Occasionally, I tell myself that I ought to subscribe to the Clarion-Ledger. Who knows? After all, it is the paper of record for central Mississippi. I might be losing out on a nugget of news that could change my life.

When these thoughts appear, the C-L invariably pulls something that makes me realize that it, and the Gannet chain of which it is a part, is interested only in maximizing its profits and consequently must, in servicing that prime directive, strive to dominate the printed news media in the Jackson metro area. Its recent scheme to drive independent publications out of business with its exclusive plastic boxes merely reinforces my conviction that the state would be better off without the Clarion-Ledger.

The Jackson Free Press, one of the publications targeted by the C-L, is running a blog on the scam.

So once again, I'll read someone else's copy and hold my nose.

Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour brags that he has saved Mississippi Medicaid $275 million in prescription costs.

The JP is unimpressed. Saving on prescription costs is easy: just order Medicaid to stop paying for prescriptions.

If you're depending on those Medicaid prescriptions to keep you alive, the solution is easy: Go without food or electricity or gas.

Any fool ought to be able to figure that one out.

USA Today reports that our reserve forces not actually in Iraq are in terrible condition:

Up to two-thirds of the Army's combat brigades are not ready for wartime missions, largely because they are hampered by equipment shortfalls, Democratic lawmakers said Wednesday, citing unclassified documents.In a letter to President Bush, Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said that "nearly every non-deployed combat brigade in the active Army is reporting that they are not ready" for combat. The figures, he said, represent an unacceptable risk to the nation.

At a news conference, other leading Democrats said that those strategic reserve forces are critically short of personnel and equipment.

"They're the units that could be called upon or would be called upon to go to war in North Korea, Iran, or any other country or region," said Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., a decorated Marine who has called for a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq.

The Congress and the American people have been warned time and time again that our military strength is being systematically hollowed out by the administration's cannibalizing the home-front units in order to keep the forces going in Iraq.

Now, dear reader: think the unthinkable and imagine that from the standpoint of the Bush administration things are going just as planned and that its intent is to hollow out our regular armed forces and render them impotent. Let us imagine further: if the right-wingers in Washington, D.C. wanted to toss the Constitution overboard and establish some kind of authoritarian corporate state, the U.S. military as it stands now would be the biggest obstacle to a takeover; our soldiers swear to uphold the Constitution, not the president or the Congress. But ship all the weapons and ordinance overseas and destroy the morale of the domestic troops, and a well-managed paramilitary force formed from private "security" services and militarized police forces could become a Praetorian Guard in fact, if not in name.


New Orleans after Katrina is a chilling example. It was swarming with heavily-armed paramilitaries hired by by the rich and powerful, ostensibly to keep order, but in fact terrorizing the people that stayed, even in neighborhoods that had not been flooded. The National Guard is supposed to keep order in the event of natural disasters, but Louisiana's National Guard had been stripped by the Bush administration of the personnel and equipment it needed to do the job. So instead, New Orleans got soldiers of fortune with no loyalty to anyone but their paymasters. There are names for this method of keeping order, and none of them are good.

Lebanon was nearly destroyed by private armies within memory.

So be concerned, very concerned, but don't be afraid. They want you to be afraid so that you trade your freedom for a little security. It's the eternal con game; fools and cowards are the marks, as usual.

The Associated Press reported this morning that financial analysts are questioning Microsoft's commitment to increase its spending by about $2.7 billion, much of which will be for research and development. An increase in spending invariably translates into a decrease in earnings, and the plummeting price of Microsoft stock reflects this drop in anticipated earnings.

As I see it, there are three factors that explain Microsoft's problems:

1. Microsoft has been a monopoly since the '80s, which means that its earnings have been based upon monopoly pricing of its operating systems and applications, not a true market price set by many buyers and many sellers. Because Windows and Microsoft Office are on virtually all the desktops of the business world, the file formats and protocols established by Microsoft have locked most businesses into a never-ending process of expensive upgrades that have enriched the management and shareholders of both Intel and Microsoft to an enormous degree.

