Slate.com

Table of Contents

If you're a philosopher, the easiest way to introduce yourself is not by elaborating a doctrine, but by telling a story. That's because philosophical views are always arguments with previous views, and so they arise within a historical narrative. Susan Neiman is a masterly storyteller; her new book Moral Clarity offers retellings of the Odyssey and the Book of Job that are themselves worth the price of admission. But she also has stories about the origins of her own position that place her in both larger intellectual narratives and more local political ones.

Neiman, an American philosopher who runs the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany, worries that American progressives have drifted away from the values and intellectual traditions of the West, stretching from classical antiquity to the Enlightenment (this is the larger narrative). She is vexed that contemporary conservatism has staked an uncontested claim to these traditions. When George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004 (this is the more local narrative), she recalls, "I was stunned by the claim that voters chose George Bush because they cared about moral values. Either they had been bamboozled or the left had dramatically failed."

Why have moral values become the property of the right? Her diagnosis, in part, is that "Western secular culture has no clear place for moral language, and its use makes many profoundly uncomfortable." She also connects the "rightward turn in American culture" to the reshaping of American conservatism as an intellectual rather than an anti-intellectual movement. As the principle-driven progressive politics of the '60s petered out, the American right discovered the power of ideas.

"Through organizations like the Olin Foundation, Midwestern businessmen who made their fortunes producing chemicals and telephones were sponsoring seminars in the mountains of Hungary on the nature of evil, or flying scholars to Chicago to discuss law and virtue," she writes. "As the right was completing its study of the classics, the left was facing conceptual collapse." The political successes of the right, she argues, were against a left that had abandoned high principle for identity politics—a bad idea in a world in which "everyone, everywhere, was running on moral passion." The Bush era, for her, is the culmination of a trend. In 2004, "whether voters were moved by their views about terrorism, or the war in Iraq, or abortion, what did not decide the most significant election in decades was the bottom line." Accordingly, she urges progressives to reclaim "concepts that have been abandoned to the right: good and evil, hero and dignity and nobility."

Reclamation, for Neiman, starts with rereading. She draws her first lessons from the biblical account of Sodom and Gomorrah, and Abraham's response when Yahweh tells him that He plans to destroy the cities of the plain. "Wilt thou indeed destroy the righteous with the wicked?" the patriarch protests. "Far be it from thee to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from thee! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" When the Lord agrees to spare Sodom if 50 righteous men can be found there, Abraham presses his case: " 'Suppose five of the fifty righteous are lacking? Wilt thou destroy the whole city because of five?' And he said, "I will not destroy it if I find forty-five there.' "

And so the bargaining starts. Neiman's heart is stirred by Abraham's universalism (these are not his people); by his resoluteness (this is God he is challenging); and by his insistence that the details matter (exactly how many just men are there in Sodom?). And because God seems to acknowledge the force of Abraham's moral reasons, the story allows her to assert, on the basis of the Old Testament itself, that we do not "need religious authority to maintain morality." It is an elegant rhetorical move to take a favorite story of the Christian right and extract a progressive lesson: the obligation of human reason to evaluate religion's demands. If you acknowledge with Abraham, she writes, "that serious religion and serious ethics are thus separate matters, you must believe things are good or evil independent of divine authority."

Liberals who grasp this shouldn't be abashed, Neiman thinks, about exploring religious texts as sources of moral insight. She thinks there's plenty that liberals can learn from the ancient Greeks, too. It has been conventional at least since Plato's time to contrast brash, fearless, confident Achilles—hero of the Iliad—with the wily, careful, uncertain Odysseus. For Neiman, Odysseus teaches us something about the possibilities of heroism in our own age. If, like him, "heroes can tremble and cry and falter, you could also become one," she writes.

Yet Neiman may be a cannier reader of the canonical texts than she is of the contemporary political situation. Are progressives truly reluctant to heroize people? A million T-shirts say otherwise. Nor is it clear just how her detailed exploration of Odysseus' journey actually connects with the modern heroes she commends to us, who are distinctly in the fearless, self-sacrificing mold: Daniel Ellsberg, the Harvard-educated Marine with a Ph.D., a defense department insider whose conscience led him to leak the Pentagon Papers; David Shulman, an Israeli professor of Sanskrit and army veteran who risks injury to work with a group of Israeli and Palestinian peaceniks devoted to nonviolent resistance; Robert Moses, fearless leader of SNCC's voting rights work in the '60s, who went on to teach algebra in the inner city; and her cousin, Sarah Chayes, a former NPR correspondent who is helping Afghan women make soap in a collective in Kandahar. (A fellow as crafty and pragmatic as Odysseus would definitely have high-tailed it out of there.) Do we really need Homer's wily wanderer to inspire the relevant virtues?

When it comes to using the language of good and evil, too, it's unclear to me who really needs persuading. The treatment of prisoners by American soldiers and operatives at Abu Ghraib, which she offers as one of her paradigms of evil, is not an event that progressives (or most others) have been inclined to discuss in value-neutral terms. Neiman can leave you unconvinced that the things that horrify her in the Bush administration are really connected with a loss of moral clarity on the left.

If you are a humanist, there is something gratifying about the idea of claiming a rhetoric that resonates with the grandest of our texts and thereby moving our country in progressive directions. (It is also an idea congenial to the creators of the Einstein Forum, which describes itself as "an institutional context for intellectual innovation outside the university.") But I found myself wondering, as I read, whether Neiman had granted a little too much to the self-promotional claims of the Olin Foundation and its ilk. And I wondered, too, whether she might not be overly credulous toward conservative depictions of how liberals think. Though she doesn't discuss Allan Bloom, her project can be seen as a progressive alternative to his Closing of the American Mind. But she may be too quick to accept something like his vision of a liberal culture overtaken by mindless relativism.

It's true that the academy has been host to plenty of radical skepticism, not to mention postmodern posturing. And because the wilder ideas of academics have always attracted disproportionate attention—at least since Aristophanes mocked Socrates in The Clouds—it may have appeared to some that this was all there was. But even in the academy, not to mention the world rumored to be outside it, the ideal of moral clarity seems to be faring rather well. Consider just the field of ethics in our philosophy departments. There are more "virtue ethicists"—devoted to elaborating Aristotle's ideas of the virtuous and the vicious—than you can shake a stick at. (Not that a virtuous person would do such a thing.) Many other ethicists insist on Kant's stern regard for duty and oppose those who claim that the true morality is a matter of a subtle attention to the multiple values at stake in particular cases. Along with the Aristotelian virtue ethicists and Kantian deontologists, there are a slew of Thomists, Realists, and contractualists, all of whom believe in something like the universality of moral values. And that's before we have even come to discussing a single actual moral issue.

So far as applied ethics goes, there are large debates about the morality of abortion or physician-assisted suicide or stem-cell research, polemics about what we owe to the poor at home or abroad, arguments over whether corporations have moral obligations and about which rights, if any, are universal. Neiman suggests that "those whose business is to think about morality have been remiss" in various respects, but a great many ethicists are working on the very tasks she says have been ignored.

Not that any of this much matters on the hustings. Elections aren't final exams, and they aren't referendums on moral theory, either. Neiman's readings of the canon are inventive and illuminating in their own right, but, for better or worse, they don't amount to a political strategy. Maybe the real lesson that Democrats at the advent of the Bush era should have taken from Abraham's argument with God was simply this: Demand a recount.

The press is inundating Hillary Clinton with advice to forget about the presidency, not just this year but for all time, just like Ted Kennedy did after he failed to wrest the nomination from Jimmy Carter in 1980. Kennedy, it is said, hunkered down in the Senate to craft (and, given his current robustness despite recently being diagnosed with a brain tumor, may well continue to craft) the legislation that became his true lasting legacy. This might or might not be good advice. It's terrible history.

I'm not sure exactly where the post-1980 Camelot meme began, but in the May 21 Chicago Tribune, Michael Tackett wrote:

There is another model of a candidate who lost in a close primary, Sen. Edward Kennedy, who on Tuesday revealed he has a malignant brain tumor. He challenged incumbent President Jimmy Carter in 1980 and took his fight to the convention. He was criticized at the time and to a degree marginalized as the rare Kennedy who lost a political race. But over time, he built an impressive record of accomplishment in the Senate.

That same day, John Farmer wrote in the Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger that after 1980 Kennedy dedicated himself to "the most successful rehabilitation of an American political career in recent American history." Five days later, Carl Hulse suggested in the New York Times, "Mrs. Clinton could adopt the model of Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, after he lost the nomination to Jimmy Carter in 1980, and try to become a superior legislator, an approach that could play to her policy strengths."

The following day, Shailagh Murray and Paul Kane wrote in the Washington Post:

In August 1980, with no hope left of winning the nomination, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy conceded defeat to Jimmy Carter in the Democratic presidential race. … And with that, at age 48, Kennedy returned to the Senate, where he committed himself to a career as a legislator, crafting landmark bills on health care, education and immigration. Many Democrats are now pointing to the Kennedy model as a path for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. …

In the June 2 Newsweek, Jonathan Alter wrote,

In 1980, Kennedy launched an ill-conceived challenge to Carter for the Democratic nomination. Despite trailing by 700 delegates, he took the struggle all the way to the convention, where he snubbed Carter on the podium and helped doom Carter's campaign against Ronald Reagan that fall. … Kennedy remarried and, happy at last, devoted himself to the Senate, working across the aisle to amass an astonishing legislative record, particularly on health and education issues.

There are two problems with this Kennedy narrative.

