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December 6, 2008

Salvation Army Strong-Arms Marriage

Next time you see the dingaling bell ringers on the sidewalk, and before you drop your coin in the red kettle, consider this: If you're an officer for the Salvation Army, you also live Salvation Army. Meaning the country's second largest charity (behind the United Way) mandates that their leaders (not priests, mind you, business professionals) don't drink or smoke, and that they marry only other officers. This all because the charity is a devoutly religious one, founded by an evangelical Christian in 1865. Still, Salvation Army gets a hefty chunk of its budget from government funding (via faith-based funding that Obama says he'll expand) so the marriage restriction seems to fly in the face of employment discrimination principles.

Take Captain Johnny Harsh, the head of Salvation Army's Oshkosh, Wisconsin chapter. His wife, also a captain, died of a heart attack in June. Johnny has since fallen in love with a nurse he met on a Christian online dating site, a nurse who, incidentally, is not a Salvation Army officer. Still, they got engaged. (The harsh consequence after the jump.)

The charity responded by suspending Harsh who's been with the Salvation Army for 14 years.

Harsh says the rule is outdated and he won't call off the wedding. And despite the fact that he'll probably be dismissed when he goes before the review board next week, he's publicly asked people to not stop giving to the charity during the holidays. He told FoxNews.com: "I want to tell people, and use the media, to say don't stop giving to the Salvation Army because of this. That would be terrible."

Speaking of terrible, being fired from your job, by a charity no less, because of who you want to marry seems criminal, especially in this day and age. I say Harsh proposes to one of his male officer friends. Let's see how the holy army takes that marriage arrangement.

December 5, 2008

MOJO VIDEO: Rallying to Unelect Obama

Obama-haters, conspiracy theorists, and old fashioned Constitution devotees that question Barack Obama's eligibility for the White House due to his birth status reached their collective apogee Friday morning in front of the Supreme Court. The justices were considering whether to put on the docket a New Jersey case that alleges Barack Obama was a dual American and British citizen at birth, and that he thus fails the ill-defined "natural-born citizen" standard demanded of presidents by Article II of the Constitution. Legal experts doubt that the case will move forward, but that didn't stop roughly 20 people from gathering on the steps of the Supreme Court building to wave flags, pray, say the pledge of allegiance, and generate as much media attention as they could.

— By Jonathan Stein and Tay Wiles

Monday morning update: The networks are reporting that the Supremes have decided against taking the case.

OJ Lyrics, Anyone?

It's too little, too late, but OJ's finally going to do time. For that stupid, stupid Vegas robbery.

I bet OJ's all kindsa pissed off. He's getting zero points for not murdering all involved, including his fellow jackasses, the room service waiters, the maids on turn-down service, and any passing valets. At other hotels.

Sorry. I hate this guy and what the nation did to itself over someone so unworthy.

So, just to dance on the grave OJ will be buried alive in for at least 9 years, hows about a contest in very poor taste?

When I read the news, I immediately laughed since someone of his intellect is probably bemoaning not having killed all the witnesses. Which reminded me of Kenny Roger's "Lucille" lyrics. Leaving aside my embarrassing but abiding love for country music, this song strikes me as the best way to laugh at OJ finally getting what he deserved.

So, write some killer kick-him-when-he's down lyrics for the title "You Picked a Fine Time to Stop Killing, OJ." (Or, ok, for any OJ song you like, party poopers), and I'll send the best entry some MoJo swag.

C'mon. It's Christmas time. Let's not discriminate against us Grinches.

Don't Just Limit Executive Compensation. Limit Financial Industry Compensation

Gao Xiqing, president of the China Investment Corporation, speaking to James Fallows:

I have to say it: you have to do something about pay in the financial system. People in this field have way too much money.... It distorts the talents of the country. The best and brightest minds go to lawyering, go to M.B.A.s. And that affects our country, too! Many of the brightest youngsters come to me and say, "Okay, I want to go to the U.S. and get into business school, or law school." I say, "Why? Why not science and engineering?" They say, "Look at some of my primary-school classmates. Their IQ is half of mine, but they’re in finance and now they’re making all this money." So you have all these clever people going into financial engineering, where they come up with all these complicated products to sell to people.

Another benefit of working in finance, other than the spectacular paychecks? Job security. You create the economic crisis, and people in manufacturing and construction lose their jobs.

Blackwater Shooters To Be Charged Under Obscure Drug Law

Since September 2007, when Blackwater operators opened fire in a Baghdad traffic circle, killing 17 Iraqi civilians and wounding 24 more, the Justice Department has been struggling to build a criminal case. The challenge is indeed unique: Blackwater employees in Iraq are, like all other foreign contractors in the country, immune to Iraqi law. (This now stands to change under the new "Status of Forces" agreement, which strips contractors of their legal shield.) Because the Blackwater shooters were operating under a State Department contract, they also fall outside the jurisdiction of the US Code of Military Justice, which applies only to military contractors. US criminal and civil law also has yet to catch up to the reality of armed US contractors operating in conflict areas, and the few provisions that do cover such work need further clarification. In essence, the Blackwater operators who opened fire that day fell through the legal and regulatory cracks, effectively rendering them immune to charges of murder.

