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Slate.com

Slate.com
Table of Contents
drink
Cognac Attack!
dvd extras
ad report card
Fugue Interstate
Jorge Posada Is Having Laura's Baby!
election scorecard
Advanced Search
Outliers in Pennsylvania
architecture
explainer
Architecture Is a Team Sport
Do April Showers Bring May Flowers?
art
explainer
Seven Mysteries of China
Apocalypse No!
assessment
explainer
WTF, WKW?
Why Are Global Food Prices Soaring?
books
explainer
The New Global Nomads
Why Does China Care About Tibet?
books
fighting words
Greer Tames the Shrew
The Tall Tale of Tuzla
chatterbox
fixing it
Hillary's Rev. Wright, Part 2
Health Care Policy
Convictions
fixing it
Stuck on Yoo
The Environment
corrections
fixing it
Corrections
The Laws in Wartime
culturebox
fixing it
This Film Should Be Played Loud!
The Presidency
culturebox
fixing it
Monkey Business
Education
dear prudence
fixing it
My Niece Is Falling to Pieces
Tech Policy
Deathwatch
fixing it
The Hillary Deathwatch
The Military
Deathwatch
fixing it
Foreign Policy
Deathwatch
foreigners
A Wrinkle in the Fabric of Society
Deathwatch
gabfest
The Corkscrew Landing Gabfest
Deathwatch
gardening
Kinder-Gardening
did you see this?
hollywoodland
Predator Rap
The Office Spinoff
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
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hot document
press box
The Torture Memo
Links That Stink
hot document
press box
Nipple Rings vs. Metal Detectors
Rupert Murdoch Is Not the Antichrist
hot document
press box
Putting the Private in Private Eye
The Times' New Welcome Mat
human nature
press box
Fetal Subtraction
The States Are Falling, the States Are Falling!
jurisprudence
reading list
Yoo Talkin' to Me?
The Pitchers and Catchers Report
jurisprudence
recycled
Shades of Gray
The April Fools' Day Defense Kit
map the candidates
slate v
The Return of Ron Paul
Internet Dangers for Kids
medical examiner
slate v
Footloose and Sugar-Free
Should She Enlist? Inverviews 50 Cents
moneybox
slate v
The Mark-to-Market Melee
Weatherman Gone Wild
moneybox
slate v
Why Fed Reform Won't Work
Dear Prudence: He Won't Dress Up!
moneybox
slate v
Rich Men Behaving Badly
Obama Girl Hurts … Obama!
moneybox
sports nut
Staying on Bush's Course
Grappling With History
movies
teachings
Illegal Use of Hands
Terror U
other magazines
technology
The Rewards of Motherhood
Cloudy Judgment
other magazines
television
Clipping the Right Wing
Ben Silverman's Critique of Slate
poem
television
"Oh Blessed Season"
Dance Marathon
politics
television
What I Mean, Not What I Say
Conan Appears on Leno
politics
the chat room
Campaign Junkie
Words of Warcraft
politics
the green lantern
Chicago School Days
Will Diesel Save the World?
politics
the has-been
What Made Richardson Flip?
Name That Loon
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the has-been
Iron City Blues
the undercover economist
The Price Is Right
today's blogs
A Winning Argument?
The Spot: A man lies comatose in a hospital bed. His anguished
lover asks the doctors if there's anything she can do. Despair is
taking hold when suddenly the man's eyes open, and he begins to
talk. "My team ... it's a keeper league," he says, spitting out the
words in his last throes. "Don't. Trade. Prince. Fielder!" With
that, his vitals go dead, the doctors bring in defibrillator
paddles, and the woman starts to wail. An announcer intones:
"Join the endless drama. Play fantasy baseball on ESPN." (Click
here to watch the spots.)
today's blogs
Did You Get the Memo?
today's blogs
Mugabe's End?
today's blogs
Sadr Says
today's blogs
Dean Screams
today's papers
How To Lose a Fight in Five Days
today's papers
Yoo Said It
today's papers
Food 911
today's papers
The purpose of this campaign (it includes a teaser ad that runs on
TV, plus several more Webisodes available at
EndlessDrama.com) is to create and retain interest in ESPN's
fantasy-baseball leagues. According to the ad agency behind the
campaign, the fantasy-baseball season can feel "long" and
"daunting" to some players. Thus the ads—with their references
to the "endless drama" inherent in fantasy sports—are meant
both to fire up excitement for the start of the new season and to
encourage players to stick it out for the whole marathon.
I'm a decent test case for the campaign. I've played fantasy
baseball in the past, and the long season waiting ahead does feel
daunting. So daunting, in fact, that this year I finally decided to
opt out. I couldn't get jazzed about signing on for another six
months of statistics parsing. I couldn't summon the passion
required to scour the waiver wire, replace injured players, assess
daily spreadsheets, and make lots of careful, math-based
decisions. It seemed like it might be more fun just to watch some
real baseball games on TV.
Best Laid Plans
today's papers
Bogged Down in Basra
today's papers
No More Alphabet Soup
today's papers
Swimming With the Sharks
So, did this ESPN campaign work on me? Did it get me psyched
up for my league's draft and stoke my fires for another half-year
of fantasy "drama"? No. (Frankly, by late July, the only drama in
my league is over who can come up with the punniest team
name. Queer as Foulke? Siouxsie and the Ben Sheets?) But my
mind was already made up, and, indeed, my league has now
started without me. For people who were still on the fence as this
season loomed, it's possible the ads offered a nudge of
encouragement.
video
Wars: Chechnya and Iraq
war stories
Bush Bungles in Basra and Bucharest
well-traveled
The Mecca of the Mouse
ad report card
Jorge Posada Is Having Laura's Baby!
A new ESPN campaign spoofs soap operas. Is that a good thing?
By Seth Stevenson
Monday, March 31, 2008, at 11:23 AM ET
Any habitual fantasy player will enjoy the knowingness of the
jokes. The ads get all the details right and are clearly written by
people familiar with the ins and outs of nerdball. (In fact, one of
the ad-agency creatives involved with the campaign has actually
written a book about playing fantasy football.) References to
lopsided trades, shady waiver wire pickups, and "keeper
leagues" (in which you can carry players over from one season
to the next) help establish geek cred.
And framing the campaign as a soap opera parody is a clever
idea. It puts forth the notion that a season of fantasy baseball
offers enough unexpected ups and downs to keep players
engaged for months on end (just as a soap buoys along its
viewers on a stream of twists and turns). But the trouble with the
campaign is that it gets the balance wrong: It's too much about
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soaps, not enough about baseball. While nailing the parody, it
sort of forgets why it's here in the first place. (Perhaps, like a
soap character in a head bandage, it has amnesia? Or maybe this
is the evil, goateed twin of the real campaign?)
Executives at Arnold Worldwide, the agency behind the spots,
had originally planned to hire a big-name commercial director to
mimic soap opera production values. But then they realized:
Why not just get the real thing? Through connections between
ESPN and ABC, they enlisted a director from the long-running
soap One Life To Live and even filmed on the show's sets.
"The way they shoot soaps is completely different from the
commercial world," says executive creative director Roger
Baldacci. "The director sits in a control room with lots of
monitors. They have three cameras running, and he snaps his
fingers to switch cameras and go live to the next one. You're
seeing the whole ad happen live [instead of filming one camera
angle, stopping to set up the next shot, and then restarting with
another camera angle]. The lighting technician sits in the control
room, too, and they have every light imaginable on the ceiling of
the set. With the push of a button, they can change the lighting.
In the commercial world, we would stop for 45 minutes while
they set up flags and bounces and the D.P. [director of
photography] anguishes over everything." Baldacci says they
shot all eight ads, plus a lot of ancillary material, in two days.
"The efficiency was incredible."
as a bartender breaking up a fight. (His wife also appears as a
love interest. When I asked if she was an actress, the ad guys
described her as "an aspiring actress.") But some of the episodes
feature no baseball players at all—just the soap actors and
maybe a bland ESPN commentator. I can't see how these spots
could hold much appeal for a jocky audience. In fact, some Web
sleuthing last week suggested that the campaign is stirring up
more intense interest on soap opera message boards, where fans
are delighting at the chance to see their soap heroes appear in a
sports context. Great for the soap fans, but I think ESPN was
hoping for the opposite effect.
Grade: B-. Almost too well-executed. The ads play so much
like real soap scenes that they neglect to do enough spoofing. I
did enjoy the "smack videos" available at EndlessDrama.com.
These are intended to keep you excited about your fantasy
league as the season wears on by letting you e-mail
unsportsmanlike video clips to your competitors. For instance,
you can send a clip of a sexy nurse who offers sympathy to
opponents when their star players get injured. "It's not enough
just to win in fantasy sports," chuckles Baldacci. "You have to
rub it in."
Advanced Search
Friday, October 19, 2001, at 6:39 PM ET
Baldacci sounds entranced with his trip to Soapville, but I think
this immersion strategy may have backfired a little. Using actual
soap crews (and performers—there are actors here on loan from
One Life To Live and All My Children) made the soap opera
jokes almost more rooted and authentic than the fantasy-baseball
jokes. "There are overdramatic pauses, camera zoom-ins, and
other little elements that make it feel right," says Baldacci. "For
instance, in a soap, they have a lot of time to let scenes play out,
and there's more dead time. So, we let our pacing become much
more relaxed than it normally would be in an ad. We trimmed
them up a little bit, but we had to fight that urge in order to stay
true to the genre."
My question is: Who in ESPN's target audience will really care
how well these ads capture the mood and aesthetics of soaps?
I'm sure there are a few dudes out there who are avid fans both
of soap opera and of fantasy baseball (though I would advise
them not to mention this in their online dating profiles). But the
vast majority of dorkball enthusiasts are men with zero interest
in daytime melodrama. It occurred to me that perhaps the
campaign was an effort to attract more women to ESPN's fantasy
leagues, but the agency says this was not its goal. (There are a
few million female players, but they make up a small percentage
of the fantasy universe.)
The ads are funniest when we see real baseball stars thrust into
the soap setting. Yankees catcher Jorge Posada does a nice turn
architecture
Architecture Is a Team Sport
So why do they award the Pritzker Prize to just one person?
By Witold Rybczynski
Tuesday, April 1, 2008, at 11:42 AM ET
The Pritzker Prize, which this year was awarded to French
architect Jean Nouvel, is often referred to as the Nobel Prize of
architecture. It is an inaccurate analogy. Nobel Prizes, whether
in literature, chemistry, or physics, are given to individuals for
individual work; buildings are the result of teamwork.
Sometimes Nobels are awarded to small teams of scientists, and
researchers do have assistants, but not 140 of them, which is the
size of Ateliers Jean Nouvel, whose head office is in Paris but
which maintains site offices in London, Madrid, Barcelona,
Rome, and Minneapolis.
This is not to take anything away from Nouvel, an imaginative if
sometimes heavy-handed architect. He deserves credit for
assembling—and leading—the talented teams that get his
designs built. But teams they are. One of the most striking
features of the bullet-shaped Agbar Tower in Barcelona,
designed in association with the firm b720 Arquitectos, is its
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shimmering exterior glass screen. The screen was fabricated by
the Italian firm Permasteelisa, one of the leading curtain-wall
manufacturers in the world, responsible for some of the most
striking walls of recent times—including that of Frank Gehry's
Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, Norman Foster's
Hearst Building in New York, and Coop Himmelblau's BMW
Welt in Munich.
The Pritzker Prize promotes the fiction that buildings spring
from the imagination of an individual architect—the master
builder. This wasn't true in the Middle Ages, when there were
real master builders, and it isn't true today. The modern architect
works with scores of specialists, first and foremost structural
engineers, without whom most architects today would be lost.
Armies of consultants are responsible for everything from
acoustics and lighting to energy conservation and security.
Fabricators like Permasteelisa manufacture—and influence the
design of—specialized building components, and contractors put
the whole thing together.
Construction has become so complex that responsibility for
design and building is commonly split between design architects
and so-called executive architects, who oversee the preparation
of construction documents and supervise the building process.
The international nature of high-profile architectural practices—
Ateliers Jean Nouvel is currently building 40 projects in 13
countries—means that local associate firms like b720
Arquitectos also play a key role in the process. Given the messy
and unpredictable nature of construction, it is often the person on
the building site who makes critical design decisions.
The other crucial ingredient for a successful building is the
client, not only because he pays for it—though that is no mean
contribution, since building costs are notoriously difficult to
estimate. It is often said that good buildings require good clients,
and great buildings demand great clients—who will support the
architect but also challenge him. It is surely no coincidence, as
John Silber points out in Architecture of the Absurd, that Gehry's
IAC headquarters building in New York, designed for Barry
Diller, is the best work the architect has done in years.
The fact that architecture is a team sport is what makes buildings
so interesting. Art is often chiefly the reflection of an individual
sensibility, but architecture tells us something about the society
that produced it, its technology, its values, its taste. In that sense,
building buildings is more like making movies than creating
personal works of art. The Academy Awards recognize that the
auteur theory of filmmaking has little relevance to making major
movies; that's why Oscars are awarded in all those categories—
art direction, sound mixing, makeup—and why the best-picture
prize is given to the producers, not the director, writer, or actors.
Perhaps the Pritzker should be given to the "best building." The
prize would be picked up by the architect, the engineer, the
builder, and, oh yes, the client.
art
Seven Mysteries of China
Is porcelain addictive?
By Christopher Benfey
Wednesday, April 2, 2008, at 7:10 AM ET
Click here to read a slide-show essay about the arcane history
of porcelain.
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assessment
WTF, WKW?
How Wong Kar-wai lost his way.
By Grady Hendrix
Thursday, April 3, 2008, at 5:03 PM ET
In 1991, when Wong Kar-wai released his dreamy 1960s period
piece, Days of Being Wild, he wrote in the director's statement:
"I really do not think it matters much if my films are critically
well-received or not. What is essential is that I want my
audience to leave the cinema having enjoyed the film, and that
means the whole world to me." Imagine his frustration, then,
when Days was released to resounding critical acclaim and
complete commercial failure, as were his next four movies. At
some point he must have decided to reverse the formula—
valuing critical acclaim over audience enjoyment—because this
week his first American film, My Blueberry Nights, arrives in
the United States, and it's the cinematic equivalent of seeing
Wong disappear up his own posterior, eased by gobs of critical
praise.
Twenty years ago, his first movie, As Tears Go By, caught
lightning in a bottle when Andy Lau pulled Maggie Cheung into
a phone booth and passionately made out with her as a
Cantonese cover of Berlin's "Take My Breath Away" swelled on
the soundtrack and the booth's fluorescent lights burned brighter
and brighter until they seared the screen white. It was the first
"Wong Kar-wai moment," and, in the six movies he made
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between 1988 and 1997, there would be many more: Faye Wong
singing "Dreams" by the Cranberries in Chungking Express as a
lovelorn cop sipped coffee in slow motion while the world
hurled itself around him in fast forward; Frank Zappa's satirical
"I Have Been in You" transformed into a breakup dirge in
Happy Together; the Flying Pickets closing Fallen Angels with
their rapturous cover of "Only You"; Tony Leung gearing up for
a night of breaking hearts while Xavier Cugat's "Perfidia" chachas in the background of Days of Being Wild.
Wong's movies showed how pop songs let us escape the world
for a place where emotions are stronger, colors are brighter, and
everyone can say exactly how they feel—but for only three
minutes at a time. He blended the tragic transience of pop with
an aching nostalgia for the eternally ending present, a uniquely
Hong Kong attitude. Hong Kong is a city fascinated with the
next new thing while simultaneously feeling as cramped and
close-knit as a small town. (See Wong's Fallen Angels, in which
a hit man escapes a bloody shootout only to run into a highschool classmate.) Most Hong Kongers live a short commute
from where they grew up, and everyone knows everybody else,
but development happens at the speed of light, and most people's
childhood memories have been paved over by the time they're
adults. Living in Hong Kong means experiencing a constant,
low-level mourning for the way things used to be while rushing
at breakneck speed into the future—a lot like living in a Wong
Kar-wai film.
Wong, his cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, and his art
director and editor, William Chang, improvised fast-on-their-feet
movies that captured this spirit of Hong Kong. They often
pushed the length of scenes beyond the point of the audience's
patience, but their highs were so high and their lows so low that
it was easy to forgive the sometimes tedious middles. Despite
Wong's relentless commercial failure, he quickly became a
major force on the Hong Kong filmscape, with his movies
spurring trends, getting parodied, getting ripped off, hated, and
loved.
After Wong won the best-director prize at Cannes for 1997's
Happy Together, he took off in a radical new direction. In the
Mood for Love (2000) was an oblique tale of a love affair
between Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, and it was to movies
what Sting's The Dream of the Blue Turtles was to rock: a clear
marker that we were now in the land of the middle-aged and the
married. In the Mood was technically accomplished, but
previously Wong had mixed reflective stillness with kinetic
movement, creating a volatile cinematic experience. In the Mood
was all stillness and no movement—it didn't race, it swooned. A
weepy violin piece took center stage, with dozens of period pop
songs relegated to the background, little more than audio
wallpaper. The headlong rush of youth was gone, replaced by
the regret of adulthood. The King of Pop had left the building.
And the critical praise had never been louder. In the Mood for
Love created a new Wong Kar-wai who was the darling of
Cannes and a global brand name. But rather than being
invigorated by the critical hosannas, he seemed to be paralyzed.
He spent years shooting his follow-up, 2046, swiping characters
and settings from In the Mood, and the film landed on screens
limp and lifeless. Next came his short film The Touch, set in this
same 1960s pocket universe, full of cosmetics-caked harpies in
lacquered beehives and Tony Leung (plus Tony Leung lookalikes) with oil shining in his hair, smoking endless cigarettes in
the shadows.
Even his collaborators were getting bored. "I feel that 2046 is
unnecessary, in retrospect," Christopher Doyle said to the
Guardian. "I think probably Wong Kar-Wai realized that
somewhere, and that's why it took so long. You do realize that
you have basically said what you needed to say, so why say
more? I think you have to move on."
But Wong couldn't move on. He had always been fascinated
with his childhood in 1960s Shanghai and Hong Kong, and his
post-2000 work has been an extension of Days of Being Wild—
replicating its cinematography, sets, costume design, and
characters. His latest, My Blueberry Nights, is set in
contemporary America and should have been a new direction.
But it comes off as desperate, playing like a greatest-hits version
of his '90s filmography performed by an all-white cover band.
His visual motifs of clocks and countertops, no longer carrying
the shock of the new, feel as empty and shopworn as fashion
advertisements.
Even his upcoming projects sound like more of the same. There's
a reworked version of his 1994 martial-arts film, Ashes of Time,
and while that film deserves the attention, rereleasing it is the
decision of a director who's looking backward, not forward.
Then he plans to shoot another preserved-in-aspic 1960s film,
this time starring Nicole Kidman. For a director who specializes
in long, rapturous close-ups of his actors, there's something
suicidal in the idea of casting an actress with the least expressive
face this side of Steven Seagal. The saddest thing is that the
critics who say they love Wong's innovative style and creativity
have been praising him for performing the same tricks again and
again.
Wong Kar-wai's production company, Jet Tone, also seems to be
in a middle-age slump. The actor Tony Leung, who has appeared
in six of Wong's films, is managed by Jet Tone. But rather than
letting Leung age gracefully, the company recently issued
airbrushed publicity shots, giving the handsome, middle-aged
actor the smooth, inexpressive face of a 12-year-old boy. Leung,
in an interview a few years ago, acknowledged that he and
Wong seemed to be trapped in a time loop. "For the past ten
years I think we're doing the same movie, starting from Days of
Being Wild to 2046 we're somehow doing the same thing. One
time we [Wong and I] talked on the set and said we should do
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something different, at least for the audience." But all signs
suggest that Wong can't find the energy to break out of his
gilded cage. He still has the potential to be the world's most
transcendent director, but wake me up when he stops repeating
his past movies and attempts something—anything—new.
books
The New Global Nomads
Jhumpa Lahiri and the perils of assimilation.
By Ann Hulbert
The era of the global nomad seems to have arrived in the United
States. Both leading presidential candidates—not just Barack
Obama but John McCain, too—grew up shuttling between
cultures and learning "to not build walls around ourselves and to
do our best to find kinship and beauty in unexpected places," as
Obama's sister summed up the sunny cross-cultural credo of the
campaign trail. Meanwhile, a pre-eminent chronicler of the
hybrid consciousness has emerged as well: Jhumpa Lahiri, a
Bengali-American who writes about darker transnational
shadows. "Being a foreigner is a sort of lifelong pregnancy—a
perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of
sorts," reflects the mother who has been transplanted from
Calcutta to Cambridge, Mass., in Lahiri's novel, The Namesake
(2003). The same character's husband can't escape an awareness
of "all that was irrational, all that was inevitable about the
world."
The legacy of growing up in the grip of a globally mobile
heritage is once again Lahiri's theme in her third book,
Unaccustomed Earth. In a collection of stories as limpid yet
complex as her Pulitzer Prize-winning debut, Interpreter of
Maladies (1999), she returns to familiar terrain—most of her
Indians are highly educated, upper-middle-class suburbanites on
the Boston-New York corridor—and to her well-honed role.
Lahiri is an unillusioned anatomist of the greatest immigrant
success story in the United States. But this time, she has
captured more clearly than ever before a restless feeling of
uprootedness that is as representative of America now, in the
post-9/11 era, as the credo of wide-eyed openness ever was.
Born in Britain in 1967, raised in Rhode Island, and regularly
taken on long visits to India, Lahiri grew up feeling, she has
written, "intense pressure to be two things, loyal to the old world
and fluent in the new." As dutifully high-achieving daughters
(never mind immigrants) often do, she mostly felt she failed at
both exacting tasks. And it seemed that nobody appreciated her
plight. Her father and sari-clad mother, and the Bengali social
circle that defined her home sphere, certainly didn't. Nor did her
peers, parochially focused on their own American meritocratic
dreams.
But Lahiri was right in step with a globalizing world. In the late
1990s, she veered off her ethnically correct academic track (B.A.
from Barnard, M.A.s from Boston University in English and
creative writing, followed by a Ph.D. in Renaissance studies) to
embark on fiction about the enigma of Indian-American arrival.
By then, accumulated brain drain and boundary crossings and
intermarriage had made hyphenated heritages "part of this
country's identity," as she put it. Lahiri was already probing the
aspirational strains, the blend of professional drive and personal
unease, when the World Trade Center towers collapsed. Her
subject—the barriers and fears that haunt even the well-off in a
newly porous world—had become, in a way, the subject. And
her Bengali background bequeathed her a perspective she's been
developing ever since. What Lahiri never fails to miss is how the
very wariness that isolates her Indians from their American
neighbors, and divides custom-bound parents from their
anxiously assimilating children, also inspires a common quest
for a sense of kinship. In a time when borders—between genders
and generations, not just nations—are more permeable than ever,
no one can count on feeling fully at home in the world.
Assimilation, in Lahiri's fiction, is about coming to terms with
disorientation. It is about not fitting in or settling down, not
starting over from scratch and freely forging a new identity or
destiny. Her characters balance precariously between two
worlds—not just Asian and Western, but inner and outer,
traditionally circumscribed and daringly improvised, unwilled
and willed—and they do so not just transitionally, but
permanently. In fact, The Namesake was animated by the
counterintuitive insight that the second generation's sense of
dislocation can be, in its way, harder to deal with than the fullfledged transplantation traumas of the foreign-born parent
pioneers. In her new stories—which have grown longer—Lahiri
pursues that theme. In various stages of setting up house, her
mostly thirtysomething Bengali-Americans feel half-betrayed
yet awed by their parents. Not that they ever let them know. Part
of the burden they live with is unspoken ambivalence about
elders who, against great odds, managed a feat that daunts their
offspring. Well-aware of their own advantages—not least
accent-free English and freedom from the old world custom of
arranged marriage—these U.S.-born young adults still can't help
feeling adrift.
Lahiri is a narrator subtly in tune with her poised yet highly
sensitive characters. She sets store, as they do, by emotional
reserve and a studious display of control—all the while alert, as
they mostly are, to powerful tensions coiled beneath the surface.
They are well-aware of profound gaps in perspective, yet where
they have trouble bridging them, Lahiri excels at just that. In the
title story, and in the three linked stories that close the collection,
she maps the divergent angles of vision and emotion that
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obstruct, even as they broaden, her characters' search for a sense
of belonging.
In "Unaccustomed Earth," 38-year-old Ruma, with a 3-year-old
in tow and another baby on the way, has recently moved from
Brooklyn to suburban Seattle, where her husband, Adam, takes a
new job that has him on the road a lot. It's a classic American
scenario, to which Lahiri adds a twist by having Ruma's father
pay a visit, alone; Ruma's mother died suddenly the year before.
Father and daughter, together and apart, are embarking uneasily
on new stages of life untethered by a woman whose
traditionalism had cramped yet also anchored them in different
ways. Lahiri shifts throughout between Ruma's and her father's
points of view, and between oblique Bengali generational strains
and the more familiar affluent American family fault lines they
can't help resembling.
The father, who unbeknownst to his daughter has met a Bengali
widow on one of the European tours he has started taking,
worries that Ruma risks being marooned in Seattle. He's haunted
by echoes of his wife's predicament decades before: "Like his
wife, Ruma was now alone in this new place, overwhelmed,
without friends, caring for a young child, all of it reminding him,
too much, of the early years of his marriage, years for which his
wife had never forgiven him. He had always assumed Ruma's
life would be different." So, of course, had Ruma, a busy lawyer
until recently. But she finds herself peculiarly unmoored without
the mother whom she had vowed not to take as her model. Ruma
had also assumed that, balking at Bengali custom, she would
never want her parents to come live with her. So, she is surprised
to end up hoping her father will move in. And she is bereft to
discover what he, like the secretly autonomous adolescent she
once was, doesn't dare admit to her: that, far from feeling
stranded, he has moved on to forge a new connection.
In her inspired concluding section—three stand-alone stories,
with separate titles, grouped together as "Hema and Kaushik"—
Lahiri again has younger Bengali-Americans unexpectedly
pulled back into the old ways, only to find that the bonds they
forge, unlike the ties their elders submitted to, don't rescue them.
As she has before, Lahiri plays with an updated variation on an
arranged marriage, intrigued by the notion that perhaps chance
can steer us more happily than choice seems to. Kaushik and
Hema, thrown together briefly as teenagers by their parents'
tenuous friendship in suburban Boston, each narrate a story that
prepares us for a much later, and brief, reunion. Their stories
prepare subliminally for a rupture as well. Both unfold in the
last, omnisciently narrated story.
The trio is a tour de force, embodying in its structure and voices
Lahiri's core themes. Outsiders at heart—Kaushik has become a
roving photojournalist, and Hema has only lately broken off a
long-term affair with a married man—the two characters reach
back to probe a sense of homelessness, addressing their stories
directly to each other. Here, at last, is a tie that feels
foreordained, rooted in a shared past of family connection,
reminiscent in that sense of their parents' arranged marriages.
Yet Hema and Kaushik are restless American romantics, born in
the wrong place and time to have the fatalistic courage of their
elders, who trusted that a shared future would truly yoke them.
As Lahiri steps in to thwart their convergence, she is as alert to
"all that is irrational as well as inevitable about the world" as the
father in The Namesake was. In her fiction, learning "to not build
walls around ourselves" doesn't begin to cover the challenges
that await her characters. They are wanderers navigating elusive
borders, bumping up against barriers and testing ties, uneasily
wondering if they will hold or not. That doesn't prevent Lahiri—
or Hema and Kaushik, or plenty of others in these impressive
stories—from finding "kinship and beauty in unexpected
places." But it inspires a perpetual vigilance and an awareness
that, even as the globe shrinks, vast distances will never
disappear.
books
Greer Tames the Shrew
A feminist icon rescues the Shakespeares' marriage.
By Laura Shapiro
One of the very few things we know for sure about Shakespeare
is that a stone slab lies over his grave site in the chancel of Holy
Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, inscribed with an
epitaph:
Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear
To dig the dust enclosed here.
Blest be the man that spares these stones,
And cursed be he that moves my bones.
Did the greatest writer in the English language really take his
leave with a rhyme that sounds like a 17th-century advertising
jingle? And what made Shakespeare such a fierce protector of
his own grave? One recent answer, perfectly plausible in the
context of most Shakespeare studies, comes from Stephen
Greenblatt, whose Will in the World (2004) is a beautifully
assembled mosaic of Shakespeare's life, work, time, and place.
Like many of the poet's biographers, Greenblatt is convinced
that Shakespeare despised his wife. Hence the verse: He knew
she would survive him and wanted to make sure she couldn't
insist on being buried with him.
And there the matter might have rested—if Germaine Greer
hadn't just galloped onto the field to defend the honor of the
most reviled woman in the Shakespeare industry. Hated his
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wife? Says who? In her new book, Shakespeare's Wife, Greer
throws down her own explanations for the verse, reinforcing
them with battalions of research. Various scraps of information
about Shakespeare's final years, she argues, indicate he may
have been dosed with mercury, which was the usual treatment
for syphilis. Anyone digging up his bones—to move them to the
charnel house, as often happened when more room was needed
in the chancel—would have been able to tell by the lesions what
had killed the poet. Not a pretty legacy. Perhaps his son-in-law,
who was also his doctor, wrote the verse to protect the memory.
Or, she suggests, maybe he was buried in the churchyard and the
chancel shrine was set up later so that visitors coming to see
Shakespeare's very own church would have something to sigh
over. Greer notes that there was an attempt in the late 17th
century to move Shakespeare's body to Westminster Abbey. If
anyone had started digging and found no body in the chancel,
the church would have been in big trouble. Maybe the verse was
quickly inscribed on his gravestone to fend off such a possibility.
Maybe … probably … it's likely … perhaps … Without such
disclaimers, we'd have no Shakespeare industry at all. For
centuries, scholars have trawled a tiny pool of reliable data about
the poet's life, poring over each real-estate transaction or baptism
as if it were a kind of homunculus that could tell us all we're
longing to know about the man himself. The best of
Shakespeare's biographers practice the art of speculation the way
pianists sometimes let loose with glorious cadenzas of their own
devising before returning to the score. Whole stretches of
Greenblatt's book come across like Mozart—pure pleasure, and
there's no need to believe a word of it.
But Greer isn't making music, she's defending a wronged
woman; and if her book is less eloquent than Greenblatt's, it's
also funnier and more provocative. She's obsessed with the other
Shakespeare—Ann (or Anne, or maybe Agnes) Hathaway (or
Hathwey, possibly Gardner), who married William sometime
around the end of November 1582. She was 26, he was 18. She
was three months pregnant with the first of their three children.
And that's pretty much all we know.
Which is why Ann—a woman with no back story—is exactly
the right subject for Greer, the Cambridge-educated feminist
historian whose first book, The Female Eunuch (1970), declared
that women's identities had been "corrupted and extinguished"
by male needs and fantasies. "Women must learn how to
question the most basic assumptions of feminine normality," she
wrote. "Everything we may observe could be otherwise." It's a
template for her approach to Ann Shakespeare: Don't let
conventional scholarship get the last word. Similarly, in The
Obstacle Race (1979), she resurrected five centuries' worth of
forgotten female artists, not to claim they were geniuses but to
figure out how and what they contributed to the history of art
despite the stranglehold of propriety and custom. Hence she's
always on the lookout for what must have been Ann's real-world
accomplishments—keeping her babies alive past the treacherous
early years, for example—while other scholars see nothing of
interest in a woman who wasn't a high-born beauty or legendary
courtesan.
Greer herself is a longtime Shakespeare scholar with plenty of
experience in the murky depths of Elizabethan-era research. By
examining sources on Stratford, the Hathaway family, and the
lives of comparable women, she comes up with a hazy but
plausible CV featuring Ann's skills as a malt-maker, herbalist,
knitter, and home manager. She also has a fine time slashing
away at nearly everything previously written about
Shakespeare's wife.
Because of the supposedly shotgun marriage, biographers have
asserted that young Shakespeare was seduced by an ugly old
maid and dragged to the altar, and that he fled for London
because the marriage made him miserable. Greer, by contrast,
has young Shakespeare ardently wooing an older woman
(several examples in the plays), welcoming the pregnancy
because it meant their parents couldn't object to the marriage (if
he didn't want to marry her, he could have run away or denied
paternity), and leaving for London because he couldn't make a
living in Stratford. The only evidence that he didn't keep loving
her is that she gave birth to no more children (maybe she
couldn't, after bearing twins) and the fact that there are no
surviving love letters (but then, there are no surviving letters
from Shakespeare to anyone).
Greer also suggests that by the time Shakespeare packed and
left, Ann may have been relieved. "Ann Shakespeare could have
been confident of her ability to support herself and her children,
but not if she had also to deal with a layabout husband good for
nothing but spinning verses, who had the right to do as he
pleased with any money she could earn," she writes. "Ten to one
if he was useless, he was also restless."
Yet the plays are full of wives who desperately miss their
husbands, and Greer believes these portraits reflect Ann. Greer
has always had a peculiar soft spot for rugged, time-worn
marriages that can survive every storm. In The Female Eunuch,
she offered the example of Lillian Hellman's long relationship
with Dashiell Hammett. (This was before the discovery that
Hellman had slathered her memoirs with fiction.) Over the years,
wrote Greer, Hammett and Hellman fought, betrayed each other,
parted, and returned—a "strange distant love affair" more
impressive to Greer than simple romance. Where Greenblatt
finds a dearth of happy marriages in the plays, Greer finds more
powerful bonds. "What should be obvious is that Shakespeare
did not think in twentieth-century cliches," she writes. "We are
not dealing her with representations of folk as 'happily married,'
but as truly married."
Greer never loses faith in this relationship, and she makes sure
Ann doesn't, either. By the end of the book, Shakespeare's wife
is selflessly nursing him through his final illness, financing the
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bust of the poet that was erected in the church, and helping
organize the First Folio. It's a little much—even Hellman didn't
have to forgive syphilis—but it speaks to a famous quirk at the
heart of Greer's feminism. In The Female Eunuch, she praised
The Taming of the Shrew for its portrait of Kate as an ideal wife.
Huh? Kate, the free-spirited woman who is abused by her
husband, Petruchio, until she's suitably broken? The whole play
is odious, but Greer is drawn to it. Kate, she wrote, "has the
uncommon good fortune to find Petruchio, who is man enough
to know what he wants and how to get it. He wants her spirit and
her energy because he wants a wife worth keeping. … [S]he
rewards him with strong sexual love and fierce loyalty." In this
book, Greer barely mentions the play; but I don't think she's
changed her mind. I think she's taken this chance to give her
beloved Shakespeare a wife who's worthy of him and the
marriage he deserves.
chatterbox
Hillary's Rev. Wright, Part 2
On second thought, Scaife isn't Hillary's Jeremiah Wright. He's her Louis
Farrakhan.
By Timothy Noah
Monday, March 31, 2008, at 7:02 PM ET
Romance continues to blossom between Hillary Clinton and her
once-mortal enemy, Richard Mellon "Vast Right-Wing
Conspiracy" Scaife. In the March 31 issue of his crackpot
newspaper, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, which loses
somewhere between $20 million and $30 million a year, Scaife
praises Hillary's self-assurance, the depth of her knowledge on
foreign and domestic issues, and her confidence. "Her meeting
and her remarks during it changed my mind about her," Scaife
gushes—affirming, perhaps, Woody Allen's famous maxim that
80 percent of success is showing up:
Walking into our conference room, not
knowing what to expect (or even, perhaps,
expecting the worst), took courage and
confidence. Not many politicians have
political or personal courage today, so it was
refreshing to see her exhibit both.
Sen. Clinton also exhibited an impressive
command of many of today's most pressing
domestic and international issues. Her answers
were thoughtful, well-stated, and often deadon.
[…]
Does all this mean I'm ready to come out and
recommend that our Democrat readers choose
Sen. Clinton in Pennsylvania's April 22
primary?
No—not yet, anyway. In fairness, we at the
Trib want to hear Sen. Barack Obama's
answers to some of the same questions and to
others before we make that decision.
But it does mean that I have a very different
impression of Hillary Clinton today than
before last Tuesday's meeting—and it's a very
favorable one indeed.
Scaife slobbered in similar fashion over Bill Clinton after the
two enjoyed, last summer, what Scaife later described to Vanity
Fair as a "very pleasant" lunch—one that prompted Scaife to
contribute $100,000 to the Clinton Global Initiative—in the
former president's New York office:
"I never met such a charismatic man in my
whole life," Scaife says, glowing with pleasure
at the memory. "To show him that I wasn't a
total Republican libertarian, I said that I had a
friend named Jack Murtha," a Democratic
member of the House of Representatives from
Pennsylvania. "He said, 'Oh, Jack Murtha.
You're talking about my golfing partner!' " In
the midst of these backslapping memories,
though, Scaife goes carbuncle-eyed and
refuses to answer on the record when asked if
he still thinks Vince Foster's suicide was, as he
once told the New York Times, "the Rosetta
Stone to the Clinton Administration."
Scaife, as I noted last week, is a significantly more poisonous
slinger of divisive rhetoric than Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's
former minister, about whom Hillary expressed disapproval at
the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review powwow. During the 1990s,
Scaife professed to believe that Hillary had actually killed
Foster, and he used the Tribune-Review to spread that ugly
rumor. Scaife's unwillingness to retract such seamy accusations
("[Bill Clinton] can order people done away with at his will. He's
got the entire federal government behind him") a full decade
after the fact doesn't strike me as repentant, even by the
redempt-o-matic standards of today's 24-hour news cycle. If, as
Hillary said about Wright to Scaife and his employees, "Hate
speech [is] unacceptable in any setting," what are we to make of
Scaife's regular outbursts of blatant misogyny? In 1981 he called
a female journalist profiling him for the Columbia Journalism
Review a "fucking Communist cunt," adding for good measure
that her mother was "ugly." Scaife's marriage broke up after a
detective hired in 2005 by his wife, Margaret "Ritchie" Scaife,
caught Scaife in flagrante with a woman who'd been twice
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arrested for prostitution. When Ritchie sought to confront the
couple, Scaife had her arrested for trespassing. She spent the
night in jail. Later, after Ritchie and Richard commenced marital
separation, he posted on his front lawn the sign "WIFE AND
DOG MISSING—REWARD FOR DOG." For Hillary "to seek
help from Scaife in publicizing Obama's supposed tolerance of
hate speech," Jonathan Alter observes in the April 7 Newsweek,
"sets a new standard in campaign chutzpah."
In the Feb. 26 presidential debate in Cleveland, Hillary told
Obama that it wasn't enough for him to express strong
disapproval of Louis Farrakhan's anti-Semitism; he had to reject
Farrakhan's support. She cited a "similar situation" she'd faced
during her first Senate run in 2000, when she "rejected" the
support of the anti-Semitic Independence party. "I was willing to
take that stand," she said.
And there's a difference between denouncing
and rejecting. And I think when it comes to
this sort of, you know, inflammatory—I have
no doubt that everything that Barack just said
is absolutely sincere. But I just think we've got
to be even stronger. We cannot let anyone in
any way say these things because of the
implications that they have, which can be so
far reaching.
Obama replied that he saw no difference "between denouncing
and rejecting," but that "I'm happy to concede the point, and I
would reject and denounce."
Hillary's willingness to tolerate the potential support of a
misogynist reptile like Scaife strikes me as precisely parallel. In
this case, though, Clinton has not been asked to denounce or
reject the prospect of a possible endorsement by Scaife and his
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Why not? She could, I suppose,
attempt a "hate the sin, love the sinner" approach and claim she's
only mimicking Obama's Wright speech. But Obama was able to
point to longstanding personal ties; to the bitter life experience
of Wright's generation of African-Americans; and to Wright's
more laudable accomplishments, of which there were many.
Hillary, by contrast, only just met Scaife for the first time; can
cite no mitigating hardships in Scaife's life, save perhaps Scaife's
well-publicized alcoholism; and, except for that $100,000 check
to her husband's foundation, can point to little in the way of
laudable accomplishments. This last would be particularly
awkward not only because of the impression it creates—that the
Clintons have been bought off—but also because any discussion
of Scaife's charitable giving would have to acknowledge its
emphasis on funding conservative think tanks and nutty rightwing causes like the American Spectator's get-Clinton "Arkansas
Project."
Scaife isn't Hillary's Wright. He's Hillary's Louis Farrakhan,
Hillary's Independence party for 2008. Does she dare tell Scaife
that she doesn't want his damn endorsement, and that if he
bestows it, she'll refuse it publicly? I wouldn't hold your breath.
Convictions
Stuck on Yoo
Dissecting the latest Bush administration's legal rationale for torture.
Thursday, April 3, 2008, at 10:31 AM ET
corrections
Corrections
Friday, March 28, 2008, at 7:21 AM ET
In the March 26 "Press Box," Jack Shafer
mistakenly stated that a drug party described in a
Time magazine story took place on Cape Cod. It
took place in New Jersey.
In the March 26 "Television," Troy Patterson
misidentified Troy Aikman as Troy Aiken.
In the March 25 "Other Magazines" item on Vogue,
Morgan Smith gave the wrong first name for
Evelyn Nesbit's benefactor Stanford White.
In the March 22 "Today's Papers," Morgan Smith
misidentified a region between Pakistan and
Afghanistan as a "border with Pakistan." It should
have read a "border with Afghanistan."
In the March 21 "Culturebox," Paul Collins incorrectly referred
to New York Telephone as NYNEX in pre-1984 references.
In the March 21 "Explainer," Michelle Tsai
understated the relative density of water to air.
Water is more than 800 times denser than air.
In the March 21 "Politics," John Dickerson
incorrectly said that the branch of the military
being spoofed in the movie Stripes was the
Marines. The correct branch is the Army.
If you believe you have found an inaccuracy in a
Slate story, please send an e-mail to
[email protected], and we will investigate.
General comments should be posted in "The Fray,"
our reader discussion forum.
11/124
culturebox
This Film Should Be Played Loud!
What makes a great concert movie?
By Jonah Weiner
Click here to read a slide-show essay on concert movies.
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culturebox
Monkey Business
So is that Vogue cover racist or not?
By Wesley Morris
No matter how many "courageous" speeches Barack Obama
gives, America will never be a "Let's talk about race" kind of
place. It'll always be a "Let's talk about how we can't talk about
race" kind of place. I'm all for doing my part. I'd like to start a
talk show called This Week in Racism. Eventually, in the
broadcast, we'd get around to the cover of Vogue's current
"shape" issue.
At the end of last week, a lot of people, smart and dumb, were
losing their minds over it. The cover captures LeBron James
dribbling a basketball while holding onto Gisele Bündchen.
James, of course, is the NBA sensation, and Bündchen is the
sensational Brazilian supermodel. His face is in mid-roar. His
arm is around her waist. He appears to be 10 times her width.
She looks underfed but appears to be having a very good time.
And yet: "It's racist," people cried. "Racist how, you
oversensitive weirdos?" people cried back. James and Bündchen
were playing themselves—unless the image happened to remind
you of a certain cinematic classic from 1933, in which a giant
gorilla scoops up a pretty white lady and proceeds to mount the
Empire State Building. This is where the trouble begins.
According to this scenario, James is King Kong and Bündchen
his Fay Wray. It's an easy conclusion to draw. James isn't
wearing his Cavaliers uniform—he's wearing anonymous black
shorts and an anonymous black tank top. She's wearing a silky
bias-cut gown, not unlike the one Wray wore. The photo, shot by
Annie Leibovitz and surely signed off by Vogue Editor Anna
Wintour, appeared, to some, to evoke one of the ugliest racist
tropes: black male as ape.
In the movie, Kong has a thing for Wray. But she's already sort
of seeing someone, the dashing white adventurer who's trying to
rescue her. The Vogue "remake" has intriguing symmetry.
Bündchen is already seeing someone, too: the dashing
quarterback Tom Brady, who is not simply white—in the minds
of many season-ticket holders and journalists alike, Brady is gilt.
Vogue could have chosen Tyra Banks, Alek Wek, or even Heidi
Klum. But it went with a woman who, while ridiculously famous
in her own right, is now recognizable as the girlfriend of
American sports' golden boy. Somebody at that magazine knew
what he or she was doing. The picture's visual inspiration might
be King Kong, but the narrative corollary is D.W. Griffith's Birth
of a Nation. Men, lock up your ladies! Here comes LeBron!
But even typing that just gave me a headache. Only on a second
glance, at a supermarket checkout, did any of the cover's
subtexts surface for me. I was struck less by the stereotypes at
play than by its erotic value: It's a hot image, and what's sexy
about it is more a matter of celebrity than race. Bündchen doesn't
look terrified. She looks exhilarated. And James looks neither
mad nor simian: He looks triumphant. Vogue could have put one
of the issue's more friendly, less suggestive photos on the cover.
But they're comparatively dull. In the other shots of James and
Bündchen, the two look like old girlfriends. The fun and sex that
leap off the cover are gone. On the cover, the superstar and the
supermodel have surprising chemistry, the kind that makes you
stop pushing your shopping cart and pick up the magazine.
It's possible that Tom Brady will get ribbed when he arrives at
training camp this summer, but the ribbing seems just as likely
to come from Randy Moss, who's black, as it would from Wes
Welker, who's white. I'd like to think that after their groggy
Super Bowl performance a few months ago, the Patriots have
more pressing concerns. So do black people. I, for one, have
racism fatigue. I'm wiped out. Between the outrage over
Obama's Jeremiah Wright problems and Bill Clinton's
unbelievable mutation from American's first black president into
Karl Rove, I don't have the bandwidth to fight Anna Wintour.
Seeing that cover as purely racist doesn't give the people looking
at it enough credit. It dates Vogue for relying on the allusion but
it also dates us for going crazy over it. Racial hysteria is the old
black. Maybe it's so old it's avant-garde—very Vogue.
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dear prudence
My Niece Is Falling to Pieces
offending her sensibilities and more concerned about rescuing
her children.
Should I take her away from her derelict mother and raise her right?
—Prudie
Get "Dear Prudence" delivered to your inbox each week; click
here to sign up. Please send your questions for publication to
[email protected]. (Questions may be edited.)
Dear Prudence Video: He Won't Dress Up!
Dear Prudence,
My older sister and I are very close and very much the opposite
of each other. I am practical, organized, and always try to be a
good role model. She is a free spirit, dressing in her teenager's
clothes and just seeing how the cards fall. Her daughter is
struggling, failing at school, and thinking of dropping out. She
has been getting into fights at school and in trouble with the
police. She also got pregnant but had a miscarriage. This girl is
so smart and has such great potential but is making poor choices
and crying out for attention. I would like to invite her to live
with me, at least during the school year. My husband has agreed
she is welcome to live with us and our daughter. I work during
the day and am home every night and weekend. My sister works
many evenings and weekends at a bar and is not home with her
children often. She frequently goes out partying, and her
drinking habits have many people in the family concerned. I am
not trying to say that my sister is a bad mother or person. She is
very loving and tries to give her children everything (material)
that they want, which has also made them quite spoiled. Would
it be wrong or offensive to invite my niece to live with me?
—Unsure Aunt
Dear Unsure,
You may not want to say your sister is a bad mother, so I will
say it for you. What other conclusion can you draw about
someone who is irresponsible, neglectful, indulgent, and drunk?
Despite your closeness, you know your sister has made a hash of
her own life and is doing everything she can to make sure the
next generation does the same. It sounds as if it would be a
blessing to bring your niece into your home and give her
stability and firm, loving guidance so that she can graduate from
school, instead of dropping out and giving birth to yet a third
generation of misery. But if you do this, don't have any illusions
about how hard it will be. Because of her lousy upbringing, your
niece lacks control of her emotions and behavior; at the very
least, you should seek assistance from people in the school
system who can help give this girl the tools for successful
functioning in life. You mention that while your sister is out
partying, she leaves her children at home alone, which means
there is more than one offspring at risk. Since your entire family
is worried, all of you need to get together and get advice on
working out a plan for interceding with your sister. Does she
need rehab and parenting classes? Should social services be
called in? Everyone needs to be less apprehensive about
Dear Prudie,
I am a twentysomething female engaged to a wonderful man.
We have been together for five years, and I couldn't be happier.
During the summer, he was gone for months on business, and I
committed a very bad act. After a night of what I thought was
harmless flirting with a guy at a bar, he invited me to crash at his
place. I made the biggest mistake of my life and cheated on my
husband-to-be. I'm not blaming the incident on too much alcohol
(although that was a contributor) and fully accept the blame for
what I have done. I am full of guilt and hate for myself. I'm
afraid to tell my fiance because I know our relationship will end,
but at the same time, I don't want to start our lives together with
a huge lie. My parents' marriage ended due to my father's
infidelity, and I swore I wouldn't be like that ... but here I am. To
make matters worse, my best friend is now dating this person.
She knows what happened and was disgusted by it, but a month
later they were exclusive. I know she is disappointed in me, but
she doesn't seem to be bothered by the fact that her boyfriend
had a part in this, too. He has been sending me sexual text
messages lately, and I know if she knew, she would blame me,
although I've ignored the messages and have not welcomed this
behavior. So, what do I do? Tell my amazing fiance what I did
and hope he can find a way to forgive me, or keep my lips
sealed?
—Once a Cheater, Not Always a Cheater
Dear Once,
Your best friend knows and disapproves of what you did, and is
now dating the guy you cheated with; and the guy you cheated
with is trying to betray your best friend so he can have another
go round with you. This situation is about as stable as taking
Semtex on a bumper-car ride. Chances are, your fiance
eventually will hear about this—and imagine the stress you'll be
under hoping each day is not the day someone blabs. Yes, if you
tell him, you run the risk of losing him, but at least you also have
a chance to show you've come forward of your own accord, you
are sickened by this single slip, and you pray he won't give up on
you. It would be helpful if you could say you are so distressed
by your own behavior—especially since you grew up under the
shadow of infidelity—that you have already gone into therapy to
figure out why it happened and make sure it never does again.
—Prudie
Dear Prudence,
I know parents shouldn't play favorites, but I can't seem to help
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myself. My two children have completely different
temperaments: The boy, nearly 15, is sweet and considerate. He
regularly tells me I'm "the best mom in the world" and is always
generous with hugs. We almost never fight, but if reprimanded,
he usually either apologizes or gets weepy. He is funny,
interesting, and sweet, and I truly enjoy his company. His 13year-old sister is a different story. Almost as soon as she learned
to talk, she started telling me she hated me. She's nasty to her
brother and demanding and rude to her father and me. She is
constitutionally oppositional, arguing about everything from
homework to whether she has to get out of bed in the morning. I
know she's just a child, and I really do love her, but often I don't
like her much. I know part of my job as a parent is helping her
learn to handle her explosive personality, and I'm thankful that
outside our house she is a mostly reasonable, pleasant girl. But I
worry that—if we survive five more years of this daily
nastiness—I will never want to see her again. That's not the kind
of mother I want to be; I have two wonderful children, and I'd
really like to feel equally connected to them. What can I do?
—Mommy Dearest
Dear Mommy,
You've got two issues: One is your guilt over preferring the
company of your delightful son; the other is what to do about
dealing with your very difficult daughter. I spoke to Dr. Alan
Kazdin of Yale, author of The Kazdin Method for Parenting the
Defiant Child, who says his approach will change the way your
daughter treats you because it will show you how to change the
way you respond to her. His Web site has an introduction to his
method of replacing your child's unwanted behavior by
systematically rewarding the opposite behavior. This
Washington Post article has more from Kazdin, and other
psychologists, on how to handle defiant kids. No method will
turn your daughter from Groucho into Harpo, but some
professional guidance should turn her into a Groucho who
willingly gets out of bed in the morning. As for the imbalance in
the way you react to your kids, Kazdin had some more advice:
Lighten up on yourself. Who wouldn't favor the company of a
happy, delightful person who says you're the best, to a hostile
presence whose favorite phrase is "I hate you"? But if you can
bring out your daughter's more agreeable qualities, you will feel
less angst about your preference for your son.
—Prudie
Dear Prudie,
Recently, I have been put in an awkward situation with my
group of friends. All are involved in different charitable
organizations to which they ask me to donate. However, I do not
agree with the goals of every organization (particularly those
that are clearly religious in nature, as I'm agnostic bordering on
apathetic) and would like to be generous with only those whose
missions I support. But I'm pressured to give to all because each
friend knows that I've given to certain charities and expects me
to donate to theirs as well. I get guilt-tripped into giving and
resent it, especially when I need the money myself. The situation
became worse when my friend asked me to buy goods from her
son to support the Boys Scouts of America, and I refused
because I don't want to financially support an organization that is
openly intolerant toward homosexuals. She said I was being
selfish. How do I let my friends know that while I support their
right to support, I don't want anything to do with their causes?
—Philanthropicky
Dear Philanthropicky,
Since your friends think you are Bill and Melinda Gates rolled
into one, you have to take a firm stand with all of them. The
causes that move you to get out your checkbook are your own
business, so when your friends hit you up for the annual drive,
explain that you are on a budget and you have already earmarked
the organizations to which you are going to donate. From your
Boy Scouts discussion, it sounds like you make the mistake of
debating the merits of your friends' charitable ventures. Don't.
Just say you know there are many worthy causes, and so you
don't end up being a charity case yourself, you need to apply
discipline to your giving.
—Prudie
Deathwatch
A big-time supporter threatens to defect to Obama.
By Chris Wilson
The mortar in Clinton machine's bulwark, once thought to be
indestructible, continues to crumble as a once-faithful supporter
hints that he might defect. Plus, more good fundraising news for
the Obama camp brings Clinton to an even 9 percent chance of
survival.
On the face of it, New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine's statement this
morning on CNBC that he reserves the right to defect if Clinton
loses the popular vote sounds more inside baseball than headline
news. But consider these factors: Corzine endorsed Clinton more
than a year ago as part of Clinton's initial sweep of
superdelegates. (Yesterday was the anniversary of that
announcement.) A defection by Corzine would mean the
foundation is crumbling. Also, Clinton won the New Jersey
primary by 11 points on Feb. 5. Jersey is in her backyard, and
the fact that the governor would consider siding with the popular
vote over the overwhelming opinion of his constituents won't go
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overlooked by other superdelegates from states she won. If
Richardson is "Judas," what would that make Corzine?
Meanwhile, Obama announced $40 million in donations to his
campaign in March, including more than 200,000 first-time
contributors, according to the press release. The Clinton
campaign was reticent on their own figures, which likely won't
become public until the campaign files with the FEC down the
road.
Better for the Clinton campaign is how much traction its
"Obama can't win" jingle is gaining. The words are emblazoned
on the cover of today's New York Post, bannered on the Drudge
Report, and picked up by MSNBC's First Read. Now that
Obama's leads among pledged delegates and the popular vote
appear to be insurmountable, look for the Clinton campaign to
push this "electability" argument front and center.
A new poll from Quinnipiac University has Clinton ahead 50
percent to 41 percent in Pennsylvania, shaving a few degrees off
the incline of Obama's uphill fight in the next-to-vote state.
Previous polls had put Clinton ahead by double digits in this
must-win for her campaign. (A new Public Policy Polling survey
has Obama ahead by two points in AP, but this is an outlier for
now.) How much this matters depends whose narrative you buy.
The Clinton camp says "a win is a win." The Obama camp,
meanwhile, is tamping down expectations, despite outspending
Clinton at least 3-to-1 in the state. CW-meister Mark Halperin
says anything less than a 10-point win for Clinton in the
Keystone State means it's over for her.
For a full list of our Deathwatches, click here. For a primer on
Hillary's sinking ship, visit our first Deathwatch entry. Send
your own prognostications to [email protected].
Deathwatch
Strong head winds put the Clinton camp back in irons.
Group, he'll burnish Obama's foreign-policy credentials. (And
maybe his old-folk cred, too—Hamilton is 76.) Too bad he's not
a superdelegate. However, Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal,
who also endorsed Obama today, is.
Hamilton's home state, meanwhile, doesn't agree with him.
According to a new SurveyUSA poll, Clinton leads Obama by
nine points in Indiana. The state's May 6 primary is still a long
way off, and this is just one poll, but a major Clinton victory
there would hand the campaign a lifeline, even if Clinton still
can't make up the pledged-delegate count. In Pennsylvania,
Obama narrows the gap from 12 points to nine, according to a
Quinnipiac poll with a 2.5-point margin of error. A Rasmussen
poll puts the gap at five points. Again, there are still three weeks
until April 22, but the chances of a Clinton blowout appear to be
shrinking.
At the same time, some Dem bigwigs are easing off earlier
procedural recommendations that favored Obama. A day after
Nancy Pelosi said Clinton should stay in the race if she wants to,
Howard Dean says superdelegates should vote as independent
agents—not a revelation, but the statement backs away from
suggestions that superdelegates should ratify the pledgeddelegate count. That said, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid
agreed with Dean that superdelegates need to make up their
minds by July 1. For Clinton, time good, deadlines bad.
Lastly: Less money, more problems. Early estimates put
Obama's March fundraising total north of $30 million. Not as
hot as his $55 million February haul, but enough to dwarf
Clinton's estimated $20 million for March. This despite what
many consider Obama's worst news month yet. Meanwhile,
Clinton's debts are reportedly as high as $9 million, not
including her $5 million self-loan. Obama is already outspending
her 3-to-1 in Pennsylvania—and he can afford to continue.
There's a saying that candidates never drop out; they just run out
of cash.
Hillary's sinking ship, visit our first Deathwatch entry.
By Christopher Beam
Wednesday, April 2, 2008, at 1:25 PM ET
Send your own prognostications to
[email protected].
A high-profile Obama endorsement, a tightening race in
Pennsylvania, and a big March fundraising gap dock Hillary 0.4
points, taking her down to 9.5 percent on the Clintometer.
Deathwatch
The big news: Democratic national-security guru and former
Indiana Rep. Lee Hamilton is endorsing Barack Obama.
Hamilton's backing isn't expected to invigorate voters, Kennedystyle (though you saw how that worked out). But as a member of
the 9/11 commission and co-chair of the vaunted Iraq Study
Slow news is good news for Clinton.
By Chadwick Matlin
Tuesday, April 1, 2008, at 2:23 PM ET
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When you've got a 1-in-10 shot of winning the Democratic
nomination, a day without any major screw-ups is a good one.
After avoiding any major pitfalls—but also failing to lure
Obama into any traps—Clinton has buoyed her chances of
winning the nomination to 9.9 percent.
The good news first: Yesterday we relayed that the Wall Street
Journal was reporting that Obama was going to snag seven
North Carolina superdelegates in the coming days. It turns out
somebody jumped the gun. He'll get endorsements, but we don't
know how many. Meanwhile, in Mississippi, Obama picked up
two unexpected delegates, which tightens the vise on Clinton
yet again.
Also, Clinton crawled back to within four points of Obama in
today's national Gallup poll. Even better news: Enterprising poll
watchdogs discovered that Obama's Gallup numbers are
routinely better when the polling window includes the weekend
rather than only the workweek. Clinton and her pollster, Mark
Penn, now have license to toss grains of salt all over Obama's
resurgence in the polls. (Late-breaking developments may put an
end to the salt-sprinkling, though.)
Nancy Pelosi offered a little more sunshine in Hillaryland when
she told NPR's Morning Edition that Clinton should take the
nomination fight to the convention if she feels like it. For
Obama Democrats, that's like telling Clinton to take a knife and
start stabbing the party's heart while she's at it.
But all good things must come to an end. Word leaked that
Obama is outspending Clinton 3-to-1 in Pennsylvania, a
problem for Clinton's campaign, which is already beset by
rumors of financial trouble. Advertising usually leads to a surge
in the polls, and Obama already trails Clinton by a moderate 11
points in the Keystone State. If she can't counteract Obama's
advertising arsenal, she'll fall back to free media like her
appearance on Leno on Thursday to charm her way into
America's living rooms.
Worst of all, Canada has once again been injected into the
Democrats' nomination fight. In an interview with Canadian
public radio on Sunday, Missouri Rep. and Clinton
superdelegate Emanuel Cleaver said he'd be "stunned if [Barack
Obama] is not the next president of the United States." Cleaver,
who is black, said the African-American community would like
it if he backed Obama, but he wouldn't feel right if he made the
switch. He compared her to a football team that you know isn't
going to win, but you root for it anyway. That'll inspire
confidence.
And finally, from the Department of Bad Omens, Clinton
announced a foolish new theme song. It's the famous score from
Rocky. Only problem: Rocky loses to Apollo Creed at the end of
the first film.
Hillary's sinking ship, visit our first Deathwatch entry.
Deathwatch
Clinton vows to stay in the race despite financial woes, more Obama
endorsements, and bad news from Texas.
By Christopher Beam
UPDATE: Clinton's chances of winning have already gone up
0.2 percent since we wrote this. Click here for the latest
Deathwatch odds.
Lots of Clinton news over the weekend, not all bad—but bad
enough to dock her another 0.6 points in the Rodhameter,
bringing her chances of winning to 9.7 percent.
Roughest of all is the latest national Gallup poll, which gives
Obama a margin-of-error-busting lead of 10 points—his largest
this year. Rather than destroying him, maybe the Jeremiah
Wright flap only made him stronger (in the short term, at least).
That, or Bosnia is the new macaca.
But Clinton soldiers on. She vowed to the Washington Post on
Saturday that she would continue to the convention in August.
We would take her word for it, if promising to push on weren't a
frequent predictor of doing just the opposite. Meanwhile, Obama
ratcheted down the "Hillary must go" rhetoric, saying she can
stay in the race as long as she wants. Smart move to soften the
drop-out drumbeat, even if he himself never called for her to
exit. Too much cockiness could stoke a backlash.
Clinton still leads among superdelegates, 250 to 217, but
Obama continues to close the gap. Today, Minnesota Sen. Amy
Klobuchar endorses Obama—the 64th superdelegate to swing his
way since Feb. 5. (Clinton has lost at least eight in that same
period.) Everyone saw it coming, but a nail is still a nail. Make
that another prominent white woman (on top of Claire
McCaskill, Janet Napolitano, and Kathleen Sebelius) who
doesn't think Hillary should be the nominee. Meanwhile, the
Wall Street Journal reports that Obama has seven North
Carolina superdelegates lined up to endorse.
Things look equally dire on the financial front, as the Clinton
campaign struggles to pay its bills in a timely fashion. As the
Politico's Ken Vogel reported over the weekend, "If she had paid
off the $8.7 million in unpaid bills she reported as debt and had
not loaned her campaign $5 million, she would have been nearly
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$3 million in the red at the end of February." That the unpaid
bills include health insurance costs doesn't help.
But, hey, at least Clinton can make the case that she won big
states like Texas, right? Sadly, no. Final numbers are still
trickling in from the district and county conventions Texas held
on Saturday (Step 2 in the state's electoral freak show), but it
looks like Obama won the day—and, by extension, the state's
March 4 vote. Clinton netted five delegates in the primary, but
Obama's estimated nine-delegate net in the caucus puts him
ahead of her. Clinton will continue to say she won Texas, but if
you're talking about delegates, she didn't.
