shocking. She knew that she was shocking. She liked that.
There's the whole other question, which is homosexuality and how people deal with that. Mae West showed gay men actually talking to each other, that they existed. It wasn’t like there was a gay subculture. You know what I mean? There was the eternal bachelor. The whole thing of homosexual culture was totally different. So she was really in the forefront of that.
There were men who had acts where they would come out in gowns and be female impersonators but it was considered family entertainment. You would take mom and the kids to see this. But it wasn’t really attached to having sex with other men. Then she did “The Drag” and things like that and suddenly people were like “Do you mean these guys in dresses actually want to be girls? They want to have sex with men? Whoa, wait a minute!”
These guys were wiped out. There was this really famous drag performer. Julian Eltinge was his name. He was reduced to bringing out a rack of dresses, pointing to them and trying to do his act! He died in penury.

Dodsworth: Today that would be performance art.
Shear: They wanted to see him dressed up as a girl doing his campy thing!

Dodsworth: Do you think there’s a misogyny in that? Is it making fun of women?
Shear: I think that there’s a flavor of that sometimes. It’s such a fine line. It’s not that I would accuse anyone of misogyny but Marlene Dietrich, when she dresses as a man, is not the object of ridicule. It’s the sexiest thing in the world.
You know the world is a big place, lots of things are allowed. But a woman dressed as a man is taking on power. Look at Hilary Swank in “Boys Don’t Cry,” there’s something really powerful about her because she has suppressed her secondary sex characteristics as a woman and therefore she is a man in the world. You take on a certain power if you dress as a man.
If you dress as a woman on some level you’re also taking on a power. A man who comes on stage dressed as Joan Crawford or Lipsinka! Lipsinka comes out on stage and this is a person of power.

Dodsworth: What is the root of that power?
Shear: The root of the power is when people transform themselves into what they feel they are, into what they feel they should be.

Dodsworth: So it’s transformation into true self?
Shear: Into what you imagine yourself to be. It’s why brides are always beautiful. The dumpiest girl in the whole world, bless her, the day of her wedding she will be beautiful. Because for most people it’s the one time in their lives where they wear a custom-made gown, where someone does their hair and their make-up, where everybody looks at them. They glow as a result of it and that runs through to everything.
I’m a big dresser-upper and how that transforms you. A lot of the time I’m in my sneakers, I’m in my T-shirt, I’m going to work out and yet when I transform and I’m in Manolo Blahniks and the Florentine cocktail dress, it’s a whole different persona that comes out. You know what I mean? When I go to Paris, for example, where I spend most of the time in a cocktail dress or out of the cocktail dress (half-laughs), it’s like I’m a different person.
But you know the thing was that Mae is really actually complex which is a thing that many people flatter themselves thinking they are...

Dodsworth: Everybody’s complex!
Shear: Everybody’s complex, but it’s not manifested in quite the same way. They’re just not simply as interesting. I don’t think Sandra Dee is as interesting as Mae West. It’s not the same conflict. Which is one of the things about drag that makes it so powerful is that underneath there’s this profound conflict (pause) between what we’re seeing and what we know to be true.

An old Mark Morris interview, for Mare Earley

2009-08-21T21:04:00.000-07:00

Mark Morris Speaks
By Fred Dodsworth, special to the Berkeley Daily Planet
Sept 28, 2003
Mark Morris and his eponymously named Dance Group regularly perform for Cal Performances at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall — so much so that some claim the globally renown dancer/choreographer as an honorary citizen of the People's Republic of Berkeley. Certainly Morris is a member in good standing in the 'cultural revolution,' as his footprints are stomped all over what is modern in today's dance world. In addition to founding the Mark Morris Dance Group in 1980, Morris was one of the founders of the White Oaks Dance Project with Mikhail Baryshnikov.

The Mark Morris Dance Group opened the Cal Performances season with L'Allegro il Penseroso ed il Moderato on September 4th and returns to Zellerbach Hall September 12 through the 14th with a 'Repertory Program' of dance featuring the music of the late West Coast composer Lou Harrison, a world premiere of dance to the music of Béla Bartók, and a nine-song dance-cycle to the recorded music of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys.
As we spoke Morris, dressed in shorts and a plain tee-shirt, laughed easily. Unexpectedly pudgy for a dancer, and with longish, straggling gray hair, the 40-something Morris had just spent the afternoon wandering unnoticed around Berkeley.