2. As I mentioned the other day, monopolies have no intrinsic reason to innovate, and Microsoft is no exception. While there might be considerable differences between Windows 95 and Windows XP under the hood (which I doubt), the overall concept, GUI and "feel" have remained unchanged for eleven years and Vista, even after years and years of development, is looking to be more of the same with a few more bells and whistles.

3. Microsoft is now encountering competition from three directions: free software, (licensed under the GNU Public License and other licensing arrangements that limit the ability of developers to privatize code by simply altering it), Apple's OSX, and, perhaps most of all, Microsoft's existing software.

PC owners now have free, user-friendly alternatives to Windows and MS Office that didn't exist a few years ago. Many Linux packages come with word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and email software, all of which are as easy or nearly as easy to use as Windows/Office. It is a trivial task to download, install, and run Ubuntu Linux on either a PC or Macintosh. It comes with OpenOffice (word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software compatible with MS Office files), Firefox (web browser), and Thunderbird (email), all first-class applications that are comparable with their MS equivalents. Although Microsoft may brag that its software is easier to use and comes pre-installed, the difference in convenience is becoming smaller and smaller, and free exerts an attraction that is hard for expensive to beat.

Then there is Apple's OSX, based on the NEXT operating system, which is, in turn, based on BSD Unix, a tried-and-proven OS. Apple's GUI is reliable, relatively bug-free and an order of magnitude more secure out of the box than Windows. While Macintoshes form only a small percentage of computers in use, Apple's share is increasing, as it's easy-to-use software is attracting both businesses and home users. Further, the Macintosh's total cost to own has always been less than that of Window's machines, even though the computers themselves are considerably more expensive. Windows machines have always required an army of network and maintenance gurus to make them work, hence the preference of IT departments and consultants for a platform that justifies their existence. As the business world wakes up to this subtle con game Apple products are becoming more attractive.

Finally, Microsoft's biggest competition is Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000, and before long, Windows XP. Windows XP is acceptably stable (finally!) and reasonably secure, provided that the user faithfully updates the software every week. As Moore's Law no longer guarantees the doubling of computer power every 18 months, the marginal advantage of upgrading is rapidly declining, resulting in longer upgrade cycles on the part of governments and businesses. Further, there is little to recommend the latest version of MS Office over Office 97 in terms of usability. Sure, there are enhancements and improvements, but for most businesses and home users the old software does the job just fine.

Seen in this light, Microsoft's predicament becomes obvious. Without an unassailable monopoly on the desktop and regular, significant improvements in the stability and power of its software along with faster microprocessors to run the new software, Microsoft must actually devote resources to innovation in order to stay ahead. Microsoft's tried and proven method of developing new products—buying up innovative companies—no longer seems to work as well as it once did.

Microsoft, one of the richest corporations in the world, has the talent and resources to easily maintain its lead as an operating system and application provider. The only question is whether its corporate culture will allow it to do so.

There's little I can say about the Israeli attack on Lebanon. It's so monstrous, so cruel, and so deliberate that words do not come. Douglas Southall Freeman once wrote that the Confederacy was not simply a nation at war; the Confederacy was war. It is beginning to look as though the state of Israel is war and little else.

In my cynicism, I have always maintained that when a nation does something so counterproductive, so idiotic, and so evil that the mind boggles at the obvious stupidity, there is always the possibility that it is merely playing by a rulebook of which I am ignorant.

I cannot conceive of any rulebook that would justify Israel's brutal attack on Lebanon. There is no future in continually pissing off your neighbors. Even if you can keep it up for a long time, eventually it blows up in your face. The crusaders' kingdom lasted 200 years, but it eventually succumbed to geopolitical reality; will Israel last that long, given it's behavior? I wouldn't bet on it, even though Israel has nukes.

James Wolcott says it a lot better than I can. Read his column.

7/22/2006. Counterspin features an interview with Fawaz Gerges on Lebanon, Israel and the Media (MP3) (RealAudio) Gerges, an American citizen and a professor at Sarah Lawrence College, is trapped in Beirut while on sabbatical.

