Esther Kaplan asks who speaks for American Jews:

…consider the day in February when John Kerry sat down in New York to discuss issues with a group of Jewish leaders hand-selected by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Hannah Rosenthal, executive director of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and one of the few liberals invited, said she had her hand in the air, ready to ask questions about civil rights, poverty and the erosion of the church/state divide, but she was avoided by the facilitators, and the meeting shaped up as a single-agenda affair. “The central issue, no matter how they came at it, was, ‘Are you going to be there for Israel in these difficult times?'” Rosenthal recalls. “It was, ‘We’re putting you on notice that this is our number-one concern.'” Kerry took his cue. During the meeting, he backed off from earlier statements that he’d send Jimmy Carter (seen by the right as pro-Palestinian) to the region to jump-start negotiations, and six weeks later, when George W. Bush, in an agreement with Ariel Sharon, accepted Jewish settlements as permanent and renounced Palestinian refugees’ right of return, Kerry immediately endorsed it…

My latest contribution to the Undernews Blog, more grinding the axe on the purging of felons from the political process (mostly drawn from earlier posts here) is up now.

Powell and Annan arrive in the Sudan:

Thousands of people swept like water across a sandy plain to meet the convoy of vehicles carrying Mr. Powell and his entourage to a camp of 40,000 displaced people in El Fasher, in north Darfur. They filled the air with applause and trills, although the presence of government minders prompted many camp dwellers to only whisper of their despair. Mr. Annan will begin his tour of Darfur on Thursday, but on Wednesday afternoon, as he met with top government officials in Khartoum, Sudanese security forces were opening fire on university students trying to deliver a petition to Mr. Annan denouncing the treatment of the people of Darfur. At least five students were injured, United Nations officials said. A top aide to Mr. Annan, Jan Egeland, under secretary general for humanitarian affairs, visited four student leaders after the shootings and raised the matter with Sudan’s foreign minister, Mostafa Osman Ismail, urging the government not to take further action against the students. Mr. Annan also raised the incident with Vice President Osman Ali Taha. “We were concerned that a protest on a political issue developed into a violent incident,” Mr. Egeland said.

Both Mr. Powell and Mr. Annan said they delivered stern warnings to the government, which sought to crush two rebel movements in Darfur in early 2003 by unleashing Arab militias on the local population of black Africans. More than a million people have been expelled from their homes since, and deaths are said to have run into the tens of thousands.

Deja vu all over again:

When Duke University president-elect Richard Brodhead starts his new job Thursday, he’ll find a gift — a desk clock with a placard that asks, “Have you thought about graduate and professional students today?” The gentle, tongue-in-cheek reminder from the school’s Graduate and Professional Student Council represents a hope that Brodhead will preside over better graduate student-administration relations than those at Yale University, which Brodhead is leaving after nearly 40 years as a student, professor and dean.

Paul Bass examines what’s changed at Yale – New Haven Hospital – and what hasn’t:

Lucretia Faulk remembers reading articles about Yale-New Haven Hospital’s vicious tactics against poor people who got sick and couldn’t pay their bills. Now that a stroke has left her blind, Faulk doesn’t read the papers anymore. But Faulk, who’s unemployed and uninsured, knows that the hospital will sometimes still sic lawyers on low-income patients rather than steer them to the hospital’s charitable funds. She knows this because it happened to her. Yale-New Haven has sued her for the $25,862.91 she couldn’t pay for her hospital stay after the stroke. She’s one of dozens of patients the hospital’s outside lawyers have sued this year, according to state judicial records.

Barbara Ehrenreich on the myth of the liberal elite:

Beyond that, the idea of a liberal elite nourishes the right’s perpetual delusion that it is a tiny band of patriots bravely battling an evil power structure. Note how richly the E-word embellishes the screeds of Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly and their co-ideologues, as in books subtitled “Rescuing American from the Media Elite,” “How Elites from Hollywood, Politics and the U.N. Are Subverting America,” and so on. Republican right-wingers may control the White House, both houses of Congress and a good chunk of the Supreme Court, but they still enjoy portraying themselves as Davids up against a cosmopolitan-swilling, corgi-owning Goliath.

Yes, there are some genuinely rich folks on the left — Barbra Streisand, Arianna Huffington, George Soros — and for all I know, some of them are secret consumers of French chardonnays and loathers of televised wrestling. But the left I encounter on my treks across the nation is heavy on hotel housekeepers, community college students, laid-off steelworkers and underpaid schoolteachers. Even many liberal celebrities — like Jesse Jackson and Gloria Steinem — hail from decidedly modest circumstances. David Cobb, the Green Party’s presidential candidate, is another proud product of poverty.It’s true that there are plenty of working-class people — though far from a majority — who will vote for Bush and the white-tie crowd that he has affectionately referred to as his “base.” But it would be redundant to speak of a “conservative elite” when the ranks of our corporate rulers are packed tight with the kind of Republicans who routinely avoid the humiliating discomforts of first class for travel by private jet.

