Here in the US we hear about a few US military casualties each day, and often about some number of civilian deaths due to insurgent attacks (suicide bombers, etc.). But 700 (opposition force) deaths in two months is astonishing.

This is relatively new information because the administration didn't release these figures until recently. They decided that people aren't supportive enough of the war so they ought to give them something to cheer. So they chose death counts.

Then two days later I watched a really interesting talk by Michael Moore on CSPAN. While he didn't talk directly about these death counts, he brought up two great points about the 'insurgency.'

First, he pointed out that while we hear the name of every suicide bomber in Israel, and even knew the names and faces of every 9/11 hijacker within 48 hours, we never hear the name of a single insurgent suicide bomber in Iraq. Why not? Because they aren't some opposition force or outsiders coming to attack the US...but they are instead the Iraqi people. They are the people Bush said would welcome us with flowers and open arms.

Second, he asked the audience of (mostly) democratic party supporters how many of them were willing to die for their beliefs? Nobody was. Yet in Iraq, there seems to be no shortage of candidates. Why?

Third, he said that it was not the US' responsibility to oust Saddam Hussein, but that it was the Iraqi people's responsibility. At first this sounded a bit harsh to me, but his supporting argument made sense. Imagine if, instead of fighting the British for our independence in 1776, we were instead invaded by France. They fight the British themselves, occupy the US, and then tell us it's time for us to vote. Would we be excited? And further, without our own citizens leading the charge, we wouldn't have had the Washingtons and Jeffersons whose visions for a better way were so essential to the democracy we now enjoy.

When you combine these thoughts of Moore's with the insurgent death count in Iraq, you get a picture of an occupied country whose passion for independence is aimed at the oppresive United States, not Saddam. What if the hypothetical French invaders had not only told us to vote, but wrote our constitution. Even if it was well intentioned, would we have accepted it as our own?

Udell's bookmarklet allows you to easily lookup books you see at Amazon (and other online booksellers) at your local library with one click. It takes a small bit of work on your part to figure out what software system your local library uses--but once you have, his bookmarklet generator is easy to use.

For those in the CU area, I've already generated bookmarklets for the Urbana Free Library (actually, it works for all of Lincoln Trails), and the UIUC Library. Just bookmark these to set them up in your browser:

• Urbana Free Library
• UIUC Library

Once you have these saved (I put them on my bookmark toolbar so they're always visible), browse to a book on Amazon you're interested in and then just click the bookmark. This will popup a new window at the library that lists the entry for that ISBN#. Brilliant.

Enjoy!

I guess the NYT hopes to equal the influence of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which has been secured behind a pay-required screen for years. How many of you have read a WSJ editorial lately? The only time I read one is when a subscriber quotes a snippet of one on their blog.

With the emergence of blogs as the new op-ed columnists, this decision will cement the NY Times' fate as irrelevant. As a regular reader of the Times, and someone who has frequently read and linked to their op-ed pages (Paul Krugman, for example), I will now be unable to do so.

This is certainly a poor decision with regard to the Times' position in daily political discourse, but is it a good business decision? I could just pay the 50 bucks and continue to read the content and link away (of course, almost nobody could follow the links). I am sympathetic to the plight of newspapers struggling to find a new way to fund their work, but for an international paper like the Times, the model that makes most sense is an advertising one. In particular, their op-ed pages drive a lot of traffic to their site, which in turn creates ad impressions that result in revenue. Their op-eds are often their most emailed stories as well. This move will cause a huge drop in traffic. Will the $50 subscriptions make up the difference?

I think a subscription model makes more sense for smaller, independent, and local newspapers and magazines. While I'd still prefer free access with ad-driven revenue streams for most sites, a small paper has a small clientele that might be willing to pay for the content.

The local paper is a good example of a site that might survive in this model. The Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette has one of the worst online sites on the internet. They only post five stories/day, with no op-ed. They delay posting of their content until after 2pm each day in hopes of avoiding the loss of sales for their paper version. Their search engine is pitiful. They are missing the future. However, I continue to go back and forth on my traditional subscription because of two things: their monopoly on information vs. the wasted paper that piles up in my house (most of which goes unread because it's repetitive national AP content). If the paper charged less for their online version (and it was a quality site with full content, no ads, RSS feeds, etc.), then I would probably cough up the dough.

