the wei

Thursday, 01/03/08
Data loss shakes voter trust. Facility guarded half-time on weekends

By MICHAEL CASS, Staff Writer

The Metro Nashville building from which thieves stole two computers containing sensitive voter data does not have security guards on duty for half of the day on weekends, and it has no alarm system or video surveillance.

The Metro Office Building on Second Avenue South has had one guard on duty 12 hours a day on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays for about 10 years, said Velvet Hunter, Metro General Services’ assistant director for administration. She declined to specify the hours, citing concerns that publicity could make the facility more vulnerable.

Hunter said city officials decide how to secure buildings based on “a risk assessment of all factors.” She said the Metro Office Building, which is on Second Avenue South near Howard School Office Building, had never been burglarized until the laptops were stolen around Christmas.

But the area around the building, which is just off Interstate 40, has had problems with crime. Four homicides were committed within a half-mile of the facility in 2007, and seven homicides within a mile of it, according to a Tennessean analysis of Metro police data.

The two Dell Latitude laptops, one of which needed repairs, contained Social Security numbers for 337,000 voters. Police said Wednesday that a computer router also stolen in the break-in at the Davidson County Election Commission offices “went offline” at 9:45 p.m. Dec. 24.

Jump to full Tennesean article

by Star Ledger Staff and wire reports
January 02, 2008, 5:07 PM

California sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today for denying its first-in-the-nation greenhouse gas limits on cars, trucks and SUVs, challenging the Bush administration’s conclusion that states have no business setting emission standards.

New Jersey joined the lawsuit and other states were expected to follow. The legal challenge was anticipated after the EPA on Dec. 19 denied California a waiver it needs under the federal Clean Air Act. The lawsuit was filed in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson denied California the waiver, saying new federal regulations would be more effective than a patchwork of state laws. At least 16 other states had been expected to follow California’s lead and adopt the state’s tougher emission limits.

New Jersey and the other states cannot act without EPA approval.

“We need the waiver enabling California’s proposed greenhouse gas emission standards for new motor vehicles, which are vital to the health and well being of New Jersey residents,” state Attorney General Anne Milgram said.

Jump to full Star Ledger article

Paul Krugman writes

Now, why should Mr. Bush fear that insuring uninsured children would lead to a further “federalization” of health care, even though nothing like that is actually in either the Senate plan or the House plan? It’s not because he thinks the plans wouldn’t work. It’s because he’s afraid that they would. That is, he fears that voters, having seen how the government can help children, would ask why it can’t do the same for adults.

And there you have the core of Mr. Bush’s philosophy. He wants the public to believe that government is always the problem, never the solution. But it’s hard to convince people that government is always bad when they see it doing good things. So his philosophy says that the government must be prevented from solving problems, even if it can. In fact, the more good a proposed government program would do, the more fiercely it must be opposed.

This sounds like a caricature, but it isn’t. The truth is that this good-is-bad philosophy has always been at the core of Republican opposition to health care reform.

Jump to full New York Times op-ed piece

The family of a California teenager plan to sue her health insurer which refused to pay for a liver transplant until hours before and she died on Thursday night.  

Her family . . . will ask the Los Angeles district attorney to press murder or manslaughter charges against Cigna HealthCare, arguing that the firm “maliciously killed” Nataline Sarkisyan by its reluctance to pay for her treatment. Although she was fully insured and had a matching donor, Cigna refused to pay . . . . 

The company recently posted figures for its third-quarter performance this year, which showed profits up 22%. Next year it expects to earn an income of up to $1.2bn.

Jump to full Guardian article.

The myth is simply this: that if an individual will work hard, follow the rules, and be patient that they can be successful. . . The truth is that in accumulating wealth hard work plays a very small role . . . no group has worked harder than the slaves that built this country, the Chinese that built the railroad, or the Mexicans that continue to do the menial labor that drives our information society.