The first problem is that all these accounts either state or imply that after his 1980 defeat, Kennedy abandoned instantly all thought of ever becoming president. In fact, Kennedy strongly considered running in 1984. He decided in December 1982 against running, partly because he thought (correctly) that the incumbent, Ronald Reagan, would be too hard to beat and partly because his children had urged him not to run. Next Kennedy considered, somewhat less strongly, a presidential run in 1988. He decided against that in December 1985. Not until then did Kennedy conclude definitively that his future lay in the Senate, not the Oval Office. In a prepared statement (drafted by Bob Shrum), Kennedy said, "I know this decision means that I may never be president. But the pursuit of the presidency is not my life. Public service is."

In sum, Kennedy did give up all thoughts of running for president, but not until more than five years after the post-1980 Camelot meme has him doing so.

The second problem with these accounts is that they either state or imply that the stellar legislative record Kennedy has racked up in the Senate is somehow the product of his post-1980 redemption. In fact, while Kennedy achieved quite a lot in the Senate during the past 28 years, he achieved even more during the 18 years before that. That isn't because Kennedy slowed down but because, during the earlier period, change was easier to achieve—partly because the Democrats held a comfortable and longstanding majority in the Senate and partly because Kennedy-style liberalism stood at high tide during most of the 1960s and 1970s. (The Democrats lost the Senate majority in 1980, regained it narrowly in 1986, lost it again in 1994, and passed it back and forth with the Republicans during most of the current decade. Sean Wilentz has labeled this entire era, with some justice, "the age of Reagan.")

In 1965, Kennedy was floor manager for an immigration-reform bill that ended a system dating back to the 1920s that favored Northern European immigrants at the expense of others, particularly Asians. In 1972, Kennedy sponsored Title IX, the law that required schools to devote equivalent resources to girls' and boys' sports. In 1974, Kennedy sponsored the campaign finance bill that limited the size of political donations and established public financing in presidential elections. In 1978 and 1979, Kennedy was a crucial player in deregulating the airline and trucking industries. Nothing Kennedy achieved after 1980 can match the long-term impact of those five laws.

Since 1980, Kennedy has logged many fine achievements, both as legislator and as leader of the loyal opposition. He fought Senate confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, he introduced the Americans With Disabilities Act, he co-sponsored the State Children's Health Insurance Program, he helped Bush pass No Child Left Behind, and so forth. If Kennedy had done nothing before 1980, he would still be considered a highly productive and effective senator. One might also argue that for Kennedy, achieving anything after 1980 was so much more difficult, due to the changed political climate, that this period of his life ought to be singled out for special praise. But to suggest that Kennedy became an important and highly effective legislator only after 1980 is not only a willful misreading of history; it's also, weirdly, a disservice to Kennedy, who learned the Senate ropes fast and put them to good use. Which, come to think of it, Hillary seems likely to do as well.

In the May 29 "Movies," Dana Stevens wrote that Sex and the City, the TV series, ended in 2005. It ended in 2004.

In the May 28 "Hollywoodland," Kim Masters misspelled Ari Emanuel's last name.

In the May 23 "Politics," Jeff Greenfield incorrectly spelled the name of singer Crystal Gayle.

In the May 22 "DVD Extras," David Zax misspelled Carrie Fisher's last name.

In the May 21 "Explainer," Chris Wilson mistakenly stated that Aron Ralston amputated his own arm in 2005. The incident occurred in 2003.

In the May 20 "Dispatches," Joshua Kucera originally stated that Azerbaijan suffered the loss of nearly 20 percent of its territory. Most analysts estimate the loss at closer to 14 percent.

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.

When Lost made its immensely successful debut in 2004, it averaged 16 million viewers per episode. Critics routinely called it the best show on television, using terms like "intricate" and "complex" to describe its narrative structure and its seemingly high-concept subject matter. But ratings have been declining steadily, and this year, despite ABC's massive advertising campaign, nearly 5 million people have abandoned the show. That's a shame, because only in the current season, which ends Thursday night, has Lost achieved complexity and intricacy worthy of the critical attention it's been receiving all along.

Throughout the first three seasons, the Lost writers took a "more is more" approach to thematic layering. They dabbled in postcolonial theory, pitting the attractive, tank-top-clad plane crash survivors against island natives, an unkempt group in flannel and polyester called "the Others." Allusions to social-contract theory popped up regularly. When Jack, the survivors' de facto leader, sees that his companions are reluctant to unite, he warns "If we don't live together, we're gonna die alone." And judging from names alone, you'd be excused for thinking Lost was a show about Enlightenment philosophes: There's a bald guy named John Locke and a mysterious French woman named Rousseau.

Lost was dense with allusions and knotty with themes, but none was particularly deep or meaningful. The mumbo-jumbo may have given the show a pleasing patina of sophistication, but viewers kept tuning in because they were hooked on the mystery of the island, not because they wanted a refresher course on Two Treatises of Government. Nor were the early seasons' vaunted narrative techniques actually all that innovative. Each episode followed an obvious structure reminiscent of a three-panel comic strip. The first few minutes advanced the central plot (the survivors vs. the Others). The next 30 minutes were filled with character-developing flashbacks to the survivors' pre-crash lives and with soapy romantic tension: Jack loves Kate, Kate loves Jack and Sawyer, Sawyer loves Kate. The last few minutes returned to big, arc-advancing events and introduced a new mystery, which in turn was developed in the first minutes of subsequent episodes. Consider "All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues," an episode from Season 1. In the first act, Jack discovers that one of the Others has taken Claire, a demure blonde from Australia, hostage. Throughout the long middle act, Jack, while looking for Claire, has flashbacks to the day his father cut a patient's artery during surgery. In a brief final act, Locke finds a mysterious object buried in the forest …

Even from a seasonal, rather than episodic, perspective, Lost was fairly simple. Here's a breakdown of the first three years: 1) Are there other people on this island? 2) There are other people on this island. 3) Oh, my God, the other people on this island are way mean!

But in the last episode of the third season, something unexpected happened. Instead of flashbacks, the show flashed forward to a time when six characters—called the Oceanic Six—have somehow managed to get off the island. The flash-forwards, which in Season 4 have largely replaced the flashbacks, may seem like more of the same—an opportunity for character development to fill the space between cliffhangers. In fact, however, the writers have shaken themselves out of the old formula—and are finally attempting a truly high-wire narrative move.

In the flash-forwards, the camera acts like an unreliable narrator. Not in the Wayne Booth sense, in which a first-person narrator deceives his audience by relaying false information. Lost isn't The Usual Suspects. It's more like Muriel Spark's novella The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which uses an irregular time sequence to disorient the reader: We're told in a prolepsis that the title character has been dismissed from her job as a teacher; only much later do we learn the circumstances of her firing. In Lost, the viewer doesn't know how many years have elapsed since the Oceanic Six left the island, or what happened in the meantime. Did the other crash survivors die? Are they stuck as they were before? Or have they managed to escape off-camera? Without these vital plot points, viewers don't know whether to think of the Oceanic Six as heroes or as Judases who have somehow betrayed their comrades.

Throughout the first three seasons, Lost viewers knew more about the characters than the characters knew about one another. We knew that Jack and Claire were half-siblings; we knew that Kate was a fugitive, having torched her father's house. This season, the Lost writers have changed the game: It's unclear how much the characters have learned by the time depicted in the flash-forwards. We no longer have a leg up on the characters, or at least we're no longer sure that we do.

Take, for example, the episode "Something Nice Back Home," in which we see Jack and Kate raising Claire's baby, Aaron, together. During a fight, Jack snaps, "you're not even related to him!" In the past, Jack has treated the boy with relative indifference, not realizing that he is, in fact, a blood relation. Has Jack learned, at some point during the ellipsis, that he is Aaron's uncle? If so, he seems to be asserting his natural rights to the child and calling Kate's into question. If he hasn't, then it's a classic example of dramatic irony, in which the audience can find more meaning in a character's words than the character knows are there. (Only in a later episode, after weeks of uncertainty, do we learn that Jack had indeed discovered his connection to Claire and that his comment was a slight.)

Uncertainty has, of course, always been a part of Lost. From the beginning, the show's writers have masterfully deployed two conventional techniques for getting the viewer's heart rate up: surprise and suspense. A polar bear jumps out of the forest. Surprise! If Locke doesn't enter the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42 into a computer every 108 minutes, the whole island might blow up. Suspense! Alfred Hitchcock thought suspense was the more effective technique, because it lasts longer. But what Lost has accomplished through its flash-forwards is even more nerve-racking. Instead of waiting for a bomb to go off or not go off, it's as if the viewers have been transported to a time after the bomb has or has not exploded—only we don't know which. Without a frame of reference, the viewers experience epistemological anxiety, doubting even their most basic assumptions about the world the characters live in.

There's a debate currently raging among Losties over whether the show's writers are making things up as they go along, like ordinary TV scribes, or have always had a master plan—a rarer, more impressive feat. Perhaps the most cunning result of the flash-forwards is that they seem to support the latter argument: If the writers are showing us the future, they must have a damn good idea of how to get us there. But that's just an illusion. The flash-forwards work like a zoom lens, revealing a detail that doesn't make a whole lot of sense without the big picture. The writers can still fill in that big picture as they wish. Previews indicate that Thursday's finale will take a step toward connecting the present and the future. Here's hoping the writers don't get their soldering irons out too quickly—they'd be abandoning their most impressive trick yet.

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 boyfriend of four years recently told me about an odd fetish he's dealt with all his life: He is fascinated by adult diapers and would like to wear them occasionally. If he had told me about this years ago, it probably would have been enough for me to end the relationship, because it genuinely bothers me. Though I love him and find it hard to imagine life without him, I'm having a difficult time thinking of him sexually, or even talking to him, now that I know about his strange fantasy. It's like his confession has transformed him into a different person. It was very difficult for him to tell me about this, and when he saw my reaction, he apologized for bringing it up. I know he feels awkward and ashamed, but I can't bring myself to comfort him or to say it's all right. I can't accept it, don't want to hear him speak of it, and don't want to think about it. But I don't know how to explain to him how deeply his fetish disturbs me without really hurting our relationship. I am worried that if I ask him not to speak of it anymore, he will be afraid to open up to me in the future. What should I do?