Fred Dodsworth: Your music is rhythmically challenging. How do you teach dancers to work with complex rhythms?
Mark Morris: How do I teach rhythm? I'm good at it and smart and my dancers are brilliant and we practice. You have to have something to start with though. If you're interested in something you work on it. If need it for what you do, if you have an interest in it then it can come true. If you don't need it and you're not interested, you'll never learn it. (laughs)

Dodsworth: You're in your 40s, as we age our bodies change, how does that effect you, as a dancer?
Morris: Well, I don’t know. I'm going to dance a little bit longer, not a whole lot longer. I'll keep performing some but not forever. Because it's less… it's more… it's more trouble than it's worth at a certain point — to warm up for two hours to dance for five minutes when it used to be the other way. It takes longer to recover from injuries. Of course I'm way smarter about certain things, I'd be much better at some things, if I could [just] do those things but that's always how it works. That's normal.
You know I'm a lovely dancer and I continue to be and when I don't want to I won't. But I'm a very good teacher and I can still choreograph and I'd rather watch other people than watch me. (laughs)

Dodsworth:Can you envision doing dance for older bodies?
Morris: I already do. The youngest man in my company is 28, which doesn't seem like much but in dance or in other things that require that sort of work, you know, like athletics or something, that's very late in your career. So it's different if you're an instrumentalist or a writer or a painter or a choreographer, of course that's different. But I work with… they are already older dancers, they're in their 40s and that's old for dancers and that's great but you have to have been a good dancer and then stay a good dancer. You know just cause you've made it, you're old and you're still dancing doesn't mean you're good. It just means you're old. It doesn't mean you're wise. It means you're old.
I was co-founder of the White Oaks Dance Project, which was originally 'older' people, but it changed as it went along so that just Misha was an old 'thang'. It's fine. It's a possibility. I don't think it's the future of dancing, is everybody getting old. If you can still dance when you're old and you make stuff up and there's still good work to do than it's great but it's not like a mission. (laughs)
I don't work with little teenagers, I mean they're great and they're fun sometimes. At the San Francisco Ballet I'm working with much younger people and that's fine but to tour and work and live with these people… I don't want them to be 17? There aren't very many good dancers anyway, old or young. But also that's… if you're 20… I mean, come on, who wants to see a naked old person? And that's the market.

Dodsworth:Is that you're market, kids in their 20s?
Morris: They're all over the place. It's mixed but there's a certain demographic that spends the most money on certain things. It's not necessarily what I want to watch. I don't like contemporary, popular music very much but I never have. It's not like I’m now old and there's nothing like the Beatles were. I never really liked the Beatles that much. I mean for a minute I did, but it's never been a big interest of mine. It's not like I'm an old curmudgeon, it's just like I don't really spend the time doing things that I don't like to do very much.

Dodsworth:Bob Wills was once popular music.
Morris: Yeah, in the ’30s and ’40s. Absolutely. I like lots of popular music. I just don't like contemporary popular music. I like music from the ’20s. It's not a rule, it's just a preference. It's not like, 'oh, this is from the’50s therefore I don't like that.' I don't think that way at all. It's, 'oh. I like that song, what's that?' There are exceptions. But I don't buy that music. It's not interesting to me.

Dodsworth:What is the story behind your Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys dances?
Morris: I work with live music but this particular piece is one that's not. It's to recorded music because it's a particular recording session that I like. I could hire a cover band but this is them [Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys] very, very old. He died sort of the next day. This is from the early-middle ’70s, they'd been a band for 40 years. It's them… they're all very old on this recording. That's what I like. It's not a period recording from the ’30s. It's fantastic. If you listen to their music from the ’30s and the ’40s and then from the ’70s, they're relaxed and they don't have to pay any attention to each other and they know each other and they read each other's minds and they play fabulously and their rhythm is perfect and it's great. It's wonderful.

New CBO estimate says Public Plan lowers costs & covers more

2009-07-02T10:11:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a preliminary score of the health care legislation under consideration in the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. The bill was estimated to cost $1 trillion over 10 years, while reducing the number of uninsured by "only" one-third. As many informed observers noted at the time, the cost estimate was incomplete because the legislation that the CBO reviewed did not contain language about a public health insurance plan or an employer mandate. Nevertheless, Republicans seized on the opportunity to engage in merciless political attacks, citing the incomplete CBO score as proof that health care reform is not worth doing: Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said "the CBO estimates were a death blow to a government run health care plan," and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said "[the CBO estimate] should be a wake up call for all of us to scrap the current bill and start over in a true bipartisan fashion." But the proposal lacked a public health insurance option or an employer mandate, provisions that would drastically change the size, scope and estimate. Now the HELP committee has submitted a full bill -- and the result is drastically different. The "plan carries a 10-year price tag of slightly over $600 billion, and would lead toward an estimated 97 percent of all Americans having coverage." In addition, "the [employer mandate] provision is also estimated to greatly reduce the number of workers whose employers would drop coverage, thus addressing a major concern noted by CBO when it reviewed the earlier proposals." Additionally, the incoming president of the American Medical Association, Dr. J. James Rohack, said his organization now supports a public plan, after initially indicating its opposition, adding that the AMA supports an "American model" that includes both "a private system and a public system, working together."

Reasons to stop Single Payer Health Care!

