Below are some details on the Change to Win, The American Dream Survey - Hope and Fear in Working America.

Four years and eight months ago, GWB signed No Child Left Behind. So the kids now taking the SAT are the first group that will have gone through a NCLB high school curriculum. And this week we got the news that SAT scores for the high school class of 2006 have had the biggest drop in 31 years. link

The New York Times published a very interesting editorial today on a Colorado toll road over a year after Unbossed wrote extensively about eminent domain which led to the breaking investigative series, Roads Scholars:

As if there were not enough poorly conceived and environmentally devastating developments in the American West, now we have Super Slab.

The location of this latest struggle between nature and money is the Bijou Basin, southeast of Denver in Elbert County. It doesn’t have the staggering majesty of the Rocky Mountains, but it does have the delicate beauty of a rural, ranching grassland. In the entire county — one of the largest in the state — there are only some 200 miles of paved roads. And that, according to the Front Range Toll Road Corporation, headed by the developer Ray Wells, makes the Bijou Basin a perfect place to put a new high-speed toll road, called, colloquially, Super Slab.

[snip]

What it is really meant to do, of course, is serve as the spine for yet another wave of the uncontrolled development that Colorado residents and all Americans should be sick of. By nearly every measure this project is a boondoggle. The planners say it will cost about $2 billion, a gross underestimate. There is not nearly enough north-south commercial truck traffic to begin to pay for the road, which would require condemning a three-mile wide, 210-mile strip of land through seven rural counties.

Stay tuned, toll road warriors. There's more to come.

My series on the CONSERVATION ECONOMY makes these main points:

1. Conservation pays, conservation pays immediately and conservation pays on multiple levels. Whether you are talking wilderness or windfarms, conservation pays;

2. The conservation economy is a bridging issue. One that can cross boundaries to bring divergent interests together, bring the conservation movement into the mainstream and realize sustainable economic benefit for communities that seek to be conservation-minded.

HUMAN powered outdoor recreation is a significant portion of the Conservation Economy . It’s a $730 BILLION Industry that supports 6.5 million jobs across the nation and generates $88 billion in state and national tax revenue every year.

I’ve never been in the Global Warming (GW) “doubter” camp. The science made sense to me early on (in the 1980s) as an interested teenager. My response to the GW threat was to become more politically active on the issue and, more importantly (to me at least), take action to reduce my contribution to the GW problem. My thought was always: if we fight hard enough, we’ll be able to turn this thing around. But as GW’s ugly consequences bear rapidly down on us, my response to it has shifted somewhat.

And not just where but why and how. Welcome to the world of extreme geography.

Sisters and brothers, today is an important day - August 26 - the anniversary of woman's suffrage.

And if you want to honor the women and men who struggled for this right, use the name they called themselves - Suffragists.

There is an interesting article in this month's Washington Monthly on assessing the quality of education and suggesting alternatives to the dreary measurements currently being used.

Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?

New Orleans is still in intensive care. If you have seen recent television footage of New Orleans, you probably have a picture of how bad the housing situation is. What you cannot see is that the rest of the institutions, the water, the electricity, healthcare, jobs, educational system, criminal justice systems -- are all just as broken as the housing. New Orleans remains in serious trouble. Like most Louisiana natives, you probably wonder where has the promised money gone.

With hurricane season about to make landfall in just over a week, one scientist is wondering if we will learn from the tragic lessons taught by Katrina. Dr. Ivor van Heerden was at the center of the storm, so to speak, as co-founder and deputy director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center. In his new book, “The Storm,” he explains what went wrong and why we must heed scientific warnings, now, in order to prevent repeating the past. Here's an excerpt.

On a list of items for which government Smart Grants are available, guess what is missing?

Yesterday, the FDA finally granted over-the-counter status to Plan B, though it restricted its OTC sale to women 18 and older. Mother Jones has put together an informative timeline of the saga. Key points include:

My series on the CONSERVATION ECONOMY makes these main points:

1. Conservation pays, conservation pays immediately and conservation pays on multiple levels. Whether you are talking wilderness or windfarms, conservation pays;

2. The conservation economy is a bridging issue. One that can cross boundaries to bring divergent interests together, bring the conservation movement into the mainstream and realize sustainable economic benefit for communities that seek to be conservation-minded.

Today we learn more. National Parks in Wyoming generate significant economic growth for surrounding communities and the state as a whole. It’s the same story all over the country.

