At the Democratic Convention, the Daily Show with Jon Stewart proved to skeptics why it went from winning the Television Critics’ Association’s award for Best Comedy to winning this year for Outstanding News Programming. I mean, we had Jon Stewart on the Convention’s first night:

The theme is “The Kerry-Edwards Plan for America’s Future.” All that’s missing are Kerry, Edwards, and a plan for America’s future.

And responding to Hillary Clinton’s declaration that she was introducing “America’s last great Democratic President”:

Oh my god! How’d they bring back FDR? Here he comes! Oh wait…it’s Bill Clinton.

Nothing, however, could top his skewering Thursday night of the networks’ criticism of most every speaker for sticking to the script and hysterical attacks on Al Sharpton for diverging from it. The clip of Howard Fineman asserting that Sharpton will depress the Black vote was damning enough, but having Stewart pan cheering Black delegates in the crowd and suggest what Fineman was reading in their minds was doubly stinging. And then he caps it off with a clip of an MSNBC anchor telling Al Sharpton that he was watching the teleprompter stay still while the Reverend “did a riff on whatever you were doing a riff on.” As Stewart asked, “Weren’t you there for the speech?” Then he did some improvised skat of his own, suggesting that such was apparently all MSNBC could hear while Sharpton was condemning the disenfranchisement of Black voters.

The A.C.L.U finds itself once more at a crossroads between its commitment to reversing a climate of fear and reaction and its hopes to operate freely within it:

The group made the promise not to employ people it knew to be on similar terrorism lists so that it could continue participating in a program that allows federal employees to make charitable contributions through payroll deductions. That promise, several members of the A.C.L.U. board said, is at odds with the group’s core principles and calls to mind an episode in 1940, when the board passed a resolution purging its staff of people who supported communism. With that history in mind, A.C.L.U. officials said, they had made the commitment in name only and did not intend to consult the lists. “We oppose ‘no fly’ lists,” said Michael Meyers, a member of the group’s executive committee. “Now we have a ‘no hire’ list that we’ve signed onto. We’re in the midst of an organizational cultural crisis of enormous size.”

…Robert B. Remar, a member of the executive committee who said he supported Mr. Romero, said the group should take prompt action given new information about the government’s position that the certification requires diligent compliance. “We either ought to litigate the legality of that or give the money back,” he said. “I don’t think the A.C.L.U. should be in the business of checking names on these lists.” Stan Furman, another board member, agreed. “It smacks of blacklists,” he said. “We’ve seen that the government under Ashcroft has made numerous lists of ‘terrorist organizations’ that in my opinion aren’t really terrorist organizations.”

Amen.

Geoff Porter challenges the Bush administration gospel that the threat of pre-emption moved Libya:

In 1999, Libya extradited two men implicated in the Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, a decade earlier. The same year, it agreed to pay compensation for the victims of the bombing of a French airliner, UTA Flight 772, whose destruction over Niger was traced back to Libya. Discussions between the United States and Libya about its weapons of mass destruction programs also began that year. These discussions finally bore fruit last fall with Colonel Qaddafi’s decision to renounce these weapons. It is true that this announcement came after Saddam Hussein’s regime collapsed, but is a mistake to link these two events. Why? For one, history argues against it: Colonel Qaddafi did not respond to direct military strikes ordered by President Ronald Reagan in 1986, even when they cost the life of his adopted daughter. It would be misleading to suggest that this time around he was brought to heel by the mere specter of military action. Instead, Colonel Qaddafi’s decision to abandon his weapons programs was motivated by domestic concerns.

For 35 years Colonel Qaddafi has used oil to buy allegiance from Libyans. In exchange for their turning a blind eye to the lack of representative government and human rights abuses, Colonel Qaddafi is openhanded in distributing Libya’s oil proceeds, sometimes as direct gifts to influential people and tribal leaders, but also in the form of state-financed health care, huge urban development projects and universal free education. But two decades of American and United Nations sanctions diminished Libyan oil revenues. The country’s oil fields were declining, exploration was all but halted, and Libya was forbidden to import new oil extraction technology. At the same time, Libya’s population was booming. In 1982 there were slightly fewer than three million people in Libya. By 2002, there were more than five million. In some cities, the annual growth rate topped an astronomical (and problematic) 7 percent. The mixture of population growth and declining oil revenues endangered Colonel Qaddafi’s ability to hold on to power.

I recently highlighted SEIU’s endorsement of full equal marriage rights regardless of sexual orientation. SEIU President Andy Stern discusses how and why it came to pass:

Regardless of their religious and political beliefs, SEIU members recently held a frank and honest dialogue on the issue. It was emotional, impassioned and spirited, but I’m proud to report they concluded overwhelmingly that this attempt is nothing more than divisive wedge-issue politics that unfairly singles out a group of people for second-class citizenship. I’m also proud to announce that at our convention in San Francisco, delegates passed [a] resolution, making SEIU the first union in the nation to support marriage equality…While sexual preference may be a personal issue, SEIU members see the gay marriage debate as a union issue. It is. There are over 1,000 rights, responsibilities and protections that come along with civil marriage, like hospital visitation and inheritance rights, and many of which relate to benefits tied to the workplace, including health insurance and pensions. Domestic partnership benefits are not a suitable alternative. They do not allow a firefighter to share his pension with his lifelong companion. A nurse who is lucky enough to be able to cover her partner on her health insurance is taxed on the value of that health plan as additional income, as the government does not recognize their relationship.

