Confounding all expectations for a low-income, low-education population, Latinos have far lower death rates than non-Latino whites in each of those top categories.

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Did Deborah Solomon of The New York Times break the paper’s strict code of ethics? In interviews with Ira Glass and Amy Dickinson, Matt Elzweig finds a troubling pattern.

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Saturday evening’s edition of Kaminari Taiko’s Festival at Miller Theatre, Houston, was a heck of a show with pretty good attendance in spite of vaguely threatening weather.

– More pictures here.

Atlanta, GA installed a green roof on its City Hall.

Covering city buildings in vegetation – creating “green roofs” and walls – could substantially save energy by reducing the need for air conditioning on hot days, say researchers.

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Sept. 27 (Bloomberg) — Morgan Stanley, the second-largest securities firm, will pay $12.5 million to settle regulatory claims it wrongly withheld e-mails in arbitration cases by saying they were lost in the Sept. 11 attacks, the company’s third sanction since 2002 for mishandling the records.

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“Always we shall have the heretic here at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible — and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own accord. That is the world that we are preparing, Winston.” –George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

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During the September 28 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, in response to Media Matters for America’s documentation of his recent description of service members who advocate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq as “phony soldiers,” Rush Limbaugh claimed that he had not been talking “about the anti-war movement generally,” but rather “about one soldier … Jesse MacBeth.” Limbaugh further asserted that “Media Matters had the transcript, but they selectively choose what they want to make their point.”

To support this claim, Limbaugh purported to air the “entire” segment in question from the September 26 broadcast of his show. In fact, the clip he then aired had been edited. Excised from the clip was a full 1 minute and 35 seconds of the 1 minute and 50 second discussion that occurred between Limbaugh’s original “phony soldiers” comment and his reference to MacBeth, the full audio of which can be heard here .

Go to MediaMatters original.

The superb portrait (visual — great photographs — and literary) of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens in today’s New York Times Magazine contains this fascinating definition of the principles of judicial liberalism on its last page.

Photograph by Platon for The New York Times

Go to original by Jeffrey Rosen

I recently asked to identify a progressive vision for the next liberal justice that could mobilize Democratic voters as well as provide an effective counterweight to the four movement conservatives on the Roberts Court. They answered that the next truly liberal justice would have at least four qualities.

First, in an age when the conservative justices are determined to cut off access to the courts in cases from civil rights to terrorism, the next liberal justice would interpret the Constitution to provide “access to the courts to enforce the rule of law” and would “understand that even the most powerful president is not a king.”

Second, the justice would “interpret the Constitution in light of the entire history of the nation, and not just in light of the Constitution’s drafting history.”

Third, the justice would “interpret the Constitution to create conditions of equal liberty to participate in the life of the nation” — in areas ranging from abortion and sex equality to affirmative action and campaign finance reform.

Finally, instead of reading the Constitution in a cramped, legalistic fashion, the justice would “interpret the Constitution to create a partnership between courts and the popular branches,” encouraging Congress and the American people to debate and define constitutional values.

Youths are being maligned to draw attention from the reality that it’s actually middle-aged adults — the parents — whose behavior has worsened.
Read original by Mike Males, the New York Times

Our most reliable measures show Americans ages 35 to 54 are suffering ballooning crises:

• 18,249 deaths from overdoses of illicit drugs in 2004, up 550 percent per capita since 1975, according to data from the National Center for Health Statistics.

• 46,925 fatal accidents and suicides in 2004, leaving today’s middle-agers 30 percent more at risk for such deaths than people aged 15 to 19, according to the national center.

• More than four million arrests in 2005, including one million for violent crimes, 500,000 for drugs and 650,000 for drinking-related offenses, according to the F.B.I. All told, this represented a 200 percent leap per capita in major index felonies since 1975.

• 630,000 middle-agers in prison in 2005, up 600 percent since 1977, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

• 21 million binge drinkers (those downing five or more drinks on one occasion in the previous month), double the number among teenagers and college students combined, according to the government’s National Household Survey on Drug Use and Health.

• 370,000 people treated in hospital emergency rooms for abusing illegal drugs in 2005, with overdose rates for heroin, cocaine, pharmaceuticals and drugs mixed with alcohol far higher than among teenagers.

• More than half of all new H.I.V./AIDS diagnoses in 2005 were given to middle-aged Americans, up from less than one-third a decade ago, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

What experts label “adolescent risk taking” is really baby boomer risk taking. It’s true that 30 years ago, the riskiest age group for violent death was 15 to 24. But those same boomers continue to suffer high rates of addiction and other ills throughout middle age, while later generations of teenagers are better behaved. Today, the age group most at risk for violent death is 40 to 49, including illegal-drug death rates five times higher than for teenagers.

I have long had a great deal of inner conflict about how to improve the world. I’ve seen so many seemingly good ideas ruined in the execution by what I would call heartless do-gooders. Drug policy, a subset of the mental health movement, is a perfect example.

People are driven insane by the conditions of their lives under scorched earth industrialism. Mental health is mainly defined by the ability to hold a job or otherwise remain solvent. Even murderers and sadists have their socially approved economic roles. But all too often holding a job requires personal sacrifices that are really the equivalent of voluntary insanity. People (ab)use drugs to deal with the numbness and the pain, to meet the demands of the machine, to soothe the anguish of injuries sustained in family warfare.

The hard-hearted do-gooders look at the results and find that it is really easy to blame the victims by assigning their failures to drug use, a moral flaw, rather than fixing the machine. In 1967, I was buying shoes in Greenwich Village and the clerk seemed unusually intelligent. I asked what he really did. He told me he was a sociologist who had worked for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. He did a massive study of all welfare programs going back to the beginning. He was fired immediately after he submitted it and the study was suppressed, he said.

The universal characteristic of all social welfare programs in the United States, he had found, was that most of the money never reached the poor. The administrators spent it on themselves.

I could offer dozens of examples of good works gone mad. One of my favorites is the old Japanese Buddhist practice of releasing live fish in order to gain merit by saving them from being eaten. They had immense campaigns in which thousands of fish were collected and released, but so many fish died in the process that it was really hard to say that anything much had been accomplished.

I decided a long time ago that the best thing would be to improve myself and create the new improved variety of children. And in that I believe that I might have succeeded.

In looking back on my own tawdry life, I comfort myself by noting that I am better than my father was. He was an out-and-out criminal, a gun-toting gangster. I’ve just been a deadbeat and an all-around jerk. I wince when I think about the different ways in which I’ve thoughtlessly hurt people. But as Anita once defended herself during a bitter argument about something selfish she had done that had hurt me, “People hurt each other.”

My children, however, are a very distinct improvement over their father. So I can honestly say that I did accomplish something in my life.

All in all, let us say that love leading to good works is not necessarily a doomed course; and doomed or not, is good in and of itself. Even if it doesn’t always work out, it is better than hate leading to evil works. And I suppose that is what keeps us going against all odds.

A woman falsely accused of date-raping a wealthy businessman has told for the first time how the ordeal ruined her life. Read more »