The honorable Matt Jerzyk has a post to this effect over at RIFuture, as does Sir Ian McKellen Donnis at N4N, but I feel the need to reiterate: what’s up with the AG? While 42 other attorneys general signed on to support the Free Flow of Information Act, which would create a qualified federal shield law for reporters, Patrick Lynch did not. Lynch, who on June 19 was elected president of the National Association of Attorneys General, does justice (no pun intended) to that organization’s alias: the National Association of Aspiring Governors.

I think a lot of Rhode Islanders take for granted an important lil’ Rhody anomaly: most states have district attorneys and attorneys general, these being two distinct positions and offices. We’re small enough that the two positions are lumped into one office. Our attorneys general, therefore, spend the majority of their time and energy prosecuting criminals and upholding severe criminal justice policies rather than representing the larger interests of all our citizens.

In March, I was privileged to attend the 11th Annual Liman Public Interest Colloquium at the Yale Law School. In keeping with the topic of the conference—”Liman at the Local Level: Public Interest Advocacy and American Federalism”—we had the opportunity to hear from Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, Ohio Solicitor General William Marshall, San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera, and James Tierney, Director of the National State Attorneys General Program. These four fellows have used their positions as state and city attorneys to compensate for the failings, negligence, and misguided decisions of the federal government and judiciary.

(more…)

(…*To Inspire You To Hide Under Your Bed Until Jan. 21, 2009)

 This must-read report just in from the New Yorker’s “This Would Be Funny If It Wasn’t So Fucking Scary” Department: “Preparing the Battlefield: The Bush administration steps up its secret moves against Iran” by the ever-vigilant Seymour Hersh.

 Hersch writes:

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership.

This may sound like generically scary Bush warmongering, but it’s actually so much more. (more…)

Remember Y6B, the year when the global population hit 6 billion? Wasn’t that, like, a month ago?

Turns out it was actually 9 years ago, in 1999. So, according to the J-Curve, we’re about due for another billion.

The world’s population will reach 7 billion in 2012, even as the global community struggles to satisfy its appetite for natural resources, according to a new government projection. There are 6.7 billion people in the world today.

The world’s population surpassed 6 billion in 1999, meaning it will take only 13 years to add a billion people.

By comparison, the number of people didn’t reach 1 billion until 1800, said Carl Haub, a demographer at the Population Reference Bureau. It didn’t reach 2 billion until 130 years later.

Meanwhile, some oversexed Massachusetts 15 year olds have entered a “pregnancy or bust” pact, which is totally not helping. (more…)

Who doesn’t remember faking a sick day from school? Somehow, I think my Mom always knew, but she let me stay home anyway.

Now, though, if your kid is faking sick, you can give him/her a dose of Obecalp (get it?) and push ‘em out the door to school. Obecalp is a chery-flavored miracle pill that is “not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease or illness.” Jennifer Buettner, the “Mommy” who invented Obecalp, told the Times that the pill “is designed to have the texture and taste of actual medicine so it will trick kids into thinking that they’re taking something. Then their brain takes over, and they say, ‘Oh, I feel better.’ ”

The use of placebos has a long and decorated history in medicine. Still, some experts question whether using a placebo on children is appropriate. You know, because deliberately deceiving children is not always the best move. “I don’t like the idea of parents lying to their kids,” said Dr. Steven Joffe, a pediatrician and bioethicist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. “It makes me squeamish.”

No word yet on whether they are working on a pill that cures the inevitable rift that might develop between mendacious parents and their hoodwinked children.

from the Times .

By the first night of Passover this year, Providence supermarkets had already run out of Matzo. To those of us planning on observing the holiday’s mandated eight-day abandonment of chametz, leavened breads and wheat/yeast-filled products, this presented quite the dilemma. [Oy vey!] Ultimately, Ari and I found a secret stash of Matzo at the Shaws in Cranston but, still, the Providence Matzo shortage seemed pretty bizarre. What’s up? It’s not that there’s been an influx of Jews to Providence, or a rapid increase in the number of Jews who observe Passover, says Jennifer Steinhauer of the New York Times; the problem is a national Matzo shortage.

Steinhauer explains:

From coast to coast, a shortfall of the unleavened flat cracker bread eaten by Jews during the eight days of Passover has sent shoppers scurrying from store to store in search of it. On Monday, Allison Mnookin circled the aisles of her local Whole Foods store in San Mateo, Calif., three times. There was no matzo to be found. […]

(more…)

Tonight from 6:30 to 8:30 don’t miss the opening of “Beyond the Birds and the Bees” - a public exhibit revealing the history of sex education in America over the last 100 years produced by the Public Humanities grad students at Brown. By looking at the military, schools and the ways that parents have explained the whole mess of intercourse perhaps we can better understand the state of our youth today. I wonder if there will be anything on rainbow parties … John Nicholas Brown Center, 357 Benefit St.

No, this has nothing to do with the Israel lobby or usury or Wall Street or 47th Street or campaign donations. This, my friends, is about poop.

The Washington Post reports:

JERUSALEM (AP) — Something didn’t smell quite right with a pile of cash discovered Thursday at a sewage purification plant in northern Israel. Shocked workers at the Tiberias plant found about 7,000 shekels ($2,000) of the dirty money, all in 200 shekel bills among the smelly sewage. Israeli TV showed the bills sticking out of sewage and stuck in pipes. The bills were cut in half.

(more…)

Obama’s speech yesterday addressing race and the manufactured Jeremiah Wright controversy was brilliant and moving. Whether you agree with that assessment or see him as a crafty politician giving another pretty speech, it is notable for the fact that he actually dared to speak to the voters about a difficult issue as if they were mature adults capable of nuanced understanding and rational discussion.