Meanwhile, violence in Iraq intensified—then cooled—as the
Maliki government cracked down on Shiite militias in Basra and
Baghdad. For Hillary, the Iraq imbroglio is double-edged. On
the one hand, Clinton loves her a national-security debate. But
on the other, it steers discussion back to that pesky 2003
authorization vote. Last time we checked, Clinton was nudging
the convo away from Iraq and toward Afghanistan, the invasion
everyone can agree on.
So, with a dip in the polls, another superdelegate lost, mounting
debt, and ugly numbers in Texas, the outlook in Hillaryland
remains bleak. On Saturday, Clinton compared the race to a
basketball game: "You know, we are in the fourth quarter and it
is a close contest. We are running up and down. We are taking
shots." The metaphor would work if she mentioned that Obama
is up by 124 points, he has the ball, and Clinton has been
missing shots all quarter. All she has now is hustle.
For a primer on Hillary's sinking ship, visit our first
Deathwatch entry.
In Pennsylvania, she suffered a setback in her efforts to win
endorsements and superdelegates when Sen. Bob Casey
endorsed Obama even though he said he was staying neutral in
the race. Casey comes from a long political lineage that is wellknown in the eastern part of the state and among Catholic
Pennsylvanians. Rubbing salt in the wound, Obama said he
didn't even court Casey's support—he entered the House of
Obama on his own volition.
Meanwhile, Sen. Patrick Leahy—an Obama supporter—called
for Clinton's withdrawal yesterday but then removed his foot
from his mouth and backed off the assertion today, saying it's a
decision "that only she can make." Even though he dialed back
his original statement, it adds another high-profile voice to the
growing din that Clinton is doing more harm than good by
sticking around. Chris Dodd—another Obama devotee—has
made similar comments.
Two statements from two head honchos are also draining
Clinton's momentum. Both Howard Dean and Al Gore said they
expected the nomination to be decided before the convention.
Pressure from the top will likely push superdelegates to side
with Obama or Clinton before August. Hillary's political clock is
ticking.
For a primer on Hillary's sinking ship, visit our first Deathwatch
entry.
did you see this?
Predator Rap
Deathwatch
A great day for Obama means a nasty day for Hillary.
By Chadwick Matlin
Friday, March 28, 2008, at 5:28 PM ET
Friday was not kind to Hillary Clinton. Based on Deathwatch's
top-secret morbidity formula, Hillary tanked on four metrics
today, reducing her chances of winning the nomination by 1.7
points to 10.3 percent.
The nastiest news for Clinton is in the polls. She has drifted
eight points behind Obama in a national Gallup survey—the first
time that she has trailed Obama by a statistically significant
margin since the Rev. Wright imbroglio. Every point she loses in
the national polls pushes her a bit closer to Davy Jones' locker.
drink
Cognac Attack!
The king of brandies is back. Which ones are worth drinking?
By Mike Steinberger
In December, six British men were given multiyear prison
sentences for hijacking a French delivery truck and stealing
$168,000 worth of Courvoisier cognac. To anyone familiar with
the recent ups and downs of the cognac market, it is a tale with
symbolic resonance. In the late 1990s, you almost couldn't give
France's most famous brandy away; these days, cognac sales are
at record levels, producers are struggling to keep up with
demand, and highway robberies are cutting into the available
supply. So how did cognac get its groove back? Credit its revival
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to an unlikely union of American rap stars, Chinese and Russian
fat cats, and hipster bartenders.
That cognac ever fell on hard times was a mighty comedown for
the so-called king of brandies. Cognac is prized for its complex
perfume, its refined flavor, and its staying power on the palate.
Some find it a little too regal. A.J. Liebling preferred Calvados,
the apple-based spirit from Normandy, which he claimed had "a
more agreeable bouquet, a warmer touch to the heart, and a more
outgoing personality than Cognac." Apart from a few dissenting
opinions, however, cognac has always been considered the
classiest and most pleasurable brandy.
As it happens, my lone visit to the Cognac region, located on the
Atlantic coast just north of Bordeaux, was in 1999, when the
crisis was at its peak. It was just a few weeks before the turn of
the millennium, and the mood in Cognac, even among the big
four producers—Courvoisier, Hennessy, Martell, and Rémy
Martin—was apocalyptic. Japan's prolonged economic malaise
and the financial meltdown that struck the rest of East Asia in
1997 had hit cognac hard, and the single-malt scotch mania then
sweeping Western yuppiedom had come as another heavy blow.
Sales were stagnant, local grape growers were staging violent
protests, and cognac was burdened with the worst possible
image—it was seen as an old fart's drink, a digestif for tuxedoed
geezers smoking cigars in wood-paneled libraries. The future for
Cognac seemed as dark as its cellars, and even if I hadn't been a
fan of the region's signature tipple, the gloom I encountered
there would have driven me to drink.
Amid all the despair, however, the makings of a resurrection
were already sliding into place. Cognac had always enjoyed a
strong following among African-Americans, and during the
1990s, it became a staple of rap lyrics. References to yak and
nyak began turning up in hip-hop songs, a trend that reached its
apogee with the 2001 Busta Rhymes/P. Diddy duet "Pass the
Courvoisier." ("Give me the Henny/ You can give me the Cris/
You can pass me the Rémy/ But pass the Courvoisier.")
Although a spokesman for Busta later admitted to the New York
Times that the performer had used Courvoisier simply because it
fit in the song and was actually a Hennessy man, the hit anthem
gave Courvoisier a huge boost in sales, and the shout-out from
the rap community sent cognac's cachet soaring, a development
that was the subject of bemused coverage in the business press.
It's believed that the African-American community now
accounts for anywhere from 60 percent to 80 percent of U.S.
sales. According to Impact Databank, 4 million cases of cognac
were sold in the United States last year, more than double the
number a decade ago.
Another bump has come from the cocktail renaissance that
began in the 1990s. The "mixology" fad, with its bar chefs,
cocktail stylists, and outré concoctions, has been a tonic for
almost the entire spirits sector, and the cognac industry is no
exception. In fact, some credit the Hennessy martini, which
became popular in the mid-1990s, with jump-starting the
cocktail revival. Cognac has been used for cocktails as far back
as the 19th century. One of the all-time classic mixed drinks, the
sidecar, supposedly invented in Paris during World War I, is
composed of cognac, Cointreau, and lemon juice; it is now
coming back into fashion, and the mixology phenomenon has
also given rise to some new cognac-based drinks. The cognac
region recently played host to an International Cognac Summit,
during which a group of eminent mixologists invented a drink
called "the summit," composed of cognac, lemonade, lime zest,
cucumber peel, and fresh ginger.
The third leg in cognac's rebuilt stool is the growing affluence of
China and Russia. While the United States is still cognac's
largest export market, taking roughly one of every three bottles
shipped abroad, demand in both China and Russia is surging.
With cognac imports growing 20 percent to 30 percent annually,
China has now eclipsed Britain as cognac's second-biggest
overseas market. Business is flourishing in Russia, too, and not
just for the big-four exporters. Some smaller producers, notably
Delamain and Audry, also command strong followings there. So
great is the Russian thirst for cognac that they are even invading
the vineyards: Last year, an outfit called the Russian Wine Trust
acquired Croizet, a cognac house founded in 1805.
All three factors in combination have created a global cognac
frenzy. In 2007, a record 158 million bottles were sold
worldwide, and the cognac houses are naturally rushing to cash
in on the flush times, particularly at the high end. Hennessy
recently introduced a new cognac, called Beauté du Siècle,
whose specs are as over-the-top as its name: Only 100 bottles are
being produced, the bottles are all made of Baccarat crystal, each
one comes in an ornate mirrored chest apparently fashioned by a
team of 10 artists, and the cognac is hand-delivered to buyers by
members of the Hennessy board. The cost? $235,000 per bottle.
Most cognacs don't require six-figure investments, but given all
the branding, marketing, and elaborate packaging, cognac is not
cheap, and the combination of spiraling global demand and a
sickly U.S. dollar is only ratcheting up the cost. VSes, the
lowest-rung cognacs (ranked thus because they are the least
aged), typically go for between $25 and $35, while VSOPs, one
level up, fetch $35 to $50 per bottle. XOs, the premium
offerings, normally sell for $70 and up. The tariffs are stiff,
though it is worth bearing in mind that an open bottle of cognac
can be consumed over a number of months.
So which cognacs are worth drinking, and how should you drink
them? VSes and VSOPs are generally considered cocktail
material, while XOs are usually left unadulterated. (Click here
for more information on the differences among VS, VSOP, and
XO.) Purists—curmudgeons, if you prefer—find the whole
cognac-as-cocktail thing a bit louche. Not being the shaken-andstirred type myself, I definitely prefer cognac straight up. On the
other hand, less-aged cognacs, even most VSOPs, are not much
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fun on their own (the flavors are often harsh and unharmonious)
and work better in combination with other spirits, soda, or tonic.
Moreover, VSes and VSOPs account for 85 percent of all the
cognac on the market, and if the mixology phenomenon is
helping support production at all levels—and clearly it is—then I
say mix away.
As for specific cognac producers, my taste runs to the little guys.
The big four, which soak up more than 90 percent of cognac
sales in the United States, turn out very good XOs, but I find that
the brandies made by some of the smaller houses are more
distinctive. I also prefer them because they tend to show more
fruit and flowers, less heat and wood. Delamain Pale & Dry
XO ($120) is a personal favorite —a mellow cognac, with
terrific aromas of dried fruits, flowers, licorice, vanilla, and
spice, leading to an eternal finish. I also love the Audry Réserve
Spéciale ($115), a buttery-smooth elixir with a bouquet of
honey, nuts, baking spices, flowers, and minerals. (If you've got
the dosh, Delamain and Audry both produce higher-end cognacs
that are even more ethereal.) Hine is another insider's choice.
The Hine Antique XO ($145) is an elegant brandy marked by
orange peel, wood, floral, and spice flavors that show great
persistence. Hine also produces an excellent VSOP that, rare for
this category, drinks well straight up. Fittingly, it is called Hine
Rare VSOP ($50). It doesn't have the complexity of the
Antique, but it has good fruit and floral scents along with an
appealing nutty note, and it goes down very nicely. I am also a
fan of Frapin. Frapin's Chateau Fontpinot XO ($108) is a laidback, delicious cognac, redolent of toffee, wood, earth, and
menthol. Having any of these cognacs after a good meal is
almost enough to make me want to throw on my tux, grab a
cigar, and join those geezers in the library.
sidebar
Return to article
Cognac Attack!
Over the centuries, various grapes have been used for cognac;
the principal one these days is ugni blanc, an otherwisepedestrian variety that just happens to make for great brandy.
The grapes are grown in six different districts that ring the town
of Cognac in a series of concentric circles. In descending order
of prestige, they are Grande Champagne, Petite Champagne (the
two Champagnes have nothing to do with the sparkling wine,
but, like the Champagne region, they are known for their chalkysoil influences), Borderies, Fins Bois, Bons Bois, and Bois
Ordinaires. (The term "Fine Champagne," which appears on
some labels, means that the cognac was made from a blend of
eaux de vie produced in the two Champagne districts; to be
designated as such, however, it must contain more than 50
percent Grande Champagne grapes.)
Cognac is made through a double distillation of the base wine,
which yields an eau de vie that is around 70 percent alcohol.
Years of maturation in oak casks evaporates much of the alcohol
(the evaporated content is poetically referred to as "the angels'
share"). Depending on how much natural evaporation takes
place, distilled water or low-alcohol spirits may be added to take
the alcohol level of the finished brandy down to 40 percent,
which is the norm, and the minimum required.
Cognacs are categorized according to the amount of aging they
have received. VS, or "very special," contains eaux de vie that
have spent at least two years in barrels. VSOP, or "very superior
old pale," requires a minimum of four years' aging. XO, or
"extra old," requires a minimum of six years, although the eaux
de vie used for the better XOs tend to be much older.
dvd extras
Fugue Interstate
Lost Highway—the O.J. Simpson story by way of Vertigo as imagined by David
Lynch—finally comes to DVD.
By Dennis Lim
Dismissed by reviewers and ignored by audiences in 1997, Lost
Highway has come to occupy an increasingly central place in
David Lynch's evolution. This malevolent neo-noir was a return
to first principles—not since his hallucinatory debut, Eraserhead
(1977), had a Lynch film so completely taken up residence
inside someone's head—but it was also a sign of things to come.
Except for the G-rated detour of The Straight Story (1999),* his
subsequent films—the sumptuous Hollywood nightmare
Mulholland Drive (2001) and its degraded video corollary
Inland Empire (2006)—have assumed the form devised in Lost
Highway. All three, which could be said to make up a psychosis
trilogy, are nonlinear puzzle-movies in which the otherworldly
ambience and the rifts in space-time are a direct outgrowth of the
protagonist's mental trauma.
Simply put—simple being a relative concept here—Lost
Highway is the story of a jazz musician (Bill Pullman) who
apparently kills his possibly unfaithful wife (Patricia Arquette),
then turns into someone else (Balthazar Getty) who promptly
begins an affair with the dead woman's doppelgänger (Arquette
again), or maybe it's the same woman, not actually dead and
wearing a blond wig.
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The film has taken ages to make its way to DVD, and in a rudely
perfunctory edition at that—not a single extra, unless you count
subtitles. (The British and French releases, featuring interviews
with Lynch and the actors, are superior options if you have a
multiregion player.)
Still, Lost Highway has attracted a growing cult. Critics
complained about its incoherence, but today the film seems
easier to parse than, say, Inland Empire or even cult brainteasers
like Memento, Donnie Darko, and Primer. With its myriad
doublings and insistent twinning of the sex and death drives, it
has been a goldmine for psychoanalytically inclined scholars
(including philosopher Slavoj Žižek), who have deciphered the
plot in terms of repressed memory, wish fulfillment, and
repetition compulsion. Despite his famous aversion to
interpretations, Lynch has encouraged these psychological
readings by describing the hero's condition as a "psychogenic
fugue" (a disorder whose main feature, according to the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, is "sudden, unexpected travel
away from home … with inability to recall one's past").
It's not just shrinks and academics who have been inspired.
David Foster Wallace's essay in Premiere magazine on the
making of the film is a masterful blend of set-visit reporting and
critical biography. One of the movie's eeriest plot points—a
couple terrorized by surveillance videotapes—later turned up in
Michael Haneke's Caché. Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth,
making an explicit link between a psychological and a musical
fugue, reimagined Lost Highway as an avant-garde opera, with a
libretto by novelist and Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek. "When I
saw the film for the first time," Jelinek said, "it was like a blow
to my brain stem."
Those who love or loathe Lost Highway, which Lynch co-wrote
with novelist Barry Gifford, probably do so for much the same
reason: It's visceral to the point of discomfort. The first third—
practically wordless, confined to interiors, scored to an
especially bass-heavy version of Lynch's signature drone—is a
sustained creepfest that belongs with the retreat into the Black
Lodge in the Twin Peaks finale or the Club Silencio interlude in
Mulholland Drive. Fred and Renee (Pullman and Arquette) live
in a big, bare Modernist box and in a constant state of nameless
dread. Their conversations are stilted and ominous, and so is the
sex. Rooms are balefully underlit; labyrinthine corridors lead
into pitch darkness. (Lynch bought the building, in the
Hollywood Hills, especially for the film, and it now houses his
production facility; he lives next door.)
The paranoid mood intensifies with the mysterious appearance
of VHS cassettes on Fred and Renee's doorstep: Apparently
someone is taping them as they sleep.
The use of video here foreshadows Lynch's conversion to digital.
After shooting Inland Empire on consumer-grade video, he
vowed never to go back to celluloid. Even in Lost Highway,
beautifully shot on film by Peter Deming, it's clear that to Lynch,
video communicates a different kind of truth. The tapes are not
mere stalker artifacts; they signal the return of the repressed.
When a detective asks whether the couple owns a camcorder,
Fred says he hates them, and his explanation is telling: "I like to
remember things my own way … not necessarily how they
happened." The discovery of Renee's dead body, not
incidentally, happens on video.
Lynch later revealed that the film's basic drives—murderous
jealousy and repressed guilt—emerged from an obsession with
the O.J. Simpson case. Interviewed on the French DVD, he says,
"Here's a guy who—at least I believe, you know—committed
two murders and yet is able to go on living and speaking and,
you know, doing and golfing. … How does the mind protect
itself from that knowledge and go on?"
The O.J. connection makes the presence of Robert Blake in a
pivotal role all the more unnerving. (Blake was later tried and
acquitted for the murder of his wife.) The first act reaches its
sinister peak with the appearance of Blake's kabuki-faced ghoul.
Accosting Fred at a party, the Mystery Man, as he's identified in
the credits, claims he's at Fred's house at that very moment and
proves it with one of the freakiest phone calls in film history.
The scene is a textbook illustration of that uncanny sensation so
specific to Lynch films that they are often simply called
Lynchian (per David Foster Wallace, "one of those Potter
Stewart-type words that's definable only ostensively—i.e., we
know it when we see it"). At their creepiest, Lynchian moments
involve a shock of recognition (or self-recognition) and a
metaphysical impossibility: déjà vu, seeing a doppelgänger,
being in two places at once. When the heroines of Mulholland
Drive are huddled in Club Silencio, the onstage cabaret is
revealed as a sham (the singer collapses but the song goes on),
forcing Naomi Watts to confront the failure of her own fantasy.
In Inland Empire, Laura Dern finds that she has somehow
wandered back to an earlier point in the film and is spying on …
herself.
In the trance state that often takes over in Lynch's films, these
moments are the equivalent of a hypnotist's clap. Sometimes
these rupture points, when illusions fall apart or the action shifts
from one reality to another, are cued by code words or phrases
that recur throughout, gaining mystical significance with each
repetition: "This is the girl" from Mulholland Drive; "I'm not
who you think I am" from Inland Empire.
Lost Highway has its own magic phrase. In the first scene, the
intercom buzzes at Fred and Renee's house, and a voice declares,
"Dick Laurant is dead." When Fred looks out the window,
there's no one there. (Lynch says this happened to him one day,
an unknown voice intoning those very words.) At the end of the
film, the same intercom buzzes and the same phrase is spoken,
but this time Fred is the speaker, not the listener.
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The narrative resolves into a Möbius strip, ending where it
begins (albeit from a jarringly different perspective). The lost
highway that races by in the David Bowie-scored opening
credits is not quite a road to nowhere but, perhaps more
alarming, an infinite loop. The relation between circular form
and obsessive content attests to the vortexlike pull of Hitchcock's
Vertigo, a sacred text for Lynch (who also explored the blondbrunette dichotomy in Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive). Žižek
argues that the narrative's shape mirrors "the very loop of the
psychoanalytic treatment in which, after a long detour, we return
to our starting point."
Lynch made Lost Highway after a five-year silence (his previous
feature, the widely panned Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, had
depleted his cachet), and it appears to have unlocked something
in him. The movie is itself a rupture point within the Lynch
cosmos. It moved his films even closer to the logic of the
unconscious, not least his own. In the French DVD interview, he
acknowledged as much. The protagonist's flight from reality
"has a beautiful feel to it," he says. "I get the psychogenic fugue
almost every afternoon."
double-digit increases among voters who care most about health
care, the economy, and the war in Iraq.
But again, these are numbers we haven't seen anywhere else
before. Two other polls taken during a similar time span—but
using different methodologies—both had Obama trailing
Clinton.
Election Scorecard uses data supplied by Mark Blumenthal and
Charles Franklin at Pollster.com.
Posted by Chadwick Matlin, April 3, 1:32 p.m.
Delegates at stake:
*Correction, April 1, 2008: This story mistakenly stated that
David Lynch's The Straight Story was rated PG. (Return to the
corrected sentence.)
election scorecard
Outliers in Pennsylvania
Obama takes ownership of the lead in Pennsylvania, but there's reason to be
cautious.
By Chadwick Matlin
The last time PPP polled Pennsylvania, Barack Obama was
down by 26 points. That was two and a half weeks ago, after the
Rev. Wright controversy but before Obama's speech about race
in America. PPP did another sweep through the state this week
and found drastically different results.
According to PPP (PDF), Obama is leading Clinton in
Pennsylvania by two points. That's a 28 point shift in the margin
between the two Democrats, and it's one that was unexpected.
Pollster.com's polling average shows Obama trailing Clinton by
10 points in the state—far from PPP's numbers. No other poll
has ever shown Obama in the lead in the state.
Obama's lead comes from a shift in support from demographics
across the board. His numbers with men, women, AfricanAmericans, baby boomers, and seniors are all up. He's made
Democrats
Republicans
Total delegates:
4,049
Total delegates
needed to win: 2,025
Total delegates: 2,380
Total delegates
needed to win: 1,191
Delegates won by each
candidate:
Obama: 1,626; Clinton:
1,486
Delegates won by each
candidate:
McCain: 1,325; Huckabee
(out): 267; Paul: 16
Source: CNN
Source: CNN
Want more Slate election coverage? Check out
Map the Candidates, Political Futures, Trailhead,
XX Factor, and our Campaign Junkie page!
.
.
explainer
Do April Showers Bring May Flowers?
Not quite.
By Samantha Henig
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Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
The month of April kicked off with severe storms soaking much
of the country. The old adage would have us believe that all this
rain bodes well for next month's blossoms. But do April showers
really bring May flowers?
Explainer thanks Charlie Nardozzi of the National Gardening
Association, Phil Normandy of Brookside Gardens, Jody Payne
of the New York Botanical Gardens, and Thomas C. Vogelmann
of University of Vermont.
No more so than showers in May or September. Exactly which
rainy period has the biggest effect on growth depends on
whether you're looking at perennials or annuals. Perennials,
which are plants whose roots stay alive even after the part
aboveground dies, usually pop up as the first proud trumpeters of
spring. If you're in Maine or England, that's likely to be in May;
farther south, it makes more sense to call them late-March and
early-April flowers. (Some perennials like the Cyclamen coum
have the audacity to show up and thrive as early as January.)
explainer
Regardless of when the perennials bloom, the rainfall of the
previous month isn't that relevant. Plants such as tulips and
daffodils, two common perennials, sprout from bulbs that have
been in the ground since at least the previous autumn, which is
when their buds were forming and roots were growing. So if
there had been a severe drought in September, the tulips and
daffodils may suffer months later. Once the foliage starts
peeking through the soil in early spring, rainfall again becomes
important. If there's a drought, the perennials won't grow as
high, and they wither faster. But in most years, there's enough
moisture in the soil from the winter's snow to sustain the spring
flowers.
The New York Times reports that two men in Hawaii have filed a
lawsuit in federal court to stop the construction of a particle
accelerator near Geneva. The plaintiffs claim that the facility on
the French-Swiss border—which is partially funded by the U.S.
government—might create bizarre physical conditions that
would lead to the creation of a black hole capable of swallowing
the planet. The case is set for an initial conference with the
Justice Department in mid-June. Could the government be
legally responsible for risking the apocalypse?
Whatever effect April's showers do have on May flowers tends
to be negative. Too much rain while the plants are blossoming
makes them more susceptible to diseases like Botrytis blight,
which causes buds to shrivel before they open.
For annuals, which are the flowers that must be replanted every
year, lifespan and growth are influenced by the rainfall in the
months immediately after they're planted, not the month before.
Summer annuals like petunias, marigolds, geraniums, tomatoes,
and cucumbers go into the ground after the frost-free date, which
varies by region but hovers around late April. Once planted, they
must receive enough water during the next few months to stay
healthy. (The exact amount depends on heat and wind, but a
good rule of thumb is that if you stick a finger into the soil and
feel some moisture, you're good.) Too much heavy rain can beat
them down or, if the soil isn't draining properly, drown their
roots and kill them. But April showers would have no effect on
annuals planted in May.
The one place where April showers would truly bring May
flowers is the desert. In arid regions like the Mojave, plants sit
under the sand, sometimes for years, just waiting for enough
water to send up shoots and leaves. A few weeks—or sometimes
even days—after a heavy rainfall, the desert will explode with
color.
Apocalypse No!
Is the U.S. government liable for the end of the world?
By Chris Wilson
No. For cases like the one filed last month against the Large
Hadron Collider in Geneva, the plaintiffs face several virtually
insurmountable barriers in U.S. courts. As part of the
demonstration of standing, they must prove damages or the
threat of damages, known as "injury-in-fact." In this case, they
must demonstrate that the threat posed by the LHC is genuine
and significant. When one of the same plaintiffs filed a similar
case against the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in 1999, a
California court ruled that his claims were "speculative" and that
he failed to prove any imminent risk.
There is no hard and fast rule for how probable a risk must be in
order to qualify as injury-in-fact. In 2006, the D.C. Circuit Court
of Appeals ruled (PDF) that that the Natural Resources Defense
Council had standing to sue the EPA over ozone depletion on the
basis of a risk of nonfatal skin cancer in one out of 200,000
people. However, even physicists who have been charitable to
the concerns over the particle accelerator overwhelmingly say
the probability of a disaster is many orders of magnitude smaller
than that.
Even if the plaintiffs could gain standing in their case—a matter
that would also involve questions of when individuals have
standing on environmental threats—they would have to
demonstrate that those overseeing the collider had broken the
law in some way. The current lawsuit charges that the
defendants, including the U.S. Department of Energy, violated
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the National Environmental Policy Act by failing to adequately
notify the public of safety concerns.
The lawsuit also argues that the defendants ignored the
"precautionary principle," an approach to weighing the promises
and risks of research. A definition of the principle drafted by a
1998 consortium stated, in part, that when a line of research
posed a threat to humans, "the proponent of an activity, rather
than the public, should bear the burden of proof." But while the
precautionary principle has not been enshrined in law in the
United States, the European Union has incorporated the doctrine
into many of its policies, based on guidelines adopted in 2000.
The plaintiffs in the LHC case directly charge the Center for
Nuclear Energy Research, which operates the collider, with
violating the EU's precautionary principle. However, the center
is outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts.
Explainer thanks the Department of Energy, Cass Sunstein of the
University of Chicago, and Jonathan Turley of George
Washington University.
corn intended for human or animal consumption decreases,
prices go up. Why does this local shift in policy affect food
prices around the world? The diversion of American corn into
energy has a ripple effect for two reasons: First, the United
States is the world's largest corn exporter, accounting for about
40 percent of global trade, so when corn-as-food production
decreases here, costs go up everywhere. Second, when the price
of corn increases, farmers in the United States, Europe, and
elsewhere who use the crop to feed livestock look for cheaper
alternatives, like wheat or sorghum. These alternatives, in turn,
become more expensive.
Another factor is the improved standard of living in rapidly
developing countries. The demand for foodstuffs like meat and
dairy is on the rise in China and India, sending costs skyward not
only for those items but for the grain used as cattle feed. Finally,
weather deserves a share of the blame. Australia has seen bad
droughts six years running, and last year there was major
flooding in Argentina. Since both of these countries are major
dairy exporters, milk and butter are pricier than they used to be.
Explainer thanks Brenda Barton of the World Food Program
and Brian Halweil of the Worldwatch Institute.
explainer
Why Are Global Food Prices Soaring?
Energy costs, investment in ethanol, bad weather in Australia …
By Juliet Lapidos
explainer
Why Does China Care About Tibet?
Plus, when are monks allowed to get violent?
The U.N. World Food Program's executive director told the Los
Angeles Times that "a perfect storm" is hitting the world's
hungry, as demand for aid surges while food prices skyrocket.
Cost increases are affecting most countries around the globe,
with prices for dairy products up 80 percent, cooking oils up 50
percent, and grains up 42 percent from 2006 to 2007. (For more
specifics on how prices have changed since 2000, the U.N. Food
and Agriculture Organization has a handy chart.) Why are
groceries getting so expensive all at once?
Energy prices. The global food system is heavily dependent on
petroleum, not just for shipping goods from one location to
another but also for production, packaging, and processing. As
the price of oil rises—crude oil is currently hovering at around
$100 a barrel—so do the costs of planting, harvesting, and
delivering food.
High oil prices have also created a secondary problem: The
burgeoning interest in biofuels. In 2006, 14 percent of the total
corn crop in the United States was converted into ethanol; by
2010, that figure will rise to 30 percent. When the production of
By Nina Shen Rastogi
Buddhist monks and other Tibetans began protesting in and
around Lhasa on March 10, the anniversary of a major uprising
against Chinese rule. Tensions have been flaring in the region
ever since, with some protests turning violent. Tibet is a remote,
impoverished mountain region with little arable land. Why does
China care so much about keeping it?
Nationalism. China invaded Tibet in 1950, but Beijing asserts
that its close relationship with the region stretches back to the
13th century, when first Tibet and then China were absorbed into
the rapidly expanding Mongol empire. The Great Khanate, or the
portion of the empire that contained China, Tibet, and most of
East Asia, eventually became known as China's Yuan Dynasty.
Throughout the Yuan and the subsequent Ming and Qing
dynasties, Tibet remained a subordinate principality of China,
though its degree of independence varied over the centuries.
When British forces began making inroads into Tibet from India
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in the early 1900s, the Qing emperors forcefully reasserted their
suzerainty over the region.
Soon after, revolutionaries overthrew the Qing emperor—who,
being Manchu, was cast as a foreign presence in Han-majority
China—and formed a republic. Tibet took the opportunity to
assert its independence and, from 1912 to 1950, ruled itself
autonomously. However, Tibetan sovereignty was never
recognized by China, the United Nations, or any major Western
power. Both Sun Yat-sen's Nationalists and their rivals, Mao
Zedong's Communists, believed that Tibet remained
fundamentally a part of China and felt a strong nationalistic
drive to return the country to its Qing-era borders. The 1950
takeover of Tibet by Mao's army was billed as the liberation of
the region from the old, semi-feudal system, as well as from
imperialist (i.e., British and American) influences. Resentment
of the Chinese grew among Tibetans over the following decade,
and armed conflicts broke out in various parts of the region. In
March 1959, the capital of Lhasa erupted in a full-blown but
short-lived revolt, during which the current Dalai Lama fled to
India. He has lived there in exile ever since.
There are also strategic and economic motives for China's
attachment to Tibet. The region serves as a buffer zone between
China on one side and India, Nepal, and Bangladesh on the
other. The Himalayan mountain range provides an added level of
security as well as a military advantage. Tibet also serves as a
crucial water source for China and possesses a significant
mining industry. And Beijing has invested billions in Tibet over
the past 10 years as part of its wide-ranging economic
development plan for Western China.
Bonus Explainer: When are Buddhist monks allowed to get
violent? When it's for a compassionate cause. Monks and nuns in
Tibet take at least two, and sometimes three, sets of vows that
constrain their behavior. For most violations, the penalty is
usually a confession that the act was committed. But if a monk
were to kill another human being—one of the most serious
violations of the Pratimoksha vows—he would be liable to
expulsion from the monastery. That being said, there is a
tradition in Tibetan mythology that could be used to justify
taking violent action against an oppressor. The ninth-century
king Langdarma, a follower of the Bön tradition, is popularly
believed to have persecuted Buddhists during his reign. A monk
assassinated him on the grounds that, by killing Langdarma, the
monk was acting compassionately toward the tyrant—taking bad
karma upon himself in order to spare the king from
accumulating the same through his despotic actions.
It's important to note, however, that the actual extent to which
monks were responsible for the violence in Tibet remains
unclear. Monks instigated the initial demonstrations, but lay
Tibetans may have ratcheted up those protests to riot status.
Explainer thanks Robert Barnett of the Weatherhead East Asian
Institute at Columbia University, Andrew Fischer of the London
School of Economics, Melvyn Goldstein of the Center for
Research on Tibet at Case Western Reserve University, and
Jonathan Silk of Leiden University.
fighting words
The Tall Tale of Tuzla
Hillary Clinton's Bosnian misadventure should disqualify her from the
presidency, but the airport landing is the least of it.
By Christopher Hitchens
The punishment visited on Sen. Hillary Clinton for her flagrant,
hysterical, repetitive, pathological lying about her visit to Bosnia
should be much heavier than it has yet been and should be
exacted for much more than just the lying itself. There are two
kinds of deliberate and premeditated deceit, commonly known as
suggestio falsi and suppressio veri. (Neither of them is covered
by the additionally lying claim of having "misspoken.") The first
involves what seems to be most obvious in the present case: the
putting forward of a bogus or misleading account of events. But
the second, and often the more serious, means that the liar in
question has also attempted to bury or to obscure something that
actually is true. Let us examine how Sen. Clinton has managed
to commit both of these offenses to veracity and decency and
how in doing so she has rivaled, if not indeed surpassed, the
disbarred and perjured hack who is her husband and tutor.
I remember disembarking at the Sarajevo airport in the summer
of 1992 after an agonizing flight on a U.N. relief plane that had
had to "corkscrew" its downward approach in order to avoid
Serbian flak and ground fire. As I hunched over to scuttle the
distance to the terminal, a mortar shell fell as close to me as I
ever want any mortar shell to fall. The vicious noise it made is
with me still. And so is the shock I felt at seeing a civilized and
multicultural European city bombarded round the clock by an
ethno-religious militia under the command of fascistic
barbarians. I didn't like the Clinton candidacy even then, but I
have to report that many Bosnians were enthused by Bill
Clinton's pledge, during that ghastly summer, to abandon the
hypocritical and sordid neutrality of the George H.W.
Bush/James Baker regime and to come to the defense of the
victims of ethnic cleansing.
I am recalling these two things for a reason. First, and even
though I admit that I did once later misidentify a building in
Sarajevo from a set of photographs, I can tell you for an absolute
certainty that it would be quite impossible to imagine that one
had undergone that experience at the airport if one actually had
not. Yet Sen. Clinton, given repeated chances to modify her
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absurd claim to have operated under fire while in the company
of her then-16-year-old daughter and a USO entertainment
troupe, kept up a stone-faced and self-loving insistence that, yes,
she had exposed herself to sniper fire in the cause of gaining
moral credit and, perhaps to be banked for the future, nationalsecurity "experience." This must mean either a) that she lies
without conscience or reflection; or b) that she is subject to
fantasies of an illusory past; or c) both of the above. Any of the
foregoing would constitute a disqualification for the presidency
of the United States.
Yet this is only to underline the YouTube version of events and
the farcical or stupid or Howard Wolfson (take your pick)
aspects of the story. But here is the historical rather than
personal aspect, which is what you should keep your eye on.
Note the date of Sen. Clinton's visit to Tuzla. She went there in
March 1996. By that time, the critical and tragic phase of the
Bosnia war was effectively over, as was the greater part of her
husband's first term. What had happened in the interim? In
particular, what had happened to the 1992 promise, four years
earlier, that genocide in Bosnia would be opposed by a Clinton
administration?
In the event, President Bill Clinton had not found it convenient
to keep this promise. Let me quote from Sally Bedell Smith's
admirable book on the happy couple, For Love of Politics:
Taking the advice of Al Gore and National
Security Advisor Tony Lake, Bill agreed to a
proposal to bomb Serbian military positions
while helping the Muslims acquire weapons to
defend themselves—the fulfillment of a pledge
he had made during the 1992 campaign. But
instead of pushing European leaders, he
directed Secretary of State Warren Christopher
merely to consult with them. When they
balked at the plan, Bill quickly retreated,
creating a "perception of drift." The key factor
in Bill's policy reversal was Hillary, who was
said to have "deep misgivings" and viewed the
situation as "a Vietnam that would
compromise health-care reform." The United
States took no further action in Bosnia, and the
"ethnic cleansing" by the Serbs was to
continue for four more years, resulting in the
deaths of more than 250,000 people.
I can personally witness to the truth of this, too. I can remember,
first, one of the Clintons' closest personal advisers—Sidney
Blumenthal—referring with acid contempt to Warren
Christopher as "a blend of Pontius Pilate with Ichabod Crane." I
can remember, second, a meeting with Clinton's then-Secretary
of Defense Les Aspin at the British Embassy. When I challenged
him on the sellout of the Bosnians, he drew me aside and told
me that he had asked the White House for permission to land his
own plane at Sarajevo airport, if only as a gesture of reassurance
that the United States had not forgotten its commitments. The
response from the happy couple was unambiguous: He was to do
no such thing, lest it distract attention from the first lady's health
care "initiative."
It's hardly necessary for me to point out that the United States
did not receive national health care in return for its acquiescence
in the murder of tens of thousands of European civilians. But
perhaps that is the least of it. Were I to be asked if Sen. Clinton
has ever lost any sleep over those heaps of casualties, I have the
distinct feeling that I could guess the answer. She has no tears
for anyone but herself. In the end, and over her strenuous
objections, the United States and its allies did rescue our honor
and did put an end to Slobodan Milosevic and his statesupported terrorism. Yet instead of preserving a polite reticence
about this, or at least an appropriate reserve, Sen. Clinton now
has the obscene urge to claim the raped and slaughtered people
of Bosnia as if their misery and death were somehow to be
credited to her account! Words begin to fail one at this point. Is
there no such thing as shame? Is there no decency at last? Let the
memory of the truth, and the exposure of the lie, at least make us
resolve that no Clinton ever sees the inside of the White House
again.
fixing it
Health Care Policy
Do it first, don't write a bill, and let someone else take the credit.
By Ezra Klein
Much of the next president's job will involve cleaning up George
W. Bush's messes: Iraq. Guantanamo. A government starved for
revenue. Cheetos under the desk in the Oval Office. But in the
case of health care, it's more about cleaning up a mess the
president mostly ignored and only occasionally exacerbated.
Here's what has happened: Since 2000, employer-based health
insurance premiums have shot up 100 percent. Wage growth has
hardly represented one-fifth of that. About 10 million Americans
have joined the ranks of the uninsured, and according to at least
one estimate, more than 100,000 Americans have died because
they lacked access to quality care. Health costs have continued
their double-time march, and economists now estimate that, if
left unchecked, government health spending will be about 37
percent of the GDP by 2050. Add in private health spending, and
the Brookings Institution's Henry Aron estimates that "the
income that's left over for everything else in the economy, other
than taxes and private health care spending, stops growing and
… actually declines."
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On health care, the vital question for the next president isn't
merely what to do but how to do it. Reform requires much more
than a willing executive, as anyone who worked in the Clinton
White House between the years of 1992 and 1994 can tell you.
The problem is not just policy—Washington is stuffed with
wonks and idea entrepreneurs eager to explain how to fix the
health care system—it's politics. Without 60 votes in the Senate,
you don't have a policy. You have a position. And nobody is
going to get good, affordable medical care from a position paper.
Sadly, there's a long history of executives coming in with a clear
position paper explaining what they want to do to fix health care
but no political strategy for how to achieve it. The next president
need not repeat that mistake. He or she needs, first, a clear
political approach—based, in part, around a solid understanding
of the mistakes made by the Clintons in 1994—that's backed up
by a solid set of policy principles.
• Do it first. One of the problems with the Clinton health care
process was that it took so long to get a bill to Congress. By the
time Clinton actually sent solid legislation to Capitol Hill, in
November of 1993, he'd already spent most of his initial political
capital on the North American Free Trade Agreement, gays in
the military, and the Deficit Reduction Act and had been
battered by the beginning of Whitewater; the crisis in Haiti; and
the massacre of American soldiers in Mogadishu, Somalia.
At the risk of offending other contributors to this series, I'd
advise the next president not to leave Congress to dither while
you take your hits and pursue other priorities. Having run, in
part, on the issue of improving health care, he or she will have
something of a mandate upon entering office. Do not let that
dissipate. On Day One, the next president must ask Congress to
begin an open process that will put a bill on his or her desk by
Day 100, include public hearings in the process, and, on the
100th day, give a prime-time presidential speech to a joint
session of Congress. The president should ask for meetings with
both the majority and the minority leader on this issue every 25
days. And if there's no bill by the 100th day, it's time to start
using the bully pulpit to press those who would delay.
• Don't write a bill. Speaking of Congress, remember that old
Schoolhouse Rock skit "I'm Just a Bill?" Remember how the bill
described its birth? "Some folks back home decided they wanted
a law passed, so they called their local congressman, and he said,
'You're right, there ought to be a law.' Then he sat down and
wrote me out and introduced me to Congress, and I became a
bill." Well, perhaps in 1994, Bill Clinton had forgotten that
teaching. He convened a massive task force that eventually grew
into 30 separate working groups that boasted 500 separate
participants. The point of this task force? Er, to write a bill.
Predictably, those arms of government actually tasked with
writing bills felt a bit left out. Sara Rosenbaum, now the chair of
health policy at George Washington University, was eventually
charged with drafting the Clinton plan. Looking back, she says,
"I was the biggest mistake of the Clinton health care bill. It was
a terrible error to have the president doing what Congress was
supposed to do. It was a misuse of the relationship between the
legislative branch and the executive branch. The executive
branch is supposed to generate action, and the committees are
supposed to actually take the action. By sending a 1,300-page
bill, you're writing a detailed blueprint for the policy rather than
using the congressional process to create a consensus."
That last bit is important. The policy-creation process centered
in the executive branch is good at creating policies. But the
congressional process is good—or at least as good a system as
we have—at creating working legislative coalitions. And that's
what we need. So the next president needs to announce that he or
she wants to do health reform, but through an open process,
centered in the Congress, that includes lots of public feedback.
• Let someone else take the credit. In part, the 1994 effort was
foiled by simple Republican intransigence. Bill Kristol, then a
Republican strategist, wrote a famed memo titled "Defeating
President Clinton's Health Care Proposal," in which he warned,
"Any Republican urge to negotiate a 'least bad' compromise with
the Democrats, and thereby gain momentary public credit for
helping the president 'do something' about health care, should be
resisted." Similarly, Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster,
advised that the party's midterm hopes relied on "not having
health care pass."
Cynical? Sure. But Kristol and McInturff were responding to
very real electoral incentives. Much of the electorate still
considers health care a Democratic issue. This is particularly
true when the reform charge is led by a Democratic president
and named after him or her. For Republicans to assist in passing
health reform, then, would be to give Democrats a massive
accomplishment they can take with them into the election. If the
next president to try ambitious heath reform is to succeed where
the last failed, he or she will need to hang back a little bit and
change the political incentives. Let the congressional process
work, and allow the bill to be named after two powerful
senators—one of whom should be a Republican looking for a
legacy. He can pull in a few of his powerful colleagues who also
see themselves as historic legislators, and you'll be closer to your
majority. And don't worry: Even if the bill is called BaucusGrassley, you'll still be the one signing it.
• Have a political strategy. Health care is complicated. Voters
are afraid of losing what they have. The electorate has a lot of
status quo bias. Powerful stakeholders will oppose the final bill.
So the next president needs to deploy an aggressive
communications strategy from the first day. The commander in
chief will need to make sure that his or her allies are well-funded
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and ready to rebut attacks; that the war room is well-staffed with
a powerful set of talking points; and that the various
stakeholders know that attempts to kill reform will not only lead
them to be written out of this bill, but to seeing their own
political priorities impeded in the future. Remember when Teddy
Roosevelt said, "Speak softly and carry a big stick?" Well, by
letting Congress write this bill, you're speaking softly. The
political strategy is your big stick. In the past, the executive
branch has been so concerned with creating a bill, they've
forgotten to sell it. By outsourcing the creation to Congress, you
can free up resources for the PR blitz.
The Bush administration squandered eight crucial years by
stalling and blocking any concerted national action to slow
global warming. Candidates Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton,
and, to a lesser extent, John McCain all favor strong federal
climate legislation. If none of the current climate change bills
(for a roundup, click here) gets passed this year, the new
president must immediately propose a new law to slash
greenhouse-gas emissions in the first State of the Union address
and make its passage a first-year priority. The fate of the
planet—no exaggeration—potentially depends on the United
States moving quickly from climate laggard to climate leader.
• Have principles more than a policy. Don't take the above to
mean you should go into the reform process without any idea of
what you want. It's just that what you want shouldn't be too
specific. Health reform is meaningless if it isn't actually
universal, if it doesn't make the system more seamless and
integrated, and if it doesn't reform the insurance industry so it
can begin competing on price and quality rather than riskshifting and denials of coverage. Optimally, you'll also break the
link between employers and health insurance and create a public
plan that can compete with private plans, so consumers can
choose between health insurance that seeks profit and health
insurance that seeks health. So those should be your principles:
universality, integration, insurance industry reform, a transition
away from employer-based insurance, and public-private
competition. You can advocate for those things without getting
too hung up on the details. Rather than being dogmatic about
policy and agnostic about politics, as your predecessors were,
you should be dogmatic about politics and, if not agnostic about
policy, more focused on ends than means.
The new president should also use his or her executive powers to
shift national policy—no need to wait for Congress. The U.S.
Supreme Court ruled last year that the Environmental Protection
Agency has the power to regulate carbon dioxide emissions
under the Clean Air Act. The EPA has done little since then, and
a new president can direct the agency to start writing rules to
that effect immediately. Likewise, a new administration can get
out of the way of the various states that have taken climate
change policy into their own hands. Where the Bush
administration blocked California's request to regulate
greenhouse-gas emissions, a new president can embrace
California's initiative and encourage the other states seeking to
experiment with environmental regulation in their own
backyards.
fixing it
The Environment
Refocusing on the environmental crisis.
By Emily Bazelon and Paul Sabin
President Bush's environmental policies may be alarming, but
they are nevertheless worthy of study. This administration has
used every last hammer, wrench, and saw in the executive
toolbox to pursue its ideas about how we should use energy,
land, water, and other elements of nature. And so when the next
president comes into office, he or she will similarly need to
deftly deploy every trick of agency rule-making, executive
order, enforcement of existing laws, and cooperation with
Congress to reverse the damage done by the Bush administration
and to usher in a new order.
• Climate change. This is the green elephant in the living room.
On his or her own, a new president can also spur international
action to fight global warming. Appointing a high-profile
climate czar—Al Gore might be available and willing—could
jump-start international climate treaty negotiations. Heck, maybe
the new president can even show up occasionally, too. Back at
home, a new high-level interagency climate office could begin to
coordinate the economic, security, and environmental
dimensions of the climate crisis, which will be with us for
generations.
Climate is big, but the new president has other work to do, too.
Over the past eight years, the Bush administration has
systematically dismantled environmental protections by easing
enforcement, reinterpreting policies, and blocking the imposition
of stricter standards. A new administration should use the same
executive powers to reverse course. Here are some
representative messes the new president can clean up using
executive authority:
• New source review. Changes to this program with a snoozer of
a name reveal the Bush administration at its most enterprising.
New source review is the government's means of propelling the
cleanup of aged power plants and industrial facilities. In the late
1990s, according to this great overview by Bruce Barcott in the
New York Times Magazine, the power companies were on the
verge of being forced into making widespread improvements to
their emissions controls, changes that would have cut dangerous
sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide pollution. Then the Bush
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Department of Energy came along and spearheaded the charge to
gut new source review, steamrolling Christine Todd Whitman,
then-head of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the
agency's director of enforcement, Eric Schaeffer, who resigned
over the controversy. The new Bush administration rules
allowed the utility companies to wriggle out of their fix: They
got 10 years' reprieve for installing any new pollution-control
equipment, and they could make significant changes to their
plants and still claim they were doing "routine maintenance,"
thereby avoiding expensive pollution control upgrades. The next
president should announce on his or her first day in office that
it's time to reconsider these rules and to come up with standards
that will hold power companies accountable for the muck they
spew into the air.
• Ozone standard. Just two weeks ago, the administration
announced that because of the president's "last minute
intervention," as the Washington Post put it, the EPA would
weaken the agency's new ozone limits. After setting a tighter
standard for long-term exposure of forests and crops to ozone
than for short-term human exposure, the EPA, under pressure
from the Office of Management and Budget and the White
House, scrapped the separate long-term standard. The proposed
limits were already more lax than those recommended by the
EPA's scientific advisers. The new president should reverse this
order—and others like it—by following the recommendations of
scientists mandated by law to set scientifically based standards
that protect human health and ecosystems and agricultural crops.
• More power to the White House. Here's another technical rule
change with broad implications, ripe for reconsideration. Last
year, the White House increased its sway over government
agencies by requiring each agency to select a political appointee
to oversee new rule-making and the guidance provided to
regulated industries. The new president should scrap this order
outright. While analyzing the costs and benefits is essential to
efficient regulation, the Bush change undermines agency
professionals and leaves regulatory initiatives to the political
whims of the White House.
• The Bureau of Land Management. Under Bush, the Bureau of
Land Management has opened large swaths of land in states like
Wyoming, Colorado, Montana, and Oregon to oil and gas
drilling, often ignoring scientists' concerns about the effects on
wildlife habitat. In the Pinedale, Wyo., field office, an internal
review leaked in 2006 stated that there was often "no evaluation,
analysis or compiling" of all the data demonstrating the
consequences of such drilling on the surrounding land and water.
The new president should restore the safeguards in the process
for granting new oil and drilling leases, so development doesn't
needlessly trash the patches of landscape that still look like the
Old West.
• Public science. Politicians often try to control the release of
information, but the Bush administration has truly taken
meddling with the findings of government scientists to an
entirely new level. From sex education to mercury
contamination and climate projections, the administration has
blocked, altered, and suppressed crucial data and conclusions it
doesn't like. The next president needs to give scientific expertise
the respect it deserves by reporting results honestly and
supporting work that's rigorous even when it's not expedient. Or
profitable. Whether or not that helps halt global warming or
preserve the landscape, it's a change worth making.
fixing it
The Laws in Wartime
Boost trust, Close Guantanamo and establish a national
security court.
By Jack Goldsmith
Don't count on the next president to undo George W. Bush's
legal policies in the war on terrorism. All three remaining
presidential candidates have pledged to close the detention camp
at Guantanamo Bay, pay greater respect to law, tamp down
unilateral presidential powers, and enhance America's stature
abroad. But many controversial Bush administration policies
have already been revised to satisfy congressional and judicial
critics. And after receiving a few harrowing threat briefings and
absorbing the awesome personal responsibility of keeping
Americans safe, the new commander in chief won't rush to
eliminate the Bush program as it stands next January. He or she
will realize that any legal climb-down that is later perceived as
even indirectly responsible for an attack would be a personal and
political disaster.
Aggressive counterterrorism policies will thus continue into the
next presidency. They will, however, be wrapped in more
attractive packaging and adjusted in ways appropriate for an
indefinite conflict. Some suggestions for how to achieve these
goals:
• Boost trust and credibility. Many people accuse the Bush
administration of exaggerating the terror threat for political gain,
but the truth is nearer the opposite: The Bush administration
frets about homeland attacks more than it lets on. Yet as 9/11
recedes from national memory, the public worries less about the
terror threat it cannot see and more about aggressive powers and
policies whose purpose it cannot fully appreciate. This growing
gap between the government's view of the terror threat and the
public's is an enormous challenge for any president. "[P]ublic
sentiment is everything," Abraham Lincoln once said. "With
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public sentiment nothing can fail; without it, nothing can
succeed."
president who genuinely engages Congress can almost always
get what he or she needs for national security.
The next government can narrow this credibility gap by fighting
the intelligence community's notorious tendency to over-classify,
and by making public more threat information so the nation can
better understand what it faces.
• Give the telecommunications carriers immunity. There is
bipartisan agreement that the legal framework for surveillance is
outdated and must be amended to give the president more
flexibility to surveil potential threats, subject to congressional
and judicial review. The most contested remaining issue in this
area is whether Congress should confer legal immunity on
telecommunications firms that cooperated with the
administration's Terrorist Surveillance Program. Private-industry
cooperation with government is vital to finding and tracking
terrorists. If telecoms are punished for their good-faith reliance
on executive-branch representations, they will not help the
government except when clearly compelled to do so by law.
Only full immunity, including retroactive immunity, will
guarantee full cooperation. The Democrat-controlled Senate
intelligence committee recently agreed, by a vote of 13-2, but
the full Congress has thus far balked. The next president should
push hard to see that full telecom immunity prevails.
But more information from even a rhetorically gifted president
will not be enough. The president's words are more credible
when echoed by officials who do not share all of his political
aims. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt began to prepare the
nation for war in the spring of 1940, he appointed Henry
Stimson and Frank Knox—Republicans who rabidly opposed his
New Deal—as secretaries of war and Navy, respectively. These
men were invaluable in convincing the Congress and the nation
that FDR acted in good faith in taking aggressive steps against
the growing but underappreciated German threat in the year
before Pearl Harbor. The next president should follow FDR's
lead by filling important national security positions with
individuals from the other party.
• Work with Congress. The next president can further enhance
the credibility of war-on-terror policies by getting Congress—
especially political opponents in Congress—onboard. The
president can share more national-security data with Congress
than with the public. When Congress supports aggressive
policies based on this information, the nation is more likely to
accept that the president is acting in good faith. After 16
Democrats in the Senate and 41 Democrats in the House joined
Republicans last August to give a weakened president
unprecedented surveillance powers, it became much harder for
critics to maintain that the terror threat did not warrant such
broad powers.
When the president presses Congress to take a stand on war-onterror issues, he and the nation receive other benefits as well.
(This is a central theme of Ben Wittes' forthcoming Law and the
Long War.) Forcing Congress to act spreads responsibility for
policies when things go bad, as John Kerry learned when he
tried to run away from his 2002 Iraq vote in the 2004
presidential election. Congressional debates educate the country
about the nature and stakes of the terror threat. And
congressional approval increases judicial support that will be
crucial in the long war. The Supreme Court's main objection to
President Bush's counterterrorism policies has been that he's
acted without or contrary to Congress. But the court almost
always goes along with national-security policies supported by
both political branches.
There is no guarantee, of course, that the next president can
persuade Congress about the terror threat or that Congress will
not play politics with a terrorism issue. But the politics of
terrorism usually cut in favor of aggressive action, and a
• Close Guantanamo. There were two justifications for using
Guantanamo as a detention facility. The first was to minimize
judicial scrutiny. The courts have chipped away at this rationale
for years and will likely eliminate it altogether when—as most
commentators expect—the Supreme Court announces this June
that U.S. constitutional protections extend to the base.
The second justification for Guantanamo was to avoid
frightening and possibly endangering U.S. citizens. This
justification still has force but is outweighed by the fact that
Guantanamo is now widely viewed—justifiably or not—as a
damaging symbol of American mistakes in the war on terrorism.
One should not, however, underestimate the political difficulty
of putting Guantanamo out of business. It will be interesting to
watch the dance among states clamoring not to become home to
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his friends.
• Establish a national-security court. Closing Guantanamo begs
the question of what should be done with the 100 to 150
remaining detainees whom no responsible president will release,
as well as any future detainees. Right now, 15 detainees are
scheduled to be tried in military commissions. But trial by
military commission is not the solution. The politically damaged
commissions are disliked by the same military tasked with
running them, and they will be subject to legal and political
challenges for a decade. The next government should ditch
commissions altogether and place the incapacitation of terrorists
under the supervision of a national-security court composed of
federal judges with life tenure.
The national-security court would have two jobs: trying
terrorists and reviewing the detention of those who cannot be
tried. Trials could be governed by modified rules of evidence,
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secrecy, and security that are constitutionally valid but not
currently available in ordinary criminal trials. National-security
court trials would be more legitimate than military trials because
they would be run by independent Article III judges rather than
military judges. And they would attract fewer legal challenges
because unlike military commissions, most of the procedural and
substantive rules they'll employ would be time-tested.
But criminal trials are not always feasible. Sometimes the
government has credible information that a detainee is very
dangerous but cannot prove a crime beyond a reasonable doubt
with nonclassified information in a manner consistent with
civilian standards of justice, even as modified. When the
government certifies that this is so, terrorists should be detained
pursuant to a system of preventive detention akin to the one now
in place in Guantanamo, but supervised instead by the nationalsecurity court. Congress should ensure that this system applies to
citizen and noncitizen detainees alike and has procedural
protections appropriate for indefinite detention, including
appointed attorneys with proper security clearances, access to all
information the government has on the detainee, and ongoing
review to ensure that the detainee remains a threat.
• Work with allies to establish an international legal framework
for terrorists. Last week, John McCain called for a "new
international understanding on the disposition of dangerous
detainees under our control." This is a good idea, not because of
a squishy commitment to internationalism but because an
international consensus on how to treat detainees would foster
deeper international cooperation crucial in thwarting terrorists.
To achieve this goal, the United States must stop talking about
which international laws do not govern the detention of terrorists
and start talking about which ones do. The Supreme Court took a
step in this direction when it determined two years ago that
Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions—which provides
minimal and rather abstract rights to enemy combatants—
governs the conflict with al-Qaida. The United States can flesh
out the meaning of Common Article 3 by drawing on some
aspects of Article 75 of the First 1977 Protocol to the Geneva
Conventions, which provides more elaborate minimum-warfare
standards. The United States has rightly opposed ratifying the
protocol in all its details for fear of legitimizing terrorism, and
Article 75 itself contains vague provisions that in the wrong
hands might be viewed as too restrictive. But these uncertainties
are also an opportunity for the United States to draw on higher
international standards to flesh out the meaning of Common
Article 3 while at the same time shaping these standards to its
own conception of appropriate justice.
There is more room for international agreement on these issues
than one might think. The foreign affairs committee of the
House of Commons recently concluded that the Geneva
Conventions "lack clarity and are out of date" and urged the
British government to "update the conventions in a way that
deals more satisfactorily with asymmetric warfare, with
international terrorism, with the status of irregular combatants,
and with the treatment of detainees." The German foreign
minister and an important European security organization have
made similar recommendations. And last year, John Bellinger—
the State Department legal adviser who has worked hard to
bridge differences with allies on these topics—convened an
important meeting at West Point with legal advisers from seven
allied nations to forge consensus on these issues. The next
president with fresh goodwill should build on these
developments.
• Fix interrogation. In 2005 and 2006, Congress went along with
a two-track approach to interrogating terrorists suspected of
having information crucial to stopping an attack. It held the
military to a very high standard but allowed the CIA to maintain
a program of classified interrogation techniques that must not
amount to torture or cruel, inhuman, humiliating, or degrading
treatment. Earlier this month, Congress changed its mind and
tried to extend the DoD rules to the CIA, but President Bush
vetoed the bill.
The way forward on this issue builds on a proposal by former
President Bill Clinton. Congress should require the next
president to make a classified finding—akin to findings used for
covert operations—giving reasons why aggressive techniques
are required. This finding and the subsequent interrogations
should be reviewed for legality and effectiveness by an internal
executive-branch body and reported to the congressional
intelligence committees. This approach would maintain the
option of using lawful interrogation techniques that might stave
off a crisis, while at the same time addressing legitimate
concerns about accountability, legal compliance, and abuse.
We are surprisingly close to putting policy issues in the war on
terrorism on a sound legal footing appropriate for the long term.
The most important issue for the next administration to resolve
is the system for incapacitating terrorists. Beyond that, what the
next president most needs to fix are appearances and processes
in dealing with the public, Congress, and the world. This is no
small thing. A major lesson of the last seven years is the
centrality of these soft factors to the successful exercise of the
hard power needed to defeat the terror threat.
fixing it
The Presidency
End the war on terror as a legal paradigm; abolish military commissions, and
restore FISA.
By Bruce Fein
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President George W. Bush's successor should renounce his
monarchy. It betters the instruction of King George III, which
provoked the Declaration of Independence. Among other things,
the 44th president of the United States should do the following
promptly upon taking office: Transfer the impending trials of six
"high-value" al-Qaida detainees before Spanish Inquisition-like
military commissions to civilian courts; repudiate President
Bush's kidnappings, secret imprisonments, and maltreatments of
suspected al-Qaida supporters abroad on his say-so alone—a
page from Hobbes' state of nature; denounce signing statements
that declare the president's intent to disregard provisions of bills
he has signed into law because he disputes their
constitutionality; and end the snobbish custom of former
government Brahmins preening in their honorifics after leaving
office. The Founding Fathers prohibited titles of nobility to
encourage a nonhierarchical culture that honors equality before
the law.
Robert Draper recounts in Dead Certain: The Presidency of
George W. Bush an alarming averment by the current occupant
of the White House. Without blushing, Mr. Bush insisted to his
biographer: "You can't learn lessons by reading. Or at least I
couldn't." Here's a to-do list for his successor:
• Put an end to the imperial presidency. President Bush has
usurped what Gen. Washington and the Founding Fathers
reprehended: unchecked power that sacrifices fundamental
liberties to trust in the president. To paraphrase Lord Acton,
absolute power corrupts absolutely. Just ask President Bush's
kidnap-and-torture victims, including Khaled El-Masri, Abu
Omar, or Maher Arar. The Constitution's marquee is checks and
balances, a system predicated upon a suspicion of human nature.
James Madison sermonized in "The Federalist No. 51": "If men
were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were
to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on
government would be necessary."
To restore the constitutional equilibrium envisioned by the
Founding Fathers, the next presidential inaugural should
enumerate the following particulars.
• End the "war on terror" as a legal paradigm. International
terrorists are criminals, not warriors. The next president should
see to it that terrorists will be captured, interrogated, prosecuted,
and punished according to civilian law. The United States is not
at war with international terrorism. The next president should
ensure that we do not brandish the weapons of war in lieu of
traditional law enforcement against international terrorists.
If the conflict of the United States with international terrorism
amounts to a war, then this nation is permanently at war—a
condition the Founding Fathers insisted was irreconcilable with
freedom. War crowns the president with monumental powers
and sweeping secrecy. It tends to gratify popular bigotries and
encourages a conflation of any dissent with treason. Remember
the imprisonment of Eugene Debs; the concentration camps for
120,000 Japanese-Americans; the burglary of the office of Lewis
Fielding, Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist; and President Bush's
water-boarding and warrantless spying on American citizens in
criminal contravention of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act of 1978. The next president must recognize the fundamental
dangers of a permanent state of war and the granting of infinite
power as commander in chief
• Abolish military commissions. Under the new president,
military commissions should be promptly abolished. No citizen
or noncitizen should be detained without charges as an unlawful
enemy combatant. No detainee in the custody of the United
States should ever again be denied an opportunity to challenge
the factual or legal basis for his detention before an impartial
judge in habeas corpus proceedings. The Classified Information
Procedures Act of 1980 should be employed to prosecute
terrorists without compromising national security. Ramzi
Yousef, Zacarias Moussaoui, and Jose Padilla—among other
accused terrorists—all have been successfully prosecuted under
CIPA. Existing criminal conspiracy law should be employed to
thwart terrorist plots in their pre-embryonic stages. Although we
seem to have forgotten this fact of late, the criminal law is both
forward- and backward-looking.
• Withdraw all U.S. troops from foreign countries. The
Declaration of Independence explains that the purpose of
government is to secure unalienable rights of life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness. The United States was not created to
build an empire, to aggrandize government, or to purge the
planet of nondemocratic regimes. Accordingly, the next
president should announce that we are withdrawing all U.S.
troops from foreign countries and that, hereinafter, all the
nation's military resources will be devoted to building missile,
electronic, and other defenses against potential foreign attacks.
The United States lacks the wisdom necessary to spin modern
democratic gold from centuries of despotic flax by military force
or otherwise. Iraq and Afghanistan are clear proof. Further, the
United States has no moral responsibility for the destiny of
persons outside its jurisdiction who pay no taxes to support the
government and pledge no allegiance to the republic.
