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Table of Contents
foreigners
In Praise of Political Rock Stars
gabfest
Advanced Search
The Huge Agenda Gabfest
altered states
green room
Change You Can't Click On
eBay and Ivory
architecture
green room
Renzo Piano's California Adventure
The Corn Isn't Green
books
hey, wait a minute
Downsizing Andrew Jackson
The Audacity of E-mail
chatterbox
hot document
Post Drinks Cheney's Kool-Aid!
CBS Rewards Bush Stonewaller
chatterbox
hot document
What We Didn't Overcome, Part 2
Suing God
chatterbox
human nature
What We Didn't Overcome
Original Skin
corrections
human nature
Corrections
Knocked-Up Grandmas
culturebox
jurisprudence
Zen and the Art of New York Times Headline Writing
What's the Best Way To Pack a Court?
day to day
jurisprudence
Glass-Ceiling Smashers
Dismantling Guantanamo
dear prudence
lifehacking
The 40-Year-Old Infant
The Quest for the Perfect Morning Routine
dvd extras
moneybox
Imagine Seeing John Wayne in IMAX
The Big Three Are a National Disgrace
explainer
moneybox
Can Your Country Get Kicked Out of the G-20?
What's the Matter With Greenwich?
explainer
movies
Brother, Can You Spare a Dinar?
000
explainer
movies
Who Stole the Cookie From the Cookie Jar?
Slumdog Millionaire
explainer
number 1
When the Deity Knows You're Dead
"AXXo You Are a God"
fashion
other magazines
Fashion Advice for Michelle Obama
How He Did It
fighting words
philanthropy
Barack to Reality
The Rise and (Potential) Fall of Philanthrocapitalism
food
poem
A Short History of the Bagel
"There Was a Man of Double Deed"
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
1/82
politics
today's papers
The TMI Presidency
Back, Back, Forth, and Forth
politics
today's papers
A Dog We Can Believe In
Almost Fired
politics
today's papers
So When Will a Muslim Be President?
What's Good for GM is Good for Obama
politics
today's papers
Chicago Hope
I Will Follow You
press box
today's papers
Crazy About Guns
The Big To-Do List
press box
today's papers
Don't Count Drudge Out
Labor's Loss
recycled
war stories
"This Is Nicolas Sarkozy. Is Sarah Palin Available?"
War Never Ends
recycled
war stories
Do World Leaders Still Use Telegrams?
Five Silver Linings
slate v
Dear Prudence: Hermit Husband
sports nut
Curriculum Vitale
Advanced Search
Friday, October 19, 2001, at 6:39 PM ET
sports nut
Rasheed Wallace Is a Toaster
supreme court dispatches
Everything Vibrates
technology
Seven More Things You Need for Your Computer
altered states
Change You Can't Click On
After one big change, Obama makes a few smaller changes to his Web site.
By Peter Bray
Wednesday, November 12, 2008, at 11:31 AM ET
technology
You Are Now Friends With Barack Obama
television
Trivial Pursuits
the book club
Outliers
Now that the election is over, it's time to break some campaign
promises! Because of the Web's constant hunger for new
information, President-elect Barack Obama is in a uniquely
difficult spot. He's issued and revised so many white papers and
policy proposals that if he so much as sneezes the wrong way, he
risks reversing something published on his campaign Web site.
the green lantern
Wood, I Wouldn't
His transition site, change.gov, isn't helping matters.
the spectator
Over the weekend, all of the policy pages on the site were
removed. Their caterpillar-short life certainly suggests that
change is coming. Fortunately for Obama, most people don't
take ephemera published on the Web as seriously as, say, "Read
my lips" statements caught on tape. So it's perhaps not surprising
that the changes attracted widespread notice but not very much
controversy.
The Good Life of a New-Media Guru
today's business press
Bush Declares Capitalism Accomplished!
today's papers
The New Workout Plan
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
2/82
There are a few smaller but puzzling changes. Like this: Obama
still believes in community service, apparently, but not enough
to require students to do it. Nor is he much interested in your
"vision" for America if you are not American. For a while, he
was seeking comments from folks in other countries on what he
should do as president. Now there's no field for your country—
the form assumes you're American. "President of the world"?
Maybe not.
Finally, Obama's astonishing gain of more than 700,000 new
Facebook friends in 10 days has got to be a record. (During the
same period, McCain lost 1,000 friends.) Maybe Obama could
be president of Facebook, if not the world.
architecture
Renzo Piano's California Adventure
Part II: San Francisco.
By Witold Rybczynski
Wednesday, November 12, 2008, at 6:56 AM ET
Click here to read a slide-show essay on Renzo Piano's
California Academy of Sciences building. Click here to read
Part I, in which Witold Rybczynski reviewed Piano's recent
addition to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
.
.
.
books
Downsizing Andrew Jackson
Why the warrior president is no hero for our polarized times.
By Louis P. Masur
Monday, November 10, 2008, at 7:07 AM ET
Andrew Jackson, the warrior president who simultaneously
denounced big government and expanded executive power, has
been riding high recently, a bipartisan hero in polarized times.
Historian Sean Wilentz and others, following lines first laid
down in Arthur Schlesinger's classic The Age of Jackson (1945),
have heralded Jackson for his assault on privilege and
aristocracy. In this telling, Jackson served as a powerful
executive who used the authority of his office to save the Union,
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
defeat the moneyed interests, and, less happily, remove the
Cherokees from their ancestral lands.
In a very different spirit, Karl Rove has compared George Bush
to Andrew Jackson: a man of the people who believed in
providence and opposed big government. In American Lion, his
new biography of the seventh president, Jon Meacham, the
editor of Newsweek, dutifully wrings his hands at all the right
places—at Jackson the slaveholder, Jackson the killer, Jackson
the hothead—but adds his voice to the admiring chorus. Jackson
was "a great general and a transformative president," he
concludes, a leader "genuinely committed to the ideal of
democracy," who was "strong and shrewd, patriotic and
manipulative, clear-eyed and determined." He was the president
who, of all the early presidents, "is in many ways the most like
us."
There certainly are parallels to be drawn between the incumbent
and Jackson, an imperious man who stretched the power of the
presidency, flouted international law, ignored the Supreme
Court, filled government positions with partisan supporters,
relied on an elaborate campaign apparatus, and espoused small
government while proceeding to expand its size. But that is only
to say that Jackson was modern less by virtue of his principles
than in his willingness to bend them when it suited his purposes.
If he is a model for our times, it is not a very heroic one. Nor
was Jackson in fact the decisively formative force in his own era
that the hagiography suggests. As David Reynolds, who teaches
at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York,
demonstrates in his astute and concise history of the period,
Waking Giant, the times defined Jackson as much as he defined
the times.
If anything, Jackson belonged to the past, not the future. Barely
in his teens, he fought in the Revolutionary War, and he held
dearly to dreams of land and community at a moment when
capitalism and individualism felt liberating. He was the first
president born (in 1767) in a log cabin, the first not from
Massachusetts or Virginia, the first not to attend college. He was
an orphan. He made something of himself, and the American
people loved that, but he was also a Mason at a time when an
anti-Masonic movement suspicious of the secretive society
gathered support across the nation. He also lived in the Southern
world of honor, rooted in loyalty to kin relations and vigilance in
defending the virtue of women: It was a world crumbling around
him. Jackson, the president whom people proclaimed as one of
their own, was very much up to date in one regard: He liked his
comforts and introduced a novelty to the White House enjoyed
only by aristocrats and guests at swank hotels—running water.
Jackson's election in 1828 did not single-handedly usher in a
democratic revolution; as Reynolds points out, he benefitted
from an expansion in voting rights for white males that occurred
during Monroe's presidency. Suffrage expansion came for
different reasons in different places: competition between
3/82
Federalists and Republicans before the Democrats existed,
economic interests, even the need for bodies to serve in local
militias. Many new voters in 1828 flocked to Jackson, mobilized
by a new political style and culture. But it wasn't because of him
that they were able to vote.
Nor was his party the catalyst of a national transformation; what
is arguably more notable is how little the Democratic Party
figured in the seismic shifts under way. It is telling that for all
but two terms between 1828 and 1860, the Democrats controlled
the presidency, but the Whigs shaped the overall direction of
society. Sen. Henry Clay's American system of banking and
investment, protective tariffs, and internal improvements
refashioned the nation. To be sure, the Democrats also had an
impact, advancing the dogma of Manifest Destiny and
encouraging Westward expansion. But it was the Whigs who
rewrote American law and in the process transformed the
nation's infrastructure, making expansion possible. Jackson's
name has attached to the age, but there are many other
candidates, including Clay, after whom the era might just as
aptly be labeled if labels are required.
As Reynolds shows, this was the period of the Second Great
Awakening, when evangelical enthusiasm burned across the
nation and Americans experienced religious conversions in
record numbers: It was the age of the Rev. Charles Grandison
Finney, whose flock consisted of Protestant Whigs, not Catholic
Democrats. This was also a time of expanding market relations,
nascent industrialization, and triumphant capitalism: It was the
age of John Jacob Astor, who made one fortune in fur and
another in real estate and who supported the arts, something
Jackson had little interest in. This was an era of social reform
when moralists urged the abolition of social evils such as alcohol
and began an aggressive assault on the institution of slavery: It
was the age of William Lloyd Garrison, whose incendiary
writings, along with those of other abolitionists, Jackson argued
should be barred from circulation in the South. Emerson called it
the "age of the first-person singular." Clearly, Jackson fit the
mode of self-reliant American individualist, but so, too, did
many others.
A recent poll on the presidency ranks Andrew Jackson 10 th,
primarily, I suspect, on the strength of his defense of the Union
against extreme states rights. Jackson's Nullification
Proclamation, however, played a small part in resolving the
crisis of 1832 (reduced tariff rates mattered more) and did
nothing to strengthen the Union in the long run, though it did
provide a useful precedent for Lincoln. What Jackson did as a
military hero in the War of 1812, winning the Battle of New
Orleans, certainly helped propel the United States into a new era
of confidence and nation-building, and his military record might
also account for the high esteem with which he is held. Fighting
was what Jackson knew (he carried a bullet near his heart from a
duel in 1806), and it was a style that also contributed to turning
his presidency into a battleground against imagined monsters, as
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
even admirers like Meacham acknowledge. Jackson's
presidential combat—pressing for passage of the Indian
Removal Act (1830), having his Cabinet resign over an affair of
honor (1831), and destroying the Bank of the United States
(1832)—hardly makes him worthy of our admiration. Assessing
Jackson's character in 1860, James Parton, one of his first
biographers, said he was "a democratic autocrat. An urbane
savage. An atrocious saint."
Jackson's career should caution us about the fallacy of drawing
simplistic lessons from the past. Meacham sees in Jackson "a
turning point in the making of the modern presidency." It is an
empty exercise, however, to argue that because he seemed to
have expanded the power of the executive, he therefore set a
precedent for the attempts of other presidents to arrogate power.
Both Meacham and Reynolds point out how often Jackson used
the veto. But subsequent presidents who also availed themselves
of vetoes did not need to rely on Jackson as a model for doing
so. It is equally misleading to get too swept up in rhetoric that
suggests an individual, even the president, makes the times.
Jackson was obviously very much embroiled in the age in which
he lived. But there were many other players, and the show closed
long ago.
chatterbox
Post Drinks Cheney's Kool-Aid!
First the veep decided he should be unaccountable. Now the press agrees.
By Timothy Noah
Thursday, November 13, 2008, at 6:12 PM ET
The reductio ad absurdum of Vice President Dick Cheney's
penchant for secrecy has always been his office's refusal to
reveal publicly the names of people who work in his office or
even their number. When the government recently published its
"Plum Book," a quadrennial listing of jobs opening up in the
federal government, it omitted any reference to jobs in the vicepresidential office, in deference to Cheney's extreme sensitivity
to sunlight. Instead, it repeated as fact a legal doctrine developed
by Cheney's zealous consigliere, David Addington, to resist any
scrutiny of his actions, or those of his staff, by the public. This
doctrine is at best controversial and at worst utter nonsense. "The
Vice Presidency," it states, "is a unique office that is neither a
part of the executive branch nor a part of the legislative branch."
Translation: "What happens in the vice-presidential office is
none of your goddamned business." The same language
appeared in the previous Plum Book, published in 2004. (No
such language appeared in earlier directories produced by the
Clinton administration in 1996 and 2000.)
Cheney found the fish-nor-fowl doctrine a convenient
justification to refuse routine oversight of classified documents
by the National Archives. When the office responsible for this
4/82
oversight pressed the matter, Cheney retaliated by moving to
eliminate that office. Eventually, a federal judge had to issue a
preliminary injunction ordering Cheney not to destroy the
classified documents in his office's possession. The new vice
president-elect, Joe Biden, stated in his Oct. 2 debate with Sarah
Palin his view of Addington's constitutional scholarship:
Vice President Cheney has been the most
dangerous vice president we've had probably
in American history. The idea he doesn't
realize that Article I of the Constitution [sic.
Biden meant Article II] defines the role of the
vice president of the United States, that's the
executive branch. He works in the executive
branch. He should understand that. Everyone
should understand that. And the primary role
of the vice president of the United States of
America is to support the president of the
United States of America, give that president
his or her best judgment when sought, and as
vice president, to preside over the Senate, [and
vote] only in a time when in fact there's a tie
vote. The Constitution is explicit.
Imagine, then, my distress when I read the following paragraph
in a Page One feature about the new Plum Book in the Nov. 13
Washington Post (" 'Plum Book' Is Obama's Big Help-Wanted
Ad"):
Many of the positions are highly specific, such
as assistant secretary for terrorist financing at
the Treasury department. Some, like the jobs
that will turn over in the vice president's
office, are not included because the office
technically is not part of either the executive
branch or the legislative branch. [Italics
mine.]
Is Addington now moonlighting as a Post copy editor? It isn't
remotely established that the vice president's office "technically
is not part of either the executive branch of the legislative
branch." All we know is that the outgoing vice president believes
it, for transparently self-serving reasons; that the incoming vice
president does not believe it; and that to the limited extent the
matter has been examined in court, a federal judge isn't buying
it. The Post usually does a pretty good job distinguishing
propaganda from fact, but this time it got played for a sucker.
.
.
.
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
chatterbox
What We Didn't Overcome, Part 2
Why you can't blame it all on the South.
By Timothy Noah
Wednesday, November 12, 2008, at 7:50 PM ET
Earlier this week, I wrote a column about Barack Obama's
failure to win the single biggest voting bloc in the United States:
white people. No Democrat has won the white vote since
Lyndon Johnson. Obama lost the white vote by 12 percentage
points. That's a much narrower margin than John Kerry's 17
points in 2004 and a slightly narrower margin than Al Gore's 13
points in 2000. But Obama's white-vote deficit is significantly
larger than that of the last two Democrats who actually got
themselves elected president. Clinton got it down to two
percentage points in both 1992 and 1996, and Jimmy Carter got
it down to four percentage points in 1976. (To see all this data in
a chart, click here.) Being white Southerners probably helped
Clinton and Carter shrink the white-vote deficit because the
South is where, since Johnson, Democrats have had the hardest
time winning white votes. (On the other hand, being a white
Southerner didn't help Carter's re-election bid. In 1980 he lost
the white vote by 20 points. Nor did it help Gore in 2000. Maybe
white Southerners were simply tired of them by then.)
White resistance to supporting Democratic presidential
candidates is troubling partly because much of that resistance is
a lingering reaction to Johnson's passage of the 1964 Civil
Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. After I wrote this in
my earlier column, some readers asked whether white resistance
to voting Democratic was an entirely Southern phenomenon that,
simply because white Southerners vote so disproportionately
Republican—in Mississippi and Alabama, 88 percent voted for
McCain—skewed the numbers for white voters nationwide.
Should whites outside the South be held harmless? Answer: No,
not entirely. I refer you to a second data chart here that shows
the percentages by state. Obama won the white vote in 18 states
and in Washington, D.C. All 18 states lie outside the South, and
most are predictably liberal. (New York, Vermont, etc.). But
Obama lost the white vote in eight of the states where he won the
overall popular vote. That's no great surprise in North Carolina
or Virginia, the two Southern states Obama carried, or even in
Pennsylvania or Ohio, where white working-class voters were
known to be resistant. It's a little surprising in Maryland, New
Jersey, and New Mexico. All three states have Democratic
governors and Democratically controlled state legislatures. (The
eighth state, Nevada, has a Republican governor, a divided state
legislature, and a political culture I know nothing about.) David
Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a
nonprofit think tank focused on issues relating to AfricanAmericans, tells me that Obama improved on Kerry's showing
5/82
among white voters almost everywhere outside the South. The
exceptions were Arizona and Alaska, where the McCain-Palin
ticket enjoyed a home-field advantage; Massachusetts, where
Kerry enjoyed a home-field advantage; and Rhode Island and
Connecticut, in Kerry's backyard. So yes, there's been progress
since 2004. But things were pretty bleak in 2004. Among the
states where Kerry failed to win a majority of white voters were
New York, California, Delaware, Michigan, and Illinois—all
states where Obama won the white vote this time out.
Many readers asked why I cared so much about racial
polarization along party lines among whites but not among
blacks. It's certainly true that African-Americans were virtually
monolithic in their support for Obama—95 percent of the black
vote went to Obama—and vote overwhelmingly Democratic in
general. Why don't I lose sleep over that? Three reasons:
1) Whites constitute 74 percent of the vote.
Blacks constitute 13 percent of the vote.
Persistent voting patterns are more worrying
among big groups than among small groups
because big groups wield more power. Case in
point: Only three Democrats have been elected
president over the past 44 years.
2) The Republican Party doesn't offer much to
African-Americans. Apart from its resistance
to supporting civil rights protections since the
mid-1960s, the GOP has been generally hostile
to government programs that help low-income
people. That matters to African-Americans
because a disproportionate number of them are
poor.
3) With respect to Obama, one can hardly
accuse African-Americans of swarming to his
candidacy just because he's black. As late as
October 2007, a CNN poll showed Hillary
Clinton leading Obama among black
registered Democrats 57-33 percent.
Let me repeat what I wrote in the earlier column: I don't consider
any given white person's vote against Obama, or against
Democrats in general, to be racially motivated. Within any
individual state, all sorts of political and sociological factors
may influence a white person's vote apart from race. But when
the Democrats go nearly a half-century without winning a
majority of white votes in any presidential election, it's
necessary to ask why, even after we've passed the remarkable
milestone of electing our first black president.
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
sidebar
Return to article
chatterbox
What We Didn't Overcome
Obama won a majority of votes. He didn't win a majority of white votes.
By Timothy Noah
Monday, November 10, 2008, at 8:05 PM ET
Electing Barack Obama president was a glorious Jackie
Robinson moment for the United States of America. Obama
didn't just win; he became the first Democrat since Jimmy Carter
to win a popular-vote majority. He won a larger proportion of
white votes than any previous nonincumbent Democratic
presidential candidate since Carter. Ta-Nehisi Coates, writing in
the Washington Post's Outlook section, was moved to conclude
that Obama's victory vindicated Martin Luther King's "belief in
white people," a belief Coates once scoffed at as a sign of
"weakness and cowardice, a lack of faith in his own."
As a white person, I accept with gratitude Coates' warm feelings.
But I fear they may be a tad premature. While it's certainly true
that enough white people voted for Obama to put him in the
Oval Office, the blunt fact remains that a majority of white
people did not. Although Obama beat John McCain in the
popular vote by an impressive seven-point margin, McCain beat
Obama among white voters by an even more impressive 12point margin. Obama got 53 percent of the broad electorate to
vote for him but only 43 percent of the white electorate. When I
say "white electorate," I don't mean the white working class, or
white Southerners, or any other subgroup whose capacity for
racial tolerance has long been held suspect. I mean all white
voters.
That strikes me as a hidden-in-plain-sight phenomenon that
warrants greater attention. Yet surprisingly little coverage has
bothered to note Obama's white-vote deficit. A rare exception
was a Nov. 2 New York Times article by John Harwood ("Level
of White Support for Obama a Surprise"), which quite
appropriately predicted that Obama would fail to win a majority
of white votes before moving on to the more hopeful news that
Obama had made greater inroads among whites than most recent
Democratic predecessors. The sad reality is that no Democratic
candidate for president since Lyndon Johnson has won a
majority of white votes (and even he lost 1964's white Southern
vote to Barry Goldwater).
6/82
Am I saying that any white vote against Obama must be counted
as racist? Of course not. White people have all sorts of reasons
for deciding who they vote for, and most (though not all) white
conservatives would have a hard time justifying a vote for any
Democratic presidential candidate. Nor am I saying that all or
even most Republican voters harbor racial prejudice against
African-Americans. Although a majority of whites was never
going to vote for a black Democrat in 2008, it's entirely possible
that a majority of whites might have voted for a black
Republican. (Remember the brief GOP frenzy to draft Colin
Powell to run against Bill Clinton in 1996?) More whites voted
for Obama than for the very white John Kerry or Al Gore. That
doesn't sound like racist behavior. It's Democrats who most
whites dislike, not black people.
But in a more complex and indirect way, the stubborn refusal of
a majority of whites to vote Democratic is all about race. Take a
look at this chart. The alignment of whites with the Republican
Party hasn't made it impossible for Democrats to win
presidential elections, but it has made it fairly difficult. For the
past 40 years, whites have made up 74 percent to somewhere
north of 90 percent of all voters. Jimmy Carter got elected
president by narrowing to four percentage points the gap
between whites voting Republican and whites voting
Democratic. Bill Clinton did it by narrowing the gap to a
remarkable 2 percent. I don't think it's a coincidence that both
men drew some appeal simply from being white Southerners.
The South is where the GOP holds its tightest grip on the white
vote.
It's no puzzler why Johnson was the last Democrat to win a
majority of the white vote. He signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act
and the 1965 Voting Rights Act into law, observing as he signed
the former that "we have lost the South for a generation."
(Actually, it's been two generations, and nobody would be
surprised to see three.) What Johnson didn't allow himself to
think was, "We have lost the white vote for a generation."
(Again, it's been more like two.) Were LBJ transported to the
year 2008, he would be deeply moved to discover that the
United States had elected a black man president. But he would
find it very depressing to learn that none of his Democratic
successors ever won a white majority. Surely, he'd think, it's
harder for Democrats to elect a black man president than to win
forgiveness from the white majority for abolishing Jim Crow.
The good news is that my fellow Caucasians are aging out of
their lock-step Republicanism. Obama failed to win a majority
of whites (43 percent); or white men (41 percent); or even white
women (46 percent), who are more open to voting Democratic.
But he won 54 percent of all white voters age 18 to 29, to
McCain's 44 percent. You'll note from the chart that the white
majority among voters has been shrinking during the past 40
years, just as the white majority has shrunk in the general
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
population. The three-point drop since 2004, though, is so
dramatic that a likely explanation isn't demographics at all but
rather a greater disinclination than usual among white folks this
year to vote. Turnout in 2008 was about what it was in 2004,
and, according to the Center for the Study of the American
Electorate, the reason it wasn't higher—as widely expected,
given the keen interest in this election—was that fewer
Republicans went to the polls. The percentage of Democrats
who went to the polls increased 2.6 percentage points while the
percentage of Republicans went down 1.3 percentage points.
The greatest favor the white race did Obama this year may have
been to stay home. That's a far cry from Martin Luther King's
dream, but it's a start.
sidebar
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sidebar
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corrections
Corrections
Friday, November 14, 2008, at 7:09 AM ET
In the Nov. 13 "Human Nature," William Saletan originally
wrote that blacks "made the difference" in passing California's
Proposition 8. This erroneous calculation was based on a margin
of passage of 4 percent. The final margin was 4.6 percent. To
prevent Prop 8's passage, blacks would have had to vote against
it by a margin of something like 53 percent to 47 percent.
7/82
In the Nov. 12 "Number 1" column, Josh Levin originally and
incorrectly stated that R5 is the name of a group that uploads
pirated movies. It is a format for DVD releases.
thinking yet disavows it; it builds dichotomies and collapses
them. There are good uses of this technique, except when there
aren't, as a sampling from the last three months attests.
In the Nov. 11 "Spectator," Ron Rosenbaum wrote that Jeff
Jarvis had heard a speech by Paulo Coelho at the Frankfurt Book
Fair that he later wrote about on his blog. He read about the
speech before posting on it. It also stated that Jarvis was living
hear Ground Zero on 9/11. He was on a PATH train near Ground
Zero that morning.
Headline: "Honesty Is the Sole Policy, Except When It's Not"
(Aug. 2)
The gist: Despite tough official policy, New York City police
officers who make false statements go mostly unpunished.
Worth a koan? Definitely—this piece is an epistemological
gold mine. (Ancient-Greek tabloid version: NYPD SEZ "THIS
STATEMENT IS FALSE.")
In the Nov. 8 "Today's Papers," Arthur Delaney originally
omitted the fact that the recipient of unemployment checks cited
in a New York Times article had lost his benefits last month.
In the Nov. 7 "Medical Examiner," Barron H. Lerner incorrectly
said that a video made by medical students used a real skeleton.
The skeleton was fake.
If you believe you have found an inaccuracy in a
Slate story, please send an e-mail to
corrections@slate.com, and we will investigate.
General comments should be posted in "The Fray,"
our reader discussion forum.
culturebox
Zen and the Art of New York Times
Headline Writing
There's nothing to it, except when there is.
By Jessica Winter
Tuesday, November 11, 2008, at 12:53 PM ET
A question for New York Times headline writers: Are you not
yourselves? You're no doubt a witty bunch, and yet house style
requires you to resist any temptation toward flavorsome puns or
tabloidy provocation in favor of the blandly informative. Your
mission is to distill a piece to its essence in a few words without
sacrificing nuance, and usually, you are more than up to the task.
Once in a while, though, you respond to the challenge not with
straight-up-the-middle declaratives but with enigmatic paradox
and riddle-me-this contradiction.
Consider: "Bigger Is Better, Except When It's Not"—a 2007
article looking at body size in sports. "Smaller Can Be Better
(Except When It's Not)"—a tech piece from 2004. "A Marriage
Penalty, Except When It Isn't"—on couples and the tax code,
2003. This is the Times headline as koan, inviting readers to
suspend in-the-box thinking and seek enlightenment below the
fold. The style presents thesis and antithesis; it embraces binary
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Headline: "NBC Is Broadcasting Live, Except When It Isn't"
(Aug. 10)
The gist: The network didn't always offer full disclosure about
which of its Olympic broadcasts were truly "live."
Worth a koan? Yes. A koan is "the place and the time and the
event where truth reveals itself." The article ponders: If the
synchronized swimming quarterfinals are tape-delayed, are they
still the truth?
Headline: "The English Actress (Except in France)" (Sept. 24)
The gist: Kristin Scott Thomas is typecast as a chilly aristocrat
in English-language movies but enjoys a more versatile career in
French films.
Worth a koan? Nah. Ms. Scott Thomas isn't a Möbius strip.
She's just bilingual.
Headline: "Job Hunting Is, and Isn't, What It Used to Be" (Sept.
26)
The gist: The Internet can help you find a job, but you still have
to get out and pound that pavement.
Worth a koan? Oh, yeah! And your CompuServe account is
and isn't what it used to be, either!
Headline: "Waiting to Lead (or Not)" (Sept. 27)
The gist: Presidents-elect tend to distance themselves from their
lame-duck predecessors in the days between the election and
inauguration.
Worth a koan? Not really—the article mulls not a paradox so
much as an either-or.
Headline: "Grieving, and Not, in the Condiments Aisle" (Oct. 5)
The gist: The late Paul Newman's face still smiles out from
grocery store rows of Newman's Own products.
Worth a koan? No. The article has no grieving or not-grieving,
just shopping.
Headline: "Dead Language That's Very Much Alive" (Oct. 6)
The gist: Latin is making a comeback in schools.
Worth a koan? Yes, because sic transit gloria, e.g.
Headline: "Shining a Light on a Movement That Maybe Isn't"
(Oct. 26)
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The gist: The Guggenheim mounts "theanyspacewhatever," a
group show of loosely linked installation artists.
Worth a koan? Whatever.
Headline: "Doing Things You're Not" (Nov. 9)
The gist: A night out with singer-songwriter Joseph Arthur, and
a quote from David Letterman on Arthur's band: "I would like to
be with those people. I think they're probably doing things I'm
not."
Worth a koan? It is and it isn't. Stripped of a subject noun, the
headline floats in space, achieving action and not-action, being
and not-being.
day to day
Glass-Ceiling Smashers
Thursday, November 13, 2008, at 7:32 PM ET
Nov. 13, 2008
XX Factor: What Clinton, Palin Did for Glass Ceiling
In the recent elections, Sen. Hillary Clinton and Gov. Sarah
Palin were running for some of the highest political positions in
the United States. But where does the so-called glass ceiling for
women stand? Dahlia Lithwick and Emily Bazelon discuss the
cracks in the glass and the benefits of having two distinct female
politicians. Listen to the segment.
Nov. 11, 2008
War Stories: How Bush Can Ease Foreign-Policy Transition
The Bush administration is paving the way for a smooth
transition of power in January. President George W. Bush is
reviving relations with Russia and Iran, among others.
Madeleine Brand talks with Fred Kaplan about the foreignpolicy silver linings for Barack Obama. Listen to the segment.
Technology: Obama's Plans for a High-Tech White House
President-elect Barack Obama made use of text messages, emails, and social-networking sites to get elected. What role will
these technologies play once he takes office? Alex Cohen talks
to Farhad Manjoo about Obama's plans for a digital White
House. Listen to the segment.
.
dear prudence
The 40-Year-Old Infant
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Mom and Dad's baby talk is driving me batty. Can't they see I'm all grown up?
Thursday, November 13, 2008, at 6:40 AM ET
Get "Dear Prudence" delivered to your inbox each week; click
here to sign up. Please send your questions for publication to
prudence@slate.com. (Questions may be edited.)
Dear Prudence,
My parents' lives began when they had babies and ended when
those babies reached about 6. From then on, they've lived in this
semi-delusional world, refusing to acknowledge that their "wittle
durl" has grown up. I'm now 40 years old, and they still "tawk to
me wike dis," making it pretty much impossible to have a real
conversation with them. When they do slip and speak to me
adult-to-adult, they actually correct themselves to baby talk. For
example, "You looked nice" is quickly repeated as, "Her
wookied sooo PURRRRTY." Every single thing that happens
reminds them of "when ooo was wittle." Now, I could somewhat
handle this when we lived across the country from each other
and contact was limited to phone calls and a visit every few
years, but now my job has brought me within easy driving
distance, and I'm finding that I just can't take it. I've tried to
gently correct them when they do this, but they don't hear me. I
don't want to be irritable every time I'm around them, and I don't
want to cut them off. They are my parents, after all. My husband
says I can't outright say anything to them about it because it
would hurt their feelings and, at their age, wouldn't change
anything, anyway. What do you think?
—Not a "Wittle Durl" Anymore
Dear Wittle,
I'm not suggesting you do this, but I do wonder whether a kind
of shock therapy could work with them. That is, next time you're
visiting, during dinner turn your plate of spaghetti over on your
head, then grab your bottom and say, "I make a pee-pee in my
pants!" Your parents have been talking to you this way for the
past 40 years, which makes this one long-running folie à deux. I
agree with your husband's assessment that the likelihood of
convincing them that Goodnight Moon is no longer your favorite
book is small. Nonetheless, I think he's wrong to say you have to
participate in their delusion. Stop being so gentle and explicitly
tell them that now that you're 40 years old, you need them to
speak to you as an adult. Explain that, from now on, when you're
visiting and they slip into baby talk, you're going to slip out the
door. Then do it. Either they will reform, or you won't have to
take it. You mention that they had "babies," so I'm assuming you
have siblings. Unless they are all so damaged from their
upbringing that they are in cribs somewhere sucking their
thumbs and waiting for the tooth fairy, perhaps they can join you
in presenting a united front to your parents. All of you could say
you want an end to the baby talk and perhaps suggest that your
parents seek counseling to figure out a new way of relating to
their children. If all this fails, then when they call wondering
where their "widdle, biddle baby-boo" is, you can say you'd love
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to see them just as soon as you become old enough to learn how
to drive.
—Prudie
Dear Prudence Video: Hermit Husband
Dear Prudence,
I recently married a wonderful man with two children. We met
via an online dating service and were married within months.
He's a great husband and father to his children as well as my
child. Our sex life is pretty good, however I'm not sure how to
tell him I need a lot more "warming up" in bed before we get
down to business. I don't want to hurt his feelings, but I don't
feel like a kiss or two is sufficient enough to get me hot,
bothered, and ready to go. I enjoy making love with him, and I
don't want this to become a bigger problem down the road. Any
suggestions?
—Not So Hot
Dear Not So Hot,
The good news is that when he does get down to business, you
enjoy it. You'd be in a much worse situation if the hors d'oeuvres
were superb, but the main course was always undercooked.
Clearly, during his previous marriage, this was how conjugal
relations were conducted. But you're his wife now, and you have
to make your needs clear—surely he will be delighted to please
you and expand his own pleasure and repertoire. You need to
talk to him, but do it at the right moment. That means not just
before or after you've made love, because it would be a mood
killer. Pick a time when you two have plenty of privacy and are
feeling cozy, and tell him that your lovemaking is wonderful, but
you're someone who needs a lot more foreplay. If you're
uncomfortable describing what you want, look at the books on
the Web site of the American Association of Sexuality Educators
Counselors and Therapists, and see if anyone could help you
give some guidance to your husband. You could also order some
of the Better Sex videos—you two might get so hot and bothered
during movie night that you won't even need hot, buttered
popcorn.
—Prudie
Dear Prudie,
I was recently at a party with my girlfriend and some of her
friends. Most of the people in attendance were female. One girl
called a male friend to get him to come over and bring some
other guys. To entice him, she said, "There are four beautiful
girls over here. One has a boyfriend, though." To which my
girlfriend replied, as she pretended to push me away, "What?
You mean, 'Mike,' my brother?" I felt belittled. Is this a harmless
joke? Am I being oversensitive? My girlfriend says it was just a
joke and that I shouldn't take it seriously. I love her, and I love
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
her sense of humor 99 percent of the time. I have talked to her
about these kinds of jokes before; she said she would try to think
about me before making jokes that might offend me, but I feel
like a prop in her stand-up routine from time to time. Do I have a
right to be offended by this "harmless" joke?
—Belittled
Dear Belittled,
Are you sure we're not dating, Mike? Because, like your
girlfriend, I've gone through life having to explain, "It's just a
joke!" If your girlfriend is only offensive 1 percent of the time,
then she's got an outstanding ratio of laughs to pain. But it's that
1 percent that can really sting. Humor requires risk. When it
works, as when Barack Obama referred to himself as "a mutt"
during his first press conference as president-elect, it's a delight.
When it doesn't, as when he said he wasn't going to try to contact
any dead presidents in the manner of Nancy Reagan, it calls for
an apology (which he gave to Mrs. Reagan). Since you say you
enjoy dating your jokester, she should appreciate that most of the
time you can take it, and when you can't, she needs to back off
and say she's sorry. But I doubt there was any deeper meaning to
her ill-conceived party gibe other than the irresistible
opportunity for a laugh.
—Prudie
Dear Prudence,
About a year ago, my first love contacted me after a 20 year
silence. We had dated in high school for three years and had our
first sexual experience with each other. I was so in love with
him, but he split up with me and broke my heart. He found a
new girlfriend and married her after we graduated. They had a
child and moved out of state. At first, he contacted me through a
classmate-finder Web site, and we chatted online several times.
Eventually, he said he would be in my area and would love to
see me. When we met and hugged, the emotions came flooding
back. He felt so good in my arms, and his smell was the same as
I remembered. We talked for hours. Since then, we have been emailing, texting, and talking on the phone. We are both still
married, but I can't stop thinking about him. We want to get
together so badly. I love my husband very much, but I can't let
go of what I feel for my first love. I think maybe I never really
let go of him; I'd just locked all of those emotions inside,
thinking that's all I would ever have left of him. But seeing him
was the key that let them loose, and now I am very confused and
want him back!
—Torn Between Two Loves
Dear Torn,
When he took you in his arms, suddenly you both transported to
the back seat of his Mustang. You were young again! You'd
never heard of a 401(k)! You didn't have a spouse who yelled
just yesterday, "Is it too much to ask you to replace the toilet
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paper when you finish the roll!" You must feel as Proust did
upon experiencing the memories evoked by eating a madeleine:
"And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to
me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new
sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling
me with a precious essence. …" However, unless you are hoping
to wreck two families, I strongly urge you to forget about being
filled with your former boyfriend's precious essence. You seem
to be trying to make the case that your life for the past 20 years
has just been an attempt to hide from what has now been
revealed: You and he belong together, and you can no longer
resist your fate. However, I'll bet his truth is pretty much the
same as it was 20 years ago: He'd like to sleep with you, but he
plans to live with her. Have you told your husband about seeing
your old flame? No? I didn't think so. So before you lead
yourself into one disastrous vicissitude, tell your high-school
Romeo that the reunion is over.
—Prudie
dvd extras
Imagine Seeing John Wayne in IMAX
That's sort of what watching How the West Was Won is like.
By Keith Phipps
Tuesday, November 11, 2008, at 9:50 AM ET
Quick: Name the highest-grossing film of 1952. Good guesses
would include Singin' in the Rain, The Quiet Man, and High
Noon. But they all fell well short of the $15.4 million earned by
a movie you couldn't watch today even if you wanted to: This Is
Cinerama.
What is Cinerama? It was the first of a wave of widescreen
processes that debuted in the early '50s. Cinerama used three
projectors to fill a giant screen curved to the contours of the
human retina. Using films shot by a three-lens camera—in
essence, three cameras in one—it created panoramic imagery
that filled even the viewer's peripheral vision. This Is Cinerama
showcased the format's capabilities, giving the Cinerama
treatment to a water-skiing show, Niagara Falls, and the canals
of Venice. (Less thrilling: a demonstration of the system's thennew stereo sound via a static shot of a church choir.)
Cinerama arrived at a moment when movies needed to stir
interest. The 11 million televisions then in American homes had
begun to eat into theatrical profits. In his introduction to This Is
Cinerama, impresario Lowell Thomas promised an "entirely
new form of entertainment" with "no plot" and "no stars." In the
coming decade, Cinerama movies showed viewers the wonders
of the world, from a roller coaster at Rockaway Beach to the
white-water rapids of Pakistan—travelogues not unlike the glam
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
documentaries that until recently defined the IMAX experience.
It wasn't until 10 years later that the first, and ultimately only,
two narrative features shot in three-strip Cinerama made their
debut: The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm and How
the West Was Won, recently released in a new special-edition
DVD and Blu-Ray. The latter is worth revisiting—as a cinematic
curio but also as a clue to what the future might hold for IMAX.
Cinerama faded before I was born, but my hometown of Dayton,
Ohio, became the unlikely site of a Cinerama revival in the '90s,
thanks to the efforts of Dayton projectionist John Harvey.
Harvey had previously set up a Cinerama screening room in his
ranch home—eliminating two bedrooms in the process—and
helped the National Media Museum in Bradford, England, set up
Cinerama projection in 1993. In 1996, Harvey moved his home
equipment to the Neon Movies, a downtown theater that had
served as a pilgrimage site for Daytonians seeking art house fare
since the mid-'80s. Harvey's Cinerama setup was supposed to
have a one-month stay. Instead, it stuck around for more than
three years, attracting widescreen enthusiasts like Quentin
Tarantino and Joe Dante.
On trips home to visit my parents, I was able to see both This Is
Cinerama and How the West Was Won, and the experience has
stayed with me. Cinerama does only one type of shot better than
other formats—long shots in which the camera proceeds into or
retreats from an environment—but it does it spectacularly well.
Early in How the West Was Won, there's an uninterrupted shot,
slightly more than a minute long, that proceeds through the dirtroad center of a young Albany, N.Y., past carts, tradesmen,
crude streetlamps, a hotel, and a ticket office, finally arriving at
the banks of the Erie Canal, where laborers are unloading a boat.
It's a Hollywood vision of the past, to be sure, but seen in
Cinerama it feels vivid and dramatic, immersive in a way it
could not have been in a traditional format. Later sequences, in
particular a buffalo stampede and a shootout aboard a train,
achieve a similarly enthralling effect.
Can such spectacles add up to a movie? In the case of How the
West Was Won, they mostly do. The film's interlocked stories are
designed to depict the heroic conquest of the American West,
"won from nature and primitive Man." It's essentially the story
of manifest destiny played without irony—unless a final
sequence presenting the Los Angeles freeway system as a
symbol of humanity's triumph over adversity counts—by an allstar cast that included James Stewart, John Wayne, Henry
Fonda, and George Peppard, among others. Three directors
divvied up the film's five segments: John Ford, George Marshall
(best known for directing Destry Rides Again), and the
dependable vet Henry Hathaway.
Surprisingly, Ford provides the weakest segment, an inert Civil
War vignette about the attempted assassination of Ulysses S.
Grant (played by Harry Morgan of M*A*S*H and Dragnet
fame). Hathaway, however, looks almost at home. His three
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segments move the story along and let Cinerama-friendly action
build naturally. In Hathaway's hands, Cinerama's third narrative
film might have really been something.
But there never was a third narrative picture. How the West Was
Won performed quite well financially, coming in as the year's
second highest-grossing film, behind the well-attended but still
unprofitable Cleopatra and just ahead of It's A Mad, Mad, Mad,
Mad World. But making and screening movies in this format
proved to be simply too difficult. A lot can go wrong shooting
with a three-lens camera. Even more can go wrong in exhibiting
films shot that way, especially once the format's then-unfamiliar
multitrack sound system entered the equation. (Cinerama
malfunctioned so often, in fact, that Thomas provided
"breakdown reels": short, single-screen segments that could be
played while technicians worked on the equipment.) Then there
were the visible seams. No image created by three individual
projectors will ever match up perfectly at all times, no matter
how much care is taken in the setup.
Even when all went well technically, it was still difficult to tell a
story with Cinerama. As one actor after another explains in
David Strohmaier's excellent feature-length documentary
Cinerama Adventure—included as an extra on the new How The
West Was Won discs—Cinerama presented forbidding lighting
challenges and made simple elements of film grammar like
close-ups impossible. It makes sense for the Great Plains to
stretch as far as the eye can see; Debbie Reynolds' face is
another story.
film to be shot in part in the IMAX format. The landscape shots
of Chicago (Gotham) and Hong Kong felt vivid and immersive,
and the action scenes played out with a focused intensity.
Nolan's direction keeps viewers trained on what they should be
seeing. The rest isn't so much extraneous as it is ambient.
Is this how all blockbuster films will soon look? Or will The
Dark Knight be IMAX's How the West Was Won? The latter
possibility seems unlikely, especially given the financial boost
Dark Knight gave IMAX theater owners. But IMAX will need to
find more directors as comfortable with and enthusiastic about
the format as Nolan, maybe even one willing to pick up How the
West Was Won's challenge and shoot the whole thing in the
format. The shifts in framing can be a bit distracting when
watching Dark Knight in IMAX, and the question of whether it
can be used to tell stories not involving caped men soaring
across skylines remain unanswered. The IMAX format has great
potential that The Dark Knight only began to realize. But as TV
screens get bigger and home theater systems crisper, the time
feels right for movie theaters to restate their claim on images that
stretch as far as the eye can see.
sidebar
Return to article
Narrative films proved too forbidding, but the best parts of How
the West Was Won suggest it wasn't so much a dead end as a
film ahead of its time. That's even evident watching it on DVD,
which flattens out the action scenes but retains some of their
impact, and especially on Blu-Ray, which uses a "Smilebox"
process, essentially a curved letterbox, to simulate Cinerama's
curved screen.
