The law of supply and demand suggests that when supply falls below demand, prices rise. A new survey suggests that professional workers are in short supply, and as a result their wages are rising.

I report on the survey results below, but one question I have is whether this situation could be the result of problems I have repeatedly reported on access to higher education. Here and here and here and here. And more reports and stories here and here on this crisis.

For the next five days, mcjoan from DailyKos.com and I are traveling the state to post field reports directly from the campaign trail of Colorado's most competitive Congressional races.

Bill Winter cuts an imposing figure. The Democratic challenger to Rep. Tom "Bomb Mecca" Tancredo in Colorado's 6th Congressional District is a veteran of both the Navy and Marines. He is candid and direct. He's also quick to hug campaign volunteers and staff.

So little time, so many studies. So much to do, so much to learn. So for the busy blog reader, I am posting a series on short pieces on new studies. Today: More money or more benefits?

To err is human . . . and science is no exception. Sometimes things don't work out as predicted . . . and the great thing is that finding out that a prediction is wrong is as important as finding out that one has not been proven wrong . . . yet.

In fact, it is for both young scientists and for and older this scientific method of theory, theory testing, and theory improvement as a result of finding that some prediction has been shown not to work that is both its power and also used to attack evolution by those who don't and won't understand.

So today we celebrate misteaks.

According to a new report released October 25, 2006, the system set up by the Department of Defense to allow soldiers and others abroad to vote creates huge risks of identity theft and more.

I for one am shocked, shocked to learn that there is gambling afoot. If only it were with money and not the ballot.

On Starbucks’ website, you can read all about their commitment to coffee farmers and their communities. Go into a store, and you might be able to coax a cup of Fair Trade coffee from the barista. In the latest news, though, Starbucks is looking less like a friend of coffee farmers and more like an ordinary greedy corporation.

This is a post I wrote in April 2005, while we were all still reeling from the 2004 election. Looking back, I think I've done at least as well as some professional pundits out there.

Via Laura Rozen, I see that the German news weekly stern is about to break a major story tomorrow. It has obtained copies of German government documents that reveal that US forces at a base in Tuzla, Bosnia were detaining and torturing terror-suspects already in September 2001.

Further, German agents saw evidence of this abuse at that time and sent a highly critical report about it to German intelligence, the German Federal Criminal Bureau, and German military intelligence. The German government, by contrast, has always claimed that it knew nothing of the existence of CIA detention centers in Europe until the news media reported about them.

According to today's Independent:

Stern said the German intelligence agents had been given access to documents confiscated by the Americans which were "smeared with blood". One German agent was said to have compared the actions of the US interrogators to Serbian war criminals during the break up of Yugoslavia. "The Serbs ended up before the international court in The Hague for this kind of thing," he was quoted as saying.

IRS woes with data and IT security are of long standing and often related to the use of outside contractors. more links A new report out has a lot to say about the security of the private information you provide to the IRS.

Just listening to Dick Cheney usually is enough to get any normal person hot under the collar. So if the unseasonably cool temperatures have got you shivering, check out the transcripts of these two radio interviews the Vice President had today with Sean Hannity and Scott Hennen.

In the former, Cheney has the gall to say that Democratic politicans who charge him and George Bush with being "liars" are undermining the war effort and "I think what it does is it encourages our adversaries", al Qaida. No word from him, however, on whether the charge is true.

Yet Hannity at his worst cannot hold a candle to the raw and stupid Hennen. From start to finish, Hennen's interview with Cheney is vile. It truly beggars belief. I suspect that you will not want to miss this one -- if only for Cheney's assertion that "things are going along swimmingly" with American policy.

So much to blog, so little time. So I am taking the quick and easy way out and giving you snippets of recent reports and news.

Wolf Blitzer's variety show last night was an eye-popper that you won't want to miss: CNN Late Edition. This was a portrait of the Republican Party in disarray.

It would be difficult to choose the single most devastating moment in this parade of humiliations for the GOP. Was it when Al Haig denounced the neo-cons for "hijacking" his party and …and tried to argue that they were former Democrats?

HAIG: [The Iraq war] was driven by the so-called neocons that hijacked my party, the Republican Party, before this administration...