2009-06-23T13:10:00.000-07:00

for Father's Day

2009-06-19T20:48:00.000-07:00

Let him know you care, he won't always be there.

Bill Maher nails Obama

2009-06-15T14:28:00.000-07:00

Three very interesting views of the growing Right Wing fanatic threat facing our country

2009-06-10T18:34:00.001-07:00

Watch and tremble

http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200906100041

http://tinyurl.com/moqsp5

http://tpmtv.talkingpointsmemo.com/?id=2706277&ref=fpblg

2009-06-09T16:55:00.000-07:00

Fred Dodsworth sez my news junkie pals will enjoy this:
Now Wikipedia is the News! http://tinyurl.com/lbbw9e
Wikipedia Articles Appear in Google News Results
Google News has built a strong reputation on its ability to quickly find, sort and deliver news information and sources. It takes information from news...

Fred Dodsworth sez evolutionary science is just too much fun for normal folk. http://tinyurl.com/l4uceh

from my Twitter and Facebook accounts

Why California & the Newspaper biz is bankrupt

2009-06-04T09:11:00.000-07:00

This is a perfect example of why both the state of California and the news media are failing. This buried story should have been on the front page of every newspaper in California, but instead it was hidden deep inside the paper. The story was printed on page 7 of the Oakland Tribune, owned by MediaNews Group, (ie: Dean Singleton who is also CEO of Associated Press) one of the largest consolidated newspaper groups in America.

While Programs For Poor Get The Knife,
Corporations Prepare For Tax Windfall
By Steven Harmon, MediaNews Sacramento Bureau
Posted: 06/03/2009 01:02:05 PM PDT, Updated: 06/04/2009 05:55:55 AM PDT

SACRAMENTO — Corporate tax giveaways from dead-of-night budget agreements in September and February will cost the state as much as $2.5 billion in revenues at a time when lawmakers are contemplating eliminating programs for the poor, a budget analyst said Wednesday.

The tax loopholes made it through the Legislature with no public hearings and little analysis of the effect, said Jean Ross, executive director for the California Budget Project, a research group that studies the effects of policies on the poor.

"The problem with dark-of-night deals is that you never get a chance to get a debate over value choices," she said. "These three tax breaks represent a reduction of one-third the income taxes paid by California corporations.... They really represent a stark contrast in values and what kind of future we want to see for Californians."

The tax breaks will cost the state $640 million for the rest of this fiscal year and for the 2010-11 budget year as lawmakers search for ways to close a $24.3 billion deficit, according to Ross's report, "To Have and Have Not." By the time they are fully implemented in 2014-15, the tax breaks could cost nearly $2.5 billion a year, she said.

In marathon, private negotiations in February, Democratic leaders seeking support for a broad tax increase reached an agreement with Republican leaders to approve the single sales factor tax break, which allows multistate corporations to choose whether they want to be taxed solely for their sales in California rather than have their taxes based on property, payroll and sales in the state.

Schwarzenegger touts the single sales factor as a policy that will strengthen small businesses and keep jobs in California.

"There's never been a more important time to create an attractive employment climate in California so that businesses stay home and create jobs," said Aaron McLear, the governor's spokesman.

In a memo supporting the tax change, California Competes, a coalition of business, technology and education leaders, said that under the old three-factor formula, California created a "competitive disadvantage for companies with a significant presence in the state, burdening them with higher income taxes because of their property and payroll investments here."

The single sales factor, the memo said, spurs job creation by eliminating the tax penalty for increasing the number of employees on payroll.

A 2005 study contradicted those arguments. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonprofit research institute in Washington, D.C., found that while most states have lost manufacturing jobs since 1995, states that went to the single sales tax formula did not fare much better.

Ross said the benefits are overwhelmingly concentrated among "a very few, very large corporations."

According to estimates prepared by the Franchise Tax Board, nine corporations will receive tax cuts averaging $33.1 million each in 2013-14 under the single sales factor. And 80 percent of the benefits will go to the largest corporations — those with gross receipts of more than $1 billion.

"One of the things so striking about the provisions is the benefits are overwhelmingly concentrated among a very few, very large corporations," she said.

Another tax loophole allows corporations that have maxed out on their tax credits to share them with a family of related corporations. Six corporations will receive tax cuts averaging $23.5 million each in 2013-14 under the credit sharing loophole.

The third loophole, called net operating loss carrybacks, allows corporations to claim refunds on taxes already paid.

Ross said these tax breaks at full implementation would be enough to pay for the entire cost of three programs Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is proposing to eliminate: CalWORKS, the welfare-to-work program; Healthy Families, the health insurance program for poor children; and cash assistance payments to low-income elderly and those with severe disabilities.

"The dollars we're talking about are significant," she said. "So, when we're talking two, three, five years from now about why California has budget problems, it'll be important to look at the revenues that have been given away by the Legislature at the depth of our budget crisis."