—Wiped Out

Dear Wiped,

Now we know there is at least one person in the world actually looking forward to the day he loses control of his bodily functions and ends up wearing nappies. Actually, your boyfriend is not alone—here's the Wikipedia entry about people with paraphilic infantilism and the one about people who call themselves D.L.s, or diaper lovers. I know it's hard to absorb this news, but try to imagine the anguish your boyfriend has felt over the last four years wanting to tell you and wondering whether he would lose you if he did. While there are some women who can explore the deep kinks in their partner's psyche (think of the stories about couples who stay together after the husband has undergone a sex change), you clearly are not one of them. I understand that the image of your boyfriend looking like Baby Huey is killing your libido, but remember that the man you love is not a different person; he's the same man who harbored these fantasies all along. And now that the diaper's out of the bag, you two simply can't pretend he's never mentioned his fixation. For one thing, you've got the little problem of the fact that you can't bring yourself to speak to him. You could try to get past this impasse with some humor. Perhaps tell him you two need to talk, but you definitely don't want to know whether he prefers cloth or disposable. Ultimately, his confession may have so shattered your conception of the two of you that you won't be able to go on. But since you say you can't imagine life without him, consider seeing a counselor together to at least make sure you don't come to a rash conclusion.

—Prudie

Dear Prudence Video: Hair in My Food

Dear Prudie,

My partner of three years and I are not married by choice. We own a home together, share our lives in every way that a married couple does, are legally recognized as common-law, and are now expecting a baby together. So what is the problem? My partner's brother is getting married in a few weeks, and his fiancee's family has a "tradition" that I am very uncomfortable with. If a younger sibling marries before an older sibling in this family, the older sibling is expected to perform a dance during the reception during which he is jeered at and teased for not yet tying the knot. My partner is expected to do this dance, and because he is the type of guy who hates to "rock the boat," he is going through with it. I can't stand this ridiculous "tradition." I don't want to make a fuss, but I also don't want to feel slighted by people I consider to be my family on what should be a lovely day for everyone. Should I make a strong objection to the dance or just smile and put up a good front?

—Sit This One Out

Dear Sit,

If the older sibling is gay, does the family stone him or her during the finale? Every family has its special customs that outsiders may find ridiculous or perplexing but go along with just to be polite (think of Garrison Keillor on the seasonal Scandinavian delicacy lutefisk). But surely one can draw the line at ritual humiliation. In addition, this is not your partner's family's appalling tradition; it's your partner's brother's fiancee's family's appalling tradition. Your partner should simply say thanks for the lovely opportunity but that he's not much of a dancer, so he'll take a pass. If he won't, you can find yourself having an extended stay in the ladies' room during the fun.

—Prudie

Dear Prudence,

I'm in my early 20s and live far away from my family. I don't get to see them as often as I'd like to, which leaves me feeling especially guilty, as my grandparents are getting older and, in their own words, "don't have much time left." I'll be moving back to my hometown in a few months, just for a short while, and I'm planning on spending some much-needed quality time with everyone. While I have the chance, I'd like to tape-record an interview with my grandparents—there are so many things I don't know or won't remember, and this could be a chance to talk about what their lives have been like, what they remember about their families, and so on. Partly, though, the idea sounds a little morbid, and I'd hate for them to think I'm dwelling on their deaths. My parents, for their part, don't really see why I should be interested in this in the first place. Should I drop it?

—Sentimental

Dear Sentimental,

Don't let your parents' indifference talk you out of this wonderful idea. Your grandparents will likely be thrilled that their beloved granddaughter wants to hear their stories. And the project is not morbid; it's a celebration of their lives. I'm sure you'll find out many things you've never heard before—that even your parents have probably never heard. How great it will be when you have your own children to have this record of their great-grandparents. And don't be surprised if when they get older, your parents suggest that maybe you would like to sit down with them and bring out the camcorder.

—Prudie

Dear Prudence,

A good friend and I both have toddlers and are now pregnant with our second children. Our daughters both have first names that are unusual but not exotic. My friend recently told me that if her second-born is a girl, she would like to give her the same name as my daughter. Though, rationally, I know I have no claim of exclusivity on my daughter's name, my friend's intention irritates me. Am I wrong to think that this is a breach of unspoken baby-naming etiquette among family and good friends? Does such etiquette really exist? If so, what would be a diplomatic way to object? Would it be sneaky to involve an intermediary to point out the unspoken rule?

—Knocked Up and Bent Out of Shape

Dear Knocked Up,

I understand your irritation, and there's one thing you can do about it: nothing. You acknowledge you have no special claim on this name, so let it go. Try to turn your thinking around and see this as a flattering tribute to your taste and your daughter's lovely personality (no one chooses a name they associate with someone they don't like). If your friend ultimately uses the same name, on the occasions you are all together, your daughter will likely be thrilled to be known as "Big Edna" while the baby is "Little Edna." And there's a 50-50 chance she'll have a boy and all this will be moot.

—Prudie

As the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting looms, Hillary Clinton cranks her electability argument up to 11. But Obama continues to woo superdelegates. Odds of survival hover at 0.5 percent.

Clinton is now fighting tooth and nail to see that the DNC's rules committee seats the delegates from Florida and Michigan at the convention in August. She continues to push for full seating, but that scenario remains extremely unlikely. Obama campaign manager David Plouffe suggests they're willing to compromise. The reason: They can afford to. Even the best-case scenarios don't have Clinton closing Obama's 195-delegate lead.

So Clinton is pushing her "popular vote" argument harder than ever. In a letter to superdelegates today, she wrote that "when the primaries are finished, I expect to lead in the popular vote and in delegates earned through primaries." The popular vote is within reach, assuming huge turnout in Puerto Rico. (Her claim that she's currently winning it is disingenuous, though, since that count includes Michigan, where Obama wasn't on the ballot.) The pledged-delegate count—or whatever she means by "delegates earned through primaries"—not so much.

Clinton also argues she isn't hurting the party by staying in the race; she's helping it. "I believe that if Senator Obama and I both make our case—and all Democrats have the chance to make their voices heard—everyone will be more likely to rally around the nominee," she writes.

But the crux of her argument is that she will win in the general, as opposed to Obama, who merely can win. Propping up her case today was a Gallup survey showing that Clinton outperforms Obama against John McCain in states whose primaries she won. In states Obama won, Clinton and Obama perform about the same against McCain. The poll bolsters her argument that her primary victories have some bearing on her strength in the general election (although polls in May have little bearing on the outcome in November). That her victories include swing states like Ohio and Pennsylvania gives her a solid talking point.

Still, Obama picks up three more superdelegates today. The campaign says it's now 46 delegates away from securing the nomination.

For a full list of our Deathwatches, click here. For a primer on Hillary's sinking ship, visit our first Deathwatch entry. Send your own prognostications to hillarydeathwatch@gmail.com.

Hillary Clinton's ill-advised invoking of RFK's assassination might have damaged her campaign if there were anything left to damage. Meanwhile, Obama closes in on the current magic number of 2,026, bringing Clinton's odds of winning the nomination to 0.5 percent.

On the list of campaign no-nos, hinting at the possibility of your opponent being shot is up there. Yet that's what some people thought Hillary meant when she told the editorial board of the Sioux Falls, S.D., Argus-Leader that Democratic nominations often extend into June: "My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don't understand it."

The New York Post led the way, blaring, "Hillary Raises Assassination Issue." Drudge quickly followed. The Washington Post fronted the story, albeit less sensationally. But little consideration was given to what Clinton meant. (Watch the video and draw your own conclusions.) Never mind that she had said the same thing to Time back in March and no one noticed. Never mind that her calendar argument is misleading in the first place: Her husband may not have mathematically secured the nomination until June, but he was the presumptive nominee in March; RFK was still campaigning in June because the primary calendar started so late. The focus was on the "assassination" comparison. "We have seen an X-ray of a very dark soul," opined the Daily News' Michael Goodwin. That or a very click-hungry media.

Luckily for Clinton, the "news" broke late Friday and appears to have run its course. The downside: She's nowhere to be found in today's top stories.

Meanwhile, the delegate count is the closest thing Clinton has to a death clock. Obama picked up six more superdelegates over the weekend, mostly add-ons from state conventions. Clinton got one. Today Obama nabs a Wyoming super, bringing his total count to 1,975.5, according to NBC, or 50.5 delegates away from the 2,026 needed to win the nomination. (Hence the 0.5 percent, according to our new formula.) But that magic number is likely to shift after this weekend, when the DNC's Rules and Bylaws Committee decides whether—or, more likely, how—to seat the Florida and Michigan delegations. If the outcome heavily favors Clinton (as this proposal would), it could turn Puerto Rico into Clinton's Last Stand.

For a full list of our Deathwatches, click here. For a primer on Hillary's sinking ship, visit our first Deathwatch entry. Send your own prognostications to hillarydeathwatch@gmail.com.

DAMASCUS, Syria—Khalid Mishaal, the exiled leader of Hamas, isn't packing his bags just yet, but his comfortable headquarters in a Damascus suburb could be closed down soon. In a surprise announcement last week, Israel and Syria confirmed indirect peace talks for the first time in eight years. Israel has long demanded that Syria cut ties with groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, but now the Golan Heights are on the negotiating table once again, and the stakes have changed dramatically.

In a late-night meeting, Mishaal was relaxed and smiling. He offered me green tea with ginger and a plate of semolina cookies. Mishaal recited a Quranic verse to open the hourlong interview, but that was his only reference to religion. Mishaal was all about divining the recent momentous events in the region: Israeli-Syria peace talks brokered by Turkey and an agreement, mediated by Qatar, to avert a new Lebanese civil war. The agreement confirmed Hezbollah's power and Syria's regional influence. It was a surprisingly peaceful conclusion to an 18-month confrontation that had escalated into a street war in West Beirut. Both deals, seemingly concluded without U.S. involvement and counter to the Bush administration's policies, will affect Palestinian politics.