Today, as Tim Wise writes in “The Mother of All Racial Preferences” white baby boomers are benefiting from the largest transfer of wealth in American history as they inherit their parents’ estates. Some of that wealth dates back to the years of slavery, when Blacks were forced to work for free while their white owners and the American economy accumulated the benefits of their toil. Another large category of the transferred wealth is land, much of it stolen by the American government from Native Americans and Mexicans and sold for a pittance to white settlers. For the average white family, however, some of the largest sources of wealth are the result of racial preferences in government policies that were started in the 20th century.

. . . it was a fact that I worked the hardest on the jobs that paid me the least . . . How can we in good conscious claim that the person[s] working for minimum wage or working two menial jobs is not working hard enough and are therefore responsible for their lack of wealth?

Critics of affirmative action lean heavily on the myth that people make it on their own in the United States based on hard work and individual effort. They also maintain that government intervention in the wealth creation process is not just unprecedented, but un-American. Simply put, they ask: Why should the beneficiaries of affirmative action be the recipients of preferential governmental policies when whites acquired their wealth through hard work? The answer is simple: in reality governmental policy has played an absolutely crucial role in determining the racial character of the haves and the have nots in America.

. . . The majority of personal wealth in America is based on home ownership, if governmental policies provided funds for one group and not all groups equally then that is favoritism. With the government condoning and encouraging “red-lining” in mortgage loans by the FHA, it allowed whites to receive low interest loans on their mortgages thus providing them with the needed equity to begin the process of wealth accumulation. This is just one of many government policies that helped to decide who was going to be well-off in America and who wasn’t.

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[Rogers], too, addresses obsolescence’s worst form of fallout, e-waste, and provides some arresting numbers: In 2004, “about 315 million working PCs were retired in North America.” Most went “straight to the trash heap.” As did more than 100 million cell phones in 2005, creating 50,000 tons of e-waste. These all add up to a “toxic time bomb,” . . .

How did we come to this almost surreal conjuncture? The first phase involved “psychological obsolescence,” the carefully choreographed arousal of dissatisfaction with the old and irrepressible desire for the new and fashionable. It didn’t take carmakers long to discover that cosmetic changes induced consumers to “trade up for style, not just for technological improvements, long before their old cars wore out.” The fashion imperative, the need to have the latest thing, has worked with any number of products over the years. Slade relates amazing lore regarding the success of disposable razors, the invention of the wristwatch, the cutthroat battle for the radio market and the advent of the calculator, the gadget that jump-started the electronics revolution.

. . . Even more alarming is [Grossman's] expose of the troubles associated with polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs, synthetic chemical compounds found in flame retardants used in TVs, computers and phones. PBDEs do not remain locked up in these objects, but instead drift into the air and infiltrate the living world. They are in our food and our bodies, and their ill effects can be drastic.

Finally, Grossman offers her perspective on the horrors of e-waste shipped in massive quantities to India, Nigeria, Pakistan and China, where children, women and men bereft of protective clothing and proper tools break apart our discarded electronics by hand. These exploited laborers are exposed, at grave risk, to permanent biological toxic substances, poisons that also flow unchecked into rivers and seas and the air we breath.

Jump to full Chicago Tribune article

The next president will have to deal with yet another crippling legacy of George W. Bush: the economy. A Nobel laureate, Joseph E. Stiglitz, sees a generation-long struggle to recoup.

by JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ, December 2007

The American economy can take a lot of abuse, but no economy is invincible.

When we look back someday at the catastrophe that was the Bush administration, we will think of many things: the tragedy of the Iraq war, the shame of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, the erosion of civil liberties. The damage done to the American economy does not make front-page headlines every day, but the repercussions will be felt beyond the lifetime of anyone reading this page.

I can hear an irritated counterthrust already. The president has not driven the United States into a recession during his almost seven years in office. Unemployment stands at a respectable 4.6 percent. Well, fine. But the other side of the ledger groans with distress: a tax code that has become hideously biased in favor of the rich; a national debt that will probably have grown 70 percent by the time this president leaves Washington; a swelling cascade of mortgage defaults; a record near-$850 billion trade deficit; oil prices that are higher than they have ever been; and a dollar so weak that for an American to buy a cup of coffee in London or Paris—or even the Yukon—becomes a venture in high finance.

