“There’s a lot of—some people who are upset [Saddam Hussein] is no longer in power.” GWB, quoted in the Christian Science Monitor.

The US is finally following Canada and most of the rest of the free world by adding a little color to our money. See the new $20 for yourself.

The Register points out that all visits to the Do-Not-Call list are being tracked by a subsidiary of AT&T, which is running the site for the FTC.

The release of the new poverty data on Friday—just in time for those of us with money to forget about it over the weekend—inspired me to pull out my calculator and do a little math.

The Post ran some slicing and dicing of the numbers, but didn’t give me what I was looking for, so I popped on over to the Census web site and got the full report. In summary, 12.1% of us—ballpark 34,570,000 Americans—are officially poor.

So what does it mean to be poor? If you live by yourself, it means you make less than $9,359 a year. Unless you’re over 65, in which case you’re deemed able to get by on $8,628 a year. But if you’re in a family of two, you’re poor if you pull down $11,756 per annum, or about six grand each. The scale goes up to “nine people or more” at $37,062, which works out to just over four grand each (forgetting about the “or more” part for the moment).

Really, the table is much more complex than this, and includes various columns for non-wage-earning kids, so take my word for it that this is just the gist.

A few pages later, we learn that of those 34 million in poverty, 24,534,000 people live in 7,229,000 poor families, the rest being singly impoverished.

Another subset of poverty: 14,068,000 people make less than half the poverty threshold, with the rest being between half and 100% of the poverty line.

So, what’s the point of these numbers?

My question is, what’s the aggregate amount of money that the poor are falling short of being not impoverished? Since the numbers are different for the singles and the families, we have to work that out separately.

There are 10,036,000 single poor. Their per capita poverty deficit is $4,798. So this group is collectively falling short by $48,152,730,000.

For the 24 million and change who are in poor families, they’re short by $2,123 each. So this group needs $52,085,680,000 to be on the poverty line.

So we have a nice round number of around $100 billion to make all of these people just barely poor. If you want to make them officially not poor, crank this number up to $125 billion, and everyone’s falling on the official line of “nearly poor”. (Skipping for the moment that this leaves out the currently nearly poor, which is 13 million other folks.)

That’s it. You want to declare war on poverty, and pretending for a moment that we had the political will to do so by just handing out checks, it would cost between $100 and $125 billion. Comparing this to a few other numbers currently in the news: $77 billion spent so far turning Iraq into rubble. $87 billion proposed to rebuild the rubble. $396 billion proposed for the Department of Defense, in addition to the Iraqi supplementary.

So… do you think we have our priorities straight?

The jury is still out on whether this blog is for real—a 24-year-old Iraqi woman in Baghdad. I’m not sure, but I’m sure as hell not qualified to judge.

But if you do believe her, then read this entry: “Females can no longer leave their homes alone. Each time I go out, E. and either a father, uncle or cousin has to accompany me…. A woman, or girl, out alone, risks anything from insults to abduction…. Before the war, around 50% of the college students were females, and over 50% of the working force was composed of women. Not so anymore. We are seeing an increase of fundamentalism in Iraq which is terrifying.”

In the Washington Post, photographic evidence of GWB desecrating the US flag. And campaign finance law. And the Hatch Act.

Okay, we don’t have photos of the last two. Just regular evidence.

From the New York Observer via MetaFilter, a story on four women who lost their husbands on 9/11 trying to get the government to actually investigate it.

I can understand why the Bushies want to avoid embarrassment here, but is there any other conceivable reason why the administration is stonewalling? What is their rationale? I’ve never heard one.

Fuji Electric has announced development of a new hard drive that stores up to 6 gigs on a disk that’s 2 centimeters wide—about 8/10ths of an inch. They’re hoping to ramp it up to 30 gigs and have it available in cell phones by 2005. And you thought the iPod was small.

The Register reports that a computer security technician was sent to jail on federal charges for telling customers at his former company that they were exposed to a security flaw.

Fred Kaplan opines that Friday proves that we’re not quite as vulnerable to terrorism as some would have you think.

Next time you get a call from someone asking you to donate to the Republican party, ask them if they’re calling you from New Delhi.

Apparently, “buy American” only applies when you’re being watched.

Maybe I’m not being paranoid when I shut off my Bluetooth connections when they’re not in use. The New Scientist reports that software called “Red Fang” can browse nearby Bluetooth gadgets and scan for access. Found this software and downloaded it after about a 30 second Google search.

Many thanks to Comedy Central for pointing this out.

“What I did before the war was predict a short, easy war, and the peace from hell, and so far I think I’m two for two. I didn’t want us to go into Iraq, not because I didn’t understand that Saddam Hussein was a miserable sonuvabitch. I’ve been active in human rights work for 35 years. I knew he was a miserable sonuvabitch when the Reagan administration was sending him weapons.