The report, which is based on analysis prepared by the California Franchise Tax Board completed in May, was handed over Wednesday to Democratic leaders of the legislative conference committee on budgets.

While the Franchise Tax Board is not authorized to release the names of taxpayers, Ross noted that a handful have aggressively pushed the single sales factor legislation in previous efforts, including Apple, Genentech, Paramount Theaters, Disney, Intel and Warner Brothers.

Repealing the loopholes would require a two-thirds vote because it would be considered a tax increase.

Reach Steven Harmon at 916-441-2101 or sharmon@bayareanewsgroup.com.

Tiny spheres of fear scare the Bushians.

2009-06-01T10:45:00.000-07:00

A jaunty tune for Yes on h8 supporters

2009-05-28T19:26:00.000-07:00

Senator Bribe-Us Baucus sells out U.S.

2009-05-21T18:43:00.000-07:00

The Shocking Doctrine that's killing U.S.

2009-05-12T12:36:00.000-07:00

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

Extend immunosuppressive drug coverage for kidney transplant patients!

2009-05-08T21:25:00.000-07:00

Help people with kidney transplants! Ask your Representative to co-sponsor HR 1458, legislation that would extend Medicare coverage of immunosuppressive drugs beyond the first 36 month after transplant. Since this alert was launched last week, 400 messages have been sent to Congress, and health care reform is building momentum, and we need you to act now by telling your Representative to act today.

This legislation is one of the key provisions in the NKF End the Wait! campaign. The bill will help transplant recipients maintain their kidney function, and will allow others to consider a transplant because they know the expensive drugs they need will be available without a time limitation.

Organ transplant recipients must take immunosuppressive drugs for the life of the transplant to help prevent the body from rejecting the organ. Currently, Medicare pays for most kidney transplants but covers drugs for only 36 months post-transplant as part of the Medicare ESRD benefit. After that, kidney recipients must pay for immunosuppressive drugs through private insurance, public or pharmaceutical programs or pay out-of-pocket. (Medicare covers drugs without a time limit if the patient qualifies because of age or disability status.)

Immunosuppressive drugs are expensive, but the alternative is even more costly.

A kidney transplant recipient costs Medicare $17,000 annually. If the kidney transplant fails, the person returns to dialysis at which point, Medicare spends an average of $71,000 per year on a dialysis patient. And quality of life often suffers too.

Please take a moment to write your Representative today and ask him or her to co-sponsor HR 1458. Share your story, or the story of a loved one, about the experience with immunosuppressive drug coverage.

More info can be found at Kidney Foundation's End the Wait! http://www.kidney.org/news/end_the_wait/recommendations.cfm

News is dying 'cuz reporters & editors are crap mongers

2009-05-08T00:22:00.002-07:00

"American journalism is in trouble, and the problem is not just financial. My profession is in distress because for more than a decade it has been chasing the false idols of fame and fortune. While engaged in those pursuits, it forgot its readers and the need to produce a commercial product that appealed to its mass audience, which in turn drew advertisers and thus paid for it all. While most corporate owners were seeking increased earnings, higher stock prices, and bigger salaries, editors and reporters focused more on winning prizes or making television appearances. -- By Walter Pincus in the Columbia Journalism Review.

read it all here.
http://www.cjr.org/essay/newspaper_narcissism_1.php?page=all

War 'tween boys & girls -- femme it!

2009-05-03T12:24:00.000-07:00

This is even better if you double click it to make two videos play at once! Very tasty echo effect.

Books are dead, long live Books!

2009-05-01T20:32:00.000-07:00

Books are dead, long live Books! Publishing-wise, I believe we're going forwards (four-words?) into the future by heading rapidly into the past. It's going to be Small Press Realities vs MegaCorp McCrap Books Unlimited, and who gives a shit about 'Beach Books' anyways? Like locavores, we'll be reading esoteric art press books by folks we love, from our own little personal worlds from all over the real world.
In the future, like in the past, a 'library', full of excellent, well-handled tomes, will be cherished, special and small, not walls of books we'll never read that fill so many rooms today.
Whether it's the Expresso/Barista Publishing Gizmo,
or Electro-On-Line-Kinda-Kindlie,
or Set-It-Yourself Type in the Basement Bookies,
Books aren't dead.
Books live forever!

News, too.

It's time for Texas to go!

2009-04-23T17:07:00.000-07:00

Reports of the death of newsprint are greatly exaggerated

2009-04-02T00:34:00.000-07:00

When it comes to profits, local beats sexy
If you believe print is doomed, the opinion of investment banker Jonathan Knee might surprise you. What follows are some quotes from Knee that appeared in the Wall Street Journal. He's an investment banker who advised on the San Diego Union-Tribune deal and who has covered the media industry for over 15 years. Knee is the director of the media program at the Columbia Business School and the co-author of “Curse of the Mogul: What’s Wrong with the World’s Leading Media Companies?”, which is to be published by Portfolio Books this year.

