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Starbucks Corp.’s recently announced goal of having 40,000 stores worldwide isn’t just about spreading green awnings through middle America, the Middle East and other areas of the world not yet tempted by easy access to mocha Frappuccinos and pumpkin spice lattes.

The coffee chain’s aggressive growth also hinges on what the company calls “infill” — adding stores in cities where its mermaid logo is already commonplace. In some cases, that means putting a Starbucks within a block of an existing store, if not closer.

While Starbucks knows there’s plenty to lure people into their stores, they also recognize that many people can’t be bothered to walk very far — or wait very long — for an optional and pricey treat.

I could make many jokes about it – but why bother when Lewis Black did a perfect job of it already.

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A think-tank has called for outdated copyright laws to be rewritten to take account of new ways people listen to music, watch films and read books.

The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) is calling for a “private right to copy”.

It would decriminalise millions of Britons who break the law each year by copying their CDs onto music players.

Making copies of CDs and DVDs for personal use would have little impact on copyright holders, the IPPR argues.

Copyright issues have, in the past, been steered too much by the music industry, the report said.

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One way or another the various long-shot exit scenarios being debated in the capital will be sorted out: federalism and partition; reaching out somehow for help from Iran and Syria; replacing Mr. Maliki with a Saddam-lite strongman. There will be some kind of timeline, or whatever you want to call it, with enforced benchmarks, or whatever you want to call them, for phased withdrawal. (Read “Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now” by George McGovern and William R. Polk for a particularly persuasive blueprint.) In any event, the timeline will end no later than Inauguration Day 2009.

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The ultimate chutzpah is that Mr. Bush, the man who sold us Saddam’s imminent mushroom clouds and “Mission Accomplished,” is trivializing the chaos in Iraq as propaganda. The enemy’s “sophisticated” strategy, he said in last weekend’s radio address, is to distribute “images of violence” to television networks, Web sites and journalists to “demoralize our country.”
This is a morally repugnant argument. The “images of violence” from Iraq are not fake ­ like, say, the fiction our government manufactured about the friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman or the upbeat news stories the Pentagon spends millions of dollars planting in Iraqi newspapers today. These images of violence are real. Americans really are dying at the fastest pace in at least a year, and Iraqis in the greatest numbers to date. To imply that this carnage is magnified by the news media, whether the American press or Al Jazeera, is to belittle the gravity of the escalated bloodshed and to duck accountability for the mismanagement of the war. Mr. Bush’s logic is reminiscent of Jeffrey Skilling’s obtuse view of his innocence in the Enron scandal, though at least Mr. Skilling has been held accountable for the wreckage of lives on his watch.
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That’s why it seemed particularly absurd when, in his interview with Mr. Stephanopoulos last weekend, Mr. Bush said that “the fundamental question” Americans must answer is “should we stay?” They’ve been answering that question loud and clear for more than a year now.

What we should be thinking about instead are our obligations to those who are doing the staying. Kevin Tillman, who served with his brother in Iraq and Afghanistan, observed in an angry online essay this month: “Somehow back at home, support for the soldiers meant having a 5-year-old kindergartener scribble a picture with crayons and send it overseas, or slapping stickers on cars, or lobbying Congress for an extra pad in a helmet.”

If we really support the troops, we’ll move past Mr. Bush’s “fundamental question” to one from 1971 posed by a 27-year-old Vietnam veteran, John Kerry, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

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The federal government is investigating the takeover last year of a leading American manufacturer of electronic voting systems by a small software company that has been linked to the leftist Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chávez.

The inquiry is focusing on the Venezuelan owners of the software company, the Smartmatic Corporation, and is trying to determine whether the government in Caracas has any control or influence over the firm’s operations, government officials and others familiar with the investigation said.

So it doesn’t matter these machines allow elections to be stolen, as long it isn’t done by Chávez?

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Frustrated with laws and regulations that have made companies and accounting firms more open to lawsuits from investors and the government, corporate America — with the encouragement of the Bush administration — is preparing to fight back.

Now that corruption cases like Enron and WorldCom are falling out of the news, two influential industry groups with close ties to administration officials are hoping to swing the regulatory pendulum in the opposite direction. The groups are drafting proposals to provide broad new protections to corporations and accounting firms from criminal cases brought by federal and state prosecutors as well as a stronger shield against civil lawsuits from investors.

Although the details are still being worked out, the groups’ proposals aim to limit the liability of accounting firms for the work they do on behalf of clients, to force prosecutors to target individual wrongdoers rather than entire companies, and to scale back shareholder lawsuits.

The groups hope to reduce what they see as some burdens imposed by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, landmark post-Enron legislation adopted in 2002. The law, which placed significant new auditing and governance requirements on companies, gave broad discretion for interpretation to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The groups are also interested in rolling back rules and policies that have been on the books for decades.

And since legislation is pretty much for sale in the USA, they’ll probably get what they want…

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There are a number of important implications in the concept of absolute power which we must be familiar with if we are to recognize it when we see it. Absolute power is, for example, accountable only to itself — and sometimes not even to that. There are no outside, independent institutions, beliefs, systems, or ideologies upon which absolute power is founded or to which absolute power is accountable. Absolute power is also independent of the many public rituals or symbols we normally associate with institutions or offices that exercise power over us. Police officers wear a badge as a symbol of their power; we stand when the judge enters the courtroom in a ritual to recognize their power. Absolute power has no need for such trappings, however, because there is no one to impress and no mediating traditions required.