"The question has been asked," says Mishaal, "why did the Arabs move because of Lebanon, but they can't do this for the Palestinians?" He was referring to the successful compromises that sealed the Lebanon deal, a model of what Mishaal called a "no-win, no-lose" formula where local adversaries agree to share power. "This is what we want internally—reconciliation on the Palestinian side."

In January 2006, Hamas defeated the corrupt and ineffective Fattah movement in parliamentary elections; by 2007, a Palestinian civil war drove Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his administration out of the Gaza Strip, leaving rival governments operating in the West Bank, under Abbas, with Gaza under Hamas control. Negotiations over a unity government have stalled.

When I ask him why he believes the no-win, no-loss model didn't work in Palestinian negotiations, he said, "The United States and, more precisely, the Bush administration prevent Palestinian reconciliation."

While the administration was mostly absent from last week's major breakthroughs, President George W. Bush has staked much of what is left of his foreign-policy political capital on a peace track between Israel and the Palestinians. The administration has been adamant that it is opposed to any openings or dialogue with Hamas.

As for the latest announcement that Syria and Israel are prepared to open peace talks again, Mishaal said that he supports Syria's decision but that he believes these talks will come at the expense of the more difficult and complicated Palestinian negotiations. He did not make these views public in Damascus in the days following the announcement, only talking about his reservations in a news conference a few days later in Tehran, where his views were more in line with Iran's leadership and are likely to cause tensions in the close alliance between Syria and Iran.

When I asked whether Hamas' position in Damascus could be at risk if Israel and Syria reach a settlement, Mishaal's response left the question unanswered. "We are not a card in any hand, we are a liberation movement. Hamas is capable [of working] under different circumstances. Our real battle is inside Palestine."

The Syrian regime has moved against Palestinian groups in Damascus before, most recently when it shuttered the media offices of Islamic Jihad and Hamas in 2003. After the Syria-Israel talks were confirmed last week, former Syrian Information Minister Mahdi Dahlallah was quoted as saying that if there is a peace agreement, "There will no longer be any need for resistance," a reference to Hezbollah in Lebanon but also to Hamas.

In a sign of the importance of peace talks with Israel, Syrian President Bashar Assad took a personal role in the Lebanon negotiations, pressing Hezbollah to make last-minute concessions to seal the deal—the election of a compromise candidate for president, a power-sharing agreement in the Cabinet, and a formula for parliamentary elections in 2009. If negotiations for Lebanon had failed, that news would have overshadowed Syria's success in opening serious, though indirect, talks with Israel.

But Hamas has cards to play, too. Despite the Bush administration's warning against "appeasing extremists" through dialogue, Hamas has had a flurry of contacts in the waning months of the Bush administration. Mishaal confirmed that the French government has opened a political dialogue with Hamas, despite a rebuke from Washington. There is also "communication" with other European countries, he said. Mishaal joined diplomats at Norway's National Day reception in Damascus this month. It is recognition that Hamas has support among Palestinians and will have to be engaged for the peace process to move forward.

Even Israel is talking to Hamas, with Egypt serving as the go-between in indirect negotiations over a cease-fire in Gaza. Opinion polls show a majority of Israelis want the government to go further, supporting direct talks with Hamas about Gaza and the release of Israeli soldier Cpl. Gilad Shalit, who was seized inside Israel near the Gaza Strip in July 2006.

In April, former President Jimmy Carter visited Damascus for talks with Hamas. Carter spoke of a breakthrough, saying Hamas was prepared to accept Israel's right to "live as a neighbor next door in peace." The former president insisted that Hamas would not undermine Palestinian President Abbas' efforts to reach a peace deal with Israel, although Hamas insists that a referendum must be held to confirm any deal Abbas makes. Carter was criticized by the Bush administration and by Israeli officials, but for Hamas, Carter's visit opened the door for others to consider engagement. It was the beginning of a shift from the black-and-white polarization of the Bush years to a recognition that the power players in the region come in varying shades of gray.

Mishaal acknowledged that the Carter visit was "fruitful," and he repeated his pledge to Carter that Shalit would be allowed to write a letter to his family. "The president requested the letter, and it's out of respect for Carter we have agreed to that. We requested from our brothers in Gaza that they allow that letter, and it will be coming soon."

Mishaal dismissed the prospects of progress on Palestinian issues during the remainder of Bush's term. The Palestinian-Israeli peace track has shown little progress so far. Mishaal is waiting for the U.S. election to change the political landscape, and this seems to be the Syrian posture as well. They are eager to engage in indirect talks with the Israelis for the next few months, but they insist that serious U.S. involvement will be necessary to guarantee a final deal.

Mishaal insists that the Bush administration will never allow reconciliation between the feuding Palestinians factions as long as this president is in office. "The American administration is supporting a corrupt party to topple Palestinian democracy with arsenals and weapons. And that was shown in Vanity Fair magazine."

This was a surprising reference for a militant Islamist leader. Vanity Fair published an article in the April 2008 issue alleging that the Bush administration conspired with a Palestinian warlord and his militia men to engineer a Palestinian civil war to reverse Hamas' election victory. For Khalid Mishaal, this was proof that the American media had finally taken the Palestinian side in this long conflict. More important for him, it also signified that the long rule of the Bush administration was finally coming to a close.

Ahead of Sunday's primary, Hillary Clinton is up by 13 points in Puerto Rico, maintaining a 51 percent to 38 percent lead over Barack Obama, according to a new Vocero/Univision poll released this week (in Spanish).



The poll, taken from May 8 through May 20, also provides some insight into how Puerto Rico would sway in the general election if its votes counted. According to the poll, 72 percent of respondents indicate they would favor the Democratic candidate in November, regardless of who won the nomination. By comparison, only 10 percent of Puerto Ricans say they would vote for John McCain. The rest are either undecided or chose not to answer the question. However, we should reiterate: Puerto Rico's votes do not count in the general election.

Regardless, more than 60 percent of Puerto Ricans still believe their commonwealth can play some role in deciding the Democratic contest.

Election Scorecard uses data supplied by Mark Blumenthal and Charles Franklin at Pollster.com.

	Delegates at stake:
	Democrats	Republicans
	Total delegates: 4,049 Total delegates needed to win: 2,025	Total delegates: 2,380 Total delegates needed to win: 1,191
	Pledged delegates won by each candidate: Obama: 1,661; Clinton: 1,499 Source: CNN	Delegates won by each candidate: McCain: 1,500 Source: CNN
	Want more Slate election coverage? Check out Map the Candidates, Political Futures, Trailhead, XX Factor, and our Campaign Junkie page!

.

.

The crew on the International Space Station had to make emergency repairs to its toilet—and use an emergency urinal—after a part responsible for collecting liquid waste malfunctioned. What do astronauts do with all the sewage that gets collected?

Send it back to Earth or eject it into outer space. Space toilets separate solid and liquid waste, and the solid waste is tightly bagged until it can be removed. (For detailed accounts of how you go to the bathroom in space in the first place, check out these descriptions by astronauts.) On a space shuttle, solid waste is compressed, stored, and then brought back to Earth. The space station, on the other hand, deposits the solid waste onto an unmanned vehicle (known as a "Progress module") that is eventually released toward Earth, burning up on its re-entry into the atmosphere.

Historically, space vehicles have released urine overboard. Because of the low temperatures outside, the wastewater quickly freezes into small crystals. (Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart once described a urine dump at sunset as "the most beautiful sight in orbit.") But urine, like just about anything else humans leave in space, can turn into orbital debris. A study conducted off the Mir space station in the mid-1990s identified "flake depressions" suspected to be caused by human waste. And even tiny objects can cause damage if they are orbiting at high velocity: In one 1983 mission, a paint flake created a crack in the space shuttle Challenger's window, and wastewater was initially suspected as a possible cause of the 2003 Columbia disaster. In fact, the risks posed by frozen pee are limited: Orbital-debris experts say it is likely to sublimate from a solid form directly into gas within an orbit or two. In addition, waste that is released from the shuttle should be moving in the same direction as the spacecraft, limiting the possibility of a collision.

Although NASA technology has improved markedly since the days of urine collection and transfer assemblies and "Apollo bags" (which are still used as backup in case of a toilet malfunction), the space shuttle still has a system that dumps wastewater (PDF) during orbit. On the space station—which currently uses Russian technology—urine is instead sent back to Earth along with the solid waste, on a Progress module.

In the near future, astronauts may begin to recycle their waste products. Later this year, NASA will send up a new system that should be able to convert urine—along with humidity in the air—into clean water. Once it is up and running, the system should be able to recover about 90 percent of the water in the urine and provide much of the water supply needed for the space station. (The rest of the urine becomes a concentrated brine disposed of as usual.) And in the future, the feces created in space may not go to waste, either: NASA is funding research on a fuel cell that would convert human waste into electricity.

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks Nicole Cloutier-Lemasters and Gene Stansbery at NASA's Johnson Space Center and Bob Bagdigian at NASA's Marshall Space Center.

A British nonprofit released a report Tuesday on the widespread sexual abuse of children by international peacekeeping troops and humanitarian aid workers. Twenty-three organizations were linked to such cases, with United Nations forces making up a disproportionate number of alleged offenders. Who's responsible for the bad behavior of U.N. peacekeepers in the field?