Well, almost. News reports indicate that the Justice Department, as early as Monday, could charge between three and six Blackwater contractors for the September 2007 shootings under the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988. The law calls for mandatory 30-year prison terms for the use of machine guns in violent crimes. The law was created in response to the crack epidemic of the 1980s, but can apparently be applied more broadly, or so federal prosecutors will argue.

But the very invocation of such a law lays bare the inadequacies of the system. The Justice Department has been probing the Blackwater shootings for over a year. Its investigators have interviewed dozens of witnesses—both in Iraq and the United States. A grand jury was called to examine the evidence and consider charges of assault and manslaughter. After all that, the best it can do is place its trust in the legally questionable application of an obscure drug law involving the use of machine guns? I suppose we should be thankful that Blackwater's armored vehicles were equipped with turret guns and that the guards themselves carried automatic weapons, for without them it seems entirely possible that the shooters would have escaped prosecution of any kind. (Then again, without such heavy weapons, victims would presumably have been fewer in number.)

And they may still do so. Among the remaining problems, Blackwater is alleged to have made repairs to the armored vehicles involved in the shootings before federal investigators could look them over, resulting in the loss of important forensic evidence that might have indicated whether the Blackwater contractors came under attack in the traffic circle (as Blackwater has claimed), or whether they opened fire without just cause. The State Department also granted the Blackwater contractors limited immunity in exchange for sworn statements about the shootings. Unless the Justice Department can make a compelling criminal argument independent of this testimony, its case remains very much in doubt.

Photo used under a Creative Commons license from abej2004.

Popular Vote Trivia

CrossingWallStreet.com has a neat catch.

Total Democratic Presidential Votes Since 1932: 745,407,082

Total Republican Presidential Votes Since 1932: 745,297,123

That difference, 109,959 votes out of 1.5 billion cast, is 0.00733 percent. Next time a conservative tells you we're a center-right country, tell them numbers exist. And they say we're pretty well split.

Equality Opportunity Opprobrium

We point out when Republicans abuse their power in ways that ought to get them kicked out of office, so we have a responsibility to do the same for Democrats. Time to go, Charlie Rangel.

New Palin Expenses Are... Curious

Politico reports that the RNC spent an additional $30,000 on clothes and accessories for Sarah Palin and her family late in the campaign, in addition to the $150,000 previously reported. Take a look at where the money was spent:

The RNC's post-Election Day report documented another $30,000 at outlets that read like a suburban shopping directory.

Dick's Sporting Goods, The Limited, Foot Locker, Wal-Mart, Toys R Us and Victoria's Secret are all listed in between the expected payments for media buys, direct mail and polling.

Sporting goods? Toys? Lingerie? In what conceivable way could these expenses be related to the campaign? I think it's a bit excessive that Palin's traveling makeup artist got paid $68,400 for roughly three months of work, and that her hair stylist got paid more than $42,000 for about two, but at least those expenses have a bearing on how Palin looked in rallies, interviews, and other campaign-related activities. What does Victoria's Secret sell that was relevant to the campaign?

December 4, 2008

Note to Fashion World: Michelle Obama Is Black

Womens' Wear Daily commissioned top designers to 'dress' Michelle Obama in her role as First Lady. I'm with Slate's Julia Turner: Why'd so many draw her as a shiksa?

I get that these drawings are stylizations but, to design for someone individually sorta requires you to deal with their skin tone, right? Would they drape a 'winter' in 'summer' colors? A few of the drawings make her downright Nubian, but a suspicious few too many have re-imagined her no darker than a color best described as "geisha".

Why? When they design for white folks, do the skin tones in the drawings vary far from alabaster? One hates to get all psychological on a Thursday, but are these artists 'helping' her by making her whiter (and thus 'capable' of beauty) or are they so squeamish in imagining a sister in couture that they have to whitewash her to make her 'worthy' of high fashion?

Check out the drawings yourself. Maybe I'm overreacting.

Nah. We're looking at some Freudian slips here.

Fiddling While Our University System Burns

The conservatives over at The City Journal are mourning the death of the classical university education:

...in recent decades, classical and traditional liberal arts education has begun to erode, and a variety of unexpected consequences have followed. The academic battle has now gone beyond the in-house "culture wars" of the 1980s. Though the argument over politically correct curricula, controversial faculty appointments, and the traditional mission of the university is ongoing, the university now finds itself being bypassed technologically, conceptually, and culturally, in ways both welcome and disturbing.