• Restore both oversight and transparency. No president is
infallible. Executive-branch decisions or policies made without
congressional vetting or oversight are prone to staggering
mistakes—for example, the Bay of Pigs, the Vietnam War, or
post-Saddam Iraq. Endogamous thinking is as foolhardy as
endogamous marriages. And secrecy, moreover, breeds
lawlessness, maladministration, and abuses. Sunshine is the best
disinfectant. The next president must restore the tools of judicial
and congressional oversight that have been eroded if not
obliterated in the past eight years.
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• Cabin the scope of executive privilege. The next president must
end the practice of invoking executive privilege to shield
confidential presidential communications or advice from any
examination by Congress absent an illicit legislative purpose,
including exposure for the sake of political embarrassment. The
next president should not defend the expansive claims of
executive privilege of President Bush used to justify the
nonappearances of former White House Counsel Harriet Miers
and Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten before the House judiciary
committee in the investigation of the firings of nine U.S.
attorneys. The next president should initiate criminal
prosecutions of the two for contempt of the House of
Representatives.
• Restore the role of warrants under FISA. The next president
must immediately agree to go back to collecting foreign
intelligence in conformity with the individualized warrant
provisions of FISA. He or she should not seek an extension of
the Protect America Act—which authorizes group warrants akin
to general writs of assistance, which were anathema to the
Founding Fathers and prohibited by the Fourth Amendment. We
have yet to be provided any evidence that FISA handicaps the
president's collection of foreign intelligence any more than do
congressional restrictions on breaking and entering homes,
opening mail, or torture. FISA functioned without complaint
from any president for more than two decades before President
Bush determined, in secret, to defy it in the aftermath of 9/11.
And at this very moment, the president is operating under the old
FISA law because the Protect America Act has not been
extended with no proof of heightened danger to the nation. The
next president should also convene a grand jury to determine
whether the government participants, in flouting FISA, should
be criminally prosecuted—including President Bush and Vice
President Dick Cheney. If the rule of law means anything, it
means that occupants of the highest offices must turn square
constitutional corners.
• Restore the state secrets privilege to ensure justice to victims of
constitutional misconduct. This doctrine is a rule of evidence
fashioned by the courts, not a constitutional requirement. The
Bush administration has successfully invoked the state secrets
privilege to deny a remedy for victims of its own constitutional
wrongdoing, for example, the kidnapping, imprisonment, and
maltreatment of Khaled El-Masri. When he sued the culpable
unnamed CIA operatives, his case was dismissed because the
identities of the constitutional scofflaws were a state secret, a
ruling more Kafkaesque than Kafka. The new president should
submit legislation that would require a default judgment in favor
of victims of unconstitutional conduct if the state secrets
privilege is invoked by the president to deny the plaintiffs a fair
opportunity to prove their claims.
• Torture should be categorically renounced. President Bush has
hedged on whether he would torture suspected al-Qaida
detainees in hopes of extracting intelligence. There is no
evidence that torture works. The Defense Department and the
FBI renounce water-boarding, and intelligence veterans concur
that information derived from torture is worthless. Moreover, if
the United States tortures, the risk of torture to our own captured
soldiers climbs exponentially. The new president should
categorically renounce torture. It cannot be justified
pragmatically. And no civilized nation stoops to imitate the
savagery of its enemies.
The ultimate stewards of the Constitution are We the People.
Grover Cleveland amplified this in his first inaugural address:
"Every citizen owes to the country a vigilant watch and close
scrutiny of its public servants and a fair and reasonable estimate
of their fidelity and usefulness. Thus is the people's will
impressed upon the whole framework of our civil polity … and
this is the price of our liberty and the inspiration of our faith in
the Republic."
fixing it
Education
Fixing education policy.
By Jim Ryan
Identifying what needs to be fixed in the field of education is
easy: the No Child Left Behind Act, currently up for
reauthorization but stalled in Congress pending the next election.
The elaborate law requires schools to test the bejeezus out of
elementary- and middle-school students in reading and math, to
test them again in high school, and to sprinkle in a few science
tests along the way. Schools posting consistently poor test scores
are supposed to be punished so that they'll clean up their acts and
allow NCLB's ultimate goal to be achieved in 2014. The act
imagines that essentially all students across the country will be
"proficient" in that year, meaning that they'll all pass the battery
of standardized tests required by the NCLB. Hence the act's
catchy title.
NCLB was enacted in 2001 with huge bipartisan support, though
many Democrats in Congress have since disclaimed if not
denounced it, presumably having had some time to read it. The
act is at once the Bush administration's signature piece of
education legislation, its most significant domestic policy
initiative, and the most intrusive federal education law in our
nation's history. The federal government provides less than 10
percent of all education funding, yet NCLB drives education
policy in every school district in the country. In short, it's a big
deal. It's also in need of repair. No one—conservative or liberal,
Democrat or Republican—doubts that.
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That's the easy part. The hard part is how to fix it. Let's start with
what not to do.
• Don't scrap it. Some reformers advocate scrapping the whole
thing and starting anew. Well-known education author/activist
Jonathan Kozol recently went so far as to stage what he termed a
"partial" hunger strike (others mercilessly called it a "diet") to
protest the act. Efforts like Kozol's, designed to torpedo the act,
are rash. NCLB has big problems, but its core ideas—creating
high goals for all schools, ensuring accountability for meeting
them, and focusing attention on disadvantaged and minority
students who are too often ignored—are worth retaining. That's
why both the New York Times and writers for the National
Review have praised the basic idea of NCLB.
• Don't stop all testing; stop stupid testing. Most of the problems
caused by the act stem from its ridiculous test-and-punish
regime. Specifically, the act promotes the heavy use and misuse
not just of tests, but of stupid tests. This isn't a reason to abandon
all testing; it is a reason, however, to come up with better tests
and better ways to use those tests to judge schools.
There are three problems, in particular, that need addressing.
• We don't know enough about school quality. Current test
results don't tell us all we need to know about schools. Far from
it. Students are tested in reading and math and a little in science.
Reading, math, and science are important, but so are social
studies, history, literature, geography, art, and music. Instead of
telling us how schools are doing in these other subjects, NCLB
is turning them into endangered species by pushing schools—
especially those that are struggling—to downplay if not ignore
subjects not tested. Many tests that are given further narrow the
focus of education by relying on multiple-choice questions that
reward memorization and regurgitation rather than analytical and
creative thinking.
• What we think we know may be wrong. The second problem is
that looking at just a sheet of test scores is a lousy way to judge
school quality. Standardized test results tend to track
socioeconomic status. As a teacher once remarked, the most
accurate prediction you can make based on a student's test score
is her parents' income. Teachers and schools with middle-class
kids will invariably look better than those with poor kids if the
only measure is how many students in a particular year pass a
test. What we can't tell from scores alone, because they don't tell
us where students started or how much they progressed over the
year, is the value that a particular teacher or school has added to
a student's education. Basing teacher and school evaluations on a
snapshot of a year's test scores makes about as much sense as
judging investment advisers based on how much money they are
managing instead of the gains they earn for their clients.
• NCLB creates perverse incentives. The third and most
fundamental problem has to do with perverse incentives. Schools
must show annual improvements on test scores or face
increasingly severe sanctions and the stigma of being labeled as
failing. NCLB couples this punitive scheme with utter laxity
regarding the standards and tests themselves. States get to
develop their own standards, create their own tests, and set their
own passing rates. Imagine if the EPA told the auto industry it
would be fined heavily for polluting too much but let
automakers decide for themselves what counts as "too much"
pollution. That's basically how NCLB works.
It didn't take states very long to figure out how to play this weird
little game: Avoid failure by lowering the bar! And that's exactly
what some did, either by making the tests easier or simply
lowering the score needed to be considered "proficient." As a
result of shenanigans like these, most state tests are not very
hard to pass. That many schools still post poor scores is a sign of
how far we still need to travel, but it's important to recognize
that, at a very basic level, this whole thing is a sham. NCLB,
despite lofty rhetoric to the contrary, is not about equalizing
opportunities in poor and rich, city and suburban schools; it's
about making sure kids can learn some of the basics. No less, for
sure, but also no more.
So what can the next president do to fix this mess? Propose an
amended NCLB for reauthorization and make sure the new
version contains at least three key changes:
• Standardize the standards. It's time to create national standards
and tests in at least reading, math, science, and social
studies/history. National tests in the past have been nonstarters
politically, but they have always polled well, and some
politicians are starting to come around. The reality is that the
current federal-state compromise isn't working and doesn't make
sense in a shrinking and flattening world. Why should we expect
less of a student in Mississippi than in Massachusetts? Do
fractions and algebra matter in North Carolina but not North
Dakota?
It's worth noting here that the best high-school students already
take national tests, though we don't call them that. We call them
Advanced Placement tests. No one argues that it would be better
to have 50 different AP tests in American history instead of one.
Why should only our best students have the advantage of a highquality, national testing system?
• Administer fewer tests. National tests should be given less
often, perhaps in only fourth, eighth, and 11th grades. This would
provide relief from the relentless test march that characterizes
elementary- and middle-school years, which would give
breathing room for subjects like music and art while
concentrating attention on key thresholds in education. Reducing
the overall amount of tests should also improve the quality of the
tests themselves.
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• Rank schools; don't prescribe punishments. The federal
government should get out of the business of telling states how
to reform and punish their schools, and we should drop 2014 as
our rendezvous with perfection. It's a gimmick that has outlived
its usefulness and is now causing more harm than good as states
grow increasingly desperate to find ways to avoid the looming
possibility that most of their schools will be labeled as failing.
The federal government should instead, right now, create a
system to rank every school within a state. A ranking system
will provide both crucial information and create ongoing
pressure for reform. It will also take away the incentive to game
the testing system. Because some schools will always be ranked
higher than others, there's no reason to try to make all students
look as if they're from Lake Wobegon.
Scores on national tests should be one factor in the rankings but
not the only one. School quality should also be measured using
value-added assessments, crediting schools that make
exceptional progress with their students, regardless of where
those students started. Other criteria should include graduation
rates, measured fairly and uniformly; college-attendance rates;
and parental satisfaction. Still other criteria, such as
advancement from grade to grade, might be used for elementary
and middle schools. Ranking systems aren't perfect, but using
multiple criteria to rank schools should provide a much clearer
and fuller picture of school quality. States can then decide on
their own how they want to sanction or assist the lowperforming schools.
If and when NCLB is fixed, the next president should
concentrate on two key issues: teachers and preschool.
• Teachers and money. Math and science teachers are in short
supply, and there aren't enough good teachers in high-poverty
and high-minority schools. A partial answer to this problem has
been known for a long time. It's called money. To attract more
and better qualified teachers, and to attract them to particular
subjects and particular schools, we need to pay them more. The
federal government has money. You see where this is headed.
• Teachers and prestige. Money alone is not enough. Respect,
prestige, and decent working conditions also matter. The federal
government cannot monitor working conditions in tens of
thousands of schools, but it can create a teaching program that
restores prestige to the profession. Teach for America—which
places recent college graduates for two-year stints in some of the
most difficult schools in the nation—is inundated with
applications. In recent years, they've had to turn down four out
of every five applicants, most from very good colleges. Indeed,
in one year, 10 percent of the entire senior classes at Yale and
Dartmouth applied.
The federal government should create a similar program by
agreeing to reimburse at least some of the college expenses of
those who enter teaching. Colleges and universities should also
chip in, much as law schools cover the student loans of their
graduates who go into public service. The longer the service, the
more loans forgiven. The federal government should use this as
a model to encourage college graduates to go into teaching—and
to stay there for more than two years.
• Preschool. It's clear that many children should start school
before kindergarten. The benefits of high-quality preschool,
especially for children from poorer families, easily outweigh the
costs. States have recognized this and have pumped billions of
dollars into preschool education over the last decade, but
millions of children remain without access. The federal
government, in conjunction with the states, should strive to
provide access at least to all 4-year-olds whose families cannot
afford a high-quality preschool on their own. This would be both
a politically popular measure and one of the single best
investments any level of government could make.
More could be done, of course, but this is plenty for starters. All
of these fixes will take real leadership and real money. But
they're worthwhile and certainly better investments than our
current response to educational failure: building more prisons.
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Tech Policy
Jump-starting our tech policy.
By Tim Wu
Perhaps the only thing that's actually improved over the last
eight years under President Bush is technology (if not tech
policy). In the sense that Nixon presided over an age of great
films like The Godfather, the Bush era was also the age of
Wikipedia, search engines, YouTube, and Facebook. But the
Bush system of benign neglect can only go so far, leaving plenty
to fix as soon as the next president takes office.
Here are a few suggestions for things we can fix right away:
• Appoint a broadband czar. Most people in technology will tell
you that the leading problem today—the one thing sinking all
boats, so to speak—is the broadband last mile, the final
connection between people and the Internet. Since 2000,
computers have become faster, hard drives cheaper, and free email better, but for the vast majority of Americans, Internet
access remains clunky. Same goes for wireless broadband (cell
phones with good Internet access), which is arriving, but slowly
and expensively. These facts limit what everyone in the tech and
media industries can imagine as effective new products. They
are also beginning to put the United States at a disadvantage as
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compared with nations in Asia and Europe that have invested
more.
It's a daunting problem with a long history of both public and
private failure. Unlike, say, building a better dating service,
broadband is an infrastructure problem that requires solutions
akin to improving roads or plumbing. National infrastructure
policy is tough, and, at its worst, Bush's approach has borrowed
largely from Emperor Nero.
To start fixing things, the next president should immediately
announce a national broadband policy with this simple goal: to
put the United States back into undisputed leadership in wireless
and wire-line broadband. But the question is how, and that's
where things get complicated. Proposed fixes abound: pay
Verizon, AT&T, or Comcast to build it? Treat the Internet's
pipes like the interstate highways, and have the government
build them? Use tax credits to encourage consumers to buy their
own fiber connections? Sell property rights in spectrum or create
a "mesh" wireless commons?
No one really knows what the best answer is. That's why the
next president should appoint a specialized broadband czar to get
after the problem. Right now, broadband is no one's
responsibility, and the buck keeps getting passed between
industry, Congress, the White House, and the FCC. The point of
a czar would be to make it someone's job to figure out what it
will take to fix broadband.
• Create the FCC dream team. The next president will have the
opportunity to appoint an entirely new Federal Communications
Commission. The FCC is the principal American regulator of
communications, setting many of the most important rules for
information economy. The appointment opportunity shouldn't be
wasted—the next president could and should dramatically
transform what the FCC can be.
Once upon a time, actual experts were appointed to the
commission. The first commission, in 1927, was, as historian
Philip Rosen writes, "a remarkable group." It included a former
admiral who was a naval radio expert, an inspector from the
Commerce Department, an engineer and editor from McGrawHill, a practicing broadcaster with a Ph.D. in English, and a state
Supreme Court judge. Today, none of these people would be
considered for the job.
Instead of communications expertise, the leading qualifications
are now mostly political. Preferred experience includes time
logged as a Capitol Hill staffer or in state government; work as a
Washington, D.C., telecom attorney and/or lobbyist; some
campaign experience; and buy-in from a major industry. Yes,
many talented people possess these qualifications, and the FCC
has, and continues to have, great leaders. But at some level the
approach is like choosing from among Nike's lawyers to find
coaches for the U.S. Olympic team. At its worst, it means
commissioners show up with "team loyalty"—a duty to serve the
interests of one of the major industries. And lax restraints on
lobbying post-FCC service exacerbates the problem—why make
your future boss angry?
The next president needs to break this tradition. She or he should
search far and wide (yes, even outside of Washington, D.C.) for
the wisest tech experts and visionaries to try to create an FCC
dream team. The yardstick is the 1927 commission. By 2010, we
should ask whether the next administration has managed to at
least equal President Coolidge in the quality of its appointments.
• Fix international tech policy. The president has broad powers
to set U.S. international tech policy, and the next president can
act to do so quickly. As with the FCC, the president has the
chance to staff the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative with
some of the best and brightest; he or she should also appoint a
worthy successor to "Internet ambassador" David Gross in the
State Department. The president can also act to reverse a few of
the uglier policy practices that have crept in.
Here's a leading example: Today, the United States—at the
request of the domestic drug industry—continues to sanction
poorer nations for trying to make available low-cost medicines
for their citizens. For much of the 1990s, the drug industry and
the U.S. government insisted that the sale of affordable generic
AIDS drugs in African nations would be bad for innovation and
global health. Under heavy pressure, the Clinton administration
in 1999 swore it wouldn't punish poorer nations that break
patents to sell cheap AIDS drugs, and Bush pledged to respect
that policy. But as recently as last year, the United States was
pressuring Thailand to abandon its efforts to provide cheaper
AIDS drugs to its citizens—even though Thailand had followed
WTO rules in doing so.
U.S. backsliding in this area is indefensible and creates plenty of
bad international karma. The next president should declare early
on that the United States will no longer put trade pressure on
developing countries using WTO-compliant means to make
medicine more affordable.
• The technology of transparent government. One of the great
and enduring accomplishments of the Bush administration was
that it undermined once and for all the argument that the best
decisions are made in secret. Some of Bush's more grotesque
mistakes—like the decision to spy on American citizens without
warrants—might have been averted by even a tiny amount of
transparency.
Bush leaves behind a transparency tradition somewhere between
Brezhnev and Dracula. A new administration can and should
change that—but giving people information about what the
government is doing is actually an information-technology
problem. To an Internet user, what the government really lacks
today is a good search engine or wiki to find out what's going
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on. The White House, perhaps through a CTO- or CIO-like
figure, can find out what the barriers to transparency are, how
many are unnecessary, and what can make it easier for citizens
to follow their government. Whether that means turning the next
White House into a four-year episode of Real World, I leave to
the next administration to decide.
fixing it
Long-term solutions
The next president will inherit a military in strange shambles. Its
soldiers fight extremely well, but its army is on the brink of
breaking. Its budget is enormous, but most of the money goes to
weapons that have little to do with promoting real security.
Some official documents detail the problems and outline
solutions, but too often they aren't translated into action. The
principal task, therefore, is to do just that—in the face of
enormous bureaucratic resistance.
• Immigration. The insanity of the current U.S. immigration
policy hurts not just the conscience but the tech industries as
well. Yes, Congress controls immigration levels, but the new
president can certainly push for more visas for highly skilled
foreign workers. Otherwise, innovation will follow the talent,
whether it's in India, Ireland, or Palau.
• Patents and prizes. The United States patent system drifted into
a state of generally recognized insanity in the late 1990s, turning
the supposed friend of innovation into a menace. In its darkest
days, the U.S. Patent Office and the Federal Circuit Court
essentially threw open the patent store and let anyone take what
they wanted. Hence the years of ridiculous patents on
sandwiches and anti-gravity space vehicles, along with industryendangering patents used to force settlements out of innovators
like RIM and Microsoft.
To their credit, the Supreme Court and the Patent Office have in
recent years fixed a few of the worst problems, but issues
remain. The next president or his surrogate must lean heavily on
the Patent Office to take seriously its responsibility as an
effective gatekeeper of patent quality. The deeper cure has two
parts: The first is pushing for a system that allows opposition to
patent applications and other reforms, like the famous "goldplated patent" proposal championed by Mark Lemley, Douglas
Lichtman, and Bhaven Sampat. The second is starting to
rebalance the pro-patent Federal Circuit, arguably among the
more activist courts in the nation and the recent target of a
Supreme Court crackdown. The president can appoint judges to
the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals (the patent court) who are
both respected experts yet also believe that more patent isn't
always better.
In addition to patent reform, over the last decade economists
have urged limits to the patent as a tool of encouraging
invention. More economists think there needs be a greater role
for "innovation prizes"—prizes for beneficial inventions that, for
one reason or another, the commercial patent system doesn't
seem to do a good job of encouraging. Examples are renewableenergy technologies or treatments for diseases in developing
countries. If we can afford to put a price on the head of Osama
Bin Laden, why not one for inventing a malaria vaccine?
The Military
How to fix the U.S. military.
By Phillip Carter and Fred Kaplan
• Overhaul the budget. If you'd awakened from a 20-year-long
slumber and glanced at the current defense budget, you'd think
the Cold War were still raging. President Bush's budget request
for the next fiscal year—totaling $541 billion, not including
money for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—is dominated by
aircraft carriers, submarines, fighter jets, and ultratech combat
fighting vehicles, i.e., the sorts of weapons you'd need to fight
the sort of comparably armed superpower that no longer exists.
Members of Congress impose no discipline on this
extravagance—they scarcely even ask whether all these
programs are necessary—for fear of accusations that they're
weak on defense or soft on terror.
Yet there is a way out of this paralysis. In each of the past few
years, Bush has put all the costs of Iraq, Afghanistan, and "the
longer war on terror" into a separate "supplemental" to the
budget. The next president should ask the defense secretary to do
two things: First, make sure everything in the supplemental
really is needed for those wars (tens of billions of dollars' worth
don't appear to be); second, announce that everything else is
back on the table. There hasn't been a "bottom-up review" of the
defense budget—a systematic look at the requirements of
security—since the end of the Cold War. It's time to conduct
one, seriously. We don't have the money to stay this course.
• Rejigger the military services. One obstacle to rational military
planning is that, for the past 40 years, by unspoken agreement,
the defense budget has been evenly split among the Army, the
Navy, and the Air Force. To do otherwise—to announce, for
instance, that the Army needs 20 percent more money and the
other services could each get by with 10 percent less—would set
off a firestorm inside the Pentagon and wreck the interservice
cooperation that has marked U.S. military campaigns in recent
years. So, over the next several years, certain missions should be
played up, others played down. Because the current Air Force is
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dominated by fighter pilots, the Air Force's No. 1 priority today
is to build as many F-22 fighter planes as it can, at a cost of
hundreds of billions of dollars—even though they would play no
role in any foreseeable war over the next two decades. One way
to wean them off such weapons is to build up (and put more
money into) other Air Force missions—for example, cargotransport planes (to carry ground forces and their gear), closeair-support planes (to fire shells or drop bombs in support of
troops on the ground), or to provide security for bases (many Air
Force personnel have been reassigned to do just that). The
defense secretary could announce that the service's continued
share of the budget depends on boosting the importance of those
missions. (This is, bureaucratically, a long-term project.)
• Fix the Army. The Army is (barely) meeting its recruitment
goals by lowering standards and dishing out large bonuses. And,
despite paying equally large rewards for retention bonuses, it is
now hemorrhaging talented junior and midgrade officers. The
Iraq war, with its grueling and never-ending deployment
schedules, is the main reason for this. (Defense Secretary Robert
Gates said recently that Army recruiters face a serious challenge
as long as signing up means getting assigned to Iraq.) But Iraq is
only part of the problem—and thus getting out of Iraq will
provide only a part of the solution.
• Invest in people. When the draft ended in 1973, the Army
chiefs shifted incentives from veterans' benefits (such as the GI
Bill) to enlistment bonuses. This approach has now gone too far,
resulting in a "transactional" mindset that hurts morale and
warps the military's credo of service. The next defense secretary
should shift back to the old approach: Fund civilian education
for enlisted personnel and officers; provide leave for them to
pursue bachelors' and graduate degrees between deployments;
give educational grants to family members as compensation for
the hardships of repeated moves; invest in immersive training in
foreign languages and cultures. These things will produce better
officers, as well as happier ones.
• Promote the right leaders. Owing to a shortage of officers,
almost anyone can get promoted to lieutenant colonel. Beyond
that, the Army's promotion boards are a hidebound lot—
notorious for favoring officers who resemble themselves and for
especially screening out intellectuals, mavericks, and
strategically minded warriors. (Gen. David Petraeus—who
possesses a rare mix of leadership talent, soldierly prowess,
intelligence, raw ambition, and luck—is one of a handful of
exceptions.) Junior officers read each year's promotion list as
they would tea leaves; it tells them what types of officers are
desired and what types are not. Many creative officers leave the
Army after realizing that it holds no future for them.
Technically, the president and Congress must approve all
promotions. Therefore, either could require that a certain
percentage of new brigadier generals possess specific qualities
or backgrounds—for instance, that they have trained foreign
military forces or proven adept in other skills that will likely be
essential in future conflicts. (There is precedent for this: As a
result of the Goldwater-Nichols reforms passed by Congress in
1986, all new generals must have experience in a joint—i.e.,
multiservice—unit.) ) The Army should also consider "360degree evaluation"—i.e., consultation by junior, as well as
senior, officers—in order to identify the most talented leaders in
its ranks. (Corporate America has long employed this
technique.)
• Create incentives for a real nation-building or
counterinsurgency capability. The Army's new field manual on
"Full-Spectrum Operations" says that "stability operations" are
just as important as combat. However, these words will ring
hollow unless and until more troops are trained in such
operations and more officers with expertise in that area are
promoted to general. A year ago, a unit was created in Ft. Riley,
Kan., home of the 1st Infantry Division, specifically to train
advisers—officers who would go advise Iraqi and Afghan
security forces. Several Pentagon officials, including Secretary
Robert Gates, said that this was one of the Army's most
important missions. The commander of the unit was Lt. Col.
John Nagl, one of the Army's top experts in counterinsurgency.
But Nagl has since complained that the unit was filled on an "ad
hoc" basis and that many of the trainers had no experience as
advisers. He has now decided to leave the Army. We—and,
more importantly, other officers—will know that the Pentagon is
taking this putative goal seriously when the unit is commanded
by a general and when officers who go out in the field as
advisers are promoted as routinely as those deployed as infantry
fighters.
• Spread the responsibilities around. Civilian experts are
probably better than sergeants at the kinds of stability operations
described above. So, the next president should see that more
money goes to the State Department, USAID, and other
agencies—many of which have nascent offices of stability
operations and foreign assistance—and let them do the jobs.
Secretary Gates urged this course (even if he didn't volunteer to
hand over any of the Pentagon's billions). Some senior Army
officers have told us that, for certain urgent tasks in Iraq and
Afghanistan, they would rather have 500 more Foreign Service
officers than 5,000 more soldiers. If wars—or foreign policies
generally—are national campaigns, the burden should be carried
by the national government more broadly.
• Taxes. On that subject, if we're not going to return to military
conscription, more citizens have to contribute something to
national defense—if not their blood, then more of their treasure.
All the steps outlined above—especially those that involve
recruiting and retaining qualified personnel—are very expensive.
And they can't all be paid for by canceling the F-22 and other
Cold War relics. Nor should they be paid for by borrowing more
cash from China. If we want to continue the kind of military
we're pursuing, and the kinds of wars we're fighting, then let's
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pass a surtax to pay for it. If we don't want to pay for it, then let's
drop the whole idea—scale back our missions in the world and
figure out some other way to fulfill them.
fixing it
Foreign Policy
What it will take to heal U.S. diplomacy.
By Fred Kaplan
Sunday, March 30, 2008, at 10:46 PM ET
The next president must repair our tarnished image in the world
and restore some of our lost power. The good news is that, in
some respects, the one goal goes along with the other. The bad
news is that both are harder than they may seem, because our
diminished condition stems not just from President Bush's
policies but from our victory in the Cold War, which
paradoxically made us weaker.
This seems odd at first glance (didn't we emerge as "the sole
superpower"?), but for all its horrors, the Cold War was a system
of international security. The world was dominated by the
United States and the Soviet Union, and the countries in between
often subordinated their own interests to accommodate—in the
West by choice, in the East by force—the interests of their
superpower protector. When the USSR evaporated, we didn't
step into the vacuum; the vacuum expanded. Old allies realized
they could go their own ways and pursue their own interests with
less regard for what Washington thought. Other powers—China
especially—moved up in the world, offering alternative
alignments.
Bush accelerated this development by failing to recognize it. He
and his top aides thought that since we were now all-powerful,
allies were no longer necessary—when, in fact, they were more
necessary, and harder to lure, than ever. The next president will
have to do what Bush failed to do—step up diplomatic activity,
renovate old alliances, devise new ones—not just because
diplomacy is preferable to war but because we have no choice.
In short, if handled shrewdly, the things the next president must
do to repair our image will also enhance our power.
Here are some of the main things:
• Travel to all the Middle East countries and leave behind a fulltime envoy to the region. It is appalling that President Bush
made his first trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories in his
final year and, even then, did nothing—and that he assured the
envoy whom he did (finally) appoint that the job was a part-time
post. The real agenda at the Annapolis summit, just before then,
was to corral the Sunni nations into an anti-Iran coalition. But
that won't happen—the leaders won't ally themselves so openly
with the United States—until we at least seem to get serious
about the Israeli-Palestinian talks. Each of the region's problems
has its own dynamic, but each is also linked to the others. Bush
has always known this. In 2002-03, he thought that the road to
Jerusalem went through Baghdad (i.e., that by toppling Saddam
and transforming Iraq into a democracy, the neighboring
dictators would fall like dominoes)—when, if anything, the road
goes in the opposite direction. Bush's father and Bill Clinton
employed Dennis Ross as a full-time Middle East envoy. His job
was to douse the flame whenever anyone lit a match and to
pounce on any opportunity for a strategic breakthrough. As long
as Arafat ruled the PLO, such opportunities were perhaps
illusory. Ross or someone like him should go back to do what he
used to do—in a more fluid, intriguing setting.
• Iraq: Use the troops as leverage. Most Democrats realize that
total withdrawal in the next few years is impractical. If John
McCain is elected, the Joint Chiefs will inform him that his
vision of a 100-year occupation is impossible. (If deployments
continue at anywhere near current levels, the Army might break
before the end of his first term.) The goal should be to withdraw
as quickly as possible while trying to keep Iraq from going up in
flames. Some believe Iraq's leaders won't get their act together
until they see that we really are leaving. Maybe. But it's equally,
if not more, plausible that there is no act for them to get together
and that the prospect of our departure will drive each faction to
retreat and prepare for the imminent civil war. The major parties
want us to leave—but not now. One way to exploit this
ambivalence: Start the withdrawal but attach benchmarks. (The
old benchmarks, which Bush put in place but ignored when they
weren't met, might still be suitable.) If the Iraqis meet certain
benchmarks, we'll suspend the withdrawal and help consolidate
the progress until the next benchmark. If the Iraqis fail to meet
them, we will continue the withdrawal. The surge—in fact, our
entire military presence—is a means to an end: an instrument to
provide security while Iraq's leaders settle their sectarian feuds.
If the feuds are irresolvable, we can do only so much; there is
little point in keeping our thumbs (and most of our fingers)
plugging up holes in the bursting dike. If Iraq were like South
Korea or postwar Europe (or even Bosnia), that would be one
thing; but no Americans died in combat after those wars were
over and the long occupations began. That's not the case with
Iraq.
• Prevent Iraq's internal violence from spreading into
neighboring countries. One can imagine Iran intervening to help
the Shiites; Saudi Arabia or Egypt or Jordan stepping up to aid
the Sunnis; Turkey moving in to crush the Kurds—in short, the
civil war morphing into a regionwide conflagration. The next
president, working with the United Nations, the Arab League, or
whatever entities are suitable, should convene a regional
conference. There should be no utopian aspirations. It should be
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a businesslike office where delegates of the interested nations
regularly meet, so that if the violence does begin to spread, there
will already be a forum for trying to contain it. This measure
would save many days or weeks—which could mean all the
difference in the world.
• In certain neighboring countries … In 2006, Condoleezza Rice
was asked why she wasn't talking with Syria. She replied, "The
Syrians know what they need to do." Maybe, but they didn't
know what was in it for them if they did—what they would get
for walking away from the Iranians and coming over to our side.
Spelling out the trade is what diplomacy is about. Maybe there's
nothing we can reasonably offer that they'd accept; but there's no
harm in trying.
• Separately, open up talks with Iran with an eye toward
negotiating a "grand bargain." These talks should cover all
issues—including Western capital investment and the end of
sanctions in exchange for concessions on enriching uranium and
supporting terrorism. This effort may not go anywhere. But
Bush's hostile rhetoric has only bolstered Ahmadinejad's
domestic support. Diplomatic overtures, if made openly and (by
all appearances) sincerely, may undermine his resistance to
reform.
• Work toward new Pakistani alliances. In Pakistan, the situation
is so fluid and uncertain, it's hard to know at this point what
policies ought to be pursued 10 months from now. But backing
away from Musharraf and moving toward whatever coalition of
parties the Pakistani people support (as long as the Taliban or alQaida aren't involved) would be a smart move. In these kinds of
situations, it's wise to invoke the Realist's slogan: Nations have
interests, not friends. (In this case, our hardheaded security
interests and our moral aspirations—to create conditions for the
survival and, if possible, the spread of democracy—coincide.)
• Pursue public diplomacy. What we do sends a more potent
signal to the world than the cleverest PR campaign. But once we
start doing smarter things, we should also be smart about
promoting our efforts. For instance: Revive the U.S. Information
Agency—a once-vast independent entity that (though lecture
programs, libraries, concerts, etc.) promoted not American
policy but American values. Send as emissaries abroad people
who understand the language and the area (not well-meaning
provincials like Karen Hughes). Expand the Foreign Service.
Offer scholarships for intense study in crucial languages. Train
customs officers to treat foreign visitors more courteously at
embassies and airports. It should be possible to be vigilant about
security without assuming that every tourist is a terrorist.
foreigners
A Wrinkle in the Fabric of Society
In Turkey, head scarves are potent political symbols.
By Anne Applebaum
It can be a little wisp of fabric, nothing more. It comes in longer
versions, shorter versions, versions that cover the hair, others
that cover the face. According to Le Monde, you can even get a
Viennese stylist to design one in the manner of "Catherine ZetaJones or Naomi Campbell," with a whiff of supermodel glamour.
But whatever shape it takes, and whatever you want to call it, the
political controversy surrounding the scarves that many (though
not all) Islamic women use to cover their heads will not go
away. The debate surrounding head scarves, banned in French
schools and some German state institutions, has just re-emerged
at the center of an extraordinary lawsuit, one that could, if
successful, bring down the Turkish government.
Brought by the chief prosecutor of Turkey, the suit—to put it
bluntly and briefly—accuses the ruling party of violating
Turkey's Constitution, and it proposes to evict its leaders,
including the prime minister and the president, from politics.
The central point of this sticky legal clash between the
"secularism" of the Turkish Constitution and the "will of the
nation," as the ruling party calls it (or the "dictatorship of the
majority," in the words of Turkey's chief prosecutor), is the head
scarf: Last February, the government lifted a long-standing ban
on the wearing of them at universities, and Turkey's secular
classes are furious.
This kind of controversy is not entirely new to Turkey, where
political parties have been banned in the past (and prime
ministers hanged in the more distant past) for insufficient
secularism. What strikes me as important this time around is the
enduring significance, once again, of that simple piece of cloth.
To outsiders, the issue usually seems petty. (The International
Herald Tribune titled its editorial on the subject "Much Ado
About Head Scarves.") Those with an Anglo-American bias—
myself included—have often been persuaded that the issue is
one of personal liberty: A head scarf should be a matter of
"choice." But if politicians are grandstanding about head scarves,
maybe that's because head scarves, at least in Turkey and a few
other places, are political symbols and not purely religious
"choices" at all.
Fairly or not, in certain Turkish communities, a head covering in
fact marks the wearer not just as faithful but as a believer in a
particular version of Islam. Fairly or not, the head scarf carries
with it, at least in Turkey, partisan connotations, as well as a
suggestion of the wearer's views of women. Political scientist
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Zeyno Baran pointed out to me that most of the wives of the
current Turkish political leadership wear head scarves, that most
of them donned the scarves after their marriages, and that most
of them never worked or studied again after they wed. You can
see why women who want something different might feel
threatened.
In fact, the Turkish ban was first instituted in the 1980s precisely
to protect these bareheaded women, as well as the secular
students who wanted to remain so. For 20 years or so, the ban
was relatively successful. After a few initial protests, it was
widely accepted—how else can a deeply divided society survive,
unless it creates zones of neutrality?—at least until the current
government tried to get rid of it again this year.
For the record, the French head-scarf ban—though widely
mocked when instituted in 2004—is at the moment considered a
great success, at least by the French government. Droves of girls
did not drop out of school, as predicted. Every year, French
officials say, there are fewer conflicts over the issue. Over time,
they argue, Muslim girls will find it easier to integrate into
French society.
None of which is to say that Turkey's supreme court can or
should oust the Turkish government: I'll let Turkey's lawyers
fight that one out. But if they try to do so, let's not pretend it's
unimportant. And if, someday, this argument comes to our
shores, let's not be surprised by that. In the end, the head-scarf
debate isn't about a wisp of fabric but about the viability of
secular Islam itself.
gabfest
The Corkscrew Landing Gabfest
Listen to Slate's review of the week in politics.
By Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and William Saletan
Click here for the most recent Cultural Gabfest.
Listen to the Gabfest for March 28 by clicking the arrow on the
audio player below:
You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe
to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.
John Dickerson, Emily Bazelon, and guest Will Saletan gather in
Slate's Washington, D.C., studio to discuss whether Hillary
Clinton has any chance of winning the Democratic nomination,
how faulty memory hurts candidates on the campaign trail, and
the 10th anniversary of Viagra.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned
in the show:
John on Hillary Clinton's will to live
Jeff Greenfield on primary lessons
Mickey Kaus on the first time Obama attended the Rev.
Jeremiah Wright's church
"Today's Blogs" on Hillary misspeaking about her trip to Bosnia
Emily recommends the film Fifty Nude Women
A public opinion poll finds that 22 percent of Democratic voters
nationwide say Hillary Clinton should drop out of the race, but
22 percent also say Barack Obama should drop out
Posted by Dale Willman on March 28 at 11:51 a.m.
March 26, 2008
Listen to Cultural Gabfest No. 4 with critics Stephen Metcalf,
Meghan O'Rourke, and John Swansburg by clicking the arrow
on the audio player below:
In this week's Cultural Gabfest, our critics discuss whether
Barack Obama was channeling Walt Whitman, whether the head
of JPMorgan was channeling Gordon Gekko, and whether
English professors should be channeling Wal-Mart associates.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned
in the show:
Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech
Walt Whitman's Song of Myself
New York magazine's profile of Jamie Dimon
Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko in Wall Street
Joseph Schumpeter's "Creative Destruction"
The New York Times' "You Say Recession, I Say 'Reservations!'
"
NOBU restaurant in New York City
Gerald Graff's Professing Literature: An Institutional History
Meghan's pick: The Hakawati by Rabih Alameddine
John's pick: Dispatches by Michael Herr
Stephen's pick: Boys and Girls in America from the Hold Steady
Posted by Andy Bowers on March 26 at 8:16 p.m.
March 21, 2008
40/124
audio player below:
Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson and David Plotz discuss Barack
Obama's speech, the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, and the
guns case before the Supreme Court.
The e-mail address for the Political Gabfest is
[email protected]. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the
writer stipulates otherwise.)
To include those who will not be drinking, John Dickerson
introduced this week's supermarket-aisle chatter in place of the
usual cocktail chatter. Emily pointed out an upcoming Second
Amendment case before the Supreme Court; David marveled at
Marion Barry's political resilience; and John introduced this
week's best listener-submitted sports metaphors.
The e-mail address for the Political Gabfest is
[email protected]. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the
writer stipulates otherwise.)
Posted by Alex Joseph on March 14 at 3:30 p.m.
March 12, 2008
Posted by June Thomas on March 24 at 12:10 p.m.
March 14, 2008
audio player below:
Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz gather in
Slate's Washington, D.C, studio to discuss the impact of New
York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's resignation, how Geraldine Ferraro's
comments can help or hurt each Democratic candidate's
campaign, and the ongoing murmurs about a Clinton-Obama
dream ticket.
Eliot Spitzer's involvement with a prostitute and subsequent
resignation dominated the discussion. Of particular note, the
Gabfest team explored the possibility that Spitzer did not pay
enough. They discussed a post on "The XX Factor" that argues
that finding sex may not be easier for powerful men. They also
looked at the consequences of Spitzer's resignation on his
superdelegate vote.
A roundup of Slate's coverage of the Eliot Spitzer scandal can be
found here.
The discussion then turned to Geraldine Ferraro's racially loaded
comments and the impact they will have on each campaign.
Emily conceded that Ferraro's comments held some truth,
although her phrasing was deeply flawed.
Listen to Cultural Gabfest No. 3 with critics Stephen Metcalf,
Dana Stevens, and John Swansburg by clicking the arrow on the
audio player below:
Our newest podcast, the Cultural Gabfest, is back just in time to
take on the Eliot Spitzer meltdown and how it's echoing through
the media. Critics Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and John
Swansburg also discuss the recent rash of fake memoirs and a
breakout blog that claims to shed light on stuff white people like.
Here are links to some of the items mentioned in this week's
episode:
"The Fake Memoirist's Survival Guide" on Slate
A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley
The Stuff White People Like blog
Stuff White People Like on NPR's Talk of the Nation
Dana Stevens' recommended movie: Chop Shop
John Swansburg's recommended fake memoir: Amazons: An
Intimate Memoir by the First Women To Play in the National
Hockey League by Cleo Birdwell (aka Don DeLillo)
Stephen Metcalf's recommended TV show: Top Gear from BBC
America
Posted by Andy Bowers at 11:55 a.m.
March 7, 2008
Finally, the Gabfest panelists doubted the possibility of a dream
ticket between the two major Democratic candidates. Emily was
particularly taken with Clinton's recent ads, which, she believes,
have successfully planted the seed in voters' minds that Obama
is the "unready" candidate.
To play the March 7 Political Gabfest, click the arrow on the
audio player below:
41/124
Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz gather in
Slate's Washington studio to discuss Hillary Clinton's comeback,
John McCain's White House photo-op, and Margaret B. Jones'
fake memoir.
Here are some of the stories mentioned in the podcast:
David Greenberg's "History Lesson" on how Democrats always
take forever to pick a nominee
A Slate V discussion of Tuesday's results, featuring Emily
Bazelon, Dahlia Lithwick, and Melinda Hennenberger
Slate's coverage of fake memoir week (check out the links at the
top of the page)
Charlotte Allen's "Outlook" essay and the outraged response on
"XX Factor"
"Trailhead" on Yes, Pecan ice cream and the hijacked
conference call
Gabfest listener Neal Jahren was nice enough to set up an
unofficial Facebook fan page for the show. If you'd like to join
the discussion there, here's the link.
If you have ideas for the most appropriate sports metaphor for
the Democratic slugfest, or if you'd just like to tell us what you
think about the show, our e-mail address is [email protected].
(E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates
otherwise.) Posted by June Thomas at 6:16 p.m.
gardening
Kinder-Gardening
How to teach your child to tend the land without losing your mind.
By Constance Casey
Ah, there's nothing like spring with your child joining you in the
garden. Little hands at work in the sweet, crumbly soil to create
a wee enchanted fairyland. Phooey! (Or a stronger expletive.)
Tending a garden is not trivial work. To do any kind of
gardening is to balance disorder and order, chaos and control. To
be a parent is to deal with the same forces.
Certainly, children can get a lot of pleasure from growing
flowers and vegetables. But let go of the sweet fantasy of the
toddler tending the bean from seed to stalk or the kindergartner
struck dumb with wonder as you explain evolution,
photosynthesis, and genetically modified organisms.
The adult's dream of a flowery haven full of teaching
opportunities quickly comes into conflict with the child's natural
energy and need to act on things, not just look at them.
Here are some suggestions for how to decrease conflict and
increase your and your young charge's chances of success. The
desired outcome in this arena consists of plants that stay alive
and no child or parent actually weeping or throwing things.
~ Don't wait until July. It will be too hot to plant, and there will
be slim pickings at the nursery.
~ Be flexible. The act of gardening, with its necessary
adjustments to weather and terrain and plagues and pests,
forcefully promotes flexibility. Now, you're interacting with a
small human being with a short attention span as well as with the
larger forces of nature.
Bend a bit in matters of taste. While you're imagining an allwhite garden, your child will be picking out the orange marigold
that goes badly with every other color, especially his or her next
selection, the red petunia with white stripes that resembles
nothing in nature.
~ Start small. Many an adult tells of being turned off gardening
for life by being given the chore of weeding a parent's half-acre.
Your child can grow a surprising amount of interesting stuff in a
half-barrel in the sun. Take care to put drainage holes in the
bottom and fill it with a lightweight sterile soil mix rather than
yard dirt. Mix in slow-release fertilizer pellets. String twine up a
wall onto hooks. Have your child plant seeds of a vine like
morning glory or small gourds or scarlet runner bean. Go to a
farmers market or nursery and let him or her pick out a trailing
annual like petunias or verbena for the barrel's edge and some
spearmint for an area that will be shaded. Water with a watering
can, not a hose, gently and thoroughly. (More later on the dire
consequences of child plus hose.)
You could stick with the half-barrel or go bigger by preparing a
sunny 4-by-6-foot spot. Surround this small patch with boards to
define it. Put a narrow board across it, so your child can reach
the plants without stepping on them or the soil. Improve the soil
before you plant. In a city, this means a well-gloved adult will
remove glass, cans, bottle caps, cigarettes, rocks, and lumps of
concrete. Spread compost or well-rotted manure on the soil and
dig it in lightly. Save the big rocks. Your child can use them to
outline the planted bed so the plot won't get stepped on.
To see why it's important to be clear about where not to walk,
picture an outdoor birthday party for a dozen 4-year-olds. Pavers
are great—kids can hopscotch along them. Raised beds for
vegetables and precious plants are even better for keeping plants
out of harm's way.
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~ Select structures that work for both adults and children. With a
small yard, you have to decide whether you want a playground
or a garden. A playground, unless it involves a swimming pool,
gets old fast. The abandoned jungle gym and the rusted swing
set are clichés for a desolate place; leave play structures to park
planners. Instead, make a big, sturdy bench—it could be no more
than firmly planted cinder blocks and a thick, wide board. A
child can jump on and off it and, when exhausted, sit and rest
beside you. Any kind of platform, as small as a bench or as big
as a deck, works as a lookout, a stage, an island, or a fort.
~ Let the child make a mess, but not everywhere. If you take a
minute to watch a child enter a yard, you'll see him sizing up the
place for somewhere to climb, somewhere to dig, and
somewhere to hide. Give your kid and a friend some trowels and
a well-defined place where you want the soil loosened up.
When putting shrubs beside a shed or garage, plant those
hydrangeas or viburnums 4 feet away from the structure, leaving
room for a hiding place. Spread pine-bark nuggets underfoot to
cut down on mud; the bark will smell good when it warms up.
~ Choose plants that will give you a relatively fast payoff. There
are some seeds that can go right into the ground in that 4-by-6foot space.
The whole plot could be sunflowers from seed. Food plants that
work well from seeds sown directly outdoors include beans,
peas, carrots, radishes, and summer squash. If you combine
sunflowers with food, place the sunflowers where they won't
shade everything else.
For plants like tomatoes, buy seedlings. (There are very few
home windowsills sunny enough to grow healthy tomato
seedlings indoors.)
A surprisingly cool plant for children is Brussels sprouts. A 3inch seedling grows a stupendously strong and thick trunk by
harvest time. The sprouts are fantastic plucked when they're the
size of a baby fingernail.
Should you grow a squash like zucchetta trombolina (one of the
selections in the John Scheepers seed collection "A Child's
Garden of Wonder"), harvest those green submarines when
they're small, or you will be overwhelmed. Prickly squash leaves
can irritate skin, not enough to hurt but enough to provide a
lesson in how plants protect themselves from browsing animals.
Also look for plants that are very pleasant to touch. Many of the
scented geraniums have leaves that are both velvety and
fragrant. Lamb's ears really are gray and fuzzy, and easy to grow
in well-drained soil.
For a child's cutting garden, cosmos and black-eyed Susans
provide the classic grandmother-pleasing daisy shape. You will
want to demonstrate to your youngster that when you pull on a
flower stem, you often pull up the whole plant. Trust your child
with small scissors with rounded ends.
Children are supposed to like plants that are pretty, but they
really, truly like plants that are weird, even monstrous. One very
easy monster perennial is joe pye weed, which can get to be 6
feet tall, with meadowy pink flowers that are attractive to
butterflies.
The tropical plants commonly known as elephant ears are
weirdly beautiful. One of them, esculenta black magic has huge
leaves that emerge green and turn to purply-black. Another,
Alocasia amazonica, has dark-green leaves with dramatic white
veins, in the shape of an African mask.
There's an easy rose bush, Rosa chinensis mutabilis, with orange
buds that open to yellow, orange, pink, and pinkish-red.
Combine it with the buddleia that has orange-pink and purple all
on the same flower.
~ Supervise watering. (Imagine that birthday party if one of the
4-year-olds gets a hold of a hose.) Watering is both the most
important thing for keeping plants alive and the biggest danger
in gardening with children, power saws aside. A blast of water
tears or uproots small plants, washes away soil, and splatters
leaves with mud.
It isn't easy to get across the concept of watering slowly and
thoroughly, letting the water sink in. This is why God created
watering cans. An adult or some calm, sane child should use the
hose to fill the watering can. You then have a very pretty
camera-ready tableau. Because your child will probably get
bored after the second watering can, the adult in the garden
needs to use a hose (with a soaker nozzle) to water the garden
the next morning.
~ Finally, teach by example more than by explaining. If an adult
is working in a concentrated, calm, meditative manner, it is a
very good bet that a child will interrupt. With luck, the
interruption will come with the question What are you doing and
why?
The last but most important step: Take a look together every day
at what's growing.
***
Some inspired advice: "Recognize that kids' gardening priorities
are different, well, practically opposite of adults'." That comes
from Cheryl Dorschner, a columnist at the Burlington Free
Press. Here's a particularly good Web site for more information.
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March 28, 2008
hollywoodland
The Office Spinoff
And other news from the NBC "in-front."
By Kim Masters
Yee-haw: NBC promised year-round fun at its "in-fronts," held
Wednesday afternoon. The network doesn't have many new hits
to tout, so it's trying to lure advertisers with an ambitious plan:
original shows 12 months a year. And instead of waiting until
May to present its plans at the upfronts, NBC is tossing a lot at
the wall right now.
Order in the court: Your Hollywoodland correspondent
decided to take a firsthand look at the Pellicano trial on
Thursday, arriving in the midst of seemingly endless testimony
about how phone companies work.
Even Pellicano—balding, wearing unfashionable glasses and his
prison-issue, olive-drab windbreaker—yawned as he watched
the endless cross-examination. Seated along the defendant's row
with Pellicano were accused co-conspirators from the phone
company and the police department. The courtroom, with its
high vaulted ceiling and rows of recessed lights, felt like a weird
converted airplane hangar.
The Office will be paired with a spinoff, but NBC is not telling
anything about it—except that it's supposed to launch after the
Super Bowl. Interest in the original show is such that "all our
Office scripts are watermarked," Ben Silverman, the co-chairman
of NBC, said. "We're only going to bring [the spinoff] to market
if it's ready for market and up to the quality of the original." He
also noted that unlike competitors' comedies, NBC's are funny.
"I've watched the other shows on other networks. I've never
laughed," he said.
There was momentary hope that things might perk up when the
phone company guy got off the stand and Freddie DeMann,
former partner with Madonna in Maverick Records, stepped up.
He testified about shelling out $135,000 for Pellicano to snoop
on his son-in-law to establish whether he was cheating on
DeMann's daughter. He admitted to listening to revealing taped
phone conversations involving that son-in-law. The testimony
was awkward but not devastating. One fact seemed worth
noting: Others who admitted on the stand that they had listened
to tapes that were allegedly made illegally have testified under a
grant of immunity. But there was no mention of immunity
during DeMann's testimony, and yet he hasn't been charged with
anything.
Chuck will be back on Monday nights. Life will hang in there by
a strand on Friday nights. Friday Night Lights will be back in
February—though the show struggles in the ratings, it has a
passionate following. NBC is keeping it by agreeing to air the
series after it runs via DirecTV.
Pellicano did not question him. The attorney representing ex-cop
Mark Arneson tried to ask DeMann if he didn't think his
daughter was better off after Dad got the dirt on her husband.
The relevance of that as a legal defense was obscure; the judge
sustained an objection, so DeMann didn't answer.
NBC will also schedule series that have previously aired in
Canada or on the BBC. Why not? It's worth a try.
More pathetic was former phone company employee Teresa
Wright, who wept copiously while she admitted that she
conducted "hundreds" of unauthorized searches at the behest of
Rayford Turner, an old friend and colleague who was sitting
there in court down the row from Pellicano. She acknowledged
tearfully that she, too, is awaiting sentencing.
Here's a little dish on the fates of what may be your favorite
shows:
Bionic Woman and Journeyman are dead. E.R. has one season
left, with a finale in late February.
As for new shows, Silverman has heavily hyped My Own Worst
Enemy, the new Jekyll-and-Hyde show with Christian Slater. We
had no idea Slater was this hot, but Silverman repeatedly
compared casting him to earlier snarings of Steve Carell for The
Office and America Ferrera for Ugly Betty. They chased Slater to
London and Spokane! Once the network got him, it skipped the
pilot and went straight to series.
Silverman cautioned that the schedule remains fluid, invoking—
and mixing—sports metaphors: "We're constantly playing a
three-dimensional chess game. …We obviously are going to
need to be able to call audibles." (link)
This week's biggest drama involved an announcement in court
on Tuesday that lawyer Bert Fields was planning to take the
Fifth if called to testify. (Recall that Fields is the lawyer who
hired Pellicano on behalf of many clients over many years,
including Brad Grey and Michael Ovitz.)
Fields promptly denied that and said he'd testify if called. The
U.S. attorney's office then issued a statement explaining the
confusion this way: Fields' personal lawyer, John Keker, had
advised that Fields would invoke his Fifth Amendment rights but
then the counsel for Fields' law firm said it wasn't so. And Keker
was, mysteriously, out as Fields' lawyer.
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What does it mean? We consulted former prosecutor Laurie
Levinson, who's not following the trial day-to-day but knows
how these things work. She says it's possible that Keker
reflexively wanted Fields to take the Fifth, as any criminaldefense attorney might, and then found out that his client
disagreed with that plan. Or it's possible that Fields knew of the
plan but didn't like the reaction after it was made public. Or
perhaps his firm didn't like the reaction. It could be that Keker
thought his client should take the Fifth and wasn't comfortable
with hanging around if that didn't happen.
Keker's reputation is so good, she says, that most people would
give him the benefit of any doubt in any rift with Fields. Of
course, Keker can't talk about what happened because it's
privileged.
As to whether the prosecutors will call Fields, she was doubtful.
Fields is not the prosecution's friend in this matter, she says, and
calling him would represent unknown and unnecessary risk. Just
another disappointment in what was once supposed to be the
trial of all Hollywood trials. (link)
It would mean that he helped an alleged serial rapist get off the
hook.
And he got away with it all for years.
For a long time, Pellicano's tough-guy talk seemed to put him on
the verge of self-parody: the hard-boiled gumshoe playing the
private-dick role in the manner that people in Hollywood would
expect. And in many cases, his alleged victims were hard to
pity—like producer Bo Zenga, who had to take the Fifth more
than 100 times when he was deposed in a lawsuit that he had
initiated. (Zenga has also declared himself an award-winning
screenwriter when all he had "won" was a contest that he'd made
up himself.)
Then there was Lisa Bonder, who tried to shake down Kirk
Kerkorian for $320,000 a month after gaming a DNA test to
trick him into supporting a child who wasn't his. It was hard to
feel bad when Pellicano exposed that type of behavior.
March 21, 2008
But even if all of Pellicano's victims had put themselves in
harm's way, what he appears to have done goes far beyond their
concerns. Every day of testimony sharpens the focus on
allegations that should scare everyone—even folks who have
never gotten closer to Hollywood than the multiplex. (link)
Sordid details: As expected, Paramount chief Brad Grey's
testimony at the Pellicano trial was not too sexy. Garry
Shandling may have gotten people's hopes up with his
complaints about Grey's behavior as his manager, but no one in
this case has a stake in pursuing that angle. The question was
whether Grey knew of Pellicano's alleged wrongdoing, and
Grey, naturally, said he did not.
Correction, March 19, 2008: The item on the Pellicano trial
originally included a photo of John Connolly, who's actually a
reporter who investigated Pellicano. The image has been
removed.
So it's hardly surprising that Shandling—a professional, after
all—turned out to be more entertaining than Grey. For those
looking for a big takedown of Hollywood power, it's long been
clear that the trial seems unlikely to pay off. But the fact that
Pellicano's big-name clients appear to have skated doesn't mean
that the allegations in this case aren't sensational. They could
hardly be more so.
If the government's got its facts right (and Pellicano, acting as
his own counsel, isn't mounting a serious defense so far), then
the worst is true: Justice in this country can be bought pretty
easily, if not cheaply.
The case has elicited testimony that Pellicano convinced cops
and phone company employees to snoop through data that
should have had vigilant protection. He perverted the system,
and not just to benefit rich clients who wanted to shake off
unwanted spouses or thwart opponents in business deals. He is
accused of having successfully intimidated a number of alleged
rape victims to prevent their testifying against a client. Got that?
hot document
The Torture Memo
Former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo greenlights abusing
prisoners of war.
By Bonnie Goldstein
hot document
Nipple Rings vs. Metal Detectors
Gloria Allred strikes a blow for body piercing.
By Bonnie Goldstein
From: Bonnie Goldstein
Posted Monday, March 31, 2008, at 1:58 PM ET
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Gloria Allred, who represents victims of harassment,
discrimination, and wrongful termination, is "the most famous
woman attorney practicing law in the nation today," according to
her own Web site. That immodest judgment would be hard to
dispute. In her storied career, Allred has filed an amicus brief in
Paula Corbin Jones v. William Jefferson Clinton; represented
Amber Frey, Scott Peterson's mistress, during Peterson's 2004
double-murder trial; and, recently, taken on Heather Mills as a
client after the activist/fashion model divorced Paul McCartney.
At a packed press conference last week, Allred announced her
latest cause: the alleged harassment of a graphic artist named
Mandi Hamlin by officials of the Transportation Security
Administration at the Lubbock, Texas airport. At issue is
whether the TSA followed a humane protocol for women who
wear nipple rings.
In a letter (see below and on the following two pages) Allred
describes the February incident. Hamlin, Allred writes, was
nearly barred from a Southwest Airlines flight to Dallas because
of her numerous metal piercings. When the hand-held metal
detector beeped near Hamlin's "left breast" (below), Hamlin
offered to confirm that her nipple rings did not constitute a
deadly weapon by showing them to a female TSA agent. Instead,
Hamlin was led behind a "dark curtain" where she was forced to
remove them with "the help of pliers" while "a growing number
of predominantly-male TSA officers" could be heard "snickering
in the background" (Page 3). This was, Allred argues, not only
cruel but also at odds with the TSA's own policy, which states
that a "pat-down inspection" is sufficient and leaves the question
of whether to remove the body piercing as an alternative to a
pat-down entirely in the hands of the airline passenger. At the
press conference, Allred demonstrated the painful and
humiliating procedure using a mannequin and a brassiere (see
video), then demanded that the Department of Homeland
Security make "a public apology." TSA, for its part, says it
appreciates Hamlin's "raising awareness on this issue" and
sincerely "regrets the situation in which she found herself." The
agency says it is "changing the procedures to ensure that this
does not happen again."
Send ideas for Hot Document to [email protected]. Please
indicate whether you wish to remain anonymous.
hot document
Putting the Private in Private Eye
Want to know what's on the Pellicano wiretaps? Get your own detective.
By Bonnie Goldstein
Posted Friday, March 28, 2008, at 3:02 PM ET
At criminal trials in U.S. federal courts, documents filed by
prosecutors and defendants are typically readily available to the
public through a court-records information system. Sometimes
trial exhibits will also be posted by the Justice Department, as
with wiretap transcripts at a recent mob trial in Chicago.
The federal trial of Hollywood private investigator Anthony
Pellicano, under way in Los Angeles, also involves wiretaps, but
those records have not been particularly accessible. Pellicano is
accused of putting police department employees on his payroll
and of crimes related to an enterprise that paired wiretapping
technology with moonlighting telephone company employees.
Hollywood attorneys hiring Pellicano used illegally overheard
phone calls or pilfered police records to gain the upper hand in
their celebrity clients' legal disputes. Paramount chief Brad Grey
testified at the trial that he was unaware of Pellicano's role in
resolving Grey's contentious falling out with former
management client, comedian Garry Shandling. Shandling,
whose $100 million lawsuit against Grey in 1998 was settled for
a paltry $10 million, also appeared.
Portions of Pellicano recordings have been played in court, but,
although the government's evidence includes much of his
allegedly nefarious "work product," a curious citizen looking at
the 26-page docket of U.S. v Pellicano (excerpts Pages 2 and 3)
will more likely encounter an "Application to Seal Document"
than a juicy transcript. Numerous filings in the case have been
replaced with the federal court's equivalent of a No Trespassing
sign (see below). Pellicano's former clients and their former
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adversaries are apparently aligned at least in one thing: keeping
snoopy gossips away.
are delivering on their promises, rather than about whether what
they're doing is wrong.
Send ideas for Hot Document to [email protected]. Please
indicate whether you wish to remain anonymous.
One key point from that article was that the new transforms the
old. What's old is sex selection. What's new is the combination
of ease, safety, and privacy with which you can now do it. This
is a fundamental dynamic between technology and culture:
Technology can coax cultures one way or the other by making it
easier to do what you want to do, with less difficulty and without
other people knowing about it.
human nature
Fetal Subtraction
Sex selection in the United States.
By William Saletan
(Note to readers: If you're accustomed to getting Human Nature
articles and items by RSS feed, you'll need to subscribe
separately to the feeds for the new HN Blog, News, and Hot
Topics. Or you can simply bookmark the new HN home page,
which links daily to all the new content.)
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the transformation of sex
selection—the practice of making sure your next baby isn't of
the "wrong" sex—into a consumer protection issue. We're
getting sufficiently used to this practice that we've begun to talk
and write about whether companies that promote and facilitate it
Now comes further evidence of this effect. Two days ago,
economists Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund published an
article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
examining the ratio of male to female births in "U.S.-born
children of Chinese, Korean, and Asian Indian parents." Among
whites, the boy-girl ratio was essentially constant, regardless of
the number of kids in a family or how many of them were girls.
In the Asian-American sample, the boy-girl ratio started out at
the same norm: 1.05 to 1. But among families whose first child
was a girl, the boy-girl ratio among second kids went up to 1.17
to 1. And if the first two kids were girls, the boy-girl ratio among
third kids went up to 1.5 to 1. This 50 percent increase in male
probability is directly contrary to the trend among whites, who
tend to produce a child of the same sex as the previous child.
There's no plausible innocent explanation for this enormous and
directionally abnormal shift in probability. The authors conclude
that the numbers are "evidence of sex selection, most likely at
the prenatal stage."
Sex selection of this magnitude has previously been documented
in China, South Korea, and India, but not in the United States.
Here, the authors note, the usual economic and political
rationales for sex selection—dowries, "patrilocal" marriage,
China's one-child policy, and dependence on your kids' support
in old age—don't apply. From this absence of practical motive,
some experts conclude that the study shows persistence of a
cultural tradition as the populations in question migrated to the
United States. But traditions can fade, and this one "is unlikely
to persist in subsequent generations," one demographer told the
Associated Press.
If you look at sex selection as a cultural phenomenon, that may
be true. But if you look at it as a technology, the opposite is just
as plausible. The spread of fetal or embryonic sex-identification
tests, which can be taken in the privacy of your home at
increasingly early stages of pregnancy, makes it easier for sex
selection to spread beyond its original cultural base. So does the
emergence of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, which lets you
chuck your conceived offspring before pregnancy even begins.