BLITZER: Name names, Mr. Secretary. Who are you talking about?...

HAIG: Well, they're a group of people who are ex-Democrats. Many of them hovered around the Seattle Conservative Democrats some years ago, who...I'm talking about Wolfowitz. I'm talking about Richard Perle. I'm talking about some newly-made ones. I'm talking about the former editor of the Wall Street Journal.

These people are very, very deeply embedded in Yale and certain intellectual circles. And for years, they've been against NATO...

In the prior post on the NAFTA complaint concerning working conditions in North Carolina, I included links to the international labor standards relied upon. I include the text of the standards cited in the complaint below.

Jeremy Greenstock, former British UN ambassador and special envoy to Iraq, gave an interview yesterday to Sky News that is enormously embarrassing to the Bush administration, even though Greenstock does still believe that US and UK forces should remain in Iraq.

Here, the interviewer asked whether Greenstock agrees with the British Defense Minister that an orderly transition of power to the Iraqi defense forces is happening.

GREENSTOCK: Well, that's the process, but it's not orderly. There's no way in which the central government of Iraq can exert its authority over the whole country in the next year or two. This is going to be a long process of violence for many years to come. I don't see it being eradicated.

On October 17, a group of Canadian, Mexican, and US unions have filed a complaint charging that North Carolina has violated international law by denying public sector workers the right to collective bargaining. It says the denial of these rights:

Seriously Diminishes Labor Standards, including the Right to Freely Associate and to Organize and to Bargain Collectively, in Violation of the NAALC, Conventions of the International Labor Organization (ILO) and Principles of International Law Incorporated in Various International Instruments.

I want to follow up on BobB's post about the absurd Ben Stein NYT column in which he claims that everyone can be in the top 1% of wealth if we all go into finance.

Conservative politicians and rich folks sometimes propose the following solution to poverty: if people would just major in the right subjects in college (say, business), then enter a lucrative profession (say, finance), then they, too could become rich.

Voila! No more poor people!

A recent opinion piece by economist Ben Stein makes this argument. However, his proposed solution violates the most basic law of economics.

It's true that I have an obsession with bioethics, health, death, and disease. But why resist? So here are links related to those subjects.

My friend Milo forwarded to me this news story from Reuters. I thought it was so interesting that I'm going to quote it in full:

Baltimore Orioles General Manager Mike Flanagan said on Friday he will resist pressure from fans for a major shift in strategy in the American League playoffs, despite growing doubts among Americans and anxiety over the Orioles among Republican lawmakers.

"Our goal in this pennant race is clear and it's unchanging," Flanagan told Republican loyalists, denouncing Democrats who want a course correction as supporting a "doubt and defeat" approach.

But less than three days before the World Series begins, pressure is growing in the U.S. Congress for a major shift in a pennant race that has seen multiple defeats in October alone.

The Republican Party in Pennsylvania has a lot to answer for. Just for example, the senior Senator from PA, Arlen Specter, declared that the repeal of habeas corpus rights in the President's torture bill was "patently unconstitutional on its face"...shortly before Specter voted for the bill. Then there is Representative Don Sherwood, who is basing his re-election campaign on family values and not choking his mistress.

But for consistent, unadulterated idiocy it would be hard to beat Sen. Rick Santorum and Congressman Curt Weldon. They are the jokers in the Republican pack.

There is a war on. We are days away from an election that may make a huge difference in the direction of this country. We think of ourselves in terms of blue and red staters. But however these things turn out, we are a country in deep denial about who we really are.

This Monday the chief prosecutor from the special tribunal in Iraq stated that the court may announce its verdict against Saddam Hussein on November 5. Oddly, none of the news reports in the U.S. so much as commented on the curious timing of such an announcement.

Here is the Associated Press report:

A verdict against Saddam Hussein and seven co-defendants charged with crimes against humanity in connection with an anti-Shiite crackdown in the 1980s [at the town of Dujail] will be announced Nov. 5, a senior court official said Monday. Sentences for those found guilty will be issued the same day, he said....

"The Dujail trial will resume Nov. 5 when the presiding judge will announce the verdict and the sentencing," [Raed] Juhi, the investigating judge, said.

