Take a look.

David Brooks had a column recently in which he disputed that Reagan exploited the “Southern strategy” of racism. Paul Krugman has a good reply:

So there’s a campaign on to exonerate Ronald Reagan from the charge that he deliberately made use of Nixon’s Southern strategy. When he went to Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980, the town where the civil rights workers had been murdered, and declared that “I believe in states’ rights,” he didn’t mean to signal support for white racists. It was all just an innocent mistake.

Indeed, you do really have to feel sorry for Reagan. He just kept making those innocent mistakes.

When he went on about the welfare queen driving her Cadillac, and kept repeating the story years after it had been debunked, some people thought he was engaging in race-baiting. But it was all just an innocent mistake.

When, in 1976, he talked about working people angry about the “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks at the grocery store, he didn’t mean to play into racial hostility. True, as the New York Times reported,

The ex-Governor has used the grocery-line illustration before, but in states like New Hampshire where there is scant black population, he has never used the expression “young buck,” which, to whites in the South, generally denotes a large black man.

But the appearance that Reagan was playing to Southern prejudice was just an innocent mistake.

Similarly, when Reagan declared in 1980 that the Voting Rights Act had been “humiliating to the South,” he didn’t mean to signal sympathy with segregationists. It was all an innocent mistake.

In 1982, when Reagan intervened on the side of Bob Jones University, which was on the verge of losing its tax-exempt status because of its ban on interracial dating, he had no idea that the issue was so racially charged. It was all an innocent mistake.

And the next year, when Reagan fired three members of the Civil Rights Commission, it wasn’t intended as a gesture of support to Southern whites. It was all an innocent mistake.

Poor Reagan. He just kept on making those innocent mistakes, again and again and again.

Corby Kummer has an excellent article in the December 2007 issue of The Atlantic Monthly (the one with the composite photo of Barack Obama on the cover) on the new directions in coffee. There’s movement away from the heavy, dark-roasted coffee pioneered by Alfred Peet and made famous by Starbucks, toward lighter and more complex coffees—and the movement is spearheaded by George Howell, whose non-compete agreement from being bought out by Starbucks has now expired.

Howell is selling his coffees through TerroirCoffee.com and is specializing in direct-trade coffees, where he buys directly from the coffee growers, as well as the lighter roasts. Kummer’s article is definitely worth reading if you like coffee, but let me point out this bit:

Good complex flavors are Howell’s specialty, and ones that dark roasts, with their brute power and body, generally obliterate. Light roasts show best when brewed at high temperatures and relatively quickly. This is why he sells only the Technivorm brewer, a Dutch machine that has long been the gold standard for brewed coffee. I brought a few standard home-brewing machines to Howell’s headquarters for what I thought would be a straightforward taste test against the Technivorm. Peter Lynagh, a young man who moved from Austin to fulfill a dream of apprenticing with Howell, and Vince Fedele, an engineer and longtime Coffee Connection fan who is Howell’s chief operating officer, became somewhat obsessed, comparing heat cycles and flavor profiles. So did Howell, who was just back from Colombia. What Lynagh and I thought would be a morning turned into three very long, highly caffeinated days.

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Take a look at the whole post.

It even has a comic history now. The keyboard shown, BTW, is not the real Dvorak keyboard—it’s the ANSI Dvorak, and keyboard manufacturers insisted that the key combinations had to be maintained. Thus in the ANSI Dvorak keyboard the “?” is in an upshift position, which makes little sense. In the original, the “?” was in a downshift position. You can see the “?” in one of the panels in the history: the original patent.

BTW, I did go to the Regional settings and look at adding a language. Esperanto was not listed. :sigh:

The unions have helped all who work, many of whom have been taught that unions are “bad.” Read this:

“Red November, black November/Bleak November, black and red./ Hallowed month of labor’s martyrs,/Labor’s heroes, labor’s dead.” So wrote radical poet and American political prisoner Ralph Chaplin in 1933. The month of November is indeed a hallowed month for leftists in this country and around the world.

In November 1915, a Utah firing squad executed Joe Hill, the labor activist and songwriter whose tunes would later inspire such politically oriented musicians as Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. Jailed on a murder charge under dubious circumstances, Joe Hill had supporters around the world, including President Wilson, who said the radical troubadour had not received a fair trial because of his membership in the militant Industrial Workers of the World labor union, also known as the Wobblies.