In fact, the 2000 census data reviewed by Almond and Edlund
suggest that within the base population, selection of male fetuses
has indeed increased. "The male bias we find in the U.S. appears
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to be recent," they write. "In the 1990 U.S. Census, the tendency
for males to follow females among Indians, Chinese, and
Koreans is substantially muted."
The most obvious factor is technology. Referring to data from
the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, the authors
observe, "Between 1989 and 1999, prenatal ultrasound use
among non-Japanese Asian mothers rose from around 38 percent
to 64 percent of pregnancies." They add: "Since 2005, sexing
through a blood test as early as 5 weeks after conception has
been marketed directly to consumers in the U.S., raising the
prospect of sex selection becoming more widely practiced in the
near future."
If you think of yourself as a techno-progressive—someone who
believes, as Barack Obama does, that "maximizing the power of
technology" will help fix everything from energy to the
environment to health care—the increase in sex selection should
give you pause. Technology can facilitate regression as easily as
it facilitates progress. But if you think of yourself as a pro-life
conservative, the data should humble you, too. In the
populations in which it has increased, sex selection isn't a
newfangled perversion. It's a custom, and a patriarchal one at
that. If the sex-selection story teaches us all to be a bit more
skeptical of both tradition and technology, that'll be real
progress.
Can't think of anyone? Me neither. Someday, when we look
back at the Bush administration's "war on terror," we'll be unable
to point to the "bad guys" because they will turn out to be a
bunch of attorneys in starched white button-downs, using
plausible-sounding legal analysis to beat precedent and statute
and treatise from ploughshares into swords. And not one of them
will be held to account.
From torture to warrantless spying to the creation of a lawless
prison at Guantanamo Bay, this has been a "war" waged by a
thousand memos. And with the release last night of the longawaited John Yoo "torture memo"—81 pages of half-supported
Bush administration wish fulfillment—we have an official poster
boy for the lawyerly claim of someone who was "just doing his
job."
This morning, my inbox runneth over with e-mails from folks
wondering what will happen to the memo's author, a man who so
blithely argued that, in effect, if the president authorizes it, it
isn't illegal. What's going to happen to John Yoo is pretty much
what has happened to every other lawyer who ever offered a
plausible-sounding legal opinion about how to break the laws in
pursuing the war on terror. Nothing. He was just doing his job.
The worst thing that will happen to Yoo may be that he has to
teach the dreaded 8:30 a.m. Friday class at Berkeley next year.
It's the lawyers who wrote the "no" memos who lost their jobs.
jurisprudence
Yoo Talkin' to Me?
Plausible deniability, and other reasons why warfare by midlevel legal
memoranda is a really bad idea.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Pop quiz for the law junkies:
1) Name the lawyer in the Bush administration who was
sanctioned, sacked, or prosecuted for anything related to the
firing of nine U.S. attorneys last spring.
2) How about the attorney fired for allowing the destruction of
thousands of White House e-mails or the CIA torture tapes?
3) The guy dismissed after advocating for warrantless
wiretapping in violation of the FISA law?
4) Disciplined for gross civil rights violations through the misuse
of National Security Letters?
In his book The Terror Presidency, my friend Jack Goldsmith—
who prescribes some fixes for the legal war on terror elsewhere
in Slate today—depicts the paralyzing effect of something called
"lawfare." Lawfare was described by Air Force Brig. Gen.
Charles Dunlap as "the strategy of using or misusing law as a
substitute for traditional military means to achieve an
operational objective." Ordinary acts of foreign policy become
bogged down in a maze of after-the-fact legal consequences.
Donald Rumsfeld saw this form of warfare as a limit on
American military authority. He was determined to find a
solution to what he called "the judicialization of international
politics."
Goldsmith argues that when government actors are hemmed in
on all sides by domestic and international laws, they become
immobilized and fearful. As he notes, "It is unimaginable that
Francis Biddle or Robert Jackson would have written Franklin
Roosevelt a memorandum about how to avoid prosecution for
his wartime decisions designed to maintain flexibility against a
new and deadly foe." It was the accumulation of all these new
laws and courts and lawyers that contributed to an inability for
anyone in the Bush administration to act quickly and forcefully
to prevent the next attack after 9/11. According to Goldsmith,
the war had been "lawyered to death," and hoards of executivebranch officials were afraid to act aggressively in fighting the
next terror attack because they were terrified of the legal
consequences of doing so. Thus, high-ranked government
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officials milled around on the sidelines waiting to be greenlighted by some attorney, in much the same way onlookers at a
car crash are afraid to move the body.
It sounds awful, and it's almost possible to see John Yoo as the
brave individual willing to green-light aggressive interrogation
amid all that paralysis. But in hindsight, Yoo has proven himself
to be a one-man argument for the wisdom of "lawfare." Those
same forces that constrain the executive from acting boldly in a
crisis may also keep it from behaving in ways that later shock
the conscience. If it's a choice between sober legal reflection and
unhinged prisoner abuse, sober reflection also has its
advantages.
But that choice also assumes lawyers engaged in sober
reflection, and that may be assuming too much. Indeed, if
anything, Goldsmith and others may have understated the
dangers of "lawfare"—if the lawyers tasked with working
around the web of international laws begin from the premise that
laws are just obstacles. As we are beginning to learn, the
growing tendency to conduct wars in the courtroom hasn't
actually constrained anyone at all over the past seven years. The
expanded role of all these laws and lawyers in the war on terror
has had the opposite effect: The Bush administration has proven
time and again that the Rule of Law is only as definitive as its
most inventive lawyers.
In short, the Bush solution to the paralysis of lawfare seems to
be to hire lawyers who don't believe in the law.
And the newly revealed Yoo memo highlights several reasons
why warfare by midlevel legal memoranda is a terrible mistake:
1) The dangerous presumption that there are two legitimate
sides to every question, including settled ones: This is a peculiar
hallmark of Bush administration's existentialist thinking.
Witness Michael Mukasey, whose ability to turn settled legal
questions ("water-boarding = torture") into exercises in 1st
Officer Spockian Deep Thought ("water-boarding might be
torture. Or it might not. Fascinating problem. Hmmm"). The
Yoo memo is what Orin Kerr rightly characterizes as "lawyerly."
It looks like a memo. Notes Kerr, "It cites tons of authority,
hedges arguments, discusses counterarguments, and generally
reads like a careful lawyer's work." That's because in law school,
they teach you to take out the bits that say, "Stick 'em in the eye
with the shrimp fork!" But as Kerr also concedes, you can be
lawyerly and also poorly reasoned. There are good arguments to
be made for many stupid legal ideas, but that doesn't make them
legal. We need to stop revering open-mindedness when it comes
to settled law. It suggests that contrarian, dangerous, bad ideas
have equal weight to settled, prudent, careful ideas, so long as
there are citations and footnotes to support them.
2) The diffusion of legal responsibility and plausible deniability:
Marty Lederman asks important questions about how a midlevel
lawyer managed to cook up some law in his constitutional EasyBake Oven that somehow became America's interrogation policy
and a how-to for interrogators at Abu Ghraib. Part of that answer
lies in the difference between what lawyers do—suggest
permissible legal pathways—and what advisers do—suggest the
wisest pathways. This is the difference, as Philip Zelikow,
executive director of the 9/11 Commission has put it, between
deciding "what we can do" and "what we should do." Whether
Yoo really should be held responsible for writing a shockingly
bad memo about what we can do during interrogations is not
even the interesting question. How that memo then morphed into
what we should do is the important half. With Yoo's legal
"analysis" in hand, and the accountability for it diffused among
many government officials, the system of legal memos promises
to give cover to everyone at the top. As Rosa Brooks so
wonderfully put it in the Los Angeles Times, it takes a village to
adopt a torture policy. But accountability should not evaporate
just because a lawyer wrote a memo at the start of the chain.
3) Lawyers cannot predict the future: The problem with letting
lawyers set policy is that they cannot always anticipate realworld consequences. To be fair, Yoo couldn't have known that
his legal worldview would become the blueprint for torture. But
legal decisions have real-world consequences; they aren't just
value-neutral thought experiments. And as a stunning new piece
in Vanity Fair by Philippe Sands on the evolution of the Bush
torture policy reminds us, when the White House—in the
persons of Alberto Gonzales and Jim Haynes—tried to distance
themselves from the 2002 Bybee-Yoo memo, they did so by
characterizing it as so much harmless legal spitballing, merely
exploring "the limits of the legal landscape." Opponents of
lawfare worry that snap decisions made by politicians in a crisis
will be judged by lawyers in the unforgiving light of hindsight.
But the Yoo memo drives home the dangers of the opposite
phenomenon: Unsupportable decisions by reckless lawyers can
be disavowed by politicians claiming that, hey, it was just an
abstract legal memo.
A lot of folks are inclined to write off the news of the torture
memo today because: (i) we already knew this; (ii) it's no longer
the law; and (iii) David Addington won't be allowed to listen in
on their phone calls in seven months. I respectfully dissent. We
should be thinking long and hard about how this memo came to
be our interrogation policy, even for a few months. Now is the
time to question the wisdom of trusting the policing of the
boundaries in the war on terror to a swarm of anonymous
midlevel lawyers whose minds may just be too open for our own
good. We need to get away from the wrongheaded notion that a
war on terror is the same thing as a war against the law.
jurisprudence
Shades of Gray
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Barack Obama has gotten past affirmative action. Have we?
By Dahlia Lithwick
When it comes to the question of race in America, Barack
Obama is used to hot tempers, accusations of bias, protests,
speeches, and outrage. In 1990, Harvard Law School was a
battleground in the identity wars: The faculty was angrily split
over minority hiring and how to teach race in the classroom.
Two years earlier, 50 students had occupied the dean's office,
demanding a more diverse faculty; and that spring, Derrick
Bell—the first African-American to get tenure at Harvard Law
School—resigned over the issue.
Similar tensions roiled the Harvard Law Review. The students
were up in arms over—among other things—the role of race and
gender in the selection of editors. "That year was unusual in that
there was a group of very assertive conservative types on the
Law Review," says Adam Charnes, who counted himself among
them. Obama, who had earned a place on the journal in his first
year at Harvard, saw a role for himself that has come to define
his pitch for the presidency today—as a bridge builder. He
approached the conservatives, according to another member of
that contingent who has requested anonymity, and explained that
while he supported affirmative action as a policy matter, he
recognized that it came at a cost. He didn't consider them racists
for opposing it. Charnes praises Obama as "a straight-up guy
who always told you exactly what he thought." The
conservatives saw Obama as a moderate and threw their support
behind him. Obama became the new Law Review president.
In his Philadelphia speech on race, Obama tried to walk an
equally fine line. He didn't disown his controversial pastor, Rev.
Jeremiah Wright, or the black church tradition from which he
had emerged. Yet Obama also made clear that he understood the
reaction of whites angered by Wright's denunciations. That's a
hard balancing act when talking about race in the abstract—
detractors later criticized Obama for pandering to all sides. But
it's nearly impossible with an issue as specific, and potent, as
affirmative action.
Should Obama become the Democratic nominee, this could be
one of the tougher issues on which to find common ground.
Ward Connerly—a prominent opponent of affirmative action—
is pushing to get referendums on the subject onto ballots in at
least five states this fall. It may be difficult for Obama to avoid
taking a definitive stance: Affirmative action, says Connerly, "is
probably the most difficult race issue [Obama] will have to
face." If the candidate denounces affirmative action, Connerly
predicts, "his support among blacks will plummet from around
80 to 50 percent. Then, bear in mind that much of his support in
Iowa, Vermont, and Wyoming came from white males, who by a
margin of 70 to 30 oppose affirmative action."
The challenge is made all the more difficult by Obama's
reputation for fresh thinking: This is a perfect chance for him to
break with the liberal orthodoxy on race-based preferences,
according to both conservatives and liberals who oppose these
programs. To this day, some of the conservatives from the Law
Review wonder whether Obama agrees with them on race-based
affirmative action—a testament to his skill at projecting
empathy, if nothing else. "But in politics you can only be a
moderator for so long," says Connerly. Eventually, "you must
become a referee."
Obama has certainly sent signals that he is not doctrinaire on the
issue. In an interview last May on ABC's This Week With
George Stephanopoulos, he was asked whether his own
daughters should someday receive preferences in college
admissions. His response was unexpected: "I think that my
daughters should probably be treated by any admissions officer
as folks who are pretty advantaged." He added, "I think that we
should take into account white kids who have been
disadvantaged and have grown up in poverty and shown
themselves to have what it takes to succeed." His comments lit
up the blogosphere with speculation that as president he might
spearhead a major policy change, shifting the basis of
affirmative action from race to class disparities.
The ABC statement fits into Obama's record on the issue, which
has never been black and white. As a 28-year-old at Harvard,
Obama attended meetings of the Black Law Students
Association and spoke at at least one event, demanding greater
diversity on campus. But his classmate David Troutt, now a law
professor at Rutgers, says he was no militant. "There are a lot of
people that spent a tremendous amount of time on that issue.
They sued the school. They camped out at the dean's office,"
says Troutt. Obama wasn't among them. His head was in a
different place.
Students at the University of Chicago, where Obama later
lectured on constitutional law, don't recall him taking a hard line
there, either. Erika Walsh, who graduated in 2002 and took
Obama's Equal Protection and Due Process class, says she came
away with no idea about Obama's personal views on affirmative
action or any other hot constitutional issue. "The way he
conducted the class, he wanted you to talk, and he would be
provocative," she says. Andrew Janis, who graduated in 2005,
took Obama's class Current Issues in Racism and the Law. Like
Walsh, he has no recollection of even discussing affirmative
action, which suggests either that the issue wasn't important
enough to make its way on to his syllabus or that professor
Obama just wasn't all that fussed about it.
As a lawmaker, Obama has never had to confront the issue
directly. There haven't been any major votes on affirmative
action since Obama joined the U.S. Senate or during his time in
the Illinois Senate. When asked about his position, the campaign
points to his previous statements on the subject, in which he has
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defended the practice in broad terms. He has called himself "a
firm believer in affirmative action." In a 1998 Illinois National
Political Awareness Test, Obama answered "yes" to questions
asking whether state government agencies should take race and
sex into account in "college and university admissions, public
employment and state contracting." And following the Supreme
Court decision in 2003 in which the court charted a middle
ground on affirmative action in upholding the admissions policy
at the University of Michigan law school, Obama was quoted in
the Chicago Defender celebrating the ruling and warning that
"George Bush is still looking to replace some members of the
court, more conservative members who might end up reversing
this opinion." Tanya House Clay, senior deputy director for
public policy at People for the American Way, works closely
with Obama's office on electoral reform and other issues. She
says her organization "has no reason to worry" about his
commitment to affirmative action because of his clear dedication
to providing equal opportunity to all.
But what Obama has done—as in his comments about his
daughters—is to try to broaden the question of increasing
diversity beyond "race and test scores," as he writes in his most
recent book, The Audacity of Hope: "Affirmative action
programs, when properly structured, can open up opportunities
otherwise closed to qualified minorities without diminishing
opportunities for white students." Gerald Kellman, who
supervised Obama during his days as an organizer in Chicago,
says the two of them never discussed affirmative action
specifically but did talk about programs that "level the playing
field." "Not so much advantages in being chosen," says Kellman,
"but things like after-school programs, tutoring, summer jobs."
Obama wanted something done to make up for the things that
poverty had denied African-American and Hispanic kids.
Kellman also says Obama preferred to work through community
organizing and community programs wherever possible, rather
than legislation.
Asked to speculate about how Obama managed to sidestep so
many of the most sensitive issues about race until the Wright
story exploded this month, Janis, his former student, said,
"Obama never sees race as in its own special camp. For him,
race and class and gender are all different kinds of social
inequality, and they are all interrelated." That has led some
opponents to hear what they want to hear in Obama's rhetoric.
The Goldwater Institute's Clint Bolick, who is helping Connerly
with his anti-affirmative-action propositions, says of Obama and
his comments about his own daughters: "The fact is that he does
not full-throatedly support race-based policies. What Obama is
doing is opening the door to needs-based, rather than race-based,
affirmative action."
Try as one may to decode the tea leaves of Obama's handful of
statements and writings about affirmative action, the truth is that
you can find evidence that Obama is for race-based affirmative
action and class-based affirmative action. That's not necessarily
because he tells folks what they want to hear. The deeper truth
seems to be that he's not that interested in affirmative action at
all. People close to Obama consistently say he doesn't talk about
it all that much. He wants to get beyond race as a singular,
defining category in America. The folks who know Obama
predict that he will not, if elected, be on a crusade to repeal or
eliminate existing federal affirmative-action programs, but
they're also clear that he wouldn't seek to expand them or use
race to define them in new or significant ways.
As is so often the case with Obama, his political and
constitutional views are almost inextricable from his personal
history. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in his recent
book, My Grandfather's Son, describes having stuck a "fifteencent price sticker" on his diploma from Yale Law School and
stowed it in his basement, because it bore the "taint of racial
preference." Obama chooses to look at his differently. In 2001,
he told the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, "I have no
way of knowing whether I was a beneficiary of affirmative
action either in my admission to Harvard or my initial election to
the Review. If I was, then I certainly am not ashamed of the fact,
for I would argue that affirmative action is important precisely
because those who benefit typically rise to the challenge when
given an opportunity." Thomas never seems to have gotten past
affirmative action. Obama seems not to have gotten into it.
Obama proved in Philadelphia that he can understand and even
transcend the hardest questions about race. Affirmative action
may be one of a handful of issues on which partisans tolerate
few shades of gray.
A version of this piece appears in this week's Newsweek.
With Eve Conant in Washington and Sarah Kliff in New York.
map the candidates
The Return of Ron Paul
The GOP candidate you forgot about is back on the trail in Pennsylvania.
By E.J. Kalafarski and Chadwick Matlin
After a month and a half off the trail, Ron Paul is back in action.
We last saw Paul in his home state of Texas rallying University
of Texas students in Austin. But since then, he slunk away from
the presidential circuit to fight off a primary challenger in his
home district on March 4. He won that battle but lost the
presidency to John McCain in the meantime. While Paul was off
the trail, McCain made 33 stops and reached the number of
delegates needed to become the Republican nominee.
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But that doesn't mean Paul is done campaigning. He's in
Pennsylvania this week and next for four speeches and rallies at
colleges in the state. Despite John McCain's nominee status, Paul
has not suspended or withdrawn his campaign, so Map the
Candidates will keep on tracking him—even if he disappears for
another month and a half.
We've updated Map the Candidates' look to offer you even more
information than before. Click here to explore the country's
political landscape, and be sure to tap into the candidates' and
states' statistics pages by clicking the popout symbols next to
their names.
Map the Candidates uses the candidates' public schedules to
keep track of their comings and goings. A quick primer on your
new election toolbox:





Do you want to know who spent the most time in Iowa
or New Hampshire last month? Play with the timeline
sliders above the map to customize the amount of time
displayed.
Care most about who visited your home state? Then
zoom in on it or type a location into the "geosearch"
box below the map.
Choose which candidates you want to follow with the
check boxes on to the right of the map. If you only
want to see the front-runners, then uncheck all of the
fringe candidates. Voilà! You're left with the cream of
the crop's travels.
Follow the campaign trail virtually with MTC's news
feed. Every day YouTube video and articles from local
papers will give you a glimpse of what stump speeches
really look and sound like. Just click the arrow next to
the headline to get started.
Take a closer look at candidates by clicking on their
names to the right of the map. You'll get the lowdown
on their travels, media coverage, and policy positions.
Click here to start using Map the Candidates.
medical examiner
Footloose and Sugar-Free
The odyssey of my no-sweets diet.
By Laura Moser
I always thought I had a pretty virtuous diet—unless you
counted the cookie I had with lunch every day and the half-pint
of ice cream after dinner. My metabolism was efficient, so why
worry? But then, last summer, shortly after going off the birth-
control pill, I woke up one day with bad skin. When topical
remedies failed me, I began to wonder whether cutting back on
sugar might help. The science behind the sugar-acne equation
was apocryphal at best, but overhauling my diet still seemed
worth a try. And so, on the stroke of midnight this past New
Year's Eve, I resolved to give up sugar, long one of my favorite
substances.
The average American consumes a shocking 150 pounds of
sugar a year, or roughly 20 teaspoons every day. Such throughthe-roof concentrations of added sweeteners may contribute to
all sorts of health problems beyond the obvious obesity: high
cholesterol and cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hyperactivity,
insomnia, and, yes, acne. And that's not all: Sugar could also act
as an immunosuppressant and cause respiratory problems like
asthma. And a recent Harvard study posited a link between
simple carbohydrates and decreased fertility.
The World Health Organization has recommended cutting our
sugar intake in half, to no more than 10 percent of our total
calorie consumption. But even 10 percent sounded like a lot to
me, so I decided to rule out all high Glycemic Index substances
that would spike insulin production—at least for the first few
weeks. That meant not just no Ben & Jerry's but no booze, no
baguettes (or pizza!), no mashed potatoes, and minimal fruit and
dairy.
In a stroke of luck, a close friend volunteered to wean herself off
sugar at the same time. She also suggested that we formally
chronicle our efforts online to dissect every triumph and rough
patch on our journey to sugarlessness. And while our resulting
blog was pathetically short-lived, our two-person support group
indisputably served its purpose.
We both learned pretty quickly that preparing our own food was
the key to eliminating sugar. For me, this meant a narrowing of
my daily diet. If I were some brilliant self-trained chef, I
might've used the experiment to broaden my culinary range, but
I'm not, so I didn't. In any event, like David Lynch, I've never
minded having the same meal every day. I like what I like, and I
was pleased to discover that a good deal of what I like is
naturally sugar-free. I began breakfasting on either scrambled
eggs or, far more frequently, steel-cut oatmeal sweetened with
either defrosted berries or grated apple and cinnamon. And
despite my Seinfeldian passion for cereals—particularly those
ornate granolas that masquerade as health foods—I forced
myself to pass right over that aisle of the grocery store.
For the other major meals, I ate a stripped-down version of my
old diet—lots of salads (homemade dressings only), threeingredient soups, beans and brown rice, chickpea stews, quinoa
medleys, and whatever other "slow" carbohydrates I managed to
work in. (My one reach—a curried bulgur dish—was an
embarrassing failure, never to be repeated.) For snacks, I had
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raw cashews and tamari almonds and guacamole and bricks of
Gruyere in various combinations.
Dull? Rather. A detriment to domestic harmony? Very possibly.
My husband soon regretted introducing me to William Dufty's
Sugar Blues, the seminal (and hilariously camp) 1975 screed
against all things sugared. Though he admired my discipline, he
constantly mourned our cleaned-out pantry. Still, he couldn't
argue with one unanticipated benefit of our righteous new
lifestyle: a dramatically lower grocery bill—yes, even in these
times of agricultural crisis and despite the outrageous asking
price of almonds these days. Turns out it's the packaged,
processed foods that add up the fastest, the two-bite scones and
frozen pizzas and other such vanquished staples of our
household. Plus, maybe I was just eating less.
I liked saving money, and once past the initial withdrawal
period, I started to feel pretty good about my random selfbetterment scheme. In no time at all, my skin was unmottled and
my stomach improbably flat. Why had I ever touched refined
sugar? The simple sugars present in natural foods—like the
dextrose in milk and the fructose in fruit—didn't trouble me so
much. But processed foods heavy on the sucrose and highfructose corn syrup offered none of the health benefits of fruit
and milk. The caloric density of artificially sweetened foods is
itself a major problem, and in addition, they can seriously screw
with our insulin response over the long term. The more refined
carbohydrates we eat, the higher our insulin requirement, and the
harder, over time, our bodies must work to produce appropriate
insulin. According to The New Sugar Busters!, "too much
insulin promotes the storage of fat, elevation of cholesterol
levels, and possibly the deposition of plaque in our coronary
arteries," though a doctor friend tells me that refined sugar is by
no means uniquely responsible for this chain of calamities.
Either way, I thought I was sold. But then, on the morning of the
New Hampshire primary, seven days after my diet began, I woke
up craving a Starbucks chai, and I mean craving a Starbucks chai
with every molecule of my being. I called my friend, hoping
she'd talk me off the cliff. Before she could pick up, I slammed
down the phone.
Ninety seconds later, I was waiting in line at Starbucks, and I
was psyched. Would I care for any snack with my beverage?
Well, now that you mention it, I most certainly would! Since
when was 7:32 a.m. too early to enjoy a delicious triple
chocolate cupcake? Five o'clock somewhere, indeed: That
cupcake was gone before I'd stepped back out into the blizzard.
For my first taste of sugar in a week, it was only so-so, but then
I'd never been big into Starbucks pastries. I still couldn't wait for
the chai—that chai promised to be the most amazing, explosive
taste sensation of all space and time. But here's the thing. It
wasn't. Like, not at all. Truth be told, it was actually pretty
nasty—monochrome and syrupy and a tad poisonous-tasting. I
sipped and I grimaced, but eventually I gave up. I simply
couldn't finish the drink—I, who have never not finished a paidfor foodstuff in all my life! And the weirdness wasn't yet over,
either. A few minutes after dumping the chai, I collapsed back
into bed and passed out. Before 8 a.m.
Over the course of that month, a pattern emerged. After about
six days on the wagon, I would leap out of bed gripped by a
raging obsession with some very specific proscribed food: pad
thai, say, or a plain white bagel or a Mrs. Fields' semisweet
chocolate-chip without nuts. I would then hit the streets—often
still in my pajamas—in pursuit of that food. Once that food was
in my possession, I would consume it on the spot, with or
without chewing.
Then, just as inevitably, would come the crash. Proof of sugar's
power—the flooding of my system with insulin and the
subsequent drop in my blood-sugar level—would knock me offbalance and send me crawling back to bed. After extended
periods of living off complex, slow-release carbohydrates, I was
clearly no longer inured to these rollercoaster blood-sugar
fluctuations. There was another stumbling block, too: I just
didn't like fretting over food all day long. My whole life, I've
taken pride in not being one of those girls. You know the type I
mean: the food-fixated, calorie-counting, scale-owners of our
species.
And so, after a month of extremes, I decided to take the middle
path. When I wanted to eat fruit, I would eat fruit. If I wanted a
slice of pizza or a meal in a restaurant or an entire log of goat
cheese while watching cable news, I was allowed that, too. As a
result, I found myself slipping up less often than before. I no
longer lunged for the bread basket, and I still mostly avoided
desserts. (And, Starbucks aside, straight-up desserts had always
been my undoing, not soft drinks or store-bought salad dressings
or other common sources of "hidden" sugars.) But I was no
longer limiting these indulgences as some empty test of selfcontrol. It seemed I'd just lost the urge. Who knew that the
sweetness of the milk in a cappuccino could be so satisfying?
These days, I'm mostly surprised by how well I've kept it up. I'm
also surprised by how completely unnecessary so much of the
food I used to eat was, and how little I miss those ice-cream
benders. But I'd be lying if I claimed that my sugar cravings
have vanished altogether. Chai is one thing; chocolate is still
chocolate. Yet even my relationship with that essential food
group has changed. Before going sugar-free, I had never favored
dark chocolate over milk. On the contrary: I had only scorn for
the pretentious Dagoba devotees of my acquaintance. Now,
though, I wonder whether my Butterfinger days are gone for
good. Even a bar with the once-unfathomable cocoa content of
73 percent tastes textured and complicated and just sweet
enough.
A sharpened sense of taste is by no means my only gain. Have I
mentioned my sparkling complexion? When minor flare-ups
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recur, it is generally within eight hours of a sugar binge. (Laugh
if you like; the empirical evidence is too powerful to ignore. And
a recent study supports this still-vague link between good skin
and a low glycemic load diet.) Another unexpected boon: My
periods are as regular as when I was on the pill, and preceded by
zero PMS.
collateralized debt obligations, which are investment vehicles
built out of subprime bond securities. These securities lacked
long trading histories or deep markets. To value them, many
outfits slipped the surly bonds of mark-to-market and assigned a
value to them based on so-called mark-to-model. (In other
words, educated guesses based on algorithms.)
But if I'd hoped eliminating sugar would motivate me to balance
a five-hour-daily meditation practice with a rigorous course of
triathlon training (and I sort of did), I can't help but be a little
disappointed with the experiment. I do not feel 10 years younger
or sprightlier or even 1 percent invincible. I am still lazy and
achy and frequently hyperactive. Still, we measure progress in
baby steps. And it's been more than two months since I've
banged on the door of Mrs. Fields dressed only in a nightgown
and winter coat.
When credit started to go bad, market participants had to write
down the value of such assets. For institutions holding onto bank
loans—an asset for which there is an active secondary market—
marking to market was relatively simple. If markets priced bank
debt of companies with a particular credit rating at 85 cents on
the dollar, banks had to write down 15 cents of the value of each
dollar of the loan. This process helped drive the massive writedowns seen at banks like UBS and Citigroup.
moneybox
The Mark-to-Market Melee
Is an obscure accounting rule to blame for the credit market meltdown?
By Daniel Gross
According to a small but powerful group of America's financial
decision-makers—mostly supply-siders and those in their
thrall—the chief cause of the credit market meltdown is not
folly, or reckless lending, or the demise of America's financial
management. It's an accounting rule.
"Mark-to-market" is a seemingly innocuous term for the
requirement that companies, banks, hedge funds, mutual funds,
and the like report the market price of the financial instruments
they hold and trade. (Here's some good background from
Morningstar.) Mutual funds that own stocks make such a report
every day. Publicly held firms like Bear Stearns must do so at
the end of every quarter, and hedge funds must do so on a rolling
basis to reassure their creditors that the assets they've put up for
collateral are still worth something. Mark-to-market is thus
crucial to the functioning of transparent markets.
For mutual funds, marking to market is a simple affair. But for
those who hold thinly traded assets or assets for which there isn't
a ready market (mortgage-backed securities, corporate debt,
venture capital investments, etc.), doing so is more of a
challenge. In these cases, managers mark to market either by
comparing analogous assets or by estimating "what market
participants would use in pricing the asset or liability."
In the past five years, Wall Street firms created huge volumes of
new kinds of complex securities, such as subprime bonds and
But for the complex new financial instruments, the valuations
became far more unstable. Many hedge funds and financial
institutions had borrowed huge sums of money to buy assets for
which there wasn't an active market. When that debt started to
go bad, it triggered a chain of unfortunate events. In many
instances, funds were forced to sell assets to meet margin calls.
Occasionally, creditors would seize assets and sell them. (That's
what happened to the Bear Stearns hedge funds that failed last
year.) This spiraling activity had the effect of further depressing
prices for such instruments. In some instances, buyers
disappeared entirely. The valuations of these new instruments
also plummeted because of market psychology. In establishing
value for assets, funds and banks often relied on newly created
indices, such as the Markit ABX indices. Since those indices are
actively traded by investors, they can be driven up and down
(mostly down) by speculation and fear. The end result: The
banks and funds holding subprime bonds (which is to say, pretty
much the entire global financial complex) have been forced to
massively cut the mark-to-market value of their holdings
because those values are based on the incredibly pessimistic
indices.
In recent weeks, some have been arguing that just as Abraham
Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in a time of war, perhaps
regulators should suspend mark-to-market in this time of crisis.
Paul Craig Roberts, a veteran supply-sider and former Reagan
administration official, wrote on March 11 that the mark-tomarket rule "is imploding the U.S. financial system by requiring
financial institutions to value subprime mortgages at their
current market values." His solution: Suspend the rule, let
financial institutions "keep the troubled instruments at book
value, or 85-90 percent of book value, until a market forms that
can sort out values, and allow financial institutions to write
down the subprime mortgages and other troubled instruments
over time." In other words, let's assign an imaginary happy value
to these assets until the seas grow calmer. Steve Forbes echoed
the sentiment in his column in Forbes, calling for a 12-month
suspension of mark-to-market in "exotic financial instruments
(primarily packages of subprime mortgages)." The reason: "It's
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preposterous to try to guess what these new instruments are
worth in a time of panic." This line of thinking quickly wormed
its way into McCain's big economic speech. He put it more
anodyne terms: "First, it is time to convene a meeting of the
nation's accounting professionals to discuss the current mark-tomarket accounting systems. We are witnessing an unprecedented
situation as banks and investors try to determine the appropriate
value of the assets they are holding, and there is widespread
concern that this approach is exacerbating the credit crunch." For
its part, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued an
opinion letter, in which it told firms, "[I]t is appropriate for you
to consider actual market prices, or observable inputs, even
when the market is less liquid than historical market volumes,
unless those prices are the result of a forced liquidation or
distress sale."
The language is technical, but the arguments here are simple and
really quite silly—especially coming from folks who value
market indicators over all else. These folks are saying that when
markets are volatile and irrationally pessimistic, it's just not fair
to force people to act as if the market prices are real.
But you'll notice that they never made that argument back when
markets were irrationally optimistic, as they were from 20032006. No hedge fund manager ever told a bank that it should
lend him less money because the value of the collateral he was
putting up was clearly a product of unwarranted optimism or that
he shouldn't collect management fees based on the assets under
management because their value was clearly inflated. Nobody
ever complains about the market's ruthlessness and inefficiency
when it's making them money.
No one questions that the current network of financial
regulators—which dates to the '30s—is confusing and unwieldy.
There are seven existing bodies in Washington created
specifically to avoid the type of looming crisis that might be
created by a couple of trillion dollars' worth of opaque financial
securities careening out of control. (And that's not including the
Financial Accounting Standards Board, established as an
independent entity to evaluate the veracity of how financial
institutions value certain securities.)
But Paulson's plan wants to add a couple more: the Prudential
Financial Regulatory Agency to watch government-guaranteed
banks and the Business Regulatory Agency to focus on
consumer protection.
None of that, however, will control the excesses of investment
banks which, among other things, led to the mid-March
meltdown of Bear Stearns. That task would putatively fall to the
Fed.
To some extent, that is already what the Fed is charged with
doing. The Fed is supposed to maintain liquidity to grease the
system (through discount windows to the "worthy" banks);
exercise monetary policy to keep it going; control risk; and
provide oversight to protect consumers. It is already regulator to
much of the industry, including bank holding companies and
diversified financial holding companies formed under the
Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999.
Had the Fed shown any appetite or competence for these roles,
we might not be in the situation we are in now. It could, for
example, have questioned how certain Wall Street institutions
already in its jurisdiction—notably Citigroup and others that
have been forced to write off billions in subprime mortgage
losses—were overleveraging the loans on their books.
moneybox
Why Fed Reform Won't Work
Yes, the financial regulation system needs overhaul, but the proposed plan is
a Band-Aid for Wall Street's mortal wounds.
By Nomi Prins
Here's how to think about the proposed reform of financial
oversight unveiled by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson on
Monday: The Federal Reserve Bank, whose job already includes
regulating a large component of the financial system, has failed
pretty badly at its tasks. The proposed solution—to give it more
responsibility—seems ridiculous and hazardous.
Yet that's the plan. Having ignored or been unduly confused by
the complexity of the banks already under its jurisdiction, the
new, improved Fed would get more books to examine for undue
risk, adding in brokers and insurance companies.
But it didn't. Today's banking system has too many intertwined
players that all do one another's jobs. Its complexity is the
creation of all the legislators who gleefully embraced
deregulation during the last two decades.
We will not solve the problem of an unstable, risk-laden banking
system by putting false hope into an ill-equipped body, no matter
how much added "transparency" has been proposed.
The fundamental question remains: What is the overseeing body
going to do with a more powerful window onto the financial
industry? What would the Fed do if it noticed that every
financial firm was creating and stockpiling risky securities and
borrowing money to stockpile more? Is it realistic to believe it
would intervene and cut the amount?
Or let's say that the Fed knew that flawed risk parameters were
being used to evaluate these flimsy securities. Wouldn't
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enforcing penalties be construed as an infringement on freemarket capitalism?
The Paulson plan does nothing to give the oversight agencies
any more legal standing to intervene or enforce than they already
possess. That's hardly surprising, given the vociferous opposition
that greater regulation faces from Wall Street firms (to say
nothing of barely regulated hedge-fund and private-equity
firms).
This isn't to say that requiring greater transparency from the
banking industry is a bad thing. But the illusion of greater
transparency at the expense of true insight is a new disaster
waiting to happen. It's like jumping out of a plane with a faulty
parachute; the idea of the parachute gives you confidence, but
that complicated drawstring that won't engage will get you every
time.
Given this, it might be construed as a blessing that Paulson's
proposed reforms seem unlikely to be enacted anytime soon. On
Monday, Paulson said: "These long-term ideas require
thoughtful discussion and will not be resolved this month or
even this year."
Well, he's right about that. All of the plan's suggestions are
cosmetic. Instead, let's please have a serious discussion about the
nature of the banking system structure itself: its complexity, its
responsibility, and the proper role of the federal government in
regulating it. The United States has had such a debate before,
leading up to the landmark 1933 Glass Steagall Act. We can and
should have such a sweeping debate again.
moneybox
Rich Men Behaving Badly
Meet the super-rich, the dysfunctional class threatening American values.
By Daniel Gross
Saturday, March 29, 2008, at 7:08 AM ET
For decades, social scientists, policy wonks, and politicians have
studied and debated what's come to be known as the "culture of
poverty." The consensus: A group of Americans is set apart from
the mainstream by geography, class, and income. Its members
adhere to norms that don't apply to the rest of society and engage
in self-destructive behavior that imposes significant costs on the
nation at large. The culture of poverty has made for potent
politics (remember Ronald Reagan's fictitious welfare queen?)
and spawned best-selling polemics from the right (Charles
Murray) to the left (Jonathan Kozol).
We don't hear as much about the culture of poverty these days.
Perhaps it's because the market turmoil is making us all feel a
little poorer. Or perhaps it's because a highly visible group is
now exhibiting all the outward appearances of the underclass:
the overclass. Forget welfare queens and the culture of poverty.
Think Wall Street kings and the culture of affluence.
Wall Street types don't live in ghettos, barrios, or the hollows of
Appalachia, but they do inhabit environments that are sealed off
socially from the rest of the world—the Hamptons on Long
Island; Manhattan's Fifth Avenue; Greenwich, Conn. Because
they rarely interact with people of middle-class means (save the
odd doctor, lawyer, or interior designer), they have become
woefully out of touch with the solid bourgeois values that made
America great.
In the underclass, unmarried, young fathers don't take
responsibility for their children. In the overclass, twice-married,
middle-aged Wall Street daddies don't own up to the
consequences of their insane financial miscues. Wall Street
titans are almost incapable of seeing the problem with taking
nine-figure payouts in years in which their stocks plummet.
"There's just a total disconnect between the compensation and
the responsibility for their actions," says William Cohan, a
former Lazard banker turned author.
In his book The Age of Abundance, libertarian author Brink
Lindsey boils down the difference between the desperately poor
and the blissfully rich to an ability to focus on the long term.
"Members of the underclass operate within such narrow time
horizons and circles of trust that their lives are plagued by
chronic chaos and dysfunction," he says. By contrast, elites are
well-organized long-term thinkers. Riiiiight. "Modern Wall
Street is a system," says Charles Morris—a former Chase banker
and author of The Trillion Dollar Meltdown—"that rewards
crazy risk-taking in the short term without regard for the longterm consequences."
Critics point to a pervasive sense of victimhood in the
underclass. But listen to what Bear Stearns CEO Alan Schwartz
told the troops after his firm succumbed to wounds that were
almost entirely self-inflicted. "We here are a collective victim of
violence," he said. Yep, just another case of the Man keeping the
Man down.
Conservative critics constantly carp that the culture of poverty
has encouraged a sense of dependency on Washington. Of
course, in recent months, the bureaucracy—the Federal Reserve,
the Federal Housing Authority, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac—
has generally ignored the struggles of poor homeowners. Yet it
vaulted into action to save the bankers from their own disastrous
bets. When Bear Stearns, the nation's fifth-largest investment
bank, approached insolvency, the Feds orchestrated JPMorgan's
acquisition of it.
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In 1993, the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined the term
"defining deviancy down." The prevalence of bad behavior in
the underclass, he argued, caused institutions to lower standards
and expectations, which effectively socialized the costs of
dysfunction. Today, the Federal Reserve is "defining solvency
down." In recent weeks, the Fed has responded to Wall Street's
crisis by systematically lowering the standards of what it would
accept as collateral for loans. (Historically, only government
bonds or bonds backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were
good enough.) But as part of the Bear Stearns deal, it agreed to
lend $30 billion against assets of dubious provenance. And guess
who bears the risk if that $30 billion can't be paid back? You and
me. If write-downs continue, rumor has it, the Fed might start
accepting sports memorabilia, Beanie Babies, and Pokémon card
collections as collateral.
There are important differences between the underclass and the
overclass, notes Susan Mayer, dean of the University of
Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy Studies. The overclass
is better connected, and it can cause more damage. "Poor innercity kids selling drugs to suburban kids can harm people," Mayer
says. "But financial markets can bring thousands and thousands
of people to ruin."
The pernicious culture of affluence merits further study. When
self-proclaimed rogue sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh sought to
learn about the culture of poverty, he hung out in Chicago's
notorious Robert Taylor Homes and befriended drug dealers.
The tale is chronicled in his fascinating book Gang Leader for a
Day. If he really wants to understand the workings of a
dysfunctional class that's threatening American values and
taxing national resources, Venkatesh, who teaches at Columbia,
should move into a co-op on the Upper East Side and get a job
on Morgan Stanley's trading desk. He can call his next book
Hedge-Fund Manager for a Day.
moneybox
Staying on Bush's Course
Here's some straight talk: McCain's fiscal program is either a joke or a fantasy.
By Daniel Gross
In the last week, the three remaining presidential candidates
made big-picture economic speeches that were perfectly in
keeping with the tone of their campaigns. Barack Obama
delivered his speech, introduced by New York Mayor Michael
Bloomberg (a potential Obamacan?), at Cooper Union, a venue
long identified with great oratory. Hillary Clinton tactically
delivered her speech in the current battleground state of
Pennsylvania and offered a list of solutions. Both campaigns
have remarkably detailed (and remarkably similar) platforms on
how to attack the various economic woes facing America.
John McCain, fresh from a whirlwind tour aimed at
demonstrating his foreign-policy credentials, took a somewhat
different approach. There's an emerging theme surrounding his
campaign: The problem with the last eight years isn't that the
Bush administration had the wrong policies or was incompetent.
No, the problem is that it lacked intensity. Which is why McCain
is bent on offering a more concentrated, sustained, high-energy
form of Bushism. Bush has been adamant about staying in Iraq
until the end of his presidency; McCain is adamant about staying
up to 100 years, if necessary. Bush has taken to carefully cherrypicking facts and metrics (the number of soccer games visible
from the air, to cite one) to construct a narrative on how well
things are going there. (I bet there weren't many soccer matches
in Sadr City today.) McCain prefers simple declarations to data
points: "We're winning. I don't care what people say. I've seen
the facts on the ground."
The same holds true for the economy. By virtue of his history as
a deficit hawk, a foe of earmarks, and an opponent of the Bush
tax cuts—not to mention the presence of reality-based advisers
like Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional
Budget Office—McCain deserves some benefit of the doubt.
Unfortunately, the brains behind the economic operation seems
to be former Sen. Phil Gramm, the Texas A&M economistturned-senator who confidently forecast in 1993 that the Clinton
program of spending cuts and tax increases on the wealthy
would be "a one-way ticket to recession." And the sections on
McCain's Web site about domestic policy reveal, as Matt
Yglesias noted, "a nearly astounding level of vacuity."
Reading McCain's economic agenda and listening to his speech,
it appears that the problem with the last eight years is that we
haven't seen enough tax breaks for the wealthy, that economic
royalism hasn't been pursued with sufficient vigor, and that the
middle and working classes haven't been stiffed sufficiently.
McCain wants to extend the Bush tax cuts, which he once
opposed as a needless sop to the rich in a time of war. (I await
David Brooks' inevitable explanation of how opposing taxes in a
time of war in 2001 and 2003, when deficits were low, but
supporting them in 2011, in a time of war and high deficits, is
deeply moral and admirable.) But McCain wants to see Bush's
tax relief and raise it some. McCain would slash the corporateincome-tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent (because
corporate profits as a percentage of GDP didn't spike enough this
decade?), and he'd abolish the Alternative Minimum Tax, which
would be a welcome move for many upper-middle-class
taxpayers. "In all, his tax-cutting proposals could cost about
$400 billion a year, according to estimates of the impact of
different tax cuts by CBO and the McCain campaign," the Wall
Street Journal reported. And how to make up for the lost
revenues? Hmmm. McCain promises to cut earmarks; to
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eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse; and to reduce the projected
growth of Medicare; but he won't provide many numbers. As the
WSJ deadpanned: "The cost will make it difficult for him to
achieve his goal of balancing the budget by the end of his first
term." That's perhaps the understatement of the year. The 2009
budget calls for a deficit of $407 billion on projected receipts of
$2.7 trillion*, as this table shows. Essentially, McCain wants to
cut revenues by about 15 percent from current levels, with
nothing close to that in spending reductions, in a time when,
even after spending excess Social Security payroll taxes, the
deficit is running at more than $400 billion. Here's some straight
talk: McCain's fiscal program is either a joke or a fantasy.
McCain's housing speech, delivered in Orange County, Calif.,
ground zero of the housing crisis, was a mixed bag. He provided
a good description of the problem. But his solution to an era in
which financial deregulation set the stage for federal bailouts,
rampant speculation, and reckless lending is ... less regulation.
"Our financial market approach should include encouraging
increased capital in financial institutions by removing
regulatory, accounting, and tax impediments to raising capital."
Bizarrely, he has also joined the chorus arguing that mark-tomarket accounting—the rules that require companies to, you
know, tell investors the actual market value of assets they hold—
should be revisited.
The Federal Reserve and the Bush administration have justified
the extraordinary help offered to investment banks and investors
by saying that it matters less how we got here and more how we
deal with the situation as it is. For McCain, however, it's all
about the journey. Poor decisions should not be rewarded—
unless those poor decisions are made by really rich people who
run investment banks and hedge funds. While "those who act
irresponsibly" shouldn't be bailed out as a matter of principle, it's
OK to take extraordinary measures to help banks prevent
"systemic risk that would endanger the entire financial system
and the economy." Obama and Clinton—and the Bush
administration, through its various efforts to ease the mortgage
crisis—have argued that it might be possible to spare further
systemic risk if something were done to buck up the fortunes of
homeowners. Bollocks, says McCain. People should just put up
more money for down payments and work harder to keep current
with their mortgage payments.
Straight talk? No doubt. At a time of rampant economic
insecurity and low consumer confidence, at the end of a business
cycle in which median incomes didn't rise and the percentage of
working people with health insurance fell, McCain won't
succumb to the easy temptation of saying that government policy
can help improve the situation. But smart politics? I wonder.
What's left of the Republican Party is becoming increasingly
downscale, and many swing states have been ravaged by the
housing crisis (Nevada, Florida) and globalization (Ohio,
Michigan). Besides, he's already got the let-them-eat-cake vote
sewed up.
Correction, March 31, 2008: This article originally misstated
that the 2009 budget projected receipts of $2.7 billion. The
correct figure is $2.7 trillion. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
movies
Illegal Use of Hands
George Clooney's pro-football comedy Leatherheads.
By Dana Stevens
Leatherheads (Universal), George Clooney's third outing as a
director and the first in which he plays a starring role, has
everything going for it on paper. Setting a screwball comedy
against the backdrop of the emergence of professional football in
the 1920s sounds like a rollicking idea. The period songs and
costumes are as jaunty as can be. And the casting of Clooney,
our era's Clark Gable, as aging football star Dodge Connolly is a
natural. So, why does the whole thing feel sloggier than the
climactic game, a near-scoreless battle waged in a lake of mud?
Much as I'd like to, I can't put all the blame on Renée Zellweger.
I've always had an animus toward this actress, with her selfcongratulatory cuteness and incessant mugging. But I have to
admit she's nicely cast as spunky newspaper reporter Lexie
Littleton, who begins to follow Dodge's team, the Duluth
Bulldogs, after they recruit a popular college player, Carter
Rutherford (John Krasinski). Carter is also a WWI hero, known
for having single-handedly captured a whole company of
German soldiers in the battle of the Argonne. Lexie's editor
(Jack Thompson) finds the whole story suspicious and puts
Lexie on Carter's trail. Lexie's initial strategy, in the grand prefeminist Barbara Stanwyck style, is to seduce Carter into spilling
the beans about what really happened in the war. But George
Clooney being George Clooney—all the more so in a
speakeasy—she can concentrate only so long on that skinny guy
from The Office.
Leatherheads' overlong middle section is devoted to the vagaries
of the Dodge/Lexie/Carter love triangle, as Clooney and
Zellweger exchange semi-snappy banter while the hopelessly
upstaged Krasinski moons on the sidelines. It was enough to
make this sports-averse viewer wish for a little more pigskin. It's
fascinating to learn that pro football as we know it is a relatively
new sport and that, as recently as the mid-1920s, the game was
unregulated, poorly attended, and on the verge of bankruptcy
(even as college football drew huge audiences). The movie
nostalgically contrasts Dodge's disappearing version of the
game—essentially, a barroom brawl between two goalposts—
with Carter's emerging one, an efficient business dependent on
advertising money. But the script—which was written by two
Sports Illustrated reporters with a long history of covering
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football—seems reluctant to explore this contrast, perhaps for
fear of alienating its female audience. Personally, I'd have
preferred to see more of the backroom tactics of the nation's first
football commissioner (an arresting Peter Gerety) and less of
Zellweger pouting in period hats.
Still, Leatherheads is better than a finger in your eye. It's a
perfectly passable, if instantly forgettable, date movie, lushly
shot by Newton Thomas Sigel and with a script intelligently
versed in American classics like His Girl Friday and Hail the
Conquering Hero. Maybe Clooney has just raised our
expectations too high with his uninterrupted ascent from "that
dude on E.R." to respected lefty director/producer (by way of
Messenger of Peace and Sexiest Man Alive). At this point in his
career, he's earned the right to make a movie that's just OK. If
Clooney's contemplating going retro again for his next project,
may I suggest a remake of It Happened One Night? Reese
Witherspoon would make a fine latter-day Claudette Colbert,
and instead of just going bare-chested as Gable famously did,
Clooney could guarantee big box office by taking it all off.
other magazines
The Rewards of Motherhood
Newsweek on women who become "gestational carriers" to supplement the
family income.
By Morgan Smith
Newsweek, April 7
The cover story focuses on couples who turn to surrogate
mothers to bear their biological children—and the women who
make the choice to carry another family's baby. Military bases
are seeing increasing numbers of "gestational carriers" as,
according to the piece, many women use surrogacy to
supplement family incomes. Often, they can "earn more with one
pregnancy than their husbands' annual base pay." … A piece
uncovers Afghanistan's "debt weddings," in which families are
forced to marry off a daughter (in one instance, as young as two
months) to repay a loan. The practice plagues poppy farmers,
who must face violent drug traffickers after their crops are
destroyed by government eradication efforts. … An article
explores America's "geeky obsession with fonts." Your choice of
typeface sends its own message: "[F]onts with round O's and
tails are interpreted as friendly, while angular types convey
rigidity and coldness."
The New Yorker, April 7
A piece studies Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ as it
changes pastors after the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's 36-year tenure.
The church grew out of a time when young black people
"wanted no part of 'the white man's religion' " and "[p]reachers
who had helped lead the civil-rights movement were being
outflanked by black nationalists." Wright, with his brand of
black liberation theology and "insistence on the presence of
Africa in the Bible," grew the church from fewer than 100
members in 1972 to the more than 8,000 who attend services
today. The piece speculates that Barack Obama "may have felt
flattered to be part of a congregation rooted in the righteous
history of a civil-rights struggle that he himself had missed,
except as a beneficiary." … In an essay on the aging boomer
generation, Slate founder Michael Kinsley observes that his
experience with Parkinson's disease makes him feel "like a scout
from my generation, sent out ahead to experience in my fifties
what even the healthiest boomers are going to experience in their
sixties, seventies, or eighties."
New York, April 7
The cover story recounts the Facebook imbroglio at Horace
Mann, a New York City prep school, and mulls the state of
private education. After Horace Mann students created Facebook
groups mocking their teachers, faculty members reported them
to the administration. But trustees—many of whom were parents
of the Facebookers—intervened to keep the students from being
disciplined. The piece reflects that "wealthy parents … believe
their contributions entitle them to substantial input in the running
of the school," and "at times, teachers can seem merely like
hired help." … A column reviews the influential Democrats who
could put an end to the rancorous battle for the nomination—but
it argues that none of them has sufficient sway to persuade
Clinton to end her campaign: "The last best hope is that Hillary
will eventually come to see yielding as not merely the path to
self-preservation, but also as her only route to long-range selfaggrandizement." Yes—that means 2012.
Wired, April 2008
The cover story reveals how Apple's rejection of the "touchyfeely philosophies of Silicon Valley" has helped make the
company a success. With its insistence on producing all
hardware and software in-house, Apple "bears more resemblance
to an old-school industrial manufacturer like General Motors
than to the typical tech firm." This also allows for a "radical
opacity" around products and company policy, which CEO and
"notorious micromanger" Steve Jobs enforces with a vengeance.
… A piece reports on the ongoing feud between tech blogs
Gizmodo and Engadget. Simply put, it "comes down to a fratlike rivalry, driven by boyish egos and measured in pageviews."
Though they cover the same subject matter, the blogs maintain
different identities: "Engadget is cool and straitlaced … [while]
Gizmodo revels in cheap jokes and hedonism." Despite
continuous attempts to discredit each other, the dueling blogs
have become "more powerful than most of the mainstream
media outlets they compete against."
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Texas Monthly, April 2008
A piece marks the 15th anniversary of the deadly standoff outside
Waco, Texas, using interviews with Branch Davidians,
journalists, law-enforcement agents, and other witnesses to give
a riveting—and, at times, contradictory—moment-by-moment
retelling of what happened. The medical examiner who
investigated the burned-out building where 74 Davidians died
says, "We found the women and children huddled together,
under blankets. … They were covered in debris—not just
construction debris but spent rounds of grenades and
ammunition." … In a column, Paul Burka writes on the endemic
fraud in El Paso, Texas, where "no level of [municipal]
government [is] immune" to corruption. The city's geographic
isolation and slow economy contributes to the state of affairs.
Burka reports, "[T]here is a sense here that no one is watching,
so why not line your pockets?"
Paste, April 2008
The cover story looks at avant-garde pop artists Gnarls Barkley,
declaring that the group's "strength lies largely in [its] ability to
bend time, traveling back and forth between the trippy 1960s and
the computer-dominated modern world." It compares "Crazy,"
Gnarls Barkley's runaway hit, to "what 'Creep' was to Radiohead
or what 'Loser' was to Beck. … They are great songs created by
artistic visionaries who happened to be embraced by the public."
… A piece profiles the husband-and-wife singer/songwriter team
behind the Weepies. The duo's music has been featured on
Grey's Anatomy and Scrubs and in JC Penney and Old Navy
commercials, but the indie musicians insist they aren't sellouts:
"Come over here and pay for [our son] Theo's schooling or
whatever he wants to do when he grows up, and we'll turn down
people who have great musical ideas but happen to work for Old
Navy."
at least one occasion," a disgruntled conservative activist
returned a fundraising request in an "envelope stuffed with
feces." … An article explores a Darfur advocacy group's
"nuanced" efforts to pressure the Chinese government to drop its
arms and oil dealings with Sudan as Beijing Olympics approach.
… A trend piece about "abstinence clubs" on Ivy League
campuses explains that many formed in reaction to what they
viewed as "institutional encouragement of promiscuity" through
college-sponsored safe-sex education programs.
Time, April 7
The cover story addresses deficiencies of the much-touted
alternative fuel ethanol. An alarming, and paradoxical,
consequence of the biofuel craze is the depletion of the Amazon
rainforest. The demand for allegedly eco-friendly energy has
driven crop prices through the roof, and farmers in Brazil want a
piece of the profits. So, ethanol is "doing exactly the opposite of
what its proponents intended." In addition to ethanol's negative
impact on the environment, its production is also causing food
prices to rise—which could spark a global hunger emergency. …
A piece questions the future of Fox News, which "will need to
remodel itself again" after Bush's presidency comes to an end.
Though the network has been unfocused lately, its viewers likely
won't go away: "It just has to figure out what's going to make
them mad starting in 2009."
By Morgan Smith
Economist, March 29
The editorial leading the cover package on American foreign
policy cautions it will be difficult for a new presidential
administration (be it McCain, Clinton, or Obama) to repair the
United States' shredded global reputation. "The mere fact of not
being Bush will bring a dividend of goodwill," but Europeans
want "America to stop playing world sheriff and submit to the
same rules as everyone else under the United Nations." … A
piece surveying Bush's foreign-policy legacy notes that his
approach to world affairs has made him "one of the most
polarizing presidents in American history." … However, another
article concludes that the source of many Europeans' antiAmericanism is that they are "furious with the Bush
administration precisely because of its refusal to live up to the
American ideals that had served the country so well during the
second world war" and that with "a little wooing, they might be
willing to fall back in love with America."
New York Times Magazine, March 31
The cover story traces the erosion of the Republican Party
following the disastrous 2006 midterm elections. GOP elders
"worry that the social conservatism that helped seal Rove's
majorities might create for them a deficit that lasts a generation,
that the party's position on social issues like gay marriage may
permanently alienate younger, more moderate voters." The
National Republican Congressional Committee reports that "on
Harper's, April 2008
A piece considers the alarming possibility of transmittable
cancer. Contagious forms of the disease persist among certain
animal populations: Tasmanian devils suffer from parasitical
facial tumors that they pass to each other during fights and
mating skirmishes; a sexually transmitted cancer exists among
dogs. There are documented cases of humans "catching" cancer,
too. Most were doctors or laboratory workers who accidentally
other magazines
Clipping the Right Wing
New York Times Magazine on the downfall of the GOP and Time on the
troubles facing Fox News.
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came into contact with cancerous cells, either by a cut or needle
prick. … An article explains how a flood of Iraqi refugees has
destabilized Syria, which has now closed its borders to displaced
Iraqis. The neighboring country, which once enjoyed sectarian
peace, now copes with the antagonism of the primarily Sunni
refugees toward its Shiite inhabitants, while the added economic
strain cripples its infrastructure. One Syrian man says, "Iraq is an
atomic explosion. It is a chain reaction that has not come to an
end."
poem
"Oh Blessed Season"
By Chris Forhan
Listen to Chris Forhan read .
GQ, April 2008
An article investigates the flagging mail-order-bride trade in the
former Soviet Union. As Moscow prospers, the "vaunted
'Russian bride' may soon be a thing of the past." Men after "their
very own superhot June Cleaver" now look to places like
Colombia, Thailand, and Brazil, where women are less selective
and still believe in the "myth of the well-heeled American
swooping in to save the day." … A profile visits Joe Francis in
jail as he waits for a trial date for charges on tax evasion.
(Francis has since been released.) During the interview, the Girls
Gone Wild founder says in front of a female guard, "Look at that
rack." "Can you take me home?" he asks her. "Don't I get
conjugal visits? It's been eight months."
Must Read
New York's cover package on the Bear Stearns buyout provides a
glimpse into the boardroom dealings between JPMorgan, the
Fed, and Bear—as well as a from-the-ground report on how the
investment firm's employees reacted when they heard they'd
been bought out for $2 a share.
Must Skip
Time interviews Hillary Clinton but doesn't succeed in cracking
the senator's boilerplate responses—her paragraphs-long replies
sound as if they're fresh off the campaign press.
Best Politics Piece
Forget the swirling debate over the Democratic primaries.
Newsweek asks the question on everyone's mind: Why don't
female politicians have more sex scandals?
Best Culture Piece
Harper's profiles the farmers of the "raw milk underground,"
who believe it's their mission to bring consumers unpasteurized
milk, and the government's attempts to shut them down.
Summer strode slowly in clownish festoonery, forgiving
everything.
Blessed was the fruit of its womb: slumbering bees, blossoms'
furious purple
*****effusions,
clouds scattered like napkins late of lips moist with cream and
champagne.
Chiffon was a word heard often then.
Oh, to live like that again, operatically bored with the reckless
long business of
*****becoming.
To loll on a ridge above the jostling gondolas,
to sprawl in a field amid the ruins of lunch, the crumbs and
rinds,
to be slaked by a final swallow of wine and feel safely ravaged
and awry,
to joy in the horses' forelocks, beribboned with blooms of sweet
everlasting—
a distraction from the black, inapt cast of their eyes,
that sequestered look, as of something they've seen and not
forgotten yet.
politics
What I Mean, Not What I Say
The little fibs campaigns tell all day long.
Best Cocktail-Party Factoid
A piece in the New Republic reveals that after an economist
proposed etching a black fly near the drain of toilet bowls in a
men's restroom at an Amsterdam airport, "spillage" was reduced
by 80 percent—"It turns out that, if you give men a target, they
can't help but aim at it."
By John Dickerson
When ABC reported the scoop that Hillary Clinton told Bill
Richardson that Barack Obama couldn't win in the general
election, I thought it was a good nugget but not surprising. It's
not as if she'd previously said she'd be a better nominee because
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Obama is a bad dancer. The Clinton campaign has been arguing
that Obama can't win in the general election for months. He can't
win big states; he can't win among key constituencies like bluecollar voters, Latinos, and Catholics; he can't beat McCain; he
can't pass the commander-in-chief test. The electability charge
is, in fact, the only basis Clinton has left as she battles to
overthrow Obama's lead among pledged delegates. It's nearly on
Clinton's campaign signs.
Why not say what you mean? Two reasons. Neither campaign
wants to be accused of giving John McCain any statements that
he can use in the general election against the eventual
Democratic nominee. Also, in the event that the candidates wind
up as each other's running mate or even just campaigning for the
other one in November, they don't want to have to eat too many
of their own words. "It's a thin but important line," says a
Clinton staffer.
But as thoroughly obvious as the Clinton remark is, it's the kind
of plain-as-the-nose-on-your-face statement that candidates are
never supposed to actually make out loud. They'll walk you up
to the idea. They'll even sound out the vowels to help you say it
yourself, but in primary season, no one is supposed to actually
say, "He can't win" or "He doesn't have the credentials to be
commander in chief." Her campaign will suggest that your
sleeping children could be extinguished in their beds if Obama is
elected, but when Clinton is asked at a debate if Obama is not
ready to be president, she'll say that's for the voters to decide.
Still, getting across the idea that a candidate is fundamentally
flawed matters. It's a more powerful argument than saying he's
less good. If he's merely that, voters can take a chance on him,
knowing they aren't really risking a few bedrock Democratic
principles. The party won't be at risk of nominating a
conservative Supreme Court justice or launching a new war
against Iran. If a voter, or better a superdelegate, can be
convinced that a candidate is doomed, on the other hand, then
you can move them to your man or woman as the safer, if less
appealing, choice.
The prediction that Obama will be a general-election failure is so
taboo that now that Clinton has said it, her aides won't repeat it.