And it gets worse. After almost seven years of this president, the United States is less prepared than ever to face the future. We have not been educating enough engineers and scientists, people with the skills we will need to compete with China and India. We have not been investing in the kinds of basic research that made us the technological powerhouse of the late 20th century. And although the president now understands—or so he says—that we must begin to wean ourselves from oil and coal, we have on his watch become more deeply dependent on both.

Jump to full Vanity Fair article

Aqua-dots, which were supposed to be the latest and greatest kid toy, are putting kids in coma and their lives at risk.

The toys were supposed to be made using 1,5-pentanediol, a nontoxic compound found in glue, but instead contained the harmful 1,4-butanediol, which is widely used in cleaners and plastics.
 
The Food and Drug Administration in 1999 declared the chemical a Class I Health Hazard, meaning it can cause life-threatening harm.
 
Both chemicals are manufactured in China and elsewhere, including by major multinational companies, and are also marketed over the Internet.  

It’s not clear why 1,4-butanediol was substituted, though there is a significant price difference. The Chinese online trading platform ChemNet China lists the price of 1,4-butanediol at between about $1,350-$2,800 per metric ton, while the price for 1,5-pentanediol is about $9,700 per metric ton.

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Adobo - rub over meat and let it sit for a while or overnight before cooking.

Adobo Paste
2 t olive oil
2 cloves garlic, minced
3 t oregano
juice of 1/2 lime
2 t sea salt
1/2 t fresh ground black pepper

From Daisy Martinez

Adobo Seco [Dry Adobo]
Makes 1 cup
6 tablespoons salt
3 tablespoons onion powder
3 tablespoons garlic powder
3 tablespoons ground black pepper
1 ½ teaspoons ground oregano

Place all ingredients in a jar with a tight fitting lid. Shake well and store for up to 2 months in a cool dry place.
You can add 1 teaspoon of any or all of the following to customize your dry adobo: Ground cumin Dried citrus zest (orange, lemon, or lime) Saffron Achiote powder.

Overrides Internet Searches With Its Own Results

by Martin H. Bosworth, November 3, 2007

Subscribers to Verizon’s high-powered fiber-optic Internet service (FiOS) are reporting that when they mistype a Web site address, they get redirected to Verizon’s own search engine page — even if they don’t have Verizon’s search page set as their default.

“It was the very first thing I noticed when Verizon finally got FiOS installed here the other day. Very annoying and hardly in the spirit of net neutrality, eh?,” wrote one Webmaster World user, who originally had Google set as his default search engine.

Technology forums such as Broadband Reports and WebMasterWorld are reporting that Verizon has now extended its “Advanced Web Search” feature to FiOS subscribers in Maryland and Virginia as well.

If you don’t want to have your search results interfered with, Verizon has set up an “opt out” procedure to reset your DNS settings. Make sure to follow the directions carefully and run several test searches with mistyped addresses to make sure you get the right–or wrong, in this case–result.

In order to redirect the user to the search sites, the user’s Domain Name Service (DNS) settings are altered, which can interfere with previously set network security and safe Internet browsing features.

It also raises the question of whether or not an Internet provider that automatically redirects a user’s searches without telling them will also shape the results they do get, such as filtering their searches to get specific results.

Preferential results from Internet providers is a prime concern for supporters of “net neutrality,” the principle that all content on the Internet should be accessesd freely and equally. Supporters of net neutrality believe that Internet providers may redirect users from their preferred Web pages or content to content the provider favors–such as redirecting a user from Google’s search page to Verizon’s.

Although Verizon opposes net neutrality, it has also said repeatedly that it would not block content or favor its own offerings over rivals–although it now appears to be doing just that.

The telecom giant recently got into hot water over its blocking of text messages from abortion rights group NARAL, leading to a quick reversal.

Jump to full Consumer Affairs article