"The reason why most newspaper companies have gone bankrupt or appear perilously close to it is that they have too much debt, not that they have stopped being profitable. ... [C]ompared to most media businesses like movies and books, most newspapers still have higher profit margins ...

"There is widespread confusion ... regarding the source of the shocking historic profitability of many newspapers. The most profitable newspapers have tended to be monopoly markets with circulation of 20,000 to 100,000 readers. These are not sexy papers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, which have historically have significantly low margins.

"Major market papers typically have suffered from the greatest anachronisms in their cost structure due to everything from oppressive union work rules to just bad management.

"When the smoke clears, the local newspaper, which may not be the sexiest part of the newspaper industry but is overwhelmingly the largest and most profitable part of the industry, will be a smaller and more-focused enterprise whose activities will be directed to those areas where their local presence gives them competitive advantage and they will continue to generate as a result better profits than the supersexy businesses in the media industry asking for government or nonprofit help like movies and music."

--this brief was borrowed from the SF/Pen Press Club, March 31 edition.

Banks walking away from foreclosures!!

2009-03-30T14:56:00.000-07:00

borrowed from the New York Times
By SUSAN SAULNY, Published: March 29, 2009

SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Mercy James thought she had lost her rental property here to foreclosure. A date for a sheriff’s sale had been set, and notices about the foreclosure process were piling up in her mailbox.

Ms. James had the tenants move out, and soon her white house at the corner of Thomas and Maple Streets fell into the hands of looters and vandals, and then, into disrepair. Dejected and broke, Ms. James said she salvaged but a lesson from her loss.

So imagine her surprise when the City of South Bend contacted her recently, demanding that she resume maintenance on the property. The sheriff’s sale had been canceled at the last minute, leaving the property title — and a world of trouble — in her name.

“I thought, ‘What kind of game is this?’ ” Ms. James, 41, said while picking at trash at the house, now so worthless the city plans to demolish it — another bill for which she will be liable.

City officials and housing advocates here and in cities as varied as Buffalo, Kansas City, Mo., and Jacksonville, Fla., say they are seeing an unsettling development: Banks are quietly declining to take possession of properties at the end of the foreclosure process, most often because the cost of the ordeal — from legal fees to maintenance — exceeds the diminishing value of the real estate.

The so-called bank walkaways rarely mean relief for the property owners, caught unaware months after the fact, and often mean additional financial burdens and bureaucratic headaches. Technically, they still owe on the mortgage, but as a practicality, rarely would a mortgage holder receive any more payments on the loan. The way mortgages are bundled and resold, it can be enormously time-consuming just trying to determine what company holds the loan on a property thought to be in foreclosure.

In Ms. James’s case, the company that was most recently servicing her loan is now defunct. Its parent company filed for bankruptcy and dissolved. And the original bank that sold her the loan said it could not find a record of it.

“It is what some of us think is the next wave of the crisis,” said Kermit Lind, a clinical professor at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law and an expert on foreclosure law.

For older industrial cities like South Bend, hard times in the mortgage market began before the recent national downturn, as did the problem of bank walkaways. In the case of Ms. James, a home health care administrator, the foreclosure proceedings began in the summer of 2007, when she could not keep up with the adjustable rate on her mortgage.

In Buffalo, where officials said the problem had reached “epidemic” proportions in recent months, the city sued 37 banks last year, claiming they were responsible for the deterioration of at least 57 abandoned homes; the city chose a sampling of houses to include in the lawsuit, even though the banks had walked away from many more foreclosures. So far, five banks have settled.

In Kansas City, Rachel Foley, a lawyer who handles housing cases, said bank walkaways were “a rare occurrence two to three years ago.”

“We’re seeing them dumped more and more at the moment,” she said.

Experts suggest the bank walkaways are most visible in states where foreclosures are processed through the courts and therefore tend to be more transparent. Other states, like Indiana and New York, have court-mandated foreclosures, but roughly half of the states allow foreclosures to proceed without court intervention, making it difficult to accurately count the number of bank walkaways in recent months.

The soft housing market and the vandalism that often occurs when a house sits empty are the two main factors influencing the mortgage holders’ decisions to walk away, said Larry Rothenberg, a lawyer for Weltman, Weinberg & Reis, one of the larger creditors’ rights firms in the country.

“Oftentimes when the foreclosure starts out, it’s a viable property,” Mr. Rothenberg said, “but by the time it gets to a sheriff’s sale, it might not have enough value to justify further expense. We’ve always had cases where property was vandalized or lost value, but they were rare compared to these times.”

The problem seems most acute at the bottom of the market — houses that were inexpensive to begin with — and with investment properties, where investors and banks want speedy closure by writing off bad loans as losses. Banks and investors typically lose 40 percent to 50 percent of their investment on every foreclosure.