It's no big deal though. Our kids won't be able to afford to go to college. From NYT:

Over all, the report found, published college tuition and fees increased 439 percent from 1982 to 2007 while median family income rose 147 percent. Student borrowing has more than doubled in the last decade, and students from lower-income families, on average, get smaller grants from the colleges they attend than students from more affluent families.

"If we go on this way for another 25 years, we won’t have an affordable system of higher education,” said Patrick M. Callan, president of the center, a nonpartisan organization that promotes access to higher education.

So it doesn't really matter much what state our colleges and universities are in pedagogically, if only a Vanderbilt can afford to attend one.

Why Obama Should Replace Larry Summers With Eliot Spitzer

It's easy to snicker at Slate magazine for signing up Eliot Spitzer, former New York governor and onetime john, as a regular columnist. But judging from Spitzer's first outing, it was a master stroke.

The manner in which Spitzer crashed and burned has essentially wiped out the pre-prostitution portion of the Spitzer tale, which included his longtime stint as a critic of corporate excesses. But Spitzer's opening column in Slate is a reminder that in these days of multi-billion-dollar bailouts, there are few powerful and knowledgeable figures in government raising the appropriate questions and challenging the save-the-rich orthodoxy.

From his Slate piece:

What are we getting for the trillions of dollars in rescue funds? If we are merely extending a fatally flawed status quo, we should invest those dollars elsewhere. Nobody disputes that radical action was needed to forestall total collapse. But we are creating the significant systemic risk not just of rewarding imprudent behavior by private actors but of preventing, through bailouts and subsidies, the process of creative destruction that capitalism depends on.

A more sensible approach would focus not just on rescuing preexisting financial institutions but, instead, on creating a structure for more contained and competitive ones. For years, we have accepted a theory of financial concentration—not only across all lines of previously differentiated sectors (insurance, commercial banking, investment banking, retail brokerage, etc.) but in terms of sheer size. The theory was that capital depth would permit the various entities, dubbed financial supermarkets, to compete and provide full service to customers while cross-marketing various products. That model has failed. The failure shows in gargantuan losses, bloated overhead, enormous inefficiencies, dramatic and outsized risk taken to generate returns large enough to justify the scale of the organizations, ethical abuses in cross-marketing in violation of fiduciary obligations, and now the need for major taxpayer-financed capital support for virtually every major financial institution.

But even more important, from a structural perspective, our dependence on entities of this size ensured that we would fall prey to a "too big to fail" argument in favor of bailouts.

Spitzer has summed up the problem as well as anyone. He goes on:

Two responses are possible: One is to accept the need for gigantic financial institutions and the impossibility of failure—and hence the reality of explicit government guarantees, such as Fannie and Freddie now have—but then to regulate the entities so heavily that they essentially become extensions of the government. To do so could risk the nimbleness we want from economic actors.

The better policy is to return to an era of vibrant competition among multiple, smaller entities—none so essential to the entire structure that it is indispensable.

Spitzer, a populist in a suit, decries the "concentration of power--political as well as economic--that resided" in the Big Finance institutions that have dragged the economy down. He writes:

Imagine if instead of merging more and more banks together, we had broken them apart and forced them to compete in a genuine manner. Or, alternatively, imagine if we had never placed ourselves in a position in which so many institutions were too big to fail. The bailouts might have been unnecessary.

In that case, vast sums now being spent on rescue packages might have been available to increase the intellectual capabilities of the next generation, or to support basic research and development that could give us true competitive advantage, or to restructure our bloated health care sector, or to build the type of physical infrastructure we need to be competitive.

This is the opposite of Rubinomics. Spitzer is contemplating what must be done to rebuild our economy so that it truly competes internationally and, most important, generates wealth--not what must be done to rescue the high-fliers who have crashed and who seem to hold our credit lines and economy hostage. It's a perspective not heard within the mainstream too often these days. His views could have been influential when the first Wall Street bailout was pulled together in September--had he been part of the public discourse at the time and had he not been such a bad boy in the Mayflower Hotel.

I'm not often a fan of second acts for disgraced public officials. But in this instance, I'm glad Slate is sponsoring the Spitzer rehabilitation program. In fact, after reading his article, I'd be delighted if Barack Obama dumped Lawrence Summers and tapped Spitzer to be head of his National Economic Council.

Spitzer, after the fall he took, is not likely to rise so high. But he's demonstrated he deserves a platform. Let's hope the marketplace of ideas operates better than the marketplace of Wall Street and recognizes the merits Spitzer still possesses.