Troop-contributing nations. U.N. member countries are expected to volunteer portions of their armed forces to serve in peacekeeping missions; currently there are nearly 75,000 troops on active duty, the vast majority of whom come from developing nations in Africa and South Asia. Contributing nations maintain exclusive jurisdiction over their military troops, which means that neither the United Nations nor the host country can take legal action against soldiers. Though the United Nations has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to sexual exploitation and abuse, the most severe action it can take is repatriation of the accused—at the contributing nation's expense—and, if the accused is eventually found guilty, a block on future service in U.N. missions. Investigations into serious violations of U.N. rules, which include sexual exploitation, are conducted by members of the U.N. Office of Internal Oversight Services, and the final decision to repatriate is made by the New York headquarters of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations. In 2007, large numbers of Moroccan peacekeepers in Ivory Coast and Sri Lankan troops in Haiti were sent home for sexual offenses.

Repatriated military offenders rarely face criminal prosecution in their home nations, however, largely because of a lack of political will and reluctance on the governments' part to publicly admit to acts of wrongdoing. In addition, cases are often thrown out because evidence gathered on the ground by U.N. investigators fails to meet the nation's own criminal-procedure standards. Sufficient evidence can be difficult to collect in unstable conflict zones, particularly in communities where issues of sexual abuse carry heavy social stigma. In recent years, the OIOS has taken steps to streamline and professionalize its investigative procedures, and the DPKO has established a Conduct and Discipline Unit with eight field offices. (The report released Tuesday noted that the United Nations' commitment to investigate and publicize allegations of abuse probably contributed to the high number of reported cases within its ranks.)

Military personnel are only one category of U.N. peacekeepers, however. There are also large numbers of civilians in the field, including U.N. officials, non-U.N. specialists known as "experts on mission," and civilian police units. These staffers have legal immunity regarding acts performed in their official capacity, with the highest-ranking officials enjoying the same privileges as diplomatic envoys. The secretary-general can waive this immunity—and therefore allow a case to be brought to trial in the host country—if he determines that the accused was acting in a nonofficial capacity and that the local government has sufficient legal systems in place to conduct such a trial. Since most conflict zones lack proper judicial and police organizations, immunity is rarely waived.

Civilian personnel found to have committed offenses can be fined, demoted, suspended, or—most drastically—summarily dismissed and repatriated. As with military peacekeepers, civilians who have been sent home often escape further punishment, and for similar reasons. In addition, many countries claim that they lack the extraterritorial jurisdiction to prosecute civilian crimes committed outside their boundaries. Problems may also arise when U.N. rules conflict with the contributing nation's laws. For example, a 2003 bulletin from the secretary-general stipulates that sex with children under the age of 18 is strictly prohibited for all peacekeepers, but the age of consent may be lower in a given peacekeeper's home country.

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks Katherine Andrews of the Henry L. Stimson Center and Dominic Nutt of Save the Children UK.

Humankind's latest envoy to Mars, the spacecraft Phoenix, touched down near the planet's north pole on Sunday. If all goes as planned, Phoenix will begin collecting soil samples next week in a search for evidence that basic organisms could survive on the planet. What is Phoenix looking for?

Carbon, of course—and all sorts of other things. Phoenix is equipped with a pair of onboard mini laboratories that can develop a detailed picture of the soil's chemical content. First of all, scientists are looking for traces of organic molecules—the fundamental building blocks of life. But Phoenix is also measuring things like the acidity of the soil, the presence of nitrogen, and the amount of water attached to minerals in the soil, to name a few. Together, all these data will help researchers determine whether the conditions on the planet were ever favorable for the development of life as we know it.

While scientists are interested in just about anything we can find in the Martian soil, many of their measurements will focus on carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur—a set of life's essential elements known to biologists as "CHNOPS."

To assemble the data, Phoenix will collect soil samples with its robotic arm and feed them into the two onboard laboratories. In the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer, the sample is gradually heated in a miniature oven up to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. Because different molecules become liquids and gases at different temperatures, this slowly separates the different components of the soil. The separated gases are then fed into a device known as a mass spectrometer, which detects the presence of isotopes—aberrant versions of an element with an unusually heavy or light nucleus. The prevalence of isotopes in the soil samples is an important clue in determining the chemical history of the soil and the behavior of water on the planet. For example, the presence of enough "heavy" water molecules—i.e., those that carry extra neutrons—might suggest that liquid water flowed across the surface of the planet.

The second lab, known as the Microscopy, Electrochemistry, and Conductivity Analyzer, measures the pH of the soil and detects minerals and salts that wouldn't show up in the oven. Using its onboard chemistry set, Phoenix mixes the soil with a variety of reagents to learn more about its chemical properties. The MECA lab also contains two microscopes that are capable of analyzing the structure of the soil and how water has shaped it in the past. Researchers have already tested the MECA lab in Antarctica and will use the results from that expedition as a reference for what they find on Mars—a process one scientist referred to as "comparative planetology."

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks William V. Boynton of the University of Arizona, Mike Gross of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Samuel P. Kounaves of Tufts University.

The Sex and the City movie begins, of course, with a voiceover: Sarah Jessica Parker, as a pensive Carrie Bradshaw, intones that women come to New York looking for two things: "love and labels." If the phrase rings a bell, you may be thinking of "Love or Labels," the heavily promoted song that Fergie contributed to the film's soundtrack. The sentiment, though—the idea that acquiring designer goods is an aspiration on par with matrimony for young female New Yorkers—is new. Although TV Carrie was a sucker for Manolo Blahnik and an ostentatious dresser, she wasn't a label whore. The movie, on the other hand, can't get enough.

Consider, for example, the scene in which Carrie suffers through an awkward phone call and then stands forlorn ... and perfectly framed in the window of a Diane von Fürstenberg store. Or the one where a sex-starved Samantha fills her Mercedes with boxes from Gucci. Or the one where Carrie gives her assistant—so destitute she has to rent a Louis Vuitton bag, the poor thing—her very own Vuitton. Or the endless scene in which Carrie tries on a succession of wedding dresses—sorry, reader: I'm not telling you whether she marries him—breathlessly panting the name of each designer as she poses and preens: "Vera Wang … Carolina Herrera … Lanvin … Dior … Vivienne Westwood." As the montage trudges on, you begin to consider the negotiations required to amass these garments. Did Herrera decree that her first name be used? Did each designer demand a certain quantum of screen time? What did Vivienne Westwood do to assure her gown would come out on top?

Although this labelmania is hardly surprising—why shouldn't a series known for its fantastical clothing recruit and then flatter such heavy hitters?—I found it disappointing. This is not to say the clothes in the film are bad. Many of the outfits are glorious. (I'll take two of the Miranda-in-therapy suits and one Carrie-buys-a-copy-of-Vogue fedora.) But there are fewer vintage pieces, fewer off-kilter touches, and the movie, with its emphasis on big-name designers, seems to ignore what the show got right about clothes: that dressing up is a way to invent different versions of yourself.

Why, after all, did Carrie dress like such a kook? Take her now-iconic tutu, besmirched each week in the TV show's opening credits. (I will reveal that the tutu has a cameo in the film—and looks spotless! Forget Carrie's unrealistically nice apartment. Who does her dry cleaning?) Initially, I suspect, such outfits served as a sort of shorthand, marking Carrie as a "creative type" distinct from preppy Charlotte, businesslike Miranda, and sophisticatedly slutty Samantha.

Eventually, though, the clothes became something more than just shorthand. Although television Carrie was ostensibly a writer—tap-tap-tapping at that Mac in ballerina-hued tanktops—her hokey prose always strained the credibility of the premise. Her real genius, we came to see, lay in the closet: Her creative outlet was getting dressed. Television Carrie was a woman who took a costume designer's approach to her own life, plotting oddball outfits for brunches and ball games alike. When she briefly dated a politician in Season 3, Carrie channeled Jackie O. in big sunglasses and vintage Halston (trying on, and eventually rejecting, both the man and the look). When she ran a few errands in Season 4, she adopted this post-apocalyptic vaudeville newsboy vibe—because why not be a badass from an alternate dimension when picking up some flowers and the paper?

There were labels throughout, of course—that post-apocalyptic newsboy is wearing Fendi mules—but Carrie mixed it up, combining dime-store finds with high-end pieces, wearing fur to Yankee stadium and a white tuxedo jacket over a threadbare Mickey Mouse T on a date. Above all, she valued looks that showcased the unexpected. (That and her great legs.) Some of these were beautiful, and some were pure disasters, but, regardless, Carrie offered an admirable model of how a woman should relate to her wardrobe: She should not unthinkingly adopt the latest thing; she can admire high-end designers without worshipping them; she should use her clothes as a means to express who she is and to become who she wants to be.

At first, America didn't get the message: Women seemed to think dressing like Carrie meant dressing like Carrie, and a thousand fake flower corsages bloomed. The character also did wonders for the brands she loved, making the formerly rarified wares of Christian Louboutin and Jimmy Choo must-haves for women across the country. Eventually, however, women found more subtle ways to pay homage to their favorite newspaper columnist, running out to buy her latest pair of shoes, yes, but also channeling her mix-and-match spirit. Indeed, the current emphasis on "the mix"—on combining high and low with élan, on serving as your own stylist—can be attributed, in part, to the Carrie aesthetic. (The citizens featured in New York's Look Book, the cover girls of Lucky, the elegant sophisticates anointed by the Sartorialist: You're more likely to hear them bragging about unexpected combinations than name-dropping Fendi and Chanel.)

Which is why it's disconcerting, in this movie, to find labels playing such a prominent role. For TV Carrie, labels were one way to get from point A to point B. For movie Carrie, they are point B. (It's true that a vintage suit plays a small and valiant role in the film. But it gets a lot more mockery than reverence.)

In another movie, this labelpalooza wouldn't be so depressing. But on Sex and the City, clothes have always served as a metaphor. Carrie's sartorial creativity symbolizes what's most appealing about her character: her openness to life and her belief that there are countless good ways to live it. The film shows us a Carrie with narrowed horizons—both sartorially and romantically. Television Carrie created her own fantasies; movie Carrie gets hers off the rack. Labels or no labels, there's nothing to love about that.