Guy Cecala, publisher of Inside Mortgage Finance, an industry newsletter, said some properties had become such liabilities for investors that it was not even worth holding on to them to strip valuable fixtures, like kitchen appliances, toilets and hardware.

“The whole purpose of foreclosure is to take title of the property, sell it and recoup what money you can,” Mr. Cecala said. “It’s just a sign of the times that things are so bad no one wants to take possession of the property.”

In South Bend, boarded-up houses for whom no one has stepped forward are dotting the landscape, adding a fresh layer of blight to communities that were already scarred from the area’s industrial decline.

The city is hoping to create a new type of legal mediation process that would bring together the homeowners and the mortgage holders to settle their disputes while allowing the owners to remain in the home — considered crucial to any stabilization effort.

“I’d say in the last three or four months, we’ve seen dozens of these cases,” said Chuck Leone, the South Bend city attorney. “We see it one of two ways. One is that the bank will simply dismiss the foreclosure complaint. The other is that the mortgage holder will follow through and take a judgment of foreclosure, but then not schedule the property for sheriff’s sale.”

In Ms. James’s case, it has been impossible to determine who canceled the sheriff’s sale, since her last mortgage holder went out of business. Even the city clerk’s records did not provide an answer.

“Nobody has any idea who owns what or who’s responsible,” said Judy Fox, Ms. James’s lawyer at the Notre Dame Legal Aid Clinic. “It’s a very common story.”

Mayor Stephen J. Luecke of South Bend added: “It’s just a crime the way it puts people in limbo. They first off have gone through the grief of losing their house, then they move out and find out that they still own it and have responsibility for it.”

In Jacksonville, Fla., Sylvester Kimbrough Jr. found himself caught in the limbo between foreclosure and ownership last year, 10 years into his 30-year mortgage on a $42,000 two-bedroom house.

Mr. Kimbrough, 56, a former driver for a car dealership who is now unemployed, had already moved out when he learned that the foreclosure had been stopped.

“That move really almost destroyed us,” Mr. Kimbrough said. “It was all for nothing.”

America's disgraceful criminal justice system

2009-03-26T22:02:00.000-07:00

"America's criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace," said Senator Webb. "With five percent of the world's population, our country houses twenty-five percent of the world's prison population. Incarcerated drug offenders have soared 1200% since 1980. And four times as many mentally ill people are in prisons than in mental health hospitals. We should be devoting precious law enforcement capabilities toward making our communities safer. Our neighborhoods are at risk from gang violence, including transnational gang violence. There is great appreciation from most in this country that we are doing something drastically wrong. And, I am gratified that Senator Specter has joined me as the lead Republican cosponsor of this effort. We are committed to getting this legislation passed and enacted into law this year."

Those are Sen. Jim Webb's (D-VA) words on introducing the National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009.

WEBB, SPECTER INTRODUCE BILL TO OVERHAUL AMERICA'S CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM: Blue-Ribbon Commission to Offer Reforms on Incarceration Rates, Sentencing Policies, Gang Violence, Prison Administration & Reintegration of Offenders

Washington, DC--Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) today (March 26, 2009) introduced bipartisan legislation to create a blue-ribbon commission charged with conducting an 18-month, top-to-bottom review of the nation's entire criminal justice system and offering concrete recommendations for reform. Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA), Ranking Member on the Judiciary Committee, is the principal Republican cosponsor.

The National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009, S.714, is the result of decades of investigation and more than two years of intensive fact-finding in the U.S. Senate. In the 110th Congress, Webb chaired two hearings of the Joint Economic Committee that examined various aspects of the criminal justice system. In October of 2008, he conducted a symposium on drugs in America at George Mason University Law Center.

[For a copy of the legislation, visit: http://webb.senate.gov/email/criminaljusticereform.html

"There have been many commissions in recent years, but the problems which we are now confronting warrant a fresh look," Senator Specter said. "This commission has the potential to really make some very significant advances in public security and protection from the violent criminals. I look forward to working with Senator Webb and my colleagues in the Senate on this important legislation."

The high-level commission created by the National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009 legislation will be comprised of experts in fields including criminal justice, law enforcement, public heath, national security, prison administration, social services, prisoner reentry, and victims' rights. It will be led by a chairperson to be appointed by the President. The Majority and Minority Leaders in the House and Senate, and the Democratic and Republican Governors Associations will appoint the remaining members of the commission.

Commissioners will be tasked with proposing tangible, wide-ranging reforms designed to responsibly reduce the overall incarceration rate; improve federal and local responses to international and domestic gang violence; restructure our approach to drug criminalization; improve the treatment of mental illness; improve prison administration; and establish a system for reintegrating ex-offenders.