Sugar Daddy Redux

Nearly a year ago, Mother Jones covered the employment opportunities available to hot young hookers via websites like SugarDaddy.com. Today a college senior tells the Daily Beast all about her own arrangement with one such sugar daddy, who made her a sexy proposition she couldn't refuse. After all, she had "tried working, but in retail, surrounded by temptation all day, I spent more than I made. Waiting tables was exhausting."

Seriously, you guys, working and spending within your means is HARD. And certainly all of the sex workers I know would disagree with the implication that sex work isn't physically and emotionally demanding, too. Not that this classy college student considers her "relationship" sex work. The most she'll concede is that it's "maybe even the distant cousin of—dare I say it?—prostitution."

No, please, you best not dare say that, since having sex with somebody you wouldn't have sex with if they weren't throwing loads of money at you for it is not so much a faraway relative of prostitution as it is rampant prostitution. Listen. When the great depression of aught eight kicks in to full gear, we may all have to start screwing old rich guys for money. But let's call it what it is. There ain't no shame in the sex-work game, but there is something sad, and alarming, about smart men and women saying that keeping or being a 20-year-old call girl on a personal payroll is simply a natural, apolitical, magnanimous situation all around.

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen Is Made of Steel

Guess who'll be joining us in the unemployment lines? This South Florida rep who hung up on Obama, not once, but twice. Then she hung up on Rahm Emanuel. Presumably before he could curse her and the horse she rode in on.

Tough chick. She wasn't getting punk'd like Palin and she's got the best Barack anecdote of all to boot. Finally, the Prez had to get one of her homies to call and convince her to stop hurting his ear drums. But of course, our Negro Cary Grant remains too cool for school; he ain't mad at her.

Now, all I want to know is why he was calling her.

Seriously Bad News Week for KBR

Yesterday, we mentioned that a KBR subcontractor is storing 1,000 workers in a warehouse in Baghdad. Today, there's this:

The lawsuit also accuses KBR of shipping ice in mortuary trucks that "still had traces of body fluids and putrefied remains in them when they were loaded with ice. This ice was served to U.S. forces."

If you think that's bad, read the full story at Army Times. There's more, and it's all horrifying.

December 3, 2008

A Good Day for Al

Jim Martin lost Tuesday night in Georgia, dashing the Democrats' hopes of getting to 60 seats in the Senate. But the Dems' hopes of getting to 59 were looking a little better Wednesday on the strength of some good news for Al Franken, who is in a recount battle in Minnesota with incumbent Republican Norm Coleman. Franken, who Jonathan profiled for Mother Jones in 2007, entered the recount trailing by over 200 votes. According to the Minnesota Secretary of State's office, he now trails by around 300. That seems like bad news. But all is not as it seems.

In all likelihood, Coleman's actual lead is in the low single digits, writes polling guru Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com. The Franken campaign estimated on Tuesday morning that it was only 50 votes behind using the assumption that all vote challenges will be rejected (more than 6,000 challenges have been filed so far). That estimate was before Franken netted 37 votes from a batch of 171 previously uncounted ballots that were discovered in Ramsey County. But why doesn't the way the Secretary of State reports ballot totals make sense? Nate Silver explains:

[T]he Secretary of State treats all challenged ballots as nonvotes until they are addressed by the Canvassing Board, effectively allowing either campaign to deduct votes from the opponent's total by challenging legal ballots. However, since the vast majority of such challenges will be rejected, the Franken campaign's standard is probably more reasonable.

There's more good news in the pipe for Franken. On Wednesday morning, in what the Franken campaign called a "breakthrough," the office of Secretary of State Mark Ritchie asked local election officials to review—not count—some 12,000 rejected absentee ballots and make sure they were rejected for one of the four reasons allowed under Minnesota law. That task has to be completed by Dec. 18, but Silver has estimated that if the improperly rejected ballots are actually counted, Franken will net between 25 and 100 votes. If the Franken campaign's current estimates are correct, that might just be enough to turn a onetime comedian into a US Senator.

UPDATE: And now the Franken campaign's internal count has them ahead.

Slavery Comes Full Circle

CNN reminds us, as the Obamas head for DC, of the slaves who helped build the White House (as well as many other federal buildings) and of the many presidents tended to there by slaves. George Washington started the trend:

Twelve American presidents owned slaves and eight of them, starting with Washington, owned slaves while they lived in the White House. Almost from the very start, slaves were a common sight in the executive mansion. A list of construction workers building the White House in 1795 includes five slaves—named Tom, Peter, Ben, Harry, and Daniel—all put to work as carpenters. Other slaves worked as masons in the government quarries, cutting the stone for early government buildings, including the White House and US Capitol. According to records kept by the White House Historical Association, slaves often worked seven days a week—even in the hot and humid Washington summers.

So, now we've come full circle. Obama's mama's family owned slaves, and Mrs. Obama's ancestors were slaves. During the run, Michelle "learned this year that one of her great-great grandfathers was a slave who worked on a rice plantation in South Carolina. She says finding that part of her past uncovered both shame and pride and what she calls the tangled history of this country."