The other night, I was having dinner with some friends in a fairly decent restaurant and was at the very peak of my form as a wit and raconteur. But just as, with infinite and exquisite tantalizations, I was approaching my punch line, the most incredible thing happened. A waiter appeared from nowhere, leaned right over my shoulder and into the middle of the conversation, seized my knife and fork, and started to cut up my food for me. Not content with this bizarre behavior, and without so much as a by-your-leave, he proceeded to distribute pieces of my entree onto the plates of the other diners.

No, he didn't, actually. What he did instead was to interrupt the feast of reason and flow of soul that was our chat, lean across me, pick up the bottle of wine that was in the middle of the table, and pour it into everyone's glass. And what I want to know is this: How did such a barbaric custom get itself established, and why on earth do we put up with it?

There are two main ways in which a restaurant can inflict bad service on a customer. The first is to keep you hanging about and make it hard to catch the eye of the staff. ("Why are they called waiters?" inquired my son when he was about 5. "It's we who are doing all the waiting.") The second way is to be too intrusive, with overlong recitations of the "specials" and too many oversolicitous inquiries. A cartoon in The New Yorker once showed a couple getting ready for bed, with the husband taking a call and keeping his hand over the receiver. "It's the maitre d' from the place we had dinner. He wants to know if everything is still all right."

The vile practice of butting in and pouring wine without being asked is the very height of the second kind of bad manners. Not only is it a breathtaking act of rudeness in itself, but it conveys a none-too-subtle and mercenary message: Hurry up and order another bottle. Indeed, so dulled have we become to the shame and disgrace of all this that I have actually seen waiters, having broken into the private conversation and emptied the flagon, ask insolently whether they should now bring another one. Again, imagine this same tactic being applied to the food.

Not everybody likes wine as much as I do. Many females, for example, confine themselves to one glass per meal or even half a glass. It pains me to see good wine being sloshed into the glasses of those who have not asked for it and may not want it and then be left standing there barely tasted when the dinner is over. Mr. Coleman, it was said, made his fortune not from the mustard that was consumed but from the mustard that was left on the plate. Restaurants ought not to inflict waste and extravagance on their patrons for the sake of padding out the bill. This, too, is a very extreme form of rudeness.

The expense of the thing, in other words, is only an aspect of the presumption of it. It completely usurps my prerogative if I am a host. ("Can I refill your glass? Try this wine—I think you may care for it.") It also tends to undermine me as a guest, since at any moment when I try to sing for my supper, I may find an unwanted person lunging carelessly into the middle of my sentence. If this person fills glasses unasked, he is a boor as described above. If he asks permission of each guest in turn—as he really ought to do, when you think about it—then he might as well pull up a chair and join the party. The nerve of it!

To return to the question of why we endure this: I think it must have something to do with the snobbery and insecurity that frequently accompany the wine business. A wine waiter is or can be a bit of a grandee, putting on considerable airs that may intimidate those who know little of the subject. If you go into a liquor store in a poor part of town, you will quite often notice that the wine is surprisingly expensive, because it is vaguely assumed that somehow it ought to cost more. And then there is simple force of custom and habit—people somehow grant restaurants the right to push their customers around in this outrageous way.

Well, all it takes is a bit of resistance. Until relatively recently in Washington, it was the custom at diplomatic and Georgetown dinners for the hostess to invite the ladies to withdraw, leaving the men to port and cigars and high matters of state. And then one evening in the 1970s, at the British Embassy, the late Katharine Graham refused to get up and go. There was nobody who felt like making her, and within a day, the news was all over town. Within a very short time, everybody had abandoned the silly practice. I am perfectly well aware that there are many graver problems facing civilization, and many grosser violations of human rights being perpetrated as we speak. But this is something that we can all change at a stroke. Next time anyone offers to interrupt your conversation and assist in the digestion of your meal and the inflation of your check, be very polite but very firm and say that you would really rather not.

Why Washington welcomed the Doha agreement—the deal that put an end to the political stalemate in Lebanon—is anyone's guess. You can take Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at her word and believe that she believes the agreement is a "positive step toward resolving the current crisis." Or you can assume that was the only option if the United States wanted to see a deal done. The agreement was signed, and Washington had no choice but to pretend that it was a good one.

So much so that Rice's assistant for Middle East affairs, David Welch, felt the need to praise even the most unlikely regimes: "If Syria and Iran have supported that," he said, "then perhaps they will continue to exercise a more constructive role in Lebanon." If he had his fingers crossed behind his back, no one saw. If he winked as he suggested such an improbable outcome, nobody noticed. But Welch knows, as do all the others, that neither Syria nor Iran are suddenly planning to play a "constructive" role in Lebanon. If they support the agreement and the United States also supports it, pretty soon one party is going to look stupid.

The Doha agreement is a series of mostly bureaucratic measures—necessary in the most complex of systems that is Lebanese politics. One such step was completed Sunday with the elevation of Gen. Michel Suleiman—a Christian relatively close to Syria—to the presidency. A more important component will be tested in the future: There's an understanding that Lebanon will hold elections in 2009—that's assumed to be the main achievement of Lebanon's pro-democracy factions.

So the agreement has achieved its short-term goal—after weeks of clashes in which more than a hundred Lebanese citizens died, a full-fledged civil war was averted. And as for the long term? Maybe there's no such thing in the Middle East—especially when discussing the future of Lebanon.

The Lebanese understand this painful truth better than anyone else. Their deep-rooted mistrust of all the other players in the region—and beyond—is justified, considering circumstances and history. They fear that Lebanon will be the one to pay the price for a regional grand deal. And last week they had an even stronger reason to worry: As Syria and Israel announced the resumption of peace negotiations, the Lebanese could easily foresee that their sovereignty would again be compromised in return for a change in Syria's behavior.

That's one of the reasons the Bush administration was so reluctant to see a resumption of the Syria-Israel talks. In the last couple of years, Washington has changed its attitude toward Lebanon. A country that was mainly seen as a minor player—a chip on the regional trading table—is now a just cause.

President Bush and Secretary Rice have publicly committed themselves to a more democratic Lebanon. (During the 2006 Lebanon War, Rice was ridiculed for stating that the conflict represented "the birth pangs of a new Middle East.") They try to treat Lebanon not as a playing field on which Israel, Syria, and Iran can war with one another in a contained fashion but, rather, as a real country. Sometimes, they seem to believe this even more than the Lebanese themselves do.

President Bush has praised Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora on many occasions. "He's a good guy; he's tough, and he's in a really tough situation. I admire him," the president told me in an interview two weeks ago. And Washington even backed its new commitment with action. Over the last two years, it has provided Lebanon with more than $300 million worth of equipment and training.

But in recent weeks, the Lebanese military—which is supported by the United States—decided to stay on the sidelines rather than clash with Hezbollah militants when Hezbollah demonstrated its power by taking over parts of Beirut. Hezbollah was willing to cave on many political components of the Doha deal. Its main interest and achievement was not in the shuffling of Cabinet seats but, rather, in avoiding any attempt at disarmament of Lebanese factions by the Lebanese state. The international community, knowing full well that Hezbollah will be the most challenging roadblock on the way to a peaceful, democratic Lebanon, was suddenly silenced. A deal is a deal—and if this is what the Lebanese people want, no one will be able to stop them.

This, essentially, is what Jeffrey Feltman, principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs and until recently the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, said even before the recent crisis was resolved at the Doha talks. About two months ago, Feltman was a guest at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. "The international community," he said there, "has been supporting an agenda defined by the Lebanese themselves and not imposed from the outside with the combination of the broad Lebanese domestic desire and the international backing that leads to success." In other words: The Lebanese have to lead—the world will follow.

This might be the realistic, perhaps even the noble, way of handling a country. The problem is that the decisions the Lebanese have recently made only increase the likelihood that they will eventually be abandoned by the international community. "There is no contradiction between having a foreign policy that looks at Lebanon as Lebanon and also sees how Lebanon fits into our regional calculations," said Feltman. That is true, unless "Lebanon as Lebanon" makes decisions that render it easier for regional forces to meddle in its affairs. Choosing a pro-Syrian president might be such a decision. Avoiding the question of disarmament might be another such decision.

"Hezbollah does not want power over Lebanon, nor does it want to control Lebanon or govern the country," Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah vowed on Monday. Why would he want such a thing? He already has the power he wants—the power of arms. As long as no one tries to confront him, he has no problem letting the government take care of the less important aspects of daily life.

If the Doha agreement proved anything, it is that regional forces are now taking things into their hands, brokering a deal that is far from ideal but that buys some quiet for the time being. The Bush administration will be gone pretty soon; the Israelis and the Syrians have started to talk; Hezbollah can quietly get more arms from Iran via Damascus. All the components for a future that is not much different from the past are in place.

That is, unless the Lebanese people decide to take matters into their own hands. In his Saban Center talk, Feltman described a cable he sent from Beirut just one day before the "March 14" demonstrations swept Lebanon, leading to the withdrawal of Syrian forces and to the most hopeful period in Lebanon's recent history. "So there was nothing at all in my cable of March 13, 2005, about the fact that the following day more than a third of Lebanon's population would turn out in a mass demonstration that changed Lebanon's history," he confessed. Feltman and the international community did not help initiate these demonstrations, nor did they understand the impact they would have.

The one thing the international community could do was to support Lebanon after the fact. That was the case in 2005—and it's the case today. So will Lebanon eventually be abandoned? That's for the Lebanese people to decide.