Maybe it's up to IMAX to finish the job Cinerama began. My
experience with Cinerama left me skeptical about IMAX for
years. Like Cinerama, IMAX is designed to overwhelm, not
necessarily to tell a story. I once asked a veteran of the
quadraphonic era why four-channel sound systems never caught
on. He replied, "Because humans only have two ears." I used to
use a variation on this line to describe my reluctance to embrace
IMAX, a format I saw as ideal for many-eyed insects but less
than perfect for humans, who can't really take in all the action at
once. That my most memorable trip to an IMAX theater
involved the 1996 movie Special Effects: Anything Can Happen,
which spent a perverse amount of time revealing the secrets
behind the Shaquille O'Neal-is-a-rapping-genie movie Kazaam,
didn't help.
The Dark Knight changed that in a few oversize frames.
Christopher Nolan's movie is the first full-length Hollywood
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World was heavily promoted as
being presented in Cinerama and was projected on curved
screens in theaters outfitted for the process. But the movie was
actually shot, like any other widescreen film, using a single-lens
camera. Movies branded as having been shot in Cinerama
continued to appear after 1963, but as with It's a Mad, Mad,
Mad, Mad World, this merely meant they were projected onto
Cinerama screens. These screens started to come down at the
end of the '60s in the United States. European Cinerama
sputtered along for a couple more years, long enough to feature a
pair of films about great composers, including the Edvard Grieg
biopic Song of Norway, starring Florence Henderson.
explainer
Can Your Country Get Kicked Out of the
G-20?
It's never happened before.
By Jacob Leibenluft
Thursday, November 13, 2008, at 6:40 PM ET
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Heads of state from the Group of 20 are meeting in Washington
this weekend to discuss global efforts to respond to the financial
crisis. Members of the group are typically described as the
world's 20 largest economies. If the financial crisis pushes No.
20 into a deep recession, does that mean it could get bumped off
the next guest list?
No. The G-20 happens to include 16 of the world's 20 largest
economies (PDF), but that's not a criterion for membership.
Otherwise, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Sweden would
all make the list. And if—like many economists—you use
purchasing-power parity to measure the size of an economy, Iran
and Poland could also make a case for grabbing seats at the
table. In fact, there are no official rules on how to add or drop a
country from the group, and the list of participating countries has
stayed constant since the G-20's creation in 1999. At that time,
four countries—Turkey, Indonesia, South Africa, and Saudi
Arabia—were included despite GDP rankings ranging from 22 nd
to 29th. While Turkey and Indonesia have since moved into the
top 20, Argentina has done the opposite.
The G-20's Web site does give some indication of how the initial
member countries were selected: "[I]t was considered important
that countries and regions of systemic significance for the
international financial system be included. Aspects such as
geographical balance and population representation also played a
major part." (The European Union also occupies one of the
body's 20 seats, despite the presence of several European
countries in the group.) Membership was restricted to keep the
group from becoming unwieldy, but that also meant a few
countries that had been members of the G-22 or G-33—shortlived predecessors from the late 1990s—were left out in the
cold. A few nations just missed the cut: Malaysia was omitted,
for example—either for instituting currency controls or for
putting its finance minister in prison, depending on whom you
ask.
For the more exclusive G-8 conferences, the country hosting the
meeting maintains a great deal of power over the agenda and
which countries get invited as guests. The G-20, on the other
hand, tends to be administered by a troika—including the current
host, along with the hosts from the previous and upcoming
meetings—which makes ad hoc invitations a little more
complicated. As a practical matter, expanding the group
permanently would probably require a consensus among all—or
at least the vast majority—of its current members.
Judging from gross domestic product alone, Spain—now ranked
eighth—would probably be the country with the most legitimate
beef over its absence from the G-20's membership slate. This
weekend, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero
will actually be in attendance at the summit, due to an
unexpected decision made by France. As the current president of
the European Union, France effectively had two seats available
at the summit. Last week, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
he would give one of them to Spain—an unprecedented move in
the history of the G-20. (Spain is not expected to maintain its
seat after the presidency of the EU moves on.)
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Colin Bradford of the Brookings Institution
and John Kirton of the University of Toronto.
explainer
Brother, Can You Spare a Dinar?
What kind of lifestyle can an Iraqi neighborhood patrol officer afford?
By Brian Palmer
Wednesday, November 12, 2008, at 3:47 PM ET
The Iraqi government this week assumed responsibility from the
United States for paying the salaries of the Sons of Iraq, the
formerly disaffected Sunnis who now serve as neighborhood
patrol officers in cities throughout the country. Their monthly
salary is approximately $300. How well can a Son of Iraq live on
$300 in Baghdad?
He'll need a roommate and some help from his family. Sons of
Iraq who live on their own may have to avoid indulgences like
air conditioning or chicken dinners. (Many rely on support
payments from clans or tribal sheiks.) Rent alone can consume
most of their budget. Real estate prices in Baghdad have
skyrocketed. A two-bedroom apartment in a safe area currently
costs around $400 per month. A small house in a lower-middleclass neighborhood is out of reach at $150,000. Real estate
prices in many areas have doubled in the past year and continue
to climb due to security improvements and a housing shortage.
Fortunately, basic food staples are affordable. The government's
Public Distribution System supplies subsidized monthly food
parcels to two-thirds of Iraqi citizens. For approximately 16
cents per month, recipients are entitled to a basket of 10 basic
products, including flour, rice, sugar, salt, and cooking oil. The
parcel supplies the minimum daily caloric intake requirement,
but the central government has discussed steep cuts to the
program.
Other food items are expensive. A Son of Iraq earns less than 8
percent of the median U.S. law-enforcement officer's salary, but
he pays close to the same prices for meats and vegetables. A
pound of potatoes in Baghdad costs 75 cents, slightly more than
the U.S. price of 67 cents per pound. A pound of chicken would
cost a Son of Iraq $1.63, compared with an average U.S. price of
$2.08.
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Electricity is supplied at low rates by the government, but it is
unavailable for much of the day. During outages, residents turn
to personal or neighborhood generators. The cost can run
anywhere from $50 to $150 per month to run a fan, lights, and
basic appliances. The cost of operating an air conditioner is too
much for many Sons of Iraq, despite average highs of over 100
degrees in the hottest months.
Inflation also threatens the already tenuous financial position of
the Sons of Iraq. Last year, Iraq's 60 percent inflation was
second in the world only to the incredible 100,000 percent
inflation in Zimbabwe. In one month alone this year, Iraqi food
prices rose by 13.6 percent.
Relatively speaking, the Sons of Iraq are paid poorly for their
line of work. Official Iraqi police officers and soldiers earn twice
as much as the Sons of Iraq. The Sons' salary would be more
comparable to that of a Baghdad butcher. However, many Sons
of Iraq are illiterate or otherwise underqualified for official
police work. The salary was also set in 2006, when the cost of
living was lower, and the majority of the Sons lived in Anbar, a
less expensive locale.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Eric Davis of Rutgers University and Corey
Flintoff of National Public Radio.
explainer
Who Stole the Cookie From the Cookie
Jar?
The best way to interrogate a child.
By Juliet Lapidos
Tuesday, November 11, 2008, at 6:39 PM ET
An 8-year-old Arizona boy charged with murdering his father
and another man appeared in court on Monday. Police say the
boy confessed to shooting the two men with a .22-caliber gun,
but his defense attorneys told reporters that "there could have
been improper interview techniques done." What's the "proper"
way to interrogate a kid?
With kid gloves. Based on the principle that juvenile suspects
may not fully comprehend a Miranda warning, most states
mandate some form of added protection for children under the
age of 16. In at least 20 states, police must notify the child's
guardian before questioning; and in at least 13 states, either a
parent or an attorney must be present.
juvenile interrogation cases. That is, there's a presumption that
the child's statements were made involuntarily unless a
preponderance of evidence indicates otherwise. The Arizona
Supreme Court ruled in State v. Jimenez that in determining
whether a confession was voluntary (and therefore admissible), a
court should evaluate the child's age, education, background, and
intelligence, plus whether the child's parents were present,
whether he was in good mental and physical health during the
interrogations, and whether he has a mental illness.
There's evidence to suggest that juvenile suspects are more likely
than adults to make a false confession. A 2004 study of 326
exoneration cases found that 13 percent of adults had falsely
confessed, compared with 44 percent of suspects under 18 years
old. Among children between the ages of 12 and 15, the rate was
75 percent. After the 1989 beating and rape of a woman known
as the Central Park jogger, five New York teenagers served
prison sentences based on false confessions. In 1998, a 14-yearold boy named Michael Crowe admitted to stabbing his 12-yearold sister to death after he'd been interrogated for 10 hours over
two days. Before the murder trial began, however, the charges
were dropped, with the judge ruling that the police had made
"illegal promises of leniency"—telling Michael he'd get "help" if
he confessed and that he'd go to jail if he didn't. (Click here for
video footage of the interrogation.)
Law-enforcement officers are often trained to conduct
interrogations using the Reid Technique, which involves direct
confrontation, physical gestures to appear concerned, and
preventing the accused from denying the crime outright.
Practitioners are encouraged to use the same methods for
children as for adults. This helps explain why children are more
likely to offer up false confessions. Children, psychologists
argue, are more suggestible than adults and thus more easily
swayed by leading questions. They're also more influenced by
short-term guarantees—"You can go home right away if you
confess"—than by longer-term consequences like 10 years in
prison. Third, juveniles are more likely to display behavior that
interrogators read as "deceptive," such as saying "I swear" a lot
and not making eye contact. Reformers advocate better
preparation for police officers as well as mandatory recording of
interrogations.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks G. Daniel Lassiter of Ohio University.
explainer
When the Deity Knows You're Dead
How do different religions define death?
Under Arizona law, the state carries the "burden of proof" in
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
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By Nina Shen Rastogi
Monday, November 10, 2008, at 6:07 PM ET
A Washington, D.C., court will hear arguments on Wednesday
in the case of Motl Brody, a 12-year-old Orthodox Jewish boy
who was declared dead last week by hospital officials. Though
the boy's brain has stopped functioning completely, drugs and a
respirator are keeping his heart beating and his lungs inflating.
According to his parents' strict religious beliefs, this means that
Motl is still alive, and the family is therefore arguing to keep the
boy on life support. How is death defined in other religions?
Usually, the same way it has traditionally been defined in all
cultures: by a lack of vital signs. Most world religions lack a
clear doctrinal statement that certifies when, exactly, the
moment of death can be said to have occurred. For most of
human history, there was no need for one since prior to the
invention of life-support equipment, the absence of circulation or
respiration was the only way to diagnose death. This remains the
standard of death in most religions. By the early 1980s, however,
the medical and legal community also began to adopt a second
definition of death—the irreversible cessation of all brain
functions—and some religious groups have updated their beliefs.
Jewish arguments both for and against accepting brain death can
be found in the Talmud, the sprawling record of rabbinical
discussions on law and ethics. Some strands of Talmudic law
hold that those who have been decapitated or had their necks
broken are considered dead, even if their bodies continue to
move—an argument that many take as proof that total loss of
brain function counts as death. Other scholars point to a section
from the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Yoma, which states that if
you come across a collapsed building on the Sabbath, you must
uncover victims at least up to their noses to determine whether
they are dead or alive, as "life manifests itself primarily through
the nose as it is written: In whose nose was the breath of the
spirit of life"—a reference to the Genesis story of the great flood.
(For a longer discussion of the Jewish definition of death, see
Chapter 12 in this book.)
Christians who ardently support the traditional circulatoryrespiratory definition of death tend to be fundamentalists or
evangelicals. They may point to Leviticus 17:11, which states
that "the life of the flesh is in the blood," or Genesis 2:7, which
describes how God "formed man of dust from the ground, and
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a
living being." Most mainstream Protestant groups in the United
States accept brain death as a valid criterion for death, as does
the Roman Catholic Church, though that ruling is not without
controversy.
In 1986, the Academy of Islamic Jurisprudence—a group of
legal experts convened by the Organization of the Islamic
Conference—issued an opinion stating that a person should be
considered legally dead when either "complete cessation of the
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
heart or respiration occurs" or "complete cessation of all
functions of the brain occurs." In both cases, "expert physicians"
must ascertain that the condition is irreversible. However, the
academy's statement was merely a recommendation to member
nations, not a binding resolution, and the question remains an
open one for many Muslims.
In 2006, the family of a Buddhist man in Boston who had been
declared legally brain-dead argued that, because his heart was
still beating, his spirit and consciousness still lingered and that
removing him from life support would be akin to killing him. In
a Boston Globe article about the case, a professor of Buddhism
explained that, within Tibetan Buddhism, a person has multiple
levels of consciousness, which may or may not correspond with
brain activity.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Courtney Campbell of Oregon State
University, Fred Rosner of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine,
and Stuart Youngner of Case Western Reserve University.
fashion
Fashion Advice for Michelle Obama
Hint: Don't dress like Jackie Kennedy.
By Josh Patner
Thursday, November 13, 2008, at 5:51 PM ET
Click here for a slide-show essay on Michelle Obama's fashion
choices.
Dear Mrs. Obama,
Congratulations to you and your husband on a thrilling victory.
It must be unnerving to find, a week after such a historic event,
that all anyone wants to talk about is your wardrobe.
Forgive us. We pro-fashion pundits can't help but chime in on
the importance of clothes. Especially now that we've been
treated to this absurdly style-happy election. We've spent the
past 20 months talking about Clinton's décolletage, McCain's
loafers, his wife's earrings, Obama's sunglasses, and, of course,
Sarah Palin's pricey makeover. We just can't stop.
But we also want to talk about your wardrobe because we think
you have great style. We are attracted to it and inspired by it,
and—with all respect due the future first lady—I thought I'd
offer a few humble thoughts on what makes your style so great
and what you might keep in mind as you get dressed for the next
four to eight years.
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I don't take the opportunity lightly, given that you are already
perched on Vanity Fair's "Best Dressed" list and rumored to be
on an upcoming cover of Vogue. But what you wear is
important, especially when the nation, and the world, is
watching you. We'll be looking to you for optimism and for
guidance. And we want you to represent.
You clearly love clothes—no woman who wears prints and color
doesn't. And it seems you are one of the lucky women who likes
her body—you show your curves with confidence and pride.
Where most wives of politicians reach for the cheerful, standard
issue skirt-suit (think Jill Biden's citrus number on Election
Night), you have more imagination.
I'm thinking here of the abstracted rose-print silk dress you wore
the evening your husband accepted the nomination. Few other
women in a similar position would have made such a daring
choice. The print was big, the colors were regal without being
dour, the cut was utterly flattering—and utterly unbusinesslike.
The dress said: I'm no cookie-cutter lady. The aqua short-sleeved
jacket you wore over gray stripes on the campaign trail wasn't
particularly "first lady like," but it was charming. And the exotic
purple feather pin on Larry King showed a feminine theatricality
that was just plain fun.
The choices you've made thus far demonstrate traits that will be
useful in a first lady: practicality, flexibility, a sense of humor, a
sense of glamour. Yours is a particularly American style—
relaxed, confident, classic, and not overly label-happy. You've
embraced American designers, from populist low-cost outfitters
like White House/Black Market (the awkwardly named makers
of the now famous $148 dress you wore on The View) to big-gun
American designers like Narciso Rodriguez (who made the
cranberry wool shift you wore at the debate in Nashville) and
new stars like Thakoon Panichgul (who made the print dress you
had on in Denver).
You've also embraced the casual chic of some classically
American looks. I love the way you wear your belt over a fitted
sweater, like Mary Tyler Moore. I love that you wear flat shoes
with a full skirt: so Maria from West Side Story.
I even love that you make the occasional mistake. It shows that
you are open-minded, even risk-taking. But the white floral-print
J. Crew dress you wore to the University of Mississippi debate
was too much. White is rarely good on camera and, you'll excuse
me, never good from the rear view.
And I must ask because everyone wants to know: What about
that Narciso Rodriguez dress in Grant Park? Wonkette called it
"hell-colored." Sixty-five percent of those polled by People.com
said they hated the dress. Tight satin? Beading? The obi waist?
The weird little cardigan? Mrs. Obama, black with red is too
jarring a color combination for a first lady. It's too dramatic. It
recalls an eerie portrait by Goya or a costume from Tosca or
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Carmen. All too fiery when we want you to soothe. Especially in
an image that will be beamed around the world and live online
forever.
By now, I imagine you must find the comparisons to Jacqueline
Kennedy flattering but tiring. At 44, you will be the youngest
first lady since Camelot; the comparisons are inevitable. That
doesn't make them accurate.
Like Kennedy, you clearly understand the power of clothes to
telegraph messages. In the midst of Sarah Palin's Wardrobegate,
you wore wore inexpensive J. Crew separates on The Tonight
Show, telling Jay Leno, "You can get a lot of great stuff online.
("All Politics Aside … this outfit gets our vote" reads a current J.
Crew ad, an effort to cash in on your endorsement.) Another
savvy choice: You wore evening pajamas by Isabel Toledo for a
fundraiser hosted by Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour in
New York last June. Toledo is an insider's designer; all black
was a smart choice for meeting fashion deities (and the pope.)
Like Jackie Kennedy, you understand that dressing for your
audience is important. But that's where the comparison ends.
Where Kennedy's wardrobe was constant, a calculated piece of
stagecraft, your style is more casual and more spontaneous.
Which makes it much more interesting.
Jackie's White House wardrobe was essentially custom work
from one designer, Oleg Cassini; you buy off the rack. Jackie
bought clothes and returned them after wearing them. What you
wear, you own. Jackie often spent tens of thousands of dollars in
one shot; no one could accuse you of lavish spending.
It seems, happily, that we are more obsessed with your wardrobe
than you are. Surely you are less fixated than the proprietors of
MrsO, an obsessive new blog devoted to your sartorial choices.
But I'd like to leave you with a few specific thoughts. (Like you,
I'm sure, I hate it when people bring me a problem without
bringing me a resolution.)
1. Live your life, but remember you are
being photographed. I don't mean that you
should leave the tracksuit at home when you
take the girls for the occasional Big Mac.
You're a mom, and we love it. But I do think
you could be more attentive to what is
photogenic for big occasions when you are not
on private time. The easiest thing to do is have
someone take a digital picture of you, see how
your look photographs. Try a profile shot as
well—cameras obviously are not always faceon, and unwanted bumps and lumps will be
revealed this way. And think about the
background: The Hell Dress on that blue stage
was harsh.
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2. Stop shopping for day clothes right now.
Repeat outfits. Wear your favorites often, and
change the accessories. That's a tried-and-true
rule for great style during hard times. Woman
across the country will appreciate it.
3. Spend, sometimes. You are allowed to
indulge, especially for state dinners, meeting
Queen Elizabeth and Mme. Sarkozy. We want
you to look awesome. And spending is good
for the economy.
4. Stick with Maria Pinto, your long-time
dressmaker in Chicago. (The aqua dress she
designed for your speech at the convention and
the vivid coral number you wore to your recent
White House visit were terrific.) She's a winwin. You can show hometown pride, support a
small business, remain loyal, and she makes
you look better than anyone.
5. A note on accessories. Please don't wear
gumball pearls like Barbara Bush. In fact,
please don't wear pearls at all. We voted for
change, and we love your outsize jewelry. So
far you've avoided the tired Washington
classics—the pearls, the miniflags, the bald
eagles, the diamond billboards for you home
state. Love it. The big glittery brooches are so
distinctive. Love them.
6. Beware of inaugural ball up-dos. Nancy
Reagan's chignon at the 1981 inaugural looked
imperious. (The fact that she was wearing a
$10,000 gown didn't help.) Hillary Clinton, I
hate to say, looked like a Grand Ole Opry star
with curls piled high at 1993's inaugural. But
you looked fabulous on the cover of Monday's
New York Post, with your hair pulled back for
a night out on the town with the future
president. If that's preview of Jan. 20, I say do
it. Just don't do it again for a while.
7. Keep wearing American designers, and
wear more of them. Oscar de la Renta has
been the favored designer of Laura Bush and
Hillary Clinton, and there's no reason to resist
his beautiful clothes on occasion.
But Donna Karan is perfect for your strength
and curves. Michael Kors and Ralph Lauren
make the classic sweaters and skirts you love.
Isaac Mizrahi makes a beautiful gown. Diane
von Fürstenberg and Tory Burch favor the
easy shapes and bold prints you love.
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Remember, these designers collectively
employ hundreds of American workers, and
the American fashion industry could use your
support right now.
8. Inauguration Day. Wear Maria Pinto to the
swearing-in ceremony and Thakoon to the
inaugural balls.
This is no time for risk-taking. Pinto has been
dressing you the longest and deserves the
honor. I'd say she's guaranteed to make you
look your best. And if you're going to wear a
hat, call Albertus Swanepoel, New York's last
great milliner. Only he could pull it off.
I think you would be incredible in a Donna
Karan draped gown and coat for evening. But
Thakoon Panichgul is the ideal choice to
design your inaugural gown. The 33-year-old
Thai-born, Omaha-raised, New York-based
designer represents the very best of American
opportunity and hard work, and he will capture
the romance and the majesty of that incredible
night for the rest of us to remember.
fighting words
Barack to Reality
Obama's victory didn't magically eliminate America's problems and enemies.
By Christopher Hitchens
Monday, November 10, 2008, at 11:30 AM ET
Yes, yes, yes. I, too, took pleasure in standing in line and in
exchanging pleasantries and greetings with the amazingly
courteous staff at my polling station and the many citizens of my
delightfully diverse Washington neighborhood. I, too, am still
wearing my lapel sticker, with the jaunty words "I Voted." And I
found it pretty easy to cast a vote that told the Republican Party,
for which I recommended a vote last time, not to try any of this
shit again. No more McCarthy tactics; no more stumblebum
quitting of the campaign trail and attempting to pull out of the
first presidential debate in order to wind up voting to save
Lehman Bros.; no more driveling Christian fundamentalism; no
more insinuation that only those silly enough to endorse them
are "real Americans." No more sneers at San Francisco as if it
weren't a real American city. McCain and his preposterous
running mate will just have to believe in an afterlife in which
they can live down the shame of what they attempted this year.
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But I might possibly have voted for them all the same, clothes
pin clamped over my nose in the voting booth, if only because of
the crucial struggle for a free Iraq and an autonomous Kurdistan.
And, in such a case, I would have been very annoyed at the
suggestion that my vote was a racist one. "Historic," yelled the
very headline across the top of my morning newspaper. (Just the
news, please, if you would be so kind.) Would the letters have
been so big for the first female vice president? And isn't it
already historic that millions of white Christians voted, win or
lose, for a man with one Kenyan parent, that parent having been
raised as a Muslim?
So let us not over-egg the pudding. And if you think our own
press and media are too uncritically adoring, just spend a second
or two exposing yourself to the overseas version. On election
night, I spent a little time on British and then on Australian
television. For expressing a few mild doubts about the new
president-elect, I was forcibly reminded in one case that the first
14 (I think it was) presidents of the United States could have
owned Barack Obama, and was informed in the second case that
just 40 years ago, he would not have been allowed to vote in the
election, let alone win it.
Well, as it happens, our new president has no slave ancestry, and
neither branch of his parentage could have been owned by
anybody, or at least not by anybody American. (Muslim-run
slavery, though, is an old story in Africa as well as a horribly
contemporary one.) And there were not a few elected black
American representatives 40 years ago, even if mainly in
Northern states. The objection I make is therefore twofold. First,
the election of Obama is the effect not the cause of the changes.
(One of my questioners appeared to think that our president-elect
had been responsible for the decision in Brown v. Board of
Education.) Second, a Republican victory would have had
absolutely no effect on the legal or political standing of black
Americans, which is a matter of our law and our Constitution
and cannot be undone by any ephemeral vote or plebiscite.
The recognition of these obvious points should also alert us to a
related danger, which is the cousinhood of euphoria and hysteria.
Those who think that they have just voted to legalize Utopia
(and I hardly exaggerate when I say this; have you been reading
the moist and trusting comments of our commentariat?) are
preparing for a disillusionment that I very much doubt they will
blame on themselves. The national Treasury is an echoing,
empty vault; our Russian and Iranian enemies are acting even
more wolfishly even as they sense a repudiation of BushCheney; the lines of jobless and evicted are going to lengthen,
and I don't think a diet of hope is going to cover it. Nor even a
diet of audacity, though can you picture anything less audacious
than the gray, safety-first figures who have so far been chosen
by Obama to be on his team?
There is an element of the "wannabe" about all this—something
that suggests that, if the clock were to be rolled back, every
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
living white person would now automatically stand with John
Brown at Harper's Ferry and with John Lewis at the Edmund
Pettus Bridge. All the evidence we have is to the contrary:
Abraham Lincoln ringingly denounced John Brown, and John F.
Kennedy (he of the last young and pretty family to occupy the
Executive Mansion) was embarrassed and annoyed by the March
on Washington. In other words, there is something pain-free and
self-congratulatory about the Obama surge. This has happened
before, of course, with the high-sounding talk about the "New
Frontier," the "Great Society," and "Morning in America." It's
just that this time it's more than usually not affordable. There are
many causes of the subprime and derivative horror show that has
destroyed our trust in the idea of credit, but one way of defining
it would be to say that everybody was promised everything, and
almost everybody fell for the populist bait.
More worrying still, there are vicious enemies and rogue states
in increasing positions of influence throughout the world (one of
the episodes that most condemned the Republican campaign was
its attempt to slander Sen. Joe Biden for his candid attempt to
point this out), yet many Obama voters appear to believe that the
mere charm and aspect of their new president will act as an
emollient influence on these unwelcome facts and these hostile
forces. I can't make myself perform this act of faith, and I won't
put up with any innuendo about my inability to do so.
food
A Short History of the Bagel
From ancient Egypt to Lender's.
By Joan Nathan
Wednesday, November 12, 2008, at 7:00 AM ET
When my family first moved to Larchmont, N.Y., in 1946, my
father had a feeling that the neighbors living behind us were
Jewish. In those days, you didn't broadcast your religion, so he
devised a plan that would reveal their cultural background. We
would go to the Bronx and bring back some bagels. If our
neighbors knew what the rolls were, they were Jewish. If they
stared at them in bewilderment, we would know they were not.
To my father's delight, as soon as our neighbors saw the bagels,
they recognized them. Nowadays, dad's devious plan to
determine a neighbor's religion wouldn't work. After all, who
doesn't know what a bagel is? But what are the origins of this
once-mysterious bread, and what happened between 1946 and
today that turned the bagel into a trans-cultural and all-American
breakfast bun?
After years of research on Jewish food in America, I thought I
had discovered all there was to know about the bagel and its
journey. But then I read Maria Balinska's lively and wellresearched book, The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest
18/82
Bread. Her book has filled in many of the questions I had about
the bagel and raised new ones, too.
The basic roll-with-a-hole concept is centuries old. No surprise,
really, as there's a practical advantage to this design—it's
possible to thread such a roll on a stick or a string, facilitating
transport. Balinska identifies several possible candidates for the
ur-bagel from around the world, including the taralli—hard,
round crackers flavored with fennel that have been the local
snack for centuries in Puglia, Italy. She also mentions the
Roman buccellatum and the Chinese girde but neglects to note
that even the ancient Egyptians had a bagellike treat. Just a few
weeks ago, I came across Egyptian hieroglyphics at the Louvre
in Paris, and among the depictions of daily life were rolls with a
hole.
The evidence suggests that the first rolls with a hole, those of
ancient Egypt and of the greater Mediterranean, came in two
types: the soft, sesame-studded variety, called bagele in Israel
today, eaten plain or dipped in za'atar (a spice combination of
wild oregano, sesame seeds, and salt); and a pretzellike crispy
Syrian ka'ak flavored much like taralli. Neither is boiled, a
distinguishing characteristic of American bagels.
Polish-born and half-Jewish, Balinska, who works at the BBC in
London, tells us that the boiled and baked bagel as we know it
comes from her homeland. She tells the story of the Krakow
bagel, which was a product of the 1683 Battle of Vienna.
Although the story is completely speculative and perhaps even
fictitious, it is a piece of gastronomic lore that has endured
throughout the ages. As the story goes, 17th-century Poland was
the breadbasket of Europe, and King Jan Sobieski was the first
king not to confirm the decree of 1496 limiting the production of
white bread and obwarzanek (bagellike rolls whose name
derives from a word meaning "to parboil") to the Krakow bakers
guild. This meant that Jews could finally bake bread within the
confines of the city walls. Furthermore, when Sobieski saved
Austria from the Turkish invaders, a baker made a roll in the
shape of the king's stirrup and called it a beugel (the Austrian
word for stirrup). As Balinska says, "Whatever its origin, the
story of the bagel being created in honor of Jan Sobieski and his
victory in Vienna has endured."
But the bagel has endured through the centuries not only because
of its heroic legend. It also had the advantage of lasting longer
than freshly baked bread because the boiling gave the roll an
outer sheen and a crunchy, protective crust. As Balinska points
out, if it got slightly stale, it was dunked in hot liquid to soften it.
Once bagels became popular in Krakow, the Jewish bakers
began making them in their own bakeries due to the strictness of
Jewish dietary laws.
It is unclear when the first bagels made their way to the United
States, but 70 bakeries existed on the Lower East side by 1900.
In 1907 the International Beigel Bakers' Union was created and
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
from then on monopolized bagel production in New York City.
What is also certain is that immigrants from Eastern Europe,
with their cravings for the foods of the old country, sparked the
New York bagel craze. Balinska explains that the Jews of the
Lower East Side created a demand for the breads of their
homeland—rye, challah, and bagels.
The '50s were a turning point. It was after World War II, and
Americans were trying to get back to normalcy and reconcile the
atrocities of the war. They were, for the first time, somewhat
philo-Semitic. In addition, Jews were rapidly assimilating,
moving to other parts of the city, expanding their culinary
horizons, and sharing their own culinary traditions with the rest
of New York.
In the early 1950s, Family Circle included a recipe for bageles
(their spelling). The copy read: "Stumped for the Hors d'oeuvres
Ideas? Here's a grand one from Fannie Engle. 'Split these tender
little triumphs in halves and then quarters. Spread with sweet
butter and place a small slice of smoked salmon on each. For
variations, spread with cream cheese, anchovies or red caviar.
(They're also delicious served as breakfast rolls.)' " Engle, who
later wrote The Jewish Festival Cookbook, did not mention the
Jewish Sunday morning ritual of lox, bagel, and cream cheese—
an American concoction that was just taking off, spurred on
most probably by Joseph Kraft's advertising blitz for
Philadelphia Cream Cheese. It soon became an American
alternative to the other Sunday trilogy of bacon, eggs, and toast.
In 1951, the bagel made a big appearance in the Broadway
comedy Bagel and Yox, introducing the word bagel into such
mainstream magazines as Time. Balinska says that "one of the
attractions of Bagel and Yox was the fact that freshly baked
bagels and cream cheese were handed out to the audience during
intermission."
At this historical moment, Murray Lender hit upon a method for
mass distribution of bagels. His father, Harry, had come from
Poland to New Haven, Conn., and had opened a wholesale bagel
bakery in 1927, one of the few outside of New York. In this
small, diverse town, ethnic communities intermingled, sampling
one another's local specialties. After a while, Balinska explains,
it became clear to the Lenders that the Jewish bagel was just as
appetizing to the Irish and the Italians as it was to the Jews. The
turning point came when Murray, having returned from the
Korean War in 1956, bought a freezer. He and his father soon
realized that they could deliver thawed bagels to retailers
without marring their flavor. A subsequent innovation was the
packaging of bagels in batches of six in polyethylene bags,
making them even more durable. Soon, Lender's Bagels shared
shelf space in supermarkets with household names like
Pepperidge Farm and Wonder Bread. Over the next decade,
supermarket sales did nothing but grow. And with the advent of
the frozen-food aisle, frozen bagels became an affordable,
convenient food that could be shipped to grocery stores in farflung parts of the country that had never before seen one.
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Bagelmania hit the ground running in this country with chains
opening up all over the place, replacing, to a certain extent, the
doughnut shops of the earlier part of the 20 th century. (Today,
America's most popular doughnut shop, Dunkin' Donuts, also
sells bagels.) It is my suspicion that bagels became so popular
because, unlike Mexican burritos or Chinese egg rolls, they don't
taste ethnic. They weren't marketed as Jewish and weren't sold in
kosher sections of grocery stores. To the bread- and sandwichloving American population, the bagel was simply another bun
with a bite—different enough to satisfy a craving for innovation,
but not different enough to appear exotic.
So, it makes sense that today's bagel bakeries are not necessarily
Jewish-owned or run. A Puerto Rican family owns H&H Bagels
in New York. John Marx, a Cincinnatian of German
background, bakes 36 different bagel varieties, including
Cincinnati Red bagels, tropical fruit, and taco bagels. And the
best bagel bakery in New York, according to many, is one
owned by a Thai couple on the Upper West Side.
Bagels are clearly no longer specifically a Jewish food. At some
point in the middle of the 20th century, their position from the
Jewish bun to the American breakfast bread shifted. The exact
moment is unclear, but one moment stands out in my mind. In
1998, when I was first filming my PBS television series, Jewish
Cooking in America, Lender's, which by then had been bought
and sold numerous times, was one of our sponsors. For this
cooking show featuring kosher food, they sent us an
underwriting spot depicting a perfectly toasted bagel with Swiss
cheese and ham! Oy! I almost plotzed. To me, that moment was
the ultimate assimilation of the bagel into American life.
foreigners
In Praise of Political Rock Stars
The post-election Obama euphoria will fade soon enough, but let's enjoy it
while it lasts.
By Anne Applebaum
Monday, November 10, 2008, at 8:10 PM ET
Rather faster than I would have expected—sometime around
close of play last Wednesday—I began to get a familiar creepy
feeling. It was that old "Princess Diana is dead, and the media
coverage is too much" sensation. I'm not suggesting that the
events of Nov. 5 remotely resembled those of a decade ago last
August, but I don't think I'm revealing much to astute readers if I
suggest that something else was mixed in with the legitimate
rejoicing at a race barrier broken: a touch, just a touch, of the
starry-eyed celebrity worship that, for not entirely rational
reasons, attached itself to Princess Diana but not to Prince
Charles; to John Paul II and not to Benedict; to Barack Obama
but not to Bill Clinton. OK, more than a touch. Whatever it was
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
that made teenage girls faint at the sight of Ringo and Paul at the
height of Beatlemania also made adult men and women scream
when Obama walked onstage in Chicago.
The politician-as-rock-star is nothing new, of course. Some of
that same celebrity charisma—not so much messianic as popiconic—also drew cheering, fainting crowds to Bobby
Kennedy's primary campaign in 1968. According to historian
Thurston Clarke, after one RFK speech "waves of students
rushed the platform, knocking over chairs and raising more dust.
They grabbed at him, stroking his hair and ripping his
shirtsleeves." Some of the same mix was in the air at that time,
too: youth, hope, change, racial progress. The 1968 primary
campaign, RFK had even declared, was about "not simply the
leadership of our party and even our country. It is [about] our
right to the moral leadership of this planet." Sound familiar?
The difference now, of course, is the way in which the RFK
effect is increased and multiplied and globalized by modern
media and the 24-hour news cycle. We saw so many pictures of
cheering foreigners last week that we became immune to them.
Actually, the phenomenon is rather weird. That Kenyans should
declare a national holiday when one of their nation's sons
becomes the U.S. president is just about understandable. But
what's up with the cheering Germans? Their nation hasn't elected
a black leader (or a Turkish leader) and isn't likely to do so
anytime soon. Even so, they felt obliged to join the global party.
Is this necessarily a bad thing? Surely it's shallow, and surely it
will end in disappointment? One German blogger has already
made his prediction: "Condescending euphoria" will be followed
by "cynicism," which in turn will be followed by "Obama is
hopelessly inexperienced and thoroughly represents the fleeting
and superficial nature of American society." One British
journalist gives the international left six months before it unites
once again behind the banner of anti-Americanism.
And there could be worse: Mass hysteria, as the RFK analogy
shows, can also inspire the world's crazed assassins. This subject
is borderline taboo, but I don't think I was the only one
momentarily gripped by terror when Obama walked onto that
stage in Chicago: What if something awful was about to happen?
In some of the weirder realms of the Internet, you can already
find verses from Nostradamus allegedly predicting that Obama's
election heralds the end of the world, and someone out there
probably believes them.
And yet—perhaps I, too, am touched by the warm afterglow—I
feel the need to be positive, in spite of myself. We know it's
superficial, we know it leads to disappointment, and we know it
can be dangerous, but can't a mass celebration sometimes be
inspiring, as well? Surely it makes a difference that the emotions
expressed on Nov. 5 were not sparked by a celebrity tragedy or a
rock anthem but by a genuinely meaningful event: the election
20/82
of the first black American president and the symbolic end of the
worst chapter of American history.
If some Americans walked away from their election-night party
vowing to improve the world around them, maybe it doesn't
matter that their feelings about him were enhanced by his rockstar presence. If some foreigners are now inspired to work for
greater ethnic and racial equality in their own societies, maybe it
doesn't matter that they know more about Obama's good looks
than they do about his health care policy. If it was only celebrity
charisma making people weep, as celebrity charisma made
people weep for Diana, we'd be in trouble. Besides, there isn't
any other good news out there—which is reason enough,
perhaps, to hope that the uplifting effects last at least until the
end of next week.
Obama's bold rhetoric does not match the more mainstream
policies he is championing. John says Obama will be able to
make some early choices that will be popular, including
reversing current policies on the State Children's Health
Insurance Program and stem cells.
The group discusses how to talk to children about the Obama
victory and its place in the racial history of the United States.
Since the election, Sarah Palin has been talking a great deal
about the campaign and her role in it, perhaps in an attempt to
rehabilitate her public image. Emily says the visibility campaign
may be an effort to become the national spokeswoman of the
conservative wing of the Republican Party.
David says Slate has received many inquiries following last
week's request for a Gabfest sponsor. He also chatters about a
New York Times story that says more and more women are
opting to give birth at home.
gabfest
The Huge Agenda Gabfest
Listen to Slate's review of the week in politics.
By Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz
Friday, November 14, 2008, at 10:28 AM ET
Listen to the Gabfest for Nov. 14 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.
Emily talks about a Supreme Court argument on whether
forensic scientists working for police labs can be required to
testify in court about their findings in criminal cases.
John chatters about a 2004 interview in which Obama discussed
his views on religion. John says the interview occurred at a time
when Obama did not yet have all the filters in place that now
prevent him from speaking candidly.
The e-mail address for the Political Gabfest is
gabfest@slate.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the
writer stipulates otherwise.)
Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz talk politics.
This week, the election, how Barack Obama will fare as
president, and the future of Sarah Palin.
Posted on Nov. 14 by Dale Willman at 10:30 a.m.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned
in the show:
Listen to the Gabfest for Nov. 7 by clicking the arrow on the
audio player below:
President-elect Barack Obama has the highest approval rating
going into office of any president over the past 25 years.
Outgoing President George W Bush, meanwhile, has the lowest
approval rating of any president since the beginning of such
polls.
It appears that the cautious tone of Obama's Nov. 4 acceptance
speech was an attempt to tamp down expectations.
A major question for Obama will be whether he should behave
like former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and work fast
to capitalize on his current popularity or whether he should
move more cautiously. John says he favors a bold approach,
similar to what Obama promised in the campaign. But he says
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Nov. 7, 2008
You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe
to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.
John Dickerson, David Plotz, and Emily Bazelon talk politics.
This week, what happened, what's next, and what will become of
Sarah Palin?
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned
in the show:
21/82
This election is significant for many reasons, among them that
the voter turnout was the largest in 44 years.
Exit polls turned out to be pretty accurate predictors of the final
results.
Voter turnout in the District of Columbia was huge but caused
few voting glitches.
You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe
to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.
Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz talk politics.
This week, it's all about the last week of the presidential
campaign—with a shout-out to the Philadelphia Phillies.
John discusses Barack Obama's final campaign rally in
Manassas, Va., which drew as many as 100,000 people. At the
end of that speech, Obama told the story of how, months earlier,
during a visit to South Carolina, one woman helped motivate
him by shouting out, "Fired up, ready to go!" That moment, he
says, shows how one person can make a difference. The phrase
itself became a rallying cry for the Obama campaign.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned
in the show:
John also talks about Rahm Emanuel's appointment as Obama's
chief of staff. He says it shows Obama quickly moving from
election mode into governing mode. The group also discusses
the baggage Emanuel could bring to the Obama White House.
He is known for being ruthless and is often described as having
"sharp elbows."
Emily suggests that John McCain is getting some traction with
his campaign's latest effort, which is to cast Barak Obama as a
socialist who wants to redistribute wealth in the country.
One major question lingering after the election concerns the fate
of Sarah Palin. Some Palin supporters say she is now being
blamed for McCain's loss. Newsweek reported that McCaincampaign insiders are complaining that Palin spent thousands of
dollars more than previously disclosed buying clothes for herself
and her husband.
David chatters about Curtis Sittenfeld's novel American Wife,
which is inspired by the life of first lady Laura Bush.
Emily talks about the passage of Proposition 8 in California, a
constitutional amendment that bans same-sex marriage in the
state. A number of lawsuits have already been filed in an effort
to overturn the measure.
John chatters about the holograms CNN used during its electionnight coverage.
The e-mail address for the Political Gabfest is
gabfest@slate.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the
writer stipulates otherwise.)
Posted on Nov. 7 by Dale Willman at 12:30 p.m.
John writes this week about a sense of hopefulness that has come
over many of the people working for the McCain campaign.
Emily attempts to correct John's pronunciation of the word dour.
John talks about the size of the crowds at campaign rallies for
Obama compared with those for McCain.
The gang also discusses whether attacks on Obama's character
will appeal to undecided voters. John points out that undecided
voters typically vote for the challenger in a presidential race,
which should mean Obama, since the Republicans currently hold
the White House. One factor in McCain's favor is that during the
primaries, the undecided voters favored Hillary Clinton over
Obama.
John says 10,000 Elvis fans can't be wrong.
John says the optimism in the McCain camp is likely misguided,
because there are too many data points favoring Obama—so
many red states seem to be leaning toward the Democrat or are
considered likely wins for Obama. He says Obama's early
strategy of challenging McCain across the country, rather than
focusing on primarily Democratic states, is now paying off.
David praises Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic Party,
who designed the so-called 50-state strategy after the
Democratic defeat in the 2004 presidential election.
Emily breaks the discussion of politics with her cocktail chatter,
in which she brags about her hometown Philadelphia Phillies
winning the World Series.
Oct. 31, 2008
Listen to the Gabfest for Oct. 31 by clicking the arrow on the
audio player below:
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
John chatters about the early vote in this election. As many as
one-third of all voters will have voted by Election Day, so it is
possible that the election will effectively be over by then, though
no one will know for sure.
22/82
David talks about Slate's effort to have staffers publicly state
who they will vote for next Tuesday. Of those who took part, the
count was 55 for Obama and just one for McCain. David claims
that almost all major news organizations would find similar
results.
The e-mail address for the Political Gabfest is
gabfest@slate.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the
writer stipulates otherwise.)
Emily chatters about a new law in Oklahoma that requires
doctors to provide ultrasounds for any woman inquiring about an
abortion.
Michael discusses the recently concluded Nike Women's
Marathon in San Francisco. The race has sparked controversy
because of an unusual occurrence—one woman crossed the
finish line first, while another had the fastest time.
David wonders why so many Republican men wear Van Dykes.
Posted on Oct. 31 by Dale Willman at 10:41 a.m.
Oct. 24, 2008
Listen to the Gabfest for Oct. 24 by clicking the arrow on the
audio player below:
The e-mail address for the Political Gabfest is
gabfest@slate.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the
writer stipulates otherwise.)
Posted on Oct. 24 by Dale Willman at 11:20 p.m.
You can also download the program here, or you
can subscribe to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed
in iTunes by clicking here.
green room
Emily Bazelon, David Plotz, and special guest Michael Newman
talk politics. This week, the latest from the presidential
campaign trail, a vice-presidential candidate's wardrobe, and a
supersecret topic.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned
in the show:
David discusses how the wheels seem to be coming off the
McCain campaign. The Republican candidate can't seem to keep
one theme going for more than a few days, and his running mate,
Sarah Palin, has publicly disagreed with McCain several times
over the past few weeks.