Tangled indeed, but finally heading north.

KBR Subcontractor Keeping 1,000 Asian Workers In a Warehouse

I'm no expert in human trafficking, but this strikes me as worthy of criminal punishment. McClatchy:

About 1,000 Asian men who were hired by a Kuwaiti subcontractor to the U.S. military have been confined for as long as three months in windowless warehouses near the Baghdad airport without money or a place to work.

Najlaa International Catering Services, a subcontractor to KBR, an engineering, construction and services company, hired the men, who're from India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. On Tuesday, they staged a march outside their compound to protest their living conditions....

The laborers said they paid middlemen more than $2,000 to get to Iraq for jobs that they were told would earn them $600 to $800 a month. Some of the men took out loans to cover the fees.

"They promised us the moon and stars," said Davidson Peters, 42, a Sri Lankan. "While we are here, wives have left their husbands and children have been shut out of their schools" because money for the families has dried up. The men live in three warehouses with long rows of bunk beds crammed tightly together. Reporters who tried to get a better glimpse inside were ushered away by armed guards.

One man held in the warehouse said there are "about 12" toilets for the 1,000 men. Because of this news report, the Kuwaiti subcontractor has said it will return the men to their home countries and give them back pay. The men, unsurprisingly, are skeptical.

New Nixon Tapes Are Always a Delight

The new Nixon tapes released this week include a couple moments that neatly summarize Nixon's flaws and foibles.

The wickedness:

— On July 1, 1971, Nixon instructs Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman to have someone break into the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.:

"I can't have a high-minded lawyer ... I want a son-of-a-bitch. I want someone just as tough as I am. ... We're up against an enemy, a conspiracy that will use any means. We are going to use any means... . Get it done. I want it done. I want the Brookings Institution cleaned out and have it cleaned out in a way that has somebody else take the blame."

The inferiority complex:

— On May 18, 1972, Nixon talks to Henry Kissinger about the National Security Adviser's meeting with Ivy League college presidents regarding the war in Vietnam:

NIXON: "The Ivy League presidents? Why, I'll never let those sons-of-bitches in the White House again. Never, never, never. They're finished. The Ivy League schools are finished ... Henry, I would never have had them in. Don't do that again ... They came out against us when it was tough ... Don't ever go to an Ivy League school again, ever. Never, never, never."

And there are a couple moments that foreshadow the current GOP. At one point Nixon tells Haldeman to freeze out the same paper that was the target of so much Palin-anger in 2008, saying, "We made the same mistake [Dwight] Eisenhower made, but not as bad as Eisenhower made, because he sucked the Times too much ... Goddamn it, don't talk to them for a while."

And the superficial appeals to the working class that mask an indifference to its actual needs is the same today as it was back then:

— On Dec. 9, 1972, Nixon talks to Colson about the appointment of building trades union leader Peter Brennan as secretary of labor:

NIXON: "The idea, they finally think the appointment of a working man makes them think we're for the working man."
COLSON: "That's precisely it."
NIXON: "They talk about all the tokenism. We appoint blacks, and they don't think we're for blacks. Mexicans. They don't think we're for Mexicans. But a working man, by golly, that is really something."

Something makes me think Nixon would have approved of Joe the Plumber. (Hat tip MSNBC)

Against Nepotism

This is a bipartisan plea. Can we stop with the scions of powerful families grabbing vacant positions for themselves? That means no Jeb Bush, who is considering a run for a Florida Senate seat; it means no Caroline Kennedy, who is apparently a contender to fill Hillary Clinton's New York Senate seat; and frankly, it also means no Terry McAuliffe, the Clintons' close confidant and former money man who is weighing a run for governor of Virginia despite being from New York state. If there was ever a time that the American people said decisively that they want new blood in Washington, it's now. Let's not perpetuate the old boys club in the face of that.

Update: Since none of the individuals mentioned in this post is getting a job directly from a relative, the title would probably be more accurate if it was "Against Legacies." But I'm going to embrace a broader, more colloquial definition of "nepotism" and leave it as is. Just, uh, in case you were wondering.

Obama's Coattails

The day after election day, when it looked like Democrats were going to pick up just 15 seats in the House and five seats in the Senate (remember, Oregon and Alaska were won late), political pundits wondered if Obama had shorter coattails than the hype surrounding him would suggest.