I do pay $20/year for my Salon subscription. I enjoy reading the independent content, and feel like I'm getting something there I can't get anywhere else. However, I rarely link to a Salon article, nor do I even forward them on to friends, because they can't read the content without their own subscription.

Choosing the subscription model takes oneself out of the public discourse. You might have thought joining the discussion was the point, but here in wonderful capitalist America it was really just to make money.

More reason to read the blogs.

When I first got my Powerbook about 3 years ago, one thing that drove me nuts was the display resolution in Microsoft Word. Text at "100%" in Word was way too small. Alternatively, on Windows XP, I find the text size to be just right. On the mac I always found myself squinting at the screen or increasing the magnification. The problem with increasing the mag, however, was that the text's kerning got wonky and the font looked bold. This was back when Word was on version "X" and OS X was version 10.1 or something like that.

I recently installed Tiger and Word 2004 on my Powerbook, and was eager to see if they had fixed this problem. While the text quality is improved, they forgot to fix the size problem. Here's the mac displaying Times New Roman at 12pt with 100% magnification in Word 2004 (click the image for a full-size screenshot):

Now here's the same text in the same font at the same mag in Word 2002 on XP:

What you can see is that the same font at the same size with the same mag is about 30% smaller on the mac than it is on the PC. But other interface elements are roughly the same--the title bar text and size, the buttons, the menus, etc.

Whats up with this!? Why is the text so much smaller, and who thinks this is a good idea?

I do a lot of collaborative writing in my work (for grants, papers, etc.) and as is becoming more and more common, academics are adopting the mac. One thing I've started to notice is how many Word docs I get from people that have the mag set higher than 100% when I open them up. In fact, pretty much everybody I know that I share Word docs with that uses the mac increases the magnification on their end.

This isn't surprising given my examples above. So why don't I just increase the mag and be done with it? Well, as I mentioned above, back in Word X, the kerning was bad and the font looked bold. So how about now? Here's the same text on the mac in Word 2004 with the mag at 135%:

They have improved (but not solved) the magnified kerning problem since Word X, but the bold font look is still there. I can't help but see this text as bold--so much so that bolded text doesn't stand out much.

So, its nice to see they worked on it some (and clearly saw it as a problem), but why not actually fix the problem?

My question to all those mac users out there is what mag do you use in Microsoft Word, and how can you stand it? It seems like everytime I try to use a Mac for a real-world purpose, I run into a show-stopper like this one. And don't suggest I use Apple's Pages or something like that. I need a real word processor with all the bells/whistles that is absolutely compatible with Microsoft Word because of the collaborative writing I do. I also try every OpenOffice version when it comes out and not a single one can handle even the simplest Word docs with embedded images without screwing it up.

I don't know who I should be blaming for this--Microsoft or Apple. I suppose it could be some contrived attempt by Microsoft to make Apple an inferior platform for word processing. If so, its successful. On the other hand, perhaps its Apple who hopes to squeeze Microsoft out? If thats the case then they don't understand the world of word processing very well.

Until things like this get fixed I'll never be able to actually use the mac as a replacement platform. Word processing is about the most basic and fundamental use for a computer, and for whatever reason the Mac can't handle it.

Carle spends about $1.3 million each year on charity care. While that is real money, it’s only 0.5% of their annual revenues. The other 99.5% is going towards non-charitable costs. Another example of Carle’s charitable nature is their habit of charging low-income uninsured customers their highest list prices.

I would certainly prefer to see Carle spending more of its revenue on charity care. It’s a real way to give back to the community. While it’s true that $1.3 million isn’t peanuts, does it qualify Carle as a non-profit organization? Of course not. They made $33 million profit on $312 million of income in 2003.

Carle is a for-profit company, plain and simple. Think of it this way: if I staked a sign in my yard and called myself a church so I didn't have to pay property taxes, would you be interested in whether or not I actually was a church?

Health care is costing a fortune (and rising) in this country. Some of the costs pay for doctors, nurses, beds, MRI machines, heat, and other tangibles directly related to patient care. However, another big chunk is administrative costs for health insurance companies, CEO salaries, and profit for the shareholders. The United States spends more money per person than any other advanced country, yet our citizens die sooner than countries that spend half as much as we do. Everyone’s health premiums have gone up in the last several years, and the state’s budget woes owe a lot to increased health care costs. Are doctors, nurses, and other health care workers seeing huge wage increases, or is that extra money going to the insurance companies?