After a conference call devoted to stacking up all the reasons
Obama would lose to McCain, I asked Clinton's top strategist
and spokesman if they were saying, as Bill and Hillary Clinton
have said privately, that Obama can't win. "No," the Clinton
aides dodged, they're merely arguing that Clinton is the better
candidate.
This is what's at stake when Clinton aides discuss the incendiary
remarks of Obama's pastor Jeremiah Wright, as Greg Sargent of
Talking Points Memo reported earlier this week. The question
the Clinton camp wants on everyone's minds is whether Obama's
pastor will sink him in the general.
A version of this happens in Obamaland, too. In response to
Clinton's claims that Obama is unelectable, the Obama campaign
has initiated its own version of the same accusation over the last
few weeks. Clinton can't win in a general election when voters
think she has a "credibility gap." "To head into a general election
with over half the electorate not believing you are trustworthy is
a serious problem," campaign manager David Plouffe said. "The
American people will not elect a candidate that they do not see
as trustworthy."
Taking the Obama argument to its logical conclusion, I asked
campaign adviser Greg Craig, who has known Hillary Clinton
since college but is siding with the other guy, if he thought she
was fundamentally dishonest. He was on one of the Obama
conference calls at which this was essentially asserted. But, of
course, he demurred. He was just on the call to dispute her
foreign-policy claims, he said.
The Obama camp wants you to hear the charge that Clinton is a
liar, but they play peekaboo by framing it in terms of the
political challenge her candidacy poses for Democrats. They
never want to come out and just say liar by itself. When Barack
Obama agreed in a New York Times interview that Clinton had
not been fully truthful six months ago, he took a lot of heat. He
has never gone that far again.
The Democratic campaign, then, has come down to the question
of which candidate is fundamentally flawed, even though neither
side wants to really come out and say this. It's a way to get what
you want, you hope, without taking responsibility. My son used
to do a version of the same thing. He'd hold up his hands over
his eyes and pretended we couldn't see him.
politics
Campaign Junkie
The election trail starts here.
politics
Chicago School Days
Obama's lackluster record on education.
By Alexander Russo
School reform advocates in Chicago have of late been heralding
Barack Obama as a champion of local school councils, Chicago's
hyperlocal system of school governance. Unique among big-city
school districts in the United States, these independent, elected
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bodies at each school are made up of parents, teachers, and
community members, 10 in all, plus the principal. Think of them
as mini school boards, parent-teacher organizations on steroids,
or condo boards for schools.
Created 20 years ago, these councils each hire and fire their own
principals. Though firings aren't common, they turn out to be a
very big deal. Dismissing a principal is the education equivalent
of capital punishment. It's often career-ending. It disrupts a
school to the core. And it sends shock waves out through the rest
of the system. The councils—each dominated by six parents—
are not all-powerful, however. Since 1995, Chicago has also had
a central Board of Education overseen by the mayor that, among
other things, has the power to close schools and open new ones.
Not surprisingly, the relationship has been extremely uneasy
between the central board office (dominated by college-educated
professionals) and individual school councils (dominated by
minority parents, not all of them college-educated). Put simply,
some advocates think LSCs are the best and only real way to
improve Chicago schools—by emphasizing local control,
curriculum flexibility, and parent involvement. Others think that
making each school independent is an indulgent holdover from
another era that mostly gets in the way of improving
accountability in a massive, 600-school system.
In reality, Obama never really championed the local councils. He
supported them behind the scenes and only eventually came out
publicly on their behalf. When he did weigh in, he came down
on the wrong side of the debate—against protecting principals
from unwarranted dismissals and in favor of keeping councils
independent, no matter what. In the end, the resolution of the
conflict between the two sides didn't alleviate anyone's concerns.
Instead, it prolonged a turf battle that seems to have dragged
down academic progress in the years since.
The story of Obama's involvement suggests that on similarly
contentious fronts involving national education policy, like the
No Child Left Behind Act, he might respond the same way—
holding back when powerful interest groups collide, only to
support the status quo of local control in the end. The candidate's
Chicago record on education also raises questions about his
much-vaunted ability to bring different sides together to find
lasting solutions.
Obama's links to local school councils began more than 20 years
ago, when they were first being created. His South Side
community organizing group, the Developing Communities
Project, supported the 1988 reform act that created the councils.
A decade later, when Obama was a second-year state senator, he
served on the board of several local education foundations that
had supported the councils and chaired the board for the Chicago
Annenberg Challenge, a $50 million philanthropic effort that
supported local control.
In 1999, hard-charging schools chief Paul Vallas went to the
Illinois Legislature to win more control over principal hiring and
firing. Vallas headed the Chicago schools between 1995 and
2001. His get-tough initiatives—mandating summer school for
students who failed end-of-year exams, for example—got
glowing press coverage and earned him not one but two
mentions in President Clinton's State of the Union speeches.
Vallas wanted to make sure in 1999 that his precious cadre of
experienced principals wouldn't continue to get bounced out of
their schools for no good reason. In particular, he wanted to limit
the LSCs' power to dismiss principals at the end of their fouryear contracts. Each year, a small number of councils (maybe 15
percent of the roughly 150 principals who are up for renewal in
any given year) would opt not to renew their principals'
contracts. Most of the time, the decisions weren't controversial.
But occasional surprises—and concerns about the lack of any
real oversight or appeal provisions—dogged the process from
the start.
Vallas felt that some effective principals were being let go
because they were white or because of personal conflicts. He
proposed giving himself the authority to review and approve
most decisions to let principals go, styling the change as an
"accountability" measure. Local-control advocates called it an
attempt to "gut" local control.
Both were right. Taking away the LSCs' power to fire principals
would have hamstrung the councils' independence. But
independent LSCs had done a good job at opening up the school
system to parents without transforming student achievement.
Vallas was trying to complete the centralization that had begun
in 1995, when the state gave the mayor a say over the schools. In
that context, leaving the LSCs in place just made no sense,
particularly given the need to make greater academic strides.
Obama was uniquely well-placed to take the lead in mediating
this battle. He had a relatively strong background in community
and education issues. He was friends and pickup-basketball
buddies with Arne Duncan, who was then in charge of magnet
schools (and has since taken over Vallas' job). Obama also knew
Vallas, who liked him. Then, as now, he was considered a
politician who could unify people and resolve challenging
conflicts. And in a racially charged debate like this one—Vallas
was a tall white guy who sent his kids to parochial school—it
didn't hurt that Obama was black.
To be sure, it would have been no easy feat to bring Vallas and
local-school advocates to the table, and there's no guarantee that
the effort would have worked. New and unknown to many other
Democratic lawmakers, Obama wasn't even on the education
committee.
Still. For several months, Obama didn't indicate clearly where
his sympathies lay. He didn't join with protesters and other
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legislators who swarmed public events denouncing the Vallas
proposal. He didn't talk to the press about the importance of
community engagement for schools or the unfairness of
diminishing the influence of the 5,500 elected LSC members.
Obama kept tabs on the negotiations through his staff, met
occasionally with local-control advocates, and, according to
those who were involved, sometimes provided ideas and advice
in private. But that was about it. Some local advocates weren't
even sure whether he would ultimately be on their side or not.
And many worried that without someone like Obama to stop it,
the Vallas juggernaut would overrun any opposition.
In the end, support for Vallas' proposal suddenly collapsed, the
victim of political infighting within the district. A face-saving
provision was added to the existing LSC law that allowed
principals to appeal their dismissals to an outside arbitration
board, but it was written so narrowly that it was all but unusable.
"We put it in there as a fig leaf for Vallas," recalls a legislative
staffer who was involved in the negotiations. "It wasn't
something that was supposed to be used."
Only after the fig leaf was in place did Obama come out publicly
in support of local school councils, making a brief speech (PDF)
on the Senate floor to codify the final agreement preserving local
councils' authority. To his credit, Obama didn't augment racial
division. Vallas was in essence trying to take control away from
poor and minority parents. He credits Obama with never having
played the race card. "Barack could have taken the bait but he
didn't," says Vallas, now head of the New Orleans schools. "He
never demagogued the issue."
In being so late to the debate, however, Obama didn't really have
to stand up to anyone—not the groups he was affiliated with, not
Vallas, not Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley. He was just
approving the final result. He remained loyal to his roots, but
only when it was easy to do so. To some critics, this is exactly
the problem. "Obama has no history of standing up to school
interests or anyone else," says Dan Cronin, the Republican state
senator who handled the 1999 legislation (and recalls little if any
involvement from Obama). "If you look at his past record,
there's nothing that's particularly bold or creative."
Partisan judgments aside, Obama missed the opportunity to
address long-standing questions about unwarranted dismissals of
principals or to resolve the conflicted relationship between LSCs
and the central Chicago school board. There is still no
meaningful way for principals to appeal their dismissals; few
have tried, and not one has been reinstated. And the structural
conflicts remain between what are essentially two different
systems of governance. (New York City avoided this problem by
doing away with its community school districts at roughly the
same time it gave control of the school board to the mayor.)
Tension between local control and centralized accountability
isn't just a problem in Chicago, of course. It's also at the core of
the debate over No Child Left Behind, the 2002 federal law that
requires annual testing by states in reading and math and
mandates publication of test score results for poor and minority
students. For more than six years, state and local educators have
complained that such mandates get in the way of local control
and flexibility.
Based on Obama's actions in Chicago in 1999, it's hard to
imagine him taking charge of the continuing debate over
whether and how No Child Left Behind should be renewed.
Forced to take a side, Obama's record suggests that, ultimately,
he would be sympathetic to local autonomy. But there's not
much evidence to show that he would be able to help mend deep
and abiding schisms between testing hawks and local-control
advocates. And without strong and unifying national leadership,
our troubled public-education system stands little chance of
making the dramatic improvements that it needs.
politics
What Made Richardson Flip?
Clinton insiders speculate about Obama's offer to him.
By John Dickerson
What did Barack Obama offer Bill Richardson for his
endorsement? Nothing, say both the Obama and Richardson
camps, but this is the question angry and jilted Clinton
supporters are asking in the wake of Richardson's announcement
a week ago that he would support Obama rather than their
woman.
Despite Clinton strategist Mark Penn's effort to downplay the
endorsement, Richardson's move was very helpful to Obama.
When Richardson said he'd decided to back Obama in part
because of Obama's speech reacting to the uproar over his
former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, his move became a
symbolic end point to the controversy. Richardson also went
beyond mere praise, calling for Democrats to rally around
Obama and bring the contest to a close.
It is a standard tactic to accuse a turncoat of having been bought
off. Some would say this is the Corleone reflex in the Clinton
world, which punishes those who stray. What better way to
malign Richardson than to claim low motives, which undermines
Richardson's professed reason—that he was inspired by Obama's
grand speech on race.
But Clinton supporters say Richardson was poised to join the
family—in fact, he was already a charter member—and the
speed of his reversal makes them think self-interest must have
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played a role in his jump. Many of those who are angriest have
known Richardson a long time and have raised money for his
various campaigns. They talked to him while he was sitting on
the fence, and in those conversations, they say, he signaled his
eventual support for Hillary. Why renege on old friends? A
grand offer must have been in the offing, the detractors surmise.
On Thursday, I talked to one of those in the Clinton circle who
had talked to Richardson, and that source said the damning
reason the former energy secretary gave for his then-apparent
plan to support Clinton was Obama's lack of experience—the
central nail Clinton has been hammering. Not to mention that
experience was the basis for Richardson's own presidential
campaign.
On Larry King Live on Thursday night, James Carville, who
branded Richardson "Judas" for what Carville said was a
particularly high level of betrayal, named a handful of Clinton
fundraisers who say they had similar cheery conversations with
Richardson. Richardson also gave former President Bill Clinton
the impression that he would ultimately back Hillary Clinton as
well as Bill Clinton's top aides. When Bill Clinton called
Richardson on hearing the news of his endorsement switch,
Richardson refused to return his phone calls. "I wouldn't treat
President Bush the way he treated President Clinton," says
Carville. Richardson's communication director, Gilbert Gallegos,
says no such representations were made to anyone connected to
Clinton and that when Bill Clinton flew to New Mexico to watch
the Super Bowl with Richardson, the governor was clear about
his intentions. "Gov. Richardson told President Clinton not to
come to New Mexico for the Super Bowl if he expected an
endorsement," says Gallegos.
This has been a bad week for Clinton's financial backers. In
addition to the Richardson betrayal, they also feel that House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi has turned on them. Despite their years of
supporting the party, they have been unable to use their leverage
to move Pelosi away from what they see as her public support
for Obama. Though Pelosi says she is neutral, she has said that
the superdelegates should follow the will of the pledged
delegates. Since Obama holds an insurmountable lead among the
pledged delegates, this is just a long way for her to say, "Elect
Barack." Clinton fundraisers wrote to Pelosi asking that she
retract her remarks and support the party rules that allow
superdelegates to vote their conscience. Furious at the letter, she
refused to.
What's significant about the Pelosi and Richardson duet is that
both seem to have made a calculation that in the long-brewing
tension between party elites and the new grass roots, they're
siding with the latter. These veteran Democrats may be making
their moves based on their assessments of Obama as a candidate,
but they also may be informed by his success in raising money
online and from a huge number of small-dollar donors, which
may mean a dilution in the power of traditional rainmakers. As a
sign of the new landscape, Moveon.org sent out a fundraising
letter asking Pelosi to stand her ground.
Richardson, through a spokesman, denies that he told anyone he
would support Clinton. Those who know him say that as a
politician who has negotiated with some of the world's trickiest
foreign leaders, he knows how to let people "believe what they
want to believe," as one put it. Both Obama's and
Richardson's spokesmen offer ironclad denials that
Obama offered Richardson anything specifically or
implicitly in the way of a quid pro quo, and there is
no actual evidence of any kind of deal.
What Bill Richardson did or didn't extract from Barack Obama
in return for his timely support may not be known until Obama
wins the nomination and picks his running mate or wins the
election and names his Cabinet. But there is one other little piece
of evidence that suggests Richardson must have wrested some
promise in return for his support. It's contained in the
"Richardson Rules," his pointers for how to negotiate: "Don't
concede absolutely everything the other side is requesting. Get
something in return, even if it's minor."
press box
Links That Stink
Grumbling about the misuse of hyperlinks on news sites.
By Jack Shafer
When Vannevar Bush first dreamt of hyperlinks back in the
1940s, surely he envisioned something tidier than the link riots
that erupt on many of today's Web pages. The extraneous links
etched into most Washingtonpost.com stories, for example,
make it look as though an insect rode a unicycle dipped in blue
ink through the copy before you got there.
Almost any Washingtonpost.com or Nytimes.com news story
demonstrates the sites' link-happy tendencies. A good example
of the Washingtonpost.com's overkill is this Page One story
from Monday about the alleged budget crunch faced by some
states. In the first 95 words, the story links Illinois, Cook
County, Michigan, New Jersey, California, and San Fernando
Valley to Washingtonpost.com landing pages containing general
news, video, and audio about those places. No thinking human
would ever add these links—obviously, a human has
programmed a computer to automatically insert them.
Of what use are such landing pages? For the reader, little. They
exist for the publisher to serve another page of ads and to
optimize search engine results.
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I don't oppose sites serving ads or optimizing pages to improve
search results—as long as the strategies don't waste readers'
time. But that's what many of the landing pages do. The real sin
here is how extraneous links induce link shyness: When the time
comes that the reader will benefit from clicking on a link, he'll
not bother because the site has taught him its links are worthless.
Next up on my hate list are links that come alive when you
mouse over them. On many business sites, a pop-over bullies its
way onto the page when your cursor lands on a keyword or
phrase, offering to fetch you a stock quote or company news,
conduct a search, or impose a frigging ad on you. These popovers really suck when they obscure the copy I want to read. See
this Bloomberg.com page for a modest example of this practice
and Yahoo News and Breitbart.com for really obnoxious ones.
(Ryan Block of Engadget has declared war on keyword pop-over
ads.)
I despise sites like the Nytimes.com that think double-clicks of a
word should automatically open a new window and fill it with
the word's definition. Please show me where I can turn this
"feature" off! I've reserved a superscalding hypercircle of hell
for Yahoo News, which thinks double-clicking a word means I
want a billboard of additional news and search options to spring
from the page. Don't bother telling me how to turn this feature
off. I'll just avoid Yahoo News altogether. (And every page
tainted with Snap Shots.)
Only slightly less maddening are the sites and writers that think
a links package that reads "click here, here, here, and here for
more" is an inducement to visit additional pages. If a writer is
too lazy to indicate where the link is going to take me, I'm too
busy to click. (Along those lines, I could do without the
overdone links that make an entire paragraph linkable.)
Gawker's mixed-link philosophy also grates on me. Some links
in its copy lead to Gawker landing pages. That's bad. Others lead
to specific Gawker stories or to outside stories, which are also
relevant. That's good. I wish the site didn't force me to inspect
the status line of my browser to see where a text link is about to
take me. Mr. Denton, remove those landing-page links from
inside your stories!
Here's my last bitch: Why doesn't every newspaper Web site
routinely link directly to the competition's work? If a
competitor's story is good enough to cite in the copy, it's good
enough to link to. Examples: A recent Washingtonpost.com
story cited an Nytimes.com story but linked to a generic page
about the Times. The Nytimes.com does no better, citing a newsbreaking Washington Post story in a recent article but not
linking to it. (I can't even locate a landing page for the
Washington Post on Nytimes.com. Subtle slap or oversight?)
There is, I'm happy to report, one old-school print journalist
whose stories point to the greater Web when they're put online.
His name is Frank Rich, and unlike so many of his newspaper
peers, he links to the competition, the out-of-town newspapers,
the blogs, the candidates' Web sites, TV transcripts, YouTube,
survey results, and his own publication's copy.
It's the way it should be done, and I'm not saying that just
because it's the way nearly all Slate writers do it.
******
Ryan Block suggests remedies (Firefox add-ons, etc.) for the
most obtrusive ads but hopes you won't modify your browser to
block all ads because then he (and I) would be thrown out of
work. What links peeve you the most? Send nominations to
[email protected]. (E-mail may be quoted by name in
"The Fray," Slate's readers' forum, in a future article, or
elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent
disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)
Track my errors: This hand-built RSS feed will ring every time
Slate runs a "Press Box" correction. For e-mail notification of
errors in this specific column, type the words links that stink in
the subject head of an e-mail message and send it to
[email protected].
press box
Rupert Murdoch Is Not the Antichrist
Proof revealed at Georgetown University.
By Jack Shafer
Rupert Murdoch addressed the students and faculty of
Georgetown University this afternoon, explaining the "creative
destruction" wrought upon the news and entertainment industries
by changing technology. Murdoch cast himself as a relentless
competitor, which he is, who has taken on entrenched
monopolies and oligopolies around the world, which is also true.
(FishbowlDC's Patrick W. Gavin live-blogged the event.)
As speeches go, it neither electrified the crowd nor induced itchy
posterior syndrome. Murdoch got off a couple of good jokes
about the similarities between the Jesuits, who founded
Georgetown, and his company, News Corp.
"The Jesuits and News Corp. attract highly talented people from
all over the world. The Jesuits and News Corp. like to challenge
the status quo. And both the Jesuits and News Corp. have a
reputation of independence and innovation. Of course, there are
some differences. I don't want to discourage anyone from
considering the priesthood, but I will tell you that at News Corp.
66/124
we don't insist on vows of poverty or chastity," Murdoch said.
"And as chief executive, I can tell you I'm not sure about the
degree of obedience, either."
The rotten old bastard did his best work while taking questions
from the crowd after his 20-minute set, answering candidly
about his ambitions to buy Newsday (it would make a good
business fit with his struggling New York Post), why he won't be
buying Yahoo (he says he doesn't have as much money as
Microsoft's Mr. Gates), and press bias (he thinks a thousand
points of view should bloom, or something like that).
He miscued, however, at a couple of junctures. While talking
about political bias and the news, he said:
The Washington Post [company] has a site
called Slate, and the guy who runs that calls
me the Antichrist.
Jacob Weisberg, the guy who runs Slate, has never called
Murdoch the Antichrist, according to Nexis. Nor have I. Perhaps
he was confusing Weisberg with the guy who runs the New York
Times? A September 2007 Vanity Fair piece by Michael Wolff
reported that Times Executive Editor Bill Keller once "angrily
confronted" Murdoch lieutenant Gary Ginsberg and said, "How
can you work for the Antichrist?"
Keller says he didn't "confront" the Murdoch employee, whom
he had known for a while. And he wasn't angry.
"I greeted Gary, smilingly, with something like, 'So I gather
you've gone to work for the Antichrist.' It was a joke," Keller
writes via e-mail. "Maybe it's true, as someone said, that there's
no such thing as a joke. But it was a joke."
The only question to derail Murdoch was a politely worded
query from a Chinese student who wanted to know what steps
News Corp. would take to support freedom of speech, human
rights, and democracy in China.
"I'd better be careful answering this—I always get into trouble
when talking about China," Murdoch said to many laughs.
"Especially from my Chinese wife."
Murdoch then recounted the criticism he's faced for evicting
BBC News from his Asian satellite-TV company, Star. The BBC
was paying $10 million a year for the slot, he told the assembly.
"The BBC has a lot more money than I; they can get their own
transponder and their own satellite. And that was taken as me
kowtowing to the Chinese government. And I've had that hung
around my neck forever," he said.
Hold it right there, Rupe, and let me tighten that necktie with a
retrospective of your comments about the BBC and Star.
After News Corp. purchased Star in 1993, it dumped the BBC
because its news coverage displeased Chinese authorities, a
point that was widely reported as fact. The company
downplayed those stories for a few months until Murdoch told
his biographer, William Shawcross, the truth. Chinese leaders
"hate the BBC," Murdoch told Shawcross. Of his critics,
Murdoch said, "They say it's a cowardly way, but we said in
order to get in there and get accepted, we'll cut the BBC out."
This turnabout was reported in both the June 14, 1994, Wall
Street Journal ("Rupert Murdoch ... has acknowledged months
after the fact that he yanked British Broadcasting Corp. news
from his satellite television service in northern Asia in hopes of
soothing bad relations with China") and the June 14, 1994,
Financial Times ("Mr. Rupert Murdoch … has finally admitted
that he kicked BBC World Service Television off his Star TV
system in Asia to please the Chinese government and help
establish the satellite service there.")
(One of Murdoch's top guys tells a similar story in his recent
book Rupert's Adventures in China: How Murdoch Lost a
Fortune and Found a Wife.)
Then, 13 years later, Murdoch decided to recant his confession,
insisting in the May 24, 2007, Financial Times that:
Star was losing $100m per year; we had to pay
$10m per year to the BBC. I said "Let them
pay it themselves," and they did. We also
cancelled two other third-party channels—
MTV and Prime Sports. At that stage we never
ever had any request from anybody in China.
Indeed, there was no discourse at all.
That he's a demonstrably poor teller of lies proves, once and for
all, that Murdoch is not the Antichrist.
******
What I do call Murdoch every chance I get is a genocidal tyrant.
But even a genocidal tyrant can have a good day. Like today!
One of his newspapers, the Australian, ran a lengthy review of
Rupert's Adventures in China, which the Australian Web
magazine Crikey calls "earnest, broadly discursive, insightful
and sometimes amusing." What makes this newsworthy, of
course, is that the Murdoch-owned Far Eastern Economic
Review spiked a review of the book last month in an act of what
the author of Rupert's Adventures would describe as
"anticipatory compliance." Send your Murdoch musings to
[email protected]. (E-mail may be quoted by name in
"The Fray," Slate's readers' forum, in a future article, or
67/124
errors in this specific column, type the word Georgetown in the
subject head of an e-mail message and send it to
[email protected].
sidebar
Return to article
Rupert Murdoch, Genocidal Tyrant?
To the best of my knowledge, nobody ever called Rupert
Murdoch a genocidal tyrant until he introduced the useful image
in a summer 2007 conference call. Here's how the Washington
Post reported it.
Rupert Murdoch wanted the Wall Street
Journal badly enough to endure a summer's
worth of hurt feelings.
"That's ... why I spent the better part of the
past three months enduring criticism that is
normally leveled at some sort of genocidal
tyrant," the 76-year-old global media tycoon
said yesterday during a conference call on
News Corp.'s fourth-quarter results. "If I didn't
think it was such a perfect fit with such
unlimited potential to grow on its own and in
tandem with News Corp. assets, believe me, I
would have walked away."
After bombarding readers with its incendiary Page One, the
newspaper dared readers to catch their breath with the Page 2
"News Summary." The sprint resumed and didn't end until the
last news page had been turned.
Then on March 25, the Times more than doubled the space given
to summaries, spreading them over Pages 2 and 3 and renaming
the feature "Inside the Times." Page 4, once the reliable home of
international news, now does meta duty, too, presenting a digest
of NYTimes.com pages and serving as the paper's new home for
corrections. Now the newspaper reads as if it begins with three
speed bumps.
For ink-stained page turners, it was as if the quicksilver Times
had put out deck chairs and free tea and invited readers to linger
over the news—instead of bolting after it like wild dogs. For
many veteran readers of the Times, these magaziney table-ofcontents pages fit like a loose suit and read like a celebration of
white space.
What did the paper cut to accommodate this expansion? Tom
Bodkin, assistant managing editor and design director at the
Times, says the paper's new kickoff doesn't come at the expense
of any inside news or features. And rather than trying to ruin the
paper with a Chinese-restaurant-length menu, Bodkin asserts
that he is trying to improve the paper.
"People say they have less and less time to read the paper,"
Bodkin says. Any way you look at it, he adds, competition for
readers' attention has never been greater. The new summary
acreage will provide readers with useful "shortcuts" to the tens
of thousands of words inside and help direct their attention to
Web site features they'd otherwise miss.
Arriving with the new pages is a redesigned reefer box at the
bottom of Page One, one that further redefines navigation, as
well as a more emphatic introduction of international news and a
typographical tweaking of the briefing boxes.
"Definitely attached to this whole change to the front of the book
was giving the 'International Report' a display page, a real
opening," he says.
press box
The Times' New Welcome Mat
The paper's design director defends its expanded summary pages.
By Jack Shafer
As recently as March 24, the New York Times' A section began
with its traditional gallop.
"The criticism I've heard is, 'We've got to plow through four
pages until we get to the real news?' You know, plowing through
four pages? I feel like I'd like to put together a little video that
shows you how to turn two pages," Bodkin says. "If you're not
interested in that two-three feature, skip it."
"If you scan A1 and you read two and three, you've got an
overview of any significant news event of the day," he adds.
Getting that same "taste" would otherwise require flipping every
page, "which is less efficient."
68/124
Bodkin isn't dismissive of the new look's critics, acknowledging
that different readers have different styles of reading.
His intent is to set out "the thematic organization of the paper a
little more aggressively. Which, again—for the hardcore
reader—isn't all that important. But it's a big, complicated paper,
and it helps to organize the paper."
By the conclusion of our interview, Bodkin had talked me down
from my ledge. I'm not sure Times readers want or need such a
condensation, but having been given permission by the architect
of the new welcome mat to ignore it, I'll do my best to coexist.
******
What do you make of the new summaries? Send your two cents
to [email protected]. (E-mail may be quoted by name
in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum, in a future article, or
errors in this specific column, type the word Bodkin in the
subject head of an e-mail message and send it to
[email protected].
press box
The States Are Falling, the States Are
Falling!
The press corps plays Chicken Little.
By Jack Shafer
Whenever the economy starts to slide southward, the press starts
sprouting horror stories spout about how "tax revenue shortfalls"
are starving state governments. Today's (March 31) Washington
Post Page One piece—"States Are Hit Hard by Economic
Downturn: Many Cutbacks Felt by Most Needy"—repeats so
many of the genre's clichés that the writers could have
assembled the piece from memory.
True to form, the Post leads its story with how "cuts,"
"shortfalls," and "slashed" budgets are depriving the needy of
health care, requiring layoffs of state employees, and gutting
after-school programs. Campgrounds are closing in Michigan,
the Post reports. A city in New Jersey can no longer afford
Independence Day fireworks. Some states have ended weekend
hours at DMV offices.
Untold in the Post story is how the state and local governments
have increased their spending every quarter for the last four
years, as the above chart, drawn from the Commerce
Department's Bureau of Economic Affairs data, shows. The
combined state and local number gives a better picture of
government spending than the state-government figure alone.
The states and localities routinely expanded entitlements,
invented new programs, and spread more cash on their
mainstays as growing tax revenue flowed in.
Now, as the stumbling economy forces individuals and families
to rein in their spending, it's only sensible that the state and local
governments should have to tighten their belts. It's called living
within your means. But news stories rarely reflect this sentiment.
In the print edition of the Post (but not online), the paper
reproduces a chart that it sources to the Center for Budget and
Policy Priorities, which it correctly identifies as a liberal think
tank. The chart, derived from this CBPP document, lays out the
"budget gaps" projected by 22 states and the District of
Columbia for fiscal year 2009 and three more in fiscal year
2010. That means, of course, that 25 states are not yet projecting
budget gaps, which is the "half full" view of the glass. One
would think that states living within their means would be of
interest to Post readers, but we learn little to nothing about their
fiscal practices. How many of the states constructed
unreasonable or profligate budget projections? The Post doesn't
say.
The CBPP release is actually better than the Post on the half-full
point, noting that mineral- and energy-rich states are
experiencing tax "revenue growth," as are agriculture states
harvesting the big-money crops of corn and soybeans. Left
unstated by the Post and the CBPP is the fact that some states—
such as Utah, North Carolina, and Georgia—generally do a good
job of matching tax revenues to expenditures. Others—think
California and Illinois—build FUBAR fiscal houses whether the
economy is booming or busting. Sounds like a story to me.
State deficit "crises" are usually caused by government officials
who fail to match their revenue projections to slow growing
revenues. They dither instead of act because they regard
shortfalls as a political problem to solve, not a financial one.
Businesses executives, on the other hand, can't afford to dither
because their company will go bankrupt (something states can't
do) or they'll be sacked.
When the states and liberal think tanks dictate the sky-is-falling
angle in news stories, the press overstates the harm done by cuts
to recipients of government largesse at the expense of the harm
done to the average taxpayer who pays for the programs.
69/124
Meanwhile, the richer budget story routinely gets missed: Why
do some officials spend their states into fiscal hell, and how do
others avoid the trip?
posts revealing self-critiques, like a recounting of a June 2007
game in which Brad Hawpe deposited a first-pitch change-up
into the seats: "I was sure I was making the right pitch to the
right hitter in the right spot. Obviously I was wrong."
******
Oh, how I hate the Washington, D.C., sales tax. Send links to
your least favorite tax to [email protected]. (E-mail
may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum, in
a future article, or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates
otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the
Washington Post Co.)
errors in this specific column, type the word Tax in the subject
head of an e-mail message and send it to
[email protected].
reading list
The Pitchers and Catchers Report
The best books, articles, and Web sites to read about the start of baseball
season.
By Josh Levin
There's red-white-and-blue bunting in the stands, the smell of
cotton candy is hanging in the air, and the scalpers want $400 for
four together. Yes, it's time once again for baseball's Opening
Day, that glorious time of year when every backup infielder is a
potential All-Star. Get ready for the season with this short
syllabus, a baseball primer that's guaranteed to leave you
jonesing for beer, hot dogs, and box scores.
ESPN might only cover the teams in Boston and New York, but
in March, even Kansas Citians can have delusions of grandeur.
Drink in the optimism of a new season at Rany on the Royals,
where long-suffering fan Rany Jazayerli lays out the top 23
reasons he's excited to be a Royals backer. Read Jazayerli's
hyperdetailed, deeply personal tributes to Kauffman Stadium,
closer Joakim Soria, and announcer Denny Matthews, and you'll
have found a 24th reason to embrace the Royals: an expert
blogger who chronicles the team's ups and (mostly) downs.
Curt Schilling's blog, 38 Pitches, offers an insider's take on life
in the big leagues. The Red Sox starter (who'll miss the start of
the season with a shoulder injury) loves the sound of his own
keyboard, but there are rare insights here if you're willing to
wade through the plugs for his video-game company. Not only
does Schilling break news—like his scoop last March that
Jonathan Papelbon would be Boston's closer—the pitcher also
One of Schilling's former teammates with the Philadelphia
Phillies, Lenny "Nails" Dykstra, is the subject of a riotously
entertaining profile in the March 24 issue of The New Yorker.
The tobacco-chewing, headfirst-sliding Dykstra has, improbably,
made a mint as a day trader and car-wash mogul. When he's not
sucking down cheeseburgers and repeating the word bro, the exoutfielder is busy putting together the Players Club, a new
monthly publication that will educate professional athletes on
money matters. "This will be the world's best magazine,"
Dykstra tells writer Ben McGrath.
It wasn't long ago that ballplayers didn't have millions to invest.
In The Last Real Season (out in May), one-time Texas Rangers
beat reporter Mike Shropshire chronicles baseball's 1975
campaign, the last season before full-scale free agency came into
effect. Shropshire's no romantic, though: The Last Real Season is
the sportswriter's Ball Four, a hilarious, profane diary of a year
spent dodging punches from booze-infused Rangers manager
Billy Martin and trying to wring copy out of a dead-end team.
(My favorite excerpt from the author's 1975 clippings: "[Rangers
first baseman Jim] Fregosi is old enough to be somebody's
grandfather, although, to the best of his knowledge, he's not.")
If you have only 15 minutes to spare, settle in with the strangerthan-fiction story of Tony Gwynn Jr. and Trevor Hoffman. As
ESPN the Magazine's Tom Friend explains, Gwynn, the son of
Padres legend Tony Gwynn, grew up idolizing and palling
around with Hoffman, his father's longtime teammate. In the
final weekend of the 2007 season, the Padres called on Hoffman
to get one final out to secure a spot in the playoffs. The man at
the plate: the younger Gwynn, now a reserve outfielder with the
Milwaukee Brewers. Even if you know what happens next,
there's enough drama here to make your skin tingle. It's a
welcome springtime reminder of the heartbreaks and triumphs
that make baseball the world's greatest game.
recycled
The April Fools' Day Defense Kit
This year, don't be taken for a sucker by the media.
By Jack Shafer
You don't look gullible, but you are. Year after year, the media
take advantage of your naiveté and humiliates you with an April
Fools' Day prank.
70/124
You're probably still kicking yourself for being fooled by the
April 2000 Esquire feature about "Freewheelz," an Illinois
startup that promised "self-financing, free cars" to consumers.
Every time you spot Discover magazine on the newsstand, you
growl because you fell for its April 1995 article about the
discovery of the ice-melting, penguin-eating hotheaded naked
ice borer. Your father probably still gripes about Sports
Illustrated's April 1, 1985, article about Sidd Finch, the New
York Mets prospect who could throw a baseball 168 mph.
The Museum of Hoaxes Web site catalogs these greatest hits to
complete its Top 100 list of the greatest April Fool's hoaxes of
all time. There's the BBC's legendary segment on the Swiss
spaghetti harvest (1957), Phoenix New Times' story about the
formation of the "Arm the Homeless Coalition" (1999), and PC
Computing's report on legislative efforts to ban the use of the
Internet while drunk (1994), just to name a few classics.
April Fools' hoaxes succeed because the victims, conditioned by
a stream of implausible but true stories in the press, aren't
expecting the sucker punch. If you don't want to be anybody's
fool this year, assume a guarded crouch, especially as the
countdown to April 1 progresses. Some April Fools' Day pranks
arrive in your mailbox a couple of days before the holiday in the
form of a monthly magazine. Remember, to be forewarned is to
be forearmed.
Beware strange animals. If a story whiffs even remotely of the
hotheaded naked ice borer, it's likely to be a hoax. Technology
Review hoaxed its readers with an April Fools' story in 1985
titled "Retrobreeding the Woolly Mammoth." In 1984, the
Orlando Sentinel did the same with a piece about the cockroachdevouring Tasmanian mock walrus. In 1994, London's Daily
Star sports pages reported that invading superworms might
destroy the Wimbledon green.
Turn off your radio. Deejays love to pull practical jokes on
April Fools' Day. In 1989, KSLX-FM in Scottsdale, Ariz.,
broadcast the claim that the station had been taken hostage by
Pima Indians, prompting calls to the police. WCCC-AM/FM in
Hartford, Conn., told listeners on April 1, 1990, that a volcano
had erupted not far away. San Diego's KGB-FM alerted listeners
on April 1, 1993, that the space shuttle Discovery had been
rerouted from Edwards Air Force Base to a local airport.
Thousands showed up to view the landing despite the fact that
the spacecraft was earthbound that day. It's not just shock jocks
pulling the pranks—you can't trust NPR, either. Its "humorists"
have aired pieces on portable zip codes you can take with you
when you move (2004), federal health care for pets (2002), and
advertisements projected onto the moon (2000).
Shun the British press. The British tabloids make stories up all
the time, but on April Fool's Day, everybody on Fleet Street
fabricates. The Times used the day to run a spoof ad announcing
an auction of "surplus intellectual property"—various patents,
trademarks, and copyrights. The Daily Mail announced the
postponement of Andrew and Fergie's wedding because of a
clash with Prince Charles' calendar. He was going to be
butterfly-hunting in the Himalayas. The Daily Mail told readers
that nuclear submarines were now patrolling the Thames. The
Independent published a scoop about skirts for men at a
fashionable shop. The Guardian declared it would replace the
women's page with the men's page. In 2000, the Times
complained that the surreal quality of the news—Labor turning
right wing, for example—had taken the ease out of cracking a
good April Fools' joke.
If they pranked before, they'll prank again. In addition to the
British press and NPR, the weekly chain formerly known as
New Times Inc. (now Village Voice Media) loves to hoax its
readers. Google has established a reputation for silly hoaxes with
pages hyping its Google MentalPlex and PigeonRank
technologies. It once posted openings for its Googlelunaplex
office on the moon and introduced a smart-drink called
GoogleGulp!
Too good to be true. News organizations sometimes fall for the
April Fools' Day pranks perpetrated by outside hoaxsters, so
don't expect every clue to be obvious. If an April 1 article
declares that something valuable is now "free" or purports to
break news about "hidden treasure," you're being had. Does an
organization's acronym or abbreviation spell April Fool? Also,
scan copy for anagrams of "April Fools'" or some similar play on
words. Discover's story on the hotheaded naked ice borer cited
as its authority wildlife biologist "Aprile Pazzo," which is Italian
for April Fool.
Alex Boese, curator of the Museum of Hoaxes and expert on all
things April Fools', advises that you finish reading articles
before rushing into the next cubicle to spread the incredible
news. Many hoax articles end with an obvious clue or an
explanation that it's all a joke. Double-check all radio warnings
of disasters—volcanic eruptions, floods, killer bee invasions—
and question any story uncovering a new, onerous tax (say, on
Linux).
New-product announcements that arrive on or near April 1, such
as the left-handed Whopper, should be approached with
skepticism, Boese says, but he cautions against reflexive hoaxspotting. On March 31, 2004, Google released the beta version
of Gmail, which featured 1 GB of free storage, cavernous
compared to other e-mail provider offerings. That was the same
day the company unveiled its Googlelunaplex plans. The moon
joke and the generosity of Gmail's 1 GB storage caused some
nerds to sense a con and insist—wrongly—that Gmail was a
giant April Fools' Day hoax.
******
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For a GoogleGulp of hoaxes, check out Alex Boese's book
Hippo Eats Dwarf: A Field Guide to Hoaxes and Other B.S.
What hilarious media-generated April Fool's Day hoax have I
missed? Send your nominations to [email protected].
(E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates
otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the
Washington Post Co.)
slate v
Internet Dangers for Kids
A daily video from Slate V.
slate v
Should She Enlist? Inverviews 50 Cents
On Sunday night, boxer Floyd Mayweather made his prowrestling debut at Wrestlemania XXIV. After a rote series of
punches and chokeholds, Mayweather defeated his mammoth
opponent, the Big Show, by resorting to the standard arsenal of
dirty fighting: groin shots, brass knuckles, and that fail-safe
weapon of the dastardly wrestler, the folding chair. Weeks of
hype preceded the showdown, including spots on Larry King
and Conan O'Brien, with much of the time devoted to whether
Mayweather was really getting $20 million. Whatever amount
Mayweather took home, it was too much—once the event was
under way, it seemed like both men wanted it to be over.
Why was the world's best pound-for-pound boxer wrestling in
the first place? Pro wrestling might seem like an odd career
move for a real fighter, but it wasn't a surprising development
for boxing connoisseurs. Floyd Mayweather's foray into the
world of turnbuckles and body slams is in keeping with a grand
tradition that dates back to turn-of-the-century champs like Ruby
Robert Fitzsimmons and the great Jack Dempsey. The wrestling
bug even bit the greatest fictional boxer of all time, Rocky
Balboa, who took on Hulk Hogan (aka Thunderlips) in Rocky
III. But the precedent that's most relevant to Mayweather's case
is that of the Greatest of All Time. In 1976, Muhammad Ali
tangled with Japanese wrestler Antonio Inoki. The hypemen:
Vince McMahon Sr. and Jr. of the World Wrestling Federation.
slate v
Weatherman Gone Wild
In the past year or so, Floyd Mayweather has catapulted himself
from mere boxing stardom to a level of pop-cultural notoriety
that's quite rare for a fighter these days. In doing so, he's helped
lift his entire sport out of the doldrums, all with an act that looks
and sounds an awful lot like the one perpetrated by a young
loudmouth from Louisville, Ky., named Cassius Clay.
slate v
Dear Prudence: He Won't Dress Up!
slate v
Obama Girl Hurts … Obama!
sports nut
Grappling With History
Floyd Mayweather follows the Muhammad Ali career path ... by climbing into
the wrestling ring?
By Dave Larzelere
When Ali, then Clay, first emerged in the early 1960s, boxing's
obituary was being written in the sports pages. Television had
destroyed the subculture of local clubs, and the bland, unpopular
Floyd Patterson had recently lost the heavyweight title to an
even less popular fighter, glowering ex-con Sonny Liston.
Beloved stars like Rocky Marciano and Sugar Ray Robinson
were retired or in decline, and no bright lights were emerging to
take their place.
Enter Ali, riding his good looks, fast hands, and loquacious
Louisville Lip to fame. This flamboyant shtick—a charismatic
young fighter reveling in the role of the cocky black braggart—
was a shot in the arm for the sweet science. In later years, Ali
admitted that he stole large parts of his act, including the
"greatest of all time" bit, from Gorgeous George, a legendary pro
wrestler of the 1940s.
Of course, for Ali, playing the self-adoring villain was a gesture
of racial defiance as well as a promotional tactic. Now that he's
been all but sainted, it's easy to forget how much of Ali's fame
grew out of the fact that the white middle class hated him and
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tuned into his fights in the hopes of seeing the Louisville Lip
buttoned once and for all.
the depth and savvy it takes to emerge from a typecast villain
into a full-fledged leading man.
Floyd Mayweather courted a similar kind of infamy last May in
his mega-fight with Oscar De La Hoya and in the behind-thescenes series that HBO aired to hype it, 24/7. Though De La
Hoya, boxing's pay-per-view king, was by far the marquee
attraction going into the bout, Mayweather stole the show,
positing himself as a new version of Ali updated for the hip-hop
generation. "I'm the greatest of all time" morphed into "I'm the
richest of all time," and the Money May persona was born. With
50 Cent a regular companion in his ever-present posse, and with
money-flinging and self-adulatory boasting his two favorite
public activities, Mayweather donned the black hat of black
defiance, selling his life, attitude, and style as a reflection of the
values of the most banal rap videos.
It's a trick that not even World Wrestling Entertainment could
perpetrate on its fans. In the initial promotion for Mayweather's
Wrestlemania appearance, he was positioned as the noble David
in a David-and-Goliath showdown, defending the honor of the
popular Rey Mysterio against the 7-foot Big Show. But there
was a problem with this "Floyd the Courageous," a plain fact
repeated over and over again by various wrestlers and
commentators—nobody likes Floyd Mayweather. In the face of
this realization, the WWE brain trust, never shy about tinkering
with the forces of good and evil, recast the fighter in a darker but
much more familiar light: the cocky braggart with a posse of
thugs.
Just as it did for hip-hop, this gangsta lean pushed Mayweather's
fights to the top of the charts. De La Hoya/Mayweather became
one of the most profitable events in pay-per-view history. The
comparable success of Mayweather's bout with Ricky Hatton
later in 2007 made it clear that it wasn't just Oscar who was
responsible for all that cheddar. The lesson: If you want to open
like Star Wars, you need a Darth Vader. The fans booed and
hissed and rooted for his downfall, and just like Ali before him,
Money May laughed all the way to the bank.
Less than a year later, however, Mayweather already seems
trapped inside a monster of his own making. The "mo' money"
vaudeville act has gotten old fast, and Mayweather doesn't seem
to know what to do with it. All he does seem to know is that he
wants to be a superstar of the sort that boxing hasn't known since
Sugar Ray Leonard, and to achieve that, he's getting admirably
creative: appearing on Dancing With the Stars, playing in the
NBA Celebrity All-Star Game, regularly floating the idea that
he'll turn away from boxing and pursue a career in mixed martial
arts. And now Wrestlemania. It's as if he's trying to emulate both
acts of the Ali drama at once—the self-conscious villainy of the
Louisville Lip era and the multiplatform cartoon character of the
mid-1970s for whom boxing was only a small facet of a gigantic
media creation.
By the 1970s, Ali had transformed into the good guy. Thanks to
a series of epic fights, the vindication of his position on
Vietnam, and a genius for selling himself, the most loathed of
heels became the hero of heroes and the face of a generation. To
follow in those mighty footsteps, Mayweather has a long way to
travel, indeed, and one has to wonder if circumstances and his
own skill set ever will allow for such a metamorphosis. As a
fighter, Floyd Mayweather is astonishingly gifted and deserves
mention in Ali's exclusive class. But as far as charisma goes, Ali
vs. Mayweather is a historic mismatch. The Greatest of All Time
could play any role, going from villain to hero or clown to sage,
sometimes in the space of a single rambling sentence. To this
point, Mayweather hasn't demonstrated such dramatic range nor
And so it was Sunday night, the crowd roaring when it appeared
that Big Show was going to finish Floyd, then booing when
Floyd turned the tables and used some hastily produced brass
knuckles to do the finishing himself. It was a bizarre and
lackluster affair, and in that way warrants Floyd yet another
comparison to Ali, whose wrestling bout with Antonio Inoki was
a lifeless travesty. Of course, at that point Ali had earned himself
a pass or two from the adoring public. That Mayweather wants
such affection for himself is clear, but the way he's going about
getting it isn't working. You'd think Mayweather, having stolen
so readily from the Ali playbook, would understand that on
history's stage only the bit players are bad guys. The big stars
always play the good guy in the end.
teachings
Terror U
What's behind the boom in homeland-security and emergency-management
majors?
By Jessica Portner
The traditionally slow-moving education industry is churning
out a slew of students with specialties in "mass catastrophe" and
"international disaster." More than 200 colleges have created
homeland-security degree and certificate programs since 9/11,
and another 144 have added emergency management with a
terrorism bent.
Homeland security is outpacing most other majors in part
because governments and corporations are hungry to hire
professionals schooled in disaster. One-quarter of the top slots—
from presidential appointments to high-level civil servants to
scientific posts—at the Department of Homeland Security
remained empty last year. And with one-third of posts at the
Federal Emergency Management Agency vacant, thousands of
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graduates are landing lucrative government gigs before they've
finished their weapons of mass destruction final. A student at the
University of North Texas now works as an emergency planner
in Florida when he's not tracking hurricanes for fun. A graduate
of the University of Southern California's Center for Risk and
Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events is using his dissertation,
rooted in game theory, to help police at Los Angeles
International Airport improve inspections. Others are security
directors on ships or bomb specialists at luxury hotels.
DHS has doled out more than $300 million since 9/11 to eight
prestigious U.S. universities to open "centers of excellence"
devoted to narrow topics like "the psyche of terrorists" or
"microbial risk analysis." Though the funding is a pittance in
federal-budget terms, the investment is a notable deposit into
higher-education coffers and a forceful message to colleges:
Build these degree programs and students will register.
Universities, which recognize a good business venture and an
admirable mission, have spent millions of dollars trying to
enhance their offerings with electives on cybersecurity and
agricultural terrorism. Thousands of military and lawenforcement experts have also enrolled in certificate programs to
expand their expertise.
Educators say terrorist training camps probably have rigorous
curricula with hefty reading lists and hard-grading teachers.
America could use an army of tech-savvy terror experts who
have the smarts to thwart the next Chernobyl or to whip out an
orderly evacuation plan when Katrina's sister arrives. It's fitting
that the generation of American students that grew up with
violent video games are the ones outsmarting the real villains.
Rarely has an academic field swept through American campuses
this quickly. When the Russians beat America into space in 1957
by launching Sputnik, the first unmanned spacecraft to orbit
Earth, Washington helped universities respond. The federal
bounty boosted college science and technology programs to
counter the perceived intellectual threat from the Soviets during
the Cold War. Physics and astronomy programs flourished.
Products like ready-to-eat foods, no-fog ski goggles, and waterresistant clothing were born.
The next time such a major academic shift whipped through
university campuses, it was a product of rage rather than
government investment. In the 1960s and '70s, students at
colleges across the country rallied their schools to create
African-American and women's studies majors to counter the
prevailing white-male-dominated canon.
The ballooning number of homeland-security and emergencymanagement majors must be making some campuses feel like
Terror U. Homeland-security majors type out term papers on
how to identify and outwit America's foes. The inevitability of
disaster permeates every syllabus whether the threat is al-Qaida
or avian flu.
Students are learning lessons written by the same international
security experts who also instruct ex-police-chiefs-turnedemergency-management consultants on how to respond to
changing global threats. The Center for Homeland Defense and
Security, funded by DHS and FEMA, offers a free, ready-made
curriculum to more than 130 universities. Packed with critical
expertise, the Naval Post Graduate School's curriculum has been
a hit with university leaders. Most schools use bits and pieces to
flesh out their existing courses. The University of Connecticut
copied it almost exactly. Universities say they are vigilant in
making sure courses in every major are written and taught to
entertain all points of view, however unpopular. But homeland
security, which is a young academic discipline still developing
its faculty, tends to be especially welcome territory for
disaffected Bush administration officials who talk openly about
bureaucratic hurdles to preventing disasters. A respected doctor
enlisted to lead major disaster-response teams vented in one
seminar about the "inadequate" and "dangerous" decisions made
by DHS leaders.
Lecturers with real-world know-how are in demand across
campus. Since 9/11, professors in more established disciplines
like international relations and criminal justice are taking time
away from teaching students how to negotiate treaties or win
legal arguments to quiz them on genetically engineered
pathogens and dirty bombs. Other majors, studying everything
from genetics to linguistics, are checking out homeland-security
courses, too. Not since the space race have so many different
disciplines abandoned their academic fiefdoms to collaborate.
Emergency-preparedness and disaster-management classes
might have geography majors and biologists, language majors
and economists all dreaming about rescue scenarios in a mock
situation room. An anthropologist might look at how culture
makes people susceptible to foreign influence, while engineers
look at a building's vulnerability to attack. Hopefully, these
future spies, corporate disaster planners, and biohazard
specialists will continue this multidisciplinary communication
well past graduation.
The question is, Will federal-government bosses listen to these
young advisers? Experts on counterterrorism and weapons of
mass destruction were sidelined before the Iraq war. The
President's Commission on Intelligence Capabilities of the
United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction reported
to Congress in 2005 that former CIA Director George Tenet
failed to pass along a senior intelligence officer's doubts about
the presence of WMD to former Secretary of State Colin L.
Powell before the Iraq invasion. The 2003 estimate on Iraq
intelligence produced by then-CIA intelligence analyst Paul
Pillar found that a U.S.-led war against and occupation of Iraq
would increase popular sympathy for terrorist goals. The
government is encouraging people to gain academic credentials
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even after the establishment ignored advice from the existing
experts after 9/11.
It's hopeful to think that by helping to create an elite squad of
terrorism-savvy graduates, some government officials may be
trying to correct that mistake. Listening to a fresh cadre of
professional paranoids could help prevent an anemic response to
a natural or manmade disaster. Not only could that save agency
bosses from literal danger and the bad press that follows a
botched operation—it could help them keep their jobs.
technology
Cloudy Judgment
Web-based applications are all well and good, but there's still no beating the
desktop computer.
By Paul Boutin
I had just finished a Photoshop how-to for Wired when the
software's maker announced a new free online version,
Photoshop Express. Great, I thought: Instead of telling readers to
spend 100 bucks, I can point them to the free, no-installationrequired version. After a few minutes of noodling, though, it was
clear that Photoshop Express couldn't perform the basic
vacation-shot-enhancement tricks I'd written up. Neither can
Picnik or Phixr, two other popular Web-based photo editors. As
of yet, no Web-based photo manipulation tool is even as
sophisticated as Photoshop Elements 5, the previous PC edition.
Buy a copy on eBay for $40—you'll thank me the next time your
Web connection conks out.
Photoshop Express is just one small example. There's now a
flood of Web-based applications that serve as simplified—read:
limited—versions of popular desktop software. Google Docs, the
in-your-browser competitor to Microsoft Office that I gushed
about a year ago, is probably the best example. Google just
announced that its word processor, spreadsheet, and slide-show
tools will soon let you keep working without a live network
connection. That will remove their biggest shortcoming. Still,
the more time I spend using Web-based apps like Google Docs,
the more I appreciate my desktop computer.
I used to be a network-computing zealot. I spent five years in the
1980s as a programmer and administrator for MIT's Project
Athena, an ambitious attempt to network the school's milewide
campus. Plunk yourself in front of any Athena computer, type in
your password, and all your stuff would be instantly available,
just as if you'd plugged in a giant hard disk. I put in another five
years at NCD, a Silicon Valley startup that tried to capitalize on
some of Athena's principles.
I thought that people who kept files on their desktops, and spent
their days installing and upgrading application software, were
idiots. Why not just have one copy of everything—applications,
files, etc.—on the network, let the IT guys back it up for you,
and connect to it from wherever you are? That's what Google
Docs does, finally. But now that my youthful efforts have come
to fruition, I've sworn off my the-network-is-the-computer
evangelism for several good reasons.
First, networks are flaky. Part of what makes the Internet so
powerful is that, unlike an old analog phone line, it doesn't have
to maintain a live, nonstop, real-time connection. As long as
your mail gets transferred and Web pages download within a
reasonable amount of time, you don't notice if your connection
briefly goes down once in a while. If you're using that
connection to edit photos, you do notice. One office network I
use is shared by a few software engineers who regularly move
gigabytes of data among servers. I can tell when they're at it,
because my Photoshop Express session abruptly hangs between
operations for a few seconds.
Second, today's network apps run inside another application—
your Web browser. That makes them slower, and it limits the
possibilities for the apps' user interface. The desktop version of
Photoshop has a wonderful feature called the Magnetic Lasso
that automatically finds the outline of a face as I drag the mouse
roughly near its edges. I can wave my mouse sloppily around a
human form, and the Magnetic Lasso will meticulously outline
the human silhouette in my picture. That lets me punch up the
color of a tourist in a photo or tone down ugly objects in the
background. Photoshop Express will only let me adjust the entire
photo at once.
Google Docs is similarly crippled. Its slide-show editor has the
same functionality of an early-1990s version of Microsoft
PowerPoint and has just as many bugs in the way it formats text.
I recently prepared a presentation for sharing online and spent
more time fixing screwy indentation and mismatched font sizes
than I did writing the words. Honestly, I don't know whether
these are limitations on a browser interface or just plain bugs in
Google's code. But that's a general problem with Web-based
apps: There's a lower bar for perfection, probably because we're
still in the "Yay! It works in your browser!" phase. Call me
crazy, but I'll keep using PowerPoint until the browser-based
solution is better than the one we've already got.
The people who build browsers need to do a better job, too, if
they expect me to do all my work inside one. Don't even get me
started on the daily hell wherein I hit a Web site that locks up
Firefox, killing all of my browser windows. If my desktop email crashes, it doesn't shut down my photo editor. But when
one browser-based app goes, they all go. Several times a week, I
hit Technorati to do a search and end up with Google Docs,
Photoshop Express, and the rest of Web 2.0 stuck frozen on my
screen. Even Microsoft Word doesn't crash that often anymore.
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In theory, Web-based apps—also known as "software as a
service" or, less precisely, "cloud computing"—are the future of
computers. That ignores the huge progress in personal computers
that sit on your desktop, in your lap, or in your pocket. Multicore processors, touch screens, motion sensors—all major
computing advances, none of which are happening in the cloud.
Consider the iPhone, a huge hit because of the things it does
right there in your hand. It's a sharp-eyed camera with a killer
photo-album tool you flip through with your fingertips, and it's a
big music and video library you can play anywhere. You can't
run applications like that over a network, and you won't be able
to for a long time.
I think there's a market for free, Web-based apps that offer basic
features. Knock yourselves out, dilettantes. For me, it'll be years
before Photoshop Express can become powerful enough to
replace my desktop version, or before Google Docs gets me to
uninstall Microsoft Office. I'm not sure I want to. One of the
nice things about Word and Photoshop is that once I fire them up
and start working, I can forget all about the Internet for a few
hours. Sometimes, my PC and I just want to be alone.
television
Ben Silverman's Critique of Slate
And other illuminating moments at the NBC Infront.
By Troy Patterson
The hype for the fall TV season began early this year with the
"NBC Infront: Primetime 08/09 Upfront Presentation." There
were many sound reasons for NBC to jump the traditional
upfront week—the mid-May period when broadcasters seduce
$9 billion out of advertisers—and they include the paralysis of
the writers' strike, the emergence of a full-year programming
schedule, the chance of more extensive product placements, and
NBC's fourth-place ratings. Ben Silverman, co-chairman of
NBC's entertainment division, called it "a perfect storm," which
is his favorite cliché. The fact of NBC's owning both the
broadcast rights to the Beijing Olympics and the next Super
Bowl? "A perfect storm." Tina Fey's minting as a superstar?
"Perfect storm." These days, the operative question in Burbank
and at 30 Rock is, What would a nor'easter do?
To be sure, NBC's scaled-back presentation is disappointing on
many levels. There are no clips to view, no actors or producers
to chat with, no open bars to assault. But I've got liquor at home.
Further, attending an upfront involves endless jostling with
hundreds upon hundreds of rudely self-satisfied ad buyers, and
the only jerk to deal with on yesterday's conference call was
Silverman, a guy who recently labeled his peers at other
networks graceless morons in the presence of Esquire's Matthew
Belloni. Silverman seems to have instigated a glorious new era
in executive-level trash talk, with a Fox programmer today
telling Variety, apropos of NBC's plans for the fall, "They're
making grandiose statements. … Everything they're saying now,
they could say in May. The difference is, they're doing it with
shows that don't exist."
Those nonexistent shows represent the most uniformly escapist
lineup of debuts in television history. The dramas include Knight
Rider (as in KITT), Merlin (as in Camelot), Crusoe (as in Defoe
and scheduled to air on Friday), The Listener (about a mindreading paramedic, Bringing Out the Dead meets Medium), and
My Own Worst Enemy (with Christian Slater as a soccer
dad/superspy killing machine). Silverman described the hero of
The Philanthropist as a cross between James Bond and Robin
Hood, but I prefer to think of him as a hybrid of Bruce Wayne
and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Then there's Kings, a
modern-day retelling of David and Goliath starring Ian
McShane. It represents, according to Bill Carter, "a joint
promotion with the Liberty Mutual insurance company. … The
themes of the show are meant to be consistent with Liberty
Mutual's 'Responsibility Project.' " You may recognize the
Responsibility Project from those commercials—
"Responsibility. What's your policy?"—depicting altruists
engaged in such acts as helping short people reach things on
high shelves and not running over dogs.
On the reality-show tip, NBC will introduce Chopping Block, a
restaurant show from the only chef in England with a temper
worse than Gordon Ramsay's—Marco Pierre White, of Quo
Vadis, L'Escargot, and, once upon a time, Mario Batali's night
terrors. But the man of the moment in the reality realm is Thom
Beers, creator of such manful occupational odysseys as the
History Channel's Ice Road Truckers and Discovery's Deadliest
Catch. He'll be expanding the subgenre with Shark Taggers and
America's Toughest Jobs. On the latter show, regular Joes will
serially toil as loggers, wildcat oil drillers, and assistants to
network executives.
The new comedies include an Office spinoff, a pre-Election Day
primetime run of a Saturday Night Live spinoff, and Molly
Shannon's Kath and Kim. Regarding the last—an adaptation of a
mother-daughter laugh-fest from Australia—Silverman
mentioned having put Selma Blair through "a Darryl Zanucktype screen test," which struck me as odd. Though Zanuck, like
many a mogul, viewed film of novice actors before offering
them contracts, his most famous contribution to the casting
process involved meeting would-be starlets on his couch 'round
about 4 p.m. When I asked Silverman whether he meant that line
as a joke about hooking up with his employees, he said, "Ah,
Slate, Slate. … You deliver the highbrow every single time. I'll
pass on your question." You brought it up, dude.
In all likelihood, Silverman meant nothing at all and was just
bullshitting. The Wall Street Journal's Rebecca Dana today
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quotes him likening himself to P.T. Barnum, who of course
thought he knew how often suckers were born.
television
Dance Marathon
The dazzling moves of Step It Up and Dance, America's Best Dance Crew, and
Your Mama Don't Dance.
By Troy Patterson
And five, six, seven, eight: Dance shows continue to twirl across
the airwaves at all angles—an unprecedented outbreak of
dipping and twisting, popping and locking, preening and
pandering. Call it Terpsichore Vision and marvel at its
adaptability. It's easy to imagine WE—nominally a women's
network, essentially a bridal channel—whipping up Save the
First Dance, in which affianced couples learn how to sway to
"Unchained Melody" and "What a Wonderful World" while
vying to win a honeymoon vacation. NBC, headquartered at
Rockefeller Center, could confect Kick It: The Great Rockette
Challenge. The Weinstein Company hasn't done much with the
tiny arts channel Ovation since investing in it two years ago; if
Harvey really wanted to build some buzz, he could hire Toni
Bentley—an alumna of the New York City Ballet and the author
of a literary memoir about butt sex—to combine those two
passions by hosting a late-night reality competition titled
Attitude Derrière.
While keeping your fingers crossed that such a day will come,
you can tide yourself over with the likes of America's Best
Dance Crew (MTV), produced by American Idol's Randy
Jackson, hosted by former teen heartthrob Mario Lopez, and
possessed of an unexpected sweetness. Here, the house style
seems to derive from the martial stepping of black fraternities,
the hectic posturing of music videos, and, when the lewdest
competitors take the stage, humping a mailbox. The crews duel
in a way that calls to mind the Sharks and the Jets. Last Friday's
live finale found the team Status Quo (six inspiring kids from a
rough neighborhood in Boston) matching off against
JabbaWockeeZ (six kids from the West who managed to be
inspiring despite performing in face masks fit for a slasher-film
psycho). The JabbaWockeeZ triumphed. O frabjous day! Tears
fell, and confetti, and the vanquished crews bounced back to the
stage, extending their congratulations by forming a conga line,
because the muse of Terpsichore Vision never guides anyone
away from tackiness.