Yesterday, on her own stick, Jane Harman released the Executive Summary of the House Intelligence Committee's investigation of how the disgraced former member, Randy 'Duke' Cunningham, managed to use his influence to steer contracts to his business cronies Brent Wilkes and Mitchell Wade. Republicans will view its release as, ahhh...inconvenient.

Here is a PDF of the Executive Summary, and here is the San Diego Union Tribune report on the story. The Union Tribune piece gives a good overview of the document Harman released, and the politics of its release.

Meanwhile the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Peter Hoekstra, is furious that Harman dared to release a document that he would have prefered to keep the public from seeing.

It has long seemed to me that the outlandish behavior of the Republican Party during the last decade; its fawning upon the nuts, the bigots, and the wild-eyed manicheans of the religious right; its flagrant corruption; its arrogant abuse of raw power; and its refusal to be held accountable either under law or custom--would provoke a long-lasting backlash against the Republican Party. Add to that foul brew an extremely nasty Bush/Cheney administration, shredding the Constitution, flouting the law, grabbing for unchecked power, hounding opponents, bungling national security, deceiving the nation about Iraq...and so forth. You get a cataclysm for the Republican Party, especially among people young enough to be flexible about their political views.

That is evident in this chart published by the New York Times on Sunday. It deserves more attention than it has gotten. The chart tracks party identification by the age of voters.

"Time and time again, we're seeing examples of Democratic Party leaders apparently having lost their perspective concerning the nature of the enemy we face," [Cheney said.]

Indeed.

hat tip to Puma at Past is Prologue

You may have seen news this week about a report on Iraqi deaths since 2003. Here is a link to the 8-page study itself. Its findings confirm a study that was issued two years ago and dismissed as inaccurate in the run-up to the 2004 election. The 2004 study may be found here.

The new study is an easy read, and I encourage you to take a look at it.

With an election just weeks away, the Denver Post recently reported two major problems with ballots printed by the company that supplies Denver with its voting machines: reversed boxes for voting "Yes" or "No" on a ballot proposition, and telling voters an incorrect amount of postage they need to mail in their ballots.

I had one of those moments the other day. You’re having a pleasant enough conversation and then wham! From out of nowhere, the words come tumbling out.

I sounded like my mother.

The psychically channeled maternal advice that fell from my lips: “The company you keep is a good judge of your own character.”

So, I thought I might exercise my newfound wisdom to offer up some sage advice to the Mother of ‘Em All — our very own Congresswoman and self-appointed moralizer-in-chief Marilyn Musgrave.

Most of us have lost the stars, lost the heavens, living as we mostly do in light polluted areas. So, let me remind you of what is just overhead, the best show in the world, and we can have front row seats, as long as we get out of town.

The LA Times posted a major story this evening linking Jack Abramoff so closely to Ken Mehlman that it has to be wondered whether the RNC Chair can survive the revelations. The evidence is documentary—emails--and these have recently been released by a House committee. Republicans will have a fine time trying to impeach the credibility of this evidence.

The new scandal certainly cannot come at a worse time for the Republican Party, since the details will confirm for the public the idea that corruption reaches all the way to the top within the GOP. The behavior of Mehlman in question is pretty despicable on the face of it. Worse, some of it would appear to be illegal. And worst of all for everybody, Mehlman committed these acts while he was working as the White House political director.

If you take a look at Medicare, Medicaid, and elderly rights groups websites, the D in Medicare Part D stands for "Damned".

Below are the links to studies and other news.

Laura Rozen has a rather remarkable post about the genesis of the Iraq War, which has gotten virtually no attention. That's all the more surprising because she's discussing allegations made in Bob Woodward's new book, which people have been pawing over frantically for inside information about how and why the White House has failed in Iraq.

Many interesting statements, and mistatements, today from Tony Snow at the White House. One of his most revealing exchanges with reporters speaks volumes about how embarrassed Republicans are by their own corruption. And, ironically, it does this by saying nothing.

We're well into the fall semester at colleges and universities across the country. Here in the Northeast, leaves are starting to turn brilliant colors, as they do every year. As they did 40 years ago when young James Meredith was escorted into Ole Miss, under guard. The courage, the foresight, the faith, the struggle, the bitterness of that time! So many who paid so dearly for the steps we have taken away from that country in which legal apartheid was the law of the land and toward our highest ideals of equality and justice.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for going down to Oxford Town. I would never have had that courage.