Ah, the rituals of American spring: the unpacking of the flip-flops, the exchanging of leaf-blowers for lawn mowers, the first traffic jams on the highway to the beach—and the annual spate of reports on the stressful lives of high-school seniors. Last year, in the months between winter college-application deadlines and spring college-acceptance letters, the New York Times infamously ran what amounted to a multipart series on the subject, printing columns and letters with titles like "Young, Gifted, and Not Getting into Harvard," as well as meditations such as the one on the Massachusetts high school that requires its overworked students to do yoga.

But this year is no different. Only days ago, the Times again ran a piece on the Westchester high school that now requires its overworked students to eat lunch, while the Washington Post described, with a certain amount of awe, a Maryland couple who track their five children's complex school and sports schedules on a color-coded spreadsheet. This sort of thing is not unique to New York and Washington, of course, you can find the same kinds of articles in USA Today, Time, or Newsweek. I know this for a fact, because a lot of these stories invariably turn up in the "Most Popular Article" lists, where, just as invariably, I click on them.

There is nothing strange about these stories. Since the university admissions process really is unbelievably fraught, readers of newspapers, many of whom might have college-bound children, naturally find them engrossing. But there is also a weird way in which these stories, and the very real national conversation that inspires them, reflect a kind of schizophrenia in American ideas about education, one that I didn't fully appreciate until I moved abroad.

Without question, Americans, whether wealthy or just upwardly mobile, are nowadays obsessed with preparing their children for a supercompetitive, globalized job market. They will therefore go a long way—switch neighborhoods, borrow money, create color-coded spreadsheets—to get their children into high schools that force them to study and test them regularly. Those who play the game most intensively are often rewarded: The child who takes 15 AP courses, plays the clarinet in three orchestras, runs a Cambodian refugee camp in the summer, and eschews lunch all winter really does have a better chance of getting into college than the child who plays kickball after school in the empty lot next door.

Yet at the same time, the parents of many driven children, raised on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Little House on the Prairie, retain a kind of nostalgia for a pre-industrial America, one in which childhood involved breaking horses and building rafts, in which "schooling" was optional, and in which dropping out was a romantic option. Layered on top of this collective memory is often a rose-colored recollection of their own high-school experience, a Happy Days whirl of sports, proms, and dates. Today's children always seem to be working harder than yesterday's children, having less fun, and taking more tests, at least according to everyone I know.

It's notable, this nostalgia, because it isn't necessarily shared by other countries. Certainly not by the British, some of whose children start taking serious, life-changing exams at age 11, nor by the Koreans whose children declare they can't let themselves "waste even a second" during their 15-hours-a-day, seven-days-a week quest to get into college, preferably Harvard. In fact, any country committed to meritocracy has to impose exams on its high-school seniors. Otherwise, university admissions will necessarily depend upon wealth, access, and parental connections.

More strangely, our nostalgia also clashes oddly with the other important American education narrative, the one that focuses on the 46 percent of high-school seniors who test below the "basic" level in science (only 2 percent qualify as "advanced"), the "Dumbest Generation" of semi-literates glued to their cell phones, and the enormous number of teenagers—a stunning one-third of the total—who fail to graduate from high school on time. Since 38 percent of these teenagers recently told one survey that they dropped out because "I had too much freedom and not enough rules in my life," it's no surprise that solutions to the drop-out crisis often involve the imposition of stricter school regimes, with more organized hours of teaching, more pressure, and, yes, more testing.

Thus are our kids both stupider than we were and harder working—though perhaps this makes sense. America is, after all, the industrialized country with the fewest paid vacations, as well as the only nation, as far as I know, that considers the "pursuit of happiness" a fundamental right. We invented the assembly line, and we invented the modern notion of "leisure." So, welcome back to work today, if you even bothered to take Monday off. Spring is here, the beaches beckon—and you've only got a few weeks left to find an impressive summer job for your high-school junior.

On May 4, the blubbery carcasses of six sea lions were discovered inside a trap at Bonneville Dam in Oregon. Animal rights advocates suspected they'd been murdered as part of a long-standing dispute over the complicated ethics of wildlife management.

It began in the late 1990s, when hungry sea lions from the coast started traveling 145 miles up the Columbia River and decimating a local population of endangered Chinook salmon. Fearful that the fish would go extinct, an unlikely alliance formed between commercial fishermen and conservationists. They pressured local wildlife managers to take action, and in March, the federal government granted permission to kill or transplant up to 85 California sea lions per year. But the Humane Society opposed the plan and filed a series of injunctions in district and federal courts to block it. So when sea lion bodies showed up earlier this month, the animal lovers wondered if someone had ordered a hit.

The question of how to balance the lives of a few pinnipeds against the continuing existence of an entire species reflects an important question: At what point do the rights of an individual animal trump the welfare of an entire ecosystem? Should we murder a few sea lions to save a whole bunch of salmon? For a fish-friendly conservation group like the Wild Salmon Center, support for the cull seems like a no-brainer. But what about broader-based organizations like the Sierra Club? Do the folks who respond to their polar bear cub campaigns understand that species preservation can be cruel—and that saving the environment has little to do with animal rights?

The dream of conservation is to restore the natural world to a time before forests were felled, rivers were poisoned, and species were exterminated. American naturalist Aldo Leopold wrote that "the land is one organism," implying that Mother Earth has a dignity all her own. But to preserve these ecosystems, conservationists must trample the rights of individual animals. An avid hunter, Leopold himself saw no conflict between killing and conservation. Today, wildlife managers prop up species in decline while mandating population control among those that have become too successful. Totalitarian measures that would be shunned in human society—hazing, mass sterilization, forced relocation, and sometimes genocide—are all part of the conservationist's toolbox. I consider myself green-minded, but I can't accept the idea that we should sacrifice compassion to save every single species on the planet.

First off, the public—and the legal system—are not so quick to dismiss animal rights. Last year, James Stevenson, founder of the Galveston Ornithological Society, faced up to two years of jail time on charges of animal cruelty after shooting a cat that he believed was killing endangered piping plovers. Indeed, according to the National Audubon Society, feral cats kill hundreds of millions of native birds and small animals in the United States each year and are second only to the loss of wilderness in causing species extinctions. Does that mean the cat's painful death was worth less than its incremental contribution to the loss of bird species? Apparently flummoxed by this question of environmental ethics, the jury deadlocked—and prosecutors have decided not to retry the case.

The picture is just as fuzzy when it comes to those who try to prevent the murder of animals. In 2002, the National Park Service bombed California's Anacapa Island with a rodent-killing poison to wipe out nonnative black rats, which were scarfing down the eggs of local seabirds. Outraged by this indiscriminate killing, activist Rob Puddicombe and a companion traveled to the island to administer an antidote to the poison. They were arrested and charged with "feeding wildlife" and "interfering with a federal function." Puddicombe was cleared in 2003, but his companion pleaded guilty and was fined $200. (Their efforts didn't pay off: The rats were exterminated.)

The conservationist accepts death and suffering as a natural product of the competition for resources. But faith in free-market biology doesn't always lead to laissez faire environmental policies. In order to preserve biodiversity, the conservationist might intervene to promote the welfare of one species over another, on the grounds that not all animals are created equal. The EDGE of Existence program of the Zoological Society of London combines two scores—extinction risk and evolutionary distinctness—to prioritize species that will maximize the genetic diversity of life on Earth. Screw the Beluga whale (No. 272); we need to save the Cuban solenodon (No. 2)!

While humans may find much to appreciate in Earth's menagerie, it is hard to argue that preserving DNA can justify the murder of a sentient being. Sea lions are remarkable creatures. Some believe their cognitive abilities rival those of chimpanzees: In 1993, a female sea lion at the University of Santa Cruz named Rio became famous for being the first nonhuman animal to understand the transitive property—if A equals B, and B equals C, then C equals A. Single females are known to baby-sit young pups while their mothers go fishing. And with social animals, the murder of one may well traumatize the entire group, as has been documented in elephants. Salmon, on the other hand, have a brain that looks like a knotted shoelace, and some scientists argue that the absence of a neocortex means the fish lack a psychological experience of pain.

We may have a sense of what it means to kill an innocent sea lion, but it's hard to anticipate the moral consequences of an ecosystem's downward spiral. If we take a consequentialist view of ethics, we cannot distinguish between an action and a lack of action. If the only way to stop a mass murderer were to kill him, and I refused because of my belief that it is wrong to kill, then I would no doubt be responsible for the murderer's future victims. Even if this murderer were severely intellectually disabled—the cognitive equivalent of a pinniped—I would still be compelled to kill him.

Taking this tack, ecologists may argue that it's worth killing sea lions to save the salmon. Salmon eat smaller fish in marine estuaries and carry key nutrients up river systems, where the salmon themselves become food for other fish, birds, and mammals. According to one study, more than 40 species of mammals and birds in Alaska feed—at least some of the time—on salmon and their eggs. Bears and eagles fertilize evergreens with the salmon carcasses they dump onshore. If salmon vanished tomorrow, some animals would find other places to live and other things to eat, but the net effect might be an increase in the number of deaths due to starvation—and a curtailment of whatever pleasure human and nonhuman animals derive from the presence of salmon.

The tricky part is figuring out what those effects would be. A sound conservation ethic cannot be based exclusively on a vague principle of biodiversity or the sanctity of the natural world. Instead, it must respect the interests of sentient beings. We have to ask ourselves if saving salmon will lead to the greatest good for the greatest number, or if the pain inflicted by trapping and killing sea lions year after year will overwhelm whatever greater good is done for our planet.

The truth is that thorny ethical questions like this one can sometimes be avoided altogether. In the dispute over the Columbia River, conservationists and animal rights advocates alike believe that the real problem at Bonneville Dam is the existence of Bonneville Dam. Without that man-made structure, the salmon would not face the bottlenecks that prevent many from getting to their spawning grounds, and sea lions would not find themselves perishing inside a metal trap. So, the one thing we can all agree on is our own misanthropy: We shouldn't be holding animals accountable for the damage humans have wrought.