This phenomenon is the subject of a story by Robert Draper in
this Sunday's New York Times Magazine.
Joe Biden apparently stuck his foot in his mouth this week.
Liza Mundy has an interesting piece in Slate about how difficult
it was to write a biography of Michelle Obama because the
Obama campaign controls information about the candidate and
his family so tightly.
The Republican Party has spent $150,000 on clothes for Sarah
Palin, according to published reports, sparking controversy.
Cindy McCain reportedly wore an outfit worth approximately
$300,000 at the Republican convention and faced very little
criticism for it.
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
eBay and Ivory
The auction site's ban on elephant products won't help the environment.
By Brendan Borrell
Thursday, November 13, 2008, at 6:42 AM ET
If, like me, you have always wanted to get a carved, elephantivory snuff box for that special someone, this holiday season
may well be your last opportunity. The online auction site eBay
announced on Oct. 20 that it would ban nearly all ivory sales on
its auction sites effective Jan. 1. Last month, the company was
embarrassed by the International Fund for Animal Welfare,
which estimated that it was hosting an elephant-ivory trade in
the United States worth $3.2 million per year.
This may seem like another example of corporate
greenwashing—a way for the auction site to paper over its
misdeeds and parade around as a concerned environmental
steward. In fact, the new policy is directly at odds with
mainstream conservationists. Just one week after eBay made its
big announcement, the Convention on the International Trade in
Endangered Species—with support from WWF—was going
forward with a one-time auction of government ivory stockpiles
from elephants that either died of natural causes or had been
culled in population-control programs in four southern African
countries. These sales netted $15 million, earmarked for
elephant conservation and local community-development
programs. Although international laws governing the ivory trade
are complex, the truth is that most of the ivory being sold on
eBay was totally legal. More to the point, buying ivory online
may actually be a good thing for conservation: The more snuff
boxes we demand, the better chance that elephants and their
ecosystems have to withstand the pressures of modernization.
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Wild elephants are never going to be tolerated in Africa so long
as locals cannot profit from the animals' most valuable asset:
those 120-pound teeth. As journalist John Frederick Walker
argues in his provocative new book, Ivory's Ghosts: The White
Gold of History and the Fate of Elephants (to be published in
January), the high regard with which American zoo-goers hold
these proboscideans is not shared by poverty-stricken farmers in
Kenya, who must contend with 4-ton living bulldozers
rampaging their cassava fields and threatening their lives. Flip
through African newspapers, and you'll find lurid headlines
describing trampled schoolchildren, panicked villagers, and
nightly curfews. Americans would not put up with life under
those conditions, yet we have imposed this imperial vision on a
far-off continent that we imagine as our private zoo.
The elephant problem is equally vexing inside the national parks
of Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, whose
burgeoning elephant populations must be managed to avoid their
overwhelming the ecosystem. Elephants are the largest living
land mammal, each consuming as much as 600 pounds of
vegetation a day and drinking 50 gallons of water. In 1970, a
hands-off policy to Kenya's elephants in Tsavo National Park
provided a bitter lesson to those who opposed culling. After
ravaging the park's fragile vegetation during a season of drought,
elephants began dying by the thousands. Animals whose meat
could have supported the region's desperate farmers and whose
ivory could have provided $3 million for conservation were
rotting in the blazing sun. In the years since, South African
wildlife managers have refined culling procedures to minimize
trauma to elephant family groups, and they catalog and store
ivory under lock and key in anticipation of future auctions.
But pragmatic approaches to elephant conservation took a blow
in 1989, when celebrities Brigitte Bardot and Jimmy Stewart
joined animal rights campaigns to fight the "elephant holocaust"
being conducted by poachers and, by implication, wildlife
managers. According to Walker, the WWF and the African
Wildlife Foundation "felt it prudent … to keep quiet about the
value of sustainable use policies." Although no African or
Western countries initially supported a ban on the ivory trade, by
the end of the year they were on the losing end of the battle for
public opinion. On Oct. 8, in Lausanne, Switzerland, CITES
listed African elephants as Appendix I, effectively cutting off
ivory sales, putting Asian importers and carving shops out of
business, and turning "white gold" into a social no-no. "In the
aftermath of the decision," Walker writes, "the ivory market
collapsed as ivory prices plummeted."
The latest effort to humiliate eBay represents another example of
an animal rights organization hijacking the African conservation
agenda with an untenable vision that may do more harm than
good. Advocates for a ban on ivory claim the CITES auction
gives unscrupulous traders a chance to launder poached goods.
But a wildlife trade monitoring program set up by WWF and the
International Union for the Conservation of Nature has found
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
that illegal-ivory seizures have declined in the five years
following the last ivory auction approved by CITES in 1999. It
appears that a flush of legal ivory from these auctions knocks out
black-market dealers. While poaching remains a problem in
Central and East Africa, the data suggest that those activities
feed domestic African markets, not online auctioneers in the
United States.
Most of the ivory that was being sold on eBay may not have
been illegal at all. A good deal of ivory in the country simply
predates the 1989 ban, and interstate sale of ivory is not tightly
regulated or monitored. As for imports, residents can bring in
licensed hunting trophies for personal use or antique ivory items
more than 100 years old. The IFAW report on eBay simply
identified certain auctions as "likely violations" or "possible
violations" of the law, based on the wording used in listings.
According to the study, just 15.5 percent of ivory goods on the
site fell into the "likely violation" category. Turn those figures
around, and it's clear that eBay also supported a vibrant, legal
ivory market.
The only way to improve this market is through transparency,
and eBay was ideally suited to play such a role. Because the site
maintains a database of every auction, the final sale price, and
the parties involved, it could provide a valuable tool for lawenforcement officers and conservation organizations. With those
data, it would be possible to track the volume of the ivory trade
and help identify questionable buyers and sellers based on their
transaction patterns. Once the market moves offline—and to
classifieds sites such as Craigslist—this sort of monitoring will
be largely impossible.
If eBay wanted to take a stand for conservation, it should have
partnered with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service—and notified
its users that any purchase or sale of wildlife products will be
recorded in a government database. Add to this the eventual
possibility of spot checks using DNA testing, and we'd be well
on our way to a sustainable, digital marketplace. Given such a
framework, ivory would regain its respectability, and it might
even be possible to open our borders to the importation of newly
worked ivory from registered sellers abroad. After two decades
under the ban, it's finally time to admit that saving elephants
requires pulling a few teeth.
green room
The Corn Isn't Green
The real reason ethanol won't—and can't—cut American oil imports.
By Robert Bryce
Wednesday, November 12, 2008, at 6:55 AM ET
24/82
H.L. Mencken once remarked that there is a "well-known
solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong."
That quote comes to mind when considering the vocal group of
neoconservatives, agribusiness lobbyists, and politicians that
claims that the best way to cut American oil imports, and
thereby impoverish the petrostates (and, in theory, reduce
terrorism), is to require automakers to manufacture "flex-fuel"
cars that can burn motor fuel containing 85 percent ethanol or
methanol.
Their rationale is simple: Using more ethanol from corn or other
biomass, as well as methanol from coal or other sources, will
create competition in the motor-fuel market and depose oil as the
main transportation fuel. Oil prices will fall, the petrostates will
suffer, and a newly energy-independent United States will zoom
back to its position as the world's undisputed superpower. Their
rhetoric is so attractive that several members of Congress have
introduced legislation that would require automakers to produce
flex-fuel cars.
Unfortunately, this idea betrays a near-complete ignorance of the
world petroleum business. The ethanol producers and the flexfuel-car advocates are wrong because their solution replaces only
part of the crude-oil barrel and won't reduce demand for that
entire barrel in any meaningful way. Here's why.
When it is refined, a barrel of crude yields several different
"cuts" that range from light products, such as butane, to heavy
products, such as asphalt. Even the best-quality barrel of crude
(42 gallons) yields only about 20 gallons of gasoline.
Furthermore, certain types of crude oil (such as light sweet) are
better suited to gasoline or diesel production than others. The
overall point is that even the most technologically advanced oil
refineries cannot produce just one product from a barrel of
crude—they must produce several, and the market value of those
various cuts is constantly changing.
The problem for the ethanol advocates is that there's very little
growth in gasoline demand, while the demand for other cuts of
the barrel is booming. In short, the corn ethanol producers are
making the wrong type of fuel at the wrong time. They are
producing fuel that displaces gasoline at a time when gasoline
demand—both in the United States and globally—is essentially
flat. Meanwhile, demand for the segment of the crude barrel
known as middle distillates—primarily diesel fuel and jet fuel—
is growing rapidly. And corn ethanol cannot replace diesel or jet
fuel, the liquids that propel the vast majority of our commercial
transportation machinery.
In June, the Energy Information Administration released its
Annual Energy Outlook, which expects domestic demand for
diesel fuel to grow about four times faster than that of gasoline
through 2015. Looking further out, toward 2030, diesel demand
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
is expected to increase about 14 times faster than that of
gasoline. Indeed, by 2030, the EIA expects U.S. diesel
consumption to rise by 51 percent over 2006 consumption levels
while gasoline use will increase by just 3.6 percent.
In July, the Paris-based International Energy Agency released its
medium-term oil market report, which said that "distillates (jet
fuel, kerosene, diesel, and other gasoil) have become—and will
remain—the main growth drivers of world oil demand."
Between 2007 and 2013, the IEA expects distillate demand to
increase nearly double while global gasoline demand will grow
only slightly.
The surge in diesel demand is due in large part to the ongoing
"dieselization" of the European automobile market, as well as
continued economic growth in Asia and the United States. This
increasing demand for diesel, combined with a global lack of
refineries that can produce the type of low-sulfur diesel that is
now mandated in the United States and Europe, means that
diesel will continue selling for a premium relative to gasoline.
And given a chronic shortage of high-quality refining capacity in
Europe, that price differential will likely persist for a decade or
more to come.
That increasing diesel demand (and the increasing value of
diesel fuel) means that U.S. refineries are buying more foreign
crude, not less. That's a bitter fact given that cutting dependence
on foreign oil has been cited ad nauseam as the justification for
the corn ethanol mandates as well as continued federal research
funding for the mirage of cellulosic ethanol.
As an executive at a large domestic oil refiner (who asked that
his name and company not be disclosed) explained it, "ethanol is
making diesel more expensive relative to gasoline because it's
expanding the pool of gasoline. But to make diesel, we have to
process more crude, which in turn is raising the price of crude."
He went on, saying that for some refiners, "gasoline is being
thrown into the market as a diesel byproduct."
In other words, ethanol is doing absolutely nothing to reduce
overall U.S. oil consumption or imports because refiners have to
buy the same amount of crude (or more) in order to meet the
demand for products other than gasoline—that is, jet fuel, diesel
fuel, fuel oil, asphalt, etc.
The most recent oil import data back up this conclusion. Since
2000 domestic crude-oil production has declined by about
600,000 barrels per day. Meanwhile, domestic corn ethanol
production capacity has surged about fivefold. In July, according
to the Renewable Fuels Association, U.S. ethanol output stood,
coincidentally, at about 600,000 barrels per day. Given those
numbers, America's overall oil imports should be flat or only
slightly higher, right? After all, corn ethanol boosters claim that
their fuel will reduce America's need for foreign oil. But the
latest numbers from the Energy Information Administration
25/82
show no decrease in imports. In fact, it's just the opposite. In
July 2000, the United States was importing about 11.6 million
barrels of crude oil and petroleum products per day. By July
2008, total imports had increased to about 13 million barrels per
day. The same trend holds true when looking only at crude oil
imports. In July 2000, crude oil imports were about 9.4 million
barrels per day. By July 2008, they had increased to 10.1 million
barrels per day.
The punch line here is obvious: The corn ethanol scam cannot,
has not, and will not significantly reduce overall oil use or
significantly cut oil imports because it only replaces one
segment of the crude-oil barrel. Furthermore, all the talk about
"cellulosic ethanol," a substance that, in theory, can be profitably
produced in commercial quantities from grass, wood chips, or
other biomass, is largely misplaced because, like corn ethanol, it
will only supplant gasoline.
Unless or until inventors can come up with a substance (or
substances) that can replace all of the products that are refined
from a barrel of crude oil—from gasoline to naphtha and diesel
to asphalt—then the United States, along with every other
country on the planet, is going to continue using oil as a primary
energy source for decades to come. And that will be true no
matter how much corn gets burned up in America's delusional
quest for "energy independence."
hey, wait a minute
The Audacity of E-mail
Dear Mr. President-elect, please take me off your spam list.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Tuesday, November 11, 2008, at 6:02 PM ET
Dear Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Joe Biden, David
Plouffe, John Kerry, Al Gore, et al.:
First, I want to congratulate you on last week's astounding
victory. I also want to take a moment to thank each of you for
the many, many thoughtful and informative communications you
have sent me over the weeks and months of this historic
campaign. Each e-mail was like a precious gift, except that
unlike a gift, each e-mail came with a request for cash.
But you know, that was OK. You were, after all, working toward
a momentous goal, and I was happy to be asked to help you get
there (particularly since my employer wouldn't allow me to give
you money, anyhow). We climbed this mountain together, you
and I, and your bulletins from the trenches never failed to set my
heart to pounding: They're calling Obama a terrorist. My $50
will get them to stop! Sarah Palin thinks there are real and faux
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Americans. One hundred dollars from me, and she will go away!
"Will you watch our response ad and make a donation of $100 or
more to help us keep it on the air?" Just $25 for a limited edition
car magnet, $75 for a commemorative coin, $100 for a backstage
pass to Grant Park!
And, Barack. When you wrote to me on election night to tell me
you were "about to head to Grant Park to talk to everyone
gathered there" but were taking a moment to write to me first—
well, I was so touched I almost didn't notice the little "donate
now" button at the bottom of the page. Also, I have to admit that
in the six days between the election and yesterday morning, I
even came to miss my near-daily missives from each of you,
updating me, flattering me, promising me great things and then
shaking me down, just as a very kind, attentive, loving parent
might do if, say, you owed him a lot of money.
But imagine my dismay yesterday when I opened my inbox to
discover an e-mail entitled "Your Victory T-Shirt." Instead of a
free victory T-shirt, I was being offered the chance to send yet
another $100 to the DNC (in exchange for which I would, in all
fairness, receive a free "victory T-shirt"). It's hard to explain why
it's so galling to be asked to donate yet more money to a
campaign after the election has been decided. It's sort of like
being asked to keep planting the victory garden, years after
Armistice Day. Even having achieved the presidency, Barack
Obama is still counting on little old me for financial help?
What's next? Dear Dahlia, Joe Biden and I have a bunch of great
ideas for fixing government. And with your $100 donation, we
can ensure that the S-Chip is fully funded and that the spotted
owl remains on the endangered-species list. Please watch this
video and consider a contribution.
America's unprecedented showing of financial and emotional
support helped the Obama campaign win the Oval Office. It was
a beautiful thing. And I really am going to miss seeing "Barack
Obama" in my inbox three times a day. But it's high time for us
voters to get back to panicking about our 401(k)s. So please stop
e-mailing to ask for money. You're president-elect now, Barack.
Consider yourself cut-off.
hot document
CBS Rewards Bush Stonewaller
Dan Bartlett wouldn't help CBS's Rathergate investigation. The network hired
him anyway.
By Bonnie Goldstein
Tuesday, November 11, 2008, at 4:45 PM ET
From: Bonnie Goldstein
26/82
Posted Tuesday, November 11, 2008, at 4:45 PM ET
In September 2004, shortly before George W. Bush was elected
to his second term, CBS correspondent Dan Rather aired a report
regarding the president's Vietnam-era service in the Texas Air
National Guard. It was already known that Bush's attendance
record had been spotty. The Rather report added some
interesting details based partially on documents whose
authenticity, it turned out, couldn't be established. Citing
"serious and disturbing questions that came up after the
broadcast," the network hired former U.S. Attorney General
Richard Thornburgh and Louis D. Boccardi, former CEO of the
Associated Press, to investigate the matter. Their report, released
four months later, concluded that "basic journalistic steps were
not carried out in a manner consistent with accurate and fair
reporting, leading to countless misstatements and omissions."
Rather had already apologized publicly for a "mistake in
judgment" and been persuaded to announce his retirement as
anchor of the evening news broadcast, a position he'd held since
1981.
At first it seemed Rather would go quietly, accepting encomiums
from the CBS brass for his four-decade career at CBS and
maintaining an ongoing role as correspondent for 60 Minutes.
But in semiretirement, Rather complained he was being
excluded from major stories, and in June 2006, CBS ended the
arrangement altogether. Fifteen months later, Rather sued CBS
for breach of contract.
That lawsuit has brought to light an interesting e-mail exchange
between Thornburgh and the Bush White House. Thornburgh
asked President Bush to answer eight fairly blunt questions
about his National Guard service (see below). These were all
questions the press had previously been stonewalled on.
(Examples: "Was there a waiting list to become a pilot of the
Texas Air National Guard at the time you entered?" "Why were
you suspended from flight status?") The next day Dan Bartlett,
then a senior adviser to Bush, e-mailed Thornburgh to say the
White House wouldn't answer them. "I must say," Bartlett wrote
his fellow Republican, who had served under his boss's father. "I
was somewhat surprised by the questions" (Page 2). Thornburgh
apparently dropped the matter. In August, CBS showed how
little it cared about Bartlett's noncooperation by hiring the
former Bush aide as a political analyst.
Posted Tuesday, November 11, 2008, at 4:45 PM ET
hot document
Suing God
The Almighty doesn't live in Nebraska.
By Bonnie Goldstein
Monday, November 10, 2008, at 2:38 PM ET
From: Bonnie Goldstein
Posted Monday, November 10, 2008, at 2:38 PM ET
In September 2007, former state Sen. Ernie Chambers filed a
lawsuit against God in Nebraska's 4th Judicial District Court.
Chambers, a political independent who served in the Legislature
for 38 years before retiring in April, sought "a permanent
injunction" to "cease harmful activities," claiming the defendant
caused "fearsome floods, egregious earthquakes, horrendous
hurricanes, terrifying tornadoes, pestilential plagues, ferocious
famines, [and] devastating droughts … resulting in the widespread death, destruction and terrorization of millions."
Last month, Douglas County Judge Marlon Polk dismissed
Chambers' claim "with prejudice" (see below and the following
three pages), citing improper service due to the defendant's lack
of proper address. According to the case history (below), the
Almighty made a "purported" special appearance and filed three
answers to the claim while an "agent of God" filed a "purported"
countersuit (Page 2). These actions and Chambers' responses
were subsequently nullified because, the ruling concluded, "there
can never be service effectuated on the named Defendant" (Page
4). Last week, Chambers filed a notice of appeal declaring his
intention to take the matter to a higher authority.
Please send ideas for Hot Document to documents@slate.com.
Please send ideas for Hot Document to documents@slate.com.
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
27/82
Posted Monday, November 10, 2008, at 2:38 PM ET
Posted Monday, November 10, 2008, at 2:38 PM ET
Posted Monday, November 10, 2008, at 2:38 PM ET
human nature
Original Skin
Blacks, gays, and immutability.
By William Saletan
Thursday, November 13, 2008, at 8:17 AM ET
Nov. 4 was a good day to be black. It was not a good day to be
gay. Arkansas voters approved a ballot measure to prohibit gay
couples from adopting kids. Florida and Arizona voters
approved measures to ban gay marriage. But the heaviest blow
came in California, where a gay-marriage ban, Proposition 8,
overrode a state Supreme Court ruling that had legalized samesex marriage. A surge of black turnout, inspired by Barack
Obama, didn't help liberals in the Proposition 8 fight. In fact, it
was a big reason why they lost. The gay marriage problem is
becoming a black problem.
The National Election Pool exit poll tells the story. Whites and
Asian-Americans, comprising 69 percent of California's
electorate, opposed Proposition 8 by a margin of 51 percent to
49 percent. Latinos favored it, 53-47. But blacks turned out in
historically high numbers—10 percent of the electorate—and 70
percent of them voted for Proposition 8.*
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
This is no fluke. Black support for Florida's ballot measure
against gay marriage ran 11 points higher than white support and
7 points higher than Latino support. The adoption measure in
Arkansas turned out differently—black support was 4 points
lower than white support—but nationwide and over time, there's
a clear pattern. In Maryland and New Jersey, polls have shown
whites supporting gay marriage but blacks opposing it. A report
from the pro-gay National Black Justice Coalition attributes
President Bush's 2004 reelection in part to the near-doubling of
his percentage of the black vote in Ohio, which he achieved "by
appealing to Black churchgoers on the issue of marriage
equality." This year, blacks in California were targeted the same
way.
The NBJC report paints a stark picture of the resistance. It cites
surveys showing that "65% of African-Americans are opposed to
marriage equality compared to 53% of Whites" and that blacks
are "less than half as likely to support marriage equality and
legal recognition of same-sex civil unions as Whites." It
concludes: "African-Americans are virtually the only
constituency in the country that has not become more supportive
over the last dozen years, falling from a high of 65% support for
gay rights in 1996 to only 40% in 2004." Nor is the problem
dying out: "Among African-American youth, 55% believed that
homosexuality is always wrong, compared to 36% of Latino
youth and 35% of White youth."
Why the gap? Most analysts blame religion. But that doesn't
explain why black Protestants, for example, are far more hostile
to gay rights than white Protestants are. Nor does it explain why
blacks, who have felt the sting of discrimination, see no parallel
in laws that deny equal rights to homosexuals. We've just elected
as our next president the child of a black-white sexual
relationship. So much for the old laws against interracial
marriage. Why, then, are the people targeted by those laws
supporting bans on same-sex marriage?
The answer is: They think sexual orientation is different from
race. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of a nation in which
individuals would be judged not "by the color of their skin but
by the content of their character." Whites, on balance, have come
to believe that sexual orientation, like color, is immutable.
Blacks, on balance, haven't. They see homosexuality as a matter
of character. "I was born black. I can't change that," one
California man explained after voting for Proposition 8. "They
weren't born gay; they chose it."
The NBJC report notes that blacks are "more likely than other
groups to believe that homosexuality is wrong, that sexual
orientation is a choice, and that sexual orientation can be
changed." Polls confirm this. In a 2003 Pew survey, 32 percent
of whites said homosexuality was inborn, 15 percent said it was
caused by upbringing, and 40 percent said it was a lifestyle
preference. Latinos answered roughly the same way. But only 15
percent of blacks agreed that homosexuality was inborn; 58
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percent said it was a lifestyle preference. A plurality of whites
(45 to 39 percent) said a person's homosexuality couldn't change,
but a two-to-one majority of blacks (58 to 30 percent) said it
could.
The pattern persists in Pew's 2006 survey. A plurality of whites
said homosexuality was inborn, and a majority said it couldn't be
changed. A majority of blacks said that homosexuality was just
how some people preferred to live and that it could be changed.
The mutability question is hardly academic. It has been driving
public opinion toward gay rights for decades. In 1977, 56
percent of Americans polled by Gallup said homosexuality was a
product of upbringing and environment; only 13 percent said it
was inborn. Today, a plurality says it's inborn. That 20-point
shift has coincided with a 20-point shift toward the stated
acceptability of homosexuality and a 30-point shift toward
support for equality in job opportunities. In Pew and Gallup
surveys, respondents' positions on mutability overwhelmingly
predict their positions on gay marriage and homosexuality's
acceptability. Pew puts the equation bluntly: "Belief that
homosexuality is immutable [is] associated with positive
opinions about gays and lesbians even more strongly than
education, personal acquaintance with a homosexual, or general
ideological beliefs."
I've covered politics for a long time. I've seen shrewd polling
and message-framing turn issues and elections upside-down.
Eventually, I came to believe that the most potent force in
politics wasn't spin but science, which transforms reality and our
understanding of it. But I've never seen a convergence like this.
Here we have a left-leaning constituency (blacks) that has
become politically pivotal on an issue (homosexuality) and is
susceptible to a reframing of that issue (seeing sexual
orientation, like color, as inborn) in accord with ongoing
scientific research.
From prenatal hormones to genetics to birth order, scientists
have been sifting data to nail down homosexuality's biological
origins. As they advance, it will become easier and easier to
persuade African-Americans that being gay is a lot like being
black. The lesson of Proposition 8 isn't that blacks have stopped
the march of gay rights. The lesson is that when they turn, the
fight in blue America will essentially be over.
Correction, Nov. 13, 2008: I originally wrote that blacks "made
the difference" on Prop 8. I calculated this based on a margin of
passage of 4 percent. This was erroneous, because the final
margin was 4.6 percent. To prevent Prop 8's passage, blacks
would have had to vote against it by a margin of something like
53 percent to 47 percent. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
human nature
Knocked-Up Grandmas
Impregnating your mother-in-law.
By William Saletan
Wednesday, November 12, 2008, at 7:44 AM ET
Good news: Another guy got his mother-in-law pregnant.
No, not that way. It's a surrogate pregnancy. The guy supplied
the sperm, his wife supplied the egg, and her mother supplied the
womb.
I'd better explain. The wife is on her second marriage. In her first
marriage, she had two kids. Then she had a hysterectomy and a
divorce. Then she married this guy. He wanted a kid. He had the
sperm, she had the eggs. All they needed was a uterus.
Enter the mother-in-law.
No, not that kind of enter. It's IVF and surrogacy, except this
time the surrogate is Grandma. Nobody in the triangle has to
touch anybody else. Fertility doctors mix the eggs and sperm,
then transfer the fertilized results to the uterus.
In this case, the results were triplets. Grandma's 56. Imagine
giving birth to triplets at 56.
No, this isn't the first time a woman has carried her own
grandkids. It isn't even the fourth. It isn't even the first case of
triplets. Four years ago, a 55-year-old woman in Virginia did the
same thing for her daughter, whose womb was diseased. Two
years ago, a Japanese woman in her 50s bore a child this way.
This year, another Japanese woman did it at age 61—the fourth
such case at a single clinic in Japan. The latest birth-by-Grandma
took place in Ohio. Reportedly, there are other cases; nobody
seems to know how many.
Now, I like to think of myself as an open-minded guy. And I
love my mother-in-law, really. How many guys can honestly say
they love both their home-renovation contractor and their
mother-in-law? I am truly blessed. Still, the thought of my
mother-in-law carrying my child … well, let's just say it hadn't
occurred to me.
But now, here it is. Motherhood is splintering. You can have a
genetic mother, a gestational mother, an adoptive mother, and
God knows what else. When one of your moms is Grandma, it's
even more confusing.
Take the Japanese case from a couple of years ago. Japanese law
treated the child's gestational mother—the genetic
grandmother—as its legal mother. Therefore, the genetic mother
had to adopt the child from her own mother. In the Virginia case,
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the genetic dad ended up telling reporters, "Mommy's doing fine.
Not this mommy. Grandma mommy." Imagine looking at your
mom and realizing that in a way, she's your sister. Imagine
getting into an argument with your mother-in-law over the way
you're raising your kids—religion, discipline, whatever—and
realizing that in a way, she's their mother.
Icky, huh? But the splintering and the incest are different kinds
of ick. In fact, the latter mitigates the former. If you banned
women from bearing their own grandchildren, it's not as though
you'd stop surrogacy. People will find a way to have kids, and
it'll be done through a market—if necessary, a black market.
When relations between the genetic parents and the surrogate
break down, it'll be a mess.
When the surrogate is Grandma, the mess is less. Mother and
daughter share a genetic bond to each other and to the child.
They're much more likely to work things out and give the child a
stable family environment.
Now, if you really want to get icky, try it the other way around:
Grandpa impregnates his daughter-in-law. You can pretty well
deduce what he's supplying. No daughter-in-law would do this,
right? Sorry. A British couple arranged it last year after
discovering that the husband was shooting blanks. According to
the Guardian, doctors "offered to provide sperm from an
anonymous donor, but the couple wanted to use a member of
their own family."
Makes sense, doesn't it? Just like using Grandma. Except this
time, Grandpa isn't just one of the biological dads. He's the only
biological dad. In every biological sense, the kid's nominal dad
is his brother, not his father.
I don't know about you, but I'm looking forward to spending the
holidays with my mother-in-law and the mother of my children.
Not necessarily at the same time.
jurisprudence
What's the Best Way To Pack a Court?
The attack on merit selection for judges.
By Bert Brandenburg
Friday, November 14, 2008, at 7:13 AM ET
Michigan's voters delivered a small but telling electoral shock on
Nov. 4. Chief Justice Cliff Taylor, a heavy favorite, got thumped
by 100,000 votes by Circuit Judge Diane Hathaway, who was
nominated just 59 days before the election. Taylor raised almost
five times as much money as Hathaway and enjoyed at least $1.3
million more in supportive television ads from groups like the
GOP and the Michigan Chamber of Commerce. Yet he was the
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
first high-court justice to be voted out in Michigan in 24 years.
The business sector acknowledges Taylor's loss as a stinging
defeat. But some of its members still see electing judges, in
general, as good for their bottom line. And now they're pushing
for more of it.
It's no secret that many chambers of commerce and trade
associations and their foes, plaintiffs' attorneys and unions, have
become the Itchy and Scratchy of judicial campaigns, willing to
do whatever it takes to prevail. Since 2000, these rivals have
spent millions to elect judges that they hope will rule their way,
smashing funding records in at least 15 states. (As an Ohio AFLCIO official put it: "We figured out a long time ago that it's
easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.") In the
last few election cycles, businesses have outspent the other side
and won more often than not. But the specter of judges chasing
after money unnerves the public: three in four Americans believe
campaign cash affects courtroom decisions, according to a
bipartisan poll that my organization, Justice at Stake,
commissioned. The latest John Grisham thriller casts a toxic
tycoon buying a court race just to win a case.
Recently, some political operatives within the business world
have been talking up a bold next step. They're taking aim at
states that use merit selection to pick judges and are pressing
lawmakers to scrap that system in favor of contested elections,
which they believe are easier to sway, losses like Taylor's
notwithstanding. Such a campaign could have big repercussions,
since three dozen states use nominating commissions to pick
some of their judges. These nominating commissions, typically
assembled by the governor, lawmakers, and bar leaders, identify
a slate of qualified candidates. After a candidate is nominated
and goes on the bench, he or she must periodically face the
voters in a retention election—an up-or-down approval vote with
no opponent.
Merit selection dates from the progressive era, when it was
embraced as an antidote to corrupt politicking by judges. Since
then, business leaders have generally favored merit selection,
preferring the stability and quality it can offer. Traditionally,
they've been wary of being drawn into high-spending races that
could undermine public confidence in the courts.
But for more militant business groups and some of their
ideological allies, a decade of victories in contested court races
has made merit selection and retention seem harder to sway than
straight-up elections. Recently, Dan Pero, head of the American
Justice Partnership, a creation of the National Association of
Manufacturers, began denouncing merit selection, deriding
nominating commissions as undemocratic "star chambers" bent
to the will of trial attorneys. The Wall Street Journal editorial
board joined in, writing this spring that "picking judges behind
closed doors only takes things further from our democratic
ideals."
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Similarly scripted efforts have been launched to weaken or scrap
merit-selection systems in Missouri, Tennessee, and Kansas.
There's a pattern: First, a local Federalist Society chapter
publishes a paper questioning merit selection (the national
Federalist Society takes no position on the matter and has
published papers for and against judicial elections). Then a poll
of state voters appears from the Polling Company, run by GOP
pundit Kellyanne Conway. The questions are carefully crafted to
elicit hostility to merit selection (in Tennessee, questioners
helpfully pointed out that the commission could include
"criminal defense lawyers"). CRC Communications, which ran
the 2004 Swift Boat Veterans campaign, handles PR for the antimerit effort.
So far, heartlanders aren't biting. On Election Day, voters in
Johnson County, Kan., rejected a measure to do away with their
local merit system. Voters in two Alabama counties chose to
create selection panels to help fill court vacancies. In Greene
County, Mo., locals voted to switch from contested elections to
merit selection, ignoring pleas from local favorite and former
Attorney General John Ashcroft. Earlier this year, after the
Missouri Legislature rejected an attempt to tamper with the
state's merit-selection system for choosing appellate judges,
supporters couldn't even find enough signers to put a petition on
the ballot. The exception here could be Tennessee, where
legislators failed to renew their merit commission this year. But
there is active talk of reviving that effort before the commission
phases out next spring.
Most Main Street businesses also seem uncertain about the
would-be crusade against merit selection. In Greene County, the
local chamber of commerce supported the switch to merit.
Indeed, a 2007 Zogby poll showed that 71 percent of business
executives supported merit selection. This presumably stems
from a distaste for politicized courts and a preference for highquality judges. In fact, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's own
survey of in-house corporate litigators shows that of the 20 states
the chamber ranked as best for business, only two elect their
high courts. In Missouri, a study from the conservative ShowMe Institute called merit selection "superior" for promoting freemarket goals. "I must say that I find it really odd that business
groups have gone off on this kick," the Manhattan Institute's
Walter Olson wrote this summer.
It's also worth noting that Justice Taylor's defeat isn't the only
warning that the business lobby that wants more judicial
elections may be investing too much confidence in them as the
means to corporate ends. In Texas, for example, it's true that a
decade of concerted campaigning delivered a state supreme court
composed entirely of Republicans. But for how long? Two years
ago, voters ousted 19 GOP judges in Dallas County. Houstonarea Democrats tossed out another 22 this November. Political
winds have a way of shifting in court races as well as in
legislative elections.
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Indeed, this year's returns offered signs that linking a judicial
candidate to business can be a liability. Michigan Democrats
defeated Taylor with the help of ads that accused him of being a
"good soldier" who stacked the deck for business interests. In
Mississippi, Chief Justice James Smith was voted off the bench
amid criticisms that he tilted too much toward corporate
litigants. West Virginia Chief Justice Elliott Maynard lost a
spring primary after his close ties to a mining executive were
mocked in an ad parodying Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.
More judicial elections would also mean more spending on both
sides of the arms race, by the corporations and the plaintiffs'
lawyers. Maybe corporate America's silent majority, which
prefers merit selection, has figured out that all that money for
consultants and pollsters could be better spent. This year's
election returns have given the business sector a fresh reason to
consider what will really benefit it.
jurisprudence
Dismantling Guantanamo
Closing down the prison camp may be easier said than done.
By Jonathan Mahler
Wednesday, November 12, 2008, at 4:52 PM ET
Earlier this week, human rights activists, civil libertarians—and,
let's face it, just about every sentient American—got some good
news from unnamed sources inside the emerging administrationelect: President Obama is apparently already working on a plan
to close Guantanamo Bay.
This is hardly as a surprise. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who don't often find
themselves lining up alongside the ACLU, went on record
months ago about the need to shutter the prison camp. These
days, the conventional wisdom on both left and right is that
Guantanamo is not just doing serious damage to America's
international reputation; its continued existence has doubtless
become a valuable propaganda tool to Islamic fundamentalists.
Put in starker terms, a detention facility that was intended to help
protect America from another terrorist attack may well have
increased the possibility of one.
So Gitmo must go. The question is: What will the Obama
administration do with the approximately 250 detainees still
imprisoned there?
The first thing to note is what will not happen to these detainees.
They will almost certainly not be tried in military commissions.
These, recall, were the special war-crimes courts that President
Bush unilaterally summoned into being via military order in
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November 2001. In the seven years that have passed since then,
a grand total of two detainees have been successfully prosecuted
in military commissions: Osama Bin Laden's driver Salim
Hamdan, and al-Qaida propagandist Ali Hamzi al-Bahlul.
And I am using the term successfully in its loosest sense. When
Hamdan was brought to trial this past summer, the government
was aiming to put him behind bars for 30 years to life. After
being acquitted on the most serious charge brought against
him—conspiracy to support terrorism—Hamdan was given just
five and a half years. Factoring in time served, that meant a
sentence of less than five months. His time will have been
served at the end of the year. (It remains to be seen whether
Hamdan will actually be released, though, as the administration
has claimed the authority to hold him as an enemy combatant
until the end of the hostilities in the war on terror.)
Believe it or not, at least from the perspective of the Bush
administration's legacy, that's the good news. The bad news is
that these military commissions have been almost universally
denounced as kangaroo courts. To underscore the point, the
conservative Supreme Court has declared them unlawful not
once but twice, first in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (when the justices
ruled that the commissions lacked proper congressional
authorization and violated due-process guarantees provided by
the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military
Justice) and more recently in Boumediene v. Bush (when the
justices concluded that the Military Commissions Act of 2006—
Congress' legislative effort to sanction the commissions—
amounted to an unconstitutional suspension of habeas corpus).
Given the court's long-standing reluctance to check the president
during times of armed conflict, between Hamdan and
Boumediene—and two other dramatic war-on-terror rulings
against the president—the Bush administration has made
constitutional history.
All of this is to say that the military commissions are too tainted
to represent a realistic venue in which to try suspected terrorists,
particularly for an incoming administration that will be
understandably eager to distance itself from the failed policies of
its predecessor. In retrospect, it's easy enough to see where the
Bush administration went wrong with the military
commissions—and, for that matter, with its entire prosecution of
the war on terror: In its zeal to protect our national security, it
overlooked the fact that upholding such basic rule-of-law values
as a defendant's right to a fair trial are important interests in their
own right and also have a valuable role to play in combating
terrorism.
Of course, identifying the problem is a lot easier than fixing it.
The daunting challenge Obama now faces is to figure out how to
preserve and promote rule-of-law values and restore civil
liberties while at the same time protecting our intelligence—not
to mention the sources and methods used to gather it—and
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
ensuring that no one who poses a serious threat to the United
States is set free.
Meeting that challenge will begin with carefully sifting through
the classified files of the remaining prisoners to determine who
warrants continued detention. The Bush administration has
already identified 50 or so men whom it would like to transfer
out of Guantanamo. The problem, in some cases, has been
finding a country that will take them and not persecute them. In
other cases, the obstacle has been reaching an agreement with
their home countries—that includes you, Yemen—to either
continue to imprison them or at least keep close tabs on their
activities.
But even if these men are eventually released, there will be
others that the new administration will want to keep behind bars.
For them, one possibility would be for Obama to ask Congress
to pass some sort of legislation expanding his authority to detain
suspected terrorists for preventive reasons. Another option is
prosecution.
It seems safe to say that Obama's preferred venue for trial will be
the federal courts. This is the approach many on the left have
been agitating for since 9/11. Last May, Human Rights First
issued a 183-page report, "In Pursuit of Justice: Prosecuting
Terrorism Cases in the Federal Courts," aimed at supporting this
argument. As Matthew Waxman, a law professor at Columbia
who worked on detainee issues in the Defense Department,
notes, the federal courts are now much better-equipped to deal
with terrorism cases than they were at the time of the Sept. 11
attacks. In addition to all the resources we have devoted to our
federal anti-terrorism infrastructure in those intervening years,
our criminal statutes have been revised to accommodate greater
liability for conspiring with terrorist groups, and federal judges
are now more experienced at dealing with sensitive information.
But there has also been at least one report that Obama is
considering an alternative to both President Bush's muchmaligned military commissions and the federal judicial system—
a newly created system of national security courts. These courts
would likely be composed of federal judges with lifetime tenure
and would function along the lines of existing specialized courts
that deal with complicated issues like bankruptcy.
In a sense, the advantages of prosecuting suspected terrorists in a
national security court would be the same as its disadvantages: It
would presumably afford more flexibility than a regular federal
court for, say, things like the standard of proof for admitting
evidence collected on the battlefield in Afghanistan. The idea
was first floated in July 2007 in a New York Times op-ed coauthored by Neal Katyal, who represented Hamdan at the
Supreme Court, and Jack Goldsmith, a former assistant attorney
general in the Bush administration. It has since been widely
derided by human rights and civil liberties lawyers (among
others) who warn that the creation of such a court would
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represent a rejection of fundamental principles of American
constitutional law—and would, in turn, raise the same
legitimacy questions as the military commissions themselves.
On Monday, the Associated Press ran a story, attributed to three
unnamed Obama advisers, claiming that he was planning to go
forward with a proposal for national security courts. Hours later,
though, Denis McDonough, a senior Obama adviser, told CNN
that no such decisions had been made. McDonough's
correction—or, at the very least, qualification—makes sense.
Until President Obama's national security team is in place and
has studied the files of the remaining detainees, it's hard to
imagine that there will be much progress on the specifics of how
to deal with these men.
That day will arrive, though, and when it does, the question will
come down to whether the new president feels that he can rely
on the criminal-justice system to convict individuals he doesn't
want to release. The Human Rights First report justly cites
dozens of successful criminal terrorism prosecutions, but it's
worth remembering that those were all cases that the Justice
Department chose to prosecute in the federal courts.
Obama's flexibility to handle the remaining detainees as he sees
fit will be constrained by the manner in which they have been
treated while in U.S. custody. Remember that Hamdan was
chosen as the first defendant for the military commissions in
large part because the prosecution thought it has a "clean" case
against him—and yet on the very first day of his trial, his
military judge threw out a number of his statements to
interrogators, ruling that they had been coerced from him and
were therefore unreliable. And that happened in a trial system
effectively designed by the Pentagon to ensure convictions.
Look at it this way: Of the 200 or so detainees left on
Guantanamo who have not been cleared for release (pending the
necessary arrangements), the Bush administration intended to try
only some 70 or 80 before military commissions. That leaves
more than 100 whom it considered too dangerous to release but
was not planning to put on trial. "What lies in those files that's an
obstacle to prosecution?" Waxman asks.
When Obama finds out, he may learn that his options for
keeping them locked up are limited.
lifehacking
The Quest for the Perfect Morning
Routine
The first in a series on lifehacking.
By Michael Agger
Wednesday, November 12, 2008, at 10:45 AM ET
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Of all the cruel ways the Internet offers to waste time,
lifehacking may be the cruellest. A fellow goes looking for a
little inspiration, and the next thing he knows, he's reading the
"Simple Living Manifesto: 72 Ideas To Simplify Your Life." A
few hours later, I still have no idea what my top four-to-five
goals are, and the day's already half done. Yet, like a bug to the
bug zapper, I return to lifehacking sites in search of a magic
aphorism for all of my deficiencies. While awaiting this
moment, I have learned an elegant way to wrap my iPod
headphones and acquired a near-creepy fondness for the Muji
Chronotebook.
This column marks the debut effort to share the fruits of my
wanderings in the self-helpy margins of the Internet. Think of it
as a field guide to lifehacking. The advice here is not my own,
but I have clicked on it. For Exhibit A, let's look at a subject dear
to both modern lifehackers and their ancient ancestors: the
morning routine. Writers, no surprise, have a lot to say about
this. Edith Wharton set a fine example at her home, the Mount.
Her maid would bring her breakfast in bed, and she would spend
the morning writing. (In general, servants are a big help with this
lifehacking stuff.) Web comic-strip author Randall Munroe
updates this Whartonian ideal in a brilliant xkcd panel that
points out how a laptop can give you a status report on friends
scattered around the world before you leave the comfort of your
bed.
Wharton and Munroe suggest the shape of the morning routine
dilemma: When do you let the electronic beast loose? Perhaps
some of you have friends, as I do, who wake themselves up with
the alarm on their BlackBerry. That strikes me as an
improvement over a simple alarm clock in terms of actually
arising—nothing like a jolt of work anxiety to open the
eyelids—but perhaps the CrackBerry doesn't set the appropriate
"true at first light" tone that morning can have. For that, witness
the routine of Leo Babauta of Zen Habits: "1. Wake at 4:30 a.m.
2. Drink water. 3. Set 3 Most Important Things (MITs) for
today. 4. Fix lunches for kids and myself. 5. Eat breakfast, read.
6. Exercise (run, bike, swim, strength, or yardwork) or meditate.
7. Shower. 8. Wake wife & kids at 6:30 a.m." No. 2 shouldn't be
a problem for most of us.