It is unfortunate that we have to praise him for what should be the standard in American political discourse, but the fact remains that such forthright maturity is decidedly not the standard. All that remains to be seen is whether the voters (and pundits, and media, and his political opponents) actually are mature adults capable of nuanced understanding and rational discussion.

Don’t let this happen to you.

Justice League: New Frontier, the cartoon adaption of Darwyn Cooke’s instant classic about the dawn of the Silver Age of DC Comics, came out on DVD last week. When I was watching it, I was somewhat disappointed. My friends who hadn’t read the miniseries thought it was sweet, but I guess the actual comics ruined me. The movie didn’t capture those iconic moments like Hal Jordan kissing Carol Ferris before he takes off to fight the Center and J’onn J’onnz going apeshit and transforming into the Martian Manhunter we know and love when King Faraday died. That being said, I want to talk about something a little more substantive than fanboy concerns.

I want to talk about the political overtones of the story. That period in the late ’50s was an exciting (and scary) time to be alive for far greater reasons than the dawn of the Silver Age of comics. Americans were suffering silently under conformity, lynchings raged across the South, McCarthyism destroyed people’s lives, and we all feared that nuclear annihilation was around the bend.  But the Global South was on fire with social revolution — A lot of folks believed a real change was a-coming. Among them was Martin Luther King, Jr. (after the jump): (more…)

This year the Ides of March falls on a Saturday. Hooray, a party just when you need one, and you don’t have to listen to some weepy Irish guy singing ‘Danny Boy’. But how do you make a toga? Add this to the list of things (Latin!) they didn’t teach you in high school — too busy with workshops on conflict resolution. As it happens, the Romans had a way with conflict resolution even if it was a bit stabby, so let’s celebrate that.

First: how much fabric to buy? (Bed sheets are for freshman.) Searching for YouTube help on this topic, one can find a woman with a British accent (the same lady who tries to sell me bars of gold I think). She seems to have a pattern designed by the Holy Sisters of the Immaculate Conception and ends up swathing herself in 6 yards of cloth, around and around. Her apparent goal is to join the Vestals and hang around in the kitchen talking about how you can-so have fun without drinking. But in the most useful video, the guy still needs 6 yards of cloth, if for somewhat different reasons. Togaboy is quite helpful, and you may only need 4 or 5 yards of cloth. For inspiration watch the amazing HBO series ‘Rome’. How-to video after the jump. (more…)

On my way to work this morning I noticed many campaign banners hanging on highway overpasses, but none was more striking than the one proudly displayed over 95S in the the North End of Providence. “Vote Black Power–It’s Time,” read the message on what, ironically, appeared to be a white sheet. At first I thought, well, there’s a strong statement. On momentary reflection, however, I began to think that in this primary season’s atmosphere of skewed racial politics, it was probably some shady Hillary operative, or at least some Hillary supporter gone way off the reservation, who put this up in order to scare white voters. I grew up in North Providence–not known as a bastion of racial enlightenment–and in my head I could hear many an NP voter seeing that and saying, “See, now why does he have to make it a black thing? That’s why I’m nervous about voting for him.” Brash display of black solidarity, or more passive-aggressive Clintonian chicanery? Sadly, we may never know for sure.

Projo Sez:

A Warwick man who impersonated a federal agent and falsely claimed that he could link a gas station owner to Islamic terrorists was sentenced Friday to serve eight months in prison followed by two months in home confinement.

While it’s good that justice is being served, this brazen attempt at extorting money out of a middle-eastern gas station owner seems pretty messed up, and the sentence, given the years we dole out for drug-related crimes, seems kind of light. I guess it’s because he plead out: (more…)

Are you planning a children’s party or some other event in which you need a magician? Consider hiring President Bush’s newly appointed Attorney General, Michael Mukasey. He is a master of sleight-of-hand tricks. Under fire because of his agency’s support of torture, Mukasey has launched a national campaign to change the subject.

Maybe you’ve seen his handiwork in your local newspaper: “The U.S. Sentencing Commission is letting violent criminals out of prison!” “20,000 crack dealers about to be released into your neighborhood!!” “And they’re all black!!!” “Crack!” “Black Men!!” “Scared yet, America?”

(more…)

I know Quizno’s legal department probably has a lot on their hands already, but I think I have no choice but to sue. Popping into their new Dorrance street location I noticed their new flatbread “sammies” being advertised in the window. I don’t want to be a jerk about this, but I invented the word “sammie” to describe a sandwich. To add insult to injury, when I brought this up with the employees there, and told them they owed me money, they laughed in my face. This means war.

I’ll be joined in my suit by rock band The Sammies, R-and-B crooner Sammie, featured above, elderly Samoyed group Silver Sammies, and my college room-mates, who also coined the word sammie as applied to sandwiches. Anyone else?

Quizno’s: You have been warned. Cut chex and get it over with.

TexasMonthly Editor Evan Smith has a beef with Rhode Island. He claims:

Some of you may be aware of a two-plus-year-old dust-up between TEXAS MONTHLY and Boston Magazine over a purloined cover concept. In February 2005, we put Tom Craddick on the cover of our “Power” issue, only to discover, a few months later, that our neighbors to the far northeast did a clumsy job of ripping off our design. (The cover subject for their “Power” issue was Mitt Romney. Hey, how’d that work out for you?) Now comes this: Rhode Island Monthly’s February 2008 issue on steak. Look familiar? The art director of that fine publication has a future. Elsewhere in New England.