Elsewhere, in a realm where hip-hop, Scream masks, and basic
coordination are much less a presence, there is Your Mama
Don't Dance (Lifetime, Fridays at 9 p.m. ET), hosted by former
teen heartthrob Ian Ziering and produced by someone who
knows the press-release value of alliteration: "Now, five female
dancers will be fox-trotting with their fathers while five male
dancers will be doing the mambo with their mothers as they vie
for praise from the judges and for America's votes." While the
Oedipus and Electra complexes do not come up for discussion,
the show nonetheless exists as a family-therapy session in 4/4
time, crafting behind-the-scenes narratives about support and
acceptance and personal growth. The dad who was always at the
office bonds with the daughter who was always at the barre, and
so on. The judges, affectingly, take the greatest care to be gentle
in their criticisms. The contestants, steadfastly, remain adorable
even when looking like fools. The girls in the makeup
department need to lay off the eye shadow.
So it is that Step It Up and Dance (Bravo, premieres Thursday
at 11 p.m. ET) enters a crowded field. None of the dance shows
have any real sense of irony, and this will be the case until
someone invents one focusing on the New Burlesque (to be
hosted by downtown superstar Murray Hill, the grapefruitshaped drag king in the polyester tux). But Step It Up and Dance
attempts to distinguish itself by trafficking in irony's closest
cousin, camp. The mistress of ceremonies is Elizabeth Berkley,
who probably earned the job on the strength of her association
with Showgirls, the third-worst film of the '90s (behind As Good
As It Gets and Sliver). She's not so much a hostess as a hood
ornament.
One contestant, Miguel, introduces himself by touting his
tenacity: "It's like telling da Vinci, 'I'm sorry. You're not a good
painter, you got to go.' " Another, Nick, talks about enrolling in
dance class after first viewing Footloose: "At that age, I realized
it was a good place to meet ladies." That age was 4. The season's
likeliest breakout star is Jessica, an amateur cowed by the fact of
competing with folks who list stints in Broadway musicals, on
big-time pop tours, and atop go-go club pedestals on their CVs.
She weeps when feeling proud of herself and flees to the wings
when confused about her choreography, and what she lacks in
self-confidence, she compensates for by not wearing very much
clothing. That is, she wears about twice as much as do the pros
on Dancing With the Stars (ABC), the program that's done so
much to reshape the idea of the female back as an erogenous
zone suitable for the family hour.
To invert the Chorus Line lyric, Step It Up and Dance has a
"looks 10, dance 3" air. The girls are pretty, and the boys are
lithe. Watching the pilot, I found myself irked by the repeated
play of the second-rate Spice Girls song to which the
competitors were mastering steps, but I stayed glued, certain that
everyone would start hooking up any second, such did they
stretch and priss and thrust. It felt rather like staying too long at
a cast party: The noisy and grating emotionalism of the actors
intensifies as the hours pass, as does your belief that an orgy will
break out. Self-aware, the show tosses out just enough tidbits
about gender performance and the construction of sexual identity
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to divert a queer theory seminar at Brown for 20 minutes or so.
For instance, a judge tells two female dancers to learn the
distinction between dancing "strongly" and "like a mean angry
man." Later, Miguel—the not-to-be-denied da Vinci—receives
instructions "to butch it up a little bit more." "Did I look like a
fag?" he asks in reply. Miguel's eyes indicate how receptive he is
to constructive criticism. He is hungering to glide across the
ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, an Astaire in gold lamé.
he learned from Stan Laurel: "Always do this. Tell the audience
what you're going to do. Do it. And then tell them it has been
done." Then, in his own voice, O'Brien pleaded, "If anybody
knows what the hell he's talking about, please tell me, because
it's been ringing in my head for years." Leno responded, "We
should call Jerry and ask him." Well, this points to the essential
friction of the evening: O'Brien getting a touch mock-hysterical
in puzzlement at a comedic koan, Leno being stiff and clubby
and patriarchal, none of us feeling terribly elegant.
television
Conan Appears on Leno
It was awkward.
By Troy Patterson
Thursday night on NBC, Late Night With Conan O'Brien was
offering a rerun, and The Tonight Show With Jay Leno was
offering Conan O'Brien. The self-deprecating absurdist has
visited the folksy wisecracker many times before, but this
appearance promised and delivered an especially odd vibe. It
was a blip of inside-showbiz awkwardness.
In 2004—with the end of O'Brien's contract approaching and
ABC batting its eyelashes at him—NBC announced that O'Brien
would ascend to Leno's swivel chair in 2009. But, for more than
a year, there have been reports that the lame duck has quacked
that he doesn't want to give up his gig. Last month, Bill Carter—
author of The Late Shift, the classic account of Leno's getting
this job in first place—reported that ABC and Fox were playing
footsie with Leno. The piece quotes an anonymous suitor hoping
that Leno will be motivated to seek "revenge" on the network
that's laying him off after his many years of service at the
observational-comedy mill. Thus, the quarter-hour Jay and
Conan shared together had the potential to offer a special lesson
in funnyman psychodynamics—or at least a good workout for
armchair analysts at 30 Rock and paranoids in Peoria.
There was a slight chill in the studio air. The greeting was rote.
Motions were gone through. I don't doubt that the two hosts
share a personal relationship that's anything less than cordial.
But before these clips get disappeared from YouTube, take a
look and see if you think that the cordiality seems forced. Scan
for signs of Leno—who, in O'Brien's presence, never mentions
that the anointed heir has indeed been anointed—being passiveaggressive. "So, you've been hosting the show," he queries.
"What other stuff have you been doing?"
Conan at one point told an anecdote about Jerry Lewis. Doing a
gaily awful imitation—a voice more Edith Bunker than nutty
professor—he passed along an inscrutable axiom that Lewis said
the chat room
Words of Warcraft
Fred Kaplan takes readers' questions about fixing Bush's military, U.S. national
security, and foriegn policy.
Slate contributor Fred Kaplan was online at
Washingtonpost.com to chat about how the next president could
fix the military and repair U.S. foreign policy after President
Bush leaves office. An unedited transcript of the chat follows.
Fred Kaplan: Fred Kaplan here. Glad to be back. Let's go to
your questions.
_______________________
Paris: Reading the article, one gets the impression that the only
thing to be fixed in the foreign policy realm is the approach to
the broader Middle East. What about multilateralism?
Relationships with China and Russia? Getting the Transatlantic
alliance back on track? Attention to Latin America? Stopping
nuclear proliferation (e.g. India)?
Fred Kaplan: Good question. (At least one other reader
submitted a very similar one.) Three comments. First, I think the
criticism is overstated. The first part of the piece, discussing
general trends in international relations, and the last part, about
the need for "public diplomacy," apply to our foreign policy
broadly. But you're right. I did focus perhaps inordinately on the
Middle East. To that, I would say, second, I had only 1,200
words; there's only so much one can do. And third, realistically,
the next president—whoever he or she is—is not going to be
able to get a whole lot done unless some sort of solution, or
coherent approach, is worked out on Iraq. That depends, in part,
on a sensible policy toward Iran, Syria, and the IsraeliPalestinian conflict.
_______________________
South Range, Wis.: Is it possible to fix U.S. soft power without
fixing the corporate control that has come to dominate every
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aspect of American culture, in particular the media? Can the
world still differentiate between American values and corporate
policy?
Fred Kaplan: Yes, I think it is possible. The United States
Information Agency was just such an instrument all through the
Cold War, when arguably corporate control of American society
and politics was far more pervasive than it is now.
hope—increasingly cautious hope, but hope nonetheless (not
dismay)—when trends seem, even slightly, to be going our way.
I would question, by the way, your premise that Iraq is "on its
way to becoming a stable democracy." What papers do you
read? I should also add that some writers at Slate—for instance,
my colleague and old friend Christopher Hitchens—are
unequivocal in their support for the war.
_______________________
_______________________
Jacksonville, Fla.: Four part question here: How much of the
military spending problems (unnecessary extravagant carriers,
fighter jets, etc.) are because of the fact that they support the
military-industrial complex of highly connected contractors?
Can this problem be corrected without harming a now huge part
of the American economy? Would any president be willing to
take on this risk? How could they manage this collateral
damage?
Fred Kaplan: Good question. I think the Military-Industrial
Complex is sometimes an overrated factor, but it's often an
underrated factor as well. (You would be hard-pressed to find
references to it, or to a euphemism for the same phenomenon, in
mainstream newspaper articles.) It's worth recalling that it was a
great general, Dwight Eisenhower, who first uttered the phrase
and warned of its dangers. But it's not just industry. It's also
congressional districts (for a half-century now, the services have
sagely distributed contracts and subcontracts for controversial
weapons systems to as many districts as possible, the better to
build up legislative support). It's also the stranglehold that
certain subcultures within the services have over the weaponsprocurement process. For instance, the #1 priority of the Air
Force these days is the F22 fighter jet—perhaps the only
airplane that has not been used in any of the wars we've fought
lately. Why? Because the Air Force procurement machinery is
still dominated by fighter pilots. Ditto for the Navy and aircraft
carriers (and submarines), the Army and tanks. A rethinking of
the role of military power in the post-Cold War world might
overhaul these priorities. But as long as the politics of the
services remain the same, little is going to happen.
_______________________
Plano, Texas: Do the liberals at Slate get angry when good
news comes out of Iraq? Are all of you mad now that it looks
like Iraq is on it's way to becoming a stable democracy?
Fred Kaplan: Let me ask you a question: Do you really believe
the premise of your question? Do you really think we jump for
joy with each report of a suicide bomb going off? Do you really
believe that we want to see the Middle East remain in the hands
of authoritarians or Islamic fundamentalists? If you've read my
columns over time, you may have noted that I have expressed
Stop-truth-decay : I can justify high tech weapons in one word:
China.
Fred Kaplan: Well, that IS the rationale. If someone had fallen
asleep in say 1985, woken up today and looked at the defense
budget, he (or she) would infer that the Cold War must still be
going on. Look at the budget. About $600 billion—NOT
including the money spent on Iraq, Afghanistan, and "the longer
war on terror." What is that $600 billion going for? Well, a lot of
it is for people. But much of the rest is for aircraft carriers,
submarines, fighter jets—remnants of the Cold War. What threat
today is best answered by lots of such weapons? There is no
such threat. Ah, but 20 years down the road, many say, China
MIGHT emerge as a great military power, and these weapons
will be necessary to deter or fight China. Two replies: First,
China's military power is strengthening, but it still doesn't
amount to much. (Do me a favor and click on a Slate column I
wrote a while back, detailing the contents of a Pentagon report
on the military power of the People's Republic of China. An
interesting document: The first half tries to raise your hair by
describing all the things China seems to be wanting to do. The
second half calmly notes how far away they are from succeeding
at any of these ventures.) Second, to the extent China wants to
dominate the world, I think they're on track BUYING the place.
We need to devote more attention to trade policy if we want to
stave off China.
_______________________
Clifton, Va.: Bubba, has there been a terrorist attack in the U.S.
since Sept. 11? No. Do I care what the rest of the world thinks
about our military and foreign policy? No! What is most
important is this country's national security and protecting U.S.
citizens. I dont care what the rest of the world thinks. If
anything, we need to spend more money on covert ops and
chasing tangoes! If we are unlucky and Obama or Clinton wins
in November 2008, then be prepared for ten of thousands of
deaths from terrorist attacks here in the U.S. Dick Cheney is
right! So!
Fred Kaplan: Hmm. The dollar's going down, our deficit and
debt are spiraling out of control, we have a hard time
maintaining 150,000 troops in Iraq and another 30,000 or so in
Afghanistan. And you don't care what the rest of the world
thinks of us. How are we going to lure allies to join our causes
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and contribute to our defense—yes, our defense (and our
national-security interests abroad)? This is not a gooey liberal
question. It's a very hard-headed one. We do not have the
money, the manpower, or the stomach to do the things you
would like us to do all by ourselves. Meanwhile, because the
Soviet Union—the common enemy that held the Western
alliance together—no longer exists, our erstwhile allies have
realized they can go their own way, pursue their own interests,
without much regard for what Washington thinks. We have no
choice but to pursue allies—not at the expense or sacrifice of our
vital interests or bedrock principles, but with active diplomacy,
which sometimes mean tactical compromises.
_______________________
curiousgemini: What Carter and Kaplan forget is that a lot of
these expensive cold war era weapons put a lot of money in
defense contractors' pockets. These companies lobby hard and
have close connections to the Pentagon. Also, many members of
Congress have a political stake in the jobs these bloated
programs create in their districts. This is all part of the "MilitaryIndustrial-Congressional complex."
Fred Kaplan: Well, we don't exactly "forget" these facts. We
spend a lot of time in our essay coming up with ways to deal
with them, to form semi-rational policies despite these obstacles.
Take another look. You're right, though: it's a very serious
problem, especially at a time when we need to overhaul the
military structure, if we're to retain our solvency and recover
much of our influence.
defense platforms, or the added costs and security risks involved
in having their production spread across the country instead of
concentrated in a few places. I recognize that both these
problems are to some extent imposed by Congress, but it's
unlikely that we will get a more effective, less expensive
military by ignoring them—meaning that at some point a
President will need to confront Congress. Do you agree?
washingtonpost.com: GAO Blasts Weapons Budget (Post,
April 1)
Fred Kaplan: This is a serious—and very old—problem. If the
president wanted to order the cancellation of, say, a big fighteraircraft program—or wanted to defer production of another $3.2
billion aircraft carrier—we would have to pay enormous delay or
cancellation costs. Weapons contracts, quite reasonably, are
loaded with these clauses. Then a defender of one of those
weapons programs would argue: If we cancel this program, we
will lose the skilled work force, we will lose the industrial base;
if we want to manufacture it sometime in the future, there may
not be the laborers—there may not be the corporation—to make
it. For this reason, a lot of officials and legislators who have a lot
of other things on their mind simply let it go; it's a fulltime job,
plus some, to tangle with these obstacles. But for this same
reason, somebody's going to have to do it, at some point, before
the excess costs and anachronistic allocations send us into the
poorhouse and wreck the army.
_______________________
_______________________
Bethesda, Md.: "Bubba, has there been a terrorist attack in the
U.S. since Sept. 11?" Hey, Clifton, I've got one word for you:
anthrax. So, yes, there has been.
Orion838: Good ideas, but unlike what the authors suggest,
Congress doesn't just sit around and passively go along with
Pentagon plans to buy Cold War relics like aircraft carriers,
nuclear subs, high tech fighter planes, etc. Congress mandates
that these purchases must be made, even when the Pentagon
would prefer to spend the money elsewhere. The reasons are job
for constituents and campaign contributions from defense
contractors. Given these congressional priorities, it's hard to see
how we can ever find the money the authors show is needed.
Fred Kaplan: I don't think it's at all clear that the anthrax scare
was a terrorist attack. We don't know where the stuff came from.
I seriously doubt it was some foreign terrorist group—or if it
was, the leaders must have given it up as an ineffectual
approach: it killed very few people, sired panic but not of the
sort that damaged our economy in the slightest; in any case, it
has not recurred. Not to be complacent, but still...
_______________________
Fred Kaplan: You're right—sort of. Many times, the Pentagon
or one of the services will put forth a budget that cuts, even
slashes, some of these much-cherished weapons systems—
KNOWING that Congress will restore the budget fully, if not
more. There's gamesmanship all round.
_______________________
kenl77: In regard to the Cold War era, the author says the
following: "The world was dominated by the United States and
the Soviet Union, and the countries in between often
subordinated their own interests to accommodate—in the West
by choice, in the East by force—the interests of their superpower
protector."
Sun Prairie, Wis.: Mr. Kaplan: I noticed that your brief piece in
Slate did not address the absurdly long time it takes to design,
test and arrange for production of weapons systems and other
It seems to me that American history since 1945 involved a
substantial amount of coercion, ranging from flat-out declaration
of war to CIA subversion of governments and elections,
80/124
assassination of foreign leaders, support of ruthless dictators and
economic destruction of third-world countries. To believe that
somehow the United States was the good guy in the Cold War is
another fable that Americans must shed before they ever can
understand why they so roundly are hated in much of the world.
other way. Recruitment targets are being met only by lowering
standards to perilous levels. Junior officers are getting out of the
service in droves. This is why a lot of general officers are eager
to find some way to cut our losses in Iraq—they fear that the
Army might wind up broken.
Fred Kaplan: I think you're misreading what I wrote, a bit. Or
maybe I should have elaborated more fully (though I have in
other columns and, even more, in my new book, Daydream
Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power—
hey, I have to get a plug in here somehow). I'm not saying that
we were "the good guy in the Cold War" (though our sins were
far less heinous than the Soviet Union's, I think it's reasonable to
say—we did not suppress our European allies in the same way
that Moscow suppressed, absolutely controlled, theirs, for
instance). My point was this: During the Cold War, many
Western (and in-between) nations subordinated their own
interests in order to accommodate ours. In some cases this was
not voluntarily; in other cases, as you point out, less so. Now,
with the Cold War over and the common enemy vanquished,
many of these countries are pursuing their own intersts again.
My point is that the Bush administration's initial premise—that
we are "the sole superpower' and therefore can do pretty much
anything we want, and we don't need allies to do it—is
completely wrong. In a very important way, we are less
powerful than we used to be, less able to get our way without
trying much; the whole concept of "superpower" is obsolete.
_______________________
_______________________
It consumes us, we are held hostage by it and the competitive
world demand for it. Everything else, the Palestine issue, proper
dialogue with key players, not just in that region, but within our
own hemisphere, let alone Africa. Something not lost on the
Chinese incidentally. Have you been to Port Harcourt, Nigeria,
recently? Would it surprise you to learn a lot of petroleum and
natural gas exports come from there to us?
Washington: Thanks for your columns—I have found them
quite interesting. Any word on how the Central Command
position will be filled? Is there any credence to the rumor that it
will be Petraeus, with Odierno going to replace him at MultiNational Force Iraq?
Fred Kaplan: Thanks. I've read the same rumors you have.
They seem plausible. But I have no inside dope on what's for
real—and it may well be that no more than a half-dozen people
do.
_______________________
U.S.: I'm very troubled by the extensive use of stop-loss orders
and involuntary recalls of people who thought they'd gotten out
of the military. While I realize military people signed on the
dotted line, the use of these provisions in this way seems to me
to be a clear violation of the spirit of the law. Are any plans
being made to avoid this situation in future conflicts?
Fred Kaplan: I agree with you, but I see no end to it as long as
the military doesn't have any other way to keep the level of
troops that the political leadership (i.e., the president) wants to
keep deployed—especially in Iraq. And currently, there is no
Rockville, Md.: Regarding terrorist attacks, what about the
Washington sniper, who roamed around the city for a month
killing people at random? The entire city was paralyzed with
fear. I guess if it's not al-Qaeda or people with brown skin, we
don't consider that a "terrorist attack."
Fred Kaplan: In fairness, the phrase "terrorist attack" usually
implies foreign involvement. (Didn't the sniper have brown
skin?)
_______________________
Tyrtaios-rising: Would it surprise anyone to know our
embassies and consulates, worldwide, are where they are to
represent our economic interests? What are those interests?
Certainly not catering to distraught American tourists, much to
many's chagrin. A posting by cbarrett on The Fray discussed an
interesting issue: oil and our foreign dependence on it.
Our foreign policy extends to the use of military force projection
in enforcing an outline called the Carter Doctrine. Look it up and
draw conclusions why we focus so much on the Middle East.
What are our future economic priorities going to be? That will
drive our foreign policy. In many cases, the use or misuse of our
military strength as a form of foreign policy as well. Which
future president has even hinted at addressing our dependence on
foreign oil? I'm aware it's more complicated then that. But it's a
start.
Fred Kaplan: As you say, it's "more complicated" than oil (and
other resources), but certainly that's a large part of it. Most wars
over the centuries have had something to do with resources.
You're certainly right in your main point—(a) that weaning our
dependence on foreign oil should be regarded as a vital nationalsecurity priority and (b) that no politicians are talking about this
very much.
_______________________
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wayhey1: Is it too much to expect the current president to do all
of these things that Kaplan suggests? Bush still has time left in
office to get the ball rolling. Of course, to regain other nations'
trust he actually would have to admit to making mistakes. As a
graduate of a 12-step-type recovery program, he should
understand this better than most—yet he hasn't shown any
inclination to apply life's important lessons to foreign policy, and
that is disappointing. Machismo and claiming infallibility is the
opposite of diplomacy, as well as the opposite of personal
healing.
In that same vein, Fred said one thing I just can't let go by
without making a comment: "The world was dominated by the
United States and the Soviet Union, and the countries in between
often subordinated their own interests to accommodate—in the
West by choice, in the East by force—the interests of their
superpower protector."
This is a myth that has gone on far too long. Western Europe
went along willingly with the United States—thanks in large part
to the Marshal Plan, in my opinion—but the same is not true of
many other U.S. allies during the Cold War. Coercion and CIAsponsored coups were used all over Latin America and the
Middle East as tools to build anti-Communist alliances. The
continued refusal to face this reality and own up to past
expediencies fuels her current enemies and weakens her
internally. Any president admitting to these facts would disarm
many of America's most vocal and most radical opponents, and
America would emerge again as the great model to which other
nations aspire.
Fred Kaplan: Good point. I would say two things, though. First,
Europe was the centerpiece of our Cold War policy. Second, as
for the other countries, many of their governments went along
with us by choice—though it's certainly the case that some of
those governments were installed or bought off. I may have used
the phrase "by choice" too cavalierly.
_______________________
Seattle, a military town: Given the massive outsourcing to
Blackwater and other nonmilitary "contractors" by the Bush
misadministration—usually at triple or quadruple pay—is it
likely we can fix our military, given how much of its hardware
has been chewed up in Iraq and the lack of noncontractor
resources? And do you think this was a plan by Red China that
Bush and McCain enabled with the help of John Yoo and other
plants?
_______________________
aix42: The U.S. must admit its use of torture and apologize. It
must stop use of black sites and Guantanamo and the ridiculous
notion of "unlawful enemy combatants." The people of the U.S.
also need to become fully aware of how the actions of the U.S.
against other nations of the world have hurt many people and
have caused great animosity toward this country.
Fred Kaplan: OK, but then what do we do after the selfflagellation. I don't mean to minimize the point. This IS a basic
prerequisite to boosting our image and restoring much of our
power—which, as I point out in the Slate column, amount to
much the same thing (if done properly).
_______________________
Nike: An even better idea! Instead of squandering the wealth of
the nation down one black hole after another in the Middle East,
why not spend that cash on education, building roads, health
care, reducing the deficit, etc.? Nah, forget it. How would
helping Americans serve the cause of the war pigs? God bless
America.
Fred Kaplan: Just curious: "black holes" aside, are you opposed
to any US activity overseas?
_______________________
Seattle: No politicians are talking about the foreign implications
of oil dependency? Last time I checked, both Obama and Clinton
were talking directly about it—and we here in the 17 states
dealing with global warming are doing something about it, with
people like me buying 100 percent green power from Seattle
City Light from wind, solar and hydro, for example, and all
made in America! Half of war is economics—so, is not the
major threat the Red Chinese taking global oil, coal and mineral
resources worldwide while we dither?
Fred Kaplan: I think you're right. Thomas Friedman had a
fascinating story in the NY Times Magazine several months ago
about U.S. firms manufacturing energy-saving devices—largescale devices—explicitly for export to the Chinese market. This
is another way to go.
_______________________
Fred Kaplan: That's all, folks. Thanks for the lively forum.
Fred Kaplan: I think we'll be seeing much less involvement by
contractors in the near future. Don't think that reduced
contracting will save us money. Somebody has to do the jobs
that the contractors have been doing. Where are we going to get
these people? As for the Red China plot: No.
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the green lantern
Will Diesel Save the World?
engines and thus require more energy and materials to
manufacture.
The environmental trade-offs of giving up gasoline.
By Brendan I. Koerner
I recently returned from an extended stay in Europe, where
most new cars run on diesel. Those cars are typically a lot
more fuel-efficient than our gas guzzlers, which makes me
wonder why there aren't more diesels on American roads. I
know that diesel has a reputation for causing dirtier tailpipe
emissions than petrol, but isn't that a bygone problem?
Technological wizardry has, indeed, made diesel-powered
vehicles vastly cleaner than in olden days. As a result, lots of
gearheads are touting diesels as finally safe enough for
American motorists, who will dig the cars' impressive fueleconomy numbers. There's considerable excitement on these
shores, for example, over the impending arrival of the 2009
Volkswagen Jetta TDi, a "clean diesel" vehicle that purportedly
gets 50 miles per gallon on the highway yet spews out far less
soot than the diesels of yore, which wreaked havoc on air
quality. So will the erstwhile environmental boogeyman of
diesel fuel end up saving us all? The Lantern is still far from
convinced.
Diesel, named after German engineer Rudolf Diesel, has
traditionally been simpler to refine than gasoline, although
making it also requires more crude oil per gallon. The end result
is a fuel that boasts much greater energy density than gasoline,
which explains why diesel cars get up to 40 percent more miles
per gallon than their petrol counterparts. The higher energy
density also means that burning a gallon of diesel emits more
greenhouse gases than burning a gallon of gasoline—about 15
percent more, to be specific. But due to the appreciable fueleconomy savings, diesel cars usually emit less of these gases per
mile driven.
There's a more disturbing difference between diesel and
gasoline: Burning diesel also emits nasty particulates and smogforming nitrogen oxides, as should be apparent to anyone who's
ever gotten a mouthful of bus or tractor exhaust.
The good news is that today's diesel contains significantly less
sulfur than in years past, resulting in much less harmful soot. On
top of that, new diesel cars are outfitted with ingenious
emissions-control systems such as BlueTec, which treats exhaust
with a urea-based solution to reduce its toxicity.
But these improvements have come with costs. According to the
Union of Concerned Scientists (PDF), manufacturing a gallon of
the new, low-sulfur diesel requires even more crude oil than the
old diesel. Also, diesel engines are more complicated than petrol
Still, a diesel car's improved fuel economy can offset these
drawbacks. The UCS recommends that car shoppers revise a
diesel vehicle's miles-per-gallon rating downward by 20 percent
in order to get a more accurate picture of the overall impact on
oil consumption.
Fans of the forthcoming Jetta TDi point out that the car's tailpipe
emissions are clean enough to pass muster in California, a state
with exceptionally tough emissions regulations. Yet the diesel
TDi still lags behind many other vehicles that meet California's
stringent requirements, including the gas-powered 2008 Jetta,
which qualifies as a partial zero-emissions vehicle.
The relative dirtiness of even the most advanced diesels worries
some researchers, who argue that the resulting soot (which they
term "black carbon") may be a key factor in global warming.
According to a 2002 Stanford University study, even if all
diesels were designed to meet California's emissions standards,
diesel cars could still warm the globe more than petrol cars over
the next half-century.
None of this is to imply that gasoline is necessarily more ecofriendly than diesel—the two fuels just have different pluses and
minuses. European regulators seem to care more about reducing
the continent's greenhouse-gas emissions than its particulate
emissions and so have favored policies that prop up diesel. As
you probably learned during your foreign sojourn, diesel is
cheaper than petrol in virtually all of Europe, largely due to its
being more lightly taxed (though maybe not for long). The
opposite is true here in the United States, where diesel tends to
cost significantly more than regular gasoline—in part because
our new, low-sulfur diesel is more expensive to manufacture, but
also because of a higher federal per-gallon tax.
The wild card here is the ongoing development of biodiesel,
which can drastically reduce a diesel vehicle's tailpipe emissions.
Perhaps more importantly, it can also be made from domestic
crops: In the United States, the chief source is soybeans, while
Europeans prefer canola.
To calculate the environmental benefit of biodiesel is a complex
task and one the Lantern hopes to accomplish in an upcoming
column. Simply put, though, not all biodiesels are created equal:
Some may require too much production energy and arable land
to justify the effort from an environmental standpoint.
We can hope that a number of well-done life-cycle analyses of
biodiesel are in the works, so we'll soon know whether
Malaysian palm is the future. In the meantime, though, the
Lantern looks forward to test-driving the 2009 Jetta TDi—not
only because it's supposedly a great ride but also to determine
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whether Volkswagen is telling the truth about those fuel
economy figures. After all, wasn't the Toyota Prius supposed to
get 60 miles per gallon in the city? The Lantern's alter ego could
barely get more than 50.
Is there an environmental quandary that's been keeping you up at
night? Send it to [email protected], and check this
space every Tuesday.
the has-been
Name That Loon
The latest on the Senate race in the state formerly known as Craig's. Plus:
Baseball Bloopers.
By Bruce Reed
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
B.Looper: Learned reader Kyle Sammin recalls
that Idaho's Marvin "Pro-Life" Richardson has
nothing on 1998 Tennessee State Senate candidate
Byron "Low-Tax" Looper. Besides changing his
name, Looper also murdered his opponent. Under
Tennessee law, the names of dead candidates are
removed from the ballot. So even though he was
quickly charged with homicide, Looper nearly ran
unopposed. The victim's widow won a last-minute
write-in campaign. Looper was sentenced to life in
prison.
Bloopers: The Pittsburgh Pirates are now the most
mediocre first-place team in baseball history. In
their season opener Monday night against Atlanta,
the Bucs provided plenty of evidence that this year
will turn out like the last 15. They blew a five-run
lead in the ninth by walking four batters and
booting an easy fly ball. Pirate players said they'd
never seen anything like it, not even in Little
League. For an inning, it looked like the team had
gone on strike to demand more money.
But to every Buc fan's surprise, the Pirates won,
anyway—12-11 in 12 innings—and with no game
Tuesday, Pittsburgh has been above .500 for two
glorious days. New General Manager Neal
Huntington e-mailed me on Monday to promise
that the team's new regime is determined to build
an organization that will make the people of
Pittsburgh proud again. That might take a while.
For now, we're content to make the people of
Atlanta feel really embarrassed. ... 1:35 P.M.
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Danger Is My Middle Name: Outgoing Senator
Larry Craig can take consolation in one thing: out
in Idaho, everyone wants his seat. Fourteen
candidates have filed to run for the Senate,
including eight Republicans, two Democrats, two
Independents, and a Libertarian. Hal Styles Jr. of
Desert Hot Springs, California, entered the
Republican primary, even though he has never
been to Idaho. "I know I'll love it because, clean
air, clean water and many, many, many
mountains," he says. "My heart, my mind, my
body, my soul, my thoughts are in this to win."
The general election will likely be a rematch between former
Democratic congressman Larry LaRocco and Republican Lt.
Gov. (and former governor) Jim Risch. If Idahoans find those
two insufficiently embarrassing, however, a number of fringe
candidates have lined up to take Craig's place. According to CQ,
one Independent, Rex Rammel, is a former elk rancher who is
angry that Risch ordered state wildlife officials to shoot some of
his elk that got away. The Libertarian, Kent A. Marmon, is
running against "the ever-expanding Socialist agenda" he claims
is being pushed by Democratic congressmen like John Dingell.
But by far the most creative third-party candidate is Marvin
Richardson, an organic strawberry farmer who went to court to
change his name to "Pro-Life." Two years ago, he made that his
middle name and tried to run for governor as Marvin "Pro-Life"
Richardson. State election officials ruled that middle names
couldn't be used to make a political statement on the ballot. As
plain old Marvin Richardson, he won just 1.6% of the vote.
Now that "Pro-Life" is his full name, the state had to let him run
that way on the ballot. He told the Idaho Press-Tribune that with
the name change, he should win 5%. He plans to run for office
every two years for as long as he lives: "If I save one baby's life,
it will be worth it."
As the Press-Tribune points out, Pro-Life is not a single-issue
candidate, but has a comprehensive platform. In addition to
abortion, he opposes "homosexuality, adultery, and fornication."
He wants the pro-life movement to refer to abortion as "murder,"
although he has not yet insisted pro-choice candidates change
their name to that.
Idaho Republicans and anti-abortion activists don't share ProLife's enthusiasm. They worry that conservative voters will
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check the box next to both Pro-Life and the Republican
candidate, thereby spoiling their ballots. So last week, the Idaho
Secretary of State persuaded both houses of the legislature to
pass emergency legislation to clarify that "voters are casting a
vote for a person and not a political proposition." Under the
legislation, candidates who appear to have changed their names
to "convey a political message" will be outed on the ballot as "a
person, formerly known as …." The Prince Bill will go to the
governor for signature this week.
According to the Associated Press, Pro-Life accuses legislators
of "trying to legislate intelligence"—a charge not often hurled at
the Idaho legislature. "The people that vote for me are more
intelligent than to have something defined in legislation like
this," he says.
Of course, Idahoans who really want to make a political
statement will still be able to outsmart the Prince Bill. Nothing
in the legislation prohibits Idaho parents who feel strongly about
issues from naming their children Pro-Life or Pro-Gun at birth.
For that matter, Marvin Richardson has changed his name so
many times that if he changes it again, the ballot might have to
describe him as "a person formerly known as 'Pro-Life.'" Or he
could just change his name to Mitt Romney.
On the other hand, Republicans and Democrats alike can breathe
a sign of relief over another unintended effect: the new law foils
Larry Craig's best strategy for a comeback. Before the law, Craig
could have changed his name to "Not Gay" and won in a
landslide. "A person formerly known as Not Gay" is more like it.
... 5:27 P.M. (link)
Friday, Mar. 28, 2008
We Are Family: Midway through the run-up to the
next primary, the presidential campaigns are
searching for fresh ways to reach the voters of
Pennsylvania. My grandparents left Pittsburgh
more than 80 years ago, so my Pennsylvania roots
are distant. But I still think I can speak for at least
half the state in suggesting one bold proposal we
long for every April: a plan to rescue one of the
most mediocre teams in baseball history, the
Pittsburgh Pirates.
Granted, the nation faces more urgent crises. But
in hard times, people often look to sports for
solace. To blue-collar workers in taverns across
western Pennsylvania, watching the Pirates lose
night after night is as predictably grim as the Bush
economy. The lowly Bucs are the reigning
disappointment in the world of sport—with a
batting average that seems pegged to the dollar
and prospects of victory in line with the war in
Iraq.
The Pittsburgh franchise hasn't finished above .500
since 1992. If, as universally predicted, the Pirates
turn in their 16th consecutive losing season this
year, they will tie the all-time frustration record for
professional sport set by the Philadelphia Phillies in
the 1930s and '40s.
Pittsburgh is still a proud, vibrant city, which has
rebounded handsomely from losses far more
consequential than the Pirates'. The once-proud
Pirates, by contrast, show plenty of rust but no
signs of recovery. In 1992, the team was an inning
away from the World Series, when the Atlanta
Braves scored three runs in the bottom of the ninth
to steal Game 7 of the National League
Championship Series. The Braves soon moved to
the NL East en route to winning 14 consecutive
division titles, the longest in sports history. The
Pirates moved from the East to the Central and
began their soon-to-be-record-setting plunge in
the opposite direction.
On Monday, the Pirates return to Atlanta for
Opening Day against the Braves. Baseball analysts
no longer give a reason in predicting another lastplace Bucco finish. This year, the Washington Post
didn't even bother to come up with a new joke.
Last season's Post preview said:
Blech. This Pirates team is so
mediocre, so uninteresting, so
destined for last place, we don't
know if we can squeeze another
sentence out of it for this capsule
we're being paid to write. But
here's one. … The Pirates haven't
had a winning season since
1992, and that streak will
continue this year. That's still not
long enough? Well, here's
another line! Hey—two sentences
in one line! Make that three! And
here's another! See how easy
that is?
This year, the same Post analyst wrote:
Okay, folks, here's the deal: We
need to fill precisely 4.22
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column-inches of type with
information about the faceless,
tasteless Pirates, and as usual
we're not sure we can do it. But
guess what? We're already at .95
inches, and we're just getting
started! Wait—make that 1.19
inches. ... Should they finish
below .500 again (and let's be
honest, how can they not?), they
will tie the Phillies of 1933-48 for
the most consecutive losing
seasons. (By the way, that's 3.53
inches, and we haven't even had
to mention new manager John
Russell, Capps's promise as a
closer or the vast potential of the
Snell-Gorzelanny duo.) There:
4.22 inches. Piece of cake."
So now the Pirates even hold the record for
consecutive seasons as victims of the same bad
joke.
Pittsburgh faces all the challenges of a smallmarket team. Moreover, as David Maraniss pointed
out in his lyrical biography, Clemente, the first love
for Pittsburgh fans has long been football, not
baseball. These days, no one can blame them.
Seven years ago, in a desperate bid to revive the
Pirates' fortunes, the city built PNC Park, a
gorgeous field with the most spectacular view in
baseball. From behind home plate, you can look
out on the entire expanse of American economic
history—from the Allegheny River to 1920s-era
steel suspension bridges to gleaming glass
skyscrapers.
The result? As Pittsburgh writer Don Spagnolo
noted last year in "79 Reasons Why It's Hard To Be
a Pirates Fan," Pittsburgh now has "the best
stadium in the country, soiled by the worst team."
(The Onion once suggested, "PNC Park Threatens
To Leave Pittsburgh Unless Better Team Is Built.")
Spagnolo notes that the city already set some kind
of record by hosting baseball's All-Star game in
1994 and 2006 without a single winning season in
between.
Although the Pirates' best player, Jason Bay, is
from Canada, if Pittsburgh fans have suffered
because of trade, the blame belongs not to NAFTA
but to an inept front office. Jason Schmidt, now
one of the top 100 strikeout aces in history, was
traded to the Giants. Another, Tim Wakefield, left
for the Red Sox. Franchise player Aramis Ramirez
was dealt to the Cubs. When owners sell off
members of a winning team, it's called a fire sale.
The Pirates have been more like a yard sale. In
2003, when the Cubs nearly made the Series, the
Pirates supplied one-third of their starting lineup.
In the early '80s, an angry fan famously threw a
battery at Pirate outfielder Dave Parker. Last June,
fans registered their frustration in a more
constructive way. To protest more than a decade of
ownership mismanagement, they launched a Web
site, IrateFans.com, and organized a "Fans for
Change" walkout after the third inning of a home
game. Unfortunately, only a few hundred fans who
left their seats actually left the game; most just
got up to get beer.
This year, fans are still for change but highly
skeptical. In an online interview, the new team
president admitted, "The Pirates are not in a
rebuilding mode. We're in a building mode." One
fan asked bitterly, "How many home runs will the
'change in atmosphere' hit this season?"
I've been a Pirate fan for four decades—the first
glorious, the second dreary, the last two a long
march from despair to downright humiliation. In
more promising times, my wife proposed to me at
Three Rivers Stadium, where we returned for our
honeymoon. On the bright side, the 2001 implosion
of Three Rivers enabled me to find two red plastic
stadium seats as an anniversary present on eBay.
Our children live for baseball but laugh at our
Pirate caps—and, at ages 12 and 14, haven't been
alive to see a winning Pirate season. Yet like so
many in western Pennsylvania, I've been a Pirate
fan too long to be retrained to root for somebody
else.
After 15 years, we Bucs fans aren't asking for
miracles. We just want what came so easily to the
pre-2004 Red Sox, the post-1908 Cubs, and the
other great losing teams of all time: sympathy.
Those other teams are no longer reliable: The Red
Sox have become a dynasty; 2008 really could be
the Cubs' year. If you want a lovable loser that will
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never let you down, the Pittsburgh Pirates could be
your team, too. ... 12:06 P.M. (link)
columns of the New York Times. Of course, since
he refuses to resign, you won't see it in the Idaho
Statesman, either.
Thursday, Mar. 13, 2008
Craigenfreude: In a new high for the partisan
divide, a mini-debate has broken out in far-flung
corners of the blogosphere on the urgent question:
Who's the bigger hypocrite, Larry Craig or Eliot
Spitzer?
Conservative blogger Michael Medved of Townhall
offers a long list of reasons why Craig doesn't need
to go as urgently as Spitzer did. He finds Craig less
hypocritical ("trolling for sex in a men's room,
doesn't logically require that you support gay
marriage"), much easier to pity, and "pathetic and
vulnerable" in a way Spitzer is not. Liberal blogger
Anonymous Is a Woman counters that while Craig
and Louisiana Sen. David Vitter remain in office, at
least Spitzer resigned.
Warning, much political baggage may look alike.
So, party labels aside, who's the bigger hypocrite?
Certainly, a politician caught red-handed
committing the very crimes he used to prosecute
can make a strong case for himself. In his
resignation speech, Spitzer admitted as much:
"Over the course of my public life, I have insisted, I
believe correctly, that people, regardless of their
position or power, take responsibility for their
conduct. I can and will ask no less of myself."
Moreover, for all the conservative complaints about
media bias, the circumstances of Spitzer's fall from
grace ensure that tales of his hypocrisy will
reverberate louder and longer than Craig's. Already
a media star in the media capital of the world, he
managed to destroy his career with a flair even a
tabloid editor couldn't have imagined. Every detail
of his case is more titillating than Craig's—call girls
with MySpace pages and stories to tell, not a lone
cop who won't talk to the press; hotel suites
instead of bathroom stalls; bank rolls instead of
toilet rolls; wide angles instead of wide stances; a
club for emperors, not Red Carpet.
Spitzer flew much closer to the sun than Craig, so
his sudden plunge is the far greater political
tragedy. No matter how far his dive, Craig couldn't
make that kind of splash. You'll never see the
headline "Craig Resigns" splashed across six
Yet out of stubborn home-state chauvinism, if
nothing else, we Idahoans still marvel at the level
of hypocrisy our boy has achieved, even without all
the wealth, fame, and privilege that a rich New
Yorker was handed on a silver platter. Many
Easterners think it's easy for an Idahoan to be
embarrassing—that just being from Boise means
you're halfway there.
We disagree. Craig didn't grow up in the center of
attention, surrounded by money, glamour, and all
the accouterments of hypocrisy. He grew up in the
middle of nowhere, surrounded by mountains.
When he got arrested, he didn't have paid help to
bring him down. No Mann Act for our guy: He
carried his own bags and did his own travel.
Larry Craig is a self-made hypocrite. He achieved
his humiliation the old-fashioned way: He earned
it.
Unlike Spitzer, who folded his cards without a fight,
Craig upped the ante by privately admitting guilt,
then publicly denying it. His lawyers filed yet
another appellate brief this week, insisting that the
prosecution is wrong to accuse him of making a
"prehensile stare."
While it's admittedly a low standard, Craig may
have had his least-awful week since his scandal
broke in August. A Minnesota jury acquitted a man
who was arrested by the same airport sting
operation. Craig didn't finish last in the Senate
power rankings by Congress.org. Thanks to
Spitzer, Craig can now tell folks back home that
whatever they think of what he did, at least they
don't have to be embarrassed by how much he
spent. In fact, he is probably feeling some
Craigenfreude—taking pleasure in someone else's
troubles because those troubles leave people a
little less time to take pleasure in your own.
Like misery, hypocrisy loves company—which, for
both Spitzer and Craig, turned out to be the
problem. But Spitzer was right to step down, and
Craig should long ago have done the same. Politics
is a tragic place to chase your demons. ... 5:30
P.M. (link)
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Wednesday, Mar. 5, 2008
All the Way: As death-defying Clinton comebacks
go, the primaries in Ohio and Texas were very
nearly not heart-stopping enough. On Monday,
public polls started predicting a Clinton rebound,
threatening to spoil the key to any wild ride:
surprise. Luckily, the early exit polls on Tuesday
evening showed Obama with narrow leads in both
do-or-die states, giving those of us in Clinton World
who live for such moments a few more hours to
stare into the abyss.
Now that the race is once again up for grabs, much
of the political establishment is dreading the
seven-week slog to the next big primary in
Pennsylvania. Many journalists had wanted to go
home and put off seeing Scranton until The Office
returns on April 10. Some Democrats in
Washington were in a rush to find out the winner
so they could decide who they've been for all
along.
As a Clintonite, I'm delighted that the show will go
on. But even if I were on the sidelines, my reaction
would have been the same. No matter which team
you're rooting for, you've got to admit: We will
never see another contest like this one, and the
political junkie in all of us hopes it will never end.
It looks like we could get our wish—so we might as
well rejoice and be glad in it. A long, exciting race
for the nomination will be good for the Democratic
Party, good for the eventual nominee, and the ride
of a lifetime for every true political fan.
For the party, the benefits are obvious: By making
this contest go the distance, the voters have done
what party leaders wanted to do all along. This
cycle, the Democratic National Committee was
desperate to avoid the front-loaded calendar that
backfired last time. As David Greenberg points out,
the 2004 race was over by the first week of
March—and promptly handed Republicans a full
eight months to destroy our nominee. This time,
the DNC begged states to back-load the calendar,
even offering bonus delegates for moving primaries
to late spring. Two dozen states flocked to Super
Tuesday anyway.
Happily, voters took matters into their own hands
and gave the spring states more clout than party
leaders ever could have hoped for. Last fall, NPR
ran a whimsical story about the plight of South
Dakota voters, whose June 3 contest is the last
primary (along with Montana) on the calendar.
Now restaurateurs, innkeepers, and vendors from
Pierre to Rapid City look forward to that primary as
Christmas in June.
But the national party, state parties, and Sioux
Falls cafes aren't the only ones who'll benefit.
Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the biggest
beneficiaries of a protracted battle for the
nomination are the two contestants themselves.
Primaries are designed to be a warm-up for the
general election, and a few more months of spring
training will only improve their swings for the fall.
And let's face it: These two candidates know how
to put on a show. Both are raising astonishing
sums of money and attracting swarms of voters to
the polls. Over the past month, their three headto-head debates have drawn the largest audiences
in cable television history. The second half of last
week's MSNBC debate was the most watched show
on any channel, with nearly 8 million viewers. An
astonishing 4 million people tuned in to watch
MSNBC's post-debate analysis, an experience so
excruciating that it's as if every person in the Bay
Area picked the same night to jump off the Golden
Gate Bridge.
The permanent campaign turns out to be the best
reality show ever invented. Any contest that can
sustain that kind of excitement is like the World
Series of poker: The value of the pot goes up with
each hand, and whoever wins it won't be the least
bit sorry that both sides went all-in.
No matter how it turns out, all of us who love
politics have to pinch ourselves that we're alive to
see a race that future generations will only read
about. Most campaigns, even winning ones, only
seem historic in retrospect. This time, we already
know it's one for the ages; we just don't know
how, when, or whether it's going to end.
Even journalists who dread spending the next
seven weeks on the Pennsylvania Turnpike have to
shake their heads in wonderment. In the lede of
their lead story in Wednesday's Washington Post,
Dan Balz and Jon Cohen referred to "the
remarkable contest" that could stretch on till
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summer. They didn't sign on to spend the spring in
Scranton and Sioux Falls. But, like the rest of us,
they wouldn't miss this amazing stretch of history
for anything. ... 11:59 P.M. (link)
one of the most popular politicians in the state.
Matheson's father was a governor, too. But unlike
Mitt Romney, Scott Matheson was governor of
Utah.
Monday, Feb. 25, 2008
If Mitt Romney has his eye on the No. 2 spot, Josh
didn't do him any favors. "It's one thing to
campaign for my dad, someone whose principles I
line up with almost entirely," he told the Morning
News. "I can't say the same thing for Sen.
McCain."
Hope Springs Eternal: With this weekend's
victory in Puerto Rico and even more resounding
triumph over the New York Times, John McCain
moved within 200 delegates of mathematically
clinching the Republican nomination. Mike
Huckabee is having a good time playing out the
string, but the rest of us have been forced to get
on with our lives and accept that it's just not the
same without Mitt.
But soft! What light through yonder window
breaks? Out in Salt Lake City, in an interview with
the Deseret Morning News, Josh Romney leaves
open the possibility that his father might get back
in the race:
Josh Romney called speculation
that his father could be back in
the race as either a vice
presidential candidate or even at
the top of the ticket as the GOP's
presidential candidate "possible.
Unlikely, but possible."
That's not much of an opening and no doubt more
of one than he intended. But from mountain to
prairie, the groundswell is spreading.
Endorsements are flooding in from conservative
bloggers like this one:
Mitt Romney was not my first
choice for a presidential
candidate, but he came third
after Duncan Hunter and Fred
Thompson. … I would love to see
Mitt reenter the race.
Even if re-entry is too much to hope for, Josh hints
that another Romney comeback may be in the
works. He says he has been approached about
running for Congress in Utah's 2nd District.
That, too, may be an unlikely trial balloon. Josh is
just 32, has three young children, and would face a
Democratic incumbent, Rep. Jim Matheson, who is
Even so, Romney watchers can only take heart that
after a year on the campaign trail, Josh has
bounced back so quickly. "I was not that upset," he
says of his father's defeat. "I didn't cry or
anything."
In his year on the stump, Josh came across as the
most down-to-earth of the Romney boys. He
visited all 99 of Iowa's counties in the campaign
Winnebago, the Mitt Mobile. He joked about his
father's faults, such as "he has way too much
energy." He let a Fox newswoman interview him in
the master bedroom of the Mitt Mobile. (He showed
her the air fresheners.) He blogged about the
moose, salmon, and whale he ate while
campaigning in Alaska—but when the feast was
over, he delivered the Super Tuesday state for his
dad.
As Jonathan Martin of Politico reported last
summer, Josh was campaigning with his parents at
the Fourth of July parade in Clear Lake, Iowa,
when the Romneys ran into the Clintons. After Mitt
told the Clintons how many counties Josh had
visited, Hillary said, "You've got this built-in
campaign team with your sons." Mitt replied, to
Ann's apparent dismay, "If we had known, we
would've had more."
We'll never know whether that could have made
the difference. For now, we'll have to settle for the
unlikely but possible hope that Mitt will come back
to take another bow. ... 4:13 P.M. (link)
Face Time: When Ralph Reed showed up at a
Romney fundraiser last May, Mitt thought he was
Gary Bauer – perpetuating the tiresome stereotype
that like some Reeds, all Christian conservatives
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look alike. Now, in Mitt's hour of need, Ralph is
returning the favor. According to the Washington
Times, he and 50 other right-wing leaders met with
Romney on Thursday "to discuss the former
Massachusetts governor becoming the face of
conservatism."
Nothing against Romney, who surely would have
been a better president than he let on. But if he
were "the face of conservatism," he'd be planning
his acceptance speech, not interviewing with Ralph
Reed and friends for the next time around.
Conservatives could not have imagined it would
end this way: the movement that produced Ollie
North, Alan Keyes, and ardent armies of true
believers, now mulling over an arranged marriage
of convenience with a Harvard man who converted
for the occasion. George Will must be reaching for
his Yeats: "Was it for this … that all that blood was
shed?"
For more than a year, Republican presidential
candidates tried to win the Reagan Primary. Their
final tableau came at a debate in the Gipper's
library, with his airplane as a backdrop and his
widow in the front row. It was bad enough to see
them reach back 20 years to find a conservative
president they could believe in, but this might be
worse: Now Romney's competing to claim he's the
biggest conservative loser since Reagan. If McCain
comes up short like Gerald Ford, Mitt wants to
launch a comeback like it's 1976.
Even conservative leaders can't hide their
astonishment over finding themselves in this
position. "If someone had suggested a year ago
and a half ago that we would be welcoming Mitt
Romney as a potential leader of the conservative
movement, no one would have believed it,"
American Conservative Union chairman David
Keene reportedly told the group. "But over the last
year and a half, he has convinced us he is one of
us and walks with us."
Conservative activist Jay Sekulow told the
Washington Times that Romney is a "turnaround
specialist" who can revive conservatism's fortunes.
But presumably, Romney's number-crunching skills
are the last thing the movement needs: there are
no voters left to fire.
To be sure, Mitt was with conservatives when the
music stopped. Right-wing activists who voted in
the CPAC straw poll narrowly supported him over
McCain, 35% to 34%. By comparison, they favored
getting out of the United Nations by 57% to 42%
and opposed a foreign policy based on spreading
democracy by 82% to 15%. Small-government
conservatism trounced social conservatism 59% to
22%, with only 16% for national-security
conservatism.
As voters reminded him more Tuesdays than not,
Mitt Romney is not quite Ronald Reagan. He
doesn't have an issue like the Panama Canal. Far
from taking the race down to the wire, he'll end up
third. While he's a good communicator, many
voters looking for the face of conservatism couldn't
see past what one analyst in the Deseret News
described as the "CEO robot from Jupiter.'"
If anything, Romney was born to be the face of the
Ford wing of the Republican Party – an economic
conservative with only a passing interest in the
other two legs of Reagan's conservative stool. Like
Ford, Mitt won the Michigan primary. He won all
the places he calls home, and it's not his fault his
father wasn't governor of more states.
Romney does have one advantage. With a
conservative president nearing historic lows in the
polls and a presumptive nominee more intent on
leading the country, heading the conservative
movement might be like running the 2002
Olympics – a job nobody else wants.
Paul Erickson, the Romney strategist who
organized the conservative powwow, called
McCain's nomination "an existential crisis for the
Republican Party," and held out Mitt as a possible
Messiah: "You could tell everybody at the table
sitting with Romney was asking himself: 'Is he the
one?'"
Romney has demonstrated many strengths over
the years, but impersonating a diehard
conservative and leading a confused movement out
of the wilderness aren't foremost among them. It
might be time for the right to take up another
existential question: If conservatism needs Mitt
Romney and Ralph Reed to make a comeback, is
there enough face left to save? ... 3:37 P.M. (link)
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Thursday, Feb. 7, 2008
Romney, We Hardly Knew Ye: When Mitt
Romney launched his campaign last year, he struck
many Republicans as the perfect candidate. He was
a businessman with a Midas touch, an optimist with
a charmed life and family, a governor who had
slain the Democratic dragon in the blue state
Republicans love to hate. In a race against national
heroes like John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, he
started out as a dark horse, but to handicappers,
he was a dark horse with great teeth.
When Democrats looked at Romney, we also saw
the perfect candidate—for us to run against. The
best presidential candidates have the ability to
change people's minds. Mitt Romney never got that
far because he never failed to change his own mind
first.
So when Romney gamely suspended his campaign
this afternoon, there was heartfelt sadness on both
sides of the aisle. Democrats are sorry to lose an
adversary whose ideological marathon vividly
illustrated the vast distance a man must travel to
reach the right wing of the Republican Party.
Romney fans lose a candidate who just three
months ago led the polls in Iowa and New
Hampshire and was the smart pick to win the
nomination.
With a formidable nominee in John McCain, the
GOP won't be sorry. But Romney's farewell at the
Conservative Political Action Committee meeting
shows how far the once-mighty right wing has
fallen. In an introduction laced with barbs in
McCain's direction, Laura Ingraham's description of
Mitt as "a conservative's conservative" said all
there is to say about Romney's campaign and the
state of the conservative movement. If their last,
best hope is a guy who only signed up two years
ago and could hardly convince them he belonged,
the movement is in even worse shape than it
looks.
Had Romney run on his real strength—as an
intelligent, pragmatic, and competent manager—
his road to the nomination might have gone the
way of Rudy Giuliani's. Yet ironically, his eagerness
to preach the conservative gospel brought on his
demise. Romney pandered with conviction. He
even tried to make it a virtue, defending his
conversion on abortion by telling audiences that he
would never apologize for being a latecomer to the
cause of standing up for human life. Conservatives
thanked him for trying but preferred the genuine
article. In Iowa, Romney came in second to a true
believer, and New Hampshire doesn't have enough
diehards to put him over the top.
Romney's best week came in Michigan, when a
sinking economy gave him a chance to talk about
the one subject where his party credentials were in
order. In Michigan, Romney sounded like a 21stcentury version of the business Republicans who
dominated that state in the '50s and '60s—proud,
decent, organization men like Gerald Ford and
George Romney. As he sold his plan to turn the
Michigan economy around, Mitt seemed as
surprised as the voters by how much better he
could be when he genuinely cared about the
subject.
By then, however, he had been too many things to
too many people for too long. McCain was
authentic, Huckabee was conservative, and
Romney couldn't convince enough voters he was
either one.
Good sport to the end, Romney went down
pandering. His swansong at CPAC touched all the
right's hot buttons. He blamed out-of-wedlock
births on government programs, attacks on
religion, and "tolerance for pornography." He got
his biggest applause for attacking the welfare
state, declaring dependency a culture-killing poison
that is "death to initiative."
Even in defeat, he gave glimpses of the Mitt we'll
miss—the lovably square, Father Knows Best figure
with the impossibly wholesome family and perfect
life. He talked about taking "a weed-whacker to
regulations." He warned that we might soon
become "the France of the 21st century." He
pointed out that he had won nearly as many states
as McCain, but joked awkwardly with the
ultraconservative audience that he lost "because
size does matter."
He didn't say whether we'll have the Romneys to
kick around anymore. But with the family fortune
largely intact and five sons to carry on the torch,
we can keep hope alive. In the Salt Lake City paper
this morning, a leading political scientist predicted
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that if Democrats win the White House in 2008,
Romney "would automatically be a frontrunner for
2012."
It's hard to imagine a more perfect outcome. For
now, sadness reigns. As the Five Brothers might
say, somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere
children shout; but there is no joy in Mittville—Guy
Smiley has dropped out. ... 5:42 P.M. (link)
Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2008
Mittmentum: With John McCain on cruise control
toward the Republican nomination, Mitt Romney
finds himself in a desperate quest to rally true
believers – a role for which his even temper and
uneven record leave him spectacularly unsuited.
Romney knows how to tell the party faithful
everything they want to hear. But it's not easy for
a man who prides himself on his optimism, polish,
and good fortune to stir anger and mutiny in the
conservative base. Only a pitchfork rebellion can
stop McCain now, and Luddites won't man the
ramparts because they like your PowerPoint.
So far, the Republican base seems neither shaken
nor stirred. McCain has a commanding 2-1 margin
in national polls, and leads Romney most
everywhere except California, where Mitt hopes for
an upset tonight. Professional troublemakers like
Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh are up in arms,
trying to persuade their followers that McCain is
somehow Hillary by other means. On Monday,
Limbaugh did his best imitation of Romney's stump
speech, dubbing Mitt the only candidate who
stands for all three legs of the conservative stool.
Strange bedfellows indeed: Rush-Romney is like a
hot-blooded android – the first DittoheadConehead pairing in galactic history.
On Saturday, Mitt Romney wandered to the back of
his campaign plane and told the press, "These
droids aren't the droids you're looking for." Oddly
enough, that's exactly the reaction most
Republicans have had to his campaign.
But in the home stretch, Romney has energized
one key part of his base: his own family.
Yesterday, the Romney boys set a campaign record
by putting up six posts on the Five Brothers blog –
matching their high from when they launched last
April. Mitt may be down, but the Five Brothers are
back.
The past month has been grim for the happy-golucky Romney boys. They sometimes went days
between posts. When they did post, it was often
from states they had just campaigned in and lost.
Bright spots were hard to come by. After South
Carolina, Tagg found a "Romney girl" video, set to
the tune of "1985," in which a smiling young
Alabaman named Danielle sang of Mitt as the next
Reagan. One commenter recommended raising $3
million to run the clip as a Super Bowl ad; another
asked Danielle out on behalf of his own five sons. A
few days later, Matt put up a clip of a computerized
prank call to his dad, pretending to be Arnold
Schwarzenegger – prompting a priceless exchange
between robo-candidate and Terminator. Then the
real Arnold spoiled the joke by endorsing the real
McCain.
In the run-up to Super Tuesday, however, a spring
is back in the Five Brothers' step. On Sunday, Josh
wrote a post about his campaign trip to Alaska.
Richard Nixon may have lost in 1960 because his
pledge to campaign in all 50 states forced him to
spend the last weekend in Alaska. That didn't stop
Josh Romney, who posted a gorgeous photo of
Mount McKinley and a snapshot of some Romney
supporters shivering somewhere outside Fairbanks,
where the high was 13 below. He wrote, "I
sampled all of the Alaskan classics: moose, salmon
and whale. Oh so good." Eating whale would
certainly be red meat for a liberal crowd, but
conservatives loved it too. "Moose is good stuff,"
one fan wrote. Another supporter mentioned
friends who've gone on missions abroad and "talk
about eating dog, horse, cow stomach, bugs."
Rush, take note: McCain was ordering room service
at the Hanoi Hilton while Mitt was keeping the faith
by choking down tripe in Paris.
The rest of the family sounds like it's on the trail of
big game as well. Ben Romney, the least prolific of
the Five Brothers, didn't post from Thanksgiving
through the South Carolina primary. Yesterday, he
posted twice in one day – with a link to Limbaugh
and a helpful guide to tonight's results, noting that
in the past week members of the Romney family
have campaigned in 17 of 21 states up for grabs
on Super Tuesday. Now we can scientifically
measure the Romney effect, by comparing the
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results in those 17 states with the four states
(Idaho, Montana, Connecticut, Arizona) no Romney
visited. After Huckabee's victory in West Virginia,
the early score is 1-0 in favor of no Romneys.
Tagg, the team captain, also posted twice, urging
the faithful to "Keep Fighting," and touting Mitt's
evangelical appeal: "The Base Is Beginning to
Rally." Back in June, Tagg joked with readers about
who would win a family farting contest. Now he's
quoting evangelical Christian ministers. The
brothers are so focused on the race, they haven't
even mentioned their beloved Patriots' loss,
although there has been no word from young
Craig, the one they tease as a Tom Brady
lookalike.
Of course, if the Republican race ends tonight, the
inheritance Mitt has told the boys not to count on
will be safe at last. By all accounts, they couldn't
care less. They seem to share Tagg's easy-comeeasy-go view that no matter what happens, this
will have been the best trip the family has ever
taken, and this time no dogs were harmed along
the way (just moose, salmon, and whale).
At the moment, the Five Brothers must feel the
same nostalgia to keep going that the rest of us
will feel for their antics when they're gone. Back
when the campaign began, Tagg joked that they
would love their father win or lose, although he
might become something of a national
laughingstock in the meantime. Mitt did his part,
but whatever happens tonight, he can be proud the
firewall he cares most about – his family – has held
up its end of the bargain. ... 6:15 P.M. (link)
the has-been
Iron City Blues
How to root for one of the most mediocre sports teams ever.
By Bruce Reed
more than 80 years ago, so my Pennsylvania roots
are distant. But I still think I can speak for at least
half the state in suggesting one bold proposal we
long for every April: a plan to rescue one of the
most mediocre teams in baseball history, the
Pittsburgh Pirates.
Granted, the nation faces more urgent crises. But
in hard times, people often look to sports for
solace. To blue-collar workers in taverns across
western Pennsylvania, watching the Pirates lose
night after night is as predictably grim as the Bush
economy. The lowly Bucs are the reigning
disappointment in the world of sport—with a
batting average that seems pegged to the dollar
and prospects of victory in line with the war in
Iraq.
The Pittsburgh franchise hasn't finished above .500
since 1992. If, as universally predicted, the Pirates
turn in their 16th consecutive losing season this
year, they will tie the all-time frustration record for
professional sport set by the Philadelphia Phillies in
the 1930s and '40s.