And I said from the beginning that you could make a case for going in on humanitarian grounds alone. But that’s not the case that the Bush administration made. The only reason I opposed going in after him is that I was terribly afraid that this country would get caught in an awful quagmire over there, and the only reason I opposed it is because I love this country.” —Molly Ivins

On the left, the GWB flight suit action figure, available for $40 at Kay-Bee stores everywhere.

On the right, the GWB Texas Air National Guard action figure. Yes, it’s an empty box. Astonishingly, you can buy it on eBay, and the current bid is $61. Update, 10 minutes later: now it’s $75. Update, 7:55 AM: “The item you requested ( 3141998098 ) is invalid, still pending, or no longer in our database.” A shame, because the description of the item was priceless.

Terrifying proof that Gray Davis is taking Schwarzenegger seriously. Link to the site where I found this pic from the AP, no word on where it’s originally from.

Amusing post here: “[The watch] runs a stripped down version of Linux, connects via Bluetooth and 802.11g, sends and receives FAXes, lets me work through email on an eyeglass LCD display, holds current digitized VFR and IFR charts for my Cirrus airplane, plus a lot more.”

Last week the Washington Post wrote up the best summary article I’ve seen that tracked the various assertions of the administration on Iraq, and showed the Emporer’s New Clothes nature of most of them.

Turns out, the Kansas City Star gave the same treatment specifically to Powell’s UN speech.

Folks, there’s no there there.

I’ve been engaged recently in a dispiriting debate with some friends about whether the war in Iraq had something to do with oil fields. It’s generally gone like this:

Me: Hey, here’s some new evidence on the web.

Them: The matter’s resolved, you lunatic. Stop buying into conspiracy theories.

The summary of my argument is that there’s a multibillion dollar honeypot in Iraq, the administration is run by former oilmen, and hey, maybe that has something to do with all this? Doesn’t strike me as farfetched, or evidence that I think the world’s being run by the extraterrestrial branch of the Trilateral Commission.

Anyway, news today that so far the reconstruction contracts are so tilted towards Halliburton that even insiders like Bechtel are complaining. Bechtel isn’t even bothering bidding.

Which is funny, because you’d think they’d be interested in getting a piece of the blanket immunity for anything they do related to Iraqi oil that GWB signed back in May.

As I write this, I’m enjoying the benefits of electric power, unlike many people to the north.

A day like today exemplifies the limitations of using the Internet to get your news. Most of my usual news sites are running the same AP articles, so bouncing around isn’t getting me more details. Kudos to the Washington Post for running a sidebar on how power grids work; ironically, this is also on the AP feed, but the Post was the only site in my normal diet to run it.

And of course, the usual chorus of bloggers who provide facts-on-the-ground in such situations are reliant on electricity to do their job. So while on September 11th I was able to get lots of first-hand information that contradicted some of what I was hearing in the national media, today it’s traditional news or bust.

The parallels to 2001 are obvious, and it’s safe to say that my initial search for news was to determine my own guidelines for how far my disaster drill should go today. (I ended up limiting it to getting some cash in my pocket in case the ATM and plastic networks go down.) But what was frustrating—and probably expected—was just how short on information the day is from official sources.

Right now, we’re not sure why the power’s out. But we’re certain it’s not the work of terrorists. So everyone should just rest easy and drink lots of water.

Beyond that, nada. No word on why we’re certain it’s not the work of terrorists. No word on best guesses as to what’s going on. Rumors that this all started somewhere near the Canadian border, but not about why the blackout miraculously stopped somewhere in the Jersey Pine Barrens.

My biggest moment of concern came from this map on the CNN web site, which seemed to show that the outage was limited to major metropolitan centers. That’s not how power grids work—I knew that before I got to the AP article. An area map showing affected regions would have been a lot more useful, but CNN probably doesn’t have that information either. So far better to put up a misleading map that makes today look much more dangerous than it already is.

Two lessons seem to be drawable from today’s events, one good, one bad:

1. Despite all of the misinformation and pseudonews about terrorist activity and color-coded levels of alert, most people seem able to act calmly and rationally in bad situations. Pat on the back for Americans.
2. The officials in charge continue with their policy of providing unsupported assertions and generally keeping the public in the dark, which someday will override the impulses that are keeping us calm today. It’s in the absence of trusted information that rumors spread—one report from NYC today relayed a rumor that Los Angeles had gone dark. Those of us who follow terrorist activities know that an attack on the power grid is a likely target, but I don’t think this has gotten to the general public yet. On the other hand, given the hype on dirty bombs, I wouldn’t expect to see the Northeast so calm if the issue were some geiger counters that were ticking ominously.

So while today is a great opportunity for a wake-up to slumbering officials, I’m afraid that the power is still out on their alarm clocks.