The results from yesterday's Senate run-off in Georgia, which Republican incumbent Saxby Chambliss won by a substantial margin over Democratic challenger Jim Martin, make the case that Obama's coattails were quite strong, at least in certain areas. Here's MSNBC's First Read:

Consider that during the general election, [Martin] trailed Saxby Chambliss (R) by just three percentage points, 49.8%-46.8%, with a third-party candidate garnering more than 3%. But in yesterday’s run-off, with 97% of precincts reporting, Chambliss won by 14 points, 57%-43%, preventing Democrats from obtaining a filibuster-proof 60 seats. How many House or Senate Democrats who believe they won because of Obama coattails -- especially in states like Alabama, North Carolina, and Virginia -- saw the run-off result and said, "Uh, oh. 2010 is going to be tough"?

Argument for Obama's coattails: Two consecutive "wave" elections for the same party are incredibly rare, and the Democrats pulled the trick off in 2008 with Obama at the top of the ticket. Argument against Obama's coattails: It's possibly that both Obama and the Democratic wave in Congress were the product of the same anti-Bush and anti-Republican sentiment. Argument that it doesn't matter: Obama has the majorities he needs to govern (for the next two years at least) and won by enough in the popular vote to declare a mandate. Coattails or no, it's time to get to work.

December 2, 2008

Cell Phone Lawsuit Follows Mojo Investigation

On the heels of a recent Mother Jones investigation into the mortal dangers of driving while gabbing on a cell phone, the nonprofit Center for Auto Safety has sued the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, accusing it of illegally withholding information related to the risks.

The lawsuit, filed yesterday in US District Court in Washington, DC, claims that the federal agency violated the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by refusing to release documents—including the first-ever government estimate of auto fatalities related to cell phone use: 955 deaths in 2002. NHTSA is a branch of the Department of Transportation that regulates the auto industry and aims to reduce injuries and deaths on the nation's highways. Contacted today, agency spokesman Rae Tyson declined to comment on the suit.

This past Halloween, Mother Jones published a Web-exclusive piece by former Los Angeles Times investigative reporter Myron Levin, telling the story of a family torn apart by a son's death at the hands of a distracted driver. The story also described a 2003 NHTSA review of worldwide research on the distraction posed by cell phones. The existence of the agency's fatality estimate and other briefing papers and reports only became known to the public after Mother Jones and the LA Times obtained the documents through unofficial channels.

Critics have accused NHTSA of pushing the safety issue under the rug. Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the DC-based center, called his organization's suit a "first step to getting NHTSA to do something…It's time to get these statistics out, so that we can adopt effective policies to make sure that talking and driving doesn't become the next drinking and driving.''

As Levin reported, NHTSA officials had also drafted a letter to the nation's governors warning that state laws requiring hands-free use of cell phones could make things worse by encouraging more yakking behind the wheel. But Transportation officials objected and the letter was never sent.

The center first sought the documents last March, but its request was denied. Following an appeal, NHTSA released a few reports, but redacted some of the most significant portions, including the fatality estimate. Agency attorneys argued that the documents were exempt from disclosure because they contained "internal pre-decisional'' information, and that their release "would have a chilling effect on the decision-making process.''

The suit, filed for the center by attorneys from the Public Citizen Litigation Group, seeks a judicial finding that NHTSA violated FOIA, along with a court order demanding the agency make the records available. Margaret Kwoka, a Public Citizen lawyer, insists the documents are not exempt. "NHTSA should not be withholding these important safety facts from the public," she says.

For readers feeling a hint of familiarity, it's worth noting that this isn't the center's first lawsuit related to stories we've published. Founded by the Consumers Union and Ralph Nader back in 1970, the Center for Auto Safety helped force a recall of the Ford Pinto stemming from "Pinto Madness," our 1977 exposé regarding the popular car's tendency to explode on impact.

Obama's First Policy Retreat?

Did Barack Obama just break his first campaign promise?

On the campaign trail, Obama railed against big oil companies. He often criticized John McCain for backing tax cuts that would reward ExxonMobil and other top oil manufacturers. But now Obama's proposal to apply a windfall tax on big oil has vanished... at least from his transition website. The President-elect's transition team hasn't explicitly announced it will drop the windfall tax plan, but a transition aide, commenting on the condition he not be identified, backed off the promise in an email. "President-elect Obama announced the [windfall profits tax] policy during the campaign because oil prices were above $80 per barrel," he said. "They are currently below that now and expected to stay below that."

The windfall profits proposal was deleted from the transition website almost three weeks before the eagle-eyed American Small Business League (ASBL), an advocacy group for small businesses, noticed the change and protested in a press release Tuesday. The plan was mentioned in a version (PDF) of the site that existed after Obama's election win. But when the transition website relaunched on November 8, references to a excess profits tax on the oil and gas industry were gone.

Obama talked about a windfall profits tax as early as April. As crude oil prices topped $110 a barrel, Obama promised to "put a windfall profits tax on oil companies and use it to help ... families pay their heating and cooling bills and reduce energy costs." And in August, the Democratic nominee issued a campaign ad that promised "a windfall profits tax on big oil to give families a thousand dollar rebate." The windfall profits tax was a key point of contention between President-elect Obama and McCain in June, when McCain criticized Obama for the plan, calling it "dangerous".