A year later, in November 1916, police gunfire killed five Wobblies who were arriving by boat for a labor rally in Everett, Wash. Two police officers also were killed, probably by “friendly fire” from their own ranks. The Everett Massacre was another chapter of labor history written in blood.

Washington’s long saga of labor unrest reached a high point of horror in the small logging town of Centralia in November 1919. During an Armistice Day parade celebrating the end of World War I, members of the newly-formed American Legion attacked an IWW meeting hall. Union men fought back and there was gunfire from both sides in the conflict. Wesley Everest, a lumberjack, IWW member and World War I veteran, vowed, “I fought for democracy in Europe and I’ll fight for it here” as he fired his pistol at the mob. That night, the captured Everest was taken from jail and lynched in his Army uniform. His body was displayed to gawking townspeople for three days and pieces of the lynching rope became coveted souvenirs of an event still remembered in labor history as the Centralia Conspiracy.

No event in the history of American labor strife has had the impact of the trial and executions of the anarchists and union organizers hanged in Chicago on Nov. 11, 1887, for their roles in what historian Paul Avrich has called “The Haymarket Tragedy” in his definitive book about the incident.

Union men and women were on the march in post-Civil War Chicago, and the city had become a mecca for radicals. Both the Democratic and Republican mainstream political parties offered little hope for disgruntled and downtrodden workers both immigrant and American-born, so doctrines like anarchy, socialism, communism, feminism and labor activism sprouted in the political soil of late-19th-century America.

In 1886, a bomb powered by the newly invented dynamite was thrown into the ranks of cops who were attacking a labor rally in Chicago’s Haymarket district. One officer was killed outright and several others were wounded. To this day, no one knows precisely how many labor activists were killed or injured in the incident and no one knows who threw the dreadful bomb. Historians do know that martial law was declared in Chicago as the whole country came under the hysteria of this nation’s first “Red Scare,” as men who had no part in the bombing were hanged for their anarchist opinions.

“Make the raids first and look up the law afterwards,” sneered Chicago prosecutor Julius Grinnel. After a sensational trial that had what Avrich called “the dimensions of a historical tragedy,” four of the anarchists were hanged by Windy City authorities on Nov. 11, 1887 - 120 years ago this week.

The Haymarket affair had many political elements that we still struggle with today: government surveillance, police misconduct, immigration, workers’ rights. It was one of the most important events in American history, but it is history that often is ignored by schools and colleges. As Ralph Chaplin wrote in “Wobbly,” his autobiography: “Working people, like everyone else, have a way of forgetting the struggles and sacrifices that made possible the improved conditions they enjoy today.”

I hate this sort of thing, don’t you?

They’re at it again. The folks in Congress are doing the opposite of what good common sense would dictate on energy issues. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) and his House counterpart Nancy Pelosi (D-California) have dropped important mandates and incentives for renewables from 2008 energy policy. According to renewableenergyaccess.com, this major concession to friends of the old energy establishment is part of the horsetrading necessary to deliver a bill to voters before the Thanksgiving recess.

What’s getting the ax?

1. The RPS, or Renewable Portfolio Standard, would have set a goal of acquiring 20-25% of the nation’s electctricity from renewable sources by 2025. This is a very modest target to begin with. The European Union, for example, is on track to meet a 21% target by 2010. While 29 individual states in the U.S. have instituted their own RPS targets, we need an aggressive national policy to stimulate U.S. innovation and investment in alternative energy. We ought to be pursuing a global leadership position in renewables. As things stand, we aren’t even doing a very good job at following.

2. Tax incentives such as the PTC (Production Tax Credit) and ITC (Investment Tax Credit). The solar space doesn’t exactly seem to lack for investment these days, so the ITC may indeed be an unnecessary boondoggle. But the PTC, currently set to expire in December, 2008, is critical for bringing consumer costs for solar in line with other energy sources in the near-term and attracting producers and jobs to the U.S. market. America, when it comes to our ability to compete in a new, sustainable economy, we may get caught with our pants down.

Pelosi and Reid may be gambling that a stronger energy bill will pass in the wake of the Presidential election. Meanwhile, the current bill seems to throw a bone to all the old dogs - oil, coal, natural gas, while appeasing heartland legislators through biofuel subsidies to farmers in Midwestern states. Those of us who care about climate change and a green energy future will want to get on the horn to our senators and representatives!