Spending 0.5% on charity doesn’t make Carle a charitable company. Their decision as a corporation to provide charity care may very well be a business decision designed to save them money by getting a tax exemption (for example, it saved them $700,000 in 2003). I would expect they'll now either start providing more charitable care (in order to change people’s minds on their status), or they'll stop providing it and start paying taxes.

Either way, it's the bottom line that counts for them, and there's no reason we should be making up for their disinterest in paying property taxes. If Carle does end up paying $2 million/year in property taxes, perhaps Urbana can spend some of that on Frances Nelson and/or other subsidies for low-income health care in the community.

First, let me dispense with the evaluative necessity—this is a great film. “The Smartest Guys in the Room” takes a complex subject and unravels it into its essential roots: the dangers of the corporate state, the consequences of our capitalist system on fundamental human behavior, and the degree to which so much in this country is controlled by so few.

The film sticks to a fairly traditional documentary style reminiscent of a Frontline or a 60 Minutes documentary. This is not a bad thing. In this age of name-calling and bias accusation (i.e. the SCLM), “Smartest Guys” presents a fully credible portrait built on the words of the Enron executives themselves. There is a great deal of direct footage of the primary players (Chairman Ken Lay and CEO Jeff Skilling), as well as backup narrative from various Enron employees that saw the action firsthand.

However, the most interesting part of this film is not its fact finding, but is instead the complex web it weaves between the facts in an attempt to explain the “why.” Moreover, the Enron executives could hardly fault anyone for asking this question given that their treasured corporate slogan was “Ask Why.”

“Smartest Guys” is a picture of the consequences of our priorities as a society—when the importance of making money becomes the driving mantra behind everything we do. The Enron execs were a bunch of macho, reckless guys with a wild-west gambler mentality. They merged this with a level of confidence that can only come with access to power at the highest levels (i.e. the White House). The result is an arrogance, both internal and projected, that allowed Enron to blind the world with their dreams and schemes.

The consequence I speak of is a corporate state without regard for you or me. The corporation has absolutely no interest or reason to support America and its people. Instead, every single aspect of the corporation is about money for its shareholders and executives. Enron took this idea to its highest highs (and eventually its lowest lows) by instituting procedures designed to weed out anyone with a cautious or empathetic bone in their body.

The Performance Review Committee (PRC), setup by CEO Skilling, was a structure for annual employee performance evaluation. If you weren’t cutthroat enough, weren’t fully committed to the unrelenting goal of making money regardless of human cost, you were let go. Enron dumped 15% of its staff every year based on PRC recommendations. What they were left with after years of this weeding was a staff that would screw us all over, that wouldn’t care about right or wrong, legal or illegal.

In the film’s best sequence, this evil mentality is most evident in Enron’s participation in, and engineering of the California energy “crisis” in 2001. “Smartest Guys” does a great job explaining how Enron sucked power out of California to create a false ‘shortage,’ so that they could then sell it back to them at a huge profit. This sequence is filled with telephone dialogue by Enron traders at the time who happily talk about screwing grandmas out of power and gleefully cheer on wildfires that threaten power distribution (so that their prices would go up even more). Finally, the film does a great job tying this whole debacle into the subsequent recall of CA Governor Gray Davis by Schwarzenegger’s friends Ken Lay and George W. Bush.

The frequent links to governmental power by the Enron executives is a recurring theme in “Smartest Guys.” Ken Lay knew Bush Jr. and Sr. going way back. Lay was an early champion of deregulation, publicly pushing for it as far back as the 1970’s. Despite George W. Bush’s attempts to distance himself from Lay in the aftermath of Enron, “Kenny-Boy” (Bush’s nickname for Lay) and his company were the largest single contributors to Bush’s presidential election campaign in 2000.

One aspect of this movie that particularly pleased me was its unwillingness to give any of the top executives a pass. It lays responsibility right where it belongs—at the top. There are great sequences in the film that include accusations by Sharon Watkins (the inside executive who was appalled at what she found and eventually testified against the company), and ridiculous rebuttals by Skilling in front of Congress. But the film doesn’t stop with Skilling and indicts Lay as well. As Skilling had, Lay claims he didn’t know anything about what these rogue people were doing in his company, and therefore claims no responsibility for what happened. Sure, he and Skilling had dumped millions in stock options just before the company tanked, had hired the people who screwed the world with its Ponzi schemes, and oversaw the downfall of the country’s 7th largest corporation—but its not their fault!