What could be better than Thomas Friedman taking a vacation from the New York Times op-ed page? Having him replaced for a month by Barbara Ehrenreich. All it would take to make it complete would be to dump the rest of that sorry bunch and replace them with the likes of Naomi Klein, Michael Eric Dyson, and Greg Palast…And just for fun, now that William F. Buckley’s fully retired from the National Review hire him too. See that’d be a fun page to read…

The Supreme Court recognizes that a Clintonian anti-porn law threatens free speech protections:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected Congress’s latest effort to curb children’s access to sexually explicit material on the Internet. But at the same time it gave the Bush administration a second chance to defend the law as a trial on its constitutionality goes forward in Federal District Court in Philadelphia. The 5-to-4 majority kept in place an order that the district court issued in 1999, blocking enforcement of the Child Online Protection Act until its validity can be resolved. The six-year-old law, which imposes criminal penalties of as much as $50,000 a day on commercial Internet sites that make pornography available to those younger than 17, has never taken effect.

The decision came on the final day of the Supreme Court’s term. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority, said that the government must now show why the voluntary use of filters to screen out material unsuitable for children would not work as well as the law’s criminal penalties. Filters “impose selective restrictions on speech at the receiving end, not universal restrictions at the source,” Justice Kennedy wrote.

Wal-Mart Watch: Wal-Mart works to spin the class action lawsuit against it:

After a judge’s ruling, announced last week, gave class-action status to a federal sex-discrimination lawsuit against Wal-Mart Stores, the company’s management broadcast a two-part message to its one million employees over the television monitors that hang from store ceilings. First, employees were told that the ruling means “that there was no finding of guilt and it was all about the class, but that we even disagree with that and are going to appeal it,” said Jay Allen, a company spokesman. Then there was a second part: “When this is all over with, this company is going to be a better company for it.”

Indeed, lawsuits like this will make Wal-Mart a better employer for workers in spite of itself. But the only way to secure those gains will come from coupling legal and political pressure with grassroots organizing and collective bargaining.

Homelessness surges in the Bush economy:

The nationwide count most often cited comes from the Urban Institute, a research group in Washington that surveyed homeless assistance providers in 1996. It found that at least 1.4 million children and 2 million adults were homeless, but that number has surely grown as cities like Columbus, Ohio; Philadelphia; St. Louis; and New York have all reported surges at their homeless shelters for the last two or three years…”In places where good data is kept, it is clear that the numbers of homeless families are increasing,” said Phil Mangano, executive director of the White House Interagency Council on Homelessness, the federal agency that coordinates government programs related to the homeless.

…Homeless families are traditionally difficult to count, but in 2001 Congress ordered the Department of Housing and Urban Development to try. While the agency does not expect to have a nationwide count until 2007, for now it relies on data from 10 cities and states, including Minnesota, St. Louis, Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia. Among this group only one city, Spokane, Wash., had not experienced an increase in the number of families seeking shelter since 2000.Other cities not on HUD’s list are also reporting increased family homelessness, including Charlotte, N.C.; Bridgeport, Conn.; and Denver.

Harvard is found culpable in a conflict-of-interest scandal over privatization in Russia:

Harvard University may have to repay millions of dollars in federal funds after a judge ruled Monday that the university broke a contract when two employees advising the Russian government on privatization made investments violating conflict-of-interest rules. U.S. District Judge Douglas P. Woodlock’s ruling came more than three years after federal prosecutors in Boston filed the complex civil case against Harvard, employees Andrei Shleifer, Jonathan Hay and their spouses. The lawsuit arose out of work by the Harvard Institute for International Development’s “Russia Project” in the 1990s to help the country shape its post-Communist government into a modern, capitalist system. The U.S. Agency for International Development gave Harvard about $34 million for the project.

The unnamed culprit? Farallon Capital Management.

Annette Fuentes on two books:

As Homeland came out, Harvard’s Samuel P. Huntington arrived in bookstores with Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, the intellectual equivalent of the nativism expressed by Jim and Nancy. Huntington posits that Americans faced with a growing immigrant population need to protect Anglo-Protestantism as a shared culture. He writes that during economic downturns “white nativist movements are a possible and plausible response to these trends.” But if Huntington sees nativism as “plausible” and hence defensible because of his own identification with its basic tenets, Maharidge sees nativism and racism as fundamentally anti-democratic, the curdled byproducts of a failed economic system and the betrayal of working-class people whatever their color or creed.

Canada’s Liberal Party survives yesterday’s elections with a minority government:

Prime Minister Paul Martin and his Liberals have survived a near-death experience to win a minority government – Canada’s first in 25 years. The CBC decision desk predicted a Liberal minority victory at 10:23 p.m. EDT. At the time, the Liberals were elected or leading in about 125 ridings, compared to 83 for the Conservatives, 53 for the Bloc Québécois and 19 for the NDP. A Liberal minority government means nothing about the country’s immediate political future is certain except the prospect of more uncertainty. Once the Liberals get over the joy of being still in power, their first job will be to figure out how to work with a partner after years of flying solo. The answer depends how it chooses to proceed: in a coalition with either the NDP or the Bloc Québécois, or by forming alliances with enough MPs from those parties motion by motion to win the required support to pass legislation.