Come ye, Brothers and Sisters of the Order of Saint Howard of Dean.

Relieve your Earthly moralistic burdens and elitist solipsism. Be free!

Enter the Liberal Confessional and confess your political sins.

Despite the hue and cry of U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) and anti-immigrant organizations, like Defend Colorado Now, there is no evidence that foreign-born workers affect job prospects for American workers, according to a new report by the Pew Hispanic Center.

My fellow teachers, don't stress too much, but summer is about to end. There, I said it. Even though my real focus is labor and work, I really like to read about science.

And not just read. For months, I've been posting about science, including my weekly Sunday Science fun posts. This past Sunday, rserven on Daily Kos suggested I put together a list of past posts as a resource for science teachers.

I just finished reading Senator Byron Dorgan's (D-North Dakota) new book, "Take This Job and Ship It: How Corporate Greed and Brain-dead Politics are Selling Out America".

On trade issues, Senator Dorgan "gets it". None of this namby-pamby "it's the responsibility of American workers to get more education so they'll be more competitive in the global economy" like we get from the corporate lapdog wing of the Democratic party.

The Right-Wingers and thier drooling, lump-headed followers continually tout the idea of "energy independence" for the United States.

"Energy Independence" is a red herring. It is a deliberatly false and misleading phrase meant to lead Americans into thinking that we can drill our nation out of the Energy Crisis. Remember, the USA holds only 3% of the world's fossil fuel resources yet consumes 25%. Do the math.

"Energy Independence" is a political phrase. Nothing more. Its important to understand why the United States can never acheive this and how that simple fact makes our current foreign policy all more insane.

For those of you intersted in the Rocky Mountain West Headwaters News is an excellent resource.

Every day, Headwaters News compiles news stories of interest from throughout the region into one easy to use format. It is an increadible resource that I encourage people to check out.

Headwaters, put out by the folks at the Center for the Rocky Mountain West, pulls articles from The Denver Post, Rocky Mountain News, Missoulian, Salt Lake City Tribune, Albuquerque Journal and hundreds of others, summarizes them into one or two sentance and provides links to the story. They also pull in the most intrested Op-eds and commentaries.

You can subscribe to Headwaters daily email news summation here.

Whats the latest?

A civilian CIA contractor accused of beating an Afghan detainee who later died in custody was found guilty of assault on Friday.  Thomas Passaro is the first person affiliated with the spy agency to be convicted in a post-September 11 abuse case.

As we have so often read of other murderers, he "looked just like the guy next door."

No, not critters in the White House. We're talking critters that can really take the heat. Wait. I heard that. No, they're not neanderthals either. Can we please just stay on topic?

"It violated everything I personally believed in and all I'd been taught about the rules of war." -- Sergeant Joseph Darby

In January 2004, Sergeant Joseph Darby, a 24-year-old Army Reservist serving at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, had a crisis of conscience. What he did turned his world—and everyone else's—upside down. Darby is a member of the 372nd Military Police Company, the unit in charge of guarding prisoners at Abu Ghraib. When Darby learned of the abuse taking place against Iraqi prisoners, he was torn between loyalty to his fellow soldiers and horror that they seemed capable of torture.

President Bush done a heck of a job, to be sure.  The War Crimes Act makes any violation of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions a crime under federal law.

Since the Supreme Court said the Administration wrongfully denied these Geneva Conventions protections to those detained in Guantanamo Bay and similar detention facilities, Administration officials could face prosecution under the War Crimes Act.

“When the Third Stryker Brigade of the Second Infantry Division left for Mosul in northern Iraq on June 22, 28-year-old Lt. Ehren Watada was not with them.

Out of a deeply held belief that the war in Iraq is both illegal and immoral, Lt. Watada refused to deploy. His decision has since mobilized dozens of anti-war activist groups who have eagerly adopted his cause to put a face to their movement. It has also alienated him from his superiors in the military.

Read DC Vote's post and then come back here to see what is the pharamcist's ethical responsibility with regard to the treatment of patients.

Until the FDA grants over-the-counter status to Plan B or another form of emergency contraception (EC), women have to get it by prescription. Two of this week's events provided additional illustrations of how difficult that can be.