Pittsburgh is still a proud, vibrant city, which has
rebounded handsomely from losses far more
consequential than the Pirates'. The once-proud
Pirates, by contrast, show plenty of rust but no
signs of recovery. In 1992, the team was an inning
away from the World Series, when the Atlanta
Braves scored three runs in the bottom of the ninth
to steal Game 7 of the National League
Championship Series. The Braves soon moved to
the NL East en route to winning 14 consecutive
division titles, the longest in sports history. The
Pirates moved from the East to the Central and
began their soon-to-be-record-setting plunge in
the opposite direction.
On Monday, the Pirates return to Atlanta for
Opening Day against the Braves. Baseball analysts
no longer give a reason in predicting another lastplace Bucco finish. This year, the Washington Post
didn't even bother to come up with a new joke.
Last season's Post preview said:
Friday, Mar. 28, 2008
We Are Family: Midway through the run-up to the
next primary, the presidential campaigns are
searching for fresh ways to reach the voters of
Pennsylvania. My grandparents left Pittsburgh
Blech. This Pirates team is so
mediocre, so uninteresting, so
destined for last place, we don't
know if we can squeeze another
sentence out of it for this capsule
93/124
we're being paid to write. But
here's one. … The Pirates haven't
had a winning season since
1992, and that streak will
continue this year. That's still not
long enough? Well, here's
another line! Hey—two sentences
in one line! Make that three! And
here's another! See how easy
that is?
This year, the same Post analyst wrote:
Okay, folks, here's the deal: We
need to fill precisely 4.22
column-inches of type with
information about the faceless,
tasteless Pirates, and as usual
we're not sure we can do it. But
guess what? We're already at .95
inches, and we're just getting
started! Wait—make that 1.19
inches. ... Should they finish
below .500 again (and let's be
honest, how can they not?), they
will tie the Phillies of 1933-48 for
the most consecutive losing
seasons. (By the way, that's 3.53
inches, and we haven't even had
to mention new manager John
Russell, Capps's promise as a
closer or the vast potential of the
Snell-Gorzelanny duo.) There:
4.22 inches. Piece of cake."
So now the Pirates even hold the record for
consecutive seasons as victims of the same bad
joke.
steel suspension bridges to gleaming glass
skyscrapers.
The result? As Pittsburgh writer Don Spagnolo
noted last year in "79 Reasons Why It's Hard To Be
a Pirates Fan," Pittsburgh now has "the best
stadium in the country, soiled by the worst team."
(The Onion once suggested, "PNC Park Threatens
To Leave Pittsburgh Unless Better Team Is Built.")
Spagnolo notes that the city already set some kind
of record by hosting baseball's All-Star game in
1994 and 2006 without a single winning season in
between.
Although the Pirates' best player, Jason Bay, is
from Canada, if Pittsburgh fans have suffered
because of trade, the blame belongs not to NAFTA
but to an inept front office. Jason Schmidt, now
one of the top 100 strikeout aces in history, was
traded to the Giants. Another, Tim Wakefield, left
for the Red Sox. Franchise player Aramis Ramirez
was dealt to the Cubs. When owners sell off
members of a winning team, it's called a fire sale.
The Pirates have been more like a yard sale. In
2003, when the Cubs nearly made the Series, the
Pirates supplied one-third of their starting lineup.
In the early '80s, an angry fan famously threw a
battery at Pirate outfielder Dave Parker. Last June,
fans registered their frustration in a more
constructive way. To protest more than a decade of
ownership mismanagement, they launched a Web
site, IrateFans.com, and organized a "Fans for
Change" walkout after the third inning of a home
game. Unfortunately, only a few hundred fans who
left their seats actually left the game; most just
got up to get beer.
Pittsburgh faces all the challenges of a smallmarket team. Moreover, as David Maraniss pointed
out in his lyrical biography, Clemente, the first love
for Pittsburgh fans has long been football, not
baseball. These days, no one can blame them.
This year, fans are still for change but highly
skeptical. In an online interview, the new team
president admitted, "The Pirates are not in a
rebuilding mode. We're in a building mode." One
fan asked bitterly, "How many home runs will the
'change in atmosphere' hit this season?"
Seven years ago, in a desperate bid to revive the
Pirates' fortunes, the city built PNC Park, a
gorgeous field with the most spectacular view in
baseball. From behind home plate, you can look
out on the entire expanse of American economic
history—from the Allegheny River to 1920s-era
I've been a Pirate fan for four decades—the first
glorious, the second dreary, the last two a long
march from despair to downright humiliation. In
more promising times, my wife proposed to me at
Three Rivers Stadium, where we returned for our
honeymoon. On the bright side, the 2001 implosion
94/124
of Three Rivers enabled me to find two red plastic
stadium seats as an anniversary present on eBay.
Our children live for baseball but laugh at our
Pirate caps—and, at ages 12 and 14, haven't been
alive to see a winning Pirate season. Yet like so
many in western Pennsylvania, I've been a Pirate
fan too long to be retrained to root for somebody
else.
After 15 years, we Bucs fans aren't asking for
miracles. We just want what came so easily to the
pre-2004 Red Sox, the post-1908 Cubs, and the
other great losing teams of all time: sympathy.
Those other teams are no longer reliable: The Red
Sox have become a dynasty; 2008 really could be
the Cubs' year. If you want a lovable loser that will
never let you down, the Pittsburgh Pirates could be
your team, too. ... (link)
Thursday, Mar. 13, 2008
Craigenfreude: In a new high for the partisan
divide, a mini-debate has broken out in far-flung
corners of the blogosphere on the urgent question:
Who's the bigger hypocrite, Larry Craig or Eliot
Spitzer?
Conservative blogger Michael Medved of Townhall
offers a long list of reasons why Craig doesn't need
to go as urgently as Spitzer did. He finds Craig less
hypocritical ("trolling for sex in a men's room,
doesn't logically require that you support gay
marriage"), much easier to pity, and "pathetic and
vulnerable" in a way Spitzer is not. Liberal blogger
Anonymous Is a Woman counters that while Craig
and Louisiana Sen. David Vitter remain in office, at
least Spitzer resigned.
Warning, much political baggage may look alike.
So, party labels aside, who's the bigger hypocrite?
Certainly, a politician caught red-handed
committing the very crimes he used to prosecute
can make a strong case for himself. In his
resignation speech, Spitzer admitted as much:
"Over the course of my public life, I have insisted, I
believe correctly, that people, regardless of their
position or power, take responsibility for their
conduct. I can and will ask no less of myself."
Moreover, for all the conservative complaints about
media bias, the circumstances of Spitzer's fall from
grace ensure that tales of his hypocrisy will
reverberate louder and longer than Craig's. Already
a media star in the media capital of the world, he
managed to destroy his career with a flair even a
tabloid editor couldn't have imagined. Every detail
of his case is more titillating than Craig's—call girls
with MySpace pages and stories to tell, not a lone
cop who won't talk to the press; hotel suites
instead of bathroom stalls; bank rolls instead of
toilet rolls; wide angles instead of wide stances; a
club for emperors, not Red Carpet.
Spitzer flew much closer to the sun than Craig, so
his sudden plunge is the far greater political
tragedy. No matter how far his dive, Craig couldn't
make that kind of splash. You'll never see the
headline "Craig Resigns" splashed across six
columns of the New York Times. Of course, since
he refuses to resign, you won't see it in the Idaho
Statesman, either.
Yet out of stubborn home-state chauvinism, if
nothing else, we Idahoans still marvel at the level
of hypocrisy our boy has achieved, even without all
the wealth, fame, and privilege that a rich New
Yorker was handed on a silver platter. Many
Easterners think it's easy for an Idahoan to be
embarrassing—that just being from Boise means
you're halfway there.
We disagree. Craig didn't grow up in the center of
attention, surrounded by money, glamour, and all
the accouterments of hypocrisy. He grew up in the
middle of nowhere, surrounded by mountains.
When he got arrested, he didn't have paid help to
bring him down. No Mann Act for our guy: He
carried his own bags and did his own travel.
Larry Craig is a self-made hypocrite. He achieved
his humiliation the old-fashioned way: He earned
it.
Unlike Spitzer, who folded his cards without a fight,
Craig upped the ante by privately admitting guilt,
then publicly denying it. His lawyers filed yet
another appellate brief this week, insisting that the
prosecution is wrong to accuse him of making a
"prehensile stare."
While it's admittedly a low standard, Craig may
have had his least-awful week since his scandal
broke in August. A Minnesota jury acquitted a man
95/124
who was arrested by the same airport sting
operation. Craig didn't finish last in the Senate
power rankings by Congress.org. Thanks to
Spitzer, Craig can now tell folks back home that
whatever they think of what he did, at least they
don't have to be embarrassed by how much he
spent. In fact, he is probably feeling some
Craigenfreude—taking pleasure in someone else's
troubles because those troubles leave people a
little less time to take pleasure in your own.
Like misery, hypocrisy loves company—which, for
both Spitzer and Craig, turned out to be the
problem. But Spitzer was right to step down, and
Craig should long ago have done the same. Politics
is a tragic place to chase your demons. ... 5:30
P.M. (link)
Wednesday, Mar. 5, 2008
All the Way: As death-defying Clinton comebacks
go, the primaries in Ohio and Texas were very
nearly not heart-stopping enough. On Monday,
public polls started predicting a Clinton rebound,
threatening to spoil the key to any wild ride:
surprise. Luckily, the early exit polls on Tuesday
evening showed Obama with narrow leads in both
do-or-die states, giving those of us in Clinton World
who live for such moments a few more hours to
stare into the abyss.
Now that the race is once again up for grabs, much
of the political establishment is dreading the
seven-week slog to the next big primary in
Pennsylvania. Many journalists had wanted to go
home and put off seeing Scranton until The Office
returns on April 10. Some Democrats in
Washington were in a rush to find out the winner
so they could decide who they've been for all
along.
As a Clintonite, I'm delighted that the show will go
on. But even if I were on the sidelines, my reaction
would have been the same. No matter which team
you're rooting for, you've got to admit: We will
never see another contest like this one, and the
political junkie in all of us hopes it will never end.
It looks like we could get our wish—so we might as
well rejoice and be glad in it. A long, exciting race
for the nomination will be good for the Democratic
Party, good for the eventual nominee, and the ride
of a lifetime for every true political fan.
For the party, the benefits are obvious: By making
this contest go the distance, the voters have done
what party leaders wanted to do all along. This
cycle, the Democratic National Committee was
desperate to avoid the front-loaded calendar that
backfired last time. As David Greenberg points out,
the 2004 race was over by the first week of
March—and promptly handed Republicans a full
eight months to destroy our nominee. This time,
the DNC begged states to back-load the calendar,
even offering bonus delegates for moving primaries
to late spring. Two dozen states flocked to Super
Tuesday anyway.
Happily, voters took matters into their own hands
and gave the spring states more clout than party
leaders ever could have hoped for. Last fall, NPR
ran a whimsical story about the plight of South
Dakota voters, whose June 3 contest is the last
primary (along with Montana) on the calendar.
Now restaurateurs, innkeepers, and vendors from
Pierre to Rapid City look forward to that primary as
Christmas in June.
But the national party, state parties, and Sioux
Falls cafes aren't the only ones who'll benefit.
Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the biggest
beneficiaries of a protracted battle for the
nomination are the two contestants themselves.
Primaries are designed to be a warm-up for the
general election, and a few more months of spring
training will only improve their swings for the fall.
And let's face it: These two candidates know how
to put on a show. Both are raising astonishing
sums of money and attracting swarms of voters to
the polls. Over the past month, their three headto-head debates have drawn the largest audiences
in cable television history. The second half of last
week's MSNBC debate was the most watched show
on any channel, with nearly 8 million viewers. An
astonishing 4 million people tuned in to watch
MSNBC's post-debate analysis, an experience so
excruciating that it's as if every person in the Bay
Area picked the same night to jump off the Golden
Gate Bridge.
The permanent campaign turns out to be the best
reality show ever invented. Any contest that can
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sustain that kind of excitement is like the World
Series of poker: The value of the pot goes up with
each hand, and whoever wins it won't be the least
bit sorry that both sides went all-in.
No matter how it turns out, all of us who love
politics have to pinch ourselves that we're alive to
see a race that future generations will only read
about. Most campaigns, even winning ones, only
seem historic in retrospect. This time, we already
know it's one for the ages; we just don't know
how, when, or whether it's going to end.
Even journalists who dread spending the next
seven weeks on the Pennsylvania Turnpike have to
shake their heads in wonderment. In the lede of
their lead story in Wednesday's Washington Post,
Dan Balz and Jon Cohen referred to "the
remarkable contest" that could stretch on till
summer. They didn't sign on to spend the spring in
Scranton and Sioux Falls. But, like the rest of us,
they wouldn't miss this amazing stretch of history
for anything. ... 11:59 P.M. (link)
Hope Springs Eternal: With this weekend's
victory in Puerto Rico and even more resounding
triumph over the New York Times, John McCain
moved within 200 delegates of mathematically
clinching the Republican nomination. Mike
Huckabee is having a good time playing out the
string, but the rest of us have been forced to get
on with our lives and accept that it's just not the
same without Mitt.
But soft! What light through yonder window
breaks? Out in Salt Lake City, in an interview with
the Deseret Morning News, Josh Romney leaves
open the possibility that his father might get back
in the race:
prairie, the groundswell is spreading.
Endorsements are flooding in from conservative
bloggers like this one:
Mitt Romney was not my first
choice for a presidential
candidate, but he came third
after Duncan Hunter and Fred
Thompson. … I would love to see
Mitt reenter the race.
Even if re-entry is too much to hope for, Josh hints
that another Romney comeback may be in the
works. He says he has been approached about
running for Congress in Utah's 2nd District.
That, too, may be an unlikely trial balloon. Josh is
just 32, has three young children, and would face a
Democratic incumbent, Rep. Jim Matheson, who is
one of the most popular politicians in the state.
Matheson's father was a governor, too. But unlike
Mitt Romney, Scott Matheson was governor of
Utah.
If Mitt Romney has his eye on the No. 2 spot, Josh
didn't do him any favors. "It's one thing to
campaign for my dad, someone whose principles I
line up with almost entirely," he told the Morning
News. "I can't say the same thing for Sen.
McCain."
Even so, Romney watchers can only take heart that
after a year on the campaign trail, Josh has
bounced back so quickly. "I was not that upset," he
says of his father's defeat. "I didn't cry or
anything."
Josh Romney called speculation
that his father could be back in
the race as either a vice
presidential candidate or even at
the top of the ticket as the GOP's
presidential candidate "possible.
Unlikely, but possible."
In his year on the stump, Josh came across as the
most down-to-earth of the Romney boys. He
visited all 99 of Iowa's counties in the campaign
Winnebago, the Mitt Mobile. He joked about his
father's faults, such as "he has way too much
energy." He let a Fox newswoman interview him in
the master bedroom of the Mitt Mobile. (He showed
her the air fresheners.) He blogged about the
moose, salmon, and whale he ate while
campaigning in Alaska—but when the feast was
over, he delivered the Super Tuesday state for his
dad.
That's not much of an opening and no doubt more
of one than he intended. But from mountain to
As Jonathan Martin of Politico reported last
summer, Josh was campaigning with his parents at
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the Fourth of July parade in Clear Lake, Iowa,
when the Romneys ran into the Clintons. After Mitt
told the Clintons how many counties Josh had
visited, Hillary said, "You've got this built-in
campaign team with your sons." Mitt replied, to
Ann's apparent dismay, "If we had known, we
would've had more."
We'll never know whether that could have made
the difference. For now, we'll have to settle for the
unlikely but possible hope that Mitt will come back
to take another bow. ... 4:13 P.M. (link)
Face Time: When Ralph Reed showed up at a
Romney fundraiser last May, Mitt thought he was
Gary Bauer – perpetuating the tiresome stereotype
that like some Reeds, all Christian conservatives
look alike. Now, in Mitt's hour of need, Ralph is
returning the favor. According to the Washington
Times, he and 50 other right-wing leaders met with
Romney on Thursday "to discuss the former
Massachusetts governor becoming the face of
conservatism."
Nothing against Romney, who surely would have
been a better president than he let on. But if he
were "the face of conservatism," he'd be planning
his acceptance speech, not interviewing with Ralph
Reed and friends for the next time around.
Conservatives could not have imagined it would
end this way: the movement that produced Ollie
North, Alan Keyes, and ardent armies of true
believers, now mulling over an arranged marriage
of convenience with a Harvard man who converted
for the occasion. George Will must be reaching for
his Yeats: "Was it for this … that all that blood was
shed?"
For more than a year, Republican presidential
candidates tried to win the Reagan Primary. Their
final tableau came at a debate in the Gipper's
library, with his airplane as a backdrop and his
widow in the front row. It was bad enough to see
them reach back 20 years to find a conservative
president they could believe in, but this might be
worse: Now Romney's competing to claim he's the
biggest conservative loser since Reagan. If McCain
comes up short like Gerald Ford, Mitt wants to
launch a comeback like it's 1976.
Even conservative leaders can't hide their
astonishment over finding themselves in this
position. "If someone had suggested a year ago
and a half ago that we would be welcoming Mitt
Romney as a potential leader of the conservative
movement, no one would have believed it,"
American Conservative Union chairman David
Keene reportedly told the group. "But over the last
year and a half, he has convinced us he is one of
us and walks with us."
Conservative activist Jay Sekulow told the
Washington Times that Romney is a "turnaround
specialist" who can revive conservatism's fortunes.
But presumably, Romney's number-crunching skills
are the last thing the movement needs: there are
no voters left to fire.
To be sure, Mitt was with conservatives when the
music stopped. Right-wing activists who voted in
the CPAC straw poll narrowly supported him over
McCain, 35% to 34%. By comparison, they favored
getting out of the United Nations by 57% to 42%
and opposed a foreign policy based on spreading
democracy by 82% to 15%. Small-government
conservatism trounced social conservatism 59% to
22%, with only 16% for national-security
conservatism.
As voters reminded him more Tuesdays than not,
Mitt Romney is not quite Ronald Reagan. He
doesn't have an issue like the Panama Canal. Far
from taking the race down to the wire, he'll end up
third. While he's a good communicator, many
voters looking for the face of conservatism couldn't
see past what one analyst in the Deseret News
described as the "CEO robot from Jupiter.'"
If anything, Romney was born to be the face of the
Ford wing of the Republican Party – an economic
conservative with only a passing interest in the
other two legs of Reagan's conservative stool. Like
Ford, Mitt won the Michigan primary. He won all
the places he calls home, and it's not his fault his
father wasn't governor of more states.
Romney does have one advantage. With a
conservative president nearing historic lows in the
polls and a presumptive nominee more intent on
leading the country, heading the conservative
movement might be like running the 2002
Olympics – a job nobody else wants.
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Paul Erickson, the Romney strategist who
organized the conservative powwow, called
McCain's nomination "an existential crisis for the
Republican Party," and held out Mitt as a possible
Messiah: "You could tell everybody at the table
sitting with Romney was asking himself: 'Is he the
one?'"
Romney has demonstrated many strengths over
the years, but impersonating a diehard
conservative and leading a confused movement out
of the wilderness aren't foremost among them. It
might be time for the right to take up another
existential question: If conservatism needs Mitt
Romney and Ralph Reed to make a comeback, is
there enough face left to save? ... 3:37 P.M. (link)
Thursday, Feb. 7, 2008
Romney, We Hardly Knew Ye: When Mitt
Romney launched his campaign last year, he struck
many Republicans as the perfect candidate. He was
a businessman with a Midas touch, an optimist with
a charmed life and family, a governor who had
slain the Democratic dragon in the blue state
Republicans love to hate. In a race against national
heroes like John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, he
started out as a dark horse, but to handicappers,
he was a dark horse with great teeth.
When Democrats looked at Romney, we also saw
the perfect candidate—for us to run against. The
best presidential candidates have the ability to
change people's minds. Mitt Romney never got that
far because he never failed to change his own mind
first.
So when Romney gamely suspended his campaign
this afternoon, there was heartfelt sadness on both
sides of the aisle. Democrats are sorry to lose an
adversary whose ideological marathon vividly
illustrated the vast distance a man must travel to
reach the right wing of the Republican Party.
Romney fans lose a candidate who just three
months ago led the polls in Iowa and New
Hampshire and was the smart pick to win the
nomination.
With a formidable nominee in John McCain, the
GOP won't be sorry. But Romney's farewell at the
Conservative Political Action Committee meeting
shows how far the once-mighty right wing has
fallen. In an introduction laced with barbs in
McCain's direction, Laura Ingraham's description of
Mitt as "a conservative's conservative" said all
there is to say about Romney's campaign and the
state of the conservative movement. If their last,
best hope is a guy who only signed up two years
ago and could hardly convince them he belonged,
the movement is in even worse shape than it
looks.
Had Romney run on his real strength—as an
intelligent, pragmatic, and competent manager—
his road to the nomination might have gone the
way of Rudy Giuliani's. Yet ironically, his eagerness
to preach the conservative gospel brought on his
demise. Romney pandered with conviction. He
even tried to make it a virtue, defending his
conversion on abortion by telling audiences that he
would never apologize for being a latecomer to the
cause of standing up for human life. Conservatives
thanked him for trying but preferred the genuine
article. In Iowa, Romney came in second to a true
believer, and New Hampshire doesn't have enough
diehards to put him over the top.
Romney's best week came in Michigan, when a
sinking economy gave him a chance to talk about
the one subject where his party credentials were in
order. In Michigan, Romney sounded like a 21stcentury version of the business Republicans who
dominated that state in the '50s and '60s—proud,
decent, organization men like Gerald Ford and
George Romney. As he sold his plan to turn the
Michigan economy around, Mitt seemed as
surprised as the voters by how much better he
could be when he genuinely cared about the
subject.
By then, however, he had been too many things to
too many people for too long. McCain was
authentic, Huckabee was conservative, and
Romney couldn't convince enough voters he was
either one.
Good sport to the end, Romney went down
pandering. His swansong at CPAC touched all the
right's hot buttons. He blamed out-of-wedlock
births on government programs, attacks on
religion, and "tolerance for pornography." He got
his biggest applause for attacking the welfare
state, declaring dependency a culture-killing poison
that is "death to initiative."
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Even in defeat, he gave glimpses of the Mitt we'll
miss—the lovably square, Father Knows Best figure
with the impossibly wholesome family and perfect
life. He talked about taking "a weed-whacker to
regulations." He warned that we might soon
become "the France of the 21st century." He
pointed out that he had won nearly as many states
as McCain, but joked awkwardly with the
ultraconservative audience that he lost "because
size does matter."
He didn't say whether we'll have the Romneys to
kick around anymore. But with the family fortune
largely intact and five sons to carry on the torch,
we can keep hope alive. In the Salt Lake City paper
this morning, a leading political scientist predicted
that if Democrats win the White House in 2008,
Romney "would automatically be a frontrunner for
2012."
It's hard to imagine a more perfect outcome. For
now, sadness reigns. As the Five Brothers might
say, somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere
children shout; but there is no joy in Mittville—Guy
Smiley has dropped out. ... 5:42 P.M. (link)
Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2008
Mittmentum: With John McCain on cruise control
toward the Republican nomination, Mitt Romney
finds himself in a desperate quest to rally true
believers – a role for which his even temper and
uneven record leave him spectacularly unsuited.
Romney knows how to tell the party faithful
everything they want to hear. But it's not easy for
a man who prides himself on his optimism, polish,
and good fortune to stir anger and mutiny in the
conservative base. Only a pitchfork rebellion can
stop McCain now, and Luddites won't man the
ramparts because they like your PowerPoint.
So far, the Republican base seems neither shaken
nor stirred. McCain has a commanding 2-1 margin
in national polls, and leads Romney most
everywhere except California, where Mitt hopes for
an upset tonight. Professional troublemakers like
Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh are up in arms,
trying to persuade their followers that McCain is
somehow Hillary by other means. On Monday,
Limbaugh did his best imitation of Romney's stump
speech, dubbing Mitt the only candidate who
stands for all three legs of the conservative stool.
Strange bedfellows indeed: Rush-Romney is like a
hot-blooded android – the first DittoheadConehead pairing in galactic history.
On Saturday, Mitt Romney wandered to the back of
his campaign plane and told the press, "These
droids aren't the droids you're looking for." Oddly
enough, that's exactly the reaction most
Republicans have had to his campaign.
But in the home stretch, Romney has energized
one key part of his base: his own family.
Yesterday, the Romney boys set a campaign record
by putting up six posts on the Five Brothers blog –
matching their high from when they launched last
April. Mitt may be down, but the Five Brothers are
back.
The past month has been grim for the happy-golucky Romney boys. They sometimes went days
between posts. When they did post, it was often
from states they had just campaigned in and lost.
Bright spots were hard to come by. After South
Carolina, Tagg found a "Romney girl" video, set to
the tune of "1985," in which a smiling young
Alabaman named Danielle sang of Mitt as the next
Reagan. One commenter recommended raising $3
million to run the clip as a Super Bowl ad; another
asked Danielle out on behalf of his own five sons. A
few days later, Matt put up a clip of a computerized
prank call to his dad, pretending to be Arnold
Schwarzenegger – prompting a priceless exchange
between robo-candidate and Terminator. Then the
real Arnold spoiled the joke by endorsing the real
McCain.
In the run-up to Super Tuesday, however, a spring
is back in the Five Brothers' step. On Sunday, Josh
wrote a post about his campaign trip to Alaska.
Richard Nixon may have lost in 1960 because his
pledge to campaign in all 50 states forced him to
spend the last weekend in Alaska. That didn't stop
Josh Romney, who posted a gorgeous photo of
Mount McKinley and a snapshot of some Romney
supporters shivering somewhere outside Fairbanks,
where the high was 13 below. He wrote, "I
sampled all of the Alaskan classics: moose, salmon
and whale. Oh so good." Eating whale would
certainly be red meat for a liberal crowd, but
conservatives loved it too. "Moose is good stuff,"
one fan wrote. Another supporter mentioned
friends who've gone on missions abroad and "talk
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about eating dog, horse, cow stomach, bugs."
Rush, take note: McCain was ordering room service
at the Hanoi Hilton while Mitt was keeping the faith
by choking down tripe in Paris.
The rest of the family sounds like it's on the trail of
big game as well. Ben Romney, the least prolific of
the Five Brothers, didn't post from Thanksgiving
through the South Carolina primary. Yesterday, he
posted twice in one day – with a link to Limbaugh
and a helpful guide to tonight's results, noting that
in the past week members of the Romney family
have campaigned in 17 of 21 states up for grabs
on Super Tuesday. Now we can scientifically
measure the Romney effect, by comparing the
results in those 17 states with the four states
(Idaho, Montana, Connecticut, Arizona) no Romney
visited. After Huckabee's victory in West Virginia,
the early score is 1-0 in favor of no Romneys.
Tagg, the team captain, also posted twice, urging
the faithful to "Keep Fighting," and touting Mitt's
evangelical appeal: "The Base Is Beginning to
Rally." Back in June, Tagg joked with readers about
who would win a family farting contest. Now he's
quoting evangelical Christian ministers. The
brothers are so focused on the race, they haven't
even mentioned their beloved Patriots' loss,
although there has been no word from young
Craig, the one they tease as a Tom Brady
lookalike.
Of course, if the Republican race ends tonight, the
inheritance Mitt has told the boys not to count on
will be safe at last. By all accounts, they couldn't
care less. They seem to share Tagg's easy-comeeasy-go view that no matter what happens, this
will have been the best trip the family has ever
taken, and this time no dogs were harmed along
the way (just moose, salmon, and whale).
At the moment, the Five Brothers must feel the
same nostalgia to keep going that the rest of us
will feel for their antics when they're gone. Back
when the campaign began, Tagg joked that they
would love their father win or lose, although he
might become something of a national
laughingstock in the meantime. Mitt did his part,
but whatever happens tonight, he can be proud the
firewall he cares most about – his family – has held
up its end of the bargain. ... 6:15 P.M. (link)
the undercover economist
The Price Is Right
Does evolution explain why we hate to pay more for scarce goods?
By Tim Harford
Friends of mine, a husband and wife, once argued over the price
of a packet of cakes bought at a convenience store. She
complained that the cakes weren't worth the price she had paid.
He pointed out that she had bought them—albeit grudgingly—
knowing exactly how they tasted and that, therefore, they had to
be worth what she had paid. No prizes for guessing which one of
them is an economist.
We economists know a lot about pricing, but we tend to be
baffled by the way the human race thinks about it. The package
holiday offer "Kids go free to Disneyland" is, to an economist, a
profitable attempt to charge more to couples with two incomes
and no children, who are likely to have more cash to burn. To
everyone else, it is an idea waved through unquestioningly—we
all like kids, after all.
The presentation of a pricing policy clearly matters—something
disconcerting to economists, who can translate all the pricing
into mathematical equations and make the presentation go away.
It seems to be acceptable to charge a higher markup for fairtrade coffee, organic bread, or lower-emissions gasoline. It is not
acceptable for businesses to say, "We are such fans of
exploitative coffee, pesticide-laced loaves, and dirtier gas that
we're willing to discount them and accept a lower profit margin."
Underneath the gloss, the pricing policies are, nevertheless,
identical.
The most common puzzle of all, for an economist, is why prices
so rarely rise in the face of a shortage. There was a shortage of
Wii games consoles last Christmas, Xbox 360s in 2005,
Playstation 2 consoles before that, and so on. To secure tickets
for a hot concert, you will usually need to go to a scalper,
because the regular concert promoters wouldn't dare charge a
ticket price that might bring demand down to the level of supply.
And when U.S. oil companies raised gasoline prices after
Hurricane Katrina, there were howls of outrage—despite the fact
that the refining infrastructure was badly damaged and that it
was evidently impossible to supply everyone at the customary
low price.
I have previously pondered the very clever explanations
economists produce to explain why prices do not rise to equalize
supply and demand. Perhaps ticket prices are kept low to
encourage a memorabilia-buying younger crowd. Perhaps
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popular restaurants like to have a waiting list for reservations
because it adds to the cachet. Even I am starting to feel that these
explanations sound strained. Are these side benefits really
enough to outweigh the lost revenue from higher prices?
The intuitive explanation, of course, is that we irrationally object
to high prices, even when the alternative is rationing, long lines,
and uncertainty over whether we can buy what we really want.
Keith Sullivan, the Independent Liberal, says the Clintons are
more "like a cartel or the mafia, choice is never something that
should come into play. It's always about entitlement and rank
with them." While John Riley at Newsday's Spin Cycle sees
them as more callow and pathetic: "the Clintons look like
crybabies and sore losers. It is so undisciplined that it furthers
the impression of a campaign that may be on its way down, and
can't accept the idea that somebody might actually prefer the
other guy."
That is discomfiting for economists, but we might at least take
solace in the idea that even though there is no immediate logic to
a belief in the just price, there is at least an evolutionary logic.
David Friedman—son of the late Milton Friedman and a superb
communicator of economics—has argued that our ancestors
would have evolved in an environment where most transactions
were one-on-one bargains. A hard-wired refusal to accept
something other than the customary price would, in such a
setting, be an advantage. Anyone who reacts to a price rise with
irrational rage turns out to be a strong negotiator.
Justin Gardner at Donklephant thinks the Clintonistas have
made Richardson's endorsement more valuable than it is
"[Because there's no way that the Clintons would have Carville
go out there and call Richardson 'Judas' or start this whisper
campaign if they didn't want to destroy his credibility. And that's
what all this is designed to do … muddy the waters enough so
people don't trust him anymore. It may work with some. I
certainly hope not."
Our stubborn preference for a just price evolved in a setting that
is no longer common; but evolution does not respond quickly,
which may be why we still shriek with outrage at price hikes. It
would also explain why ticket scalpers still prosper.
And David Knowles at AOL's Political Machine observes:
"John McCain certainly can win a Republican primary, and a
whole lot of people said he couldn't. For that matter, declaring
that the person who is currently beating you is not capable of
beating the next guy, thereby implying that you can, is a bit of a
stretch."
today's blogs
A Winning Argument?
By Michael Weiss
Bloggers analyze Hillary's latest anti-Obama tactic. They also
wonder about a history teacher who lambastes Southern
Christians and scratch their heads over Ted Turner's cannibalism
comments.
A winning argument? "He cannot win, Bill. He cannot win." So
Hillary Clinton told Gov. Bill Richardson in reference to Barack
Obama, whom Richardson went on to endorse for the
Democratic nomination. Richardson evidently thought likewise
not too long ago. But bloggers wonder whether playing the
electability card is a sign of desperation.
Steven G. Brant at Huffington Post writes: "Since Obama's
defeat is an unshakable reality in Hillary's mind, if Barack gets
the nomination I hope Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Howard
Dean arrange for Hillary to spend the period between the
convention and the general election in some far away place
(Russia? China?) where her negativity will not drag down the
efforts of the rest of us to prevent the Republicans from
maintaining control over the White House."
Read more about the Clinton-Richardson fracas. In Slate, John
Dickerson writes: "The prediction that Obama will be a generalelection failure is so taboo that now that Clinton has said it, her
aides won't repeat it."
"Jesus Glasses": California high schooler Chad Farnan and his
family are suing a history teacher for saying that Christianity is
inextricably linked to bad behavior. "What country has the
highest murder rate? The South! What part of the country has the
highest rape rate? The South! What part of the country has the
highest rate of church attendance? The South!" No mention of
whether the teacher's wanting grasp of geography is included in
the suit.
At the National Review Online, Corner regular Jonah Goldberg
can't work up a sweat over this: "I think the lawsuit probably
goes too far. But it's interesting to ponder what the bureaucracy
would have done to this guy if he'd employed a similar argument
against blacks or Mexicans." Significant Pursuit by
Renaissance Guy agrees: "Even though it is tempting to say that
turnabout is fair play, I don't think Christians should react to
being offended in the same litigious way as the politically
correct elite. I think the teacher overstepped his bounds, and I
think his logic is questionable, but I don't think a lawsuit is
necessary or even warranted. Unfortuantely a federal district
judge thinks that it is."
Rachel Lucas turns the teacher's comment on its head:
"Nevermind that one possible reason Christians in the U.S. are
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more likely to do anything is because they are 77% of the
population, and that no public school teacher should ever be
allowed to say any of that shit anyway, at least until they can
also say shit about Islam without being fired."
Read more about the Christian-bashing teacher.
Are you going to finish that? "Most of the people will have died
and the rest of us will be cannibals." That's Ted Turner, talking
to Charlie Rose, on the imminent aftermath of global warming.
Reasonable Kansans' "Forthekids" cautions not to stockpile the
soylent green just yet: "[L]et's just hope that Ted Turner doesn't
team up with Dr. Eric R. Pianka, world-renowned ecologist, and
decide to take it upon themselves to do something about that
'over population' issue. Pianka, at one time, endorsed airborne
Ebola as an efficient means for eliminating 90 percent of the
world's population."
Blue Crab Boulevard calls Turner a "dim-witted Malthus"
except that the "implications in Ted Turner's vision are a little
more sinister: 'See all the multitude of poor people who want to
be rich people? How greedy of them! We can't have them
succeed at that, now can we?' … It's amazing that so many
supposedly secular people want so desperately to be living in
'end times.'"
Read more about Turner's cannibalistic scenario.
today's blogs
the implausibilities weren't in service to such reprehensible ends.
It's one thing to, say, confidently assert a very narrow but
plausible reading of a statute restricting executive power.
Confidently asserting a broad range of arbitrary executive
powers (including the power to torture), allegedly beyond the
power of the legislature to regulate, despite the explicit textual
grants of relevant powers to Congress, during a 'war' whose
battlefield could be the entire planet and whose duration could
be infinite, is another matter entirely.
Josh Patashnik of the New Republic's Plank marvels at the lack
of outcry from Congress over the release of the memo: "It'll be
interesting to see how Republicans in Congress (and John
McCain) react to this. When you think about it, it's somewhat
breathtaking that, as a group, they were--and remain--so docile,
willing to embrace (or, at least, quietly tolerate) a constitutional
theory that renders them toothless."
At TooHotforTNR, Spencer Ackerman believes this document
illustrates the dangers of trying to define "acceptable" torture:
"Remember: there is no such thing as a little torture. The slope
inevitably slips. Throw this memo in the face of any rightist who
hectors that liberals don't 'understand'evil."
Wired blog Threat Level argues the damning evidence found in
this memo only reinforces the need to declassify more
administration documents: "There's no reason that Congress
should be in any hurry to hand more wiretapping power to this
administration of exaggerators and chicken littles until it releases
the other John Yoo memo -- the one that gave legal cover to the
government's spying on American citizens without court orders.
The one that told this President that he had the power to order
his minions to collect, store and sift through my phone records
and internet usage without getting a judge's approval."
Did You Get the Memo?
By Alex Joseph
Bloggers jump on a newly released memo by former Bush
official John Yoo and discuss the congressional hearings in
which oil executives were drilled about their record profits.
Did you get the memo? A 2003 memo by then-Deputy Assistant
Attorney General John Yoo was declassified Tuesday. The
memo argued that federal laws should not apply to military
interrogators investigating enemy combatants and was rescinded
nine months later. That's not stopping liberal bloggers from
having a field day.
At Tapped, the blog of the liberal American Prospect, Scott
Lemieux references Slate's own Emily Bazelon when registering
shock over the newly released memo: "Bazelon cites their 'glib
certainty' as what stunned her, but I'd argue this would be
potentially acceptable if its arguments were more plausible and
Liberal Steve Benen at the Carpetbagger Report finds irony in
the similarities between the memo and a certain disgraced
president: "Nixon once argued, 'When the President does it, that
means that it's not illegal.' It's since become something of a
punchline, but the Yoo memo made the tenet official
government policy — so long as administration officials were
trying to defend the country, they need not concern themselves
with the law."
But James Poulos of Postmodern Conservative believes the
outcry over limited methods of torture fails to recognize the
alternative of suffering on a much larger scale through all-out
war: "And so we have to rely on a different set of extraordinary
techniques to try to make up for the fact that we're not
prosecuting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as if the only goals
there were military victory. In a way we've got to think soberly
about, our dark turn down the torture road is a consequence of
our late-modern, small-l liberal nausea over real war."
Read more about the Yoo memo.
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Black gold: Executives from the five largest oil companies
testified before Congress Tuesday about rising gas prices. While
some bloggers are crying foul about subsidies and tax breaks for
the oil companies, others suggest the real pain at the pump isn't
Big Oil but Big Government.
Marc at Cranial Cavity points the finger of blame at
government taxes: "The real price gouger is the government.
According to the Tax Foundation, in the last three decades
government has collected more than $1.34 trillion (inflation
adjusted) in gasoline-tax revenues — 'more than twice the
amount of domestic profits earned by major U.S. oil companies
during the same period.' "
Townhall's Mary Katherine Ham suggests that the goals of Rep.
Ed Markey, chairman of the House committee that held the
meeting, are contradictory, since he wants to lower gas prices
and "move beyond this oil economy": "One of the things that
might actually encourage a move 'beyond the oil economy' are
high oil prices, which discourage unnecessary consumption by
motorists through perfectly logical self-interest instead of
government-imposed conservation mandates or whatever heavyhanded measure it is Markey wishes for," she writes. "Making
gas prices artificially respond to your whims makes the process
of buying gas artificially painless, thereby removing all
indicators for the consumer that he should have any concern at
all about an oil economy." Polimom at the Moderate Voice
agrees: "The best thing that could happen, strangely enough, is
for prices to go higher yet. Until we cross above the point where
the cost of renewable energy is less than non-renewable, we're
stuck … and no amount of election year grandstanding will get
us out of the spring mud."
ThisJustIn doesn't foresee a downturn in oil prices and therefore
believes the oil executives' argument that the industry is cyclical
to be defunct: "So suck it up, oil industry. We have been
carrying you for a decade; it's time for you to carry us. And
Congress, do what's right: Strip those tax breaks and either
invest the entire amount in research for alternative energy
sources or give the ailing taxpayers a real tax break (not the
upcoming fake one)."
Read more about the oil execs' testimony.
today's blogs
Mugabe's End?
By Michael Weiss
Bloggers ponder the wonderful notion of a Mugabe-free
Zimbabwe and try to figure out what Nancy Pelosi really thinks
about superdelegates and a prolonged primary season.
Mugabe's end? After 28 years of brutal authoritarian rule, Robert
Mugabe may be on his way out. According to the New York
Times, the Zimbabwe president's attempt to falsify last
weekend's election results are failing, and opposition leader
Morgan Tsvangirai is in negotiation with Mugabe's top advisers
about brokering a transfer of power.
This is Zimbabwe's Sokwanele quotes one democratic activist:
"i am so happy to see change is finally coming to my country. i
have worked for 10 years. i think after change we will have a
rainbow zimbabwe made up of tolerance and i pray for a
prosperous zimbabwe. my president believes that in 100 days we
can feed our children again. sehambile!!!! (he is gone)" Nancy
Reyes at Mugabe makaipa puts one concern to rest: "[T]he
major worry is that Zimbabwe will turn into another Kenya. The
main difference is that in Kenya, the riots were tribal factions
backing different men. In Zimbabwe, the Ndebele oppose
Mugabe, but many of the opposition leaders, including Morgan
Tsvaigirai, are of the majority Mashona tribe. So unlike Kenya,
you do not have danger of a tribal war."
But at the New Republic's Plank, James Kirchick, who knows
Mugabe's history well, is wary of celebrating the fall of the
tyrant just yet: "[W]hile it's tempting to hold out hope that
reports of his imminent demise are true, there is very little about
Zimbabwe's history or Mugabe's own behavior to suggest that he
would ever retire without handpicking a successor, or that he
would ever be forced out office without a fight." As Lawhawk at
A Blog for All cautions: "Mugabe will have to be given quite
the golden parachute to make that happen. He still has support
from the military and unless the military sees the writing on the
wall and chooses to follow the election results that show the
opposition clearly winning, they may continue to enable
Mugabe's hold on power to the detriment of all Zimbabweans."
But Kel at the left-wing Osterley Times notes: "[T]he speed
with which the results are being delivered, alone, tells us that
Mugabe has been thrown off course and is frantically trying to
fix things in his own favour. It's interesting that reports are
coming out that he has been persuaded from simply pulling off a
military takeover, as I would have imagined this to have been
the first place his mind went."
Ed Morrissey at Hot Air says: "[t]he international community
needs to increase its pressure on the situation as well. The West
has no influence with Mugabe, but it does on his African
associates. South Africa's Thabo Mbeki has been one of
Mugabes' closest allies, to the shame of Mbeki's own nation.
Britain and the US should make clear to Mbeki his responsibility
in convincing Mugabe to abide by the actual will of his people
and depart forthwith."
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Read more about Mugabe.
Nancy's about-face: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi previously
said Democratic superdelegates should vote according to the will
of the people (read: for Obama), but she's changed her mind,
apparently. She told Good Morning America: "These
superdelegates have the right to vote their conscience and who
they think would be the better president, or who can win, but
they also then should get involved in the campaigns and make
their power known there." Now how'd that happen?
Conservative Jimmie at the Sundries Shack feels sorry for
Pelosi: "A smart person in her position would have ducked every
election question. The Speaker of the House doesn't ahve a lot to
do with the election and you could forgive Pelosi for wanting to
stay out of the steel cage match that the primary has become.
Besides, she has plenty of other stuff to do, like seeing if she can
hit single digits before November. Instead, she decided, what the
heck, why not just see if both of her feet could fit into her mouth
in the same week."
Wonkette describes Pelosi's history of statements about the
election as a journey from "Pelosi is just another Obama freak
riding the Hope Express all the way to President McCain's
inauguration day" to "In other words, she is totally gay for
Hillary Clinton. Right?" In conclusion? "What a tease."
Jules Crittenden sees a pattern to Pelosi's logic: "Let the
election play itself out, as long as everyone gets behind one
candidate long before the election. There's some Moebius logic
in there. It's kind of like supporting the troops, while cutting all
support for them."
And Strata-Sphere's AJ Strata follows the money: "Must be in
response to democrat top donors threatening the purse strings if
she did not stay out of the fight. Seems the power is still in the
purse - all those hidden purses who yank the chains of the
"public servant". Now it is clear who runs Washington, as if
there ever was any doubt."
Read more about Pelosi's comments.
today's blogs
Sadr Says
By Sonia Smith
Bloggers are parsing the significance of Muqtada Sadr's ceasefire in Basra and pondering the rise of abstinence clubs in the
Ivy League.
Sadr says: Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr ordered his Mahdi Army
fighters to stand down Sunday after six days of bloody clashes in
Basra. This agreement came as a surprise to some, as Iraqi Prime
Minister Nouri al-Maliki had said previously that Iraqi army
troops would see the Basra campaign through to victory. Many
bloggers point out that Sadr called off his troops after a peace
agreement was reached in the Iranian city of Qom.
At the Carpetbagger Report, liberal Steve Benen finds Maliki
and Bush the losers here. "The humiliation for Maliki — and, by
extension, the Bush administration policy — is rather
breathtaking. He launched this offensive, he oversaw the
'crackdown' on Shiite militias, he vowed to see this through to
'victory,' and he was backed up by U.S. forces, despite his
apparent reluctance to tell U.S. officials about his plans before
he attacked. And now look at the landscape." At 1 Boring Old
Man, liberal Mickey opines that, despite the glaring defeat, the
Bush administration will find a way to spin it favorably: "There's
been enough bloodshed in Iraq for several wars. Bush and
Cheney will be spinning like Rumpelstiltskin, about al-Malaki's
flexing his muscles. Meanwhile, Moqtada al-Sadr comes out of
it still holding Basra, Sadr City, and probably most of Southern
Iraq. He emerges from it as a proven Military and Political force.
And he is likely headed to the winner's circle in the elections due
in October."
"Any illusion that Iraq is near political reconciliation has also
been shattered. The Western media division of Iraqis into merely
three sects—Shiite, Sunni, and Kurd—is obviously wrong, as
there is substantial discord within those groups," observes James
Joyner at Outside the Beltway. "It's difficult to imagine that six
days of killing one another is going to lessen that in the near
term."
At the Seminal, Washingtonian Jason Rosenbaum suggests
integrating Sadr into the official power structure: "The way
forward, as it has always been, is to bring Al-Sadr into the
government. Declaring offensives on his followers - thugs and
criminals though they may be - isn't going to work, and going
back on our agreements is only going to breed more distrust.
Given our history, I wouldn't hold out too much hope for this
truce, but perhaps those ruling Iraq will finally prove me
wrong."
Many bloggers gravitate toward the fact Iran brokered the peace,
citing a McClatchy piece by Leila Fadel. Conservative Jules
Crittenden takes the trip to Qom as final proof the Iranians are
deeply involved in Iraq's internal affairs. "Persians,
magnanimous, agree to call off their Shiite militias. I guess this
means we don't have to use 'alleged' or 'U.S. accuses Iran of
involvement' or any other qualifiers anymore. Apparently the
mullahs are calling the shots."
Declaring that Bush's influence in Iraq is waning, at Informed
Comment, University of Michigan history prof Juan Cole sees
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an ascendant Iran. "The entire episode underlines how powerful
Iran has become in Iraq. The Iranian government had called on
Saturday for the fighting to stop. And by Sunday evening it had
negotiated at least a similar call from Sadr."
Read more about Sadr and Basra.
Ivy abstinence: A New York Times Magazine article on Ivy
League chastity clubs profiles Harvard junior Janie Fredell, who
was fed up with her school's "all encompassing hook-up
culture." Fredell is a member of True Love Revolution, a secular
group that uses science and philosophy to promote abstinence. In
the article, Fredell dubs herself an "unconventional feminist," as,
she says, "conventional feminists" believe in "the freedom to
have sex without consequences."
Slate's Melinda Henneberger, writing at XX Factor tweaks the
New York Times: "It was in many ways right off-the-rack," she
critiques. "Not all young people who are virgins on purpose are
dum-dum religious nuts. Some of them—brace yourselves—
have even infiltrated Harvard. And have complicated
philosophical reasons for this lifestyle choice. Too complicated,
in fact, even to take a stab at explaining. But don't sweat it,
because underneath—who would have guessed?—they're
religious nuts, too!" And moderate law professor Ann Althouse
scolds the New York Times for its Ivy tunnel vision. "Does
celibacy require a social club? Does a celibacy club deserve a
lengthy NYT Magazine article? Don't be silly! It's a celibacy
club at Harvard. That's what makes it newsworthy in
NYTworld. 'Harvard' is named 22 times in this article."
Read more about True Love Revolution.
"The problem for these privileged kids is that they succeed in
investing way too much focus and power on sex by making it a
platform to display the perceived sanctity of their moral compass
and personal virtue. Being a virgin doesn't mean you're a good
person, it only means that you're not a person who has sex,"
snaps Canadian feminist Medbh at Dante and the Lobster.
Liberal Kim takes issue with Janie Fredell's conception of
feminism at Don't You Evah. "You don't have to be asexual to
be a strong woman. Abstaining from sex does NOT mean
'Women Reclaim Self-Respect.' That logic is just off. What, any
woman who has sex doesn't hold herself in high regard? Another
issue is how having any sex at all suddenly means you are
promiscuous. Guess what? It is possible to satisfy your desires
without being an egomaniac or self-hating doormat," she writes.
At What Would Phoebe Do, Phoebe Maltz is unimpressed with
Fredell's commitment because of her youth. "Too much is made
of the 'choice' to be virgins made by people who aren't even that
old, and probably haven't met someone they wanted to have sex
with yet. We all had that freshman-year dorm-mate who 'didn't
drink,' who went on to spend the whole of spring term hungover.
Or the avowedly chaste who meet someone they like senior year
and, what the hell."
Religious conservatives are pleased to see such clubs popping up
at elite liberal institutions. At Christian Reformed Campus
Ministries at UWO, University of Western Ontario blogger
Mike Wagenman applauds the existence of True Love
Revolution. The article "seems to lay out the case for abstinence
before marriage. It's weak people who are promiscuous. Strong
people respect themselves, others, and God with their bodies."
While Savannah-based Christian writer Harrison Scott Key, at
Worldmagblog, supports the abstinence message, he thinks the
group's secular nature will hurt it. "Her group's arguments are
powerful with the university audience, but if her propositions are
founded on secular ideologies, they will ultimately fail. Here's to
hoping there's more to these groups than the cracked and weary
discourse of the body, of oppression, of feminism. If so, kudos."
today's blogs
Dean Screams
By Bidisha Banerjee
Bloggers respond to Howard Dean's call to superdelegates to
make up their minds. They are underwhelmed by a Dutch
politician's much-hyped anti-Islamist video but overwhelmed by
Carla Bruni's visit to Britain.
Dean screams: Democratic National Committee Chairman
Howard Dean is urging neutral superdelegates to choose a
candidate so that the nomination could be settled by July 1 at the
latest.
"[Dean] is blocking Clinton's NDonly remaining path to the
nomination, which is to wait for Obama to self-destruct,"
explains DHinMi, a DailyKos diarist. "This is leadership from
Howard Dean. I wish he had demonstrated more on Florida and
Michigan, but his leadership on this is welcome," writes Big
Tent Democrat on TalkLeft.
"I'm thinking more and more to sit this one out...at this point I
don't think my vote will count. This is being decided by the
leaders of the party NOT the voters," fumes commenter
"lochnessmonster" on the Swamp, the blog of the Tribune Co.'s
Washington bureau. And Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall
underscores the "trickle of comments -- often only noted in local
papers -- from Clinton super-delegates who are maintaining their
support for Hillary but also saying that that support either may or
will change if Obama wins the majority of the pledged
delegates."
106/124
Is the deadline too early or too late? "July 1???? Why is there a
need to wait until then? The absolute latest date for the
superdelegates to decide should be June 4, the day after the final
primaries in SD and MT. But even that isn't necessary. The last
'super Tuesday' is May 6 (IN and NC). By May 7, everyone
should be able to put this thing to rest," comments Dan on Marc
Ambinder's blog. Irish Trojan in Tennessee Brendan Loy
downplays the date and supports a superdelegate
superconvention: "[I]f Hillary publicly buys into the concept
(even if kicking and screaming), then it will have the potential of
producing some actual closure to the race, as opposed to the
anticlimactic June trickle of superdelegate endorsements that
Dean seems to envision."
Read more about Dean's deadline.
Fit for Fitna: On Thursday, nativist Dutch politician Geert
Wilders launched his 15 minute anti-Quran film Fitna, which
juxtaposes verses from the Quran with images of recent
violence, on Live Leak. This aftertoon, Live Leak took the video
down, citing "threats to our staff of a very serious nature."
Many in the conservative blogosphere are happily embedding
the video. "Apparently Google still had it up and I was able to
get an English Copy. This video needs to go viral…which it has.
But we all need to post it. A point is being made that the
Muslims who get upset need to understand. Freedom of speech
is paramount to freedom itself," pontificates Pierre Legrand's
Pink Flamingo Bar. "Wilders also deserves a lot of credit for
focussing heavily on gays, and the fate that would be theirs if
Islam ever took over the Netherlands. If this movie manages to
win over Leftists in Europe, it would have done a great deal,"
comments InfidelPride on JihadWatch.
But critics of Wilders' approach abound. "While Michelle
[Malkin] and Co. are all up in arms supporting Geert's freedom
of speech, he is there asking for the Koran to be banned,
therefore stifling everybody's freedom of speech," reflects the
liberal law student behind Cowardly Political Musings.
"[W]ilders isn't actually serious about challenging Islamism,"
yawns Ali Eteraz, an American Muslim writer. "If Wilders
really wanted to expose Islamism — the entire legacy of 20th
century ideological Islam — he would start with how the French
Suez Canal Company funded the Muslim Brotherhood's first
mosque….Or Wilders could have expressed some outrage over
the drafters of the new Iraqi constitution — drafted in
consultation with Western lawyers — which makes Sharia the
law of the land (a fact bemoaned by Iraqi feminists)."
Wilders' production values are also being scrutinized. "[I]f I'm
going to get a death sentence on my head, I at least want to be
able to hold that head high for a job well done. This film was not
well done, it's standard youtube fare," scoffs A Dime a Dozen
Blog's graphic designer Robert Jago. Lebanon Update's Riemer
Brouwer, an expat in Beirut, makes another pointed critique: "A
Muslim expert made an interesting comment yesterday on Dutch
TV by saying that Wilders has copied the exact style of the Al
Quaeda recruiting tapes, as these tapes have a similar mix of
violent images and references to the Koran."
Read more about Fitna.
Carla conquers Britain: This week, Carla Bruni accompanied
French President Nicholas Sarkozy to Britain on her first state
visit as first lady. The British press gushed over Bruni's style,
comparing her to Jackie Onassis and Princess Diana.
"The tone for the coverage was set early when, the day before
France's first couple's visit, Christie's announced it was putting
nude photos of Ms. Bruni up for auction. The tabloid Daily Mail
and even the ostensibly more respectable Telegraph wasted no
time in serving the public interest by publishing one of the
photos (find them yourself, folks). " assert the editors of Foreign
Policy on their blog Passport.
Never mind the nude photos. Allsteim, who provides a detailed
wardrobe analysis, salutes Bruni's decision to wear Dior: "It was
a diplomatic fashion choice since Dior is a revered French
couture house, which is designed by the legendary Englishman
John Galliano."
"[P]eople forget she is posh totty if ever there was. The daughter
of a wealthy Italian industrialist, she's hobnobbed with highrollers her whole life," observes Second Cherry, an 'over-40s
babe.' "She's also fulfilling a media role that's been left vacant a
long time. The world has been looking for a style icon since
Diana snuffed it and maybe they've found it in Bruni."
Read more about Bruni.
today's papers
How To Lose a Fight in Five Days
By Daniel Politi
The New York Times leads with a look at what went wrong in the
Iraqi government's offensive on Basra. It all apparently comes
down to a question of planning, which was at least partly due to
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's failure to understand the full
strength of the militias, as he was convinced the assault would
be a success. Ambassador Ryan Crocker tells the paper that he
first learned of the operation on March 21 and insists U.S.
officials thought it would involve a long-term strategy to slowly
root out militias from the area. USA Today leads an interview
with Crocker, who says the offensive "had its share of problems"
107/124
and estimates that the United States had only about 48 hours'
notice before the operation began. Overall, though, Crocker,
who is set to testify before Congress next week, insists the
situation in Iraq has improved and says he expects the "political
and economic progress" to continue.
The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street
Journal's world-wide newsbox lead with Senate leaders agreeing
on a bipartisan plan to help the housing market. The package
would cost approximately $15 billion over the next 10 years and
involves a little give-and-take on both sides, as it's clear that
lawmakers are facing intense pressure to get something passed.
The WP is most blunt in stating up high that the measure
provides billions for "the slumping home-building industry
while offering little to homeowners threatened with foreclosure."
The plan would provide $6 billion in tax breaks for home
builders, tax breaks for those who purchase foreclosed
properties, grants for cities to buy foreclosed properties, $100
million for counseling, and a new deduction on property taxes,
among other measures.
When Maliki launched the full-scale assault in Basra, "nothing
was in place from our side," Crocker said. Apparently U.S. and
Iraqi officials were developing a plan that would involve a slow
buildup of troops followed by strategic attacks against militias.
Gen. David Petraeus even warned Maliki that acting too quickly
could reverse recent gains. But Maliki seemed determined to
have a triumphant moment and, displaying his very impulsive
nature, decided to send his troops into the city of Basra even
before all the Iraqi reinforcements had arrived. U.S. forces then
had to quickly get organized in order to come to the aid of the
Iraqi troops. On the upside, the move did show that Iraqi troops
have the ability to mobilize quickly.
In a Page One article, the LAT tries to figure out how the Iraqi
security forces performed during the fighting, which is
something lawmakers will undoubtedly ask Petraeus next week.
There is no clear answer, although most seem to agree that the
Iraqi forces did relatively well overall, even as the fighting
revealed they continue to be plagued with logistical and
command problems. "There were pockets of excellence, but
there was no synchronized excellence," a U.S. Army official
said. The biggest shortcomings seemed to come from the
national police, who often are not trained in urban warfare.
Although there are no official figures, there are reports that a
large number of police officers deserted or worked with militias
during the fighting. "Police work where they live and are
inherently influenced by the politics of their community," said a
Western security official, who estimates there was a more than
50 percent desertion rate in Mahdi Army strongholds.
Senators came under much criticism yesterday for removing the
provision from the housing legislation that would have allowed
bankruptcy judges to modify the terms of mortgages. Some
estimate this change could prevent as many as 600,000
foreclosures, notes the LAT. Passing it without this provision
"amounts to dancing around a fire when Congress is supposed to
be putting it out," the president of the Leadership Conference on
Civil Rights said. The WP points out that Democrats "will
almost certainly" try to reinsert the bankruptcy provision as an
amendment.
Under a huge picture of President Bush walking with the
president of Romania near a beautiful lake (swan included!), the
NYT points out that "for a man who came into office as the
nation's first M.B.A. president," he has "sometimes seemed
invisible during the housing and credit crunch." Yesterday was
another clear example of this because Bush was discussing
NATO membership while the Senate rushed out its bipartisan
plan. Allowing others in the administration to discuss the issue
could be a good idea considering his low approval ratings. But
some Republicans worry that if Bush continues this way, most
will simply remember how he was surprised to hear about $4-agallon gasoline, and he will end his tenure appearing out of
touch with the concerns of regular citizens.
The WP and WSJ front news that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben
Bernanke finally said the R-word before Congress yesterday. "A
recession is possible," Bernanke said. Although Fed leaders
usually avoid using the word, many analysts praised Bernanke
for being more honest, even if he was saying something that
everyone already knew. "This testimony says that the Fed isn't in
denial anymore," an economist said.
The NYT and LAT front the latest from Zimbabwe, where
election officials announced that President Robert Mugabe's
party had lost control of parliament. And now it seems virtually
certain that there will be a runoff between Mugabe and Morgan
Tsvangirai. The LAT notes that an initial pronouncement from
opposition leaders who said Tsvangirai had received more than
50 percent of the vote, which the NYT cites, was actually due to
an "embarrassing math mistake." In fact, the opposition's own
figures show Tsvangirai didn't quite reach the 50 percent
threshold. Both papers note that there's growing fear that a
runoff will lead to widespread violence that was all too common
in previous campaigns.
In the WSJ's op-ed page, Richard Bond, a former chairman of the
Republican National Committee, says Senate Majority Leader
Harry Reid has the power to end the Obama-Clinton fight if he's
willing to put his own interests aside for the good of the country
and his party. Reid would have to agree to step down and offer
the role of Senate leader to Clinton. Bond thinks that "only the
proffer of this consolation prize would likely persuade Mrs.
Clinton" to drop out. Meanwhile, USAT says many Democratic
insiders see North Carolina's primary on May 6 as Clinton's last
chance to improve her standing or face even more calls for her
withdrawal from the contest.
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The NYT breaks word that rapper Jay-Z is close to reaching a
$150 million deal with concert promoter Live Nation. The paper
says the deal "rivals the biggest music contracts ever awarded"
and notes that it could be a sign of what is to come as the music
industry deals with the constant decline of album sales. The
contract would give Live Nation a stake in virtually every aspect
of Jay-Z's career for the next 10 years, and the WSJ suggests that
these side deals with the ever-enterprising artist are the real draw
for Live Nation rather than his concerts. "I've turned into the
Rolling Stones of hip-hop," Jay-Z said.
today's papers
Yoo Said It
By Joshua Kucera
The Washington Post leads with the release of a
notorious 2003 Justice Department memo that
argued that military interrogators didn't have to
follow the law because they were defending the
country. The New York Times leads with Senate
leaders vowing to bring bipartisan legislation to
help homeowners at risk of foreclosure, a story
that also tops the Wall Street Journal's world-wide
newsbox. The Los Angeles Times leads with the
federal government saying it will waive a variety of
environmental regulations to ease construction of a
fence between the United States and Mexico. USA
Today leads with Federal Aviation Administration
whistleblowers saying that top FAA officials are too
cozy with airlines and block enforcement of safety
rules.
The interrogation memo, written by John Yoo, then
the second-ranking official at the Office of Legal
Counsel, put forward a "national and international
version of the right to self-defense." The existence
of the memo has been known for a long time, but
it was released only yesterday.
According to the memo: "If a government
defendant were to harm an enemy combatant
during an interrogation in a manner that might
arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be
doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the
United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network. …
In that case, we believe that he could argue that
the executive branch's constitutional authority to
protect the nation from attack justified his actions."
Legal scholars competed with each other to come
up with the strongest possible denunciation of the
memo. "This is a monument to executive
supremacy and the imperial presidency," one told
the NYT, which also fronted the story. But the Post
got an e-mail from Yoo himself, now a law
professor, who said: "Far from inventing some
novel interpretation of the Constitution … our legal
advice to the President, in fact, was near
boilerplate." The Post also helpfully posts PDFs of
the memo, in two parts, so you can be appalled
yourself.
Senators have just gotten back from a two-week
recess, and apparently they heard from
constituents who aren't happy the government
bailed out investment bank Bear Sterns without
doing anything to help ordinary homeowners hit by
the country's economic crisis. "Everyone was home
for a couple of weeks, and if they heard what I
heard in Florida, I think that they realize this is a
serious, serious problem," said Florida's Republican
Sen. Mel Martinez, as quoted in the LAT, which offleads the story.