Bush has been spying on innocent American citizens, pretending that it's all in aid of the War on Terror™. We have a law that requires the executive branch to seek permission of a special court before it can listen in on the conversations of American citizens. Bush ignored the law and thus he is a self-admitted criminal.

If you want some insight into the soul of the 21st Century Republican Party, consider that one of the their finest, Sen. Arlen Specter, has introduced a bill that is supposed to rectify the situation. Exactly why the situation needs to be rectified is not clear; the statute, on the other hand, is quite clear. If it wants to listen in on American citizens, the executive branch must explain to the FISA court why it feels the need to do so and the court must grant permission, which it invariably does.

From the Robo-Republican viewpoint, however, the problem is the law, not that the president has violated the law. They want to solve the problem by changing the law, not reining in the executive branch, which is what the law was intended to do in the first place.

The bill is a sham. It gives the president the power to ignore the law.

Specter is a scoundrel, along with any other Republican or Democrat that supports this bill.

References:

Balkinization: Specter Gives Up the Game-- The Sham NSA Bill

Feral Scholar (Stan Goff): Spectral Security

USA Today ignored Democratic criticism of Specter's FISA proposal

The New York Times and Washington Post reported today that the president ensured that that the Justice Department would be unable investigate the NSA's wiretapping of American citizens; he refused to grant DOJ investigators security clearences. Without security clearances, they had no legal access to the matters they were supposed to be investigating.

It is a fundamental principle of any constitutional government, and especially a government of a democratic republic like the U.S., that no person, including the president, is above the law. It follows that no person, agency, or even branch of our government, including the president, should be immune from investigation, because anything that is immune from investigation is, for all practical purposes, above the law.

Bush, by thwarting the investigation of what is clearly a crime by the executive branch, has held himself above the law. If he is allowed to get away with it, our constitutional system of government is gone, pure and simple. Our founders feared precisely this kind of aggrandizement of power by the executive branch and created a number of constitutional provisions to prevent it. Without the other two branches of government fulfilling their constitutional role to keep the executive in check, however, the Constitution—arguably the most profound political document in the history of civilization—is nothing more than a quaint artifact of an era where men wore wigs and soldiers fired muskets.

by Paul Rogers

A week into the war, Israel's intransigence and the United States's indulgence make the prospects for peace minimal.

Israel's attacks on Lebanon continued over the night of 17-18 July with fifty sites being hit. Many of these were said to be Hizbollah facilities, even though the targets have included a lighthouse, a medical truck and a dairy factory. In any case, the main effect has been to cause disruption across much of the country as numerous bridges are hit and movement of refugees made difficult if not impossible. The attacks continue through 18 July with equal ferocity, and no let up in sight.

The level of trauma and anxiety in Lebanon has increased greatly in the past week; 200 civilians have been killed (with several examples of internally-displaced people being caught out in the open by Israeli air raids) and thousands injured. The effect of this is to cause mass anxiety for many thousands more civilians now trying to move away from zones of conflict.

Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) spokespersons claim that, as a result of IDF actions so far, a high proportion of Hezbollah's 12,000-plus rockets and missiles have been destroyed. There is little independent evidence for this, and in any case such claims have been accompanied by the direct evidence of Hizbollah firing another fifty rockets into Israel in the past twenty-four hours. This in itself is hugely significant, given the massive level of Israeli military activity across the border; the Hizbollah attacks are having a great impact on a deeply insecure population across northern Israel.

The IDF is making a massive effort through the use of air power, artillery and naval gunfire support to stop Hizbollah's offensive actions, and has so far failed to do so. In a further indication of the militant group's capabilities under bombardment, one missile attack reached as far south as the town of Atlit, eight kilometres south of Haifa and fifty-five kilometres south of the Lebanese border – indicating either that Hizbollah can fire missiles from very close to the border or else has longer-range missiles that can be launched from deep inside Lebanon. Meanwhile, the IDF has began the process of calling up reservists, with three battalions being mobilised for deployment in the West Bank to release regular army troops to support IDF actions in the north.

