Apparently, the Bush administration hates us for our freedoms:

“What’s going on across the street?” one woman asked while waiting in line to deposit her paycheck last Friday. “Not sure,” said the man ahead of her in line. “Something to do with the government. The police cars and guards have been there since shortly after 9-11.” “Oh,” she said. “No matter.”

Actually, if the woman knew what was happening inside the nondescript office building at 3701 Fairfax Drive, she might think it really does matter because the building houses the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s Total Information Awareness Program, the “big brother” program Congress thought it killed. When the woman in line deposited her paycheck at the Bank of America branch, a record of that deposit showed up immediately in the computer databanks in the office across the street, just as financial, travel and other personal transactions of virtually every American do millions of time every minute.

Phoebe on Yale’s financial aid policy:

…it’s interesting, how more or less anyone who complains actually does end up with substantially more money (shows how they’re putting every last cent they can spare into that financial aid budget)…they’re fairly willing to placate individual complainers so long as they don’t have to–or perhaps to ensure that they don’t have to–broadly change the policy…i wonder what would be the response if everyone complained individually.

The key now is that everyone – whatever their financial status – begin complaining and agitating collectively. And because Yale’s policy is built on fostering a social expectation that class and financial aid not be discussed, resisting begins with fostering a community in which we can recognize common problems as such and reject Yale’s perverse rat race mentality about aid awards which reeks of the false meritocracy evident in too many of our University’s policies.

Zach reports back from the Home Health Aides’ Rally:

Emphatically, in a process Rivera rightly called “Democracy in Action,” the workers, in an open air vote of thousands and thousands of people, rejected the proposal and voted to stay out for the remainder of the three days. After this, which was kind of amazing to watch, as thousands of workers chanted “strike” in unison, we marched down 43rd streed and turned on to ninth avenue, filling half the street (and thus moviing very slowly) down to 26th street, where we turned east, marched over to fifth, and then turned north again to 32nd street, where we heard a few more speakers and a live band playing a customized 1199 version of “aint no stopping us now.”

What struck me, as i marched was the energy and feeling of power everyone had. The organizing that went in to this strike must have been pretty incredible, because these workers were out in force and “ready to rumble.” And the crowds on the sidewalks and the windows of office buildings and balconies of new-development condos in hell’s kitchen were behind the strike 100%.

Another challenge to the conventional (American) wisdom on privatization:

U.S. hospitals owned by investors with the aim of making money are less cost-efficient than nonprofits, Canadian researchers said. And experts who wrote a commentary on the study said converting all investor-owned hospitals to nonprofit status could have saved $6 billion in 2001. The report, published in Monday’s issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, adds fuel to the debate over whether health care should follow a business model. Dr. P.J. Devereaux and colleagues at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, reviewed medical studies on hospital care in the United States, covering 350,000 patients and hundreds of hospitals. Devereaux, a cardiologist, said he had to study U.S. hospitals because “the U.S. is really the only country which has any large degree of investor-owned, for-profit health facilities,” he said in a telephone interview.

Home Health Aides demand their strike continue:

Home care agencies scrambled to send nurses or other aides to care for the patients as the city’s largest health care union, 1199/S.E.I.U., called a three-day strike. The union is seeking raises of 43 percent, hoping to increase the wages of 23,000 aides to $10 an hour from the current $7. Union leaders asserted that the strike was highly effective, saying that 12,000 home care aides – nearly all black and Hispanic women – demonstrated yesterday at a Midtown rally in which Senator Charles E. Schumer and Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor and Democratic presidential candidate, took part. But the home care agencies said the walkout did little damage, saying that more than half of the 23,000 workers crossed the picket line to care for patients.

At the rally, Dennis Rivera, 1199’s president, announced to huge applause that he had just reached a settlement with Partners in Care, which had
agreed to pay its 4,000 aides $10 an hour. Mr. Rivera told the boisterous crowd that the union’s leaders were recommending that the strike planned for today and tomorrow be canceled and that the union’s leaders be given 30 days to negotiate with 10 other agencies. Mr. Rivera said the union could renew its strike against any agencies that did not reach a contract within 30 days. To Mr. Rivera’s visible surprise, the workers – shouting an emphatic “No!” in a voice vote – rejected his recommendation. “This is democracy in action,” Mr. Rivera said. At one point, mumbling to himself, he added, “I wasn’t expecting this.”