In addition to Senators Webb and Specter, original cosponsors of the legislation include: Democratic Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Crime and Drugs Subcommittee Chairman Richard Durbin (D-IL), Crime and Drugs Subcommittee Ranking Member Lindsay Graham (R-SC), and Senators Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Patty Murray (D-WA), Ted Kennedy (D-MA), Ron Wyden (D-OR), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Ben Cardin (D-MD), Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Mark Warner (D-VA), Roland Burris (D-IL), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY).

Webb said that he has also had encouraging discussions about the bill with officials from the White House and Department of Justice.

Senator Webb's interest in reforming the U.S. criminal justice system stems from his days as a Marine Corps officer, sitting on courts-martial, and "thinking about the interrelationship between discipline and fairness." Later, as an attorney, he spent six years in pro bono representation of a young African American Marine accused of war crimes in Vietnam, eventually clearing the man's name three years after he took his own life.

Twenty-five years ago, while working on special assignment for Parade Magazine, Webb was the first American journalist allowed inside the Japanese prison system, where he "became aware of the systemic dysfunctions of the U.S. system." Japan, with half of the United States' population at that time, had only 40,000 sentenced prisoners in jail compared to the U.S.'s 580,000; today, the U.S. has 2.38 million prisoners and another five million involved in the process, either due to probation or parole situations.

"We are not protecting our citizens from the increasing danger of criminals who perpetrate violence and intimidation as a way of life, and we are locking up too many people who do not belong in jail," concluded Webb. "I believe that American ingenuity can discover better ways to deal with the problems of drugs and nonviolent criminal behavior while still minimizing violent crime and large-scale gang activity.

"We all deserve to live in a country made better by such changes," said Webb.

This statement was provided by the office of Senator Jim Webb.

Failed states & failed policies: Stop the failed drug wars

2009-03-26T08:31:00.000-07:00

From The Economist print edition Mar 5th 2009

Prohibition has failed; legalisation is the least bad solution
A HUNDRED years ago a group of foreign diplomats gathered in Shanghai for the first-ever international effort to ban trade in a narcotic drug. On February 26th 1909 they agreed to set up the International Opium Commission—just a few decades after Britain had fought a war with China to assert its right to peddle the stuff. Many other bans of mood-altering drugs have followed. In 1998 the UN General Assembly committed member countries to achieving a “drug-free world” and to “eliminating or significantly reducing” the production of opium, cocaine and cannabis by 2008.

That is the kind of promise politicians love to make. It assuages the sense of moral panic that has been the handmaiden of prohibition for a century. It is intended to reassure the parents of teenagers across the world. Yet it is a hugely irresponsible promise, because it cannot be fulfilled.

Next week ministers from around the world gather in Vienna to set international drug policy for the next decade. Like first-world-war generals, many will claim that all that is needed is more of the same. In fact the war on drugs has been a disaster, creating failed states in the developing world even as addiction has flourished in the rich world. By any sensible measure, this 100-year struggle has been illiberal, murderous and pointless. That is why The Economist continues to believe that the least bad policy is to legalise drugs.

“Least bad” does not mean good. Legalisation, though clearly better for producer countries, would bring (different) risks to consumer countries. As we outline below, many vulnerable drug-takers would suffer. But in our view, more would gain.

The evidence of failure
Nowadays the UN Office on Drugs and Crime no longer talks about a drug-free world. Its boast is that the drug market has “stabilised”, meaning that more than 200m people, or almost 5% of the world’s adult population, still take illegal drugs—roughly the same proportion as a decade ago. (Like most purported drug facts, this one is just an educated guess: evidential rigour is another casualty of illegality.) The production of cocaine and opium is probably about the same as it was a decade ago; that of cannabis is higher. Consumption of cocaine has declined gradually in the United States from its peak in the early 1980s, but the path is uneven (it remains higher than in the mid-1990s), and it is rising in many places, including Europe.

This is not for want of effort. The United States alone spends some $40 billion each year on trying to eliminate the supply of drugs. It arrests 1.5m of its citizens each year for drug offences, locking up half a million of them; tougher drug laws are the main reason why one in five black American men spend some time behind bars. In the developing world blood is being shed at an astonishing rate. In Mexico more than 800 policemen and soldiers have been killed since December 2006 (and the annual overall death toll is running at over 6,000). This week yet another leader of a troubled drug-ridden country—Guinea Bissau—was assassinated.

Yet prohibition itself vitiates the efforts of the drug warriors. The price of an illegal substance is determined more by the cost of distribution than of production. Take cocaine: the mark-up between coca field and consumer is more than a hundredfold. Even if dumping weedkiller on the crops of peasant farmers quadruples the local price of coca leaves, this tends to have little impact on the street price, which is set mainly by the risk of getting cocaine into Europe or the United States.

Nowadays the drug warriors claim to seize close to half of all the cocaine that is produced. The street price in the United States does seem to have risen, and the purity seems to have fallen, over the past year. But it is not clear that drug demand drops when prices rise. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that the drug business quickly adapts to market disruption. At best, effective repression merely forces it to shift production sites. Thus opium has moved from Turkey and Thailand to Myanmar and southern Afghanistan, where it undermines the West’s efforts to defeat the Taliban.