The weakness of power

Tentative peace moves have been proposed, primarily from United Nations sources, but the government of Ehud Olmert is highly unlikely to call a halt to its extensive military actions. The level of vulnerability felt in Israel is palpable, even though the idea of such an incredibly strong military power even feeling vulnerable is difficult for outsiders to understand. One indication of this is an effect of the Hamas-instigated event that helped begin this specific cycle of violence.
On 29 June, a Hamas unit dressed in IDF uniforms infiltrated a well-defended IDF unit on the Israeli side of the border with Gaza through a 1,000-yard tunnel dug from deep inside the strip. Two Israeli soldiers were killed and one, Gilad Shalit, was kidnapped. This was the latest of a series of tunnelling episodes that, like the crude homemade Hamas rockets and the much more sophisticated Hizbollah missiles, have hugely damaged the validity of Israel's policy of establishing security through solidly-protected borders.

The reaction to the tunnelling episodes has been extraordinary. On one recent occasion, the IDF actually experimented with a 1,000-metre stretch of an underground steel barrier, over fourteen metres deep, on the Gaza/Egyptian border. Shuki Rynski, a retired colonel and former deputy commander of the IDF's Gaza division, has even advocated building a polymer-reinforced cement wall going twenty-two metres down, as a supplement to border protection on the surface (see Barbara Opall-Rome, "Israel Confronts Threat of Gaza Tunnels" Defense News, 10 July 2006 [subscription only]). This would cost around $500,000 per kilometre, a quarter of the cost of the wall being built round much of the West Bank; some observers have pointed out that in any case, Palestinian militias would simply dig deeper.

Such plans, coupled with the extensive IDF raids into Lebanon that have widespread support within Israel, all point to a national mindset of protection that is currently unable to even comprehend that the entire process is ultimately self-defeating. Israel cannot achieve physical security without political security, and that cannot be achieved except by negotiating with its adversaries and recognising the predicament of the Palestinians. In the final analysis there is no alternative to a peace settlement encompassing the creation of a viable Palestinian state.

There is little chance of that even beginning to be recognised in the current insecure environment within Israel. It is made even less likely by the solid support from the Bush administration, due in no small measure to the political significance of Christian Zionism in the United States (see David Brog's new book, Standing with Israel: Why Christians Support the Jewish State, Front Line Books, 2006).

Almost a week into the war, a weak and disunited Europe concentrates very largely on evacuating its citizens from Lebanon, and the United States displays a special sense of irony by chartering a cruise ship to do the same. At present, the prospects for peace are minimal.


Paul Rogers is professor of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. He has been writing a weekly column on global security on openDemocracy since October 2001 Among Paul Rogers's columns on Hizbollah, Iran and Israel: "Hizbollah's warning flight" (5 May 2005); "Iran in Israel's firing-range" (8 December 2005);"Iran: war by October?" (20 April 2006); , Lebanon, and beyond: the danger of escalation" (17 July 2006)

In addition to his weekly openDemocracy column, Paul Rogers writes an international security monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group; for details, click here

A collection of Paul Rogers's Oxford Research Group briefings, Iraq and the War on Terror: Twelve Months of Insurgency, 2004-05 is published by IB Tauris (October 2005)

This article originally appeared on openDemocracy.net under a Creative Commons licence. To view the original article, please click here.

Thanks to FeedBlitz, you may subscribe by typing your email address into the form on the sidebar. This blog has featured an RSS feed since its inception, but the ability to receive articles by email was added only today. FeedBlitz does not share your email with anyone, and you may even subscribe anonymously. RSS links for the blog and comments (via Haloscan) appear at the bottom of the sidebar contents, where you can copy the addresses and paste them into your RSS aggregator.

Via the Poynter Institute, The Miami Herald has featured a series of deeply-researched stories on the air cargo industry, a business that has remained below the radar of public consciousness, but forms the backbone of the overnight delivery industry. Without significant oversight by the FAA, the industry employs young pilots (called "freight dogs" in the trade) to fly marginally-maintained planes far too many hours a week, often in bad weather at night for very low pay. The result is the loss of one pilot per month on the average. So far, a cargo plane has not crashed into a hospital or a hotel, so a crash usually involves the death of only one or two people. Sooner or later, however, a cargo plane is going to kill several hundred people in a single crash, at which point the public and Congress will demand stricter oversight, and Congress might possibly appropriate enough money to enable the FAA to perform the inspections it had the power to do all along. Until then, overworked, exhausted pilots will be flying old, questionably-maintained planes right over our homes every night. That ought to be enough to gain our attention.