Leo's routine, though infinitely worthy, best suits a selfemployed writer living on Guam (which he is). Most of us have
two mornings: getting out of the house and settling down at
work. The house-escape hacks are the most extreme. Joel
Falconer, on Stepcase Lifehack, suggests this insane shower:
"Grab a two-in-one shampoo and conditioner, chuck it in your
hair, and use a scrubber with body wash to clean yourself up
while you brush your teeth with the other hand (you can store a
toothbrush and paste on the ledge of the shower wall if it's wide
enough—and if you can reach up there!). From the time you've
got the temperature right, you can be out in 90 seconds without
sacrificing any cleanliness." I would need at least another 30
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seconds to congratulate myself on my two-handed grooming
dexterity. Falconer is out the door in six minutes.
wrote a book about it.) But I also think the no-bailout folks are
being too cavalier.
The secret to the superfast morning exit seems to rely on some
evening prep (putting all bags in place, choosing clothes, etc.)
and not having kids. Once the lifehacker novice arrives at work,
the morning becomes a question of e-mail vs. priorities. Julie
Morgenstern, who titled her book of work strategies Never
Check E-mail in the Morning, counsels that you not log in for an
hour after getting to your desk. Instead, finish one thing that's
hanging over your head (that's not an e-mail). The idea is to
work on what's important instead of reacting to what's being
asked of you.
Yes, GM's management has been dreadful. As Israeli diplomat
Abba Eban said about the Arabs, they never missed an
opportunity to miss an opportunity. And it's difficult to make a
case that Cerberus, the private equity firm that thought it was
getting a steal when it bought Chrysler, should get any taxpayer
assistance. But I'm having a difficult time jumping on the antibailout bandwagon. Perhaps it's because I grew up in midMichigan and played Little League baseball in the shadow of the
Fisher Body plant. Or perhaps because, for a brief period long
ago, I covered bankruptcy courts. In any case, what follows is
less an argument for a bailout than an argument against those
agitating for a rapid Chapter 11 filing.
Most of us, however, need to do a little Web surfing before
settling into the day. For that important purpose, I recommend
the Firefox add-on Morning Coffee. The program places a coffee
mug icon in your browser; when clicked, it opens all of your
"daily read" sites in tabs, i.e., the New York Times, A Continuous
Lean, Give Me Something To Read, Arts & Letters Daily, and
FAIL Blog. I find that it gets the brain up and running, and,
should I spend the morning going down the blog/news rabbit
hole, well, that's not such a bad thing. As of this column, it's
kind of my job.
******
Got a great and/or awful morning routine? Send me an e-mail at
slate.browser@gmail.com. I will compile the responses for an
upcoming column.
moneybox
The Big Three Are a National Disgrace
If the Big Three don't get government checks, it's very likely that
they'll run out of cash and be forced to file for Chapter 11
bankruptcy. GM, which is bleeding fastest, would be first to fall.
Chapter 11 bankruptcy is an efficient process for conducting
corporate triage. A retailer fails, and the creditors assume
control. Some stores remain open while other are liquidated.
Trade and financial creditors accept partial payment of the debts
they're owed. Leases and other pre-bankruptcy legal obligations
are torn asunder. Mall owners around the country move swiftly
to fill the vacant space. Several months later, the winners and
losers having settled and moved on, a chastened, less-burdened
company emerges from bankruptcy.
But General Motors wouldn't be a typical bankruptcy. GM's
management argues that the very act of filing for bankruptcy
eliminates the possibility of recovery since people would be
reluctant to purchase expensive, long-lived assets (cars and
trucks) from a bankrupt entity. And because of GM's size and
the place it occupies in the supply chain, the company's failure
would likely trigger the bankruptcy of hundreds of suppliers and
other companies that rely upon it.
But we still need to save them.
By Daniel Gross
Thursday, November 13, 2008, at 6:09 PM ET
Why not just let General Motors, and perhaps Ford and Chrysler,
just go bankrupt? Even as auto industry executives and their
political allies clamor for a bailout, the anti-bailout chorus is
growing louder. The shrewd John Gapper makes the case in his
Financial Times column, and hedge fund sharpie Bill Ackman
seconds the motion. In the National Review, Jim Manzi makes
the ideological case.
Of course, they're all correct. Allowing the listing Big Three to
keel over would be a triumph of free markets. It would punish
failure and invite new managers and investors to enter the field.
I'm a big fan of creative destruction and its wondrous benefits. (I
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
More significantly, Chapter 11 proceedings for GM would be far
more complicated than that of a retailer or of Lehman Bros.
Recent experience shows that for auto companies, Chapter 11 is
like the Hotel California. You can check in any time you like,
but you can never leave. Auto parts supplier Delphi filed for
Chapter 11 in October 2005 and still languishes there. Getting
out of Chapter 11 can be tough when a) the bankrupt companies
are capital-intensive manufacturers, and b) creditors are reluctant
to give up on their claims. Among those with the biggest claims
on the automakers in general, and GM in particular, are the
United Auto Workers. It's common, especially in the fever
swamps of the right, to blame the UAW for the Big Three's high
cost structure and legacy costs. (Never mind that management
for generations willingly entered into labor pacts, consciously
trading salary increases for longer-term liabilities like
guaranteeing health insurance for retirees. Such pacts allowed
the Big Three to report higher profits in the short term and
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pushed the hard choices to the future.) Last year, the UAW and
the auto companies set up a health care fund that, as the New
York Times writes, would "shift a $100 billion burden off the
companies' backs." Would the UAW simply give up on the
health care benefits and tell hundreds of thousands of forty- and
fiftysomething members to just go out and buy their own health
insurance?
Another difference between this and other large bankruptcy
cases is the potential collateral damage. New York will survive
the failure of Lehman Bros. and Bear Stearns, although it will
feel the pain of lower tax revenues and retail sales. When a
national retailer goes down, it hurts landlords all over the place
but rarely causes an entire mall to become vacant. But already
depressed Michigan, and several adjacent states, will have a
much more difficult time dealing with the collapse of an
automaker. This doomsday economic scenario, released by the
Center for Automotive Research, says that up to 3 million jobs
nationwide could be lost if the Big Three stop all production
next year. That might not be in the offing. But the impact on
Michigan's cities, towns, state government, housing values, and
public institutions (including resources that the state has built
that are national resources, such as its public university system)
would suffer grievous harm.
There's a general consensus that in order to survive, the Big
Three need to shrink their capacity by 40 percent, recruit new
managers and corporate boards, restructure labor relations in
such a way that they can have lower-cost and more flexible work
forces, and shuck many of the liabilities they willingly entered
into, all while raising vast new sums of capital to invest in
research, development, and factory modernization.
But is a Chapter 11 filing the best way to reach these goals?
Answering yes presumes that the case would be resolved
quickly, that the entities would be able to obtain ample debtorin-possession financing, that parties with legitimate legal claims
on the company's assets and cash flows would give them up
willingly. But many of the questions surrounding the Big Three's
future can't be resolved in law firm conference rooms or in the
chambers of bankruptcy court, and won't center around legal
questions. The failure of the American automotive industry—
and let's be honest, it has basically failed—is a matter of public
policy. If the Big Three can be saved, they can be saved only by
government.
moneybox
What's the Matter With Greenwich?
Why the rich voted for Obama against their own economic interest.
By Daniel Gross
Monday, November 10, 2008, at 12:11 PM ET
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
For several years, I've been writing about Bushenfreude, the
phenomenon of angry yuppies who've hugely benefited from
President Bush's tax cuts funding angry, populist Democratic
campaigns. I've theorized that people who work in financial
services and related fields have become so outraged and
alienated by the incompetence, crass social conservatism, and
repeated insults to the nation's intelligence of the Bush-era
Republican Party that they're voting with their hearts and heads
instead of their wallets.
Last week's election was perhaps Bushenfreude's grandest day.
As the campaign entered its final weeks, Barack Obama, who
pledged to unite the country, singled out one group of people for
ridicule: those making more than $250,000. At his rallies, he
would ask for a show of hands of those making less than onequarter of $1 million per year. Then he'd look around, laugh, and
note that those in the virtuous majority would get their taxes cut,
while the rich among them would be hit with a tax increase. And
yet the exit polls show, the rich—and yes, if you make $250,000
or more you're rich—went for Obama by bigger margins than
did the merely well-off. If the exit polls are to be believed, those
making $200,000 or more (6 percent of the electorate) voted for
Obama 52-46, while McCain won the merely well-off ($100,000
to $150,000 by a 51-48 margin and $150,000 to $200,000 by a
50-48 margin).
Right-wingers tend to dismiss such numbers as the voting
behavior of trust funders or gazillionaires—people who have so
much money that they just don't care about taxes. That may
explain a portion of Bushenfreude. But there just aren't that
many trust funders out there. Rather, it's clear that the nation's
mass affluent—Steve the lawyer, Colby the financial services
executive, Ari the highly paid media big shot—are trending
Democratic, especially on the coasts. Indeed, Bushenfreude is
not necessarily a nationwide phenomenon. As Andrew Gelman
notes in the book Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State,
the rich in poor states are likely to stick with the Republicans.
But in the ground zero of Bushenfreude, Fairfield County,
Conn., it was practically an epidemic last week. Bushenfreude's
most prominent victim was Rep. Chris Shays, the last
Republican congressman east of the Hudson River. For the past
several cycles, Shays, who played a moderate in his home
district but was mainly an enabler of the Bush-DeLay
Republicans in Washington, fended off well-financed
challengers with relative ease. Last week, he fell victim to Jim
Himes. Himes, as this New York Times profile shows, is the
ultimate self-made pissed-off yuppie: a member of Harvard's
crew team, a Rhodes Scholar, a former Goldman Sachs banker,
and a resident of Greenwich.
Shays claims he was done in by a Democratic tsunami in
Fairfield County and the state. And Connecticut's county results
show Obama ran up a huge 59-41 margin in the county, which
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includes Bridgeport and Norwalk, densely populated cities with
large poor, minority, and working-class populations. But an
examination of the presidential votes in several of Fairfield
County's wealthier districts (here are Connecticut's votes by
town) shows the yuppies came out in the thousands to vote for a
candidate who pledged to raise their taxes. In the fall of 2003, I
first detected Bushenfreude in Westport (No. 5 on Money's list of
25 wealthiest American towns). The telltale symptom: Howard
Dean signs stacked in the back of a brand-new BMW. The signs
of an outbreak were legion this year. On our route to school, my
kids would count the number of yard signs for Obama and
McCain (the results: 6-to-1). On the Saturday morning before
the election, I stopped by the Westport Republican headquarters
to pick up some McCain-Palin buttons, only to find it locked. On
Election Day, Westport voters went for Obama by a 65-35
margin. (That's bigger than the 60-40 margin Kerry won here in
2004.) Bushenfreude spread from Westport to neighboring
towns. In Wilton, just to the north, which Bush carried
comfortably in 2004, Obama won 54 percent of the vote.
Perhaps most surprising was the result from Greenwich, Conn.
The Versailles of the tri-state metro area, the most golden of the
region's gilded suburbs, the childhood home of George H.W.
Bush, went for Obama by a 54-46 margin—the first time
Greenwich went Democratic since 1964. Who knew the backcountry estates and shoreline mansions were populated with so
many traitors to their class? (In the 2004 cage match of New
England-born, Yalie aristocrats, George W. Bush beat Kerry 5347 in Greenwich.) Some towns in Fairfield County were clearly
inoculated from Bushenfreude. In New Canaan and Darien,
which ranked No. 1 and No. 2, respectively, in Money's list of 25
wealthiest towns, McCain-Palin won by decent majorities. (In
both towns, however, the Republican margins were down
significantly from 2004.) What's the difference between these
towns and these neighbors? Well, New Canaan and Darien are
wealthier than their sister towns in Fairfield County. (In both,
the median income is well more than $200,000.) So perhaps the
concern about taxes is more acute there. Another possible
explanation is that these towns differ demographically from
places like Greenwich and Westport, in that they are less Jewish,
and Jews voted heavily for Obama.
While there has been job loss and economic anxiety throughout
Fairfield County, I don't think that economic problems alone
explain the big Democratic gains in the region. In Greenwich,
economic stress for many people means flying commercial or
selling the ski house (while maintaining the summer house on
Nantucket). There's something deeper going on when a town that
is home to corporate CEOs, professional athletes, hedge-fund
managers, and private-equity barons, the people who gained the
most financially under the Bush years and who would seem to
have the most to lose financially under an Obama
administration, flips into the Democratic column. Somewhere in
the back country, in a 14,000-square-foot writer's garret, an
erstwhile hedge-fund manager is dictating a book proposal to his
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
assistant, a former senior editor at Fortune who just took a
buyout, that explains why many of the wealthy choose to vote
for a Democrat, in plain violation of their economic self-interest.
Working title: What's the Matter With Greenwich?
movies
000
In Quantum of Solace, James Bond is a total zero.
By Dana Stevens
Thursday, November 13, 2008, at 7:31 PM ET
Quantum of Solace (Columbia Pictures), the 22nd James Bond
film since 1962 and the second starring Daniel Craig, occupies
an uneasy place in the 007 canon. The novelty of Craig's
decidedly unsuave take on the British superspy has worn off,
though we're still eager to see where he'll take the character. And
now that the audience has adjusted to the notion of Bond as a
tormented brute, we're starting to remember what drew us to this
series in the first place: exotic locations, nifty surveillance
technology, creative villains, and babes with ridiculous names.
In short, we're drawn by fantasy, pleasure, and fun, none of
which figures on the to-do list of the new James Bond nor of the
movie's director, Marc Forster.
Daniel Craig plays the first Bond who seems uncomfortable with
his own Bond-ness. Where the previous incarnations were lifeloving, skirt-chasing bon vivants, he's a study in glum
anhedonia. To be sure, his dejection is not without cause: This
movie begins only minutes after where the last, Casino Royale,
left off, with Bond still seeking the leader of Quantum, the
sinister multinational organization responsible for killing his one
true love, Vesper Lynd. (Bond also believes that, before she
died, Vesper tried to double-cross him, which would seem to
obviate the need to avenge her death. But never mind; he's
complex, OK?)
At first, Bond's personal vendetta against Quantum dovetails
with the agenda of his boss, M (Judi Dench). The problem is, he
keeps killing off agents who could have provided her with useful
information about the supersecret crime ring. Answers to
questions like: Why is French eco-entrepreneur Dominic Greene
(a delectably amoral Mathieu Amalric) angling for control of
huge tracts of land in Bolivia? (Even though the answer is based
on a horrifying true story, it doesn't juice up this dull plot line—
there's only so much suspense you can wring from the signing of
a land lease.) And why does Greene's leggy consort, Camille
(Olga Kurylenko), seem so eager to get close to a deposed
dictator (Joaquin Cosio)? M begs Bond to rethink his killeveryone-in-sight strategy. But when he realizes that the CIA
may be in on Quantum's murky geopolitical tomfoolery, Agent
007's only choice is to go rogue, evading even his own MI6
superiors.
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Forster, a director of upscale tearjerkers (Finding Neverland,
Monsters' Ball, The Kite Runner), has no feel for action
sequences. The big chases, of which there are several (in planes,
in cars, through the streets of La Paz, and over the rooftops of
Siena) could all be replaced with a title card reading, "Insert
action here." Jolting a hand-held camera around while your lead
actor throws punches and scowls doesn't make you Paul
Greengrass—and really, why should the Bond franchise need a
Paul Greengrass? Hollywood has no shortage of inexpressive
gunslingers and jittery mayhem. I love the idea of starting the
series from scratch with a young and introspective Bond, but
when he's done looking deep into himself, I want him to find …
James Bond, the irrepressible enjoyer of wine, women, and the
hospitality industry. (There's a touch of that scoundrel on view
here in the scenes with Gemma Arterton, as a Diana Rigg-esque
British agent who helps Bond, er, settle into his luxury hotel
room in Bolivia.)
Quantum of Solace, the first bona fide sequel in the Bond series,
has the poky pace and expository padding of the middle chapter
of a trilogy. Some characters, like Jeffrey Wright's wry Felix
Leiter, seem to be doing little more than holding their places for
future installments. The movie's final image suggests that Bond
has finally begun to move on from the death of Vesper Lynd.
(To be fair, the divine Eva Green is a hard person to forget.)
Perhaps in the next Bond film, Craig's troubled but magnetic spy
will be allowed not just his quantum of solace but also his
modicum of fun.
movies
Slumdog Millionaire
Danny Boyle's irresistible hokum.
By Dana Stevens
Thursday, November 13, 2008, at 11:44 AM ET
Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire (Warner Bros.) is a stylish,
ingeniously constructed bit of hokum, a sparkling trinket of a
movie that's as implausible as it is irresistible. As a matter of
fact, this film's implausibility is exactly what makes it
irresistible. In this post-globalization update of a Horatio Alger
tale, all a boy needs to rise to the pinnacle of success is true love,
a pure heart, and a run of luck so extreme it can only be karma.
When the film opens, Jamal Malik (Dev Patel), a teenager from
the slums of Mumbai, is about to win an unprecedented sum—
nearly 20 million rupees—on the Indian version of Who Wants
To Be a Millionaire? This uneducated orphan, who works
fetching tea for employees at a customer-service call center,
seems incapable of giving a wrong answer, whether the question
concerns movies, literature, cricket, or whose face appears on the
American $100 bill. The show's unctuous host (Bollywood
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
superstar Anil Kapoor) suspects fraud and arranges to have
Jamal kidnapped and questioned by a local cop (Irrfan Khan).
As we learned in last year's A Mighty Heart, getting interrogated
by Irrfan Khan is really not the way you want to spend your
evening. After some non-Geneva Conventions-approved
activities, Khan realizes that Jamal isn't lying—he really does
know all this stuff. So the officer sits the boy down and goes
through the tape of the game show, question by question. As
Jamal recounts the moments in his life, most of them traumatic,
that brought him each piece of hard-won knowledge, the movie's
tricky structure reveals itself: Flashbacks of Jamal's hardscrabble
childhood alternate with present-day scenes in the interrogation
room and increasingly tense rounds of the televised trivia game.
In these glossy, propulsively edited flashback sequences, Jamal
and his brother Salim (both played by three different actors as
they age from child to adult—grown-up Salim is Madhur Mittal)
lose their mother to mob violence during an anti-Muslim riot.
The boys soon fall into the clutches of a loathsome entrepreneur,
Maman (Ankur Vikal), who offers beggar kids food and shelter
while forcing them to hand over their earnings. The brothers
befriend an orphan girl, Latika (played in her adult incarnation
by Freida Pinto) but lose sight of her during a terrifying escape
from Maman's compound. Jamal then swears to devote the rest
of his life to finding Latika—a goal that eventually, after
convolutions too baroque to detail here, lands him in the hot seat
on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?
Like Fernando Meirelles' City of God, Slumdog Millionaire is at
times guilty of aestheticizing the poverty that it seeks to critique.
(A.R. Rahman's hip-hop-influenced score and Anthony Dod
Mantle's sleek cinematography don't help any.) Boyle's Mumbai
is a squalid, teeming jungle of gang warfare and child
exploitation, but it's also a marvel of color and music and life;
there are scenes of kids scaling junk heaps that are as beautiful
as a long-distance commercial. The interrogation episodes bristle
with the psychological gamesmanship of The Usual Suspects,
and the bits from the televised broadcast thrill like a live sports
event. Boyle, co-directing with his Indian casting director,
Loveleen Tandan, balances all these shifts in tone with
remarkable skill. At some point near the feverish, overplotted
conclusion, you start to realize how little there is to this movie:
It's just boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-performs-miracle-onlive-television-in-order-to-get-girl. But by the time boy and girl
perform a Bollywood-style dance number in a crowded train
station, you'll be too happy to care.
number 1
"AXXo You Are a God"
The secrets of BitTorrent's top movie pirate.
37/82
By Josh Levin
Wednesday, November 12, 2008, at 6:53 AM ET
BitTorrent is TiVo for the tech-savvy and the ethically
flexible—a way to watch what you want when you want it
without having to pay for it. Instead of flipping through the
channels or putting on a DVD, you can head for the Web to grab
pirated digital copies of whatever movies and television shows
you want. As you might expect, downloaders gravitate to
popcorn flicks and nerd-friendly TV fare—among the top search
phrases on one BitTorrent search engine are Quantum of Solace,
Max Payne, Saw V, Heroes, Prison Break, and Fringe. But the
No. 1 search query isn't a movie title or the name of a TV show.
Rather, it's the name of BitTorrent's top uploader: aXXo.
No matter what metric you choose, aXXo is BitTorrent's biggest
name. The editor of the blog TorrentFreak, a 28-year-old from
the Netherlands who goes by the nom de Web Ernesto, says that
his weekly chart of the 10 most pirated films on BitTorrent is
essentially a compilation of aXXo's latest releases. That includes
last week's top four: Tropic Thunder, Wall-E, The Chronicles of
Narnia: Prince Caspian, and Kung Fu Panda. Exactly how
popular are aXXo's movies? Ernesto says that the most popular
aXXo titles get 500,000 to 1 million downloads per week. Eric
Garland, the CEO of download-tracking firm BigChampagne,
says that on a recent, randomly selected day, a remarkable 33.5
percent of the movies downloaded on BitTorrent were aXXo
torrents. (The next closest competitor, FXG, is responsible for a
mere 8.9 percent of movie downloads.) To judge by the fawning
comments on the torrent aggregator Mininova—"i dont know
what to do without you axxo," "Tks aXXo! I wish you were my
father!," "axxo you are a god"—the Web is teeming with
satisfied customers. That god theme is common. Last year,
TorrentFreak published an aXXo prayer that begins, "Our
Ripper, who art on Mininova / aXXo be thy name."
BitTorrent, as Paul Boutin explained in a 2004 Slate piece, is the
smartest file-sharing mechanism yet conceived by man.
Downloading something from a single source can be slow and
unreliable. BitTorrent speeds things up by grabbing pieces of the
file—aka torrent—from lots of different sources. The cleverest
thing about the BitTorrent protocol, though, is its sharing
scheme. As you're downloading, your computer simultaneously
uploads the chunks of the file you've already received to others
who still need them. The more popular the file, the more people
share it, and the sooner your download will finish.
While simple peer-to-peer programs like Napster enabled music
piracy to take off in the bandwidth-challenged 1990s and early
2000s, it was BitTorrent's rise five or so years later that allowed
Web-based movie piracy to become widespread. (While
BitTorrent can be used for all manner of legal file-sharing, it's
made its name and reputation as a means for copyright
infringement.) But even as it became possible to snare a massive
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
video file in a matter of hours, the world of online movie
filching remained treacherous. After waiting a few torturous
hours for your file to download, you might be greeted by a piece
of malware, a password-protected file, or a copy of Iron Man
that's been shot on a camcorder by a guy with the d.t.'s.
When it's hard to know what files you can trust, downloaders
gravitate to known commodities. Enter aXXo. Starting in 2005,
someone with that handle began posting movie files on a
message board called Darkside_RG. In the three years since,
aXXo has uploaded more than 600 torrents to the Darkside
board as well as more-popular torrent sites like Mininova and
the Pirate Bay, all of them easy to spot on account of the word
aXXo in the filename.
In the fly-by-night BitTorrent universe, aXXo quickly became a
trusted brand name. For one thing, aXXo movies are always
crisp DVD rips—files harvested from a digital copy of the
movie rather than a shaky camcorder—and are often posted
online weeks before the movies are released on video. They're
never bundled with malware or protected with passwords; all
you have to do is press play as soon as the download is
complete. Finally, the files are a predictable size: right around
700 megabytes, the amount of data that fits on a single CD-R.
That makes it easy to burn an aXXo movie to CD for archiving
purposes or for watching on a compatible DVD player.
BigChampagne's Garland says that BitTorrent users flock to
aXXo for the same reason people go to, say, Pixar movies—a
reputation, earned over time, for quality and reliability. There
are other popular uploaders ("release groups" in BitTorrent
parlance): FXG and eztv are both well-known purveyors of
pirated TV shows and movies.* Garland notes the parallels here
to the illegal drug trade. Just as labeling the product in a dime
bag "Pineapple Express" might confer a certain renown, so can
slapping a label on a computer file. "If you just go looking for a
particular film or a particular TV show, you never know what
you're going to get," Garland explains. "The logo or the mark or
the brand ... is important because there's a reasonable
expectation that you're going to be getting a high-quality
product."
Indeed, TorrentFreak's Ernesto says that even when aXXo
uploads a relatively unknown movie—Loaded and Boy A are
two recent examples—it's still liable to make his mostdownloaded list. One reason for this is that BitTorrent
transactions cost nothing—since you don't have to pay for the
privilege, you're liable to download and watch (or download and
not watch) movies that you wouldn't buy a ticket to see. Another
is the way BitTorrent software works: the more popular the file,
the faster the download. As a consequence, it takes less time to
acquire an aXXo movie than pretty much any other torrent—
quite a competitive advantage over other uploaders. Perhaps
most important, though, is the fact that the BitTorrent
marketplace is perilous enough that dependability often trumps
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selection. Even if you prefer pizza to Brussels sprouts, you
might shovel down the veggies if you're worried that somebody
spit on your pepperoni.
Of course, a clean reputation never lasts on the Web. The aXXo
brand name is frequently used to lure in guileless downloaders.
Torrents with aXXo in the filename are often used to disguise
malware, and there have also been widespread allegations on the
Web that the MPAA and its proxies have uploaded phony aXXo
files as bait for wannabe copyright violators. (The MPAA denies
this.) For those in the know, however, it's easy enough to tell the
real stuff from the fakes—sites like Mininova maintain
dedicated pages that host only authentic aXXo torrents.
Despite aXXo's dominant market share and generally sterling
reputation, the pirate's work is not universally acclaimed. One
BitTorrent faction derides his 700-megabyte DVD rips as lowquality work, inferior to larger, HD-quality files created by other
release groups. ("The lunatic fringe loves quality, the mass
market has always valued convenience," says Garland. "That's a
reason why Blu-ray will struggle. A DVD looks really good to
the average person.") Other insider-y types complain that aXXo
merely "steals" and re-encodes—that is, converts to a different
format and a smaller file size—movies that have originally been
uploaded by members of a group of superpirates called "the
scene." (You know you're in a universe with a strange moral
code when people start complaining that the stolen goods they're
in turn stealing weren't stolen properly.) And then there are those
who simply don't like the top dog. "I think it's kind of like a
monopoly thing. Some people are upset with him because he
basically controls the movie pirating on the Internet," explains
one astute poster on Darkside_RG. "It's like Microsoft.
Everybody hates them, but they will curse the company on
forums and blogs while using the damn Windows OS."
Microsoft stayed on top for two decades—can the Microsoft of
movie piracy do the same? It's surprising that aXXo has even
lasted three years. Ernesto of Torrentfreak says he assumed that
aXXo would peter out after a few months—the typical shelf life
of a BitTorrent uploader. But while aXXo has gone into
hibernation for months at a time, leaving his loyal fans to pine
desperately for their provider's return—during one such hiatus, a
Darkside member noted the similarity between the message
board's supposed aXXo spotters and the loonies who claim to
have seen the Virgin Mary's face in a grilled cheese sandwich—
BitTorrent's alpha dog has always returned. Ernesto, who landed
a short interview with someone purporting to be aXXo in 2007,
says that he used to believe the uploader was a single person,
someone with insider access in the movie business. Now he's not
so sure—considering that "aXXo" has uploaded as many as three
movies in a single day in recent weeks, he thinks the label could
encompass a larger group of pirates. (Messages that I sent to
aXXo through Darkside_RG were not returned.)
One reason for aXXo's staying power might be that the MPAA
has only rarely focused on individual uploaders. John Malcolm,
the MPAA's director of worldwide anti-piracy operations, says
the movie studios' strategy for snuffing out illegal downloads has
generally been "to go as high up the piracy food chain as we
can." For the MPAA, that's typically meant pursuing lawsuits
against BitTorrent portals. By some measures, this has been a
success: TorrentSpy, once a hugely popular torrent
clearinghouse, was forced to shut down as a result of an MPAA
suit. On the other hand, such site closures haven't done anything
to tamp down piracy—BitTorrent traffic has soared in 2008.
Shutting down a site like TorrentSpy has little effect on
download rates because uploaders like aXXo don't sequester
their files on a particular site—they're available all over the
Web. Unless the MPAA changes its enforcement strategy, then,
aXXo should continue his reign as long as he cares to remain on
top. A word of advice for aXXo's fans: Don't forget to say your
prayers.
Correction, Nov. 12, 2008: This piece originally and incorrectly
stated that R5 is the name of a group that uploads pirated
movies. It is a format for DVD releases. (Return to the corrected
sentence.)
other magazines
How He Did It
Newsweek and The New Yorker on Obama's win.
By David Sessions
Tuesday, November 11, 2008, at 4:38 PM ET
Newsweek, Nov. 17
A seven-part article on how Obama won the presidency spans
50,000 words and promises inside information from a team of
reporters given special access over the past year. It begins in
Chicago with Barack Obama's unlikely decision to run for
president on just two years' senate experience. Reporters
embedded with the campaigns reveal how John McCain first
found a narrative, how Hillary Clinton's campaign lost the
primary death match, and how the McCain camp's "loose
cannon" atmosphere continually sabotaged its own message.
When McCain picked Sarah Palin behind closed doors, it "had
the feel of a guerilla raid, a covert operation." The long story's
final chapter explains how Obama got voters to the polls in the
last days and how rifts between advisers ended the McCain
campaign on a "poisonous" note. As McCain staffers fought with
Palin and one another, Obama showed the same calm he'd had
since the beginning.
The New Yorker, Nov. 17
An article examines the "obsessive singularity" inside the
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
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Obama campaign that led them to victory: "In their tactical view,
all that was wrong with the United States could be summarized
in one word: Bush." That strategy worked in both the primary
and general elections, since both Hillary Clinton and John
McCain could be portrayed as hardened members of the
Washington establishment. Other election-deciding tactical
moves included Obama's choice to opt out of public financing
and his careful management of his own celebrity—particularly
after McCain's effective Paris Hilton ad. … An article traces
John McCain's path to "losing his soul," as one supporter
describes it. Before the 2008 campaign, McCain was respected
by members of both parties because of "a single belief: that he
was more honorable than most politicians." Close friends
confirm that his reputation wasn't a facade or a media
concoction, which makes it all the more difficult to explain the
angry, negative final months of his campaign.
Weekly Standard, Nov. 17
A scathing essay announces the end of conservatism and blames
the movement's champions for its spectacular failure: "We've
had nearly three decades to educate the electorate about freedom,
responsibility, and the evils of collectivism, and we responded
by creating a big-city-public-school-system of a learning
environment." Among the tactical blunders are the right's
pandering to the South, hysterics over Bill Clinton's personal
life, interference with the public will on abortion, bumbling
foreign policy, and support for expansive government spending.
… An article calls unity a "recurring delusion of American
politics," noting that most unifying presidents are only
retrospectively acknowledged as such. Reagan is now
considered successful but was a polarizing figure in office.
Obama may, like Reagan, eventually be seen as effective. "But if
he does, it will be because, like Reagan, he engaged his
ideological and political opponents in ferocious battles and beat
them."
New York, Nov. 17
The cover story rapturously calls Barack Obama "a kind of
religion … one rooted in a deep faith in rationality." … A profile
interviews New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, whose third
book hits shelves next week. His first two, The Tipping Point
and Blink, trekked in geek-cool academic research and
marketing philosophy rendered as entertainment. Gladwell's
critics object to his "parasitic" use of others' research, and the
looseness with which he applies it to everyday situations. He
tends to agree, and promises Outliers—which argues that the
very successful are just very lucky—contains his "very bedrock
beliefs." … An article tells the story of a bailarina, a Spanish
dancer at one of the many New York clubs where men pay for
dance partners or table companions. Bailarinas aren't strippers,
but often manage complex, frustrating lives of multiple
romances and abusive working conditions.
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
The Nation, Nov. 24
An article blames the current economic situation on "a
mythology about the dangerous consequences of big government
that does not stand up to the evidence." The numbers, rather,
show that the economies of nations who spend far more of their
GDPs on "social transfers" than the United States does grow at
the same rates. Bold government action occasionally leads in the
wrong direction, but correctly-administered programs are more
likely to boost productivity than to hinder it. With a GDP of $15
trillion, the U.S. can easily afford the improvements it needs "to
compete in a more competitive world." … A column
backhandedly thanks Sarah Palin for her presence in the
presidential race. She was "a gift to feminism" in both negative
and positive ways: She clarified what feminism isn't ("feel good,
'you go girl' appreciation of the female moxie") and worked in
tandem with Hillary Clinton to normalize the idea of a female
president.
philanthropy
The Rise and (Potential) Fall of
Philanthrocapitalism
Billionaires brought their business sense and ambition to charitable giving.
Now what?
By Georgia Levenson Keohane
Thursday, November 13, 2008, at 6:42 AM ET
Talk about unfortunate timing. With the global economy reeling
from the excesses of Wall Street, Mathew Bishop and Michael
Green give us the incredulously titled Philanthrocapitalism:
How the Rich Can Save the World. Bishop, the chief business
editor at the Economist, first described how the barons of the
new economy were revolutionizing philanthropy by applying
their business principles—and sweeping ambition—to their
charitable endeavors in 2006. Now he has teamed up with
Green, an international development expert, to chronicle how
this "movement" of philanthropists has "set out to change the
world." The world is indeed changed: This gilded age has come
to an abrupt and hard stop, and with it, perhaps, has come a
tempering of irrational exuberance about the potential of
outsized philanthropists to be, in Bishop's words, "superheroes
for solving some of society's problems."
Bishop and Green offer an exceptional synthesis of the influence
of the private sector on the field of philanthropy, and this book
should be required reading in any MBA or public policy
program. But the authors fail to probe some hard questions
thoroughly enough: Is the "new" philanthropy really even
"new"? And is the private sector the best exemplar of corporate
governance, accountability, or long-term investment savvy—
particularly when it comes to complex and persistent social and
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economic problems? With the pillars of global capitalism
quaking and government bailouts that will, inevitably, limit
public spending for social needs, these are more than academic
questions.
In their engaging—if incomplete—history of philanthropy, the
authors cite the influence of Andrew Carnegie's Gospel of
Wealth, in which he described the rich as merely stewards of
their economic surplus and advocated giving wealth away in
one's lifetime, rather than leaving it to heirs. The Gospel has
inspired tycoons from John D. Rockefeller, the world's first
billionaire, to philanthrocapitalist par excellence Bill Gates, who
received a copy from Warren Buffett. So, what, exactly, is
philanthrocapitalism, and how does it differ from the
philanthropy of those earlier titans of industry? First, the scale is
unprecedented. The wealth creation of the last quarter-century—
adjusted for historical inflation and the recent collapse—dwarfs
any other period in history. At the start of 2008, the United
States claimed 1,000 billionaires and the world 2,500. And
charitable giving in the United States has increased accordingly,
more than doubling from $13 billion in 1996 to nearly $32
billion in 2006. Second, this wealth has been created by
entrepreneurs in tech, finance, and other industries who now
channel their energy, drive, and principles to philanthropic
endeavors. According to Bishop and Green,
philanthrocapitalists are developing a new (if
familiar-sounding) language to describe their
business like approach. Their philanthropy is
"strategic," "market conscious," "impact
oriented," "knowledge based," often "high
engagement," and always driven by the goal of
maximizing leverage of the donor's money.
Seeing themselves as social investors, not
traditional donors, some of them engage in
"venture philanthropy." As entrepreneurial
"philanthropreneurs," they love to back social
entrepreneurs who offer innovative solutions
to society's problems.
Bill and Melinda Gates are the most obvious example of
philanthrocapitalism—huge wealth, strategic investing, risktaking, leverage. The Gates Foundation is the world's largest,
with approximately $60 billion in assets (as of early 2008). It is
on track to grant $3 billion a year—improving education in the
United States and fighting poverty and diseases like malaria,
tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS around the world. According to the
authors, Gates applies the "systems" approach of his Microsoft
success to "strategic" funding choices of the foundation. New
York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein notes that Gates
supported experiments in the reform of the city's school system
that were initially too risky to fund with public dollars (e.g.,
piloting new small schools). Gates also understands markets—
when they work and when they fail. He funds research into
vaccines for diseases that disproportionately affect the world's
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
poor since pharmaceutical R & D dollars will not flow without
the prospect of a return on investment. To help create the Global
Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, Gates convened a
number of corporate, philanthropic, and government agencies,
then leveraged their funds to guarantee demand for vaccines for
diseases like malaria.
Though the Gateses may personify philanthrocapitalism, Bishop
and Green illustrate that Bill and Melinda are not alone: The
tenets of philanthrocapitalism now suffuse the entire charitable
sector. Venture philanthropy, for example, which draws on the
lexicon and principles of venture capitalism, has grown beyond
Silicon Valley to charities national (New Profit Inc., Robin
Hood) and international (Absolute Return for Kids Foundation,
Children's Investment Fund Foundation in the United Kingdom).
Social enterprise, which once typically referred to organizations
"non profit in nature, entrepreneurial in spirit," now increasingly
emphasizes commercial activity and "the role of profit."
According to this logic, revenue generation allows social
enterprises to be "self-sustaining," and profits will attract
additional capital to solve social ills. Pierre Omidyar, who
founded eBay with Jeff Skoll and who describes himself as "promarket, anti-big government, skeptical of traditional
philanthropy," has created the Omidyar Network to support both
nonprofit and for-profit social enterprises. Google's own hybrid
approach to philanthropy allows it, in Executive Director Larry
Brilliant's words, to "play with every key on the keyboard."
The influence of the private sector is not limited to new
philanthropic entities like Gates and Google. Many established
philanthropies have undertaken significant introspection,
examining what they fund and how they fund it. Perhaps the
most radical "shakeup" of traditional philanthropy has come at
Rockefeller, under the leadership of Judith Rodin. Since taking
the helm in 2005, Rodin has embraced the language and methods
of philanthrocapitalism: Program areas are now "strategic
initiatives," grants are made in "portfolio," and Rodin
"leverages" private and public resources from "strategic
partnerships." The Rockefeller Revolutionary, as she was called
by the Economist, has been a controversial figure in the
philanthropic world, particularly with those skeptical of the
private sector sway.
Although they mention this controversy, Bishop and Green fail
to explore it fully. The debate in philanthropy between "old" and
"new" is not simply a case of the ancient regime resisting
change. Rather, some of the field's veterans are asking more
fundamental questions about the nature of
philanthrocapitalism—just how revolutionary is it? How
valuable are all its business prescriptions? And might
philanthropy in fact hold some lessons for the private sector?
In his Gospel of Wealth, Carnegie championed systemic change
for social ills and helping "those who will help themselves," a
mantra consciously echoed today by his philanthrocapitalist
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successors. Rodin characterizes her own revolution as a return to
the "scientific philanthropy" of John D. Rockefeller, who created
his foundation to "go to the root of individual or social ill-being
and misery." In 2006, Rodin teamed up with the Gates
Foundation in support of a "green revolution" in Africa to
enhance agricultural productivity and reduce hunger. The model
for this initiative was the first Green Revolution, which was
launched with funds and direction from the Rockefeller
Foundation between the 1940s and 1960 and which dramatically
improved farming and food production in Latin America and
Asia.
Susan Berresford, who spent 37 years at the Ford Foundation,
including the last 10 at its head, oversaw similar visionary and
risk-taking initiatives. She has cautioned against a false and
"dangerous" dichotomy between "old and new philanthropy." In
2007 Berresford told the Financial Times, "I don't think there is
anything more ambitious about new philanthropy than old
philanthropy. … Hundreds of foundations for decades worked to
address apartheid, hundreds of foundations worked to support
the civil rights movement in this country, there is nothing more
ambitious than those noble aims. They were extremely resultsoriented—they wanted the end of apartheid, they wanted fairness
for minorities—and the use of business principles has been in
the foundation world for a long time."
In Just Another Emperor: The Myths and Realities of
Philanthrocapitalism, Michael Edwards makes a critical
distinction between the tools of business—many of which can
and have helped improve the effectiveness of nonprofit
organizations—and a wholesale adoption of free-market
ideology. Some private sector principles, he contends, simply do
not translate. Long-term "social transformation," for example, is
neither easy to measure nor always cost-effective in profitmaximizing terms.
Bishop and Green dismiss Edwards in one page in their
epilogue. Both his dissent and their hasty dispatch reveal a clash
of cultures between the philanthrocapitalists and the charitableworld lifers that is the subtext of the philanthrocapitalism debate.
Many of the early philanthrocapitalists—successful in one
sphere and new to another—saw inefficiencies and opportunities
in philanthropy but overlooked the knowledge and experience
residing there. According to Omidyar: "[E]very business person
who first engages in the nonprofit sector goes through a lot of
growing pains, disappointments. It is a very different kind of
sector, a different cultural environment."
Some of the more vexing assaults came not from philanthropists
themselves but from members of the business management
establishment. Writing in the Harvard Business Review in 1999,
Michael Porter and Mark Kramer claimed "billions are wasted
on ineffective philanthropy. … [T]he real scandal is how much
money is pissed away on activities that have no real impact."
Three years later, McKinsey consultants Les Silverman, Paul
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Jansen, and former Sen. Bill Bradley wrote in HBR of a "$100
billion dollar opportunity" if nonprofits could only fundraise
more efficiently, streamline how they provided services, and
distribute money more quickly. "Perhaps," they admonished in
the New York Times, "non-profit executives can learn some
lessons from their counterparts in the private sector."
While there are merits to many of these claims, they were also a
product of a heady economic era. Some (including Jansen, et al.)
have advocated for foundations to spend down, or "pay out,"
their endowments faster than the 5 percent per year required by
law. The choice of pace (which, in economic terms, is a discount
rate) effectively represents a choice between spending on the
needs of present vs. future generations. Many in the
philanthropic world counter that capital preservation in certain
instances may be vital to the health of the social sector.
Reiterating this case in the Sept. 5 Chronicle of Philanthropy,
Susan Berresford and Lorie Slutsky, the president of the New
York Community Trust, argued, "[D]onors who set up
endowments in perpetuity understand the value of a constant
resource, available in good times and bad, for causes popular
and unpopular. … Many have bold ambitions and seek solutions
to problems such as poverty and injustice that they know will
take many lifetimes of effort. Others want to ensure that future
generations can deal with the inevitable—and now
unimaginable—challenges that will arise."
The unimaginable just might be a meltdown of the financial
system. Since that op-ed ran, the S&P 500 has lost more than 25
percent (50 percent over the year), destroying billions of dollars
at the most diversified endowed philanthropies, eviscerating
Wall Street corporate and family foundations, and making
charitable donations difficult for all Americans. Giving for 2009
will plummet across the country and the world. This comes at a
time when enormous government bailouts leave fewer public
resources for greater public need. Perhaps experience in the
philanthropic sector will be better-heeded. Writes Michael
Edwards, "It's time for more humility."
Evidence suggests that humility—or some common ground—
had arrived before the crash. In June 2007, the Wall Street
Journal and others touted a Seedco report, "The Limits to Social
Enterprise," which found that many nonprofits, pressured to
launch commercial enterprises, had their work derailed by the
distractions of running businesses. Since this spring, the
Stanford Social Innovation Review, an intellectual weathervane
for the social sector, has featured articles calling for a more
realistic assessment of the achievements of venture philanthropy
and for the use of "social innovation" (rather than "social
enterprise") as the lens for "understanding and creating social
change in all of its manifestations." Accordingly, "social
innovation" recognizes the "cross fertilization" that occurs
between the "nonprofit, government, and business sectors" rather
than the unidirectional business-influence-on-philanthropy thesis
of philanthrocapitalism.
