A friend, who counsels food pantry customers, tells me that – as the winter progresses – she has noticed increasing numbers of desperate, hungry and homeless “nouveaux poor.” They are formerly middle-class and working people who are have become surplus. They bring to mind the powerful Phil Ochs song There But For Fortune because, like many of us, they were just one illness, one job, one drink, one cop from disaster. (To see Phil Ochs sing his song in a time-warp 1967 Bitter End Video click here , or, for a somewhat downtempo take by Peter, Paul & Mary (1982), here.)

In this context, are you disturbed to see Mayor Bloomberg media boosters cranking out copy concerning his miserable skirmish on poverty? Tuesday’s New York Times, for example, features an editorial Mayor Bloomberg Tackles Poverty praising efforts which, to my mind, are microscopic, half-hearted and feeble.

Because spin, data manipulation and misleading statements seem so crucial to Mayor Bloomberg’s policies and practices, it’s as shocking as an ice cold shower when the NYC shifts to realistic data collection for policy planning. Evidence-based planning, absent elsewhere in Mr. Bloomberg’s universe (about which I will post shortly), is being introduced by NYC’s Center on Economic Opportunity. . It galls me to say it, but, Mayor Bloomberg and his Deputy Linda Gibbs deserve praise for this effort. Update: Late December New York Times report is here .

By the time you read this, we are fifteen days and some hours too late. By the time you read this, Lillian Milán is already dead and buried, victim of the daily little violences carried out by our tax-funded bureaucratic neglect.

We arrive more than half-way into the story because, even though there's a mother and wife missing, the bureaucratic violence that killed Ms. Milan is still going strong.

You don't need to go to New Orleans to witness the havoc and devastation of our government's willful neglect.

All you need to do is take the train to 140 Moore Street in Brooklyn.

This diary was originally written once the lessons of Hurricane Katrina had sunk in a bit. This week is the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Two years ag...I remember watching on the weather channel as a category 5 hurricane was bearing down on the Gulf Coast and thinking, "THAT is going to be really bad."

But no one in the Bush Administration seemed to think that. They thought about celebrating John McCain's birthday, buying shoes in NYC, vacationing...while one hell of a hurricane was bearing down on America's Gulf Coast.

The people of America's Gulf coast didn't matter to the Bush Administration. Those people we watched die of neglect in New Orleans died because Republican America considered them insignificant...worthless...useless.

Sparkling Science Writing. Have you been following the recent science reporting by Claudia Dreifus? I have. I first looked at her conversations with scientists out of curiosity and affection – I had met Ms. Dreifus more years ago than I care to repeat, but have remained a reader because she’ll really good at explaining to science idiots like me what those people are doing and talking about. Tuesday’s conversation with DNA sequencer Elizabeth Blackburn is here. But don’t stop there. Her previous profile of yeast researcher Susan Lindquist looks both at women in science and yeast as research targets, but the best is her interview with my favorite sex researcher Pepper Schwartz

Keeping Poor People Down. When it comes to the poor, Mayor Bloomberg’s billionaire instinct for starvation wages and unaffordable housing comes through