We’ve recently written about explosive growth in the solar energy space. Encouraged by government subsidies, companies like China’s SunTech Power and Arizona’s First Solar have have been bullish regarding growth prospects in the U.S. solar market. Let’s hope that tax incentive programs on the state level will be sufficient to drive this growth, and that this latest foolishness from Washington will only present a bump in the road, rather than a long-term setback for U.S. solar producers.

The US doesn’t have the institution used in Japan, of designating certain masters of their craft or art as Living National Treasures, but we perhaps should institute it, and Studs Terkel would be an early recipient if I have anything to do with it. Take this story:

“I’m known around the block as a writer and broadcaster,” Terkel tells me, “but also as that old guy who talks to himself. I never learnt to drive. Why should I have? The bus was there. So one day I’m on the corner alone, waiting for the 146. I’m talking to myself, finding the audience very appreciative. Then other people arrive; I talk to them too. This one couple ignore me completely. He’s wearing Gucci shoes and carrying The Wall Street Journal. She’s a looker. Neiman Marcus clothes. Vanity Fair under her arm. So I told them, ‘Tomorrow is Labor Day: the holiday to ‘ honour the unions.’ The guy gives me the kind of look Noël Coward might have given a bug on his sleeve. ‘We despise unions.’ I fix him with my glittering eye, like the Ancient Mariner, and I ask, ‘How many hours do you work a day?’ He tells me eight. ‘How come you don’t work 18 hours a day, like your great-grandparents?’ He can’t answer that. ‘Because four men got hanged for you.’ I explain that I’m referring to the Haymarket Affair, the union dispute here in Chicago in May 1886. The bus is late. I have him pinned against the mailbox. Then I say, ‘How many days a week do you work?’ He says five.”

Terkel laughs, and takes a sip of water. “I say: ‘Five – oh, really? How come you don’t work six and a half ?’ He isn’t sure. ‘Because of the Memorial Day Massacre. These battles were fought, all for you.’ I tell him about that massacre of workers, in Chicago, in 1937. He’s never heard of these things before. She drops her Vanity Fair. I pick it up, being gallant. I am giving it to them now: the past. Because, like James Baldwin said, without the past, there is no present. The bus arrives. They leap in. I never see them again. But I’ll bet… they live in an upscale condominium that faces the bus stop. I’ll bet she looks down every morning, from the 20th floor, and he says: ‘Is that old nut still down there?’ And can you blame them?”

More good stories about him here.

It’s not common to single out an arranger, but Neal Hefti is really good. He’s a trumpter but I think is probably better known as an arranger. What is it about trumpeters, anyway? Two other notable arrangers I immediately think of are trumpeters: Billy May and Benny Carter. Of course, Benny Carter is as much a clarinetist or saxophonist as trumpter.

Which reminds me of a great story. There used to be a program where established jazz greats would listen to pieces by up-and-comers and try to identify them. Once a very nice track from Maria Muldaur’s eponymous 1973 album was played and the panel listened attentively. At the end, Dinah Washington Sarah Vaughn said, “I don’t know who’s singing, but that’s a Benny Carter arrangement.” That particular album has several Benny Carter arrangements, and they are amazing: somehow a truly three-dimensional sound: great depth and shimmering planes of sound.

But back to Neal Hefti. He’s done a lot of arranging, and one particular album is fantastic: Count Basie’s band playing all Neal Hefti arrangements in the album The Complete Atomic Basie, which, at $8, is a steal. (The Frank Capp Juggernaut also played those arrangements in the very tasty CD In A Hefti Bag.) Here’s one track from the Count Basie album, Li’l Darlin’.

And Glenn Greenwald explains why:

Two months ago, Dianne Feinstein used her position on the Senate Intelligence Committee to enable passage of Bush’s FISA amendments, granting the President vast new warrantless surveillance powers.

Last month, Feinstein used her position on the Senate Judiciary Committee to ensure confirmation of Bush’s highly controversial judicial nominee Leslie Southwick, by being the only Committee Democrat to vote for the nomination (The Politico: “Sen. Dianne Feinstein had emerged as a linchpin in the controversial nomination”).

This week, Feinstein used her position on the Senate Judiciary Committee to enable confirmation of Bush’s Attorney General nominee by ensuring that the frightened Chuck Schumer didn’t have to stand alone (Fox News: “Schumer’s and Feinstein’s support for Mukasey virtually guarantees that a majority of the committee will recommend his confirmation”).