Deadly Express: A Miami Herald Investigation Team Exclusive

Okay, it’s time to tackle Greg Palast’s new book, Armed Madhouse. It’s made the New York Times bestseller list, far the less substantial works by far lesser authors have hovered above it, a testimony to the power of the prevailing mindset of the media and the American reading public.

Palast is well-known in Britain for his political analysis of American politics, but because he is ruthless in pursuit of the truth about what is happening in this nation, he is a non-person in the America media, much like Noam Chomsky, who is known abroad far better than here. Palast must look for publication on the BBC, The Guardian, and the world media outside our borders.

After the 2000 election, Palast broke the story about the Florida “felon list,” a device concocted by Kathleen Harris, the Republican Secretary of State, and Choicepoint, a personal data-gathering company with close Republic ties. Felons are prohibited from voting in Florida without having the right restored by the governor, but it turned out that few of the persons on the list were felons—many had similar names—but by the time the scam was revealed the election was over and in the hands of the U. S. Supreme Court. We all know how conscientious they were about honoring the intent of the voters.

Palast focuses his attention on several issues in his book, but the ones that struck me as the most important were the Republican plans to steal the next election and the real reason why the Bush administration led us into the military disaster that is Iraq.

First, the elections. Palast painstakingly reviews what happened in 2004 to the votes in several critical states that resulted in those states being counted for Bush. The details of what transpired in Ohio and New Mexico are not pretty. Moreover, they were obvious. Ohio is a classic case of voter disenfranchisement by a thousand cuts: furnishing an inadequate number of voting machines to Democratic precincts and thus creating impossible lines for working people, and the wholesale rejection of provisional, absentee, and “spoiled” ballots, not to mention ballots in which the voters unaccountably failed to vote in the presidential race. Palast:

The nasty little secret of American democracy is that, in every national election, ballots cast are simply thrown in the garbage—millions of them. Most are called “spoiled,” supposedly unreadable, damaged, invalid. They just don’t get counted.

In Ohio, there were 153,237 ballots simply thrown away, more than the Bush “victory” margin. In New Mexico the uncounted vote was five times the Bush alleged victory margin of 5,988. In Iowa, Bush’s triumph of 13,498 was overwhelmed by 36,811 votes rejected. In all, over three million votes were cast but never counted in the 2004 election.

It gets worse from there. When the exit polls, shown to be highly accurate in predicting the election outcome, showed that Kerry should have won in Ohio, the mass media immediately put on experts stating that the exit polls were flawed.

Palast puts it all together and concludes that John Kerry won the presidential race and his victory was stolen from him by fraud, aided and abetted by the mass media. He further states that the Republicans are planning the same tricks and even more for this year and 2008.

Think of the new computer black boxes as a convenience. You may already have voted in 2008, they just haven’t told you how.

If you have any investment in the U.S. Constitution or democracy, you will be outraged by the sorry story of how Republicans stole the election and the Democrats acquiesced. I am afraid that it may be too late to remedy the situation before the fall elections; the mechanisms for disenfranchising Democratic voters are already in place.

Then there is Iraq and oil. I would not want to spoil your surprise when you learn why Bush was so intent on invading Iraq, even though he already knew that every single reason his administration advanced in support of the invasion was a lie. To prepare yourself for this revelation, try the following exercise: Make a list of the winners and losers of the conflict up to now. Let your mind wander all over the globe; do not stop with the obvious. Two hints: first, recall that the middle east is the center of what was once called the “Great Game.” Second, follow the money. The incredible deficits run up by the Bush administration play a significant part in this petro-pecuniary drama.