The Wall Street Journal offers more from the When-will-this-buck-ever-stop department:

Bush administration lawyers contended last year that the president wasn’t bound by laws prohibiting torture and that government agents who might torture prisoners at his direction couldn’t be prosecuted by the Justice Department. The advice was part of a classified report on interrogation methods prepared for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after commanders at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, complained in late 2002 that with conventional methods they weren’t getting enough information from prisoners. The report outlined U.S. laws and international treaties forbidding torture, and why those restrictions might be overcome by national-security considerations or legal technicalities. In a March 6, 2003, draft of the report reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, passages were deleted as was an attachment listing specific interrogation techniques and whether Mr. Rumsfeld himself or other officials must grant permission before they could be used. The complete draft document was classified “secret” by Mr. Rumsfeld and scheduled for declassification in 2013. . .

The president, despite domestic and international laws constraining the use of torture, has the authority as commander in chief to approve almost any physical or psychological actions during interrogation, up to and including torture, the report argued. Civilian or military personnel accused of torture or other war crimes have several potential defenses, including the “necessity” of using such methods to extract information to head off an attack, or “superior orders,” sometimes known as the Nuremberg defense: namely that the accused was acting pursuant to an order and, as the Nuremberg tribunal put it, no “moral choice was in fact possible.”…

You read that right. The Nuremberg defense.

New York City Home Health Aides begin their strike in the morning. As I mentioned before, you can contribute to their Strike Fund here. If you’re in New York, turn out to their rally at 10 AM with Senator Schumer and Governor Dean at 42nd St. between 8th and 9th Avenues.

The Times on the hearings beginning Tuesday which could lead to Governor Rowland’s impeachment:

Canceled checks, bank statements, bills, letters and deeds are among hundreds of documents that will be magnified on a giant screen for the scrutiny of the 10-member bipartisan committee – a high-tech parade of paper intended to shed light on the sometimes mysterious intersections between the governor’s personal and political lives that are at the center of the scandal. “The documents that we’ve collected tell a story,” Steven F. Reich, the lawyer for the House Select Committee of Inquiry, said last month.

Mr. Reich and a private investigator, James B. Mintz, will be among the principal narrators. In the months since the impeachment inquiry began they likely have learned more about Mr. Rowland’s affairs than anyone in Connecticut, except perhaps for the federal investigators who are examining his conduct.

Another reason you don’t hear much from the White House about Afghanistan these days:

The UN in Afghanistan says not a penny of the money the international community has pledged for elections due in September has been handed over. It says that if the funds do not come through soon, the vote is in danger of being further delayed. The polls were originally supposed to happen this month. The warning relates to money promised for the actual voting process – to buy items such as voting screens and ballot papers and hiring electoral staff.

Kevin Drum on Tony Blankley on George Soros:

Translation: he’s a Jew-hating Jew, he’s a greedy Jew, he’s a conniving and heartless Jew, he’s an atheistic Jew, and he’s a Jew who must have been (if you get my drift, wink wink) a Nazi collaborator. Anyone who’s not a child knows perfectly well what Blankley was saying here.

Conservatives routinely jump on every alleged piece of anti-Semitism out of France as proof of European moral decrepitude, and here at home they can get seriously bent out of shape by nothing more than liberals using Jewish names as examples of neocons (i.e., Kristol, Feith, Perle, Wolfowitz). But Blankley’s transparently racist imagery hasn’t caused much of a ripple. Eugene Volokh has an extremely mild rebuke, but that’s about it. Nada from Instapundit, Sullivan, The Corner, Den Beste, or LGF, despite the fact that anti-Semitism is part of their regular beat.

Oy: This site is apparently the 12th to come up on MSN if one searches for “busty latinos.” No comment on that one, other than that I’m sorry if the web surfer in question found this site somewhat lacking in busty latinos, and that perhaps he/she was looking, in fact, for busty latinas instead…Just a guess.

More from the “That buck seems not to be stopping anywhere at all” department:

Disparate inquiries into abuses of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan have so far left crucial questions of policy and operations unexamined, according to lawmakers from both parties and outside military experts, who say that the accountability of senior officers and Pentagon officials may remain unanswered as a result. No investigation completely independent of the Pentagon exists to determine what led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, and so far there has been no groundswell in Congress or elsewhere to create one.

But on Capitol Hill, even some Republicans have begun to question whether the Pentagon’s inquiries are too narrowly structured to establish the causes of the abuses, as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others have pledged to do, and then to determine if anyone in the chain of command was responsible for them. Some House Republicans, bucking their leaders who have said the focus on Abu Ghraib is distracting from the larger effort in Iraq, have joined Democrats in urging a more aggressive review of the investigations. In the Senate, members of both parties said there remained major aspects that fell outside the scope of any of the investigations that are under way — including the role of military lawyers in drafting policy on detainees and the involvement of civilian contractors in their interrogations.