Rob, at Say Anything blog, on the FedEx discrimination suit

This story had not surfaced in my usual haunts, but Rob, writing at the Say Anything blog, tells about the class action suit against FedEx. Rob says that FedEx is being sued for not lowering their standards:

FedEx is getting sued for allegedly favoring non-minority employees for promotions and raises.

SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) — A federal judge has certified a class action lawsuit alleging that FedEx Corp. discriminated against minority workers.

The suit was filed in 2003 by eight current and former employees. It seeks millions of dollars in damages and an end to the company’s alleged discriminatory practices.

The class action case, certified Wednesday, includes an estimated 10,000 current and former hourly workers and about 1,000 low-level management employees in Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Wyoming and parts of Texas.

When I did consulting for FedEx in Memphis, I was impressed by what an equal-opportunity company it was. Memphis is largely minority (black) and FedEx had been a way for them to improve their standard of living, and move into better position by growth in the company.

Michael Heraghty on Gadgets

We have been looking at start.com and Gadgets from Microsoft, so I was interested to see them mentioned by Michael Heraghty.

Michael writes:

I’ve seen the most interesting development to occur in web development so far this year and it’s from … gasp! … Microsoft.

Before you choke on your sushi, check it out: Microsoft “Gadgets” on Start.com lets you slide rectangular containers of text (widgets, I’m told) around the screen, and snap them into new positions.

The site is a portal, a little like Google News or MyYahoo, but with the innovative interface as described — which does not require Flash or any other plug-in. (It works in Firefox too.)

The technology Microsoft Gadgets employs is similar to AJAX — the combination of JavaScript and dynamic server calls used by Google in many cool applications of late (Gmail, Google Maps, etc.). Apparently the new Windows will allow you to drag Gadgets from web pages and drop them onto your desktop, unless I’ve misunderstood the information on the Gadgets weblog.

The downside is that the web pages generated using Gadgets are neither accessible, standards-compliant nor search-engine friendly. But they look cool and the design is clean … so Gadgets could have potential.

Charles Johnson writes about the pirates who raided Britain

Students of 17th Century naval history know about this already, but Charles Johnson points out a post about a book called "White Gold", which tells the story of the Salley pirates and their ilk. They were so brazen and strong that they raided Britain to take slaves:

Melanie Phillips’s Diary: Britain’s 200-year jihad.

On my travels for the past few days, I have been reading a book which tells the story of a quite astonishing part of British history of which I was previously unaware. In ‘White Gold’, Giles Milton records the appalling details — gleaned,it appears, from a wealth of historical documents including diaries and letters — of a seaborne Islamic jihad against Britain which lasted for no less than two centuries.

From the early seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, thousands of British men women and children were kidnapped by Arab corsairs and sold into slavery in Morocco where they were kept in conditions of unspeakable barbarism. The astounding thing is that these British victims were not merely seized at sea where they ran the gauntlet of such pirates in places such as the Straits of Gibraltar. They were actually abducted from Britain itself.

This is the sort of history that is so nasty, that contemporary "history" ignores it, as they don't want to offend anyone.

Duane Patterson, at Radio Blogger, tells about how Ray Nagin moved to Dallas

Duane Patterson, blogging at Radio Blogger, tells about Ray Nagin, mayor of New Orleans, and how he moved his family to Dallas. Duane is Hugh Hewitt's producer for his syndicated radio show.

If I hadn't seen and heard this with my own eyes and ears, I would have thought it was too good to be true. Just about five minutes ago on Wolf-TV, Ray Nagin, the beleaguered Mayor of New Orleans, found himself the subject of an impromptu press conference. After the Congressional testimony today by former FEMA head Michael Brown, in which Nagin's performance during the Katrina crisis was largely criticized, the press wanted to get Nagin's reaction.

Now before I let you in on the audio I heard, let's go back to September 13th, on Fox News Channel's Special Report with Brit Hume. Brit reported that it had been learned that Mayor Nagin, a mere week after the storm hit, had moved his family to Dallas, enrolled his daughter in school there, and had already purchased a house in Dallas. He was still going to be the Mayor of New Orleans, but have his primary residence in Dallas. Here's a link to the report from the 13th. We ridiculed that for several days, but it has fallen from the public consciousness. Until today, that is.