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"Cross fertilization" may have found its most articulate advocate
in Luis Ubiñas, who in January succeeded Susan Berresford as
the head of the Ford Foundation. Ubiñas, who came to Ford
from McKinsey's Silicon Valley office, seemed to many the
quintessential "philanthrocapitalist" choice. Yet in one of his
first public interviews with Alliance Magazine in September,
Ubiñas sounds refreshingly humble:
I'm new enough to be cautious about making
pronouncements across the foundation world. I
think that learning across sectors is inherently
valuable. I think that there are things that
foundations do that would be very interesting
to businesses—taking a long-term approach,
taking a more holistic approach, attacking
problems from multiple angles, learning about
qualitative measurement. At the same time, I
think there are things from business that
philanthropy can learn: thinking about grants
as investments, thinking about the possibility
of expecting returns, thinking about grantees
as partners instead of grantees, people we
work with on an ongoing basis, closely, in a
shared, open dialogue. I think the question isn't
what can philanthropy learn from business, it's
what can philanthropy learn from itself, from
business, from government? Establishing a
learning environment is what matters, who we
learn from is secondary. …
Let's hope cross-fertilization bears fruit. Ubiñas has his work cut
for him.
dual processes resolve themselves? With the disruptive,
emphatic, and triple repetition in the final line.
There was a man of double deed,
Who sowed his garden full of seed;
When the seed began to grow,
'Twas like a garden full of snow;
When the snow began to melt,
'Twas like a ship without a belt;
When the ship began to sail,
'Twas like a bird without a tail;
When the bird began to fly,
'Twas like an eagle in the sky;
When the sky began to roar,
'Twas like a lion at my door;
When my door began to crack,
'Twas like a stick across my back;
When my back began to smart,
'Twas like a penknife in my heart;
And when my heart began to bleed,
'Twas death, and death, and death indeed.
……………………..............………—
Anonymous
Click the arrow on the audio player to hear Robert Pinsky read
this poem. You can also download the recording or subscribe to
Slate's Poetry Podcast on iTunes.
Slate Poetry Editor Robert Pinsky will be participating in the
"Poem" Fray this week. Post your questions and comments on
"There Was a Man of Double Deed," and he'll respond and
participate.
poem
"There Was a Man of Double Deed"
The unhinged reason of an anonymous classic.
By Robert Pinsky
Tuesday, November 11, 2008, at 7:27 AM ET
This anonymous poem exemplifies how poetry can join reason
and unreason, method and wildness, so effectively that the
opposites become part of a single process. The links and
repetitions seem governed partly by rhyme and partly by some
obsessive, hyperrational formula of causality. As in dreams or
some forms of mental illness, the systematic becomes a form of
derangement. Here, the zany yet orderly movement from thing to
thing also feels fateful and pointed. Even the sudden
introduction of the first person—" 'Twas like a lion at my
door"—feels inevitable and foredoomed as well as crazy and
unanticipated. The doubleness of deed, the doubleness of linked
repetitions, the doubleness of couplet rhyme: How can these
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
politics
The TMI Presidency
How much transparency do we really want from Obama?
By Christopher Beam
Wednesday, November 12, 2008, at 8:15 PM ET
During a presidential campaign, there's no such thing as oversharing. Barack Obama promised to run the most transparent
White House in history—disclosing donations, shunning
lobbyists, and broadcasting important meetings on C-SPAN.
Transition captain John Podesta reiterated the point Tuesday
when he said Obama's would be "the most open and transparent
transition in history."
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But once a candidate becomes president, he faces a transparency
trade-off: More transparency may make the government more
accountable, because the public can learn the rationale behind
policy. But less transparency may allow for more wide-ranging
and honest deliberations, which can lead to better policy.
So what would a radically transparent administration look like?
And what liabilities would come with increased transparency?
With the help of a new report by OMBWatch, as well as the
Sunlight Foundation and the Center for Responsive Politics,
we've put together a list of ways the Obama administration can
promote transparency. We've also listed some potential
drawbacks.
1.
2.
3.
Spotlight the bailout. If the purpose of transparency is
to increase faith in government, there's no better place
to start than the Treasury. Obama could set special
disclosure standards for not just how the $700 billion is
being spent but who is being hired, where they have
worked in the past, and any potential conflicts of
interest.
Drawbacks: It's embarrassing. The fact is, the
Treasury is hiring many of the bankers and traders who
got us here in the first place. This isn't because the feds
are in the pocket of Wall Street—it's because they are
Wall Street. It's the same paradox that bedevils bans on
lobbyists being involved in issues they worked on: The
people with vested interests on an issue often know the
most about it.
Force lobbyists to disclose everything. The Lobbying
Disclosure Act of 1995 (PDF) now requires lobbyists to
file quarterly reports that reveal who they lobby and on
what issues. If Obama wanted to up the ante, he'd make
lobbyists file monthly reports that detail which meetings
took place when. They would also have to report which
pieces of legislation they pushed for or against, as well
as specific earmark requests they made. Obama would
also make lobbyists release guest lists for the parties
they throw for members of Congress and their staffs.
Likewise, Obama would continue his policy of refusing
to hire federally registered lobbyists and prohibiting
anyone who lobbied in the recent past from advising on
the policy area in which they lobbied.
Drawbacks: If you believe that ethics legislation is a
slowly tightening noose around the neck of free speech,
then all this disclosure feels like a nuisance. As Hillary
Clinton said, lobbyists are people, too. As for keeping
lobbyists at bay, the fact is that lobbyists are some of
the most knowledgeable people in Washington on
policy matters. No doubt there are other qualified
candidates out there without the shady ties—they're just
harder to find.
Broadcast Cabinet meetings. It's possible Obama was
exaggerating when he suggested broadcasting top-level
meetings online. But doing so would give Americans
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
4.
5.
6.
more insight into the deliberative process than ever
before. And it would force Cabinet secretaries to hone
their ideas beforehand and defend their views
eloquently. (Besides, it would be undeniably good
television.)
Drawbacks: Cabinet secretaries are unelected and,
theoretically at least, focused on policy. Broadcasting
Cabinet meetings would encourage political
grandstanding and would hamper actual decisionmaking. (Have you seen British parliament on the
BBC?) Plus, there would have to be a seven-second
delay to bleep out all the classified information.
Publicize the president's schedule. If members of
Congress have to report their meetings with influenceseekers, why shouldn't the president? Lobbyists aren't
the only ones trying to peddle their wares. (Technically,
they're just the ones who spend at least 20 percent of
their time doing it.) Corporate chief executives, heads
of state, NGO presidents, and others who pass through
the West Wing also have agendas, and full transparency
would require that we know when they have the
president's ear. No one's asking for a live blog. Personal
visits could be off-limits. But a record of who gets
official face-time with the president would be a useful,
and mostly harmless, influence-meter.
Drawbacks: Safety, for one. Rule No. 1 of post-9/11
presidential security is: Never broadcast the commander
in chief's schedule. Another, admittedly lesser problem,
is jealousy. If the CEO of Apple learned that the CEO
of Microsoft got a face-to-face meeting with Obama, he
might demand one, too.
Get rid of "pseudo" classifications. Right now the
intelligence classification system is a joke. In 2007
there were "107 unique markings and more than 131
different labeling or handling processes and procedures
for SBU [sensitive but unclassified] information,"
according to one government official. These included
such labels as "for official use only" and "law
enforcement sensitive." President Bush issued a
directive to consolidate the labels in May, but he didn't
try to make them less common. To increase
transparency, Obama could eliminate the gray area
altogether and force officials to decide whether
information is classified or not.
Drawbacks: In the real world, it's never all-or-nothing.
Some documents are meant for all staff members, some
are restricted to the top 20 people, and some are "For
Your Eyes Only." Agencies need to be able to
distinguish among levels of classification. Sure,
"pseudo" classifications have gotten out of hand,
especially in the Bush administration's culture of
secrecy. But they do serve a purpose.
Make all filings electronic. Senators still file financialdisclosure reports on paper, which can take weeks to
process. Electronic filings make the data easier to
process, organize, and search. It also helps create
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7.
metadata—dates, tags, and other categories that help
people sort and draw meaning from the data itself. For
example, a senator can release thousands of pages of
bank statements. But without metadata, it's nearly
impossible to analyze them. Not to mention, it saves the
state thousands of man-hours and millions of sheets of
paper.
Drawbacks: None—unless you're a senator with
something to hide.
Highlight earmarks. It's impossible to ban earmarks
completely. But as John McCain would say, make their
authors famous. Set up a system under which
legislation is published online prior to voting and lastminute changes are automatically highlighted. Better
yet, track changes so the public knows which lawmaker
added what.
Drawbacks: Earmarks serve a useful purpose, helping
to attract backing for a bill that a member may not
otherwise support. (Of course, there are other ways to
compromise.) At the same time, lawmakers might
hesitate to make necessary but controversial changes if
everyone knows who made them.
Is there such a thing as too much information? Yes—but only if
there's no way of processing it. The key to increasing
transparency, therefore, is to allow people to interpret what
they're seeing. That means not just more documents but better
databases, more navigable interfaces, and more visual aids to
help people analyze information. If you've got that, there's no
such thing as over-sharing.
politics
A Dog We Can Believe In
The politics of presidential pet care.
By Michael Schaffer
Wednesday, November 12, 2008, at 6:29 PM ET
At President-elect Barack Obama's first postelection press
conference, amid questions about economic crises and foreign
dangers, he was also asked to describe his ideal candidate for a
particularly prominent and sensitive White House position: first
dog.
Obama was noncommittal, though he did appear to rule out the
one real candidate of change—a mutt "like me"—because
daughter Malia required a hypoallergenic animal. Still, his
answer set off a round of speculation and commentary that will
not abate until the new dog becomes part of the family—and
then President Obama will have a whole new set of issues to
deal with. Even the family dog is not immune from presidential
politics.
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
By stating his preference for a mutt, Obama sidestepped only
part of this puppy political battle. In fact, Americans' lingering
fascination with breed purity is a fading aspect of pet culture,
something that may someday look as goofy as those tuxedo-clad
TV announcers who pontificate about the proper size of basenji
paws during the Westminster Kennel Club's annual show.
Slate V imagines Barney the Dog's farewell video:
But that's not to say that the world of pet ownership has become
a carefree one. Picking the breed will be easy compared with
some of the other political tasks facing the dog owner in chief.
Over the past few decades, the relationship between Americans
and their pets has changed dramatically, as the animals have
been promoted from loyal servants to faithful pals to ersatz
family members. The change has spurred the growth of a $41
billion pet industry. Only a small portion of that total represents
the boutique canine couture displayed at New York's annual Pet
Fashion Week. Most of it involves vast expansions in basic
aspects of pet ownership: food, health, training, and care. In
other words, the same basic nurturing needs of our human
families. And like other family matters in a society riven by
cultural politics, each category is fraught with controversy.
Take education. President Obama will want a trainer to help
avoid the international incident that might ensue should the
pooch, say, nip Vladimir Putin the way George Bush's Barney
recently bit a Reuters reporter. Not long ago, hiring a behaviorist
was something you did only if you needed to train a seeing-eye
dog or a police canine. These days, it's about as ordinary as
sending your teenager to driver's ed: According to the Bureau of
Labor Statistics, the nation's population of animal trainers tripled
to 43,000 in the years between 2000 and 2006.
We're sharply divided, though, about what those professionals
should teach. In the late 20th century, the field was transformed
by the same pedagogical revolution that reshaped human
education, with sharp yanks on the choke collar replaced by a
positive model that emphasized rewarding pooches when they
do well. That establishment-endorsed theory now faces a
backlash in the form of the tough-love model popularized by the
uncredentialed TV celebrity Cesar Millan. The furious debate—
with accusations of dangerous permissiveness on one side,
heartless cruelty on the other—represents a four-legged version
of the culture wars. Whichever side the new president takes, he'll
disappoint a large chunk of the electorate.
Then there's food. Modern pet food is a mind-boggling
marketplace that has, since the 1970s, transformed itself in the
same way as the human-food market. Once upon a time, we all
shopped at Safeway and bought 35-pound bags of basic Alpo.
Now we choose among Sam's Club, Whole Foods, or the vegan
co-op for ourselves—and navigate a world of ever-pricier pet
selections that feature human-grade ingredients, raw meat, allorganic contents, or menu descriptions such as "grilled tuna,
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wild rice, broccoli and dill." Wal-Mart's low-cost house brand
remains a best-seller, but it's also possible to buy an 11-pound
bag of imported ZiwiPeak for $105—or order a home-delivered
meal from one of the doggie bakeries that have sprung up around
the country.
The investment might seem worth it to those scared by the
tainted Chinese wheat gluten that poisoned dozens of massmarket brands last year. But does a president's political adviser,
particularly an adviser to a president who's already been accused
of being an arugula-loving elitist, want him to spend more on his
dog's dinner than his constituents spend on their own?
Then there's health care. As a pet owner, Obama will find that
many of the inequalities that affect human health care are present
in the veterinary version, which, in scarcely a generation, has
gone from basic deworming and rabies-inoculating to
administering psychopharmaceuticals and practicing advanced
specialties like dermatology or radiation oncology. In 1980,
there were less than 2,000 vets credentialed by 12 specialty
organizations; by 2007, there were about 9,000 members of 27
groups like orthopedics. American spent $1.32 billion in 2003 on
anterior cruciate ligament surgery to repair dogs' knees.
The phenomenon explains why one of the industry's fastestgrowing sectors is veterinary health insurance, which expanded
26 percent a year between 2003 and 2008. Of course, when
you're president, the fact that your pet has insurance becomes
more politically complicated, given that millions of your human
constituents do not. Balancing the new pooch's life, on the one
hand, and the visuals of spending thousands on intra-arterial
chemotherapy during a recession, on the other, makes picking a
breed look awfully simple.
In grappling with pet-ownership's contemporary dilemmas,
Obama will actually embrace an old tradition. The way we live
with our pets has always reflected the way we live, period. And
that includes politics: Long before there was a White House,
there were potentates with pets. Once upon a time, such
animals—like the well-dressed lapdogs of Mary, Queen of
Scots—elevated leaders above the masses who couldn't afford to
feed nonworking beasts, much less outfit them in royal velvet.
In our democratic society, by contrast, dogs let presidents play
everyman. The patrician FDR was humanized by pictures of him
cuddling with his beloved Fala. Serving the same purpose for
President Obama will be the family's new dog. Whatever breed it
happens to be.
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
politics
So When Will a Muslim Be President?
A guide to which minority group has the best chance to win the White House
next.
By Mark Oppenheimer
Wednesday, November 12, 2008, at 2:48 PM ET
At long last, my people have an answer to the question "When
will we have a Jewish president?" The answer, it turns out, is
"Not before we have a black president." I imagine that all ethnic
groups play this game of "when will one of ours get there?" (The
question is especially common among Jews, since we're sort of
white and used to success at other jobs—law, medicine,
swimming.) But now that a half-African man with Muslim
ancestors has defeated, for the presidency, an Episcopalian with
a Roman numeral after his name, the bookmakers have to move
the odds for all of us.
Which historically oppressed group will see one of its own take
the oath of the presidency on a Bible/Quran/Analects/etc. next?
We must admit that some groups are too small to have much of a
chance—met any Zoroastrians lately?—and others seem too
exotic. But plenty of others are in the running. Here, then, is a
guide to which minority group will next see one of its own in the
White House, in descending order of probability, and with
possible candidates included:
The women: First off, they're not a minority. With so many
more men than women imprisoned, unable to vote because of
felony convictions, dying in battle, and murdered, there are both
more women alive and more women eligible to vote. If they
choose to unite behind one of their own—as many of them were
inclined to do in 2008—they'll be the not-so-little voting bloc
that could. Top candidates: Hillary Clinton, although by 2012
she'll be a little long in the pantsuit; Kansas Gov. Kathleen
Sebelius, mentioned as a possible Democratic veep this year, but
she is only six months younger than Clinton; and Sen. Claire
McCaskill, from the swing state of Missouri. Many top
Republican women are either too moderate for the base, like
Maine Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe; too old, like
Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison; or too Sarah Palin, like
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.
The Latter-day Saints: Learn the terminology—they often call
themselves "Saints" or "LDS"—because a Mormon president is
coming. The main Mormon denomination claims 5.7 million
adherents in the United States, making it twice as large as the
Episcopal church and the Congregationalists put together. And
despite widespread prejudice against Mormons, they're
overrepresented in national politics. Until Oregon's Gordon
Smith lost last week, there were five Mormon senators: four
Republicans and a very big Democrat, Majority Leader Harry
Reid. Mormons are also an unusually affluent group, with many
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businessmen in their ranks, and as Mitt Romney's campaign
showed, they're inclined to give to one of their own. The liberal
Barack Obama may prove a boon to conservative Mormons'
electoral prospects: Those least inclined to support a Mormon
are Southern Protestants, a group Obama struggled with, but
after they have four or eight years to get used to a black man in
the White House, a Mitt Romney or an Orrin Hatch might not
seem so strange. If Jeremiah Wright couldn't derail Obama, who
will be afraid of Mormons' sacred underwear? Top candidates:
Romney, although his sell-by date is nearing, and former Utah
Gov. and current Secretary of Health and Human Services Mike
Leavitt. Dark horse: wildly popular, if troglodytic, radio host
Glenn Beck.
The Jews: Together now, a sigh of relief: It's not going to be
Lieberman! Having dirty-danced with too many political parties
in the past four years, Joe's rep is tarnished; Mitch McConnell
and Harry Reid are both happy to use him, but neither really
wants to be seen holding hands with him the next morning. So
which members of the tribe—a tribe that is about 5 million
strong in America, with deep pockets, high voter turnout, and
diminishing fear of the Bradley (Bernstein?) Effect—might be
next on America's dance card? Top candidates: Rahm Emanuel,
congressman-cum-chief of staff, a man whose debtors include
every Democrat in Congress, since he led the House Dems'
fundraising effort in the watershed election of 2006; rising GOP
star Eric Cantor, of Virginia's 7th congressional district; and
Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold, whose very name recalls that
old, shattered dream known as campaign-finance reform. But
Feingold, who has thought about running before, is on the record
supporting same-sex marriages, so we may want to sub in Ed
Rendell, the Pennsylvania governor who, after supporting
Hillary, helped deliver his state to Obama. If you think Rendell
(b. 1944) is too old, and you just can't see Michael Bloomberg in
the Oval Office, then it might be fun to consider Al Franken—
should he push aside his fellow Jew, Minnesota Sen. Norm
Coleman, in the recount still in progress.
The Muslims: Muslims, you may have heard, have a PR
problem. And a Muslim running for president would be in a
tricky situation: There's more hostility to Muslims in the red
states, so a Muslim candidate would have to bank on the blue
states. But if he or she hewed closely to traditional Islam on
matters like the role of women, he would never win California or
New York. To go blue, he'd have to be a pretty secular
Muslim—but if he were too publicly secular, he'd lose potential
donations of money and time from fellow Muslims. Of course,
many American Muslims are quite secular, so nobody knows
what kind of Muslim could count on ethnic politics to be an
asset, rather than a detriment. Which is why the first Muslim
president may well be a black Muslim, not Arab or Persian, and
it so happens the only two Muslims in Congress—let's call them
the top candidates—are African-American: Keith Ellison (DMinn., raised Catholic) and André Carson (D-Ind., raised
Baptist). Bonus prediction: In future years, look for a relatively
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
secular politician to emerge from the large Iranian community in
Los Angeles and achieve national prominence.
The Hindus: It's actually fairly surprising that there's no Hindu
in Congress or in a governorship, given the popular perception
of Indians as an industrious, nonthreatening model minority. If,
like millions of Americans, you've been introduced to Indian
folkways from The Simpsons and that stellar character actor who
often works alongside Seth Rogen, you're probably inclined to
like them. But as we learned in the aftermath of 9/11, some
Americans assume that any dark-skinned, South Asian-looking
person is an Arab or a Muslim—and despise him accordingly.
It's likely that the first Hindu (or South Asian) president will
come from a red state, having earned the white-guy seal of
approval. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal would be a perfect
example, except that he is a convert to Catholicism. According
to the Hindu American Foundation, there are four Hindu state
legislators, including Kumar Barve, the majority leader of the
Maryland House of Delegates. But my bet is that the first Hindu
president will be an Indian-American celebrity who, before
entering the political arena, has already transcended ethnicity in
people's minds. Top candidate: Kal Penn, better known as
Kumar from Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. Penn is
more intellectual than most actors (I've interviewed him, and he's
impressive), was a visiting professor at the University of
Pennsylvania, and stumped for Barack Obama.
The gays and lesbians: Yes, I know, we may already have had a
gay president—Lincoln is a much-nominated candidate for
closeted commander in chief—but if we're talking about an
openly gay president, it won't be for a while. Still, we know what
to do to improve a gay candidate's chances: murder an old
person. Younger generations are far more tolerant of
homosexuality; we know, for example, that voters under 30
opposed California's Proposition 8. When the time comes, voters
may feel more comfortable with a lesbian president than with a
gay man, given the stereotypes about lesbian monogamy and
domesticity. Top candidate: a young woman, a college freshman
somewhere in the progressive Midwest, maybe Wisconsin or
Minnesota, who just worked her ass off for Barack Obama and is
planning her run in 2048.
The atheists: When the lion lies down with the lamb, when the
president is a Republican Muslim and the Democratic speaker of
the House is a vegan Mormon lesbian, when the secretary of
defense is a Jain pacifist from the Green Party, they will all
agree on one thing: atheists need not apply. A 2007 Gallup poll
found that 53 percent of Americans would not vote for an atheist
for president. (By contrast, only 43 percent wouldn't vote for a
homosexual, and only 24 percent wouldn't vote for a Mormon.)
As Ronald Lindsay, executive director of the Council for Secular
Humanism, told me in an e-mail: "Atheism spells political death
in this country."
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Indeed. Only one current congressman has confessed to being an
atheist: Rep. Pete Stark, a Democrat from the lefty East Bay
region of Northern California. If he ever ran for president, he
would need God's help just as surely as he wouldn't ask for it.
Update, Nov. 12, 2008, 9:57 p.m.: As several readers have
noted in "The Fray," this guide is not exactly comprehensive.
With apologies to Summum, herewith two more groups that have
good odds at winning the White House in the not-too-distant
future.
The Hispanics: At more than 13 percent of the population,
Hispanics are considered the largest ethnic minority in the
country—but what that means is murky. Not all Hispanics (or
Latinos, as we more commonly say) speak Spanish, and not all
have strong roots in a Spanish-speaking country: Argentine
immigrants to the United States, for example, are often ethnic
Italians who, having lived in Argentina for one generation, now
magically share an ethnic designation with descendants of the
Aztecs. This wild diversity has hindered the development of
voting blocs, especially since the politically powerful Miami
Cubans are more conservative than, say, reliably Democratic
Puerto Ricans. Still, the sheer numbers of Hispanics, and their
concentration in states rich with electoral votes, mean a señor or
señora presidente is coming soon. Top candidates: New Mexico
Gov. Bill Richardson will be 69 in 2016, younger than John
McCain is now. Antonio Villaraigosa, the mayor of Los
Angeles, could be a senator or governor before eight years have
passed (but many worry about bimbo eruptions, like the one that
brought down his marriage). Ed Garza served two terms as the
wunderkind mayor of San Antonio before being term-limited
out; he was an early Obama supporter who could end up in the
administration. And it's hard to resist the Sanchez sisters, Linda
and Loretta, Democrats of California, the first sister-sister pair in
Congress.
East Asians: Although an old and assimilated minority group—
it's not hard to find fifth-generation Japanese- or ChineseAmericans on the West Coast—there have been few national
political figures with East Asian roots. Their political success
has been limited by unfair prejudice in every era: against
Japanese-Americans during World War II, against ChineseAmericans during the Cold War, against Vietnamese-Americans
during and after the Vietnam War. Looking ahead, the strong
Christianity of the Korean-American community makes it a
natural place to look for politicians who could woo evangelicals,
but for now most Asian-American politicians come from secular
ethnic communities on the West Coast. Top candidates: Matt
Fong, an Air Force Academy grad and former treasurer of
California, who in 1998 ran unsuccessfully against Sen. Barbara
Boxer, then joined the Bush administration; Fiona Ma, only 42,
the majority whip in the California Senate, a Democrat with a
degree from Pepperdine—a conservative Christian school; and
Chinese-American Gary Locke, the former governor of
Washington.
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
politics
Chicago Hope
The Windy City gave us Obama. What can it expect in return?
By Christopher Beam
Monday, November 10, 2008, at 7:52 PM ET
In the days before the election, Chicago Mayor Richard M.
Daley downplayed drama surrounding Barack Obama's
logistically nightmarish election-night rally in Grant Park.
"Could you see me saying no to Senator Obama?" he asked.
Now that Obama has won and the rally is over, the question can
be flipped: Can President Obama say no to Mayor Daley?
Obama spent much of his campaign crusading against the kind
of chit-calling, favor-trading, and back-scratching that are a
hallmark of politics in Chicago (and, to be fair, pretty much
everywhere else). Still, Obama's adopted hometown will benefit
hugely from his presidency—whether or not he intends it.
The biggest boon may be to the city's bid for the 2016 Olympics,
which the IOC is scheduled to award in October 2009. Chicago
is one of four cities competing for the Games that year, and it's
fair to say that Obama has the other would-be hosts—Madrid,
Tokyo, and Rio de Janeiro—in a panic. "I have a sense of crisis,"
one Japanese committeeman told the AP. Mayor Richard Daley
has had his heart set on the Games for years, and Obama is
expected to meet with the Olympic committee when it comes to
Chicago in the spring. (Similar efforts by Tony Blair were seen
as partly responsible for London's win in 2012.)
But the Olympics bid is only the most prominent example of
what could be a fruitful relationship for the Daley
administration. The Obama-Daley connections run deep. Bill
Daley, the mayor's youngest brother, served as commerce
secretary under Clinton and is now part of Obama's economic
transition team. (He's also a potential Cabinet member.) Rahm
Emanuel, Valerie Jarrett, and David Axelrod all worked for
Daley at some point in their careers: Emanuel as a fundraiser,
Jarrett as a deputy chief of staff, and Axelrod as a consultant.
Meanwhile, Mayor Daley has had Obama's back repeatedly
during the presidential campaign. He broke his longstanding
tradition of not endorsing during the primaries by backing
Obama against Hillary Clinton in December—of 2006. He spoke
up when Obama's prior drug use became an issue. His support
culminated in the election-night blowout, which cost $2 million
(the campaign promised to reimburse the city) and attracted
240,000 people—and which doubled as a not-too-subtle display
of Chicago's logistical acumen (cough Olympics cough).
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Another obvious boon is access to federal funds. That doesn't
necessarily mean a quid pro quo. But it may mean that Obama
makes urban issues a priority, which will inevitably help
Chicago. Daley has long been pushing to upgrade the city's mass
transit system, including a "circle line" to link up the existing
lines of the Chicago L and a new high-speed rail to O'Hare
International Airport. (An expansion of O'Hare itself is already
under way). "If the progressive Democratic wing of the party
follows through on a green revolution in transportation, that can't
help but benefit Chicago," says Bill Savage, who teaches
Chicago literature and history at Northwestern University. Same
goes for education reform and better funding for public housing.
Surely some earmarks will get through. "I think you'll see the
city gets more than its share of federal funds," says Laura
Washington, a former aide to Mayor Harold Washington (no
relation). The challenge for Obama, says Dick Simpson, a
former Chicago alderman and professor at the University of
Illinois in Chicago, will be "to make sure his fingerprints aren't
on the earmarks."
Less measurable than federal funds, but no less important, is
access. At the very least, Chicago politicians will have the ear of
the administration. Between Jarrett, Axelrod, Emanuel, Daley,
and Obama himself, there will be no shortage of ears attuned to
Chicago. It's not as if Chicago's national political profile was
low—George W. Bush celebrated his 60th birthday there, and
Daley's father famously went to great lengths for JFK—but it
never hurts to have your mayor and your president on a firstname basis.
Yet the high profile cuts both ways. Expect more scrutiny of
Chicago's famously corrupt political machine. So far, Obama has
managed to convince people he's from Chicago but not of it—a
phenomenon one Chicago columnist dubbed "hopium." But just
as the national media are now obsessed with Alaskan drilling,
they're also likely to scrutinize city politics and speculate about
potential ties to Obama. There may be only one Tony Rezko, but
the media can be counted on to try to find others like him.
How else will Chicago change because of Obama? Well, people
will go there—at least that's the hope. The state tourism board
plans to promote a three-day vacation package featuring sites
related to Barack Obama. The Chicago Convention and Tourism
Bureau has already set up a "Presidential Chicago" page
dedicated to the Obama family's favorite shops ("The soon-to-be
First Lady is frequently seen wearing designs by Chicago's
Maria Pinto") and eateries ("Obama pegs MacArthur's—which
serves fine soul food in a family atmosphere—as one of his top
Chicago picks"). A Chicago restaurant even made T-shirts that
read, "Obama Eats Here." No plans yet to sell jars of air exhaled
by Barack Obama, but just wait.
Spurring tourism will be the inevitable Chicago makeover. Right
now, Chicago may be known best for the Cubs and Al Capone.
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
(And, to those of a certain age, for Biker Mice From Mars.) But
if all goes well, images of futility and crime will be replaced by
pictures of the motorcade cruising down the Kennedy
Expressway, barbershops on the South Side, and the rustic brick
of the University of Chicago. Goodbye, America's grundle.
Hello, "capital of the new decade."
Chances are the city will get safer, too. Hyde Park-Kenwood has
just become "the safest urban neighborhood in America." When
Obama was in town for his acceptance speech, police blocked
off all roads within a quarter-mile of his house. When he's not in
town, the Secret Service still keeps an eye on his house. We've
already seen what happens when you try to mess with the
motorcade.
Some expectations will no doubt be dashed. Federal agencies
will not brim with Chicagoans. Obama will not move the capital
to the Windy City, as he did his campaign. The Cubs will not
win the World Series. But at the very least, Chicago will force
the world to acknowledge that America is more than the sum of
its coasts.
press box
Crazy About Guns
The press spooks its readers about increased gun purchases.
By Jack Shafer
Thursday, November 13, 2008, at 6:26 PM ET
Firearms scare almost everybody. But no demographic gets more
wiggy about handguns, shotguns, and rifles than journalists.
Ever since the Washington Post ("Gun Sales Thriving in
Uncertain Times," Oct. 27) put the idea into circulation that the
election and economic turmoil were spurring an increase in gun
and ammo sales, a score of other news outlets have published
their takes on the topic.
The Salt Lake Tribune got there on Nov. 6 ("Election Triggers
Upsurge in Military-Like Firearms Sales"), the New York Times
on Nov. 7 ("On Concerns Over Gun Control, Gun Sales Are
Up"), the Associated Press ("Fears of Democrat Crackdown
Lead to Gun Sales Boom") and Reuters on Nov. 8 ("Obama Win
Triggers Run on Guns in Many Stores"), the Kansas City Star on
Nov. 9 ("Election's Outcome Triggers Record Sales at Gun
Shops"), the Anchorage Daily News on Nov. 10 ("Armed and
Nervous in Alaska"), FoxNews.com ("Gun Owners Stockpiling
Over Fear of Democratic Weapon Bans") and CNN.com on Nov.
11 ("Gun Sales Surge After Obama's Election"), the Chicago
Tribune ("Obama Win Triggers Run on Guns") and the Globe
and Mail on Nov. 12 ("Obama Win Spurs U.S. Gun Sales
Boom"). And that's just a partial list.
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The foundation upon which these outlets build their stories is
solid: The primary measurement of gun purchases shows that
sales are rising this year. Federal law requires licensed gun
dealers to submit background check requests of all purchasers to
the FBI's National Instant Criminal Background Check System.
The Post reports that "there were 8.4 million background checks
from Jan. 1 to Sept. 28, compared with 7.7 million in the same
period last year," which is a 9 percent increase.
It sounds scary, but the 2008 year-to-date increase doesn't tell
the whole story. The first full year of the background check
system was 1999, when 8.6 million background checks were
conducted. For the next four years, background checks bubbled
(PDF, Page 5) under 8 million annually and didn't break above 8
million again until in 2004. In 2007, the number of applications
was essentially the same as in 1999 (8,658,000 vs. 8,621,000),
which means that there was no growth in the number of gun
sales over almost a decade. Considered inside the context of a
decade's worth of background check data and a growing
population, the 9 percent year-to-date increase doesn't seem very
significant. (Nota bene: These days, 1.6 percent of gun
applications are denied each year, translating into no gun sale.)
Perceived increases in gun sales tend to make news while
perceived decreases do not, a realization I came to when I failed
to find evidence in Nexis of any publication making a big deal
out of the years that background checks fell below 8 million
(2000-2003).
If all 8.6 million background checks in 2008 were for first-time
buyers, one could make the potentially chilling case that
growing numbers of citizens are bearing arms. But that's not
very likely based on established survey data. Ownership of most
of the nation's estimated 200 million guns is concentrated in
relatively few hands—according to a recent article in the journal
Injury Prevention, 48 percent of gun owners reported owning
more than four firearms. A similar data point collected by the
National Institute of Justice (PDF, Page 2) states that of "gun
owners in 1994, 10 million individuals owned 105 million guns,
while the remaining 87 million guns were dispersed among 34
million other owners."
This year's uptick in buyers must reflect some new gun owners,
but if past surveys are a good guide, surely most of these buyers
are repeat buyers. This means that the well-armed are probably
getting better-armed—a point none of the recent news stories
makes.
Further tamping down the fears of the nation's anti-gun nuts are
data compiled by the National Opinion Research Center at the
University of Chicago. NORC found that gun ownership in the
United States has been falling since 1977 (PDF, Page 11), when
54 percent of households reported owning a gun, compared with
34.5 percent in 2006. More good news for anti-gun nuts:
According to the Department of Justice, nonfatal firearm-related
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
violent crimes are down sharply since 1993, and nonfatal
firearm-related violent victimization rates are also down since
1994. (Both rates turned up slightly in 2005 but remained low.)
Crimes committed with firearms peaked in 1993 and stabilized
at late-1980s levels.
Several news outlets (AP, the Anchorage Daily News,
CNN.com, and the Kansas City Star) interviewed gun dealers
who claimed to be posting record sales. Placed in context, that
assertion wilts. A study (PDF) by the Violence Policy Center
finds that the number of U.S. gun dealers declined from 250,000
in 1994 to 50,000 in 2007. Granted, many of the original
250,000 dealers were small-timers, moving small numbers of
guns, who left the trade because of the cost and hassle of
increased regulation. But if gun sales over time remain static
while the number of gun sellers is plunging, wouldn't you expect
individual dealers to post increased sales? So take those record
sales with a grain of salt.
To be fair to the press horde, some sort of "Obama effect" does
exist. During the week of Nov. 3-9, the FBI received 374,000
background requests, "a nearly 49 percent increase over the
same period in 2007," CNN.com reports. Anecdotes collected in
some of the news stories indicate that some buyers are keen on
buying so-called "assault weapons," which were banned from
1994 until 2004.
Many gun enthusiasts worry that the Obama administration and
Democratic Congress will reinstitute the ban and pass other
restrictive legislation. Although Obama supports "common
sense" gun laws, his idea of what constitutes common sense
differs from that of most gun owners. Consider:
The Chicago Tribune reports that as "an
Illinois state legislator [Obama] voted to
support a ban on semiautomatic assault
weapons and tighter restrictions on all
firearms. He has said in the past that he
opposes allowing gun owners to carry
concealed weapons."
The AP reports that as a U.S. senator, "Obama
voted to leave gun-makers and dealers open to
lawsuits."
According to the Anchorage Daily News, "the
pro-gun control Brady Campaign to Prevent
Gun Violence endorsed Obama and called his
win Tuesday 'a major victory.' "
If a genuine run on guns exists, whose fault is it? Blame Obama
and his running mate, Joe Biden, a well-known "assault weapon"
foe. Paradoxically, if Obama wanted to end the purported run on
guns, he could do so by opposing any new regulations.
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I'd love to see a spate of stories exploring that line.
*****
I fully expect to win the Stephen Hunter Second Amendment
Award for this article and for the judgment to be so
overwhelming that they retire it forever. Send news of other
journalism prizes I qualify for to slate.pressbox@gmail.com.
Thanks to readers Allen Flanigan and Eric Verkerke for their
nudging. (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 word guns in the subject
head of an e-mail message, and send it to
slate.pressbox@gmail.com.
press box
Don't Count Drudge Out
His demise is overreported once again.
By Jack Shafer
Monday, November 10, 2008, at 6:51 PM ET
At the beginning of the summer, the press considered the Drudge
Report so influential that its proprietor, Matt Drudge, was
thought to be in position to determine the fall election's results.
Jonathan Martin and Ben Smith of Politico wrote that he had "an
uncanny ability to drive the national conversation" and quoted
Mitt Romney's press secretary saying that Drudge "serves as an
assignment editor for the national press corps." In a piece titled
"How Matt Drudge Rules the (Political) World,"
Washingtonpost.com reporter Chris Cillizza wrote that Drudge
and his site "sit at the junction of politics and journalism in the
modern media age." Cillizza pointed to both the Politico story
and the 2006 book by John F. Harris and Mark Halperin, The
Way To Win: Taking the White House in 2008, which anointed
Drudge as "the single most influential purveyor of information
about American politics." Harris and Halperin also credited
Drudge as a major reason for John Kerry's2004 defeat.
By the fall, Drudge had lost it, the press surmised. "Does Matt
Drudge, an unabashed conservative, still have huge clout in
shaping the media's coverage?" the Washington Post's Howard
Kurtz asked on Sept. 18. "Or is his influence overstated by those
seeking a simple explanation for why MSM types do what they
do?" Kurtz cited TPM's Greg Sargent, who had just chronicled
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
the decline of Drudge's influence over cable news. By late
October, Media Matters' Eric Boehlert was calling the Drudge
Report "unplugged down the stretch." Cillizza expanded on
Boehlert's theme in his blog on Oct. 30, quoting a series of
wishful headlines on the Drudge Report hinting at a possible
upset of Barack Obama by John McCain.
This isn't the first Drudge collapse to be recorded by the press.
The media gravediggers have been sharpening their spades for
him ever since he broke onto the national media scene in 1998
by previewing the Monica Lewinsky story Newsweek was
reporting. In December 1999, New York Times columnist Frank
Rich declared Drudge's demise as he left his weekly Fox News
Channel show, noting that Drudge's Web site had dropped from
the 228th most popular to the 636th. Drudge's "brief reign as
national press mascot" was over, Rich asserted.
Not to take anything away from Drudge, but he was never as
important as his promoters made him out to be. Time
embarrassed itself by calling him one the world's 100 most
influential people in 2006! He's recorded ups and downs, hits
and misses, scoops and errors, but he's never approached the
irrelevance his detractors would wish upon him.
That Drudge touted a dubious McCain comeback or that his
influence over cable may have waned misses the fact that 12
years after its founding, no greater media punch can be found in
a smaller Web package than the Drudge Report, reportedly just a
two-person operation. According to comScore Media Metrix, the
Drudge Report's number of unique visitors rose 70 percent from
September 2007 to September 2008, impressive even in a year
that most Web sites covering the campaign have attracted
plumper audiences.
What's most remarkable about the Drudge Report after all these
years is how efficient and useful it remains in the age of
podcasts, Web video, RSS feeds, animations, interactive charts,
interactive maps, slide shows, Digg buttons, Facebook widgets,
comment pages, change-text-size buttons, print options, and all
the rest. Drudge's idea of sexing up his one-page-fits-all-sizes
site is adding a plain-wrap version for mobile devices. Maybe
the Drudge Report derives its efficiency and usefulness from its
lack of podcasts, Web video, RSS feeds, animations, interactive
charts, interactive maps, slideshows, Digg buttons, Facebook
widgets, comment pages, change-text-size buttons, and print
options!
If you could access only one home page for breaking news and
chose Washingtonpost.com or CNN.com over the Drudge
Report, you'd be a blockhead. His newswire-meets-tabloid sense
of story—hysterical and playful at the same time—links to both
what you need to know and what you want to know, and he
updates more frequently than conventional media sites do. Sure,
Drudge breaks stories of his own now and again, but that's not
his big draw. "The dirty little secret about Drudge," Tom
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Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism,
told the Los Angeles Times, "is that he's a gateway for
conventional journalism."
"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.)
It's astonishing that this late into the Web era no major media
site has followed Drudge's lead and established a news fix with
attitude that points to great headlines on the rest of the Web. The
site is so simple that anybody could do it—but nobody has for
very long, or at least not successfully. Newser tries to deliver a
free-range news feed, but it's so hopelessly overloaded with
technology, user options, and typography that you just want to
click away when you land there. Plus, its "grid" design gives no
indication of what's most important or most interesting: You
might as well visit the more Drudge-esque Google News.
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 word Drudge in the
subject head of an e-mail message, and send it to
slate.pressbox@gmail.com.
Drudge has his critics, and he deserves them. For starters, here's
FiveThirtyEight's recent takedown on Drudge's use of polls and
EW.com's Josh Wolk on the Chris Rock "Oscar" blowup. He
also fell for the "Attacked and Mutilated" McCain-volunteer
hoax (but give him credit for correcting the record). He made
entirely too big a deal about the mysterious John Kerry affair
that wasn't and got overexcited about the "clues" of an ObamaBayh ticket.
Although he hates the left, as Philip Weiss reported in New York
magazine in the summer of 2007, he's not the right-wing attack
machine that some think he is. "Republicans can't count on
Drudge. He praises Rosie O'Donnell and Michael Moore for
their independence and fight, and seems to despise Giuliani and
McCain," Weiss wrote. Drudge's brand of iconoclasm is so
elastic that he found a way to accept the Hillary Clinton camp's
advances even before the primaries, peppering his page with
positive news about her campaign. Such resourcefulness will
serve him well in the Obama administration.
Drudge endures, while imitators and newly minted Web stars
fade, for a variety of reasons. He works incredibly hard. He
cares about his site. He appears to have no interest in working
for somebody else, and his entrepreneurial vigor makes the site
come alive. And also because he appreciates something about
readers they might not even know themselves: They want an
information site that would rather err on the side of recklessness
once in a while than be right all the time.
******
When Slate launched in the summer of 1996, Editor Michael
Kinsley tried to hire Drudge. He politely declined. I reviewed
Drudge Manifesto for the Wall Street Journal in 2000, where I
called for "More Drudgism! … But maybe a little less Drudge."
Instead, we've gotten more of both. In 1998, following the debut
of the Lewinsky-Clinton scandal, I wrote a feature for the New
York Times Magazine about Drudgephobia in the press. I think it
holds up. Let me know what you think at
slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name in
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
sidebar
Return to article
"A Man and His Manifesto," by Jack Shafer
Reprinted from the Wall Street Journal, Oct. 24, 2000
Drudge Manifesto
New American Library, 247 pages, $22.95
WHEN MATT DRUDGE broke the news that Monica Lewinsky
had paid scores of service calls on the White House, the
establishment seemed to be more outraged about the story's
venue—an amateurish Web site—than about its substance.
Even when Mr. Drudge's Jan. 17, 1998, scoop turned out to be
100% true, reporters, pundits, think-tank shills and ethical
watchdogs savaged him as a merchant of yellow journalism and
his medium, the mercury-quick Internet, as an enemy of the
truth. By year's end, one TV news newcomer with even less
journalism experience than Mr. Drudge—President Clinton's
former bootblack, George Stephanopoulos—was spanking him
for the "lowering of standards of what is acceptable political
discourse."
Blaming the lowering of standards on Matt Drudge rather than
Bill Clinton seems an outrageous matter of shooting the
messenger. But the administration and its factotums never really
feared Matt Drudge as much as they did Drudgism—the specter
of uncontrollable voices freely discussing the affairs of state.
Any political parley outside the reach of its command-andcontrol apparatus scares the bejesus out of Washington, whether
it is on the Internet, through the initiative process (against which
the Washington Post's David Broder has written an entire book)
or over the vox populi of talk radio.