Some of this was made evident recently by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld when he presumptuously told critics of the administration’s failed war in Iraq: “You ought to just back off, take a look at it, relax, understand that it’s complicated, it’s difficult. Honorable people are working on these things together.�? So, should the American people just trust the administration to get everything right and not raise complaints, criticisms, or suggestions? What in the administration’s record on anything, much less Iraq, should inspire such trust and complacency?

I think that what we are seeing is a denial that officials in the administration are really accountable to the American people whom they are supposed to be serving. Whatever rhetorical gestures they might make in the general direction of accountability, I see little hard evidence that the concept is taken seriously and enforced by this administration. On the contrary, I see instead a constant struggle to free the president and his minions from what few constraints his sycophantic Congress might try to impose.

I think that there is also more going on here between the lines. Rumsfeld’s statement, “Back off,�? isn’t just an expression of his attitudes but also a command: he’s giving an order to the media and to critics to step away, stop criticizing, and go back to reporting on other, less weighty, matters. How this is related to the question of absolute power is explained by Wolfgang Sofsky in his seminal book The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp:

“Third, absolute power is graduated power. It sets up a cleverly devised system of collaboration by turning some victims into accomplices, outfitting the functionary elite with substantial authority. One of the pillars holding up the camp system was an auxiliary force of Kapos (prisoner-functionaries who supervised prisoner work squads, or Kommados) and “scribes�? (Schreiber, record-keepers) who helped maintain everyday routines and relieved the burden on the SS personnel. Through their agency, absolute power became omnipresent. It filled almost every cranny, every niche in the camp. Without that delegation of power, the system of discipline would quickly have collapsed. The attendant rivalry for positions in supervision, administration, and supply provided the SS with a welcome opportunity to play the various factions among the prisoners’ elite against one another, keeping them dependent.�?

I think that we can find many ways in which the media elite have been all too eager to serve as Bush’s Willing Kapos. NBC, for example, has apparently refused to air ads for the Dixie Chicks’ movie because it is “disparaging to President Bush.�? Airing material critical of our political leadership is in the public interest which, in turn, is an obligation media companies have in exchange for access to the broadcast spectrum. The fact that these same corporations stand to make a lot of money from favorable regulation decisions and favorable laws made by the same political leadership they refuse to be critical of indicates that they are instead putting their corporate interests ahead of the public interest.

Many individual reporters and commentators go to great lengths to describe the actions of both Republicans and Democrats as if they were “equivalent�? even when there is no truth to such a perspective. Thus both parties are described as engaging in widespread negative campaign advertising even when the Democrats are doing almost none. Reporters are forced to just make things up, like describing the Michael J. Fox ad on stem cells as “negative.�? Much the same happens in reports about scandals — the fact that almost all involve Republicans is glossed over in an effort to create “balance�? where none exists. The fact that same reporters and commentators rely heavily on the good will of the people in power for access to information, “leaks,�? and invitations to good parties where the rich and powerful pretend to accept them as equals for an evening, suggests that they are putting their personal interests ahead of the public interests.

One consequence of all this dumbing-down of political reporting might be to turn us into something like the “proles�? of George Orwell’s book 1984. This Wikipedia summary of who and what the proles were should explain how they fit in here:

“[P]roles were not considered to be human beings. They did not have the intellectual power to understand that they are exploited by the Party (as a source of cheap labor) and were unable to organize resistance. Their functions were simple: work and breed. They did not care much about anything else than taking care of home and family, quarreling with neighbors, watching some films and football, drinking beer, and above all buying the lottery tickets. They were not required to express their support to the Party. They were only required to show primitive patriotism. The Party created special meaningless songs, novels, even pornography for the proles.�?

A similar disdain for “inferiors�? is often exhibited by Christian Nationalists in America. Despite the many injunctions in the New Testament that followers of Jesus should serve rather than rule, there appears to be a prevalent attitude that Christians “contain the wisdom and grace and love and creativity of Jesus�? and therefore should naturally rule by setting the laws. Parallels to this attitude existed in Nazi Germany and were expressed via the concept “Volksgenossen.�? This can be translated as “national comrade,�? but that hardly does the term justice and there is no exact translation.

It may be easiest to explain through example: Aryan Germans were Volksgenossen; Jews, Slavs, and other Untermenschen were not. Greater Germany, of course, was to be limited exclusively to Volksgenossen. In modern America, it might be possible to say that white conservative Christians are Volksgenossen; godless liberals and other traitors are not. I think that there was always the expectation among the Nazis that the categories of Party members and Volksgenossen would become indistinguishable. I suspect that there is an expectation among Christian Nationalists today that a similar process should occur: Republican Party members and American Volksgenossen should become one, which of course leaves everyone else out in the cold.

Or perhaps on the other side of that new fence they want to build.

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Christopher Soghoian’s stated intent with the “Boarding Pass Generator” website was to illustrate a well-documented airline security weakness that airlines and government failed to address — not to commit fraud or help terrorists. IANAL, but people who are lawyers are no doubt examining the laws that may apply to his case, now that he has been visited by FBI agents bearing a search warrant, his computer and other belongings seized.

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Doesn’t it seem like the FBI is coming down on this guy with all the power of a fully-operational space station to make an example of him, and thereby silence anyone else who may get some crazy ideas like speaking freely about how ineffective the Department of Homeland Security is?

The problem was well-known for over year, but now that it has publicity it is suddenly urgent enough to get a search warrant and ransack his home at 2 AM?

And if you want a Delta boarding pass instead of NW, just go here.