Lawmakers still haven't finalized the details of the
bipartisan housing bill, but the papers say its
provisions are likely to include money to issue
bonds to refinance subprime loans, funding for
counseling programs for at-risk homeowners, and
requirements for lenders to give more information
to homebuyers. It would leave out a controversial
provision of a Democratic-backed bill, the ability of
bankruptcy judges to modify home loan terms. The
bill could be ready as early as this afternoon, the
NYT says.
The Department of Homeland Security and its
head, Michael Chertoff, apparently got tired of
dealing with all the regulations that the border
fence was up against. It had already prepared draft
environmental impact assessments as required by
law, and "environmental groups said they were
awaiting the final reports when Chertoff made the
announcement."
"It's surprising how cursory their reviews have
been," said Kim Delfino, director of the California
branch of Defenders of Wildlife. "There's a lot of
boilerplate and analysis shifted from one document
to another. It's kind of like they were going
through the motions." With the new waivers, DHS
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hopes to finish the 670-mile project by the end of
the year.
in an Islamic society would be very comfortable,"
one Mormon tells the paper.
Zimbabwe's longtime dictator Robert Mugabe
appeared to be losing control of his country, as
initial results from Saturday's presidential election
show an opposition candidate winning, and there
are apparently talks underway for a peaceful
handover of power. Both the NYT and the Post put
the story on the front page.
today's papers
Both the WSJ and Post find bad news for John
McCain as he runs for president in a struggling
economy. One of his top advisers, Phil Gramm, led
the deregulation of the banking and financial
services industry as a senator in the 1990s and is
now a vice chairman of a bank wrapped up in the
subprime mortgage crisis. Another adviser is Carly
Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, who
was publicly ousted by the company's board. The
Post asks if these people are good for McCain to be
tied to publicly. "I, for one, have thought about it a
lot," one McCain adviser answered. "And that's all I
will say."
The Journal, meanwhile, finds that business groups
that are traditionally Republican-friendly are
donating more to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama
than to McCain. One reason is that McCain has
annoyed many business leaders with his vaunted
"maverick" approach; another is that people don't
expect him to win. Corporations have been
"moving in a direction where the electorate is likely
to be," a Democratic analyst said.
Also in the papers … Intelligence centers
operated by states have more personal data on
you than you probably were aware of, the Post
finds. Also in the Post, South Dakota is going to try
another abortion ban referendum. The United
Kingdom is showing a stiff upper lip and putting its
troop drawdown in Basra on hold in light of
increased violence there, the NYT says. A House
committee dabbled in the online world of Second
Life, with predictably cringe-worthy results, the
Post reports. The LAT says the Olympic torch is set
to make its only appearance in the United States
next week, in San Francisco, and the Chinese are
probably thinking twice about choosing a city with
such a high per-capita number of angry activists.
Mormons and Muslims are finding that they have a
lot in common, the LAT reports. "A Mormon living
Food 911
By Daniel Politi
The Los Angeles Times leads with a follow-up to the World
Food Program's recent emergency appeal for more money and
takes a look at how the worldwide phenomenon of rising food
prices is leading to more hunger and food shortages. The WFP
director calls it "a perfect storm" because not only does it cost
much more for the agency to continue its current programs, but
the number of people who need help is continuously increasing.
The New York Times leads with a lawsuit that claims insurance
companies are costing the Social Security system millions of
dollars every year by forcing people who file disability claims
with them to also apply for money from the federal program
even if it's clear that they'll be denied. These insurers often force
claimants to appeal the denial, thus costing more money and
delaying benefits for people who really need the government
program.
The Wall Street Journal leads its world-wide newsbox with a
look at how the offensive in Basra weakened Prime Minister
Nouri al-Maliki and increased the power of cleric Muqtada Sadr.
Iraq was quieter yesterday after most of Sadr's supporters appear
to have complied with the cleric's call for a cease-fire. The
Washington Post and USA Today lead with the resignation of
Housing Secretary Alphonso Jackson. USAT points out that it's
the first time in Bush's tenure that a member of his Cabinet has
resigned amid a criminal investigation. The WP characterizes it
as a clear blow to the administration, particularly since he's
leaving in the middle of the mortgage crisis. Democrats had
called for his ouster because Jackson is the subject of multiple
investigations for charges that he improperly used his position to
hand contracts to friends. Jackson, one of the few remaining
officials in the Bush administration who followed the president
from Texas in 2001, announced he would be leaving on April
18.
Besides feeding people in places like Sudan, where many rely
exclusively on aid, WFP officials are particularly concerned
about what they say is a new category of needy people who
could once afford to eat but for whom rising prices have turned
the most basic of necessities into somewhat of a luxury. These
are mostly people who live in urban areas and are at the mercy
of market prices. Several countries have already experienced
food riots, and officials expect more to come. Meanwhile, the
LAT does a good job of explaining how growing hunger can
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quickly reverse years of progress in developing countries by
worsening overall health and decreasing education levels.
if you can hold for a few years, we've got a really great plan to
restructure the federal emergency response system.' "
Insurers who pay out long-term disability insurance want
claimants to try to get Social Security benefits because it would
cut down on the amount of money the private company would
have to pay out every month. The problem is that the
government program defines disability much more stringently
than private companies and usually doesn't pay out money unless
the person can't do any job at all. But everyone still has the right
to apply for Social Security benefits and each case must be
investigated, which is why even the ones that are obvious denials
cost time and money for an already-strapped system. These costs
are then multiplied when insurers force claimants to appeal a
denial again and again.
If you fall victim to a prank today, don't worry, it probably
means people like you. The NYT points out anthropologists have
found that practical jokes, like the ones many will be victims of
during April Fools' Day, are a common way to welcome
someone into a group. "It can be a kind of flattery, if you're
being brought in," a sociologist tells the paper. Plus, it could be
good for you. "The feeling of 'I should have known better' is the
sort of counterfactual that serves to highlight your own
shortcomings," a psychologist explains. "These counterfactual
insights can kick-start new behaviors, new self-exploration and,
ultimately, self-improvement."
The WSJ talks to U.S. officials who say Maliki also lost a
significant amount of support because there's a widespread
perception among Iraqi people that he ordered the strikes in
Basra to improve his political standing before the October
elections. But now Maliki looks weaker than ever, and Sadr has
seldom looked stronger. An expert in Shiite politics tells the WSJ
this will end up being a "defining moment for Iraq" because it
will mark "the birth of Sadrist power." Meanwhile, McClatchy is
reporting that the Iranian general who helped Iraqi generals
negotiate the cease-fire deal with Sadr is on the U.S. terrorist
watch list. "Iran showed that they could mediate this cease-fire
while the U.S. has shown very little influence," a Middle East
expert said.
All the papers front or reefer a look at how the plan by Treasury
Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. to overhaul the financial
regulatory system, which was officially unveiled yesterday, was
immediately criticized by a variety of lawmakers and interest
groups. The plan calls for streamlining the agencies that oversee
the financial system, but no one really thinks it has much of a
chance of passing, because it's simply too complicated and
involves too many moving pieces. The Post points out that the
plan calls for the revamping or elimination of some longtime
Washington institutions, which is never easy to do. The LAT
quotes an expert who says Paulson is merely "taking advantage
of the current crisis to push a regulatory restructuring plan that
would otherwise attract no interest."
Paulson warned that "those who want to quickly label the
blueprint as advocating more or less regulation are
oversimplifying." And indeed, the NYT notes that the plan
"features both regulatory and deregulatory elements."
Regardless, Democratic lawmakers said they simply don't have
time for such huge overhauls when they have to deal with the
current crisis. "This is a wild pitch. It is not even close to the
strike zone," Sen. Christopher Dodd said. The Consumer
Federation of America was more blunt: "Rolling out this plan in
the middle of the current crisis is like telling Hurricane Katrina
victims stranded on their rooftops in New Orleans, 'Don't worry,
today's papers
Best-Laid Plans
By Daniel Politi
The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and
the Wall Street Journal's world-wide newsbox all lead with
Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr calling on his followers to put down
their weapons and bring to an end six days of clashes with Iraqi
and U.S. forces. In exchange, Sadr demanded that the Iraqi
government stop "illegal and haphazard raids," and free his
followers who are now imprisoned but haven't been convicted of
any crimes. Sadr also demanded the government help bring back
"the displaced people who have fled their homes as a result of
military operations." The LAT says the six days of fighting have
killed more than 350 people.
USA Today leads with word that the Transportation Security
Administration will begin testing a more serene screening
process at one airport in the hopes that it will improve security.
Here's a preview: "Mauve lights glow softly, soothing music
hums, and smiling employees offer quiet greetings and
assistance." TSA officials think it will be easier to catch
suspicious passengers if security checkpoints are no longer
synonymous with stress. In a chaotic atmosphere, screeners
could subconsciously feel the need to rush. "Chaos gives
camouflage," the TSA administrator explained.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki called Sadr's statement "a step in
the right direction," though it's unclear whether the government
is willing to meet his demands. Also, no one knows whether
many of his followers will listen and actually drop their weapons
since his movement is hardly unified and many have divided
into separate militias. Regardless, everyone reports that even
though violence continued after Sadr's announcement, it seemed
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as though it had decreased in several key areas. "Some laid down
their arms while others kept fighting," the Post summarizes.
across the country as many speculated that it was giving the
government an opportunity to rig the results.
The NYT, WP, and USAT point out that Maliki allies traveled to
Iran in order to negotiate with Sadr. USAT focuses its Page One
story on the Iran angle and says the agreement was brokered by
the commander of the Quds brigades of Iran's Revolutionary
Guard Corps. "The government proved once again that Iran is a
central player in Iraq," a political analyst tells USAT.
The LAT fronts, and everybody else reefers, the death of Dith
Pran, the Cambodian-born journalist whose amazing story of
survival in the brutal Khmer Rouge regime served as the basis
for the 1984 movie The Killing Fields. He was 65 and died of
pancreatic cancer. Dith helped Sydney Schanberg, the NYT
journalist who covered the rise of the Khmer Rouge, make sense
of Cambodia. When Schanberg was forced to get out of
Cambodia, he had to leave Dith behind. Nothing was heard from
him for years, and he was presumed dead. But more than four
years later, Dith managed to escape and moved to New York,
where he became a photographer for the NYT.
How much the violence will decrease in the coming days still
needs to be seen, but the NYT and LAT both note that if there's
one single loser from the six days of clashes it's Maliki, who
clearly underestimated the strength of the militias. The prime
minister made a big deal of emphasizing that he was overseeing
the operation in Basra and vowed to stay in the area until the
militias were defeated. "If anyone comes out a winner, it's Sadr,"
a Middle East expert tells the LAT. "He's coming out stronger,
and Maliki looks like a lame duck." The WP points out that Sadr
appears "more politically astute" than he was a few years ago
because he seems to realize that his chances of winning big in
the upcoming provincial elections would markedly improve if he
can claim credit for helping end the current bout of violence.
Early-morning wire stories report that the Green Zone was once
again pounded by rocket and mortar attacks today.
The WSJ goes inside with word that Housing and Urban
Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson will resign this
morning. The move is a blow to the Bush administration since
Jackson has been a key player in its efforts to deal with the
housing crisis. But Jackson has faced intense criticism
throughout his tenure, and many critics have pointed to his
failures at handling public housing after Hurricane Katrina. Most
recently, Jackson has been under investigation for charges that
he gave out lucrative contracts to friends.
The WSJ fronts a look at how a number of figures in the
Democratic Party are throwing their support to Sen. Barack
Obama in an effort to get Sen. Hillary Clinton to drop out of the
race. The paper gets word that Sen. Amy Klobuchar of
Minnesota will endorse Obama today. In addition, the seven
Democratic House members from North Carolina are all
expected to endorse Obama as a group before the state's May 6
primary. Although calls for Clinton to get out of the race
continue to get louder, the WSJ points out that "no Democrat
today has the power to knock heads and resolve the mess."
Everyone notes that Zimbabwe's main opposition party claimed
victory after presidential and parliamentary elections, which
would mark an end to President Robert Mugabe's 28 years in
power. But these claims were based on unofficial vote counts at
each polling station while the nation's election commission
released almost no results. The delay led to growing tension
USAT reports that a new survey reveals traditional dog names
are falling out of favor, and more people are choosing to give
their four-legged friends names that are usually associated with
humans. Still, it seems some traditions are hard to shake since
Buddy continues to be among the top names for male dogs.
Other top choices include Max and Rocky for males, while
Bella, Molly, and Lucy head the list for females. "It's a reflection
of the position that pets hold in a household," an expert in dog
history tells the paper. "They are integral members of the family,
just like a child."
today's papers
Bogged Down in Basra
By Ben Whitford
Sunday, March 30, 2008, at 5:18 AM ET
The New York Times leads with with a report on violence in
Basra, where Shiite militiamen continued to frustrate the Iraqi
government's efforts to wrest back control of the city; U.S.
troops also clashed with insurgents in Baghdad, prompting fears
that the tension could flare into a wider conflict. The Washington
Post eyes the Treasury Department's plans to rewrite America's
financial rule-book; lawmakers and regulators said the revamp
was unlikely to jolt the U.S. economy out of its current funk.
The LA Times leads with a look at the Democratic district
conventions now underway in Texas, where tensions are running
high as supporters of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama jockey
for position.
Despite the presence of 30,000 police and government troops,
Mahdi army militiamen yesterday retained control of broad
swathes of Basra, repeatedly launching attacks on government
positions before vanishing into alleyways and slums. The NYT
reports that violence also spread north to Shiite districts of
Baghdad, prompting fears of a wider breakdown of the ceasefire
called by the Mahdi Army's founder, Shiite cleric Muqtada al-
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Sadr. The Post reports that the U.S. military provided ground
and air support to Iraqi government forces in Basra, and killed
dozens of Shiite insurgents during clashes in Baghdad.
percent is widely believed to be an underestimate—the Post says
a stolen result could tip the country into chaos. "If Mugabe wins,
there will be civil war," said one opposition supporter.
The LAT fronts a piece framing the battle for Basra as a power
struggle between the Mahdi army and the Islamic Supreme
Council of Iraq, the national government's largest Shiite faction;
the NYT likewise notes that the government assault may be
intended, at least in part, to tarnish the Mahdi army's reputation
ahead of coming provincial elections. On the NYT's op-ed page,
Anthony Cordesman makes a similar point, warning that the
United States should be cautious about too readily endorsing the
central government's attack on the Sadr movement. The U.S.
presidential hopefuls also joined the debate; John McCain said
the Basra assault was a sign of the Iraqi government's strength,
while Barack Obama argued that it highlighted the Bush
administration's failure to resolve Iraq's lingering political
tensions.
Both the NYT and the Post cover Condoleezza Rice's calls for
Israeli and Palestinian negotiators to cooperate on security in the
West Bank; the move, which came as Rice began a trip to the
Middle East, was intended to jump-start three-pronged
negotiations between Israel, Hamas and the Palestinian
Authority.
Back home, the backlash has begun against the Treasury
Department's proposed overhaul of America's decades-old
financial regulatory apparatus; the Post reports that the revamp
will take years to implement and will have little impact on the
current credit crunch. And while the move would allow the
Federal Reserve to send SWAT teams into industry sectors or
institutions that threatened the stability of the overall financial
system, the NYT notes that the fine print makes it clear that the
government would do virtually nothing to regulate many of the
financial products that precipitated the current crisis. In an
editorial, the NYT says it's hard to have confidence in the
reforms, given the Bush administration's "disastrous" track
record.
Hillary Clinton earns space on the Post's front page by declaring
her intention to stay in the presidential race until the end of the
primary season and perhaps even until the Democratic National
Convention in August; she said she wouldn't consider bowing
out until the spat over Michigan and Florida's invalid primaries
was resolved. The NYT runs a similar story inside, eying
Clinton's efforts to woo Indiana voters ahead of the state's
primary on May 6. Clinton's pledge came as Texas Democrats
bickered over the state's delegates; the LAT reports that
infighting could cause the Democratic Party lasting damage at
the state and local level. Barack Obama, meanwhile, says he has
no problem with Clinton staying in the race; the Post's editorial
board agrees, arguing that "polite political combat" will only
strengthen the eventual Democratic nominee.
Zimbabweans went to the polls yesterday, but many feared that
whichever way they voted, President Robert Mugabe would
retain his 28-year grip on power. The NYT reports that voter rolls
are absurdly swollen with the names of fabricated or deceased
voters; even Ian Smith, the white prime minister who led the
country when it was still Rhodesia, is on the lists. Still, with the
economy in utter collapse—the official inflation rate of 100,000
Colombian officials say computer files captured in a
controversial cross-border raid show that the Venezuelan
government has been attempting to arm Colombia's leftist
guerrillas. The NYT says the files, currently being examined by
Interpol, suggest that Venezuela's intelligence chief offered to
mediate between Colombia's FARC rebels and a Panamanian
arms dealer, and that the group asked Venezuelan President
Hugo Chávez for a quarter-billion-dollar loan "to be paid when
we take power." Chávez mocked the reports, saying the files had
been forged. "This computer is like à la carte service, giving you
whatever you want," Chávez said. "You want steak? Or fried
fish? How would you like it prepared? You'll get it however the
empire decides."
today's papers
No More Alphabet Soup
By David Sessions
The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times lead with a
Treasury Department plan to grant broad new market-stabilizing
powers to the Federal Reserve. The plan is part of a larger
attempt to simplify the nation's "alphabet soup" of financial
regulatory agencies. The Washington Post fronts that story but
leads with another Bush administration proposal—a plan to bail
out homeowners struggling to pay their mortgages after the
values of their homes have dramatically decreased. The proposal
encourages lenders to let homeowners refinance their property
for a more affordable rate, forgiving a portion of their debt in
exchange for financial backing from the federal government.
The Wall Street Journal tops its world-wide newsbox with U.S.
forces' launching of airstrikes in Basra, Iraq, as Iraqi forces faced
a strong resistance from Shiite militias.
The Treasury Department's proposal comes after a year of study
by Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson, the LAT reports, and
would overhaul a system built piece-by-piece over the past
century and a half. The plan, which requires detailed approval by
Congress, would consolidate the current jumble of regulatory
agencies—including the Securities and Exchange Commission—
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into three overseeing institutions. The NYT predicts Democrats'
response, saying they'll likely complain that it does not go far
enough toward limiting the activities that caused the current
financial crisis. An LAT quote from one prominent Democrat,
New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, confirms that premonition:
Schumer says that Democrats agree with "large parts" of the
proposal in "broad outlines" but that it does not address "the full
spectrum of complex new financial securities." Both the WP and
the LAT credit the NYT for breaking the story on its Web site late
Friday.
The WP leads with a second Bush administration proposal
addressing the credit crunch—a plan to rescue homeowners who
face foreclosure because falling prices mean they now owe far
more than their homes are worth. Details are still being finalized,
but the administration has revealed that the plan resembles one
proposed two weeks ago by Democratic Rep. Barney Frank
(legislation the WSJ says has "little hope of passing in its current
form"). Under the proposal, the Federal Housing Authority
would urge lenders "to forgive a portion of those loans and issue
new, smaller mortgages in exchange for the financial backing of
the federal government." If successful, the Post explains, the
plan would mark the first time the White House has committed
federal funds to assist individual borrowers.
The NYT, WP, and LAT all front Sen. Patrick Leahy's call for
Sen. Hillary Clinton to drop out of Democratic race for president
and avert a bloody nomination battle with Sen. Barack Obama.
The NYT serves up Sen. Clinton's behind-closed-doors
analysis—she told Democratic allies that she is the girl being
"bullied out" of the race by the rough boys. Democratic National
Committee Chairman Howard Dean set out to calm
"increasingly anxious" Democrats, the WP reports, by taking a
television tour and setting a "target date" of July 1 for finalizing
the party's nomination. (Dean was suspiciously short on details
as to how the "target date" will be met.) The LAT explains the
"growing anxiety" in the party as Sen. Clinton reaping what she
sowed—a self-focused, "complex and difficult" relationship with
fellow Democrats that is coming back to haunt her candidacy.
Clinton hopes to right her campaign with victories in
Pennsylvania, where she enjoys a comfortable lead in the polls.
U.S. forces launched airstrikes in Basra in the midst of heavy
fighting between U.S. and Iraqi soldiers and Shiite militiamen,
according to the WSJ's world-wide newsbox. The NYT reports
that the campaign was initially handled by Iraqi security forces,
who asked American forces to step in when they were unable to
control the situation. Washington Post correspondent Sudarsan
Raghavan fleshes out the day of sudden violence with a
sprawling report from Sadr City, where he was trapped 19 hours
alongside the Mahdi army of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
Raghavan's riveting account includes real-time interviews with
Abu Mustafa al-Thahabi, a military adviser to the Mahdi army.
Neither the NYT nor the WP can resist subtle philosophizing
about what the pitch battles in Iraq "underscore."
Spring brings baseball to LAT's Column One, which observes the
early rehearsals of the Florida Marlins' new plus-sized male
cheer team, the Manatees. The Miami-based team's latest
attempt at fighting perennial low-attendance, the Manatees
weigh in from 225 to 435 pounds, and most of them still can't
dance after weeks of practices. Or maybe they're too busy
making hot dog jokes and staring at the team's more traditional
cheerleaders—the Mermaids—to remember the steps. The LAT's
humorous, understandably skeptical account is perhaps best
captured by the response of one Manatee's 8-year-old daughter:
"Oh, daddy, no!"
Elsewhere in the lighthearted Saturday copy, a WP op-ed
belatedly debunks Sen. Hillary Clinton's "3 a.m. Phone Call" ad
by providing a history of presidential slumber. The experts—
including Henry Kissinger—say they can't remember any
decisions that had to be made in the middle of the night, and
even when presidents are woken, they can usually take the report
and go back to sleep. "After all, if it's the end of the world,
there's nothing the president can do about it. If it isn't, it can
almost always wait till breakfast."
today's papers
Swimming With the Sharks
By Daniel Politi
The Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and the Wall Street
Journal's world-wide newsbox lead with the latest from Iraq,
where tens of thousands took to the streets in Baghdad to protest
against the crackdown on Shiite militias that is being overseen
by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. At least 125 people have
been killed, but the Iraqi security forces seem no closer to
getting rid of the militias in Basra than when the offensive began
on Tuesday. The Green Zone was once again pounded by rocket
and mortar attacks, which yesterday killed another American
contract worker. The government imposed a curfew in Baghdad
after explosions rocked the capital throughout the day and
violence continued to rage in several cities. The WSJ highlights
that a bomb was placed under an oil pipeline near Basra, which
officials said could affect shipments and increase prices. In a
Page One story, the WSJ highlights that the increasing violence
once again threatens efforts to lure big oil companies to Iraq.
The Washington Post devotes most of its above-the-fold space to
the role of U.S. forces in the Iraqi crackdown but leads with a
look at how the actions taken by the Federal Reserve in the last
couple of weeks could mark a vast expansion in the role of the
central bank in the future. The Fed was just trying to deal with
the current crisis, but many are now starting to recognize the
actions will have long-lasting consequences. "Whether we like it
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or not, they've recreated the financial universe," a finance
professor declared. USA Today leads with the hundreds of flight
cancellations that passengers have had to deal with this week
and warns there could be more to come as the Federal Aviation
Administration continues cracking down on airplane safety.
After problems were discovered in Southwest planes, the agency
ordered all airlines to check for problems. American Airlines
and Delta Air Lines canceled flights this week, and some suspect
others will follow suit as the FAA continues its inquiry.
President Bush declared yesterday that Iraq is returning to
"normalcy" and praised the latest operation in Basra as a sign
that the Iraqi government is taking security matters seriously.
"This offensive builds on the security gains of the surge and
demonstrates to the Iraqi people that their government is
committed to protecting them," Bush said.
The WP off-leads its Iraq story and says there are hints that U.S.
troops are more involved in the fighting than military officials
let on. One of the paper's correspondents saw U.S. troops in
armored vehicles directly fighting Mahdi Army forces in Sadr
City while Iraqi units largely stuck "to the outskirts of the area."
Throughout the day, "the din of American weapons" could be
heard, and the WP pointedly declares that U.S. troops "took the
lead in the fighting." So U.S. forces are getting more involved in
the conflict even as one American official admitted that "we
can't quite decipher" the situation and figure out why the
government decided to act now. But there's a growing consensus
that Maliki is firing "the first salvo in the upcoming elections,"
says the official, who then gives us the understatement of the
day: "It's not a pretty picture." U.S. military officials insist
American troops are merely playing backup to Iraqi security
forces, but commanders with the Mahdi Army say they've been
fighting U.S. troops for the past three days.
The LAT points out that U.S. officials are now in a strange
situation where they have to consistently talk about how the
crackdown is aimed at Shiite militias in general and insist that
it's rogue elements of Muqtada Sadr's army that are to blame and
not the cleric. Of course, they're worried that Sadr will officially
call off his cease-fire. But as the WP makes clear, that cease-fire
seems to exist in name only, since Sadr's "fighters and Iraqi and
U.S. forces are waging full-scale war in places." The NYT once
again notes that there's "little evidence" that Iraqi security forces
in Basra are targeting anyone besides Mahdi Army fighters.
Slate's Fred Kaplan plainly declares that the fighting in Basra "is
not a clash between good and evil or between a legitimate
government and an outlaw insurgency. … It's just another
crevice in the widening earthquake called Iraq."
The WP talks to administration officials who say Maliki
launched the offensive without consulting the United States. But
the move couldn't have been that much of a surprise seeing as
the NYT reported on March 13 that the Iraqi army was planning
an offensive to take control of Basra's port.
The Post says that when the leaders of the Fed decided to open
up what is "essentially a bottomless pit of cash," which was
previously available only to traditional banks, to large
investment houses, they knew it was a big deal. The plan calls
for that money to be available for at least the next six months,
but even if it expires, the perception of how the Fed will act in a
crisis has been forever changed. Experts now say that investment
banks and their clients may be less worried about risky
investments in the future since they will assume that the Fed will
come to the rescue if there's a crisis. The question now is
whether the Fed will formally take on a more heavy-handed
approach to regulating Wall Street.
The LAT and NYT front, while everyone else goes inside with,
the proposals put forward by the presidential contenders to deal
with problems in the economy. Sen. Barack Obama emphasized
there should be more federal regulation of the financial markets,
while Sen. Hillary Clinton proposed a plan to retrain laid-off
workers. Obama put forward a $30 billion economic-stimulus
package, and Clinton's aides took the opportunity to highlight
that she had proposed to spend $30 billion to help prevent
foreclosures (the country needs "leadership, not followership,"
they said). Both the Democratic contenders sharply criticized
Sen. John McCain, who said the federal role should be limited
because "it is not the duty of government to bail out and reward
those who act irresponsibly, whether they are big banks or small
borrowers."
The NYT highlights that, despite the rhetoric, both parties have
agreed that the government should be involved, but "the
ideological clashes are … more about whom it should try to
rescue." In the end though, their results could be similar, since
it's probably impossible to separate the individuals from the
markets, because each would suffer if the other is doing badly.
The NYT's Paul Krugman analyzes their proposals and says that,
just as with health care, each candidate's policy tells "a tale that
is seriously at odds with the way they're often portrayed."
McCain, who is often referred to as an independent maverick,
"offers neither straight talk nor originality" as he offers
traditional right-wing views. Obama is seen as "a
transformational figure," but his proposals "tend to be cautious
and relatively orthodox." For her part, Clinton, who "we're
assured by sources right and left, tortures puppies and eats
babies," offers proposals that "continue to be surprisingly bold
and progressive."
The Post takes a look at Obama's huge success in raising funds
through the Internet and says that in the past two months the
senator has "rewritten the rules of raising campaign cash." The
key to his "elaborate marketing effort," which involves spending
heavily on Internet ads, seems to be that his campaign doesn't
ask for money at every possible turn and instead has pursued a
"strategy of slow-walking its way into supporters' wallets."
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The WSJ reports that as foreclosures continue to increase, banks
and mortgage companies are increasingly finding that
homeowners are taking revenge by trashing their homes before
handing over the keys. As a result, many are offering
homeowners hundreds, or thousands, of dollars "to put their
anger in escrow and leave quietly."
Maliki wound up a loser because he launched the offensive,
demanding that Sadr's militiamen surrender their weapons—
then, a few days later, agreed to a cease-fire that kept the militia
armed.
Bush lost because he backed the campaign with America's armed
might and his own proclamation.
The Iraqi army lost because its commanders and troops revealed
all too clearly that they're still unable to lead a successful battle.
video
Wars: Chechnya and Iraq
A Magnum photo essay.
"I'm embedded with the Americans in Iraq. As a Westerner,
there is no more access to the insurgents' side. I don't claim to
have any overview. History made my choice—it's fine!"
The U.S. Army lost because its troops are now doomed to stay in
Iraq for still longer than they might have been led to believe.
(The five "surge" brigades will go home in July, as scheduled;
but the case will now be made that the Iraqi army's poor showing
in Basra means we can't prudently withdraw more of our own
troops just yet.)
Who won?
—Thomas Dworzak
Photographs by Thomas Dworzak
Produced by Adrian Kelterborn
war stories
Bush Bungles in Basra and Bucharest
The president's latest gaffes.
By Fred Kaplan
Good lawyers usually don't take their cases to the Supreme
Court unless they have a strong chance of winning. By the same
token, good wartime presidents don't announce that the fighting
has reached "a defining moment" unless there's a strong chance
that it will resolve in their favor or they believe that by
rhetorically raising the stakes, they'll spur their troops to victory.
Yet President George W. Bush did just that last week, after Iraqi
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki sent troops—backed by U.S. air
power and (we've since learned) Marines and special-ops
forces—into the southern city of Basra in an effort to crush
Muqtada Sadr's radical Shiite militia and, by extension, its
political base.
As a result of this needless hype, the clash—which, on its own
terms, ended in stalemate—took on the air of a defeat, and in
many dimensions. To call the battle "a defining moment" was to
declare that its outcome would define the state of the struggle.
And that state does not look good in the aftermath.
Sadr won because his Mahdi Army resisted the offensive—at the
same time that his men continued to abide by his moratorium on
attacking U.S. troops directly (in other words, he showed
himself both militarily effective and politically in control).
And the Iranians won because Maliki turned to them to mediate
the cease-fire with Sadr, thus confirming their status as a major
player in Iraqi politics and a dominant power on Iraq's southern
port. (The Iranians probably would have won no matter what
happened, because the rival Shiite militia backing Maliki—the
Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, 10,000 members of which
fought alongside the official army—also has ties to Iran. Maliki
afterward admitted those 10,000 into the national armed forces.
Does this mean that the ISCI militia has been co-opted into the
Iraqi government—or that the government is, even more than
before, controlled by the militia?)
This week, Bush traveled to Europe, a less confounding part of
the world, for the annual conference of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization, held this year in Bucharest. Yet here, too, he
behaved like a bad lawyer—and did more harm than good to
those whose cause he advocated, in this case the new (if
somewhat shaky) democracies of Ukraine and Georgia.
Leading up to the NATO conference, Bush assured those leaders
that he would push for their admission into the alliance. The
problem was that he hadn't checked with the other members first.
When most of those other members voted down the proposal, for
a variety of reasons, the Ukrainians and Georgians felt insulted
and humiliated—understandably so. Their hopes had been raised
and then dashed—all in public.
NATO did release a statement noting that the two nations might
be admitted someday. If Bush hadn't made his baseless promises
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ahead of time, the document might have been read as an
assurance. But, under the circumstances, it seemed like a
brushoff.
Again, Bush turned the status quo into defeat. Why? The New
York Times quoted a "senior official" as saying that Bush wanted
to "lay down a marker" for his legacy. First, Bush may be
thinking about his legacy, but the other Western leaders will
have to live and lead in Europe after he's out of power. Second,
what kind of marker is it to tick off Ukrainians and Georgians
for no good reason and to pile another layer of uncertainty and
awkwardness onto the whole panoply of East-West relations?
As Casey Stengel once screamed, "Can't anybody here play this
game?" That was when he was manager of the New York Mets
in the team's first season. Bush has been in power now for seven
years and two and a half months. It's unbelievable that he has
nine and a half months—enough time for more "birth pangs"—
to go.
next five days, I plan not to stray beyond the borders of the
Disney empire. (Don't worry, that still leaves me 47 square
miles, an area roughly twice the size of Manhattan, in which to
roam.)
Why on earth would I, a childless adult, visit Disney World by
myself? Basically, to figure out what the hell's going on in this
place. Because America has clearly decided it's hallowed
ground.
More than 100,000 people visit Disney World every day. I went
when I was a kid. Nearly all my friends went. A few went more
than once. Heck, I know Jews who weren't bar mitzvahed but did
go to Epcot.
Somehow, this cluster of amusement parks has grown into a rite
of American childhood. Kids are born with homing beacons set
for Orlando. Meanwhile, parents—despite the hefty costs—often
seem just as eager or more so to make the pilgrimage.
My question is: What exactly are we worshipping at this mecca?
well-traveled
The Mecca of the Mouse
Worshipping at the church of Disney.
By Seth Stevenson
From: Seth Stevenson
Subject: The Wide World of Disney World
Posted Monday, March 24, 2008, at 7:17 AM ET
Soon after checking in to my hotel room, I discover a mouse in
the bathroom. Three mice, in fact. One is imprinted on the bar of
soap. One peers out from the shampoo label. And a third, on
closer inspection, is a washcloth—ingeniously folded by hotel
staff to create two protruding, terrycloth ears.
I'm growing used to these rodentophilic touches. Earlier today,
as I drove into the enormous Walt Disney nation-state here in
Florida, I noticed a tall electrical stanchion topped with a pair of
Mickey ears. Soon after, I spotted a water tower with the ears
painted in black. When it comes to branding, Disney's aim is
total immersion.
Which is good, because that's my aim, too. I'm here to envelop
myself in the Disney World experience. I've obtained lodging
deep within the compound, at a Disney-owned resort. I've
bought a $280 multiday pass, granting access to more Disney
attractions than any person could reasonably endure. For the
Day 1: Epcot
I drive the three minutes from my hotel and ditch my rental car
in the lot. After swiping my pass-card and getting my fingerprint
scanned (a new security measure), I enter through Epcot's gates.
Once inside, I'm immediately jaw-dropped by the looming mass
of Spaceship Earth.
It's tough to ignore—being a 16-million-pound, 180-foot-high
disco ball. One of Walt Disney's personal rules for theme-park
design involved a concept he curiously termed the wienie. A
wienie is a show-stopping structure that anchors the park. It is
meant be iconic and captivating, so that it lodges in your visual
memory forever.
Spaceship Earth is perhaps the wieniest of all wienies. And it
announces right off the bat that Epcot will not be your standard
kiddie fun park. Over at the Magic Kingdom, the wienie is the
fairy-tale Cinderella Castle. Here, it's a geodesic sphere inspired
by the theories of R. Buckminster Fuller.
When I enter Spaceship Earth, I board a ride tracing the history
of communication—from the first written symbols to the advent
of the personal computer. It's low season now, so there's a
mercifully short wait for the ride. That's the good news. The bad
news is that once the ride is under way, I discover that it's a
vague, aimless snooze. Toward the end of it, we pass what I
believe to be an animatronic Steve Jobs. He's pneumatically
gesturing inside a replica of a 1970s California garage.
When the ride is over, we spill into an area called
"Innoventions." It's sponsored by a company called Underwriters
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Laboratories, which specializes in product-safety compliance.
Among the fun activities here for kids: Try to make a vacuum
overheat! Also: See if you can fray the cord of an iron! (I'm not
kidding about this. There are 9-year-old boys with furrowed
brows attempting to cause product failures.)
Several other exhibit halls surround Spaceship Earth. According
to my guidebook, they feature "subjects such as agriculture,
automotive safety, and geography." Well gosh, that's what being
a kid is all about!
Inside a pavilion labeled "The Land," I find myself being
lectured on sustainable development. The lecture is delivered by
the animated warthog from The Lion King. I can overhear the
nice mom behind me trying to distract her whimpering toddler.
"Look honey," she says, reading from her Epcot brochure, "the
next ride is a 'voyage through amazing greenhouses and a fish
farm!' " The kid cries louder.
Though I was only 8, I still remember the day Epcot opened in
1982. The TV networks treated the event as news, airing live
coverage. Every kid in my third-grade class was desperate to see
this wondrous new place.
Once the fanfare faded, though, we began to sense that Epcot
was a slightly odd duck. Disney had purposefully designed it to
appeal more to young adults than to their offspring. It was bound
to disappoint all but the nerdiest of children. It had been the
largest private construction project in all of American history—
requiring three years and $1 billion to complete—and in the end,
it was essentially a tarted-up trade expo.
A perusal of Disney history suggests that Epcot was in some
ways the brainchild of the man himself. What Walt envisioned
was an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow—a
real town, serving as a laboratory for cutting-edge ideas about
urban planning. But after Walt died in 1966, his dream was
gradually perverted into the theme park we see today.
Sponsors were called in to defray the huge costs, and in return,
Epcot's "Future World" exhibits became an ode to giant
corporations. The automotive safety ride is brought to you by
General Motors. The agricultural science ride is compliments of
Nestlé. In his tome Vinyl Leaves: Walt Disney World and
America (the title refers to the fake leaves on a Disney "tree"),
mildly paranoid anthropologist Stephen M. Fjellman writes that
Epcot's attractions are meant to "convince us to put our lives—
and our descendants' lives—into the hands of transnational
corporate planners and the technological systems they wish to
control."
When I leave the Future World area, I walk around the Epcot
lagoon to the other half of the park. Here I enter the "World
Showcase." It consists of 11 separate pavilions, each dedicated
to a different nation.
I like the idea of the World Showcase. And some of the
architecture—the faux Paris street scene, for example—displays
an astounding talent for mimicry. But if you've ever actually
been outside America, this nod to the rest of the world is mostly
just insulting.
Half the pavilions have no cultural content at all. The Morocco
complex is just souvenir stores selling carpets and fezzes. The
ride meant to encapsulate Mexico is a collection of slapstick
Donald Duck skits. (Donald loses his bathing suit while
parasailing in Acapulco, Donald flirts with some caliente
señoritas, etc.) I guess none of this should surprise me. Lots of
tourists view travel abroad as basically a chance to shop for
regionally themed trinkets.
By the early evening, it's getting dark, and both kids and adults
are getting crankier. A lot of strollers get wheeled into corners as
moms whisper-shout, "Settle down, Hunter" and "You stop that
right now, Madison." I'm also noticing a lot more people buying
the $8.50 margaritas available next to the Mexico pavilion.
I take this as my cue and head back to the parking lot.
Tomorrow's another day—and another theme park.
Subject: Disney's Hollywood Studios
Posted Tuesday, March 25, 2008, at 7:36 AM ET
The keynote attraction of Disney's Hollywood Studios, listed
first on the park brochure, is something they call the Great
Movie Ride. This ride purports to trace the history of American
cinema. "Travel through classic film scenes and Hollywood
moments," the pamphlet promises.
Eager to see what sort of curatorial stamp the Disney imagineers
might put on this topic, I line up, wait my turn, and hop aboard a
conveyor pod. Soon, I'm rolling along past various iconic movie
stuff. There's Jimmy Cagney cracking wise. There's Humphrey
Bogart wooing Ingrid Bergman. And oh, look, it's Sigourney
Weaver battling an alien. (To my great disappointment, we at no
point pass Debbie doing Dallas.)
There are two big problems with this ride (besides there being no
Debbie). First, as best I can tell, the kids sitting all around me
have no idea who any of these actors are. Never seen any of
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these movies. They perk up solely at references to films that
were released after 2005.
Second, these aren't video clips we're watching: Those famous
scenes are being performed by animatronic robots. They have
waxy faces and whirring pneumatic limbs. Frankly, they're
weird. And they, too, leave the kids completely cold.
I'm sure "audio-animatronic" creatures were nifty when Disney
pioneered them in the 1960s. They became possible after
Wernher von Braun lent his pal Walt Disney some magnetic
computer tape—the same kind that was used by NASA to
synchronize its launches. (Pause to contemplate: Wernher von
freaking Braun! He gave the world not only the V-2 rocket and
the Saturn V superbooster, but also the means to create an
android Sigourney Weaver. Perhaps the greatest innovation of
all!)
In 1964, an animatronic Abe Lincoln wowed the crowds at the
New York World's Fair. People were convinced he was a live
actor. Impressive achievement. Four decades later, though, who's
impressed when a mannequin blinks and raises its eyebrows?
Sadly for Disney, many well-known rides throughout all the
parks—even the famed Pirates of the Caribbean—still rely on
animatronics as a central selling point. I'm guessing that within a
decade all these robot performers will get phased out. Robot
Humphrey and Robot Sigourney will get powered down one
final time, then tossed on a pile in some dark, archival closet. A
few classics—maybe android Abe—will be left out on display to
appease the nostalgists.
However dated, it's still very Disney—this notion that the
ultimate entertainment is to watch a machine impersonate a
human. It hints at Disney's core philosophy. If I had to choose a
single word to describe the Disney theme parks, that word would
be inorganic. Or, as a cultural studies post-doc might put it:
"Blah blah simulacra blah blah Baudrillard." As has been noted
in many a dissertation, we visit Disney World to savor the
meticulous construction—physical, mythical, and emotional—of
a universe that's completely fake and soulless.
But oh, how beautifully soulless it is. Upon leaving the Great
Movie Ride, I walk down a facsimile of Sunset Boulevard. Here,
I notice the asphalt under my feet has rubbed away in spots,
revealing the old streetcar tracks beneath. Of course, there never
was a streetcar. And its tracks were never paved over to make
way for the automobile age. And that pavement was never
subsequently eaten away by the ravages of time. In fact, this
entire fake history came into being all at once, fully formed,
plopped on top of some Florida scrub land. As famed
Baudrillard scholar Michael Eisner announced at the opening of
the park in 1989: "Welcome to the Hollywood that never was
and always will be."
I think it's these interstitial moments—the seamlessness and the
attention to detail—that really stun Disney visitors and stay with
them long after they've left. The rides are great, sure, but every
amusement park has rides. Disney creates fully realized
narratives.
Consider the Tower of Terror, located at the end of Sunset
Boulevard. It's just a classic drop tower, where the goal is to
send your stomach up into your sinuses. A regular amusement
park would put you in a windowed gondola, crank it up high,
and drop it. But here the complicated back story is that we're
visiting a haunted, 1930s-era Hollywood hotel. The hotel lobby
contains accurate period furnishings—battered velvet chairs,
musty lampshades.
As I wait in line, shuffling forward, I eavesdrop on the couple
behind me. The woman (I've gathered she's from a showbusiness background) is marveling at Disney's set design. "Look
at the distressing on all the surfaces," she says with real
admiration. "That's not easy to do. You can't just let the set hang
around and age for 50 years." She's right: The place is yellowed,
stained, and cobwebbed to a perfect patina. You'd never guess
the whole thing was built in 1994.
After passing through the lobby, we're shown an expensively
produced film about the hotel's haunted past. Then "bellhops" in
Barton Fink-ish costumes lead us to our seats. And then, at last,
the actual ride happens. It's about 45 seconds of screaming our
tonsils out as we plummet down an elevator shaft. All that effort
and ingenuity wrapped around such a simple thrill. But this is
precisely what draws folks all the way to Disney World instead
of to their local Six Flags.
When the ride's done, I go back outside and watch people
strolling down Hollywood Boulevard. It turns out that the most
far-fetched fantasy in Disney World isn't the magic spells, the
haunted buildings, or the talking animals. It's the fact that there
aren't any cars.
For the mostly suburban Americans visiting here, this whole
pedestrianism concept is at once liberating and bewildering.
People don't seem ready for it. On the one hand, they adore
walking with their children in a totally safe environment (one
that's outside and is not explicitly a shopping mall). On the other
hand, they're getting extremely winded.
It's pretty far to walk the whole park. "Slow down! Stop walking
so fast," I hear over and over—sometimes from fat adults, other
times from their chubby children. They sweat through oversize
T-shirts. They breathe heavily with every step. Their plump
calves go pink in the sunshine, contrasting with their bright
white sneakers and socks. Self-propulsion appears to be a wholly
unfamiliar challenge.
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Still, the rewards for their efforts are many. Around any given
corner there might lurk Power Rangers, mugging for
photographs. Sometimes a troupe of fresh-faced teens will
suddenly materialize and perform dance numbers from High
School Musical. Later, you can buy a multipack of High School
Musical socks at one of the sidewalk souvenir stores. (OK, I
actually bought some of these socks. They were for my 26-yearold sister. We share a refined sense of humor.)
As the afternoon wanes, and I grow tired of the masses, I duck
into the least-attended attraction I can find. It's called "Walt
Disney: One Man's Dream." Inside, there's a small museum
dedicated to Walt's life and a theater screening a short
biographical film. There are about 12 people in the auditorium
when the film begins. One family leaves halfway through
because their toddler is cranky.
Poor Walt, I think to myself. One day you're chilling with
Wernher von Braun, inventing lifelike robots. The next day
you're just some dude who drew a mouse.
(Hey, let this be a lesson to you, High School Musical brats.
There will come a time when no one will be buying your
licensed hosiery anymore. Who will sing and dance with you
then? Allow me to answer: You will sing and dance alone.)
Subject: Disney's Animal Kingdom
Posted Wednesday, March 26, 2008, at 8:05 AM ET
The Imagineering Field Guide to Disney's Animal Kingdom
reveals that the imagineers deliberately left the parking lots out
in front of this Disney-style zoo as bleak and barren as they
could. A wasteland, with no strips of grass to interrupt the
endless asphalt slab. They wanted to heighten the contrast we
feel when entering into the lush, wooded Animal Kingdom park.
The scheme "ensures that the immersion into nature ... will be
very impactful."
My first thought upon reading this was: Screw you, imagineers!
Parking lots suck enough as it is. You're saying you made yours
even more depressing than necessary, just so you could
showcase some cutesy landscaping idea? Go imaginuck
yourselves!
Once I'd gotten this indignation out of my system, my second
thought was: Gosh, they sure do put a lot of thought into this
stuff. Leafing through these behind-the-scenes books (I also
have The Imagineering Field Guide to Epcot) brings to light, yet
again, the insane attention to detail you find at every Disney
property.
For instance, once you've made that transition from the parking
lot, through the gates into the Animal Kingdom entrance area,
the imagineers' next goal is to carefully orchestrate your first
glimpse of the massive Tree of Life. (It's one of this park's two
wienies—the other being a replica Mount Everest.) Various
inclines, berms, and hollows have been arranged so that you're
forced to ascend a small rise before suddenly stumbling onto a
gorgeous, unimpeded view of the tree. (The tree itself is an
impressive feat of engineering. And is, of course, totally fake.)
I've been curious to see how this obsessive nano-focus would be
reconciled with the challenges of a zoo. Live animals seem
decidedly un-Disney, as they can't be compelled to perform a
repeated, synchronized sequence. (Unlike an animatronic robot.
Or a low-wage employee.) With the animals' free will involved,
it's impossible to ensure that every guest will receive the same,
focus-group-approved experience. This sort of thing makes the
imagineers extremely uncomfortable.
Their response was to make the animals into a sideshow. In
many cases, you don't even get to watch the animals from a
static viewing point, as you would at a regular zoo. Instead,
there's a "ride" with a silly narrative structure (about, for
instance, chasing poachers), during which you get quick, oblique
glimpses of the animals as you speed by. The true stars of
Animal Kingdom aren't the lions, apes, and elephants. The stars
are the precision-crafted environments you walk through.
Here, come with me as we visit the delightful little village of
Harambe. Harambe is the perfect East African port town of your
mind's eye. When you first come upon it, it's hard not to feel
you've been teleported to Kenya.
All the signs are in the right typeface. The buildings are lovingly
dilapidated. The paint-color choices are perfect. (The imagineers
say they took paint chip samples on research trips and did
surface rubbings to get the building textures right.)
Having traveled to Africa myself, I can tell you that Harambe
gets only two minor details wrong. The first is that Africa has
many more flies than this. And the second is that Africa has
black people.
Given the otherwise remarkable accuracy of Harambe's set
design, I'm sort of surprised that Disney didn't manufacture
15,000 animatronic Africans. OK, so they did import a few
actual, nonrobot Africans to work the snack stands. Jambo! But
perhaps the bigger issue is: Where are the black tourists visiting
the park? I've seen maybe two black families all day. As in the
rest of Disney World, there are literally more French people here
than African-Americans.
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Another population dynamic I've noticed: the dearth of children
at this supposed family destination. I've seen lots of adult
couples with no kids in tow. Even when there's a token toddler
present, there are often six or seven grown-ups attached to it. I'm
beginning to suspect it's the adults who really want to be here,
while the kids are just serving as fig leaves.
This theory is bolstered by a scene I witness while waiting in
line for food. An elderly, gray-bearded gent is in front of me,
trying to buy a soda, when all of a sudden he's interrupted by his
twentysomething daughter, who is scurrying toward us.
"Daaaaaad! She's not tall enough to go on the ride!" whines the
woman, gesturing with a pout at the tiny girl clinging to her
thigh. "So now I can't go! And you wandered off!" The man says
nothing. "Take her hand," the woman demands. The poor old
fellow is mortified by this behavior (and is in the middle of his
beverage transaction, to boot). But he silently takes his
granddaughter's hand so his horrid daughter can go enjoy her
fricking roller coaster.
Admittedly, Disney has some pretty great roller coasters.
Toward the end of the day, I walk over to Anandapur (a fake
Himalayan village, complete with Tibetan-style prayer flags)
and board the Expedition Everest ride. I'm seated in a rickety rail
car, which creaks up to the top of the 200-foot mountain before
swooping, banking, and dropping at insane speeds. Everyone
screams together. It's a group outpouring of white-knuckle
terror. When the ride's over and I disembark, I find I've broken
out in a light sweat. My dazed fellow riders look at each other in
total awe: Can you believe what we just went through?
The same thing happens on the nearby Kali River Rapids ride.
There are seven other people on my raft, and as we float down
the rushing river, I can feel us starting to gel into a team. We
shout warnings to each other when the white water rages ahead.
("Look out, here it comes!") We catch each others' eyes and can't
help but smile. The little girl sitting next to me cackles every
time we get hit with a splash. She's shouting, "I'm soaked!" with
a big, adorable grin.
If I've found one redeeming feature of the Disney World
experience, it's the community spirit that's fostered when
strangers all join together for a primal shriek of fear—or joy.
Subject: Celebration and Downtown Disney
Posted Thursday, March 27, 2008, at 7:44 AM ET
The incessant magicalness is starting to wear on me. I'm feeling
a need to escape Big Rodent's clutchy claws. At the same time, I
don't want to risk too much corruption from outside influences.
I'd rather not stray too far—geographically or spiritually. The
perfect compromise: a visit to Celebration.
This insta-town was conceived by Disney, built on Disneyowned land, and initially managed by Disney executives (though
the company has shed much of its involvement over time). And
it's only a few miles from my hotel. I make the short drive, park
my car downtown, and hop out for a look.
I've long been a fan of planned communities. I once lobbied my
editor at Newsweek to let me write a story about Co-op City—
those ugly brick apartment towers in the Bronx, N.Y., next to I95. My resulting (very short) article included a quote terming
Co-op City's architecture "a disgrace to humanity." The piece
also noted that Co-op City had been constructed on the rubble of
an abandoned theme park. The park was called Freedomland,
and it was the creation of a former Walt Disney associate.
Celebration, though it wasn't built until the 1990s, was in some
ways the creation of Walt himself. Walt's original plan for his
Florida swampland was to create a brand-new living town—the
true Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.
Celebration is the belated (and mangled) realization of that
dream.
Walt had envisioned a high-tech, sci-fi city, in appearance not
unlike Epcot's Future World area (monorails whizzing by and
whatnot). That's not how things turned out. Celebration is
instead backward looking, with neotraditional, faux-prewar
houses. Its old-timey, Norman Rockwell vibe is less Future
World and more Main Street U.S.A.
Celebration's planners were proponents of New Urbanism (in
itself a somewhat nostalgic credo, what with its emphasis on
marginalizing the automobile). The town's layout is pedestrianfriendly, the retail and restaurant district is a short stroll from
many houses, and all the car garages are hidden in rear alleys not
visible from the street. Sure enough, within moments of my
arrival, I find myself smack in the middle of a New
Urbanist/Rockwellian moment: children walking home from
school together as a friendly crossing guard holds up his stop
sign.
The thing is, I can't help but wonder if these kids might be
animatronic. Everything looks waaaaay too perfect. The town
famously has a strict rulebook legislating things such as yard
upkeep, what color your curtains can be, and what kind of
furniture (if any) you can put on your porch. This results in a
place so scrubbed of individuality that the houses seem to resent
their human residents.
I've spent three straight days inside the Disney World fortress.
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All the streets here have the same power-washed gleam as the
streets in the Disney theme parks. The neighborhoods have the
same built-all-at-once aesthetic. I actually like some of the
downtown buildings designed by shnazzy architects. (Favorites
include the toylike post office by Michael Graves and the retro
cinema by Cesar Pelli—though I feel Philip Johnson's town hall
with its forest of pillars is a facile, unfunny joke.) But having
spent the last few days surrounded by maddeningly perfect
Disney habitats, I'm now getting the sinking sense that I haven't
escaped the Mouse at all.
Celebration forces upon you the same seamless, manufactured
experience you get when you walk through the "villages" of
Harambe and Anandapur. The inhabitants of Celebration are
essentially living inside a theme park. (We might call it Suburb
Land.) Each night when the park shuts down, they're still inside
the gates.
In the evening, I decide to check out downtown Disney, back
inside the fortress. It's basically a very high-end strip mall—with
a Planet Hollywood instead of an Applebee's, and a Virgin
Megastore instead of a Hot Topic. I grab dinner at Bongos
Cuban Café (celebrity owner: Gloria Estefan) and then stroll
over to Pleasure Island as it gets dark.
Pleasure Island is where adults on vacation at Disney go at night
to escape their children. Also here: businesspeople stuck in
Orlando for conferences and locals who treat this as their regular
hangout. (Pleasure Island doesn't require a Disney Pass.) There's
a club for every taste, from the disco lounge (8-Trax) to the hiphop spot (BET Soundstage) to the mainstream, top-40 dancehall
(Motion).
A single cover charge gets you in to all the clubs, all night. So
people bounce back and forth among the venues. This creates the
sort of nightlife melting pot that you rarely, if ever, find in the
real world. Because it's Disney, and we all feel safe and
emboldened, no one's afraid to venture into what might be
perceived as alien territory.
Nerdy white people stride confidently into the "black" club.
Older couples wade onto dance floors packed with
whippersnappers. Gay dudes sashay through the redneck-y rock
club. (When I say that, I'm not trying to play on a stereotype. I
literally watched three gay men prance about and do ballet
jumps while the house band played Lynyrd Skynyrd. These guys
were egging each other on, trying to get a rise out of the crowd,
but none of the lumpy heteros seemed to pay any mind.)
I find the whole scene oddly hopeful—at first. If people can all
get along together here, maybe we can bring that tolerance back
home with us. As the night wears on, though, different groups
begin to self-segregate.
Early in the evening, for instance, I had a drink at a club called
Mannequins. It had a mixed crowd: moms and dads in dorky
khakis, some college-age kids getting blitzed, and one pair of
gay guys dancing up a storm under the disco ball. I was
heartened by the diversity. But it didn't last.
When I popped back a few hours later, I ordered a drink and
scanned the room again. It appeared the demographics had
undergone a radical shift. Now there were 150 men positively
swarming the rotating dance floor. They were accompanied by
about three women. And I couldn't help but notice that these
men, as a group, seemed extraordinarily handsome, trim, and
well-dressed.
Ohhhhhhhhhh. I suppose that name should have been a clue,
now that I think about it.
Anyway, it's all good in the Disney 'hood. When we envision a
"magic kingdom," we, each of us, have our own ideas.
Subject: The Magic Kingdom
Posted Friday, March 28, 2008, at 11:39 AM ET
Inside every Disney theme park, you'll find at least one booth—
often more than one—stocked with information about Disney
Vacation Club Resorts. A nice man or woman will hand you a
brochure, offer to take you on a tour of model rooms, and talk
you through a few different time-share options. Apparently, it's a
terrific deal if you want to bring your family back to Disney
World every year.
Query: Why would anyone want to go to Disney World every
year? You can pretty much see the whole thing in a week. OK,
fine, kids might like it enough to go back again—once, or maybe
twice. But this time share makes financial sense only if you
return about seven times.
Holy frack! I'd go mental if I had to spend seven precious
vacations trapped inside the Disney universe. But let's put my
personal feelings aside. Let's say you're a parent. Mightn't it be
better to broaden your children's horizons just a tad? Like,
maybe visit Canada—instead of just the Canada pavilion in
Epcot?
According to Disney, there are more than 100,000 member
families in the Vacation Club. These people have handed over
all their foreseeable leisure time to the Walt Disney Co. It's an
astonishing decision, no? And it's surely less about a destination
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than an ideology. We'll call it Disneyism. These families aren't
choosing a vacation so much as a religion.
Walt Disney, the man, is a singular character in American
history. He gets his start as an animator, then becomes a movie
mogul, an amusement park baron, and eventually a
mythmaker—a sort of unprecedented high priest of American
childhood. By the mid-1960s, with his techno-utopian plans for
the living city of Epcot, Walt had even turned into (in the words
of anthropologist Stephen M. Fjellman) "a social planner and
futurist philosopher."
It's these later incarnations of Walt that really fascinate me. The
guy is sculpting the toddler id while also designing a domed
metropolis with a monorail. How did this happen? A man who
got famous drawing a cartoon mouse was now going to solve all
America's urban problems?
It's hard to think of a comparable career arc. But as a parallel,
evil-twin figure, consider Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.
He was born 10 years after Walt, also in heartland America. His
career likewise took off on the strength of mass-market
entertainments (in Hubbard's case, sci-fi). And then
midcentury—during that Atomic Age moment when everything
somehow seemed possible—he turned his attention to a grand,
ego-gratifying social project of dubious utility.
Who knows what ambitions might have bubbled up in Walt if
he'd lived past 1966. But I think one way to look at his life is as
L. Ron Hubbard gone good. This is a long way of saying:
Disney isn't just a media outfit with some theme parks. It's a
worldview—sprung from the head of a lone, imaginative man.
And ultimately, for the people who come back to Orlando year
after year, it's a church.
On my last day here, I visit the Magic Kingdom—the original
and still best-attended of the Disney World parks. After walking
down Main Street U.S.A. (a fake, turn-of-the-century boulevard
lined with yet more Disney souvenir stores), I come upon the
famous Cinderella castle. Fairy-tale spires everywhere. It's so
gleaming, it looks like they repaint it every night. (Over the last
several years, furthering my Disney-as-religion theory, the castle
has become a prime location for wedding ceremonies. Up to five
weddings per day are held on Disney World's grounds. Mickey
and other characters will even attend your wedding reception.
For a fee.)
As I get closer to the castle, I see the familiar Disney apostles
(Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy) performing musical numbers
on a stage, enthralling a large crowd. The lyrics to their songs
shuffle around a few key words—dreams, magic, imagination,
wonder—and weave them into some upbeat string arrangements.
Hymns for the Disneyist congregation.
Many of the little girls watching this are wearing princess
dresses (bought at those souvenir stores). For years, Disney must
have sought a boys' version of the princess obsession, and it
seems they've finally found it—thanks to the blockbuster Pirates
of the Caribbean films. Lots of little dudes are running around in
pirate costumes, waving plastic swords.
Disney has increasingly managed to find characters to leverage
for each different demographic group. Tinkerbell, from Peter
Pan, has been rebranded as the slightly saucier "Tink" and now
graces T-shirts targeted at your tween daughter. Meanwhile,
your death-metal son will be drawn to the skull-and-bones
imagery of The Nightmare Before Christmas franchise.
Even adults wear Disney gear here. There are moms in Mickey
ears and dads with giant sorcerer hats. This is a safe place for
everyone to act like a kid, and I'll admit there's a certain
sweetness about that.
I'm not a fan of the gender dynamic implicit in the
princess/pirate split. (Visiting Mickey and Minnie's side-by-side
houses does little to reassure me on this score. Mickey's house
has a nonfunctioning kitchen and is full of sports equipment,
while Minnie has a to-do list on her wall with the entries "Bake a
cake for Mickey" and "Make a box lunch for Mickey.") Still, my
heart melts when I see a little girl wearing a princess dress while
sitting in her wheelchair, beaming ear to ear as her even beamier
parents take pictures.
I can understand why families love Disney World. And there's
nothing wrong with making kids happy. I just think we'd all be
better off if we didn't indoctrinate our kids in the Disneyist
dogma.
After spending the past five days here, I've come to the
conclusion that Disney World teaches kids three things: 1) a
meaningless, bubble-headed utopianism, 2) a grasping, whining
consumerism, and 3) a preference for soulless facsimiles of
culture and architecture instead of for the real thing. I suppose it
also teaches them that monorails are cool. So there's that.
I end my day with the "It's a Small World" ride. Yes, it's a prime
example of bubble-headed utopianism. Yes, it features
animatronics, which are dated and lame. And yes, that song just
never ends. No matter: The ride somehow manages to charm me
anyway.
Designed for the UNICEF pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair, it
shows us children of many cultures all living in harmony. (A
color-saturated, Pop Art harmony.) It's an unassailable message,
and there's also something comforting in the ride's retro
simplicity. Our open-top boat floats along, and I love the gentle
bump and redirect when it hits an underwater guide rail. I even
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have a soft spot for the music. (Though I prefer to reimagine it
as a slow, melancholy ballad.)
As I leave the park, I decide that after all my cranky
complaining, I'm glad my week came to an end this way. "It's a
Small World" makes for a nice, pleasant memory to finish on.
I'm feeling positive about Disney again. And then there's an
incident on the parking tram.
I'm seated on the tram, ready to ride back out to the parking lot
where my rental car's waiting. The driver has already blown the
horn and announced that no more boarding will be allowed.
Suddenly, I notice a woman 20 yards away, running toward us.
The driver spots her too. The tram is in motion now, and he
screams over the loudspeaker: "Ma'am! Stand back! There is no
more boarding!" But the woman can see that there's no real
danger here—the vehicle is moving at, like, 3 miles an hour—
and fer crissakes she doesn't want to wait 15 minutes for another
tram if she doesn't have to.
The driver keeps shouting. The other passengers are tut-tutting at
this rule-breaker. The tram keeps rolling. The woman is getting
nearer.
As I watch all this, I start to think about the totalitarian
seamlessness of Disney. The berms that hide the loading docks
and the Dumpsters. The fireworks that go off every night at
precisely 9 p.m. The impeccably G-rated entertainment. The
synchronized rides. The power-washed streets.
"Ma'am!" the driver yells again, with real exasperation. She's
just a few strides away, with her eyes on that slow-moving prize.
"Ma'am, there is no more boarding at this time!"
I can't help but break into a satisfied grin as the woman hops up
on the running board and takes a seat.
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Slate.com

Transcription

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