What made Mr. Drudge so dangerous to the politico-journalistic
complex was his rejection of Washington's established rules of
conduct. Here was a reporter who had little interest in writing
52/82
"beat sweetners" about his subjects for future access to info
tidbits; who wasn't above "stealing" a story that he thought other
journalists were sitting on; who believed in unvarnished
partisanship; who didn't think he needed years, or even minutes,
of seasoning in the provinces before taking on the U.S.
president; who relished throwing dead cats into Democratic
temples but wasn't above torturing Republican kittens; and who
was more interested in being first than being absolutely accurate.
with direct access to wire services, as well as an e-mail list to
alert the faithful to breaking stories. For these reasons, the
Drudge Report remains the political news portal of choice
among my set, which includes commies, conservatives,
libertarians, liberals and even folks on the middle of the wing.
Mr. Drudge attempts to chronicle his pioneering Internet life and
times in "Drudge Manifesto." But I can't really recommend. His
collection. Of sentence fragments. To anybody seeking an
intelligible account of. How Drudge. Gave American journalism.
A much-needed kick in the tuchas. Besides Mr. Drudge's
sentence-fragment tic, he
RunsWordsTogetherForDramaticEffect as if under the spell of
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, making readers struggle to follow his
tale.
While we're all titillated by the "exclusives" that decorate the
Drudge Report—"SECRET WHITE HOUSE VIDEO SHOWS
CLINTON WITH OTHER INTERN!"—we know from
experience not to believe them until more credible outlets
corroborate. Although Mr. Drudge dons the hairshirt for his
biggest goof—he reported that another Clinton bootblack,
Sidney Blumenthal, beat his wife, and he still faces a libel suit
for doing so—he demands ethical equivalence with other media
entities. Didn't NBC mistakenly identify Richard Jewell as the
Atlanta bomber? Didn't ABC News prematurely report Bob
Hope's death? And, besides, Mr. Drudge says, I retracted the
Blumenthal story within 12 hours.
The real pity, though, is that Mr. Drudge and his credited ghost,
Julia Phillips ("You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again"),
neglect to milk the Internet badboy's saga for all it's worth:
Imagine a plot line mixing the Horatio Alger myth and the
hijinks of "The Front Page" with the vigilance of "All the
President's Men" and the hilarity of "Scoop" and you can sense
the possibilities.
By insisting that readers acknowledge his scoops without
recording his mistakes—that Clinton's distinguishing mark was
an eagle tattoo; that Bill "might" have fathered a love child with
a Little Rock prostitute—"Drudge Manifesto" begins to
resemble the season-highlights film of a cellar-dwelling NFL
team. Kick-offs returned for touchdowns! Heroic goal-line
stands! But no mention that the team went 5-11 for the season.
A born loser and congenital loner, Mr. Drudge barely finished
high school in the Washington suburb of Takoma Park before
gravitating to Los Angeles in the early '90s. There he got a job in
the CBS Studios gift shop and an apartment in the divey
Hollywood and Vine area. For reasons apparently unknown even
to his autobiographer, he started snooping in trash cans for
entertainment gossip. Papa Drudge bought him a computer, and
he got connected to the Internet.
On the long shot that Mr. Drudge's accuracy problem is a
correctable vice and not a congenital disability, here's hoping
that he makes the best of his six-year apprenticeship and
continues his wild experiment, inspiring scrappy outsiders to
make their voices heard. More Drudgism! I say. But maybe a
little less Drudge.
What did the loser have to lose? With a cunning born of
desperation, the sort known to every punk rocker ever to find an
audience by banging out three energetic chords, Mr. Drudge
embraced the Do It Yourself ethic and homesteaded a space on
the Internet. Almost overnight, he began to fill the ether with
raw and gossipy journalism, some of which helped stagger a
president.
What Mr. Drudge understood about the Internet from the getgo—and many media properties have yet to absorb—was that
not every member of its audience wanted to read a repurposed
daily paper or a 24-hour news channel masquerading as a Web
site. They wanted a "news portal" that offered the feral variety of
the Web, not the world according to AOL Time Warner or
CBS/Viacom/Paramount.
The Drudge homepage still includes a menu of hot political
stories and links to goofball articles and columnists collected
from thousands of sites. Among his innovations was a homepage
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
recycled
"This Is Nicolas Sarkozy. Is Sarah Palin
Available?"
How world leaders make phone calls.
By Daniel Engber
Monday, November 10, 2008, at 2:57 PM ET
Sarah Palin was on the receiving end of a prank call last week
when a Canadian DJ pretending to be the president of France
managed to get through to the governor directly. In 2006,
Daniel Engber explained how world leaders actually make
phone calls. The article is reprinted below.
(Click here for an "Explainer" on why some world leaders still
send telegrams.)
53/82
President Bush called the prime minister of Denmark this week
to offer moral support as anti-Danish riots continued throughout
the world. Last week, he called to congratulate Evo Morales, the
newly elected president of Bolivia. The week before that, Bush
had the new prime minister of Canada on the horn. How does the
president call up other world leaders?
Bonus Explainer: For calls to Russia, there's always the famous
"red phone." President Kennedy first suggested "the hotline"
after the Cuban Missile Crisis. A direct teletype link to Moscow
was set up in 1963. The hotline didn't include a true telephone
until the early 1970s, and even then communications were
almost always sent in written form.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
He has his people call their people. White House operators are
known for being able to get hold of just about anyone. If Bush
needs to talk to Tony Blair, his situation room operators get in
touch with the staff at 10 Downing Street. They set up a time to
chat and patch through the call when that time comes.
White House operators have special phone numbers for some
world leaders. They might use the cell-phone number of a
leader's aide in one place, and call the number for a situation
room in another. In some cases, they could go through the main
switchboards like everybody else.
Some leader-to-leader calls apparently do arrive via the listed
phone numbers. On Jan. 27, Jacques Chirac received a call from
a radio DJ in Quebec who had convinced the French operators
that he was Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. According
to the DJ, he called Chirac's office and was told that the
president would call him back. Chirac did so half an hour later.
World leaders have to put up with prank calls all the time. As a
general practice, one leader's staff members will arrange to call
back the staff members of another. (If someone claiming to be
from the White House called Buckingham Palace, for example,
the queen's staff could call the White House back to confirm.)
This verification process doesn't always work. In 2003, a pair of
radio DJs in Miami had a woman with a Cuban accent call for
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. She claimed she was one of
Fidel Castro's operators, and that Castro was at a secret location
where he couldn't be called back. It took about 10 tries to get
through, but the DJs finally weaseled a direct number out of a
Venezuelan officer. (A few months later they successfully called
Castro, posing as Chavez.)
In 1990, then-President George Bush returned a phone call to a
man posing as the president of Iran. "We were suspicious and
began checking," said White House spokesman Marlin
Fitzwater, "but, ultimately, the president needed to make the call
as part of the check."
Sometimes a legitimate call from a world leader doesn't go
through. Following the Soviet coup in 1991, newspapers
reported that President Bush made at least two attempts to check
in with Mikhail Gorbachev by phone. The operator at the
Kremlin told the one at the White House that Gorby wasn't
available.
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
recycled
Do World Leaders Still Use Telegrams?
Don't they have e-mail like the rest of us?
By Brendan I. Koerner
Monday, November 10, 2008, at 2:57 PM ET
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Russian President Dmitry
Medvedev were among those who sent telegrams to Barack
Obama last week upon his election as president of the United
States. In 2004, Brendan I. Koerner explained why world
leaders still send telegrams to one another. The article is
reprinted below.
(Click here for an "Explainer" on how world leaders reach each
other by telephone.)
The New York Times reports that German Chancellor Gerhard
Schröder sent President Bush a congratulatory telegram on
Wednesday, urging cooperation on issues ranging from security
to climate change. Do politicians and diplomats really still send
telegrams?
Archaic as it may seem, Schröder actually sent a telegram. It's
standard practice when heads of state exchange ceremonial
notes, whether to congratulate one another on political victories,
mark national holidays, or offer condolences. The telegram
remains the preferred means of communication partly because of
tradition—Schröder, of course, could have sent a letter via
FedEx instead, but that's not the way it's been done in the
modern era. But a telegram is also practical for ceremonial
purposes: An e-mail or fax doesn't have the same elegance, nor
are they quite as suitable for framing.
Rank-and-file diplomats, on the other hand, are using telegrams
less and less nowadays. American embassies and consulates still
occasionally use telegrams—"cables" in diplo-speak—to send
memos to one another or back to State Department headquarters
in Washington, D.C. They stick with cables when they want a
paper trail, when Internet access is lackluster, or when they want
to ensure confidentiality. (Click here for a lengthy 1998 memo
on telegram preparation, including guidelines on how to produce
confidential telegrams.) But the practice has tailed off as the
54/82
foreign service has become more adept at e-mail security. The
State Department estimates that its far-flung employees send 66
million official e-mails annually, and just 1 million cables. And
the department has plans to phase out cables entirely by the end
of 2006.
As recently as the early 1990s, the telegram was the primary
means by which American diplomats relayed sensitive
information from distant locales. This past June, for example, a
secret 1989 telegram from a Beijing-based consular officer,
James Huskey, was declassified. It had been the most detailed
account Washington received regarding the atrocities at
Tiananmen Square and included Huskey's personal account of
seeing upward of 300 bodies that had been crushed by tanks.
If you'd like to follow Chancellor Schröder's lead and send your
own congratulatory telegram to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., you
can attempt to do so using Western Union's online telegram
service. But it'll cost you $14.99, and there's no guarantee the
deliveryman will pass muster at the White House gates.
Update: Western Union suspended its 150-year-old telegram
service in January of 2006.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Chester Crocker of Georgetown University,
Terry Ann Knopf at Tufts University, and Kay Khandpur for
asking the question.
slate v
Dear Prudence: Hermit Husband
A daily video from Slate V
Monday, November 10, 2008, at 11:02 AM ET
sports nut
Curriculum Vitale
How to polish your pro-basketball résumé.
By Elliot Hannon
Thursday, November 13, 2008, at 6:43 AM ET
One of the perks of being a pro athlete, you would think, is that
you don't have to maintain a résumé. I'm guessing that Kobe
Bryant has never suffered the indignity of typing up an "Honors
& Awards" section or had to remember to put the good paper in
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
the laser printer before running off a dozen copies of his CV. But
not every athlete is Kobe Bryant. Let's assume you're a
ballplayer on the fringes—you graduated from a college that's
better known for honing academic credentials than frontcourt
fundamentals, or maybe you didn't play college basketball at all.
I've got bad news for you, friend: You're going to have to update
that résumé—and quick.
As the NBA season gets under way and the league pulls back the
curtain for its brightest stars, a lot of lesser-lights get pink slips.
Many of these players look to take their game overseas, where
an online résumé is a requirement if you want to land an oncourt job. While the NBA is a self-contained circuit, the
European leagues and those beyond are sprawling, often loosely
connected organizations. Out on the pro-basketball frontier,
teams with wildly disparate budgets search for talent across
dozens of countries. It makes sense, then, that basketball's talent
marketplace has evolved into something like a combination of
Monster.com and Match.com, with a healthy dose of Craigsliststyle unruliness.
It doesn't matter whether you're a 15-year-old Bulgarian looking
for a team or an American former first-round NBA draft pick—
it's time to start social networking. The first step is to get an
agent. If you're not a college stud who caught the gaze of a
European superagent, there are plenty of workaday
representatives to choose from. Many agencies specialize in a
certain type of player: Global Sports Plaza, for example, touts
itself as "the first Macedonian-American based" agency. It's the
agent's job not only to whisper in the ear of potential employers
but also to jam their inboxes with your credentials.
One reason for the proliferation of the online résumé is speed.
Coaches and general managers are under pressure to make
decisions fast, and these tight deadlines mean that expediency—
can you hop on the train from Brussels to Berlin in an hour?—
can be as important as talent. John Patrick, the head coach and
general manager of BG 74 Göttingen, a team in Germany's top
league, maintains a database of players he's monitoring and also
"spot checks" the 10 to 20 unsolicited player résumés he gets in
his inbox daily. If Patrick is sufficiently interested, he'll double
back to check stats, watch game tape, make phone calls to past
coaches, and (depending on time and resources) go to see the
player in person.
While the hoops CV serves more as a trailer than the full picture,
it's still important to make yourself stand out in a sea of 7footers. If you're at the top of the basketball matchmaking pool,
then your Web presence is most likely a reminder that you are
alive, don't weigh 300 pounds, and do, in fact, still play
basketball. Former NBA-er Lamond Murray's CV, for instance,
stresses that he "is still only 34 years old, injury free, and in
excellent shape."
55/82
Those of us who aren't former first-round picks need to craft a
fuller picture. While a glamorous college pedigree and gaudy
stats may get you a second look, there are other variables, like
the ability to cope with a new culture, that are just as crucial
when making the leap overseas. It's just as important to "explain
who you are," Patrick says. "Explain your successes on and off
the court."
If you're looking for a model, you could do worse than copying
off Gabriel Hughes, an out-of-work center from Cal-Berkeley
who's now represented by the Dutch agency Court Side. Along
with his height, weight, and stats, Hughes' résumé includes a link
to a personal highlight reel—team execs look at online video to
uncover non-numerical details like gimpy knees, a poor attitude,
or third-rate competition—as well as a 300-word personal
statement that recaps his professional highs and lows. "Big men
take longer to develop and Gabriel Hughes is a prime example of
this axiom," the promotional copy begins. More rationalizations
quickly follow: "He got a 6-figure contract last season to play for
Al-Wasl in Saudi Arabia. While the money was good, Hughes
had his season shortened by injury (and the one foreigner on the
court rule did not help his stats as he had to share playing time
with the other American on the team)." After getting the
negatives out of the way, Hughes' CV focuses on the bright
spots: "For a 7-footer, Gabe runs the floor well, has leaping
ability, good hands and doesn't mind contact. He also has mental
toughness, having survived some of the roughest/dirtiest play.
Hughes has always been able to rebound, having led the leagues
in Japan and Ireland in rebounding." And in conclusion: "He
plays hard and hustles. A family man, he has an excellent
attitude on and off the court."
John Ebeling, an agent with the Megasport agency in Italy, says
that Hughes' realistic, explanatory CV is far preferable to one
that overhypes your game. James White's online résumé, for
example—"Superhuman athleticism and leaping ability. Most
athletic player in college basketball while playing for Cincinnati.
… Dunked for the first time as a 12-year old"—might come off
as a bit over-the-top. Rather than making yourself sound like a
human highlight reel, Ebeling prefers technical information:
plays multiple positions and excels in an up-tempo offense, not
capable of jumping over small children.
Along with the good, Ebeling suggests including a sliver of the
not so good. It's a dreaded question for job applicants: What are
your weaknesses? This doesn't mean "going off the deep end
with actual negatives," he says. If you are an atrocious defensive
player, keep a lid on it. Instead, pick a positive part of your game
and say you're going to improve it. Alexander Lutter provides a
textbook case of snatching self-congratulation from the jaws of
self-deprecation: "[Lutter] is his own harshest critic and despite
his ability to easily make defences—and gravity—seem
irrelevant it is difficult to find a harder working player."
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
One thing that the basketball-résumé writer needn't worry about
is spelling. While the typical job applicant seeks to avoid having
his CV sound like 99-cent Viagra spam, this is nothing to fret
about in the hoops world. Sure, English is the lingua franca of
the basketball world, but most agencies that represent players
abroad aren't overloaded with fluent speakers. So don't fret if
your representative posts this sort of gobbledygook: "[Charles
Gaines'] appearance, his forcefulness, his generosity in defensive
assistance, his intimidation and his consistance makes him a
determinant player, able to change by himself the
dynamic of a team." Just as long as they spell your
name right, you're probably OK.
If you don't trust an agent even to get that much
right, you can always make your own résumé. For
the player going it alone, the Web site Eurobasket
offers a "Make-It-Pro" service. According to
Eurobasket, not playing pro basketball may be the
biggest mistake of your life: "If you feel that you
are a quality player and you are able to contribute
to a professional team overseas, please do not
miss your opportunity." For just $39.99 for three
months (or $105.99 for a full year), Eurobasket will
list your online profile alongside those of 120,000
other players and coaches. While there are other
companies that help players spread an online
résumé, Eurobasket has the advantage of listing all
of its free agents together, giving the impression
that you're a real player, not just a rec-league
bruiser.
As an aspiring professional hoops player myself—
who isn't, really?—40 bucks seems like a small price to
pay for a shot at fulfilling a lifelong dream. The first step of
writing my basketball profile: taking the résumé I used to land
my current job and deleting everything except my name and
contact info. Step 2: adding my date of birth, nationality, height,
and a position. (Remember, this needs to look professional: I'm
6-foot-3, so I'm calling myself a guard.) Next, some florid prose:
"A team oriented player, Hannon's interior passing often makes
big men look better than they actually are and his jump shot
spreads defenses and frees up teammates." And finally a bit of
self-criticism: "Needs to improve inbounding." You can look at
the final product here.
I grab my credit card, submit the résumé to Eurobasket, and I'm
officially a free agent. But not for long. A short while later, I get
an e-mail from Marek Wojtera, manager of the site. "I am really
confused about adding your record to the database," he writes.
"The problem is that Make-It-Pro service is aimed at the players
who have real chance to make it to professional basketball."
Ouch. And it gets worse: "If I were the coach of a basketball
club, I would not consider you as the candidate to join their pro
roster. You may have extremely impressive stats, but if they are
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for playing at the local team, which is not recognized anywhere,
you have really 0% chance to be called for any try-out. ... I do
not see any real chance for you to make it to pro basketball and I
believe it will be only wasting your money to try it."
Despite that e-mail, I'm not ready to quit. Did Rudy quit when
everyone told him he wasn't good enough to play football at
Notre Dame? Did Michael Jordan quit after being cut from his
high-school basketball team? I don't think so. So, if any general
managers are reading this, don't be discouraged by Marek
Wojtera. I may not be good enough for Eurobasket, but I'm
always ready to hop on the train from Brussels to Berlin—just as
soon as I get home from work.
sidebar
Return to article
My Basketball Résumé
Hannon, Elliot
Elliotprohoops@gmail.com
12/24/78
6-foot-3, 200 lbs
Position: 2/3
USA
Bio:
Elliot is an excellent perimeter shooter, but isn't afraid to take on
a much much smaller defender on the post. He has a knack for
finding space and scoring on the break and excels at shooting the
15-18 foot jumper off the dribble or coming off a screen. A team
oriented player, Hannon's interior passing often makes big men
look better than they actually are and his jump shot spreads
defenses and frees up teammates. Selfless on both ends of the
court, as well as cool under pressure, any good coach would
want him in the game at the foul line with the game on the line.
At this point, Hannon is a student of the game and will literally
be like having another coach on the floor. Occasionally
compared to Jimmy Chitwood on the court and Gene Wilder off
it. Needs to improve inbounding.
Stats:
2008-2009: YoCo's Hoopsters (JCC): games 22.7 pts., 6.7 rebs.,
2.1 asts.
2007-2008: YoCo's Hoopsters (JCC): games 24.2 pts., 6.3 rebs.,
3.2 asts.
Awards/Achievements:
TBD
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
sports nut
Rasheed Wallace Is a Toaster
Presenting the NBA's Periodic Table of Style.
By FreeDarko
Tuesday, November 11, 2008, at 10:49 AM ET
FreeDarko is the Web's leading destination for the obsessive,
overliterate, free-thinking NBA fan. The basketball collective's
new print extravaganza, The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball
Almanac, mines all of FreeDarko's obsessions. There are
incisive profiles of players, from LeBron James to Leandro
Barbosa; unique statistics (the dunk-to-layup ratio among NBA
big men); and—perhaps the book's most startling innovation—
the Periodic Table of Style. Below, Nathaniel Friedman explains
the table's genesis and meaning. Once you've read his
introduction, take in a slide-show essay featuring Style Guide
depictions of Gilbert Arenas and Rasheed Wallace as well as
excerpts from the Arenas and Wallace essays in The
Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac. (Read more book
excerpts here and buy the book from Amazon.)
High-school coaches try to drill into us that basketball is a game
of X's and O's, but anyone who's watched or played the game
knows that's not true. Driving to the hoop, finding your man in
traffic, making a wide-open three—these aren't straightforward
propositions. Everything you do on the basketball court requires
some level of problem-solving, something each player does in
his own way, based on his strengths, weaknesses, and even his
personality.
With this in mind, FreeDarko created the Style Guide. The Style
Guide exists at the nexus of generic description and high-def
motion capture, representing players' games as a composite of
descriptive text and symbols—what we call the Periodic Table
of Style. Kobe Bryant, maneuvering between defenders, isn't just
driving toward the basket; he's exemplifying the practice of
"lock and key." Carmelo Anthony doesn't display excellent
footwork; he dances the salsa, takes baby steps, and bounds like
a deer.
This is the vast vocabulary of style, and how each player pieces
these components together to make the court their own is, in
effect, who they are. NBA players have bodies, minds, and
histories that factor into everything they do on the court. But the
basic building blocks of style, basketball's instantaneous
language, is certainly within our reach as students of the game.
All is contained in the Periodic Table of Style, and from there,
all men will be spoken for.
At this point, the FreeDarko Style Guide can be applied only in
retrospect, through a second-by-second breakdown of film.
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Hopefully, though, someday networks the world over will build
computers that map out replays in these terms and maybe even
provide scripts to radio broadcasters. It may sound like a return
to Morse Code or a government frequency devoted to UFO
secrets, but to NBA enthusiasts, "sand dollar ... rocket ... sea gull
... mystery novel ... drain" will be the future of communication.
Click here for a slide-show essay on FreeDarko's Periodic
Table of Style.
.
supreme court dispatches
Everything Vibrates
The Supreme Court grapples with the primordial ooze of the Summum case.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Wednesday, November 12, 2008, at 7:40 PM ET
Let's stipulate: Summum is weird. First off, having been founded
in 1975, it violates my own base-line spiritual rule: "Never
believe in any faith younger than you are." With its pyramids,
and mummification, and nectars, and hairless blue aliens,
Summum is an existential stew of transcendental Gnosticism and
particle physics: Isaac Luria meets Star Trek Voyager. But, as
my husband would be quick to point out, yours truly has been
known to fly into a panic when a meat fork touches her milk
sink, shrieking and driving the offending utensil deep into the
dirt of the kitchen avocado plant and then waiting the ritual
interval until its kosherness is mystically restored. All of which
merely illuminates the First Aphorism of Religion Cases: Only
the religious convictions of other people are weird. Yours are
perfectly rational.
Mormons settled the town of Pleasant Grove City, Utah, in 1850.
Since 1971, the town's "Pioneer Park" has featured the usual
assortment of gardens, trees, and other historical relics, which sit
alongside a massive permanent monument to the Ten
Commandments—one of many such monuments donated by the
Fraternal Order of Eagles (working to reduce juvenile
delinquency) and Cecil B. DeMille (working to promote his
Charlton Heston movie The Ten Commandments). In 2003,
Summum's founder, Summum "Corky" Ra, requested
permission to donate a monument to the park celebrating the
Seven Aphorisms upon which their beliefs are based. (The
Seven Aphorisms are, in brief: the principles of psychokinesis,
correspondence, vibration, opposition, rhythm, cause and effect,
and gender.) Summum holds that these aphorisms were revealed
to Moses at Mount Sinai, but he demurred because his people
were not yet ready for them. The Decalogue was the rewrite.
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
The Pleasant Grove City Council denied Summum's request to
erect a monument. Summum sued, alleging that their free speech
rights had been violated because the city could not display the
Ten Commandments while denying the Seven Aphorisms. They
lost in federal district court, prevailed before a three-judge panel
of the 10th Circuit, and then blew the minds of the entire 10th
Circuit, which ultimately declined to hear the case en banc. The
city appealed. This brings me to the Second Aphorism of
Religion Cases: They invariably represent the most forcefully
argued, passionately defended constitutional gibberish ever
produced in the federal courts. Whether Summum was denied a
space in the park because Mormons think Summum is weird or
whether there is some kind of equal right of access for all
religious groups to erect monuments in public spaces is a
question that lies at the murky interstices of doctrine dealing
with religion, speech, government speech, and the law about the
uses of public forums. It's an unprecedented mess or, as Justice
Anthony Kennedy puts it late in the morning, "a tyranny of
labels."
Summum isn't before the court as a religion case. It was brought
as a free speech case, and, as Jay Sekulow of the American
Center for Law and Justice learns about three minutes into oral
argument this morning, if he wins this case as a result of the
court's free speech jurisprudence, he will be back in five years to
lose it under the court's religion doctrine. The more zealously the
city claims ownership of its Ten Commandments monument, the
more it looks to be promoting religion in violation of the
Constitution's Establishment Clause.
Chief Justice John Roberts puts it to him this way: "You're really
just picking your poison. The more you say that the monument is
'government speech' to get out of the Free Speech Clause, the
more you're walking into a trap under the Establishment Clause.
… What is the government doing supporting the Ten
Commandments?"
Sekulow replies that the display is 100 percent Establishment
Clause kosher in light of the Supreme Court's ruling in a 2005
Ten Commandments case, which upheld a Texas display of them
(on the same day it struck down a rather similar display in
Kentucky). Justice Stephen Breyer was the deciding vote in each
of those cases, which—read together—stand for the current
Third Aphorism of Religion Cases: Government establishment of
religion is only impermissible when it freaks out Justice Stephen
Breyer.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg suggests that the difference
between the Ten Commandments display in Utah and the
permissible one in Texas is that the Texas monument had a "40year history, and nobody seemed troubled by it." Sekulow retorts
that the Utah display has a 36-year history, at which point
Justice Antonin Scalia chuckles, "I think 38 years is the cutoff."
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Sekulow is arguing that the city's display of the Ten
Commandments needs to be analyzed under "government
speech" doctrine and not as a debate about the park as a public
forum. Once you have entered the domain of government
speech, the state may pick and choose among messages without
running afoul of the First Amendment. The idea is that
governments get to speak their own values, even if they can't
favor anyone else's. And Sekulow says a donated monument
becomes government speech the very moment the government
assumes control of it.
Justice John Paul Stevens wonders whether just calling
something "government speech" means you can reject any one
monument over another because you dislike its message. Justice
David Souter says if that is the case, the city's decision about
whether or not to accept control of a monument on the basis of
its message is "control with a vengeance."
Of all the Summum aphorisms, my favorite is probably
"everything vibrates." Whoever wrote that had yet to meet
Justice Clarence Thomas, who spends this morning, as he does
every morning of oral argument, in perfect, motionless repose.
The Bush administration is in this case on the side of Pleasant
Grove City. Stevens asks Deputy Solicitor General Daryl
Joseffer whether the government, when it erected the Vietnam
memorial, could have decided "not to put up the names of any
homosexual soldiers." Yes, says Joseffer: "When the
government is speaking, it can choose who to memorialize and
who not to."
Breyer responds that all this law is making him crazy: "The
problem I have is that we seem to be applying these
subcategories in a very absolute way." Thus spake the vote-oneway, vote-the-other-way justice of the last two Ten
Commandment cases. Now he is balking at "artificial kinds of
conceptual framework." Thus, the Fourth Aphorism for Religion
Cases: Doctrine is not your friend. Those six-part tests for
limited public forums vs. designated public forums vs. displays
of religious items on public grounds sometimes create more
problems than they solve.
Justice Samuel Alito observes that there is a difference between
free speech, in the classic sense of protests, leafleting, and
speech-making, and hauling around massive granite monuments,
then demanding public-forum analysis be applied to "the
Washington Monument or the Jefferson Memorial." Joseffer
says that when the government is "acting as curator," it can
engage in viewpoint discrimination. In other words, it can
choose the speech. "You can't run a museum if you have to
accept everything, right?" says Scalia.
Pamela Harris has 30 minutes to represent Summum, and
Roberts hits her with the hypos: "You have a Statue of Liberty;
do we have to have a statue of despotism? Do we have to put
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
any president who wants to be on Mount Rushmore?" Harris
replies that if a government wants to claim its displays represent
"government speech," then it needs to "adopt" or "convert" the
privately donated monument into its own message. Scalia
wonders why the government isn't adopting the monuments
merely by taking ownership. Souter thinks that if the dispute
turns on formal government "adoption" of a monument, it's a
"silly exercise in formality." Harris responds that it's not just
formality. Pleasant Grove refuses to endorse the message of the
Ten Commandments as its own precisely because it wants to
"have it both ways," sidestepping Establishment Clause
concerns, on the one hand, and eluding Free Speech problems on
the other. Then she and Scalia do several laps around the
speedway over what a formal "adoption" of a privately donated
monument would even look like.
Even Ginsburg balks at Harris' assumption that monuments and
speeches are identical for First Amendment purposes: "From
time immemorial," Ginsburg says, "public parks have been
places where people can speak their minds. But I don't know of
any tradition that says people can come to the park with
monuments and just put them up." Even the most doctrineloving justices seem to be bothered by the practical problem of
city parks becoming cluttered with hate monuments, weird stuff,
and, eventually, rusted-out cars. But the problems on the other
side are equally glaring. Cities should not be allowed to exclude
unpopular groups based only on the content of their message.
The state should not be able to keep gay soldiers' names off the
Vietnam Memorial. Just ask Moses if it stopped being speech
just because it was carved in stone.
And thus we arrive at the Fifth (and final) Aphorism for Religion
Cases: Pulling a crystalline, cogent rule out of the murk of the
court's First Amendment, public forum, and Establishment
Clause doctrine is an act of creation too complicated for mere
mortals. In fact, after this morning's wild constitutional ride,
anyone searching for clear, cogent rules need look no further
than my favorite Summum aphorism: Everything vibrates.
technology
Seven More Things You Need for Your
Computer
Reader suggestions for software that you absolutely need to have.
By Farhad Manjoo
Thursday, November 13, 2008, at 2:51 PM ET
Last month, I disclosed the contents of my computer to Slate
readers: I went over the 18 programs and services that I use to
surf the Web, manage e-mail, make phone calls, jot down
reporting notes, and write articles.
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I also asked readers for their own computing tips. The response
was enormous. I got more than 100 e-mails—and dozens of
"Fray" comments—from people who thought I'd overlooked
certain apps or that I'd been using stuff that was hopelessly oldschool. I've been trying out many of your suggestions since, and
I've distilled them into this short list.
As always, if you've got any more suggestions, please send me
an e-mail or post to "The Fray" and let me know. (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.)
Digsby. For many years, I'd been using a program called Trillian
for all my instant-messaging needs. I loved that it connected to
several different IM services (you can chat with friends on AOL,
Yahoo, etc.) and that it had a slick, customizable interface. But
lots of readers told me to ditch Trillian in favor of either Pidgin
or Digsby. Each of these worked pretty much like Trillian, but
they've both got one extra feature—they connect to the Jabber
network, the same protocol that Google's chat service uses. That
means both programs let you chat to Gmailers, too. (You've got
to pay extra to get Trillian to do this.) Digsby is the winner
because it adds alerts from Twitter and Facebook, making it a
one-stop app for all-day procrastination.
AVG Anti-Virus. A few readers chided me for failing to
mention any anti-virus programs in my line-up. (Mac and Linux
users, you're exempt from this discussion.) The truth is, I hate
anti-virus apps, and I've never used them very diligently. Many
are resource-hungry (they slow down your PC and spin your
hard drive for hours on end), and they're always asking you to
update their virus lists, usually with some kind of pitch to get
you to shell out for a "Pro" version. I'm not suggesting anti-virus
apps are useless—I'm sure they've saved many machines. But in
my years of using Windows computers, I've never had a serious
infection, and my data is sufficiently well-backed-up that a
serious infection won't bring me down. (And as I said last
month, I do use an anti-spyware program, Spybot Search &
Destroy.)
Still, to please the scolds, I went out in search of a good antivirus app. AVG was the best I found: It doesn't seem to use
every bit of computing power to scan my machine, and it doesn't
constantly pressure me to buy an upgrade. (The basic version is
free.) I set it to analyze my computer when I'm asleep, and so
far, it hasn't worked my hard drive hard enough to wake me up.
VLC media player. I'd forgotten to add this great video app to
my list, and lots of readers reminded me of my omission. If you
download many videos in many different formats, you need
VLC. This fast, free player works on Mac, Windows, and Linux
machines and seems to handle just about every type of video file
you throw at it, even files that are slightly broken.
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
PeerGuardian 2. This app prevents Internet addresses that are
known to be harmful from connecting to your machine while
you're using peer-to-peer file-trading programs. It's hard to know
whether PeerGuardian is really keeping you safe from malware
(or perhaps from detection by Hollywood), but several perhaps
paranoid readers called it a must-have, and it works quietly
enough in the background that I see no harm in keeping it on.
Evernote. Many readers were puzzled by my note-taking
strategy—I keep a single text file and use it to store all of my
thoughts, to-do lists, and other urgent messages. Lots of people
told me to use Evernote instead. In fact, I've long been a fan of
this online service that promises to store everything you put in
it—pictures, text notes, Web pages, anything—forever. (Read
my review of Evernote here.) Its best feature is its ability to
extract text from photos: Imagine that you're attending a
conference and you meet a guy who works at Microsoft. To
remember him, just snap a picture with your cell-phone cam and
stick it into Evernote. In a few minutes' time, the software will
have crunched the picture, even converting your new friend's
conference name tag into searchable text. So when you search
Evernote for "Microsoft," you'll see the guy's photo and name
tag. I still find my text-file method easier for most of my notes,
but for remembering Web pages and things that I snap with my
iPhone on the street, I often rely on Evernote.
Foxit Reader. This Windows app opens PDF files quicker and
with fewer crashes than Adobe Reader. What's not to love?
MediaMonkey. Last month, I complained that I'd found few
good alternatives to iTunes. Apple's music program looks good
and is easy to use, but it's slow to load up, and it's constantly
bugging me to install slightly revised updates, a process that can
take 10 minutes or more. Many readers shared my frustration
with iTunes, and several told me that I'd have a ball with a
Windows program called MediaMonkey.
But after installing it, I can only give MediaMonkey a halfhearted recommendation. True, the app is packed with features
that are great for people who are obsessive about keeping their
MP3 collections under control. If many of your songs are
missing "metadata"—song or album names, release dates, etc.—
MediaMonkey can surely help you out. (It can extract tags from
Amazon and other online repositories, and it's got several search
options to let you see which songs are missing which tags.)
Trouble is, you'll need to look up an online how-to—here's one,
and here's another—to figure out how to use the software.
MediaMonkey's interface is neither pretty nor intuitive, and it
took me a while to understand how it was laying out my music
and how to get it to do the many great things readers promised.
Other warnings, if you're thinking about switching: The app can't
play any copy-protected songs or movies that you've purchased
through the iTunes store (which, to be sure, is Apple's and the
music industry's fault, not MediaMonkey's; consider buying your
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music from Amazon's DRM-free MP3 store). Also, some people
have reported trouble getting MediaMonkey to hook up to their
iPhones. But, hey, MediaMonkey is free (a slightly more
feature-packed Gold version sells for $20), and it installs
quickly, so give it a try. You might well find it better than
iTunes.
argues that if Obama can use the Web to spark the same wellorganized fervor for his policy goals as he did for his campaign,
"I think it's going to be one of the most powerful presidencies
we've seen since FDR, and maybe even more powerful. Even the
best presidents have never had a way to connect directly with
millions of Americans—Obama will have that."
Backup. How should you safeguard your precious data against
your computer's inevitable demise? You should back it up. But
how? In my last roundup, I didn't recommend any sort of backup
program. That's because I don't use one—while I'm careful about
saving my data, my strategies are kludgy, mainly involving
manually copying important files and folders to external drives. I
realize this is madness, and many readers offered better ways.
But I'm still searching for the perfect backup strategy. If you've
got a great backup tip, please let me know. I'll report back in a
later column.
That, anyway, is the dream. In reality, President Obama faces a
bunch of challenges in transitioning his Web network from a
campaign tool into a force for passing legislation. Campaign
finance rules likely prohibit him from running
My.BarackObama.com, his sprawling social network, out of the
White House. Instead, he'll need to build a new noncampaign
site and ask the country to join it. (It's unclear whether the site
will be hosted on the main White House domain—
Whitehouse.gov—or at some other dedicated address, like the
transition site Change.gov.) If he does so, tens of millions of
people would probably heed his call.
technology
You Are Now Friends With Barack
Obama
Will the White House Web site work as a social network?
By Farhad Manjoo
Monday, November 10, 2008, at 5:23 PM ET
Barack Obama ran the most technologically sophisticated
presidential campaign in history. In addition to siphoning
hundreds of millions of dollars from his online fans, Obama's
team recognized the Internet's capacity to attract and organize
volunteers across the country. His bloggy, YouTube-addled
supporters helped shape the larger media narrative surrounding
his bid; they overwhelmed social news sites like Digg and
Reddit, trumpeting McCain or Clinton missteps into
blogospherewide news. Most important, Obama relied on the
Web's social-networking capabilities to channel boundless
enthusiasm into effective campaign activity. His site encouraged
supporters to connect with one another to launch their own
voter-registration drives, phone banks, and door-to-door
canvassing operations—efforts that proved pivotal to Obama's
victory in the primaries and in last week's general election.
But the campaign's over. What will become of this new Web
network now that candidate Obama has become President
Obama?
Though no one in the Obama camp will discuss the specifics,
Democratic Web guru Joe Trippi and others believe that the
White House Web site will transform into a social network—a
kind of Facebook for citizens, a place where people can learn
about and work toward passing the president's agenda. Trippi
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
The key, of course, is what happens after everybody signs up—
we've all registered for social networks before and done nothing
more useful on them than SuperPoke! Obama's challenge is to
make his online presence exciting, to get users as fired up to pass
his tax or health care policies as they were about getting him to
the White House. This will be difficult; online communities are
fragile, tenuous associations, and Obama's Web coalition—
millions of people with various competing interests—could very
well splinter when tasked with working toward specific policy
goals. It's easy to make a viral video in support of a vague,
unobjectionable notion like "change." Will.i.am and Scarlett
Johansson might have a tougher time coming up with a catchy
ditty in support of expanding the mortgage interest tax credit.
During the campaign, Obama often discussed his plans to use the
Web to reconnect Americans to their government. For instance,
he wants to let people post comments on pending legislation.
He'll also put up detailed information about what the White
House is doing each day, as well as specific ways for Americans
to get involved: Call this congressman, help get the bill through
that committee, fight this lobbying group. Thomas Gensemer, a
managing partner at Blue State Digital—the political consulting
firm that helped build Obama's online campaign operations and
Change.gov—points out that these initiatives go far beyond what
you can do on President Bush's Web site. In addition to some
fascinating virtual tours, today's Whitehouse.gov offers the
opportunity to sign up for a weekly e-mail newsletter about the
administration's activities—and that's about the only interaction
you get with the president.
A more engaging site, Gensemer says, will help Obama cultivate
groups of "superactivists"—the tens of thousands of especially
motivated people who, during the campaign, took time off from
work and relocated to other states in order to volunteer full-time.
Let's imagine that Obama's ambitious health care plan runs into
trouble in Congress. The social network might help him identify
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the few hundred or few thousand health care activists in key
congressional districts who agree with his proposals. In the same
way that Facebook lets you plan a lavish birthday dinner for
yourself, the White House Web site would let activists hold
gatherings to lobby their legislators on Obama's behalf. "If a
congressman goes home and sees a town hall meeting with 1,000
people in their district, that matters," Gensemer says.
Is this a realistic scenario? "Congress is the great shock absorber
of American politics. Movements go there to die," says Micah
Sifry, co-founder of an annual technology and politics
conference called the Personal Democracy Forum. Organized
interests—the health care industry, say—wield influence in this
environment because they've got the money and the patience to
be there every day and keep pressing their agenda. At its best,
says Sifry, the social network will help Obama develop a
counterweight to those groups. "The White House has always
had the bully pulpit to go over the heads of Congress through the
mass media," he says. "What Obama now has is the ability to go
between the legs of members of Congress."
But that presumes that all of Obama's social-networking friends
will support his agenda—and what if that's not the case? What
happens when conservatives flock to the White House Web site
to post nasty comments opposing Obama's stem-cell policy or if
Sean Hannity urges his audience to use the site's tools to plan
gatherings protesting Obama's tax plan? Even Obama's
supporters are likely to disagree with him from time to time;
already, there are online petitions and Facebook groups calling
on him to skip over Larry Summers and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
for Cabinet positions. The opposition might be especially hairy
during periods of national emergency—if Obama decides to
launch military action, would the White House Web site fill up
with comments showing that the country is not fully behind
him?
During the campaign, we saw one vivid example of how Obama
might handle online protests of his policies—he'll let them go
on. In June, the senator announced that he had switched
positions on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. He
decided to vote for an updated version of the bill even though it
offered immunity to telecom companies that had worked with
the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program, a
measure that many of his supporters vehemently opposed.
Protestors immediately took to the campaign's site; a group
urging Obama to reject the bill swelled to more than 20,000
members, making it by far the site's largest. Obama didn't
change his mind on the eavesdropping bill. But neither did the
campaign take any steps to shut down the anti-FISA group, and
shortly before voting for the bill, Obama posted a lengthy note to
the group explaining why he'd voted for the bill, and his policy
staff answered hundreds of comments from the group explaining
the nuances of the senator's position.
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Alan Rosenblatt, the associate director of online advocacy for
the Center for American Progress Action Fund, says that if
Obama does the same thing while in office, he might be able to
blunt some of the inevitable criticism of his proposals. "If there's
a level of back-and-forth, it creates a sense of democracy,"
Rosenblatt says—and that sense of democracy ends up serving
the candidate well. The FISA protest took place during a key
moment in the Obama campaign—just after he'd locked up the
nomination, at a time when many volunteers were deciding how
much work to do for the campaign. I called up Chrisi West, a 29year-old Obama supporter who opposed his position on FISA
but who, nevertheless, went on to become one of the campaign's
most active supporters in her home state of Virginia. West told
me that Obama's response on the eavesdropping bill helped
convince her that the online community wasn't incidental to
Obama—that he actually respected what people thought of his
positions. That kind of openness only pushed people to work
harder, West said, and when he takes office, "we'll all be ready
to jump in when we're needed."
It remains to be seen, though, whether more casual online
supporters will take up arms for Obama when he takes office.
The sort of Web site the Obama team seems to be envisioning—
one in which the president and his citizens hold deep discussions
about the controversial issues of the day—will surely be much
less focused than My.BarackObama.com, which had a singular
goal: to get Barack Obama elected. Obama's campaign Web site
connected disparate people who shared a common passion; the
White House social network will connect people who disagree
with each other and with the president—and whose goals might
be in conflict. So far, the Web hasn't had a great record of
bridging social divisions. If Obama can change that, maybe he
really is a different kind of politician.
television
Trivial Pursuits
Game shows reach a deeper level of weirdness.
By Troy Patterson
Tuesday, November 11, 2008, at 8:08 PM ET
Based on the board game that has teased minds and strained
friendships since 1982, Trivial Pursuit: America Plays
(syndicated, check listings) makes for an approachable little quiz
show, a welcome companion for a half-hour of afternoon ironing
or insomniac aimlessness. Its hook is its neighborly YouTube
populism. At the show’s Web site, average Americans (or
"folks," as one always wants to call them after an election
season) upload video clips of themselves asking questions. In the
studio, standing on a six-spoked set paying homage to the home
game, three pleasant contestants attempt to answer them. The
host—Christopher Knight, once and forever Peter Brady—gives
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off vibes indicative only of good heath and family fun. The
stakes are agreeably modest, and there's always a winner. If a
studio contestant does not earn the booty accumulated in the
"bank," then the folks from the Web videos get to divide it. It is
somehow cheering to know that you may win 700 bucks and
change just for wondering aloud what the capital of Belgium
might be.
Brussels, Raleigh, Oslo, Ecuador; copper, the opossum, Alf;
Prince, King Lear, Stephen King; Old Ironsides, Margaret
Thatcher, Fanny Brice, Vanilla Ice—such are the landmarks on
Trivial Pursuit's map of cultural literacy. The show has a
reasonably high estimate of the lowest common denominator
and a wide-ranging idea of pop culture. Overwhelmingly
genial—surely a boon to retirement-home recreation rooms—it
still has a slight provocative streak (unless, 20 years after
Straight Outta Compton, there is nothing provocative about folks
scratching their heads and trying to name two members of
NWA).