And now, Feinstein is using her position on the Senate Judiciary Committee and Senate Intelligence Committee — simultaneously — to single-handedly ensure fulfillment of Bush’s telecom amnesty demands, as her hometown newspaper, The San Francisco Chronicle, reports:

Feinstein backs legal immunity for telecom firms in wiretap cases Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Thursday that she favors legal immunity for telecommunications companies that allegedly shared millions of customers’ telephone and e-mail messages and records with the government, a position that could lead to the dismissal of numerous lawsuits pending in San Francisco.

In a statement at a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is considering legislation to extend the Bush administration’s electronic surveillance program, Feinstein said the companies should not be “held hostage to costly litigation in what is essentially a complaint about administration activities” . . .

Feinstein, D-Calif., plays a pivotal role on the Judiciary Committee, which has a 10-9 Democratic majority. If she joins committee Republicans in voting next Thursday to protect telecommunications companies from lawsuits for their roles in the surveillance program, the proposal — a top priority of President Bush — will become part of legislation that reaches the Senate floor.

There is nothing worth critiquing in what Feinstein specifically said, since she just recited the administration’s standard pro-amnesty talking points, leading with its most deceitful ones. As but one example, Feinstein — echoing John Aschroft’s NYT Op-Ed from this week — said in her statement that “suits are unfair to the companies, which are ‘unable to defend themselves in court’ because the government has insisted that their activities be kept secret.” That is just false. As the Chronicle reported: “federal law allows such defendants to present secret evidence in private to the judge, a practice [EFF's Cindy Cohn] said has been carried out for decades without any leaks.” Oddly (or not), the Chronicle article quotes Feinstein as saying that telecoms “should not be ‘held hostage to costly litigation in what is essentially a complaint about administration activities’” — the same exact phrase, verbatim, featured in Fred Hiatt’s Editorial two weeks ago urging telecom amnesty (Hiatt: “we do not believe that these companies should be held hostage to costly litigation in what is essentially a complaint about administration activities”).

I wrote about Feinstein at length a month ago here, including all the ways her administration-coddling and courting of intelligence officials benefits her defense-contractor-husband. But still, this recent behavior is really amazing.

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Interesting talk on learning happiness and joy.

Remarkable. It requires IE Tab to display (or, I guess, you can simply use IE). Click “Watch the advert” to watch the advert.

Baby furniture that transforms to toddler furniture—and back, for the next baby.

Yet another green tendril of hope and accountability showing in the fire-blackened landscape: actual fact-checking:

News outlets are fact-checking political advertising more than ever, according to two new studies being released Friday morning, which indicate the number of newspaper “adwatch” stories has more than tripled since the beginning of the decade.

“Those who feed false or misleading information to voters are going to be under more scrutiny in 2008,” said FactCheck.org director Brooks Jackson. “For political advertisers the message is ‘Caveat mendax – let the liar beware.’”

Newspaper and broadcast journalists are becoming more aggressive in challenging false or misleading political claims, according to the studies released today by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.

The studies are being released by FactCheck.org and the Annenberg center at a Washington, D.C., conference titled, “Pants on Fire, Political Mendacity and the Rise of Media Fact-Checkers.”

Among the findings:

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It seems unlikely, given that there’s no sex involved. Still, this is interesting:

You wouldn’t know it if you just watch TV news or read the corporate press, but this past Tuesday, something remarkable happened. Despite the pig-headed opposition of the Democratic Party’s top congressional leadership, a majority of the House, including three Republicans, voted to send Dennis Kucinich’s long sidelined Cheney impeachment bill (H Res 333) to the Judiciary Committee for hearings.

The vote was 218 to 194.

Now the behind-the-scenes partisan maneuvering that preceded that vote was arcane indeed, with Kucinich first exercising a member’s privilege motion to present his stymied impeachment bill to the full House, only to have Speaker Nancy Pelosi arrange for a colleague (Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-MD) offer a motion to table it. The Republicans, anxious to embarrass the Speaker, threw a wrench into that plan, though, by voting as a bloc to oppose tabling. Since Kucinich already has 22 co-sponsors for his bill, it was clear that the tabling gambit would fail. As soon as that became apparent, rank-and-file Democrats, unwilling to be seen by their constituents as defending Cheney, rushed to change their votes to opposing the tabling motion. In the end, tabling failed by 242 to 170 with 77 Democrats supporting a pleasantly surprised Kucinich.