Palast’s thorough and careful reporting convinced me that a peak in world oil production is highly unlikely, if not impossible, at $80/bbl, although it is a serious problem at $10/bbl. The higher price makes it feasible to spend a lot of money to extract and process oil that would otherwise be uneconomical.
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Long-standing readers of The Jackson Progressive will notice the ad for Armed Madhouse on the sidebar. It is the first advertisement to be run in this publication since its inception in May, 1999. The author has plans for expansion of The Jackson Progressive, and although the cost of hosting a web site today is, for all practical purposes, zero, investigating local and state politics and creating or purchasing content is another matter entirely. Ultimately, revenue will be required to publish a journal of politics and the arts that is worthy of the appellation. Unless a wealthy donor steps up with a substantial sum of money, this site can grow only through selling, either as an associate of firms like Amazon or as a seller of its own products like books or T-shirts. Wealthy people are usually not progressive, so the ad route is the only practical way to build a great journal.

So buy Armed Madhouse, preferably by clicking on the sidebar icon, but buy it somewhere and read it. It is high time that the truth be generally known.

I'm sitting at Fusion Coffeehouse at 1111A Highland Colony Parkway checking the news and blogging on the way to an appointment. I'm easily twice as old as the next oldest person here.

The coffee is good and the atmosphere is tasteful. Nice folks. Recommended, even for old codgers like me.

The National Journal, via Kos, reports that the president's top aids received generous annual costs of living increases:

President Bush’s most senior aides -- the ones who hold the coveted title of "assistant to the president" -- recently received a $4,200 cost-of-living bump-up in compensation and now earn a top pay rate of $165,200, according to an internal White House list of staff salaries. The list was compiled by the administration for the year that ended June 30 and is displayed both alphabetically, and by dollar ranking, below. Those at the bottom of the White House staff pay scale -- the folks answering phones and responding to the president’s mail, for example -- remain stuck at last year’s pay floor of $30,000, according to a year-to-year comparison of White House data obtained by National Journal.

Because the cost of living in Washington, D.C. is so much higher than it is here, a salary of $30,000 there is the equivalent of $20,094 here in Jackson, Mississippi. Think about it: office workers in the office of the most powerful man in the world are being paid $20K/year. Here are comparative statistics for American cities.

It's a microcosm of the brave new world for which the Republican Party has been striving ever since the founders emerged from the womb with railroad stock certificates in their little hands. It's David Ricardo's iron law of labor made into a religion. It's the plantation system being imposed on the whole nation.

The vast majority of us—white, black, red and yellow—have always been darkies in the eyes of the power elite represented by the Bushes. That's the message of Dubya's famous sneer: "Tough luck, peons. " Maybe the new massehs will be generous and give us their old clothes when they buy new ones. I've always wanted to wear Gucci and Armani.

The 2005 Annual Drinking Water quality Report arrived in the mail today. The heart of the 2-page report is contained in a table that sets out the concentrations of twenty different contaminants in Jackson's drinking water. For the technical non-experts among us, including this writer, the significant columns are Violation (Y/N), Date Collected, Level Detected and the Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL).

The only contaminant showing a violation is Total Organic Carbon (TOC), the most likely source of contamination of which is said to be "Naturally Present in the Environment." The Water Department believes that this violation was due to errors in sampling and analysis, and TOC poses no health problem, anyway, except that "total organic carbon provides a medium for the formation of disinfection byproducts." That means that too high a TOC level may produce some nasty contaminants such as trihalomethanes and haloacetic acids when the water is chlorinated at the water plant. At the bottom of the table you will find HAA5 (sum of 5 Haloacetic acids) and TTHM (total trihalomethanes) concentrations, which are not not comforting. The level of HAA5 is 55.25 ppb, very close to the MCL, which is 60. The level of TTHM is 70.66 ppb, very close to the MCL, which is 80. (Whether the MCL is reliable is another question. Setting maximum concentration levels of contaminants is not only a scientific or medical matter; it has recently become political, with the appointment by the Bush administration of political operatives to positions of authority in scientific agencies like the CDC and the National Institutes of Health. Having a clean and healthy environment can be costly to the corporate backers of the Republican party, so instead of forcing them to comply with environmental regulations, Bush has either put people in charge who have no intention of enforcing inconvenient regulations or he has simply rewritten the regulations to exempt his political sponsors. It is hard to trust public health agencies run by political hacks.)