Gosh, I hate to to say this, but, ahem, one common error I hear all the time - especially since I teach in a university where these items are commonly found - is using the word "podium" for "lectern". As a word expert says:

Strictly speaking, a podium is a raised platform on which you stand to give a speech; the piece of furniture on which you place your notes and behind which you stand is a lectern.

As a pedagogue I stand on a podium while I place my lecture notes on the lectern.

Reporting on a new study in Nature, Scientific American explains that "Life in the hippocampus is as tough as high school."

A new study by the Government Accountabiilty Office concerns confirms and complaints that military recruiters have been overly aggressive in their methods.

DCvote had the goods on this idiotic marketing scheme. Now, try your hand at the sign-o-matic at Ronald McHummer.com before McDonald's and/or Hummer shuts 'em down.

Fourth Congressional District Rep. Marilyn Musgrave is hosting a campaign fundraising event this week which has again raised questions about her connections to ethically-challenged politicians.

The American Psychological Association (APA) issued the following press release on 10 August 2006.

New Orleans - The Council of Representatives of the American Psychological Association (APA) has approved a resolution reaffirming the organization's absolute opposition to all forms of torture and abuse, regardless of the circumstance. The resolution furthermore affirmed United Nations human rights documents and conventions as the basis for APA policy.

[...]

"It is not enough for us to express outrage or to codify acceptable practices. As psychologists, we must use every means at our disposal to prevent abuse and other forms of cruel or degrading treatment," said Gerald P. Koocher, PhD, President of the APA.

Quite a contrast from Dr. Koocher's "dead wrong" on torture response six weeks ago to a petition by members of the APA which called for an unequivocal end to psychologists' participation in detainee interrogations.

The whiners at the Colorado Oil and Gas Association got together last week in Denver to moan and wimper about the public's lack of support for yet more energy development in the West.

Among thier ideas?

...an expensive, sustained, high-profile advertising campaign -- on the order of the dairy industry's "Got Milk" push or the cattle industry's "Beef, It's What's For Dinner" program...

..."That's what this industry needs," said Duane Zavadil, manager of government and regulatory affairs for Denver-based Bill Barrett Corp. (NYSE: BBG).

"It's going to take a campaign like that: long-term and high-dollar," he said, then added how the industry is perceived by many. "Right now I think we're gambling, alcohol, tobacco and prostitution all rolled into one. [But] we're just as important to the country as affordable food, clean air and clean water."

Gee. I wonder why the bad public opinion?

But they work for you. Kind of. Or maybe not.....

It may come as a surprise to some Bureau of Land Management officials, but they do not work for the oil and gas industries - at least not officially.

I've long wondered WHY the oil and gas industry is working at such a furious pace to gain oil and gas leases throughout the west when they cant even drill the ones they have!

Good Morning!!!

It's looking like the oil and gas industry has no interest in pulling out of the Rocky Mountain west. In fact, they intend to drill the hell out us over the next 10 years.

How does life treat the real Oliver Twists, the children who survive the foster care system and ask for more? More being more education, the ability to go to college and graduate from college. Only pessimists need apply. How's that for a twist of fate?

It is being reported today that Bush has had to put down his summer reading, Albert Camus' "The Stranger" and a biography of Lincoln, to concentrate on the top three crises at hand: Lebanon, UK terrorists, and the war in Iraq. Rueters

But MSNBC reports that Bush has finished Camus' "The Stranger" and found it a quick read.  Then he discussed existentialism with his aides, including Tony Snow.  

He read Albert Camus's The Stranger, triggering a discussion about existentialism with his aides. "He found it an interesting book and a quick read," said Mr Snow. "I don't want to go too deep into it, but we discussed the origins of existentialism." MSNBC

Bush, who has demonstrated scorn for the literate, has boasted about declining to read the daily newspapers, was advised by someone in his White House literati cabal, to read Camus' "The Stranger"  Plot summary follows with the Bush cycle.  

At its national conference this week, the American Psychological Association passed a resolution strongly condemning torture. Details below.

In Southern California, they refer to them as events. Or temblors. For those who can't be there in person, now 45 minutes after an earthquake, ShakeMovie will post a video of ground shake patterns for all "events" magnitude 3.5 or greater back to 1999.

This essay was written by Mikk0 of The Pony Express and posted to Unbossed with permission.