ASBL president and founder Lloyd Chapman says he was "disappointed" and "surprised" that Obama dropped the windfall tax plan. He maintains that a reduction in the price of oil does not justify the policy shift. "There's not always a correlation between the price of a barrel of oil and what we're paying at the pump," Chapman said. "The oil and gas companies are clearly making excessive profits. They've taken advantage of the fact that there's no regulation of that industry and overcharged at the pump and hurt our economy. The excessive profits tax is based on the excessive profits they've made in the last eight years. The tax was to get some of that money back for the American people."

James Galbraith, an economist at the University of Texas and a frequent Mother Jones contributor, says that Obama's change of course "makes sense" given the dramatically reduced amount of money a windfall profits tax would bring in now. "You could still pass the tax but the revenue from it would be much less," Galbraith wrote in an email Tuesday.

Cathy Landry, a spokeswoman for the American Petroleum Institute, which lobbies for the oil and gas industry, says that her organization hadn't heard any details of the Obama team's change in plans, but that the oil and gas lobby was happy to hear about it. "[API] is pleased that President-elect Obama is reevaluating his position, particularly considering the economic situation," Landry said. "The oil and gas industry has been one of the bright spots in the economy, and this would be a bad time to snuff out bright spots in the economy."

By the way, on October 30, ExxonMobil reported its quarterly earnings. It netted $14.83 billion, setting a national record for quarterly profits. Bright spot, indeed.

Should Blacks Gain From Obama's Win?

So the New York Times thinks more TV stars will be black, but The Root doesn't think black political reporters will see any advancement. I think both got it right.

Hard as it is to land a TV role, it's not so hard to make a lead character black. At least, not as hard as landing the plum job of White House reporter. The Root points out that many black reporters made their names covering Jesse Jackson's presidential run. But that run was never more than symbolic; basically, you send black reporters to cover the civil rights movement, which is the best way to characterize Jackson's play. But the White House? The press corps there won't be darkening any time soon. And it shouldn't. The White House beat should, by rights, go to those who've earned it. Which black reporters can, and will do.

Auto Execs Starting to Get It?

Bad PR works wonders, apparently. Just two weeks after incurring public wrath for flying private jets to Washington in order to beg for bailout money, Detroit's top dogs are returning this week (driving hybrid cars to get here) with a plan to make amends:

Ford Motor Co. Chief Executive Alan Mulally plans to tell Congress he is accelerating his company's development of hybrid and electric vehicles and is willing to cut his salary to $1 a year if Ford uses any federal funds.

General Motors Corp. is expected to focus on efforts to lighten the company's heavy debt load and consolidate or sell at least one of its eight automotive brands, most likely Saab, people familiar with the matter said. GM CEO Rick Wagoner also will take a $1 salary, those people said....

In a phone interview Monday, Mr. Mulally said Ford will explain to Congress it is rushing to launch new hybrids and electric vehicles by 2011, including a battery-powered commercial van and compact sedan. A plug-in electric vehicle that can be recharged from a standard electrical outlet should follow in 2012, he said.

In a separate interview, Ford Chairman William Ford Jr. said the company is looking beyond survival to opportunity. "We want to come blasting out as a global, green, high-tech company that's exactly where the country and the Obama administration want us to head," he said.

There is serious reason to doubt Bill Ford on this issue — he has long talked a good game on environmental matters while his company continued to mass produce gas-guzzling over-sized vehicles. At this point, though, reality appears to have finally penetrated the auto executives' thick skulls. No more private jets, no more massive salaries, no more ignoring the market for hybrids, and hopefully, no more business plans that produce SUVs and little else.

WMD Terrorist Attack "More Likely Than Not" by 2013, Says Report

On the heels of President-elect Barack Obama's announcement of his national security team, a new report wastes no time in outlining one of the more serious and immediate challenges facing the new administration: how to combat the spread of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). According to the Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism, a congressionally mandated, bipartisan panel of experts led by former senators Bob Graham and Jim Talent, the outlook is not good. The panel's final report, due out tomorrow, shows proliferation to be on the rise and concludes that "unless the world community acts decisively and with great urgency, it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013."

The last administration famously began its ill-fated foreign adventure in Iraq out of fear that "a smoking gun could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." But the Commission sees biological rather than nuclear weapons as a more pressing concern, describing the United States as "very exposed" to biological attack. The US has taken the lead in securing fissile materials used in nuclear weapons (although serious problems remain), but comparatively little effort has been spent in preventing biological attacks. The nuclear age began with the use of nuclear weapons, which gave urgency to fighting their spread. "The life sciences community," says the Commission, "has never experienced a comparable iconic event. As a result, security awareness has grown slowly, lagging behind the emergence of biological risks and threats." One possible exception, of course, was the 2001 anthrax attacks. But the vulnerabilities in the system has been "only partly addressed" and the Commission notes that "if only 15 grams of dry anthrax spores delivered by mail could produce such an enormous effect [an estimated $6 billion in damages, not to mention lives lost], the consequences of a large-scale aerosol release would be almost unimaginable."