Whenever we have a disturbance in the water supply, such as the pump failure last month, the water contains so much chlorine that it burns my nostrils when I wash my hands. At some point the chlorine becomes a greater health hazard than the possible bacterial contamination, and we can only hope that the authorities know what that point is and are appropriately cautious.

The only other disturbing information in the report is the age of some of the tests. Copper and lead tests were last run six years ago, hexacholorocyclo-pentadiene seven years ago and Beta/Photon emitters three years ago. Things change so fast in a capitalistic/technological/industrial world that relying on a six-year old test for contaminants could amount to gross negligence, although it probably isn't. It would be reassuring if the next report explains why a yearly (or even more frequent) test is not necessary for these substances.

Finally, the water that comes out of my north Jackson faucet tastes and smells foul. I don't recall that Jackson water was that bad when I grew up. In the '50s and '60s, bottled water was what you bought in Europe, not here. Now the tap water in Europe is as good as it gets and those of us who can do so either use filters or buy bottled water at a price higher than the price of gasoline.

What kind of investment would it take to make our city water sweet again?

Our web publishing program, RapidWeaver, has been upgraded and we are trying different styles for the blog. Let us know how you like this one.

Today I received the following particularly idiotic chain email from an acquaintance in Jackson:

PETITION FOR: President Bush , Gov. Schwarzenegger and Congressman Dana Rohrbacher

Gentlemen and Mr. President: The petition below is a protest against what the senate voted on recently which was to allow illegals to access our social security! We demand that you and all congressional representative require citizenship for anyone to be eligible for social services in the United States. We further demand that there not be any amnesty given to illegals, and NO free services or funding, or payments to and for illegal immigrants.

We are fed up with the lack of action about this matter and are tired of "paying" for services to illegals! Tell Senor Fox to pay for his own people!

======

Agree or Delete: Instructions to sign are at the bottom.

The message was followed by some 247 names of petitioners, the last of which was the acquaintance who sent me the message.

The "illegal immigrant" crisis is a manufactured crisis, pure and simple.

Once again, let's look at some facts:

1. Why now, rather than long ago?
As Thom Hartmann put it so well, "we had an open border with Mexico for several centuries, and "illegal immigration" was never a serious problem. Before Reagan's presidency, an estimated million or so people a year came into the US from Mexico - and the same number, more or less, left the US for Mexico at the end of the agricultural harvest season. Very few stayed, because there weren't jobs for them."

2. Employers given a green light to hire undocumented aliens.
Reagan made it easier for employers to hire undocumented aliens at pay below the minimum wage by simply not enforcing the laws forbidding employers from hiring undocumented aliens. He also did everything in his power to destroy labor unions. By increasing the size of the labor force with workers willing to work for a pittance he weakened organized labor and kept wages down. In other words, he legitimatized scabs.

3. Mexican farmers rendered destitute by the North American Free Trade Agreement.
NAFTA destroyed Mexican agriculture by allowing U.S. agribusiness to dump its subsidized product, mainly corn, on the Mexican market at a price below Mexican farmers' cost to produce. The totally predictable result was mass migration of destitute Mexican farmers into urban areas in search of jobs. The influx of laborers depressed wages in the cities, resulting in the migration of farmers and workers from Mexican cities across the border into the U.S., where employers, always looking for a way to cut labor costs, welcomed them with open arms. NAFTA and other trade agreements ratified during the Clinton years by a Republican-dominated Congress (and an unprincipled president) made it profitable for corporations to outsource manufacturing to low-wage countries and thus destroy our manufacturing sector, thus eliminating the high-paying jobs that historically enabled so many industrial workers to join the middle class.

4. Desperate people will do what is necessary to survive.
No one leaves their home, their community, their friends and their family to work furtively in a foreign land unless they are desperate. No one else would be willing to brave the hazards of crossing the border, walking over miles and miles of desert, and risking being shot by nut jobs who have appointed themselves to patrol the border. You and I would do exactly the same thing under the same circumstances, so there's no point in demonizing people who do what they must.