SEIU members sent a strong message at our convention. SEIU isn’t about merely tolerating difference, we embrace and thrive on difference – and we stand up for social and economic justice for everyone. And we’ve gone on record once again in support of equality for every person in this country and standing up for what is right and just.

No pesticide left behind:

The Bush administration made it easier Thursday for the government to approve pesticides used by farmers and homeowners, saying it no longer would require the Environmental Protection Agency to first consult other federal agencies to determine whether a product could harm endangered species. The change, supported by growers and pesticide manufacturers, affects federal regulations for carrying out the Endangered Species Act, a law that protects about 1,200 threatened animals and plants. Environmentalists said the streamlined process would strip away protections for those species. The law has been successfully used by environmental groups in a recent lawsuit seeking to mitigate the effects of pesticides on salmon in the Pacific Northwest. A federal judge found that the EPA had failed to abide by a requirement that it consult with federal wildlife agencies over the potential harm from pesticides.

A hearty (if belated) welcome to radical scientist Robin Herlands and her blog to the ever-expanding circle of social-contract-supporting-New-Haven-bloggers. Robin’s recently returned from the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions’ conference in New York:

I kinda wanted to get a CGEU button just so I could make up false realities for the acronym. Crazy Geriatric Elitists Unite or Caged Gorrilla Emancipation Underground…The conference was really great- two days in NYC with 120 other liberal, young, enthusiastic and dynamic intellectuals struggling to find a way to take back the academy from corporate america’s reigns. Speakers from our international unions encouraged us to focus all our energy on getting Bush out of office in november (amen!) and to work together. organize together. STRIKE together. Every campus’s fight is a the same fight, and we need each other…I won’t go into details now, but Hallelujah, radical scientists rock.

Better you than me. I mean, I’m a radical, but I could never be a scientist…

In a shameful rebuke of New York’s workers and of those Democrats who fancied him a moderate, New York Governor George Pataki has vetoed the state legislature’s minimum wage legislation. Demand here that the legislature stand its ground.

Profiling made easy:

The Electronic Privacy Information Center has obtained documents revealing that the Census Bureau provided the Department of Homeland Security statistical data on people who identified themselves on the 2000 census as being of Arab ancestry. The special tabulations were prepared specifically for the law enforcement agency. There is no indication that the Department of Homeland Security requested similar information about any other ethnic groups. One tabulation shows cities with 1,000 or more people who indicated they are of Arab ancestry. For each city, the tabulation provides total population, population of Arab ancestry, and percent of the total population that is of Arab ancestry. A second tabulation, more than a thousand pages in length, shows the number of census responses indicating Arab ancestry in certain zip codes throughout the United States. The responses are subdivided into Egyptian, Iraqi, Jordanian, Lebanese, Moroccan, Palestinian, Syrian, Arab/Arabic, and Other Arab.

The heavily redacted documents show that in April 2004, a Census Bureau analyst e-mailed a Department of Homeland Security official and said, “You got a file of Arab ancestry information by ZIP Code Tabulation Area from me last December (2003). My superiors are now asking questions about the usage of that data, given the sensitivity of different data requests we have received about the Arab population.”

Bush told a crowd today that “results matter.” Like these:

The overall income Americans reported to the government shrank for two consecutive years after the Internet stock market bubble burst in 2000, the first time that has effectively happened since the modern tax system was introduced during World War II, newly disclosed information from the Internal Revenue Service shows. The total adjusted gross income on tax returns fell 5.1 percent, to just over $6 trillion in 2002, the most recent year for which data is available, from $6.35 trillion in 2000. Because of population growth, average incomes declined even more, by 5.7 percent. Adjusted for inflation, the income of all Americans fell 9.2 percent from 2000 to 2002, according to the new I.R.S. data. While the recession that hit the economy in 2001 in the wake of the market plunge was considered relatively mild, the new information shows that its effect on Americans’ incomes, particularly those at the upper end of the spectrum, was much more severe. Earlier government economic statistics provided general evidence that incomes suffered in the first years of the decade, but the full impact of the blow and what groups it fell hardest on were not known until the I.R.S. made available on its Web site the detailed information from tax returns. The unprecedented back-to-back declines in reported incomes was caused primarily by the combination of the big fall in the stock market and the erosion of jobs and wages in well-paying industries in the early years of the decade.

In the past, overall personal income rose from one year to the next with relentless monotony, the growth rate changing in response to fluctuations in economic activity but almost never falling. But now, with many more ordinary employees joining high-level executives in having part of their compensation dependent on stock options and bonus plans, a volatile and relatively unpredictable new element has been introduced to the incomes of millions of workers. “Risks used to be confined largely to executives and business owners with large incomes,” said Edward N. Wolff, an economist at New York University who studies wealth and income. “But now for many people with more modest incomes their earnings are more volatile,” Mr. Wolff added, leaving them more vulnerable to losing pay they count on to meet regular expenses like mortgage payments, car loans and day-to-day living costs.

Working Americans: Make no mistake about how the Bush Campaign views you. With utter contempt:

A campaign worker for President Bush said on Thursday American workers unhappy with low-quality jobs should find new ones — or pop a Prozac to make themselves feel better. “Why don’t they get new jobs if they’re unhappy — or go on Prozac?” said Susan Sheybani, an assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry Holt. The comment was apparently directed to a colleague who was transferring a phone call from a reporter asking about job quality, and who overheard the remark. When told the Prozac comment had been overheard, Sheybani said: “Oh, I was just kidding.”

I don’t get it. I don’t think many voters will either.