But don't discount nuclear terrorism entirely. As the Commission observes, "were one to map terrorism and weapons of mass destruction today, all roads would intersect in Pakistan." The country has become, thanks to the A.Q. Khan network, perhaps the world's greatest proliferator. It has a history of unstable dictatorships, is a haven for Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and possesses a large stockpile of nuclear weapons. Many experts now point to Pakistan's tribal areas as a the place where future terrorist plots are likely to be hatched, and the Commission agrees. "In terms of the nexus of proliferation and terrorism, Pakistan must top the list of priorities for the next President and Congress."

The Commission will present its findings tomorrow to President Bush, Vice President-elect Biden, and senior congressional leaders.

Obama Takes Initial Open Government Step

Who here is interested in the copyright standards of the Obama transition's web-based information, documents, and videos? Everybody, right? Excellent.

Open government advocates are cheering the fact that the Obama transition team has changed the copyright restriction on Change.gov to a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, which allows users to grab content off Change.gov, copy it, remix it, and distribute it without limitation. All users have to do is attribute the content to Change.gov. It is the freest possible version of a copyright and a step in the right direction.

But there's more to be done, of course. The open government community is pushing for a couple more concessions from the Obama people, the primary one being that content needs to be practically accessible in addition to legally accessible. That is to say, it matters little if content on Change.gov can be remixed and modified and disseminated, if the coding of the content doesn't allow it to be copied in the first place. Here's an explanation from open-government.us, where you can find more ideas for a truly open transition:

Citizens should be able to download transition-related content in a way that makes it simple to share, excerpt, remix, or redistribute. This is an essential digital freedom.

For example, while content may be posted on a particular site such as YouTube, because YouTube does not authorize videos on its site to be downloaded, transition-created content should also be made available on a site that does permit downloads. Just as it would be unacceptable for government websites to block the copying-and-pasting of publicly accessible text, making video accessible in a manner that does not allow easy or authorized excerpting and reuse blocks access and engagement.

We would therefore strongly encourage the transition to assure that the material it has licensed freely be practically accessible freely as well. There are a host of services — such as blip.tv — which not only enable users to download freely licensed content, but which also explicitly marks the content with freedom it carries.

We'll see how far Obama wants to go in this regard; sacrificing control for the sake of openness is not something the executive branch has been good at of late, and Obama need not take drastic steps to improve on the behavior of his predecessor. But the fact that the Obama team seems cognizant of and amenable to the priorities of the open government community signals good things for the upcoming administration. Says Larry Lessig, "I'm glad the thought in this administration led to the right conclusion, so quickly, and in the midst of so much else going on."

South Texas Indictments of Cheney, Gonzales Dismissed

Happened yesterday. And it wasn't surprising.

The Great Recession

Who will we be after the economic meltdown? This is something I've been pondering a lot lately.

Maybe I'm overreacting, but if we don't all become our parents and grandparents—the ones who survived the Great Depression and used every tea bag thrice—the Visigoths are on the horizon.

Personally, I'm planning a major downsizing, even though I've been living far from large since having two kids. My parents were sharecroppers born in the 1920s Deep South, so I grew up wearing patched hand-me-downs, saving aluminum foil, and scraping the last dregs from every pot to have for lunch the next day. The amount of food my kids waste has always horrified me (all those bananas and PB&J's they were dying for, then took one bite of); since my oldest's birth, my diet has consisted mostly of scarfing down their leavings. Once upon a time, I knew this was laughable. Now I'm telling the whole world: For dinner last night, I had partially eaten raviolis and pre-gnawed garlic bread scraped from both their plates, plus their leftover apple juice (son) and milk (daughter). Pre-Bush, it was just a habit my schmancy friends chuckled at indulgently. Post-Bush, it's a civic duty, a matter of house and home.

So, I'm waiting, hoping, to find that we all become like my tight-fisted Great Aunt Pearl who grew up five to a bed, downwind of the outhouse, but owned four mortgage-free houses by the time I was born. She made an apple last for three days. If you asked her for a Christmas present, she'd glare and say, "You got the day off didn't you?"

HuffPo has inagurated a new column to suss out how, if, we're all adapting to this brave new world of utter insecurity. Maybe now America will become the place where we brag about how many we fit into how little space and not how big our flat screens are. Or maybe this is just a history we're doomed to keep repeating.

Posted by Debra Dickerson on 12/02/08 at 5:02 AM | |