5. They didn't come here to freeload.
Is it necessary to point out that these undocumented immigrants from Mexico came here to work? That's the entire purpose of making the journey. They are not the ones cheating the IRS out of withholding taxes; it is their criminal employers who are not making payroll deductions and remitting them to the IRS. They pay sales tax, gasoline tax, and all the other ad valorem and excise taxes, directly or indirectly, that local and state governments levy. They give value and in return receive far less than Americans doing the same work. They contribute more than their share, not less.

More than half the citizens of this nation in their foolishness and their ignorance voted twice for Reagan, once for Bush the Elder, and twice for Clinton, all of whom carried out this project as though it were part of one, single bipartisan plan to eliminate the American middle class. (I omit George W. Bush because the evidence is overwhelming that Bush lost the elections of 2000 and 2004 through voter supression, spoliation of ballots, and other more subtle devices like Kathleen Harris's notorious "felon list," not to mention two Supreme Court Justices with clear conflicts of interest that formed part of the 5-4 majority in Bush v. Gore. They should have been impeached and removed from office for gross violations of legal and judicial ethics.)

The human disaster imposed by our government on Mexico has blown back on us. We are reaping here in Mississippi what has been sown by the kleptocrats whom we allowed to control our national government.

What to do? Humpty-Dumpty has fallen off the wall and can't be put back together again. The Mexican farmers cannot return to their farms because one of the requirements of NAFTA was a repeal of Mexico's statutory scheme that prevented foreclosures on farms. Their farms are now owned by people with the money to purchase their land at fire-sale prices. They are stuck. Send them back over the border and they will find a way back, and they will find jobs waiting for them, because under the eternal laws of the free market god that is worshipped in the temple of Ricardo, Spencer, Von Mises and Friedman, employers can—nay must—pay their workers as parsimonous a wage as they can get by with. With a plentiful supply of cheap, docile labor, they can get by with paying very little.

So, dear Americans, we created this problem ourselves, or rather, the kleptocracy that has been in control of the government since 1980 did it to us with our consent. It is difficult to sympathize with this foolish and complacent generation that has so willingly allowed itself to be duped and that is even now deluding itself that its problems arise from elsewhere.

The Associated Press ran a story this morning on the planned launch of the space shuttle Discovery in spite of insulation having fallen off one of the solid fuel boosters.

According to the article:

[NASA Administrator] Griffin decided two weeks ago that the shuttle should go into orbit as planned, despite the concerns of two top agency managers - the top safety officer and chief engineer - who wanted additional repairs to the foam insulation.

But the two agency officials said the foam loss will not threaten the crew because NASA has a plan for the astronauts to move into the international space station if in-orbit inspections find serious damage to the spacecraft. The crew would await rescue 81 days later by a second space shuttle.

With insulation having recently fallen off a booster rocket, and the fact that the Columbia met disaster from a large piece of insulation in the past, it seems idiotic to this writer to launch the shuttle without making damn sure the insulation stays put. It's looking more and more that the initial decision to use solid-fuel booster rockets was an economic decision, rather than a scientific or engineering decision. Space flight on the cheap. We've already lost two crews of some of our finest people; it would not just be a tragedy if we lost this crew. It would be an outrage.

The idea that in case of damage to the space shuttle the crew could hang out in the space station for 81 days reeks of political motivation. There are plenty of things that could go wrong with the space shuttle during its flight over which we have no control, but insulation falling off is a hazard that we already know about and the fact that the piece in question weighed less than one-tenth of an ounce, while it might not affect the safety of the shuttle, is a sure indication that the insulation is susceptible to coming off the tanks during the flight.

Given the expertise of the NASA personnel involved, there is undoubtedly a high probability that the flight will go as planned. There was, however, a high probability that Challenger and Columbia would have successful flights, also.

Let us pray for the safety of the crew.

6/6/2006 Comment: The space shuttle made a successful takeoff and it appears that there is no damage to the spacecraft from falling insulation. That still does not alter the fact that NASA was rolling the dice with the lives of the crew at stake.