Kevin Aylward, at Wizbang, unmasks the fake Republican

There is a guy who periodically pretends to be a Republican at protests. Kevin Aylward, writing at Wizbang, unmasks him.

Jeb Eddy joins thousands of demonstrators to protest the war in Iraq on Saturday. Associated Press photo by Noah Berger The only problem is that he's a complete fraud.

Crockspot at Conservative Underground was the one who first used a little Google-fu to debunk this guy's con job. The San Francisco Chronicle has fallen for this guy's act on more than one occasion, which should hardly come as a suprise.

Shock & Blog has more links to the Google evidence against Eddy.

Ed Morrissey says the GunScam is the next Canadian flap

Ed Morrissey, writing at Captain's Quarters, thinks that what he calls GunScam (the registration program mess) will be a problem for the Liberal government in Canada. The Liberals seem to be adept at buying votes and capturing the tenor of the Canadian people, but they seem to be inept at government and administration.

The Winnipeg Sun reports that the Conservatives in Canada await more than just one report next winter that could alter the trajectory of Canadian politics. While Judge Gomery writes his report on the Sponsorship Programme, the auditor general has quietly performed her investigation into the controversial gun registry that the Liberal Party imposed on its citizens, and the results could produce some uncomfortable moments of its own for the Grits and the Martin government:

Critics of the gun registry are eagerly awaiting Auditor General Sheila Fraser's "Canadian Firearms Program" audit which is scheduled to be released in February -- if we're not in the midst of a federal election campaign.

Fraser isn't doing interviews about the audit, which has been underway for months.

The last time her office attempted to look into gun registry spending was 2002 and the results were explosive. In fact, her team was forced to abandon its attempts to follow the spending on the gun registry because of the absence of records.

"The information on cost recovery provided to the government changed as the program developed," Fraser wrote at the time.

Marc Cooper on the anti-war movement

Marc Cooper is sympathetic to being against the Iraq war. He writes about the current state of the anti-war movement, and its issues. Marc believes that the only way for an anti-Iraq war movement to succeed is to gain the support of a majority of the Democratic party:

Thanks to C-SPAN, I watched at least some of this weekend’s anti-war demonstrations with a great measure of ambivalence and even wonderment. To be honest, I watched for about 20 minutes until I began to overdose on the shrill rhetoric from a bunch of shouting nobodies on the rostrum. Like it or not, they were the voice given to the sea of people who actually turned out.

Perhaps as many as 200,000 people or more participated in rallies from coast-to-coast with the largest gathering taking place in Washington.

No question that there is a growing frustration and even dread about where the war in Iraq is leading – if anywhere. Or if it has been worth the bloodshed until now. And the demonstrations were a good opportunity to manifest that mounting discomfort.

That said, there are only two ways the anti-war movement can achieve its goals. Either through what the Europeans calls “extra-parliamentary” methods i.e. the disruption of business-as-usual and rendering the country ungovernable. Or through a political strategy by which there is a strategic shift in The Establishment.

The problem is that the current movement is the current anti-war movement is inept and ineffective:

This is a failure not only of the Democrats themselves, but also of the clearer-thinking folks inside the peace movement who ought to know better. I have said it before, so why not again? These more moderate voices need to resist the political blackmail of true-believers of the ANSWER variety and simply push them out of the leadership of the movement. At least they must if they want that movement to be something beyond an impotent theater of self-expression.

I can anticipate some of the reaction to this notion. “Oh, Marc,” I will be told, “Who cares what the idiots on the stage said? You don’t really think that the scores of thousands who came to Washington actually listened to the speeches from the stage, do you?"

My answer: Of course not. There aren’t five hundred people in America, let alone a hundred thousand, who could sit or stand through more than five minutes of that drivel.

But wouldn’t it be nice if there were antiwar speakers on that platform – just two or three instead of 45 or 50—whose words could inspire not only the protestors, but also move other millions into some deeper sort of reflection and action?

Wasn’t that the case in the great 1963 civil rights march on Washington? Have you ever in your life met a single person stupid enough to say that the only important thing that day 42 years ago was merely showing up in D.C. because it really didn’t matter what Martin Luther King actually said? That no one was really listening?

Why do we accept such a miserably lower standard for the anti-war movement?