Those looking for a game show that provides somewhat ruder
stimulation should turn to the SciFi Channel, which is currently
bringing a zany, nearly Japanese-style sense of mayhem to the
genre, all for the pleasure of a demographic that must be rather
young, primarily male, and hopped up on energy drinks. SciFi
promotes the new Cha$e (Tuesdays at 10 p.m. ET) as "the
world's first live-action video game"—a brave way to describe a
competition that looks like a baroque game of tag, imagined by
the director John Woo, complete with scattered lofts of slo-mo
pigeons.
Cha$e finds its participants scurrying around some confined area
for an hour—L.A.'s Terminal Island, in one episode—waiting
for a finish line to materialize so that they can score $50,000. In
general, the men are unduly boastful about their physical fitness,
the woman outfitted in togs apparently designed by Lara Croft
for Old Navy. All are on the lookout for "hunters"—
expressionless pursuers dressed, like Matrix villains, in black
suits and black ties. While there is a small degree of
intercontestant strategery involved here, the main act is running
away from bad guys who've got you in their Terminator-esque
sights. Here is the only thing I do not get: Why sit in front of the
television watching a "live-action video game" when you could
instead be sitting in front of the television playing an actual
video game? Broken thumb ligaments? Sprained front lobe?
Whatever: Cha$e is American Gladiators for devotees of
futuristic noir.
For admirers of B-movie exploitation, SciFi has lovingly slapped
together Estate of Panic (Wednesdays at 10 p.m. ET), the pun of
its title creaking like the hinges of a heavy cellar door. As its
tagline—"7 contestants, 1 mansion, no mercy"—suggests, Estate
of Panic is Fear Factor doing a Vincent Price impression. The
fog machines work overtime. The host, campily droll and
casually sadistic, wears rouge. The competitors spend an
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
evening in and around a gloomy manor, where they scrounge for
cash in a fanciful array of horror-movie scenarios. Check out the
hand-held camerawork as they grasp at the dollars floating by in
a flooding basement. A bit later, still dripping wet, the
contestants forage for money in a segment of the grounds crisscrossed with electrified wires. What tenacity they show! Says
one go-getter, "I dug underneath some of the moss and some of
the overgrowth, and that's where I found my $100 bills." You've
got to admire that kind of hustle—and you've got to do it while
simultaneously gorging on scenes of humiliation.
But if you need to feel virtuous while watching a game show, or
are a connoisseur of pungent tedium and misguided good
intentions, then flip to Planet Green, the Discovery Channel's
"eco-tainment" spin-off, and watch Go for the Green!
(Saturdays at 8 p.m. ET). It is hosted by Tom Green, the
quondam prankster and gross-out artist, and every indication is
that he scored the gig solely on the basis of his surname. Each
single-minded episode is largely a multiple-choice affair.
"Which of the following is one of the 'dirty dozen' fruits and
vegetables most sprayed by pesticide?" "In Hawaii, what items
must all be solar-powered by 2010?" The very awfulness of the
questions almost makes them decent tests of the contestants'
deductive-reasoning skills. The big prize (10 days of eco-tourism
in Costa Rica) is as predictable as the stage patter ("Be sure to
catch our next show, where I'll be composting the script for this
week!"). But don't the rules of keeping a compost pile forbid the
addition of manure?
the book club
Outliers
What Gladwell forgets to mention.
By John Horgan and Edward Tenner
Friday, November 14, 2008, at 7:12 AM ET
From: Edward Tenner
To: John Horgan
Subject: Outliers Have Outliers, Too
Posted Thursday, November 13, 2008, at 6:44 AM ET
Dear John,
When we co-reviewed Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point
for Slate in 2000, we agreed his book had much to say about
networking and influence but not enough about the inherent
quality that word-of-mouth hits usually need. His new book,
Outliers, is a more sober look at success for a post-boom
audience. But it rejects the Poor Richard self-help tradition.
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Gladwell is skeptical about innate genius and lonely struggle. He
shows that we are the products of our social origins, the
centuries-old values of our geographic roots, and even of the
exact year and even month of our birth. That's what Outliers has
in common with The Tipping Point: Both books apply sociology
and social psychology to exceptional performance. The
catalogers of the Library of Congress have assigned Outliers the
subject headings "1. Successful People" and "2. Success," but
they might have added one they used for the first book: "Context
Effects (Psychology)."
Outliers offers hope. Exceptional ability is less important than
the good old work ethic. Prodigies from Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart to computer programmer Bill Joy required the same
10,000 hours of practice for mastery as the rest of us; Mozart
just began especially young. The Beatles considered their real
break the intensive practice they received playing marathon sets
in the Hamburg, Germany, red-light district. Many more of us
could excel if we realized the time required and worked more
patiently. Math students, for example, may simply be giving up
too early in problem-solving.
In fact, Outliers is positively sunny about education and training.
Do arbitrary cutoff dates for youth sports give kids born early in
the year an unfair advantage? Change recruitment regulations.
Does a legacy of social and linguistic hierarchy endanger airline
safety by inhibiting timely warnings to captains? Hire outsiders
to retrain your staff and shoot up in the safety rankings, as
Korean Airlines did. Do American children, especially those in
inner cities, lag behind Asian counterparts? Extend the school
year.
But context also has an unfair, even fatalistic side. The suave,
rich, and neurotic Robert Oppenheimer received only probation
and psychotherapy after trying to poison his Cambridge physics
tutor (Oppie as proto-Unabomber?), while the equally brilliant
blue-collar American who may indeed have the world's highest
IQ, Christopher Langan, with uncaring parents and teachers,
dropped out of college and still is far from academic recognition.
Memo to overscheduling, hovering, upper-middle-class mothers
and fathers: Keep up the good work.
Time as well as class will tell. The founders of Microsoft and
Sun Microsystems were all born between 1953 and 1956,
coming of age just in time to work on a handful of early
academic time-sharing computers when other scientists and
engineers were still punching stacks of cards. Bill Gates' prep
school had rare remote access to one such machine in 1968. The
lesson, John, is that we should not only choose our parents
wisely but also pick the year they have us.
Seriously, though, isn't Gladwell missing an opportunity to
encourage his readers with a bigger picture? Gurus of
information technology, recognizing and exploiting new tools,
have appeared in every decade. Larry Ellison (born 1944),
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
founder of Oracle, is the third-richest American. And don't
forget Michael Dell (born 1965) and Google's founders, Larry
Page and Sergei Brin (both born 1973). A dozen or more
pioneers of computing, beginning with Grace Hopper (born
1906), who created plain-English programming language, never
made fortunes but are revered in industry and academia. Are
they unsuccessful?
Gladwell also shows how a generation of New York lawyers
from Jewish garment-industry backgrounds struggled during the
Depression, while the next such generation, favored by its small
size and excellent education, flourished in merger-andacquisition work originally disdained by snobbish old-line firms.
Perfectly true. But many Jewish lawyers who came of age in the
1930s also found a way to succeed in the face of economic
hardships and ethnic discrimination. Lawrence A. Wien invented
real estate syndication and became a major philanthropist;
Chicago's Pritzkers also built a fortune buying distressed
properties that ultimately soared in value. Jewish lawyers helped
implement the New Deal in Washington, while others (like
Daniel J. Boorstin and Studs Terkel) entered academia and
journalism. And Edith Spivack, who joined the New York City
Law Department as an unpaid volunteer in 1934 and did not
retire until 70 years later, became its unsung mastermind,
helping avert financial collapse in the 1970s.
Yes, these men and women were atypical. They were outliers;
isn't that the book's title, though? As with The Tipping Point, I
loved Gladwell's combination of storytelling and academic
social science even when I rejected his conclusions. But John,
his soft demographic determinism makes me want to paraphrase
Cassius in Julius Caesar: The fault is not in our birth cohorts but
in ourselves, that we are underlings.
Best wishes,
Ed
From: John Horgan
To: Edward Tenner
Subject: A Squandered Opportunity?
Posted Thursday, November 13, 2008, at 1:48 PM ET
Dear Ed,
My reaction to The Tipping Point eight years ago was not quite
as mild as you recall. That book, which sought to transform the
truism that little causes can have big effects into an allempowering revelation, irked me. I called Gladwell a "clever
idea packager" whose "engaging case histories … cannot
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conceal the fatuousness of his core conclusions." In fact, my
review was so nasty, even for me, that I was determined to give
Gladwell's new book every benefit of the doubt.
Without the scholarship, Joyce would probably never have
gained admittance to University College, where she met
Gladwell's father.
As you note, Ed, Outliers features the same "combination of
storytelling and academic social science" that animated The
Tipping Point and Gladwell's second book, Blink, which is a
tribute to snap judgment. Like you, I found Outliers entertaining
and even fascinating at times. It also advances a much more
consequential theme than Gladwell's previous books. Nurture,
Gladwell argues, contributes at least as much as nature to our
success or lack thereof. Delve into the history of "men and
women who do things out of the ordinary," and you will find that
their success stems from "hidden advantages and extraordinary
opportunities and cultural legacies."
Gladwell's family history engaged and even moved me. But the
lessons that he gleans from this and other case histories in his
book are oddly anticlimactic, even dispiriting. He concludes that
success "is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a
web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not,
some earned, some just plain lucky." To be fair, Gladwell offers
more substantive analysis of the link between race and
achievement elsewhere in his book when he analyzes the
mathematical performance of Asian-American children and of
inner-city New York kids enrolled in a special school called
KIPP. Last December, he provided a sharp refutation of the Bell
Curve reasoning in the pages of The New Yorker—why didn't he
incorporate that material into the book, too?
With this insistence on the importance of environmental factors
as shapers of our lives, Gladwell is bucking a deplorable recent
trend in science. Over the past few decades, fields such as
evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics have tipped the
scales toward the nature side of the nature-nurture debate,
implying that innate factors largely determine our personalities
and talents, and hence our destiny. I call this line of reasoning
"gene-whiz science."
One notorious example of gene-whiz science is the 1994 bestseller The Bell Curve, in which Harvard scholars Charles Murray
and Richard Herrnstein asserted that blacks are innately less
intelligent than whites. James Watson, the Nobel laureate and
co-discoverer of the double helix, reiterated this persistent claim
a year ago, as did Slate's own William Saletan.
Gladwell has a personal stake in this debate. He concludes his
book by telling the tale of his mother, Joyce, a Jamaican
descended from African slaves. While attending University
College in London, Joyce fell in love with a young
mathematician, Graham Gladwell. They soon moved to Canada,
where Graham became a math professor and Joyce a writer and
therapist. They had three children, including Malcolm.
Perhaps now that a man of African descent has been elected
president, we have truly transcended race. But I still can't help
but feel that Outliers represents a squandered opportunity for
Gladwell—himself an outlier, an enormously talented and
influential writer and the descendant of an African slave—to
make a major contribution to our ongoing discourse about
nature, nurture, and race.
Ed, maybe my problem with Gladwell is that I just expect too
much of him.
From: Edward Tenner
To: John Horgan
Subject: Not Even Wrong
Posted Friday, November 14, 2008, at 7:12 AM ET
Dear John,
While acknowledging the ambition and intelligence of his
mother and other ancestors, Gladwell repeatedly emphasizes the
role that serendipity played in their upward journey. The first
lucky break took place in the late 1700s, when a white plantation
owner in Jamaica, William Ford, took a fancy to a pretty female
slave, "an Igbo tribeswoman from West Africa." Ford bought the
woman and made her his mistress, saving her—and, more
importantly, her offspring—from a life of brutal servitude. She
gave birth to Ford's son, John, who was defined as "colored"
rather than black and hence under Jamaican law was free.
John, who became a preacher, was the great-great–greatgrandfather of Joyce, Gladwell's mother. She was lucky, too. She
received a scholarship to a private school in Jamaica only after
another girl who had received two scholarships relinquished one.
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
You're not expecting too much of Malcolm Gladwell. Where I
come from—university press publishing—one philosopher
explained pages of arguments accompanying a favorable
recommendation: "Philosophers show respect by disagreeing
with each other." Physicist Wolfgang Pauli put it more
negatively about a junior researcher's paper: "Not even wrong."
So, we should welcome Gladwell neither as a genius (a concept
he dislikes, anyway) nor as a mere packager of others' ideas.
Instead, let's treat him as a colleague who deserves careful
attention.
Outliers isn't wrong, but neither is it necessarily right. Gladwell
doesn't see, for example, that some outliers were just the first
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ones to seize a unique opportunity that others could not share—a
"positional good," as economist Fred Hirsch called it in his book
Social Limits to Growth. After ridiculing the idea of buying "a
shiny new laptop" for every student, he asks rhetorically, "[I]f a
million teenagers had been given unlimited access to a timesharing terminal in 1968" like Bill Gates, "how many more
Microsofts would we have today?"
Some academic reviewers have also dissented from much of the
research Gladwell cites. One of his favorite sources is historian
David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed, which he uses to argue
the strong persistence of values in American regional cultures
over four centuries. The work, rightly admired for its rich
scholarship, has also been blasted for its selective use of
evidence to support its thesis. Fischer's idea (repeated by
Gladwell) that the cult of honor in the U.S. South originated in
medieval British border disputes has also been questioned.
According to Bertram Wyatt-Brown, author of the standard work
Southern Honor, "colonial and backcountry historians in general
stoutly reject" Fischer's book.
Cultures change more rapidly and thoroughly than Fischer and
Gladwell acknowledge. Think of the cosmopolitan, lively Spain
that followed the grim Franco years or the hypercapitalist and
individualist China that came after Mao. What about postwar
Germany, which now rates much lower on indexes of
authoritarianism than France, at least according to one of
Gladwell's notes? Or, for that matter, consider the changing
values represented by Barack Obama's election victory that you
mention, John, which overthrew structuralist dogmas of "blue"
and "red" states and fears of concealed racism.
Obama's story has another dimension strangely neglected in
Outliers: his abandonment by his father, the death of his mother,
and his struggle for a new identity. The successes cited by
Gladwell, including his own mother, go from strength to
strength; cultural forces and good luck come together. Yet for all
Obama's elite education, his years as a community organizer in
Chicago while others of his age were launching lucrative careers
only conforms to the "accumulative advantage" model endorsed
by Gladwell in hindsight.
There isn't much suffering, for the sake of art or anything else, in
Outliers. People fortunate enough to be born in the right time,
place, cultural group, and profession are borne along by the
current. Yet among previous presidents, even upper-class
outliers had a lot to overcome. Think of Theodore Roosevelt's
lifelong respiratory problems, Franklin Roosevelt's polio, John
F. Kennedy's childhood scarlet fever and his war injuries. (When
Kennedy said that life is unfair, he was referring to health and
sickness.) John McCain's captivity was his own turning point, as
PT-109 was Kennedy's. Americans aren't the only politicians to
be proud of fighting adversity. Nicolas Sarkozy, with a
multiethnic family tree and an absent father like Obama's, once
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
declared, "What made me who I am now is the sum of all the
humiliations suffered during childhood."
Gladwell credits some of J. Robert Oppenheimer's success to the
aristocratic social skills he absorbed from his family. But there
was another side of Oppenheimer, revealed when he contracted
tuberculosis as a young professor and retreated with his younger
brother Frank to the hills of New Mexico; his fascination with
Los Alamos began during that interlude. When Oppenheimer
took his Army physical before receiving his commission in
1943, he was nearly disqualified as 11 pounds underweight with
a chronic cough. But according to Gladwell's main source on
Oppenheimer, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin's American
Prometheus, the physicist was able to withstand the stress of
preparing for the hearings on his security clearance; as his
secretary later recalled, he "had that fantastic stamina that people
often have who have recovered from tuberculosis. Although he
was incredibly skinny, he was incredibly tough."
Misfortunes are not like cultivated homes and great schools;
their effects are unpredictable, energizing some and crushing
others regardless of social class and education. In rejecting the
myth of self-made men and women—and very properly
revealing all the help most of them had—Gladwell also ignores
important, if often mysterious, realities of endurance.
John, if our economic emergency is as serious as it appears,
"accumulative advantage" will matter less and dealing creatively
with crises will count more. And if this sounds like the old-style
success books that Outliers is trying to replace, I can only recall
an aside made by historian of science Charles C. Gillispie in my
college History 101 course: "There is nothing more
embarrassing to the educated mind than a true cliché."
Best wishes,
Ed
the green lantern
Wood, I Wouldn't
It's better to heat your home with gas than with trees.
By Jacob Leibenluft
Tuesday, November 11, 2008, at 7:30 AM ET
I live in a fairly rural place, and we have an oil furnace, some
electric heat, and a wood stove. I've heard that wood burns
pretty cleanly, but it doesn't look like it compared with what
comes out of the oil-furnace chimney. Of course, wood
doesn't have to be refined, and it comes from only a few
dozen miles away. It's getting chilly: Should I be heating my
home with firewood?
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It's not just old-timey nostalgics who are mulling this question.
Sales of wood stoves are up 55 percent over last season as
consumers look for a greener and a cheaper alternative to oil and
gas.
So how does the green case for wood stack up? The argument
centers on the fact that wood is a renewable resource: When you
chop down a tree for firewood, you can easily plant one to
replace it. (It would take millions of years to replace spent fossil
fuel.) Mile for mile, transporting firewood can be pretty energyintensive since it's so bulky, but you are far more likely to have
wood in your backyard (literally!) than you are to be located in
close proximity to natural gas reserves.
But a "burn local" movement won't do much to help the
environment if your stove starts spitting out toxic fumes. In
some communities, wood smoke accounts for as much as 82
percent of particulate matter—tiny particles that can cause
serious respiratory problems—emitted during the winter.
Moreover, because that smoke is being produced right in (or
outside) your house, the probability of exposure is greater—and
that can have significant health effects. Existing research
suggests that young children living in homes heated by woodburning stoves "had a greater occurrence of moderate and severe
chronic respiratory symptoms" than children in homes without
those stoves. And it's not just that these particulates might be
hard on your lungs: Wood smoke has high concentrations of
toxic chemicals like benzene, formaldehyde, and polycyclic
aromatic hydrocarbons, all of which are considered possible
carcinogens by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The good news is that the most modern stoves—which must be
manufactured under EPA requirements—are a good deal cleaner
than the old models. But while the new versions cut down on
emissions by more than two-thirds, they can still produce
particulate matter concentrations about 100 times greater than oil
or gas furnaces. And outdoor wood boilers—which have become
more popular in recent years—are typically even bigger emitters
than stoves.
What about greenhouse gases? All in all, using wood to heat
your home is generally considered to cut down on the emissions
that cause global warming. There's some debate about how to
figure the carbon footprint of burning wood: After all, a tree
releases carbon when it decomposes anyway, so it's conceivable
that putting wood in the stove is more or less carbon-neutral. On
the other hand, if we cut down trees faster than they are replaced,
there's a net reduction in carbon sinks that sequester carbon
dioxide. And when a tree decomposes, some of that carbon is
absorbed by the soil; when you burn wood, virtually all of it will
end up in the atmosphere. Still, as long as your firewood is
farmed sustainably, heating by wood is less likely to contribute
to heating the earth. Researchers estimate that, in total, wood
may produce between three times and 10 times fewer
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
greenhouse gas emissions per unit of heat than other energy
sources.
So, is wood worth it? Taking everything into account, the
Lantern doesn't recommend switching over to wood for
environmental reasons. If you want to cut down on your
greenhouse gas emissions, there are better ways of doing it—
from changing your transportation habits to your diet—that
won't involve pumping those other pollutants into the air. Instead
of changing your source of fuel, you may want to think about
how you might get by with less heat to begin with; to start, you
can turn down the thermostat by a few degrees or improve your
insulation.
Of course, if memories of the hearth or a surplus of kindling
have driven you to a wood burner, make sure you're using an
EPA-certified stove manufactured after 1992 to cut down on
your particulate emissions. (For other tips on how to use a wood
stove in a greener way, this is a good source.) After all, where
there's fire, there will be smoke—but it doesn't have to be quite
as bad for the environment as it used to be.
Is there an environmental quandary that's been keeping you up at
night? Send it to ask.the.lantern@gmail.com, and check this
space every Tuesday.
the spectator
The Good Life of a New-Media Guru
Is Jeff Jarvis gloating too much about the death of print?
By Ron Rosenbaum
Tuesday, November 11, 2008, at 7:06 PM ET
Take a look at this, from Jeff Jarvis' blog BuzzMachine:
Dubai-bound
November 5th, 2008
I'm in the Emirates lounge getting ready to fly
to Dubai for a World Economic Forum
(Davos) meeting of the Global Agenda
Councils. I'm on the one devoted to the future
of the internet, which is humbling. (Full
disclosure: The travel expenses are paid by the
airline and the government of Dubai.) I'll
report from there as wifi allows.
Jeff Jarvis is living the good life. (But he's still humble—he says
so himself!) Jeff Jarvis is the very model of a modern new-media
guru. Do you know about him? He started out in print media but
is now a multiplatform new-media consultant. If you work in
media, you probably know his work. If you consume media, you
probably should. He's one of the leading Web futurists, one of
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the few new-media consultant types who came over from old
media. (He was founding editor of Entertainment Weekly.)
After leaving EW in 1990, Jarvis worked as an editor at the New
York Daily News and a critic for TV Guide. Then he took to
blogging and—eventually—blogging about blogging, and now
he can often be found consulting about new media and giving
media-futurist speeches to international forums and selfproclaimed new-media "summits." Recently he has even begun
to host international forums and self-proclaimed new-media
summits, when not directing J-school programs focused on new
media (at the City University of New York) or raking in
consulting fees from old-media giants like the New York Times
and Advance Publications, the parent company of Condé Nast.
Jeff Jarvis seems to be seeking to be your Marshall McLuhan,
and he's convinced a lot of media corporations to pay him
consulting fees to tell them what is happening with these new
intertubes—and what should happen.
I used to like Jeff Jarvis: I've never met him, but I felt I knew
him from his blog, which I've read fairly regularly since he
began blogging eloquently about 9/11. I've often enjoyed his
opinions and, especially, his crankiness. I loved what he did to
Dell when the company failed to fix his computer: He called it
"Dell-Hell" and used his blog to mobilize the Dell-discontented
multitudes to make the company pay attention to their "service"
pledges. (He must have had flawless service in the Emirates
lounge.)
What I liked about his blog was that it was personal and
immediate. He's a natural at the form, with an ability to entwine
his life and those of the rest of us in his musings. Here is a guy
who literally took 9/11 to heart: He was on a PATH train near
Ground Zero that morning and developed atrial fibrillation in the
aftermath, a problem that still afflicts him.* He has been
outspoken on the issue of anti-Semitism. And I never had a
problem with his championing the idea of taking bloggers
seriously and using the Web to find a new way of making
journalism viable in the 21st century. He was right about the
potential of the Net when I was still being a Luddite about it.
(After all, I'm a blogger, too, these days.)
But something has changed in the last year or two: He's now
visibly running for New Media Pontificator in Chief. He began
treating his own thoughts as profound and epigrammatic,
PowerPoint-paradoxical, new-media-mystical. He acquired the
habit of proclaiming "Jarvis' Laws" of new media, acting like a
prophet, a John the Baptist if not the messiah. (Although he
knows who the messiah is. He's about to publish a book of
Google worship—What Would Google Do?—that makes that
clear.)
Meanwhile, he's become increasingly heartless about the
reporters, writers, and other "content providers" who have been
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
put out on the street by the changes in the industry. Not only
does he blame the victims, he denies them the right to consider
themselves victims. They deserve their miserable fate—and if
they don't know it, he'll tell them why at great length. Sometimes
it sounds as if he's virtually dancing on their graves.
Consider Jarvis' response to an essay by Paul Farhi that
suggested the current crisis in journalism might not be entirely
the fault of journalists. Jarvis parried with a cruel, disdainful rant
contending that writers and reporters deserve their fate:
The fall of journalism is, indeed, journalists'
fault. It is our fault that we did not see the
change coming soon enough and ready our
craft for the transition. It is our fault that we
did not see and exploit—hell, we resisted—all
the opportunities new media and new
relationships with the public presented. It is
our fault that we did not give adequate
stewardship to journalism and left the business
to the business people. It is our fault that we
lost readers and squandered trust. It is our fault
that we sat back and expected to be supported
in the manner to which we had become
accustomed by some unknown princely patron.
Responsibility and blame are indeed ours.
I have a strong feeling that when he says "we" and "ours," he
really means everyone but him and his fellow new-media gurus.
Not all reporters had the prescience to become new-media
consultants. A lot of good, dedicated people who have done
actual writing and reporting, as opposed to writing about writing
and reporting, have been caught up in this great upheaval, and
many of them may have been too deeply involved in, you know,
content—"subjects," writing about real peoples' lives—to figure
out that reporting just isn't where it's at, that the smart thing to do
is get a consulting gig.
But Jarvis believes the failure of the old-media business models
is the result of having too many of those pesky reporters. In his
report on his recent new-media summit at CUNY, he noted with
approval one workshop's conclusion that you'd need only 35
reporters to cover the entire city of Philadelphia. Less is more.
Meta triumphs over matter.
It makes you wonder whether Jarvis has actually done any, you
know, reporting. Particularly when he tells you that in doing his
book on the total wonderfulness of Google, he decided it would
be better not to speak to anyone who works at Google, that
instead he's written about the idea of Google, as he construes it,
rather than finding out how they—the actual Google people—
construe it. What he's done, Jarvis claims, is to "reverseengineer" the reality of Google. This means deducing how
Google got to be what it is and do what it does by conjecturing
about its effects from the outside.
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Allow me to make a conjecture: Did Jarvis sound out Google
informally and get rebuffed, prompting him to "decide" he
wouldn't talk to them "on principle"? Of course, I could ask
Jarvis about this, but that would be mere "reporting"; it's more
fun to "reverse-engineer" his decision.
Yes, by Jeff Jarvis' logic, the hardworking reporters now on the
street were fools: They didn't spend their time figuring out how
to multiplatform themselves. I think of that guy John Conroy,
who wrote about police torture for years for the Chicago Reader,
which is now bankrupt and had to let Conroy go just as—after
years and years—Conroy's reporting (100,000 words!) on the
subject was vindicated and an official investigation began at last.
Dedicated guys who did great work at the dying dailies are being
made to feel by Jarvis that they deserve to be downsized. Yet
who has the most honor, the men and women who did the work
or the media consultants who mock them?
Here are a few excerpts from Jeff Jarvis' blog over the last
month that illustrate his self-congratulatory attitude: First, the
demise of a venerable print daily (and the suffering of who
knows how many families) causes Jeff Jarvis to reflect on how
right Jeff Jarvis was and is and probably always will be:
The Christian Science Monitor is turning off
its press and going fully online. I heard about
this at my conference on new business models
for news last week and said it makes perfect
sense.
Next his international audience of Rich Guys Who Want To
Understand This Internet Thing calls:
I need to write an essay on a bold goal for the
internet for a World Economic Forum (aka
Davos) Global Agenda Council on the future
of the internet. My thoughts:
The internet is a right.
I can't imagine a bolder notion than that. Or
maybe it's not so bold. ...
Then we travel with Jarvis to the Frankfurt Book Fair, another
example of the downfall of print and the rise of Jarvis:
The Frankfurt convention grounds are also
jammed with books from all around the world.
What struck me was the optimism of it: all that
work to create books on the hope that someone
would read them. And they make fun of
bloggers for whistling in the wind.
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
I was there on Saturday to speak with
Wolfgang Blau, editor-in-chief of Zeit Online
for what turned out to be a sizeable audience.
...
Note his dim view of the "book people" and their foolish
romantic optimism. These poor fools; they might as well be
making buggy whips. Sure, they do serve some purpose—
merchandizing his book—so it's good they're still in the foolish
business long enough for him to monetize their death. But
otherwise, if they don't make big profits, dead-tree books are not
worth doing, according to the new-media gospel.
Then it's time for a little self-congratulation while scores lose
their jobs:
Sometime ago, I used TV Guide as a
cautionary tale to beware the cash cow in the
coal mine. How now, said cow—which not
long ago sold more copies every year than any
other magazine—just sold for $1. Beware
media and news companies that try to preserve
their past: This could be you. Moo.
(I didn't make up that "Moo." That's new-media wit.)
We can learn more about Jarvis' ambition to guru-hood by
studying his remarkable endorsement of the New Age
boilerplate mysticism of Paulo Coelho, which we learn about as
he shares with us the exciting experience of his triumph at the
Frankfurt Book Fair.
In one of his Frankfurt posts, he discusses a talk given by
worldwide best-seller Coelho.* (He claims 100 million books
sold.) In his talk, Coelho advocated giving away the digital
content of books for free as a means of boosting sales.
"That has certainly been Coelho's experience," notes Jarvis (who
calls Coelho—I kid you not—"the Googliest author I know").
"Freely available electronic files have led to increased print sales
in territory after territory—including the US, where [Coelho's]
The Alchemist has been on the NYT bestseller list for a full year
even though it was among the first of his titles to be available
online at Harper's web site."
Surely Jarvis is intelligent enough to see that the Coelho model
won't work for everyone. Sure, if you break through to New Age
guru status and peddle the notion that everyone can discover
their own fabulousness (from the jacket of the Alchemest, aka
New Age Mysticism for Dummies: "A discovery of the treasure
found within"), you're more likely to have a audience that will
support you by buying the hard cover to doubly reaffirm their
vanity. (A new definition of "vanity press"?)
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But what about a different kind of book? You know—a serious
book. I just got in the mail a newly published book by an old
friend of mine, Gordon Goldstein. It's called Lessons in
Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam, and
it' s likely to reopen still-unresolved debates about why we did
what we did and the way we did it. It is, to put it mildly, no less
deserving of attention than Coelho's 100-million-seller. Will
publishers pay writers to write serious books like this and then
give them away for free?
Look, there's nothing wrong with Jarvis doing all this thinking
and decreeing. He's said some savvy, if unoriginal, things about
journalism (advocating looking at the article as an ongoing
process, not a product, for instance). He's among the most
rational of the new thinkers. But it's the callous contempt for
working journalists that grates. It's a contempt for the beautiful
losers who actually made journalism an honorable profession for
a brief shining moment—well, longer than that—before it
became a platform for "reverse engineering."
If Jarvis values books (and I can't help think that despite all the
digital bluster, he's an intelligent guy who likes reading), do we
just listen to the market and focus-group what we should print
and give away, which is likely to result in all Coelho, all the
time, with maybe a little bit of Jarvis thrown in?
Correction, Nov. 12, 2008: This piece originally stated that Jeff
Jarvis heard the Paulo Coelho speech he later wrote about on
his blog. In fact, he read about the speech before posting on it. It
also stated that Jarvis was living hear Ground Zero on 9/11. In
fact, he was on a PATH train near Ground Zero that morning.
(Return to the corrected sentences.)
But Jarvis doesn't seem to recognize distinctions of value. Or to
have heard of Gresham's law. (Trash drives out value.) Listen to
his blog reaction to the recent bailout/economic meltdown:
Why wasn't the government better at listening
to the market? Did it ever ask what it should
do? That's not the way government thinks, but
it's the way it should learn to think.
Wait, did I get that right? The government should have "listened
to the market," the same market that created this debacle and
came close to destroying the economy? It's an example of his
blind allegiance to the wisdom of the consumer, to quantity over
quality and expertise. Everything else is elitism. He's the Sarah
Palin of gurus. The crowd is always right.
But what makes him wined, dined, and comped by Dubai to fly
to self-proclaimed summits all over the world? It's not just that
corporations are dumb enough to waste what's left of
stockholders' money to pay for someone to tell them to "listen to
the market." No, it's Jarvis' pretensions to guru-hood, his gnomic
"laws" and pronouncements. Firing people on the writing side
because of the incompetence of the business side is a long
tradition in the media business, and Jarvis gives management a
New Age fig leaf with which to shift the blame from their own
incompetence.
He offers chestnuts like, "The link changes everything," "Stuff
sucks" ("Nobody wants to be in the business of stuff anymore.
… Google's economy is more appealing"), "Atoms are a drag,"
and—yes, his contribution to the "X is the new Y" genre—
"Small is the new big."
Yeah, down with stuff! Let them eat fake. Sleep in buildings not
made with atoms. Everyone should be a new-media consultant,
and then we won't need any media at all.
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
today's business press
Bush Declares Capitalism
Accomplished!
By Bernhard Warner and Matthew Yeomans
Friday, November 14, 2008, at 7:08 AM ET
today's papers
The New Workout Plan
By Daniel Politi
Friday, November 14, 2008, at 6:13 AM ET
The Washington Post leads with word that the Federal Deposit
Insurance Corp. will announce a new plan today to help stem the
tide of foreclosures across the country. The new plan, which
would carry a $24.4 billion price tag, could help prevent 1.5
million foreclosures in the next year by offering to share losses
with companies that agree to decrease monthly mortgage
payments. The New York Times leads with the diminishing
chances that Democratic lawmakers will be able to pass a bailout
for Detroit's automakers before January. While Democrats tried
to put on a happy face and say that they'll get what they want
once President-elect Barack Obama takes office, some fear one
of the Big Three will go under before then.
USA Today leads with this weekend's economic summit in
Washington that will bring together leaders from 20 of the
world's top economies. Among other issues, leaders will discuss
how to increase transparency and regulation as well as the best
ways to stimulate economies that are on a seemingly endless
downward spiral. No one really expects any immediate, dramatic
action to come out of the meeting, as the leaders will focus on
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long-term solutions. The Wall Street Journal leads its worldwide newsbox with the Food and Drug Administration's decision
to block all products from China that contain milk. The FDA
discovered traces of melamine contamination, which has
sickened more than 50,000 babies in China, in several products;
it now says importers must prove their goods are safe before
they can be sold in the United States. The Los Angeles Times
leads with the fire that broke out last night in the upscale
community of Montecito in Santa Barbara County, Calif., and
has burned at least 800 acres and destroyed as many as 80
homes.
Democratic leaders appear to be widely enthusiastic about the
new plan to prevent foreclosures, but FDIC Chairman Sheila
Bair continues to face resistance from the Bush administration.
But that may not matter that much now because, as the WP puts
it, "proponents increasingly view the Bush administration as a
roadblock with an expiration date." Those who have missed at
least two monthly payments would be eligible for the program. It
would require lenders to decrease payments to no more than 31
percent of a borrower's monthly income. In order to encourage
companies to participate, the government would essentially offer
to split the loss with any lenders that lose money from most of
the modified mortgages.
If the chances for the Big Three bailout are rapidly diminishing,
Democrats have pretty much given up on the idea that they'll be
able to pass any sort of economic stimulus package during next
week's lame-duck session. Still, even if they don't have the
votes, there are hints that Democrats will move ahead with the
efforts to provide $25 billion to the automakers, perhaps as a
way of having someone else to blame if one does go under soon.
The measure would have to pass the Senate first, and Democrats
would need 11 Republican votes, since neither Obama nor Vice
President-elect Joe Biden is expected at the lame-duck session.
In preparation for the weekend's meetings, President Bush
defended American-style capitalism and called on world leaders
not to "reinvent" the system. "Our aim should not be more
government," Bush said. "It should be smarter government." The
WP fronts a look at the measures currently under discussion and
highlights a proposal to create a new regulatory body to oversee
the world's 30 largest financial institutions. The leaders of the 20
countries that will be meeting are also "close to a deal" on the
creation of an "early warning system" that would aim to detect
weaknesses in the financial system before they become a
problem. There's also likely to be discussion on a proposal to
limit executive pay as well as pressure on Bush to drop his
resistance to more fiscal stimulus packages. Obama will not be
attending but is sending former Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright and former Iowa Rep. Jim Leach to talk to world
leaders.
The WP fronts a look at how the government takeover of Fannie
Mae and Freddie Mac may be more expensive than the Bush
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
administration publicly suggested. This is speculative, since "not
a cent has been spent," but some analysts say that because of the
deteriorating conditions in the financial and housing markets, the
two mortgage giants will need more than the $200 billion that
was initially set aside for companies. At the time of the takeover,
the Treasury Department said it was setting aside $100 billion
for each merely to reassure investors and suggested that the final
tab would be nowhere near that amount. Truth is, though, no one
knows how much money the two companies will ultimately need
since they are both at the mercy of the housing market.
During the election, Obama's campaign was famous for not
airing any of its arguments and disagreements in public. But now
a public battle is being waged among some of Obama's advisers
who disagree on what to do about the huge network of
supporters that the president-elect amassed during the campaign,
reports the LAT. The standard operating procedure is that a new
president turns over information about supporters to the party's
national committee. Some in Obama's camp want to do just that.
Others, however, say that would be the quickest way to destroy
the grass-roots network that includes many political outsiders
who would drop out if asked to participate in traditional partisan
politics. To avoid losing the network, some say it should remain
an independent entity that is "organized around the 'Obama
brand,' " says the LAT.
The WP points out that the Democrats' dream of a filibusterproof majority in the Senate is still alive. Yes, it's very unlikely,
but as of now, the Democrats have 57 seats, and there are still
three races to be decided. The Alaska contest is still too close to
call, though the Democrat was slightly ahead this week. In
Minnesota, Democrat Al Franken is 206 votes behind Sen. Norm
Coleman, and there are hundreds of lawyers in the state to
oversee a process that is quickly bringing back memories of
Florida. Finally, Georgia will be voting in its runoff election on
Dec. 2, and both parties have come out in force to help
campaign.
The WP's Al Kamen reports "there's increasing chatter in
political circles" that Sen. Hillary Clinton is being considered for
secretary of state in Obama's administration.
The WP, NYT, and LAT all front the extraordinary news that two
groups of astronomers have taken the first pictures of planets
outside our solar system. One team recorded a planet orbiting the
star Fomalhaut, 25 light-years away. The second team identified
three planets circling a star known as HR 8799 that is 130 lightyears away. The fact that so-called extrasolar planets exist isn't
news as more than 300 have been found over the last decade, but
they were discovered indirectly.
The LAT fronts a look at how activists opposed to Proposition 8,
which banned marriage between same-sex couples in California
last week, are stepping up efforts to boycott businesses whose
employees or owners gave money to the Yes on 8 campaign.
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The LAT's Joel Stein says gays are going about this all wrong.
Marching with an old "No on 8" sign "makes about as much
sense as holding a John McCain rally next month at John
McCain's house." Instead, Stein takes a cue from Mexican
immigrants and declares Dec. 5 "No Gays for a Day day." Stein
called up Kathy Griffin, who, of course, was thrilled to accept
the position as celebrity spokesperson for No Gays for a Day.
"Now the rest of the world will find out what Griffin has known
all along: We need our gays," writes Stein. "If it turns out I'm
wrong, and we don't miss them, then as a married man, I can tell
you this: The best way to keep them at home is to let them get
married."
today's papers
Back, Back, Forth, and Forth
By Daniel Politi
Thursday, November 13, 2008, at 6:28 AM ET
In the least surprising news since Barack Obama's victory last
week, the Treasury Department officially announced that it has
switched gears and will no longer be using the $700 billion
bailout package to buy toxic securities. Instead, the money will
continue to be used to inject capital into financial institutions
with a stepped-up emphasis on efforts to loosen up the frozen
consumer credit market. The Los Angeles Times deftly
recognizes the no-duh aspect of the announcement and leads
with an analysis while relegating the straight-up news story to its
inside pages. "The surprise content of the announcement today is
precisely zero," a finance professor tells the LAT. "This is not a
change of policy, but a recognition of a policy that's already
happened."
The New York Times points out that, confusingly, the "program
is still called the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, but it
will not buy troubled assets." At a news briefing yesterday,
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson emphasized that the consumer
credit market "has for all practical purposes ground to a halt,"
which is "raising the cost and reducing the availability of car
loans, student loans, and credit cards." The Washington Post
puts this in perspective by pointing out average interest rates on
car loans "almost doubled from July to September … and
borrowers were required to make much larger down payments,
an average of $2,000 more down on a $20,000 car." USA Today
points out that many were quick to criticize the Treasury's
"herky-jerky approach, noting such changes were leading to
reduced confidence that the government would help thaw frozen
credit markets and prop up the economy." Indeed, the Dow
Jones industrial average plunged 4.7 percent yesterday. The Wall
Street Journal notes that investors blamed the Treasury "switch"
for at least part of the decline, "as the bailout's widening focus
underscores the depth of the economy's problems as well as new
strains on the government's rescue net."
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
The LAT notes that Paulson's announcement that the bailout
funds would be directed at "both banks and non-banks" renewed
fears that government officials "are failing to specifically define
the purpose of TARP." It's little wonder, then, that this lack of
specificity has led lawmakers to view TARP money as free cash
that can be made available to troubled industries. But Paulson
quickly raised the ire of Democrats in Congress by making it
clear he has no intention of using TARP funds to bail out
Detroit's Big Three and by acknowledging that his department
still hasn't figured out how to use the bailout money to help
homeowners avoid foreclosure.
"Using some of the TARP money to reduce foreclosures was not
only contemplated in it, it was one of our major focal points,"
Rep. Barney Frank said. The WP highlights that congressional
leaders seem intent on keeping the markets guessing about what
comes next by emphasizing that Paulson's decisions won't mean
much once Obama is in the White House. "I am concerned that
we may have to wait until the next administration before we
have the real change in economic policy that our nation needs,"
Sen. Christopher Dodd said.
Truth be told, it's less than clear how much Paulson is even
planning to do before he bids farewell to Washington. The
Treasury has already allocated $290 billion of the first $350
billion installment, and yesterday Paulson suggested his
department might keep the remaining $60 billion as a sort of
rainy-day fund. Paulson would have to go back to Congress to
get the remaining $350 billion but said yesterday he has no
specific plans to do that yet, notes the WSJ article that also
points out the Treasury secretary is wary of getting new
programs started before Obama's inauguration. "I'm not looking
to make anything more difficult by implementing programs that
don't need to be implemented before they're here," Paulson said.
So, let's see if we got this right. Paulson is running out of money,
has no plans to go back to Congress to ask for more, and doesn't
want to implement anything new. What's the point in all this,
then? An out-loud brainstorming session to confuse the markets?
There seems to be no better example of this shoot-from-the-hip
mentality than Paulson's befuddling decision to mention that
Treasury and the Federal Reserve would be working together to
develop a new lending facility that would aim to thaw the frozen
consumer credit market. The NYT goes big with this potential
new program but gives the impression that Fed officials were
extremely confused as to why Paulson would even mention it in
public when it's still so early in the planning stages and no one is
sure how it would work except to say that "TARP would likely
make an investment in the facility and the Fed would provide
liquidity," as the WSJ puts it.
The NYT says Treasury officials are looking to put in about $50
billion into this new lending facility that would help companies
that issue student, car, and credit card loans. Any new program
is likely to require companies to raise private money and not rely
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solely on government funds. The NYT hears that Treasury would
put in somewhere between 5 percent and 10 percent of the
money, and then the Fed would raise money for the rest. This
would allow the government to get a huge bang for its buck, but,
scarily enough, this type of highly leveraged transaction would
be eerily similar to the "eventually disastrous, special-investment
vehicles that banks" created to "to hold, among other things,
securities backed by subprime mortgages," explains the NYT.
Still, it's important to remember that nothing has been decided,
and officials emphasized there are several different ways the
program could be financed.
Meanwhile, the WP off-leads a look at how the government
hasn't filled any of the independent oversight posts that are
supposed to keep tabs on the bailout and make sure everything is
kosher. The Treasury's inspector general is overseeing the
bailout program until the new position of special inspector
general is filled, but he readily acknowledges he's severely shortstaffed to carry out the job effectively. Congress also has failed
on its end of the bargain as lawmakers haven't yet nominated the
five-member Congressional Oversight Panel, although party
leaders say they expect that it will all be resolved by the end of
the month.
Along with Paulson, the White House also said it's opposed to a
plan by Democratic lawmakers to use some of the TARP money
to give $25 billion in government loans to Detroit automakers.