Kurt Eichenwald recently wrote a book on the same subject, titled “Conspiracy of Fools.” I had been particularly interested in reading this book when it first came out, as I was engrossed by his last work, “The Informant,” which lays out the details behind an ADM price-fixing scam in the style of a John Grisham novel. But my reading of reviews of “Fools” revealed that Eichenwald gives Ken Lay a pass and adopts Lay’s defense of ignorance. As unbelievable as his ignorance claims are, their truthfulness is irrelevant in determining guilt or innocence. At the very least Lay engineered and ran the company that screwed 20,000 employees out of a job and lost their billions in pension funds. He managed to get away with hundreds of millions in cash himself, though.

I do wish “Smartest Guys” had done a better job explaining the complex accounting schemes that led to the company’s unreal growth around 2000. Enron created hundreds of “partner” companies, usually consisting of nothing but paper, that they used both to squirrel away debt and to realize projected profits from. These schemes, combined with the confident attitudes and connections to power allowed them to blind the stock analysts who gave them nothing but buy ratings. The film missed an opportunity to unravel this mystery through a simple diagram and explanation.

I also would have liked to have heard more about the aftermath of Enron—the calls for corporate accountability by the citizens and the degree to which our government responded (or failed to respond). How much did Bush play in blocking these reforms? Was enough done to prevent this in the future?

Minor quips aside, “Smartest Guys” is a great film that does a noble service in pointing out that Enron is not an aberration, but is a direct and logical result from the structures we have setup and tolerate as a society. As the film mentions near its end: if it looks too good to be true, than it probably is—a fitting cliché for 21st century America, its corporate dominance, and its superpower politics.

Some of you may recall one of my last posts about the "at-large" campaign in Urbana. Laurel was on the same side of that campaign (the "no" side) as an overwhelming majority of Urbana citizens (63% in the November election).

I won't renumerate her positions here as you can read them on the website. But one of the most interesting things you can read there is a collection of letters to the editor. Many of them are written by people with firsthand knowledge about various actions by Mayor Tod Satterthwaite, and detail a candidate that has trouble controlling his temper.

Too busy to get into much else, but please read the website and see what you think.

Every four years you hear talk about all the new voter registrations and how they'll change the face of the election. Every four years they don't seem to make much difference. This year they will. 10000 new registrations in my own county in Illinois--a state that isn't even up for grabs. Thats how many people want a voice in this election.

The main reason for people to register is for *change*--not for the status quo.

So, we'll see in a few days, but I'm predicting a Kerry win.

Well, actually I'm always paying attention to local politics, but its just been more than usual lately. As someone who watches the city council almost every week on cable, I seem to fall into a somewhat rare category.

Enough of that. The issue I've been paying attention to is an effort by some in the city to add "at-large" seats to the Urbana City Council (Illinois). Currently the council is elected by districts (called "wards" in Urbana), and there are seven of them. There will be a referendum on the ballot this November to add two at-large seats to the seven ward seats. What makes them "at-large" is that they are elected city-wide as opposed to ward-wide.

So what's the big deal? Well, my first clue that something might be wrong was that this question was pushed onto the ballot at the last minute, without any formal study or public hearing. My second is that some of its roots are clearly political, based on conflicts between the council and mayor. But aside from that, I decided to investigate the question for myself--What are the problems and benefits to at-large elections?

So I set out reading all of the major scientific literature on the topic from the last 35 years. What I found has led me to become one of the leaders of a campaign against the referendum. The campaign is called Vote No At-Large. Those of you that know me know I follow politics closely, but aside from photography, rarely get particularly involved. So what's so bad about at-large that its drawn me in like this?

Since I've already written a bunch on this, I'm not going to rehash it all here, but I'll touch on one major issue with at-large--that it dilutes minority representation in local government.

At-large seats are effective in diluting the minority vote because they require candidates to run city-wide as opposed to district-wide. Minority neighborhood districts are more likely to elect minority candidates. But at-large seats, with voters taken from anywhere in the city, typically elect majority candidates. This has been proven time and again in study after study, making it one of the most verified findings in the field of political science.