Al Capone, but on a global scale
Indeed, far from reducing crime, prohibition has fostered gangsterism on a scale that the world has never seen before. According to the UN’s perhaps inflated estimate, the illegal drug industry is worth some $320 billion a year. In the West it makes criminals of otherwise law-abiding citizens (the current American president could easily have ended up in prison for his youthful experiments with “blow”). It also makes drugs more dangerous: addicts buy heavily adulterated cocaine and heroin; many use dirty needles to inject themselves, spreading HIV; the wretches who succumb to “crack” or “meth” are outside the law, with only their pushers to “treat” them. But it is countries in the emerging world that pay most of the price. Even a relatively developed democracy such as Mexico now finds itself in a life-or-death struggle against gangsters. American officials, including a former drug tsar, have publicly worried about having a “narco state” as their neighbour.

The failure of the drug war has led a few of its braver generals, especially from Europe and Latin America, to suggest shifting the focus from locking up people to public health and “harm reduction” (such as encouraging addicts to use clean needles). This approach would put more emphasis on public education and the treatment of addicts, and less on the harassment of peasants who grow coca and the punishment of consumers of “soft” drugs for personal use. That would be a step in the right direction. But it is unlikely to be adequately funded, and it does nothing to take organised crime out of the picture.

Legalisation would not only drive away the gangsters; it would transform drugs from a law-and-order problem into a public-health problem, which is how they ought to be treated. Governments would tax and regulate the drug trade, and use the funds raised (and the billions saved on law-enforcement) to educate the public about the risks of drug-taking and to treat addiction. The sale of drugs to minors should remain banned. Different drugs would command different levels of taxation and regulation. This system would be fiddly and imperfect, requiring constant monitoring and hard-to-measure trade-offs. Post-tax prices should be set at a level that would strike a balance between damping down use on the one hand, and discouraging a black market and the desperate acts of theft and prostitution to which addicts now resort to feed their habits.

Selling even this flawed system to people in producer countries, where organised crime is the central political issue, is fairly easy. The tough part comes in the consumer countries, where addiction is the main political battle. Plenty of American parents might accept that legalisation would be the right answer for the people of Latin America, Asia and Africa; they might even see its usefulness in the fight against terrorism. But their immediate fear would be for their own children.

That fear is based in large part on the presumption that more people would take drugs under a legal regime. That presumption may be wrong. There is no correlation between the harshness of drug laws and the incidence of drug-taking: citizens living under tough regimes (notably America but also Britain) take more drugs, not fewer. Embarrassed drug warriors blame this on alleged cultural differences, but even in fairly similar countries tough rules make little difference to the number of addicts: harsh Sweden and more liberal Norway have precisely the same addiction rates. Legalisation might reduce both supply (pushers by definition push) and demand (part of that dangerous thrill would go). Nobody knows for certain. But it is hard to argue that sales of any product that is made cheaper, safer and more widely available would fall. Any honest proponent of legalisation would be wise to assume that drug-taking as a whole would rise.

There are two main reasons for arguing that prohibition should be scrapped all the same. The first is one of liberal principle. Although some illegal drugs are extremely dangerous to some people, most are not especially harmful. (Tobacco is more addictive than virtually all of them.) Most consumers of illegal drugs, including cocaine and even heroin, take them only occasionally. They do so because they derive enjoyment from them (as they do from whisky or a Marlboro Light). It is not the state’s job to stop them from doing so.

What about addiction? That is partly covered by this first argument, as the harm involved is primarily visited upon the user. But addiction can also inflict misery on the families and especially the children of any addict, and involves wider social costs. That is why discouraging and treating addiction should be the priority for drug policy. Hence the second argument: legalisation offers the opportunity to deal with addiction properly.

By providing honest information about the health risks of different drugs, and pricing them accordingly, governments could steer consumers towards the least harmful ones. Prohibition has failed to prevent the proliferation of designer drugs, dreamed up in laboratories. Legalisation might encourage legitimate drug companies to try to improve the stuff that people take. The resources gained from tax and saved on repression would allow governments to guarantee treatment to addicts—a way of making legalisation more politically palatable. The success of developed countries in stopping people smoking tobacco, which is similarly subject to tax and regulation, provides grounds for hope.

A calculated gamble, or another century of failure?
This newspaper first argued for legalisation 20 years ago. Reviewing the evidence again, prohibition seems even more harmful, especially for the poor and weak of the world. Legalisation would not drive gangsters completely out of drugs; as with alcohol and cigarettes, there would be taxes to avoid and rules to subvert. Nor would it automatically cure failed states like Afghanistan. Our solution is a messy one; but a century of manifest failure argues for trying it.

Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.