Reuters reports on 08/09/06:

The problem

• Baghdad's morgue received 1,815 bodies in July, the highest tally in five months (1,595 were received in June).
• Morgue assistant manager Abdul Razzaq al-Obaidi said that about 90 per cent of the eighteen hundred had died violently. "Most of the cases have gunshot wounds to the head. Some of them were strangled and others were beaten to death with clubs," he told Reuters.
[ Read More... ]

Posted by: Alexa at 03:00 PM. Filed under: general

• Go ahead: say your piece

This beautiful essay was written by my friend Boadicaea, and posted to Unbossed with permission.

I didn't serve in Vietnam, and thankfully, I didn't lose any of those close to me who did. I sent others to that war; no matter how far down the line of diminishing responsibility I worked, that is what I did. My part was small but veterans tell me, "You were there," and some say "Welcome home."

Veterans give me a place to be, but there is no forgetting the enlistees and draftees whose entry into the military and the nightmare of war I was a part of. I am writing to illustrate how widespread and long-lasting the damage of war is, even for someone who was never in danger, never saw any of it first-hand.

Do you read the comics? Do you read them first or last? Me, I'm one of those people who reads the comics in the newspaper first. It's a way to break into the day before I have to hit the hard stuff. But I know perfectly respectable people who read them last so they can get the bitter taste of world events out of their mouths and have a reason to go on living.

This week has some great strips up. The kind folks who read this blog would want to ead. But have you? I'm going to mention a few and provide some links. But this is participatory: What do you like?

McDonald’s seemed to be doing so well for a while. They scaled back promotion for their grease-laden Big Macs and fries in favor of salads and fruit cups, and offered apple slices in place of fries in Happy Meals. Now, though, they’re turning kids on to a new unhealthy habit: Gas-guzzling vehicles.

The Hypocrisy of NY1 Cable News:

From an editorial yesterday in NY1 news, "a division of" Time Warner, who contributed $101,000 to Sen. Clinton's campaign this year:

"Clinton has been attacked by some voters and liberal bloggers for not calling for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq. And like Lieberman, she faces a similar anti-war opponent in her Democratic primary.

Jonathan Tasini is trying to gain attention for his push to end the war in Iraq. But unlike Lamont, Tasini has low name recognition and very little money in the bank.

At this point he's not a threat to Clinton, but given her full campaign schedule, it's clear she's thinking about him."

- Michael Scotto
NY1 news

Low name recognition? It's NY1 itself who is fixing, controlling and censoring the debate !! NY1 news has set the conditions for the debate against Sen. Clinton it is producing on August 22: THE RICH NEED ONLY APPLY

It didn’t take New York Times long to uncover the identity of a particular AOL user whose search terms were collected online.

DHS? Don't Hit Steve? DooHickey Stereo? Doodle Hoodle Schnoodle? Might as well be. Makes more sense than and it's more descriptive than Department of Homeland Security. Sez who? Sez the Government Accountability Office, only they say it very politely.

You just gotta love the restraint GAO exercises with its reports' titles.

For example, take a report that says that TSA spent almost $470 million from fiscal years 2002 through 2005. But it was not until 2005 that TSA started keeping records on what it was paying a contractor to maintain machines that detect explosives at airports.

Why? Because, its contract "was not structured to capture these data." And this is simple data.

If they didn't try to "capture" this data, what data is roaming wild?

Crossposted with permission from Colorado Confidential.com

Serious concerns about a former elected official's personal financial gains from a tax system that he created while in office are being raised just ahead of the Tuesday primary.

Steve Miller, the former Larimer County (CO) Assessor who is again seeking the Republican nomination, has solicited Larimer County property owners by letter offering to serve as their agent to protest properties he considers overvalued by the current assessor's office. A successful protest before the Board of Equalization would result in a lower property tax. Miller would then collect a fee of 50 percent of the annual tax savings from the property owner.

Curiously, the supposedly incorrect property valuations were based on a system that Miller himself implemented when he was the assessor from 1989-2002 and that is still in use today.

Somebody told me there's some primaries tomorrow. Heh.

What's shakin' in your neck of the woods? Any interesting candidates or ballot initiatives?

First, the anthropology.

Savage Minds.

is a collective web log devoted to both bringing anthropology to a wider audience as well as providing an online forum for discussing the latest developments in the field.