TangoMan, at Gene Expression, has a good piece about President Clinton and our present goverment financing

TangoMan has a piece at Gene Expression that is rather provocatively titled "Semantics - The Threshold Necessary To Be Called A Liar".

For the last few days I've been involved in an ongoing debate with Steve Verdon and one of his readers, Victor, on whether President Clinton is a bald-faced liar for making this statement:

On the US budget, Clinton warned that the federal deficit may be coming untenable, driven by foreign wars, the post-hurricane recovery programme and tax cuts that benefitted just the richest one percent of the US population, himself included. "What Americans need to understand is that ... every single day of the year, our government goes into the market and borrows money from other countries to finance Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, and our tax cuts," he said. "We have never done this before. Never in the history of our republic have we ever financed a conflict, military conflict, by borrowing money from somewhere else."--emphasis added Clinton added: "We depend on Japan, China, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and Korea primarily to basically loan us money every day of the year to cover my tax cut and these conflicts and Katrina. I don't think it makes any sense."

After a few rounds of back and forth it looks like we've adopted two differing interpretations of what "financed" means. Steve and Victor argue from the default position that there have always been significant foreign debt holders of US Securities, and their default hypothesis must be refuted entirely by accounting for 100% of the debt sourcing. To account for less than 100% automatically implies foreign contribution, and even an insignificant foreign contribution, falsifies President Clinton's statement. I'm interpreting "financed" to mean the costs of the entire endeavor, not simply a minor part of the endeavor. This seems to be the more common usage, such as "I financed my house with a $600,000 mortgage from the bank" being a true statement even though I received a $5000 loan from my father-in-law in order to help with the downpayment.

Later in his piece, TangoMan has a table of figures about percent GDP, tax rates, and related information for wars from WWII on that I found interesting reading.

Power glitch (UPDATED)

We are located on the southeast side of Dallas. We just experienced a major power glitch that reset everything. One computer rebooted and the other shut down. The alarm clock was reset and my wife's CD player was started, playing one of her meditation pieces. The wind is picking up, and we may yet see some Rita action. Hopefully, it won't be too bad.

We had another power glitch and the computer on which I am blogging came up only with great difficulty. The problem seems to be the high winds we are seeing. Within five miles, many of the electrical wires on on poles, near trees.

Duane Patterson has the transcript of Hugh Hewitt's conversation with the Beltway Boys

Duane Patterson, at Radio Blogger, has the transcript of Hugh Hewitt's conversation with Fred Barnes and Mort Kondrake (the Beltway Boys on Fox News Channel). The Beltway Boys have been pre-empted for the wall-to-wall Rita coverage. There is a good bit of coverage of the flap over the illegal disclosure of the Maryland Lt-Governor's credit report. This was engineered during Senator Schumer's watch:

All right. Now I want to play for you two a cut of Chuck Schumer talking at the discussing of his vote yesterday, and then come back to Chuckaquiddick, which is sweeping through the DCSS. Here's Chuck Schumer:

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HH: Now Fred Barnes, his concern for privacy, evidently, did not extend to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, where two staffers have been furloughed, though with pay, for illegally using the social security number of Lt. Gov. of Maryland Michael Steele, to fish his records. How big of a problem is this for Schumer and the Democrats?

FB: Well, it should be a big problem, and we don't know the extent of it yet, whether there were other Republican Senate candidates whose credit they looked into, and we'll see. Naturally, the excuse is always well, it was a couple of over-anxious, or over-eager young people on the staff that did it. That usually...I don't know all the facts in this case, because it just started to be investigated. It was just exposed. That usually turns out to be wrong. Higher-ups know.

HH: You know, Morton Kondracke, it strikes me as odd that the director of research at the DCSS is considered young, and this would be the first time in her life she'd ever tried this tactic. Doesn't that seem odd to you?

MK: You know, I know even less about the facts of this. How old is she?

HH: 28 or 29.

MK: Well, that's not too young.

HH: Yeah, she previously worked for John Edwards. She previously worked for David Brock at Media Matters, which is a Soros op-fit. She previously worked...she's from Wesleyan, and she's worked on Sam...yeah. And so, the idea that the director of research at the DCSS is a young staffer, that just doesn't seem to me to be the ordinary way you would refer to the director of research.

MK: Yeah, unless you're trying to make them too young to be responsible.