A new Inspector General Report on the U.S. Education Department's administration of student-loan programs is out. As aid given based on needs has been transferred to "merit" scholarships whose purpose is to increase a college's rankings, student loans have become the only way many middle class and poor students can get a college education

Sadly, with this administration, it's the shame-old, shame-old.

Rather incredibly, during the last month the only news story on Watergate II (or 'Hookergate') came out of Australia. That dearth of news coverage ought to stop, if only because this huge scandal perfectly epitomizes the Republicans' rampant corruption and reckless disregard for national security.

You'll recall that Watergate II involves Republican members of Congress who regularly took part in poker parties and, reportedly, orgies with prostitutes in Washington area hotels. These were arranged and paid for by private contractors, especially Brent Wilkes, who benefited handsomely from government contracts, especially those awarded by Congressional earmarks. Among the main participants were Randy "Duke" Cunningham, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo (who became Executive Director of the CIA, and resigned in May after being implicated in the Cunningham bribery scandal), and (allegedly) Porter Goss, the head of the CIA who resigned abruptly and without explanation shortly after the stories of poker&prostitutes surfaced in May.

So how in the world did this scandal just disappear from American news coverage? Perhaps we can help to put Cunningham, Wilkes, et alii back in the news by linking them to Foley. The parallels between the scandals are obvious and unavoidable. The alleged orgies at the Watergate and Westin hotels in DC are said to have been purely Republican affairs which continued for years with the involvement and collusion of top GOP officials. Though apparently the parties were well known, nobody dared to blow the whistle.

More to the point, these sexual libertines were undermining in private the very things they made a public show of upholding--the security of the nation.

Last week, GAO issued a report of "highlights" from a forum on privatizing government. So what's the scoop?

That is a finding in a new Department of Education Inspector General Report - Special Allowance Payments to Nelnet for Loans Funded by Tax-Exempt Obligations.

We heard a lot about the Marsh Arabs in the early days of the Iraq War. As Human Rights Watch found, they were one of the groups that suffered under Sadam Hussein:

[S]ystematic bombardment of villages, widespread arbitrary arrests, torture, “disappearances,” summary executions, and forced displacement have reduced the Marsh Arabs from more than 250,000 to as few as 40,000.

Large-scale government drainage projects have virtually wiped out the Marsh Arab economy and, along with severe repression, forced the displacement of at least 100,000 of the Marsh Arabs inside Iraq. More than 40,000 others fled as refugees to Iran.

But now there is the UNEP Marshlands Project.

More than three years after our American troops invaded and occupied Iraq for the reported purpose of finding “weapons of mass destruction,” North Korea claims to have detonated its first nuclear weapon. The irony that the search of Iraq came up short on WMD and that N. Korea would now join the nuclear club without incident is obvious. Perhaps less obvious is the misleading term “WMD,” which many of us continue to take for granted. But how do you categorize a “weapon of mass destruction”?

crossposted from Planting Liberally with permission from Shai Sachs.

If you live in a major metropolitan area, chances are that there's a large transient population - students, young professionals, living-out-of-a-hotel consultants, etc. This population is a significant challenge to local political organizations: they're not likely to be interested in local politics, they're probably too busy getting settled to get involved in politics, and even if they do join your group, they're likely to leave town in the not-too-distant future.

Local political groups and affiliated organizations can turn this challenge into an opportunity by writing guides to their city from a liberal perspective. Such a guide will not only welcome newcomers to the city, but will have many tangible benefits for the groups who put it together.

Women in Iraq face unspeakable suffering, even more than Iraqi men, and in fact the deterioration in their lives was becoming pronounced within months of the U.S. invasion. Today the Observer publishes a devastating account of the daily peril women face. This is a portrait of the freedom that George Bush promised to bring the Iraqi people.

'Of course rape is going on,' says Aida Ussayaran, former deputy Human Rights Minister and now one of the women on the Council of Representatives. 'We blame the militias. But when we talk about the militias, many are members of the police. Any family now that has a good-looking young woman in it does not want to send her out to school or university, and does not send her out without a veil. This is the worst time ever in Iraqi women's lives. In the name of religion and sectarian conflict they are being kidnapped and killed and raped. And no one is mentioning it.'