I found this blog while looking for more information on a brief news story on the language of the Aymara. Cognitive science, meet the angel of history - a discussion of recent articles awed by the discovery that the Aymara people in Bolivia refer to the past as in front of them and the future as behind them. Makes sense when you think about it, just a different sense than does English usage. The Aymara see the future as being that which is not seen, and we cannot see what is behind us. The past has been seen and can be seen in our minds, and things we see are before us.

So now, the past.

This essay was written by my Why Orange co-founder, mikk0 and posted to Unbossed with permission.

As as result of Rumsfeld losing to Hamdan in the Supreme Court case Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld the public for the first time got a chance to learn what type of justice the detainees in Guantanamo were likely to face: a rigged trial system of justice as it turned out, in which the detainee was said to be guilty before the trial started, was fed into the trial process, told to "shut up" or excluded during trial, and was popped out the other end proven guilty.

Now Pres. Bush wants to extend this same rigged trial system to cover all American citizens.

"As science brings us every closer to unlocking the secrets of human biology,
it also offers temptations to manipulate human life and violate human dignity. Our conscience in history as a nation demand that we resist this temptation."

-- President George W. Bush,  after fulfilling his promise by using the first veto of his presidency to nix a bill that would have allowed increased federal funding for Stem Cell Research.

No sanctity for Omar Khadr.

Human rights advocates have long suspected a link between interrogations in the "war on terror" and a secretive military survival school that trains elite U.S. troops to resist torture.

Jane Mayer explored the evidence of a connection between the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape school at Fort Bragg, N. C., and real-world interrogators in a July 2005 piece for the New Yorker.

The Torture School curriculum and Mohammad al-Kahtani's torture records, obtained through an ACLU FOIA request, are another damning indictment against the Waterboarding Administration.  

How is this any different than what we knew?  The fact that SERE teaches "interrogation techniques" (what you and I would call torture) to be used on detainees is new and it's appalling.

The Food Quality Protection Act of 1996 required the EPA to review and reassess food-use pesticides over the course of the next decade. Yesterday marked the 10-year deadline, and health and environmental advocates had mixed reactions to the agency’s final decisions.

A few months ago, uber-smart, uber-talented, and uber-hip Alex Doonesbury was being wooed by top technical colleges. As she talked to each she asked them a technical question., the response to which was supposed to be the basis for her choice.

But for such a smart young woman, Alex asked the wrong, wrong question.

Between my orchard and flower bed sits an overgrown thicket of scrub and poison ivy. Years ago, you could occasionally venture in to pick a few mediocre grapes growing in a tangle there. But it's become an outright nuisance in what ought to be a central part of our landscape. Only a colossal effort could make it productive again.

So too the territory occupied by right wingers in the U.S. If they've anything valuable to say, you couldn't discover it midst the chaotic and noxious weeds of their minds. And the bombs raining down in Lebanon have just watered the gardens of the superpatriots' hatred.

A perfect specimen is an absurd little weed that the true-believers rushed to cultivate when it first popped up the other day. After a British blogger managed to convince himself that wire service photos from Qana had been staged, wingers in the U.S. competed to embellish the baseless accusation. And though the AP published an article rebutting the charge, fevered minds on the right are having none of it.

Another day, another controversial Bush nominee. The controversial nominee de jour is Paul DeCamp to head the Labor Department's Wage and Hour Division. So what's the problem on the ole DeCamp ground?

Following a controversial decision by Denver NBC affiliate KUSA-TV/9News to ignore an unflattering approval poll of Republican Senator Wayne Allard, the sole Colorado media sponsor of SurveyUSA reported as a "top story" a poll on the 7th Congressional District Democratic primary that has some local politcos scratching their heads.

On July 26, Colorado Confidential's Sen. Allard Dead Last in Approval Rating scooped the local media including the apparent media sponsor of the poll.

When 9News vice president and news director Patti Dennis was contacted by this reporter for comment on media watchdog Colorado Media Matters' story about the station's failure to report on the poll, she remarked that Sen. Wayne Allard's ranking as the "Worst Senator" was not newsworthy. 

Think about it. Central Pennsylvania, Center County, PA, where the green forested Alleghany Mountains rise up mile after mile. Some of the last great stands of interior forest in this country. Towns with names like Snowshoe. Light human population. Lots of very small towns, people living up dirt roads, lower education level. Think of all that means.

And if you are a developer what it means is: What a perfect place to build the largest landfill and garbage incinerator in the eastern US.