A few quotes for illustrative effect:

As convincing as it is, one need not solely rely on empirical evidence in the scientific literature for examples of how at-large affects minority representation. Right here in central Illinois we have plenty of examples:

• In 1987, a group of African-Americans filed a minority vote dilution lawsuit against the city of Springfield, seeking the city�s compliance with the Voting Rights Act. As a result, the city eliminated its at-large system in favor of a ward system�like we have here in Urbana. The first African-American was then elected to that body since 1911.
• Also in 1987, a similar lawsuit was brought against the city of Danville. At that time in the city�s history, every elected council member since the city was founded in 1867 were all white men. The city settled the lawsuit by eliminating at-large and adopting a ward system�again, like we have in Urbana. And since they removed at-large? The city has elected 5 African-Americans, 8 women, a Latino, and a person of Native-American descent. Danville, with an over 20% African-American population, has since had two African-Americans on the council at all times.
• In 1998, the citizens of Urbana voted to eliminate at-large seats from the school board in favor of district elections because of poor minority representation on that all-white body.

While Springfield and Danville�s electoral systems were fully at-large, the system being proposed in Urbana is referred to as a �mixed� system�one made up of both districts and at-large. Proponents of the proposed change suggest this is an important distinction, one which makes all of the scientific evidence �irrelevant.� But the leading scholars in political science have studied mixed systems as well. Susan Welch, a leading researcher on the effects of at-large elections on minority representation, and Dean and Professor of Political Science at Penn State University states it clearly: �While blacks are equitably represented in the district portions of mixed systems, they are abysmally underrepresented in the at-large portions.�

Frankly I can even keep going with examples, but I won't belabor the point any further. At-large has all kinds of other problems--it injects big money into local government (citywide campaigns require lots of money), and it produces candidates out-of-touch with the citizens (since citywide campaigns can't knock on all doors they knock on few and instead rely on media saturation).

In fact, most cities are abandoning at-large, not adding them back.

If you find this interesting and want to follow the campaign more closely, get involved, donate, or anything else, please see the Vote No At-Large website, which is homebase for the campaign. Other information on the website includes a literature review I wrote on the topic of at-large elections, statements from our campaign kickoff press conference, and the text of the NAACP's resolution endorsing a "no" vote against at-large in Urbana. The site will catalog things as they come up, so please check there for updates, as I probably won't post much here.

In case you missed his speech at the convention tonight, I highly recommend you watch a re-run on CSPAN (real player required). Here's an excerpt to whet your appetite:

There's a real satisfaction that comes from living in "blue state" Illinois...

Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2004 02:49:21 -0500 (CDT)
From: Damian Menscher <....>
To: comments@foxnews.com
Subject: FNC reporting errors

I've noticed several times on your news show that the claim is made that
the 9/11 Commission Report found a connection between the terrorist
attacks and Iraq. This view is supported by republican guests and
rejected by democrat guests. I am disturbed that your "Fair and
Balanced" reporters are siding with the republican party on this issue,
especially given that the facts show otherwise.

After a guest suggested that viewers read the report for themselves, I
decided that was the only fair way to settle the issue. After all, the
question of whether the 9/11 Commission Report found a link between
al Qaeda and Iraq is easily and unambiguously settled by reading it. I
found the following paragraph on page 334 of the report:

I was not able to find any other reference to the links between al Qaeda
and Iraq in the report. Unless I'm missing something, I conclude that
your news anchors are either uninformed or deliberately misleading the
viewing public.

Given that the facts show the democrats to be correct, it seems your
news anchors will have to stop pushing the republican claims. I have
just informed you of your error--if you continue to press the issue
with empty claims of evidence it will only be demonstrating the
intentional bias alleged by the creators of the movie "Outfoxed."

I intend to pass this email on to other news media, but would like to
give you the opportunity to respond with any evidence (include a page
number please) of a connection cited in the Report. I will include your
response in my upcoming news release.

--

Message to Fox: feel free to just leave your response in a comment here if you like.

There was a massive protest against Bush and his policies in Rome today, and CNN reports it on their front page as "Thousands march in Rome against Bush, war." Guess how many the thousands are? Police estimates (always low when it comes to protests) were for 500,000. That's right, one-half million people. Where's that SCLM (so-called liberal media) when you need them?