Of course, we here at Sunday Science Fun Central come from a long line of IgNobility. So who better than we to give you a few IgNoble science links.

While there is a lot to be concerned about in connection with the environment on this planet, our home, earth, not all is bleak. Here are two good news stories - one domestic and one from Iraq. First the domestic one.

Anyone working in education today knows that the most widely publicized and used rankings of colleges and universities utterly fail students and fail in what they claim to do. They fail students because they pick measurements that are irrelevant to quality education and they fail in what they claim to do because their most powerful impact has become on forcing students to make choices because they will improve college rankings - not because they are sound for education.

And yet these rankings seem impervious. A new proposal is out to displace the reigning rankings with rankings that will help students and their families make wise choices and support education in this country.

More than ever, the UN desperately needs the leadership of a dynamic Secretary General. Instead, what it is likely to get when Kofi Annan retires is a virtual non-entity, Ban Ki-moon. Mr. Ban has been promoted by the Bush administration, John Bolton in particular, because he's non-threatening and appears to have no ideas.

US Ambassador John Bolton was wearing an uncharacteristic smile when he came to the microphone outside the Council chamber to give his spin on the almost certain confirmation of Ban. Some observers saw joy at the election of Bolton's favored candidate, others the smile of an assassin wiping his blade and contemplating his handiwork, scuppering other candidates with a discreet and anonymous veto.

That's what the infamous recess-appointment of John Bolton amounts to in the end--the neutering of the UN Secretary General for years to come.

Back in August, unions representing EPA scientists criticized the agency’s administration for failing to heed its advisory panel’s concerns about pesticide assessments. Last month, the EPA ignored the overwhelming majority of its Clean Air Science Advisory Committee and declined to reduce the average annual standard for the amount of soot we can breathe.

Earlier this week, Chemical & Engineering News reported that three members of the EPA advisory panel on pollution and toxic substances had resigned.

George Bush has never backed up his frequent assertion that al Qaida hopes the U.S. will withdraw from Iraq. In fact, intelligence agencies have long believed that al Qaeda leadership wanted Bush to invade one or more countries in the Middle East, expecting that the U.S. would become bogged down and ultimately defeated politically (if not militarily). Further, Ron Suskind has claimed in his One Percent Doctrine that CIA analysts concluded that bin Laden released his October 2004 audio tape in order to boost George Bush's re-election chances. The expert consensus, then, appears to be that bin Laden believes Bush's floudering Middle East policy advances the interests of al Qaida.

But the public has never before been privy to direct evidence that would prove the case. Now we have a document that does so, released by the Army itself.

Just heard commentary by former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich extolling the virtues of Wal-Mart's employee voter registration program.

Marketplace Morning Report aired the piece but has not yet updated their website with today's stories.

Here's some background on Wal-Mart's initiative from hillnews.com

Did anybody else hear this shout out to oligarchy?

UPDATE: Here's the link. I've copied the transcript in the comments.

The Rocky Mountain News had a somewhat new** take on the Colorado Governor race this morning.

Bottom line? When it comes to the environment, Ritter gets it. Beauprez does not.

Blogger jorndorff makes an important observation today based upon one of the emails of corrupt Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whose texts were released recently. In this message, dated March 18, 2002, Abramoff mentions in an off-hand manner "the upcoming war on Iraq". Here is Abramoff's email (from page 26 of this PDF):

From: Jack Abramoff
To: 'octagon1'
Monday, March 18, 2002 8:31 AM
Subject: RE: Sunday

I was sitting yesterday with Karl Rove, Bush's top advisor, at the NCAA basketball game, discussing Israel when this email came in. I showed it to him. It seems that the President was very sad to have to come out negatively regarding Israel, but that they needed to mollify the Arabs for the upcoming war on Iraq. That did not seem to work anyway. Bush seems to love Sharon and Israel, and thinks Arabfat, is nothing but a liar. I thought I'd pass that on.

Science certainly has its sensual and aesthetic sides. So for today, we offer links to sites that unlock the manifold beauty of science.