In order to avoid a floor debate on the merits of impeaching the eminently impeachable Vice President Cheney, Pelosi and her allies then moved to send Kucinich’s bill directly to the Judiciary Committee. They were joined by three Republicans, including maverick Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul (R-TX).

Now the hope of the Democratic leadership is that this means Kucinich’s impeachment bill will continue to be safely bottled up in a subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee. But it may not work out that way for them.

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I blogged earlier about the idea of making a desired behavior fun—in the robot goat that eats losing race tickets, for example, so that properly discarding the ticket instead of throwing it on the ground becomes fun. I later remembered another example: the Santa Cruz boardwalk has a great merry-go-round that allows those on the outer horses to reach for a brass ring. Now, how do you collect the rings so they can be reused? Just a little farther there’s an enormous clown-face target against one wall, and if throw your ring through the hole that forms the nose, you’re rewarded with a bell and a light. All the rings thrown fall into a trough that collects them for re-use.

And this post shows taking it one step further: instead of finding a way to make proper disposal of beer bottles fun, design the beer bottles so that they can be useful and thus either won’t be left on the beach to begin with, or will be collected by people who plan to put them to use in building a wall.

I wonder why this didn’t catch on.

Watch this video.

Boosting a baby’s IQ by breastfeeding requires both nature—a particular gene—and nurture—the decision to breastfeed. Science News:

Scientists have achieved a breakthrough in deciphering the genetics of intelligence. Ironically, they did it by accounting for a key environmental factor.

Breast-feeding boosts children’s IQs by 6 to 7 points over the IQs of kids who weren’t breast-fed, but only if the breast-fed youngsters have inherited a gene variant associated with enhanced chemical processing of mothers’ milk, reports a team led by psychologist Avshalom Caspi of King’s College London.

The new finding supports the controversial hypothesis that fatty acids in breast milk enhance newborn babies’ brain development. Moreover, the results demonstrate that intelligence researchers must examine how children’s genetic natures interact with the ways in which they’re nurtured.

“Genes work via specific environmental experiences to shape intellectual development,” Caspi says.

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Like tendrils of grass appearing after a fire, little traces of accountability are seen here and there. For example:

Shortly after Condoleezza Rice took charge of the 57,000-person State Department in 2005, she said she relished the challenge of “line responsibility” in leading a large organization. “I really enjoy that,” she said in an interview. “Some of my favorite times here have been my budget and high-level management reviews.”

Nearly three years later, Rice is under fire from inside and outside the State Department for a range of crises that are largely managerial in nature — the failure to monitor private security guards in Iraq, the delays in opening the huge U.S. Embassy under construction in Baghdad and the resistance of some Foreign Service officers to being forced to serve there. Over the summer, the department also fell woefully short in processing passport applications, resulting in ruined vacation plans for many Americans.

Within the department, Rice is viewed by many rank-and-file employees as an aloof manager who relies on a tight circle of aides, leaving her out of touch with the rest of the staff, in contrast to her predecessor, Colin L. Powell, a retired Army general who won praise from workers for treating them as though they were his “troops.” At her last town hall meeting with employees 2 1/2 years ago, Rice told staffers: “I consider myself the chief management officer of this department.” But a poll by the American Foreign Service Association indicated that an overwhelming majority did not feel that Rice was their advocate.

The latest controversy about forced assignments to Iraq has only heightened internal resentment of Rice’s management style. “I personally do not like the ultimatum-giving,” said one Foreign Service officer. “It is not what State is about.”

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It gets simpler and easier as I go. I have this little wooden drying rack from Mama Bear (scroll down at this link), which I’ve used to hold my alum block. Yesterday, when I finished with the Cube, I placed it on the rack—it just fit between the side rails.

This morning I picked it up, and the rack came with it. Okay, no problem. I held the rack in my left hand while I worked up the lather using the Rooney Style 3 Size 2 Super. Then I thought, why hold it? I put it back in place on the back of the sink and let it sit there as I lathered away at the top. The Cube is heavy enough to stay in place, and the lathering went fine.

I put the piece of Shaving Paste in the brush, lathered more, and then applied lather and picked up the Futur with a Treet Blue Special and started shaving. The double downward pass is a nice thing, I discover. Then sideways, then up, lathering between each pass.

Very smooth result. 9.5, I would say. Acqua di Selva aftershave, and tomorrow I’m trying the Rooney Style 3 Size 1 Super. Then next week, I’ll use the same razors in sequence, but using regular soap or shaving cream and note the difference, if any.