But Democratic lawmakers insist they will move ahead with the
legislation, "setting up a final showdown with the Bush
administration," says the WP. All this activity by Democratic
lawmakers leads the LAT to wonder: "Will Congress be leading
or following the Obama administration as it gets its sea legs?"
Lawmakers, of course, are quick to say they'll follow Obama's
lead once he's in office, but right now they're busy asserting
themselves almost as if trying to ensure they'll get a seat at the
table early on in the next administration.
In an interesting front-page piece, the WP notes that Iran's
leaders seem to be moving away from their repeated calls for
direct, unconditional talks with the United States ever since
Obama was elected. "For Iran's leaders, the only state of affairs
worse than poor relations with the United States may be
improved relations," notes the Post. Criticizing the United States
is one of the centerpieces of Iranian politics, and there's little
sign that will change, regardless of who is sitting in the Oval
Office.
The LAT fronts a look at how it has been a deadly week in
Baghdad. According to police statistics, 58 people have been
killed by some sort of bomb in Iraq's capital since Monday.
After a steady decrease in violence, this week's bombings have
brought back a sense of vulnerability to Iraqis just as they were
starting to feel relatively safe again. Some see it as a sign that
the Iraqi security forces aren't ready to protect Baghdad without
the help of U.S. troops. American military officials insist that a
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
bad week doesn't take away from all the recent progress and
emphasize that there is a confluence of factors, including the end
of Ramadan and the U.S. elections, that could be motivating
insurgents to step up their attacks now.
The Post's Al Kamen notes that Senate Democrats are in for a lot
of wheeling and dealing in the coming weeks as it has "been a
while since the chairmanships of so many committees were in
play." But while several senators will be moving up and Sen. Joe
Lieberman might actually get to hold onto his committee
chairmanship, Sen. Hillary Clinton would be left out due to
seniority rules. "So, let's see: She pretty much equaled Obama in
the Democratic primary race, with nearly 18 million votes, but
lost," writes Kamen. "She nonetheless was out there all over the
battleground states—even Nebraska—rallying the troops for
Obama. And she gets bupkes? Nada? Zip?"
The WP's Dana Milbank highlights a slip by "Treasury Secretary
Sigmund Freud" during his news conference yesterday: "I
believe and I know that this administration believes the auto
industry is a very important, critical industry in this—in this
country. We're very supportive of management—excuse me.
We're very supportive of—of manufacturing."
today's papers
Almost Fired
By Daniel Politi
Wednesday, November 12, 2008, at 6:37 AM ET
The Washington Post leads with word that the two top
intelligence officers in the country expect that President-elect
Barack Obama won't keep them around for very long, even
though they appear eager to stay in their current jobs. There
seems to be a consensus building among Democratic leaders that
Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and CIA
Director Michael Hayden should be let go, mostly because of
their support for harsh interrogation techniques and warrantless
eavesdropping. The Los Angeles Times leads with the latest
effort to put a brake on home foreclosures that could help several
hundred thousand homeowners who have mortgages that are
owned or guaranteed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. It will do
little for the vast majority of troubled borrowers who are at risk
of foreclosure, but there are hopes that lenders will use it as a
guide to deal with the rising number of delinquent borrowers.
The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal's worldwide
newsbox lead with Democratic leaders in Congress making it
clear that they intend to pass legislation to help Detroit's Big
Three during the lame-duck session that starts next week. The
move sets "the stage for one last showdown with President
Bush," notes the NYT. Democrats insist automakers should be
73/82
allowed to tap into the $700 billion bailout package, but Bush
administration officials have said the money would be best spent
on financial institutions. USA Today leads with two analyses that
show those on Medicare prescription drug plans will pay an
average of 43 percent more in monthly premiums next year than
they did in 2006, when the program began. While the Medicare
drug program is costing the government less than was originally
estimated, seniors are seeing the cost of premiums and drug copayments increase each year.
Obama's transition team isn't talking much, but both Hayden and
McConnell interpret the fact that the president-elect hasn't
reached out to them as a sign that they will both be out of a job
soon. And they're not happy about it. Of course, they're not
saying anything publicly, but they have plenty of unnamed
intelligence officials speaking on their behalf. And it's not a
personal issue, mind you. Both Hayden and McConnell think
their departures could be seen as a politicization of intelligence
offices. The two officials also say that Obama will have enough
on his plate with the economic crisis and so should rely on their
experience with national security issues. Even though neither
was directly involved in the controversies regarding the failure
to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the harsh
interrogation techniques, many Democrats are pushing Obama to
make a clean break from the past.
Under the mortgage-modification program announced on
Tuesday, a borrower must have missed at least three payments in
order to qualify for a new loan with monthly payments that will
not exceed 38 percent of the homeowners' income. By offering a
simplified process to determine who is eligible for a mortgage
modification, officials hope to get things moving quickly. But
many were quick to criticize the plan, saying that while Fannie
Mae and Freddie Mac own or guarantee almost 60 percent of all
single-family residential mortgages, due to their higher lending
standards the two giants hold only 20 percent of seriously
delinquent mortgages. For its part, the WP is more optimistic
that major lenders will extend this formula to their own loans.
on the side of the Big Three. General Motors has warned it could
face a cash shortage by the end of the year, and yesterday its
stock fell to its lowest point since 1943. Besides giving the
automakers access to the $700 billion pie, Obama also wants to
speed up delivery on the $25 billion for fuel-efficient cars and
emergency loans from the Federal Reserve.
The NYT gets word that Democratic leaders want to take up the
issue with Bush so if he refuses to bail the automakers out then
he can get blamed if one of the companies fails. The WSJ
suggests that a clear sign of whether Democrats are really
interested in helping the automakers rather than making a
political point will be whether they present the issue individually
or as part of a bigger economic stimulus package. Republicans
have long been reluctant to support another big stimulus
package, but Democrats are likely to convince enough GOP
lawmakers to come around to their side if the issue is solely the
Big Three.
The WP fronts a look at the debate over whether GM should just
be allowed to go bankrupt. Of course, GM says bankruptcy is
not an option and insists that its collapse would affect industries
far beyond General Motors. But while buyers might not be eager
to buy a car from a bankrupt manufacturer, bankruptcy
protection would give GM the flexibility to impose new changes
that could help it turn around.
The NYT takes a front-page look at how lobbyists have
descended on the Treasury Department as many companies and
associations are clamoring for their own piece of the $700
billion bailout package. The National Marine Manufacturers
Association, for example, wants boat-financing companies to get
help, and a Hispanic business group representing plumbers and
home-heating specialists wants its members to get hired to take
care of any houses the government may end up owning if it buys
distressed mortgages. Bankers, and particularly community
bankers, are concerned that this push to include different types
of companies in the bailout could end up diluting the effort to
stabilize the financial system.
Sheila Bair, the chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance
Corp. who has been one of the loudest proponents of getting the
government involved to help people stay in their homes, quickly
said the new mortgage-modification plan "falls short of what is
needed." The NYT points out that Bair had said she was close to
reaching an agreement with the Treasury Department on a plan
to spend $50 billion to modify mortgages, but Treasury officials
ended the discussions abruptly last week. The NYT sees
yesterday's announcement as the "clearest sign" yet that the
administration is moving away from proposals that would have
the government refinance a large number of mortgages.
USAT fronts, and everyone covers, Obama's transition team
announcing a set of rules that restricts the way lobbyists can
participate in the transition. Lobbyists will not be able to work in
the subject area they had previously lobbied and will be barred
from donating money for the transition. If someone becomes a
lobbyist after working on the transition, they'll be forbidden
from lobbying the administration for 12 months. John Podesta, a
transition co-chair, recognized that some qualified people might
be left out but said that was a price Obama is willing to pay.
The WSJ points out that the current situation with the Detroit
automakers is just what Obama's aides "had hoped to avoid,
potentially giving the president-elect responsibility for an
emergency" before he can do anything about it. But time is not
Even though it might be true that the restrictions are "the
strictest, the most far-reaching ethics rules of any transition team
in history," as Podesta said, there are a few loopholes. The rule
applies only to registered federal lobbyists, though many
lobbyists don't have to register. As a candidate, Obama once said
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
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that lobbyists "won't find a job in my White House," but
lobbyists are free to work on the transition as long as it's not in
policy areas where they have lobbied.
The LAT says the failure to impose an all-out ban on lobbyists is
merely the latest example of how Obama is turning to seasoned
Washington veterans in an apparent effort to avoid rookie
mistakes. This is more than clear in his transition team, which "is
rife with officials from the Clinton administration." As a
candidate, Obama loved to criticize the Democratic
establishment and often portrayed himself as an alternative to the
politics of the past. But now it's "starting to look as though Sen.
Hillary Rodham Clinton's family empire is living on."
The WP fronts a look at how many students in the Washington
region are taking both the ACT and SAT to improve their
chances at their college of choice. Still, no matter how obsessed
Washington-area students are with college admission tests, they
can't even come close to what South Korean students experience.
The WSJ fronts a piece looking at how the whole country gets
involved when high-school seniors take the nine-hour college
entrance exam. Many offices open late to leave the roads clear
for students, planes can't land or take off when students are
going through the listening portions of the tests, and parents get
together to participate in overnight prayer sessions.
today's papers
What's Good for GM Is Good for Obama
By Daniel Politi
Tuesday, November 11, 2008, at 6:22 AM ET
The Washington Post leads with a look at how things haven't
gone quite as planned for Fannie Mae and American
International Group after the government took them over. Both
say the government set up such strict terms when it effectively
nationalized the companies that it's impossible for them to
succeed. As was already reported yesterday, the government
unveiled a new investment in AIG. In its lead story, the Los
Angeles Times poignantly wonders: "Will $700 billion be
enough?" When an individual company gets so much money, it's
bound to get other industries to wonder why they can't get a
piece of the pie as well.
The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal's world-wide
newsbox lead with President-elect Barack Obama urging
President Bush to extend financial support to the U.S. auto
industry and to back a new financial stimulus package. Bush said
he might be willing to support those measures if Democrats
agree to drop their opposition to the Colombia free-trade deal.
USA Today leads with a look at how many state and local
governments continue to spend heavily despite the ongoing
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
economic slump. In the third quarter, state and local spending
increased 7.4 percent while the governments continued to
increase hiring at a pace not seen in the vast majority of the
private sector. Some insist the increased spending is helping to
soften the economic downturn, but it also means states will be
facing some steep budget shortfalls next year.
The troubles that AIG and Fannie Mae have faced since the
government took a controlling stake in the companies
demonstrates the difficulty that the government faces in trying to
find the right balance between protecting the taxpayer-funded
investment while also making sure the rescue works as intended.
Yesterday, the government not only poured an extra $40 billion
into the ailing insurance company, but it also eased up on its
repayment terms.
For its part, Fannie Mae reported that it had a loss of $29 billion
for the third quarter and said it might need an injection of cash
from the Treasury before the end of the year. While the federal
takeover "has largely stabilized Fannie Mae," as the WP reports,
it has so far been unable to pour money into the mortgage
market because of the strict conditions attached to the capital
that the government made available to the mortgage giant. So
far, the Treasury has proved unwilling to renegotiate the terms of
its agreement with Fannie Mae.
In a front-page piece, the WSJ points out that there was another
clear example of the troubles befalling financial-services
companies in the decision by American Express to become a
bank-holding company, which would make it eligible to receive
cash from the Treasury. General Motors, which has been trying
to convince the government to hand over some money, said
yesterday that it might not be able to fulfill its debt obligations
unless it manages to stabilize its finances.
The government has already committed to use all but $60 billion
of the initial $350 billion that was authorized by Congress. As
the WSJ notes, this means it's likely that Treasury Secretary
Henry Paulson will soon have to go back to Congress to ask for
the second half of the $700 billion bailout. But even that might
not be enough. "The money could go quickly," one expert tells
the LAT.
As an interesting side note, the WSJ points out that the problems
with AIG's bailout could cloud the chances of Federal Reserve
Bank of New York President Timothy Geithner becoming the
next Treasury secretary. He's widely viewed as a top candidate
for the job, but he was a key architect of all the bailouts this year
and the New York Fed has been overseeing AIG for the past two
months.
As Democrats continue to pressure the Bush administration to
extend a helping hand to Detroit's Big Three, the president-elect
took the message directly to the sitting president in their first
post-election meeting. Democrats want the Treasury to approve
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an additional $25 billion to auto makers, which would bring the
total federal assistance to $50 billion. Many key Democrats
insist the bailout package is worded broadly enough to allow
help for Detroit's Big Three, but the Treasury isn't so sure and is
allegedly looking into the issue. Democratic congressional
leaders said they have no intention of calling a lame-duck
session for next week unless they get some assurance that Bush
would support a stimulus package. The NYT says Democrats
aren't too keen on the idea of giving in to Bush on the Colombia
free-trade pact, so they might just wait until Obama takes office
to get what they want.
Speaking of the president-elect, the WP gets an inside look at
Obama's broad plans for Afghanistan and says the Democrat
wants to pursue a more regional strategy, which could include
talks with Iran. As was clear before the election, Obama
supports the already progressing move for dialogue between the
Afghan government and some elements of the Taliban and wants
to step up the search for Osama Bin Laden. Besides supporting
an increase of troops in Afghanistan, Obama's advisers think the
Bush administration has spent too much time trying to build a
modern democracy there, instead of just a stable nation that
rejects extremism and doesn't threaten the United States. There
are also hints that an Obama administration might have more
luck in trying to persuade NATO allies to step up their
commitment to Afghanistan.
Who will direct the nation's wars under Obama? There are still
more signs that Obama might ask Defense Secretary Robert
Gates to stay in his job for at least a year, notes the WSJ. Gates
has made it clear he's likely to accept the offer. Of course, no
decision has been made and some prominent Democrats are also
being considered for the position. But, conveniently enough,
Gates pretty much agrees with Obama on Afghanistan, although
he has often spoken up against the idea of setting a firm
timetable to withdraw troops from Iraq.
The LAT fronts word that Goldman Sachs urged investors to bet
against California bonds even though it also made millions of
dollars helping the state sell some of the same bonds. The piece
was reported jointly with investigative journalism nonprofit
ProPublica, which got its hands on a report that Goldman
presented to investors in September in which it advised clients
on how they could "profit from California's deepening financial
misery," as the LAT puts it. This strategy could effectively result
in an increase in the interest rate the state would have to pay to
borrow money. Although the move isn't illegal, some describe it
as inappropriate and it provides an example of how these
companies can profit several different ways from a financial
instrument. Not only did Goldman make millions by bringing
the bonds to market, it also put forth credit default swaps that are
supposed to protect against a default, even though that almost
never happens with municipal bonds.
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
The NYT's David Brooks and the LAT's Jonah Goldberg both
take a look at the future of the Republican Party from slightly
different perspectives. They both basically agree that the GOP is
now divided between traditionalists and reformers. Goldberg
insists both sides "agree on a lot more than they disagree" yet are
now hampered by "an elephant named George in the room" that
is "blocking each side from seeing what the other is all about."
Once Bush is out of the picture, it'll be easier for the sides to
come together. Brooks is far less optimistic and says the only
thing he's sure of is that the traditionalists will win the short-term
battle. This isn't just because the majority of congressional
Republicans are traditionalists, but also because they rule the
public policy institutions. "In short, the Republican Party will
probably veer right in the years ahead, and suffer more defeats."
Then the reformers will be able to start building new institutions
and putting forward new ideas, "and the cycle of conservative
ascendance will begin again."
today's papers
I Will Follow You
By Daniel Politi
Monday, November 10, 2008, at 6:51 AM ET
The New York Times leads with word that a classified order
issued in 2004 gave the U.S. military authority to carry out
nearly a dozen of what the paper describes as "previously
undisclosed attacks" against terrorist targets in Syria, Pakistan,
and other countries. The order was signed by then-Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and it gave the military the
authority to attack al-Qaida targets anywhere in the world, with a
specific emphasis on "15 to 20 countries" that were believed to
be the prime destinations for militants in hiding. The
Washington Post leads with, and almost everyone else fronts,
news that China announced a $586 billion stimulus package that
aims to prop up the country's slowing economy. The huge
package, which some are comparing to the New Deal, could also
help fight the effects of a global recession.
The Los Angeles Times leads with a new study that found statin
drugs can cut in half the risk that seemingly healthy people will
suffer a heart attack. The findings are bound to be a boon for
statins, which millions of people already take to manage their
cholesterol: Experts say that if this new treatment were widely
adopted, it could help prevent 50,000 heart attacks, strokes, and
deaths each year. USA Today leads with the Sunday interview
tour of President-elect Barack Obama's key advisers, who said
that passing a new stimulus package is one of the Democrat's
main priorities. The aides also made it clear that Obama plans to
move full steam ahead with his plan to repeal President Bush's
tax cuts for those earning more than $250,000 while instituting
new tax breaks that would save 95 percent of working
Americans an average of $1,000 each. The Wall Street Journal
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also leads its worldwide newsbox with the president-elect's plans
but focuses on how he is likely to reverse some of Bush's
executive orders, including the restrictions on embryonic stemcell research.
of time before doctors begin prescribing statins to people with
normal cholesterol levels. "It's a breakthrough study," one expert
tells the Post. "It's a blockbuster. It's absolutely paradigmshifting."
Most of the attacks that came out of the 2004 classified order
were carried out by Special Operations forces, often in close
coordination with the CIA. Despite the order's broad authority,
each mission required approval from the highest levels of
government. And "as many as a dozen" operations were
canceled due to potential problems, "often to the dismay of
military commanders." Although there were debates over
whether to include Iran in the 2004 order, officials ultimately
decided against it and now insist there have been no raids inside
Iran using the secret authority.
The WP fronts a fascinating piece looking at how the Treasury
Department quietly slipped in a nice gift to U.S. banks at a time
when the country was fixated on the debate over the $700 billion
bailout package. Lawmakers were so concentrated on the bailout
bill that it took them several days to realize that the
administration decided simply to change 20-year-old tax policy,
effectively giving American banks a "a windfall of as much as
$140 billion," reports the WP. Lawmakers were angry, and many
tax law experts insist that the Treasury Department had no
authority to do this. But it seems many in Congress are choosing
to keep this quiet for now out of fear that speaking up could
further destabilize the economy, since it might reverse several
recent bank mergers. Getting rid of or changing Section 382 in
the tax code has been a long-running goal of conservative
economists.
So what were these "previously undisclosed attacks" that used
the authority granted by the 2004 classified document titled "Al
Qaeda Network Exord"? The paper's sources aren't talking and
just say they took place in "Syria, Pakistan and other countries."
The only specific example of an attack provided, in fact, is one
that took place in Pakistan in 2006, which hardly fits the
description of "previously undisclosed," since the LAT wrote
about it in July. While there's no doubt that the NYT helps
advance the story about the Bush administration's anti-terrorism
tactics with the details it reveals about this classified order, it
can't really be considered surprising that the military has been
carrying out these types of operations. By late 2006, for
example, it was already clear that Special Forces had been
carrying out secret missions in allied countries that were part of
a classified program designed to help the United States track
terrorist networks.
While China was widely expected to unveil a stimulus package,
its huge size came as a welcome surprise to many economists,
and Asian stock markets surged. The Shanghai composite index
increased 7.3 percent today. Under the stimulus plan, the
Chinese government said it would spend $586 billion over two
years in social-welfare programs, health care, and infrastructure
projects, to name a few. The NYT notes that it's not exactly clear
how the Chinese government came up with the $586 billion
figure, and officials didn't specify how much of the spending
would go to projects that were already in the pipeline.
Statins were so clearly beneficial to patients that an independent
safety monitoring board stopped what was supposed to be a
four-year study after less than two years. In a study that involved
18,000 people, researchers found that statins reduced the risk of
death from heart disease by 20 percent. The study participants
didn't have high cholesterol or histories of heart disease, but they
all did have high levels of a protein known as CRP, which
indicates inflammation. Scientists were quick to praise the study,
saying they finally found an option to prevent the heart attacks
that occur in people without high cholesterol. Checking CRP
involves a simple blood test, so everyone says it's only a matter
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
The NYT and WSJ front news that the U.S. government will be
throwing away its original bailout deal for American
International Group in favor of a new $150 billion package. This
is a striking admission that the initial $85 billion emergency
credit line, which has since grown to $143 billion, failed to
stabilize the ailing insurer. The new deal would give AIG not
only more money but more time to repay the loan at a lower
interest rate. This new package is bound to raise the ire of
Democrats: They're likely to say that while the Treasury seems
all too willing to sink more and more money into AIG, it appears
uninterested in helping Detroit's Big Three.
The NYT's Paul Krugman and the WP's E.J. Dionne Jr. both have
one simple message for Obama: Be bold. Krugman says that
while Roosevelt's New Deal brought real relief to many, it
almost failed because it didn't create as much fiscal stimulus as
many people assume. Roosevelt wanted to be prudent, and now
Obama can't make the same mistake. "It's much better, in a
depressed economy, to err on the side of too much stimulus than
on the side of too little," writes Krugman. For his part, Dionne
says Obama needs to ignore all those who warn him not to
"overreach," because it's clear that the president-elect "has been
authorized to move in a new direction." Obama shouldn't be
afraid to follow Ronald Reagan and make some bold first moves.
In the end, "timidity is a far greater danger than overreaching,"
Dionne writes, "simply because it's quite easy to be cautious."
today's papers
The Big To-Do List
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By Jesse Stanchak
Sunday, November 9, 2008, at 7:27 AM ET
agendas? What would their appointment mean for the
administration?
The Washington Post devotes most of its front page to a package
of stories about the incoming Barack Obama administration. The
paper leads with a piece on the unusually graceful transition
being orchestrated between the Bush and Obama staffs. The New
York Times leads with a look at the issues Obama will try to
tackle first. The Los Angeles Times ran its story on Obama's
priorities yesterday, and so it leads with Congress looking at
using infrastructure spending to stimulate the economy.
Rounding out the WP's Obama package is a pair of stories about
the inauguration. The paper reports that hotel rooms are selling
out all over Washington as people come from around the world
to be part of the historic occasion. Subsequently, the paper fronts
an amusing piece about Washingtonians getting calls from longlost acquaintances looking for a place to crash during the
festivities.
The Bush administration has extended an unprecedented level of
access to the Obama team, especially where the Treasury
Department is concerned. The hope is that a smooth handoff will
provide comfort to the already jittery financial markets. That's
not to say that the old and new guards are really working
together. Obama's team is already working on identifying Bush
administration policies they can quickly undo without passing
legislation, such as lifting limits on stem-cell research.
Obama says fixing the economy will be priority No. 1 when he
takes office in January. But what else will he be tackling straight
away? The NYT explores two philosophies vying for supremacy
inside the Obama transition team. Some staffers favor being bold
and ambitious, taking on every problem at once in order to take
advantage of Obama's momentum. Others want to focus on a
few issues at a time, in order to keep the administration from
being bogged down. Both sides cite historical examples of
presidents flailing in their first months because they tried to do
too little or too much at once. One possible compromise is
focusing on economic-stimulus programs but then using those
programs to support secondary goals like expanded health care
and alternative energy.
Public-works projects have been part of government strategies
for spurring economic growth for decades. But this year, the
LAT reports, Congress and the White House decided that simply
issuing checks to taxpayers would stimulate the economy faster.
But now that the economy appears to be in an extended
downturn, lawmakers are taking another look at infrastructure
spending, which directly creates jobs and provides a slow, steady
trickle of money into the economy. Meanwhile, the WP fronts
coverage of Congress' attempts to shore up the economy by
securing some of the $700 billion in bailout money to aid ailing
Detroit automakers.
The LAT fronts a feature on Obama's "inner circle," focusing on
old friends from school or from Chicago. The trouble with the
story is that it's full of details about how the president-elect relies
on old friends to get him through tough times, but it's noticeably
short on examples of how these people could influence the way
he'll govern. It says that some of the people may well follow him
to the White House but never explains what sort of impact they'd
have. What do these people bring to the table? What are their
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
The NYT goes under the fold with analysis of the suddenly
gracious rhetoric former Obama foes are using to describe his
historic victory. This wild shift in tone is far from universal, and
it probably doesn't translate to an increased willingness to
cooperate, says the paper. The story posits that perhaps it's just
that no one wants to be remembered for booing the first black
president before he even takes office.
Texas didn't turn 'blue' last Tuesday—not even close. But that's
not to say that the Lone Star State will be red forever. According
to the LAT, some Democratic strategists think that just as
growing numbers of Democrat-leaning Latinos helped deliver
New Mexico and Florida for Obama, they might someday put
Texas up for grabs. The story argues that if these trends continue
in state level races in 2010, then a serious push in 2012 or 2016
might not be so far-fetched. If the prospect still seems crazy to
you, Virginia provides a handy example of how a highly partisan
state can turn into a tossup in just a few short years. The WP
goes inside with coverage of the state's changing political
makeup.
The WP fronts a piece on Iraqi security forces' concerns about
the U.S. pulling troops out of Iraq. While violence has died
down there, the paper says the security forces are still heavily
dependent on U.S. forces for support, logistics, and training.
Public defenders across the country are having trouble coping
with the burgeoning number of defendants they represent each
year. Lawyers in several states are refusing to take on more
clients or else they're suing to limit their case loads. They argue
that taking more cases would be unethical, since they're already
unable to give most clients the time and effort necessary to
defend them. The NYT has all the details.
What happens if an uninsured immigrant goes to a hospital in the
United States and ends up needing long-term care? The answer,
as the NYT discovers, is mostly up to the hospital. The patient
might be given the care he needs, even if he can't pay. Or the
hospital might have the patient sent back to his homeland, even
if he came to the U.S. legally. The paper follows several
different cases to show how the discretion of hospital
administrators can make all the difference.
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Remember those nifty swimsuits the U.S. Olympic swim team
used to win all those gold medals? Well, the WP says that they're
quickly becoming commonplace for competitive swimming at
every level, despite costing hundreds of dollars and needing
regular replacements. Some are worried that the cost of the suits
could put competitive swimming out of the reach for lowerincome families and less-affluent schools.
The WP notes inside that when the college basketball season
begins tomorrow, it will do so with a revised 3-point-line, now
set a foot farther back in an attempt to reinvigorate the sport's
ailing midgame. The paper examines the history of the line and
examines a few predictions about the new rule's impact.
Instead of raising the price of common household items, some
manufacturers are simply reducing the size of the package,
effectively charging more for less. Is anyone noticing? The LAT
has the story.
The NYT Magazine explores the Saudi government's plan to use
group therapy to deprogram would-be terrorists.
today's papers
Labor's Loss
By Arthur Delaney
Saturday, November 8, 2008, at 5:58 AM ET
Yesterday was the first Friday of the month. That means the lead
stories in today's newspapers are all about the Department of
Labor's latest monthly statistics, bad ones for the 10 th month in a
row: The U.S. unemployment rate jumped to 6.5 percent as
American employers cut more than 240,000 jobs. The New York
Times highlights the fact that unemployment has reached its
highest level in 14 years. The Washington Post and the Los
Angeles Times focus on President-elect Barack Obama's call for
a new economic-stimulus package. The Wall Street Journal says
the hurting auto industry is Obama's most pressing challenge.
The NYT reports that almost one-third of the unemployed today
receive government benefits, far fewer than their counterparts of
the 1950s, half of whom received checks while jobless. To put a
face on today's recipients of unemployment benefits, the Times
finds a looking-for-work guy who received $562 a month from
Uncle Sam under the benefits that expired last month. Now the
guy's girlfriend is paying the rent, he has a tumor in his foot, and
soon he will be unable to afford health insurance.*
If Congress and the current White House can't agree on a new
multibillion-dollar economic stimulus package by January,
Obama said in his first press conference yesterday that it would
be the "first thing" he'd get done upon taking office, reports the
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
WP. Despite Obama's call for both political parties to "set
politics aside," the White House indicated it would prefer to give
more time to the $700 billion banking bailout before signing off
on a plan from the Democrats that would include extending
unemployment benefits and increasing food-stamp funding.
General Motors and Ford posted big losses and burned through
billions in cash during the third-quarter, reports the WSJ,
prompting the auto giants to warn that without government
assistance they may not have enough cash reserves to operate
later this year. Obama called the auto industry the "backbone of
American manufacturing" and endorsed efforts to convert
factories to producing more fuel-efficient vehicles. In a Page
One story, the NYT says the government faces a tricky choice: A
bailout for GM wouldn't even guarantee the company wouldn't
need another bailout later, but allowing GM to go bankrupt now
would cause a devastating economic ripple effect.
The WP fronts an analysis of Obama's first press conference as
president-elect, reporting that Obama spoke cautiously and
emphasized that he will wait until he actually assumes the
presidency before he tries to "manipulate the levers of power."
Obama said he had spoken to all the "living" former
presidents—after the presser, he had to call former first lady
Nancy Reagan and apologize for saying he would not "get into a
Nancy Reagan thing about … doing any séances." The LAT
declares the séance line to be the president-elect's First Gaffe.
Below the fold, the WP trumpets Japanese convenience stores as
"the most convenient convenience stores on earth," places where
citizens pay their bills, order appliances, book flights, and buy
earwax remover. And the stores do very well, making money
even as the Japanese economy slides into recession.
The LAT takes a look at the rift between the gay community and
the black community in California over the state's newly voterapproved ban on gay marriage, which was largely carried by
black voters. The Times reports that pro-ban robocalls used
Barack Obama's statement that marriage is "between a man and
a woman," even though Obama specifically stated his opposition
to a ban.
Colleges across the country are facing budget cuts and hiring
freezes, according to an A1 NYT story. Rich and poor schools
both are suffering in the current economy, and one way students
are reacting to increased costs and reduced aid programs,
allegedly, is by flocking to their state schools—though the Times
offers a 50 percent increase in applications to one New York
state school as the only evidence of this trend.
The NYT fronts a piece on the potentially devastating impact of
geriatric falls, focusing on the divergent recovery stories of two
particular women, 87 and 93, who both fell and hurt themselves
in July.
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The WP retraces the path of the toxic chemical that found its
way into all kinds of foods in China, sickening tens of
thousands. Chinese officials banned melamine in 2007 when it
was discovered to have poisoned thousands of dogs and cats in
the United States. The melamine scourge continued in China as
farmers bought the powder from con men who told them it could
boost protein in feed and make milk from water. Also to blame:
greedy chemical companies.
A huge African-American crowd is coming to Washington,
D.C., to attend Barack Obama's inauguration in January, reports
the WSJ. The paper calls the event reminiscent of historic black
gatherings here such as the Million Man March and the 1963
rally in which Martin Luther King gave his most famous speech.
Many people are planning to travel to D.C. without booking a
room in advance, and lots of D.C. residents are planning to host
friends and relatives.
Correction, Nov. 10, 2008: This column originally did not state
that the unemployment-check recipient's benefits ran out last
month. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
war stories
War Never Ends
Getting to know the men of Whiskey Six—and the loved ones they left behind.
By Phil Zabriskie
Tuesday, November 11, 2008, at 4:39 PM ET
In my youth, I knew Nov. 11 as my sister's birthday. As I aged, I
learned that it was also Veterans Day. Now, having spent time
with American soldiers in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the
Philippines—and time elsewhere with soldiers from other
nations—I think I have a much better understanding of what the
day is designed to commemorate.
For the last three years, I've found myself looking past Veterans
Day, to Nov. 15, which is now a more significant date on my
personal calendar than many officially recognized holidays. It's
only by a quirk of fate that the day means anything to me, but
that quirk of fate had a lasting impact on me, and far more so on
four different families.
I need to back up a little. In October 2004, I was halfway
through my second stint with Time magazine's Baghdad bureau.
Conditions in Iraq were rapidly deteriorating. Mobility was
limited, reporting increasingly dangerous. And in several places,
working as an embedded reporter almost certainly meant coming
under fire.
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Ramadi was one of those places. Some military men considered
it more dangerous than Fallujah, but, at that point, it still seemed
like a good idea to spend time there with the 2 nd Battalion, 5th
Marine Regiment, one of the outfits trying to keep the city from
spiraling completely out of control. By chance, I was briefly
billeted with the 2/5's Whiskey Company, which was charged
with, among other things, patrolling the main thoroughfare,
known as Route Michigan, which almost guaranteed they'd get
attacked. A week later, I returned for a few days to report on
Ramadi and on combat stress among front-line soldiers.
During that second visit, I mainly rode in company commander
Capt. Pat Rapicault's Humvee, a vehicle with the call sign
Whiskey Six. I'd initially thought Rapicault—"Frenchy" to his
men—was Cajun, but I later learned he'd grown up in
Martinique and France before attending high school and college
in Mississippi and enlisting. He was joined by Cpl. Marc Ryan, a
steely-eyed South Jersey native; Cpl. Lance Thompson, who
hailed from Indiana farm country; and Lance Cpl. Ben Nelson, a
Californian.
Late one night, Whiskey Company rode out to support other
Marines. I sat behind Ryan, who drove. Rapicault was behind
Thompson, who manned the radio, and Nelson was in the
gunner's hole. "We'll probably get hit," Ryan said. He'd know, I
thought; he'd already served a bruising tour in Ramadi with the
2/4 Marines, then he re-upped and came back after spending
only two weeks at home.
Indeed, he was right. Whiskey Company was ambushed twice
that night. Whiskey Six was very nearly disabled by roadside
bombs that detonated a few feet from the front tires. The wheels
were flattened, the windshield spider-webbed and covered with
engine oil. When Rapicault bellowed at Ryan to get moving,
Nelson had to shout down directions so he could steer to safety.
Now I see that night as the most frightening experience I've ever
had. Then, it was part of my job—and even more so, part of
theirs. At the end of the month, my stint in Iraq ended. The battle
for Fallujah commenced. Fighting continued in Ramadi. And on
Nov. 15, I learned from the newspaper the next day, a suicide car
bomber rammed Whiskey Six, killing Patrick Rapicault, 34;
Marc Ryan, 25; and Lance Thompson, 21. Ben Nelson was
seriously wounded but survived.
I didn't know them well, but they may have saved my life. I
happened to be in New York visiting my parents, so I went to
Ryan's funeral in Gloucester City, N.J. Later, I met Rapicault's
older sister, Christine Cappallino, who lived in Poughkeepsie,
N.Y. The next year, on Nov. 15, I joined the Ryans for a
memorial they held at a local bar. Two years later, I visited
Lance Thompson's family, the Rapicaults, and Ben Nelson,
thinking I'd write about how they were handling their losses.
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They were wary but welcoming, still mourning but generous. I
think they felt the stories I'd written for Time about Ramadi gave
them a window into what life "over there" was like for their sons
and helped memorialize them in some way. They, in turn, gave
me a window into their lives and the steps they were taking to
protect and maintain the memories of those they'd lost—the
gatherings, the T-shirts, the stickers and photo books, and the
scholarship funds. I saw Gloucester City High pull out a
stunning last-minute victory on the day they retired Marc Ryan's
jersey. I saw how Lance's brothers, Matthew and Philip, his
cousin Casey, and his mother, Melanie Smith, had all gotten the
same tattoo Lance had on his wrist—the Chinese characters for
gung-ho. And I saw that the Rapicaults, who had moved to a
planned community in central Florida in the 1990s to be nearer
to Patrick, were doing their mourning in isolation. Their English
was shaky, leaving them largely unable to plug into the networks
the Ryans and Thompsons had at their disposal. Cappallino had
moved from New York to Florida to help out her father and
stepmother (then 91 and 74, respectively), but she was finding it
hard to adjust to the new surroundings. More to the point, they
were heartbroken about Patrick, as was Vera Rapicault, his
widow, who had moved to Oregon.
him at one of his low points. And that's true, particularly, I think,
with mourning. It doesn't go away, but if you can make some
peace with whatever happened—whether it's by saying someone
died doing something they loved or performing certain rituals or
finding others who know the feelings involved—it gets a little
easier to meet the days ahead.
Last year, on Nov. 15, Melanie Smith laid four roses at Lance's
gravesite in Indianapolis' Crown Hill cemetery, red ones for
Lance, Marc Ryan, and Pat Rapicault and a white one for Ben
Nelson. "I notice [the anniversary]," Nelson said last year when I
asked about it, but "I miss them just as much every other day."
I don't know exactly what I'll do this Nov. 15, but it's already
been on my mind for a while, and I'm sure it will remain that
way.
war stories
Five Silver Linings
Ben Nelson had improved dramatically and was working
again—as a radio dispatcher for the Plaster County's sheriff's
office—but he still felt the effects of his injuries. The explosion
had collapsed his lungs and severely burned his hands, neck, and
face. Shrapnel had pierced his back, shattered his jaw, split his
tongue, and broken seven teeth. His back and knee were badly
bruised, likely from landing after the blast pressure popped him
out of the turret into the air, which saved his life.
There had been hard times, a few ups—especially the birth of a
daughter, Kaitlyn—and a lot of downs. His father and friends
helped out as they could, but in the main, his greatest asset was
his preternaturally poised wife, Emily. She was 21 when she got
the call telling her Ben was wounded. "She grew up fast," a
friend of hers told me. "She's everything to me," Nelson said last
winter.
Time couldn't run the story I wrote, which was immensely
frustrating for me and, I imagine, for the families as well. But
they were extremely gracious about it. Melanie Smith and Linda
Ryan took to comforting me about it; they told me that it was
meeting each other that really counted. Our connection wasn't
much when measured temporally, and I daresay we had different
opinions about the war itself, but I found myself opening up to
them in ways I almost never do with people I write about.
A lot of people spent more time and faced more harrowing
situations in Iraq than I did, but I think I've learned a few things
about war through my various experiences in conflict zones. The
biggest, I'd say, is that it doesn't really end. It marks the people
who experience it, and it marks their families, too. "It's not what
happens to you; it's how you deal with," Ben Nelson's father told
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
In spite of the obvious challenges, Obama will enter the White House with
some paths to success staked out.
By Fred Kaplan
Monday, November 10, 2008, at 5:48 PM ET
It's a truism that Barack Obama faces the most intractable set of
challenges that any president has faced in at least 50 years. But
on a few issues in foreign and military policy, he's caught a
break. Whether by luck, the effect of his election, or President
George W. Bush's stepped-up drive to win last-minute kudos,
Obama will enter the White House with some paths to success
already marked, if not quite paved.
Iraq. Just a few days after Obama's victory, the Iraqi political
factions seemed much more disposed to sign a new Status of
Forces Agreement with the United States. The SOFA, which is
set to expire at the end of the year, outlines the conditions under
which U.S. troops are permitted to remain in the country. One
condition that Iraq has been demanding is the complete
withdrawal of U.S. combat troops by 2011. Several Iraqi parties
have been reluctant to ratify the accord even then, doubting that
George W. Bush—or, had he won, John McCain—would really
withdraw. But they believe that Obama will. So they're suddenly
more eager to finalize an accord. Some factions are also more
keen to settle their internal differences to avoid a political
collapse or a renewed civil war once the Americans leave.
Obama knows that early in his presidency he'll have to figure out
a way to mount a major withdrawal from Iraq while minimizing
the chance that the Baghdad government falls apart. This new
tenor in Iraqi politics somewhat eases the task.
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Iran. After refusing to talk with Iran for seven years, on the
grounds that "we don't negotiate with evil, we defeat it" (as Vice
President Dick Cheney once put it), the Bush administration is
preparing to set up a U.S. interests office—not quite an embassy
but the beginning of renewed diplomatic relations, a forum for
communiqués, anyway—in Tehran. If Obama is prepared to
offer more elaborate negotiations, as he should be, a forum will
exist for doing so. At the same time, a smart-sanctions campaign
run out of the U.S. Treasury Department for the last two years—
in which international banks have been persuaded to stop doing
business with Iran—seems to be having some effect. Meanwhile,
plunging oil prices have slashed Tehran's cash flow. And
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has been riding high on
this flow, is losing popularity at home. In short, the time may be
ripe for a game of carrot-and-stick diplomacy with Iran, in which
the carrot may be welcome and the stick might really hurt.
Russia. President Dmitry Medvedev's recent rumblings—his
threat to place short-range missiles in Kaliningrad if the United
States proceeds with its plan to install missile-defense batteries
in the Czech Republic and Poland—may, if played right,
redound to Obama's benefit. Obama clearly doesn't share Bush's
misplaced enthusiasm for the missile-defense program; he has
said several times that he would deploy a system if it were
proved workable—a condition that's not likely to pan out. So
Obama now has a good reason to drop the deployment plan—but
with a caveat. He should reiterate Bush's point (whether or not
it's entirely true) that the batteries in Eastern Europe were
designed to shoot down Iran's missiles, not Russia's, and if he's
going to let down our guard on that front, Russia has to help him
keep Iran from building nuclear weapons in the first place—in
other words, Russia has to stop assisting the Iranian nuclear
program and join the sanctions initiated by the United States, the
European Union, and the U.N. Security Council. If this trade can
be made, other avenues of cooperation can also be reopened.
Efforts to revive relations with Russia—crucial for dealing with
such vital issues as terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and stability
in the Middle East—might also be boosted by the latest news
from Georgia. Independent military groups monitoring Russia's
withdrawal are reporting that Georgia might not have been the
purely innocent victim of Russian aggression, after all. The
evidence, though still tentative, seems to suggest that Moscow
was responding to the Georgian military's indiscriminate rocket
and artillery barrage against the semi-autonomous enclave of
South Ossetia. This finding doesn't exonerate Medvedev or Putin
from the brutality of their counterinvasion, nor should it prompt
an abandonment of concern for Georgian independence. But it
does create an opening for rapprochement with Moscow—for
hardheaded national-security reasons—without seeming craven.
North Korea. After six years of refusing to talk seriously with
the North Koreans
about their nuclear program—for the same reason that he refused
to talk
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
with the Iranians about anything—Bush finally signed an accord
that at
least stopped North Korea's plutonium project. However, this
was one case in which their obstinacy was justified. The deal
signed last year was a multiphase arrangement. As part of the
second phase, the North Koreans were to present data on their
nuclear program—at which point the United States was to take
North Korea off the list of nations supporting terrorism. The
North Koreans submitted the data; Bush officials then demanded
that the United States be allowed to verify the information on the
list through on-site inspections. The North Koreans protested—
correctly—that verification is a matter to be taken up in the third
phase. When Washington kept refusing to take them off the
list—largely at the instigation of officials in Cheney's office—
the North Koreans threatened to cancel the whole agreement.
Finally, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sent Assistant
Secretary Christopher Hill to Pyongyang, and the deal was
straightened out. The point is this: In 2000, Bill Clinton left
George W. Bush on the verge of signing a far-reaching
agreement with North Korea on nuclear weapons and missiles—
and Bush tore it up and threw it away. Now Bush is leaving
Obama with a much less-satisfying deal—during Bush's notalking period, Pyongyang built and tested an atomic bomb and
thus gained considerably greater leverage—but Bush is leaving
Obama something to take to the next level without sparking (too
much) partisan rancor.
Military spending. According to a story by Bryan Bender in the
Boston Globe, the Defense Business Board, a senior advisory
group appointed by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates,
recommended huge cuts in the military budget, noting that the
current level of spending on weapons is "unsustainable." Several
private and congressional defense analysts have been making
this point for a few years now; the U.S. Government
Accountability Office recently calculated that the Pentagon's 95
largest weapons systems have accumulated cost overruns
amounting to $300 billion (that's just the overruns, not the total
cost, which amounts to many hundreds of billions more). It's
also clear, from the Pentagon's own budget analyses, that well
over half of the $700 billion-plus budget has little if anything to
do with the threats the United States faces now or in the
foreseeable future. The past seven years have been a free-for-all
for the nation's military contractors and service chiefs; the
number of canceled weapons projects can be counted on one
hand; they've otherwise received nearly all the money for
everything they've asked for. Even many of the beneficiaries
realize that the binge is coming to an end; the nation simply can't
afford it. Obama's fortune is that he can order the cuts, invoking
not his own preferences but the sober-minded urgings of a
business advisory group in the Bush administration.
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