In his new book, Now the Hell Will Start, Brendan I. Koerner tells the story of an epic World War II manhunt: the quest to find Herman Perry, a black soldier who shot and killed a white commanding officer, then disappeared into the jungles of Burma, where he joined a tribe of headhunters and eluded capture for months. The book is an amazing piece of reporting—part thriller, part history—that got its start as a Slate "Explainer." When Koerner wrote the column back in 2003, he came across an account of an Air Force translator who'd been charged with spying for Syria. "If convicted of the spying charges," noted the New York Times, "he could face the death penalty." As Koerner researched this "Explainer" (detailing which offenses, when committed by military personnel, are punishable by death), he encountered the following tidbit: "Pvt. Herman Perry, murderer who long evaded capture by living with Burmese tribe, 1944-1945." Koerner's curiosity was piqued—it sounded so very Kurtz. Five years later, Koerner presents Now the Hell Will Start: One Soldier's Flight From the Greatest Manhunt of World War II, which tells Perry's story in full.

Click here for a slide show about Herman Perry.

.

.

Cafeteria contretemps: They may have hugged it out, bitch, but that doesn't mean that Ben Silverman and Ari Emanuel* have made peace.

Silverman has a reputation for being a flamboyant guy who likes a good party. Those invited to his late-night upfront soiree earlier this month at the Empire Hotel were greeted by bikini-clad models. (That might not quite compare to the tiger at his Emmy party a few months back, but still.) In January, he was living it up at the Super Bowl in the box of the Giants' owners—effusively praising fellow guest Michael Bloomberg and suggesting that the mayor would make an awesome subject for a reality show.

But it hasn't all been good times. In recent months, Silverman has clashed with high-profile agent Ari Emanuel, famous not only for his own outrageous persona but for being the inspiration for Ari Gold of Entourage.

A few weeks back, Silverman missed a meeting with David Maisel, chairman of Marvel Studios (which just brought you a little movie called Iron Man). Maisel apparently was arriving at the NBC offices when he was told that Silverman would not be there for an 11 a.m. meeting. The agent seething on the scene was Emanuel, who represents Marvel in the television arena and who, as it turns out, was already irked with Silverman.

In fact, Emanuel had already blown up at Silverman for a slight involving another client, Peter Berg (executive producer of Friday Night Lights). We're told it was a missed meeting, though Berg tells us that there was no missed meeting, adding for the record that he's very grateful to Silverman for coming up with a way to keep his ratings-challenged show on NBC's air.

While still simmering about the Berg incident, Emanuel arrived at the executive dining room at Universal, where he was to have lunch with film studio chairman Marc Shmuger. As fate would have it, Shmuger's boss—Universal Studios chief Ron Meyer—was meeting Silverman there that day. In fact, the two couples were in adjoining booths. When Emanuel spied Silverman, he delivered a tongue-lashing, touching on Silverman's lifestyle and its impact on NBC-Universal's business. He didn't whisper.

We're told that Emanuel expressed similar negative thoughts to Silverman's boss, Jeff Zucker, which naturally did not endear Emanuel to Silverman. (Silverman declined to comment, as did Emanuel.)

At the lunch, the almost-always-affable Ron Meyer tried to keep out of the line of fire. But we're told that afterward he advised Silverman to mend fences with Emanuel. Eventually, the two met and at least nominally made up.

A source says that later the very same day, however, Silverman attended a party where he was overheard expressing some negative opinions about Emanuel. And another guest promptly relayed that information to Emanuel. (link)

In front or upfront?: This evening, NBC's "experience" will be taking the place of the usual upfront presentation. Recall that the network said it would forgo all of that this year, opting for the "in-front" session several weeks ago. So instead of filling Radio City Music Hall with advertisers and the press, as usual, the network will instead have reporters walk through some sort of display that will expose us to the many facets of NBC—including its mighty cable properties and the Internet stuff that CEO Jeff Zucker bored us with in upfronts past.

This is a weird year for the upfronts. The writers' strike converged with ongoing digital-revolution-related problems plaguing the industry to throw everything out of kilter. The networks have said they wanted to cut back on the hoopla, anyway, though some think that's not such a great idea. If you're going to brag about being the greatest aggregator of eyeballs, this thinking goes, you gotta keep the show in show business. But it's not going to happen so much this year. Only Fox is going for the full-on upfront presentation. The others are austere—no Tavern on the Green party for CBS, no rousing Dancing With the Stars turn at Lincoln Center from ABC entertainment president Steve McPherson. (That was two years ago now, but that was a show. We've never looked at McPherson quite the same way.)

Shari Anne Brill, who analyzes programming for advertisers, says she's concerned that this year's upfront won't provide her with the usual dose of clips from upcoming shows. That's partly due to the strike, though in some cases NBC is boasting of going straight to greenlighting shows without a pilot. Brill thinks that idea is rubbish, by the way. "If you don't have a pilot, that's going to hurt your success rate," she warns. "Pilots allow you to make adjustments."

Brill seems piqued with NBC generally. She wanted to take a look at Kath and Kim, an upcoming remake of an Australian sitcom. (Like so much of NBC programming—The Office, the planned Office spinoff, American Gladiator, The Biggest Loser—the show comes from Reveille, NBC Entertainment co-chairman Ben Silverman's former company. Happily for him, the fact that he gets paid for getting his own shows on his network doesn't bother parent company GE.)

Brill, concerned that she won't get to see clips from NBC's version of Kath and Kim, got hold of an episode of the Australian original. "That thing makes Married With Children look like The Brady Bunch," she says. (To be clear, that is not a good thing in her mind, though Married With Children had quite a run and it may be a great thing in Silverman's mind.) All in all, Brill seems unimpressed with Silverman's progress to date. "Everything that he's done has been an acquisition," she says. And she says talk of an Office spinoff has gone on for so long that she's beginning to doubt that the project will jell. "He doesn't have an Office spinoff," she says tartly. "He has spin."

Well, we'll see, won't we?

NBC is also poised to announce today that Jimmy Fallon will replace Conan O'Brien when the latter takes over Jay Leno on The Tonight Show next year. In time, that ought to set off an interesting round of musical chairs. Leno won't be able to make a new deal for six months, per his NBC contract, but he isn't likely to take a break longer than he has to. He will be coveted by both ABC and Fox. New York Times reporter Bill Carter, who wrote The Late Shift (the book about the last changing of the late-night guard in the early '90s, when Johnny Carson retired), thinks Leno will go for ABC, which would give him an 11:30 p.m. time slot (Fox's news lead-in ends at 11 p.m.). That would allow Leno to go head-to-head with O'Brien and David Letterman and prove that he's the real king of late night.

Carter doesn't think ABC would hesitate to kill off Nightline to make room for Leno. In that scenario, Jimmy Kimmel's show would be pushed back 30 minutes, which might not sit well with him. So maybe Fox could chase him to fill its late-night void. With all that Leno's seemingly premature forced retirement sets in motion, the drama around late night might be more compelling than anything on the networks' fall schedule. (link)

May 8, 2008

Don't dream it's over: Steven Spielberg finally allowed the folks at Paramount to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull on Tuesday afternoon, less than two weeks before the film's premiere at Cannes on May 18. That's nice, considering that Paramount sunk a few pfennigs into this little romp. We're told that no one at the studio had been permitted to see it before, and we have no word on how it played.

It's safe to assume that the Paramount executives clapped pretty loudly, though. May is supposedly when DreamWorks can start shopping for a new deal, and Paramount might not be ready to say goodbye to Steven Spielberg just yet.

Speculation about the fate of DreamWorks has gone on for quite some time, as the studio has used the press to lay the groundwork for a negotiation over its future. There have been a number of stories about the DreamWorks team's suffering under the supposedly heavy hand of Paramount; partner David Geffen even went on the record a few months back to tell Vanity Fair that the people running Paramount are "a nightmare."

That's why many observers expect Geffen and Spielberg and Stacy Snider to leave in the coming months. But the speculation about which studio will win over DreamWorks seems misplaced. To us, there seem to be only a couple of possibilities. Option A: DreamWorks raises a bunch of money and makes a deal with Universal to distribute its movies. Option B: DreamWorks raises a bunch of money and makes a deal with Paramount to distribute its movies. We lean toward A, though B probably makes more sense. That's because we tend to believe that animus trumps logic.

We checked in with a favorite DreamWorks observer to see if he agreed with us. He did, kind of. First, he said, everyone should be clear that what began as DreamWorks—David Geffen, Steven Spielberg, and Jeffrey Katzenberg—now is only about Spielberg.

Katzenberg is bound to DreamWorks Animation, which is obligated to remain with Paramount for quite some time. Geffen is negotiating his way out of the movie business. Yes, he'll want to make some noise as he settles the company's fate, but that should be simple enough. He'll just have to raise a mind-boggling sum to finance the DreamWorks slate. If Tom Cruise can raise $500 million, Geffen should be able to bring in about a trillion for a company with Spielberg's name on it.

So the question is: Where will Spielberg want to make his deal?

We lean toward Universal, because Spielberg has always been attached to the place—he's never left the lot notwithstanding the fact that his company belongs to Paramount. Of course, this isn't necessarily the most logical move. If he were to leave Paramount, he would hypothetically also leave behind many projects in development there. But that's what negotiations are for. The reasonable deal would be for Spielberg to take the projects he wants as long as Paramount can opt in as a partner when it wants.

Our DreamWorks watcher leans toward Option B, staying at Paramount. "There's still a lot of hope at Paramount that Spielberg's not leaving—at the highest levels," he says. And why shouldn't they hope? Paramount is looking at a great summer, but not because of movies that the current regime has developed. "They have Iron Man, which they didn't make; Indiana Jones, which they didn't make; Kung Fu Panda, which they didn't make; and Tropic Thunder, which they didn't make," says our observer. "They made Love Guru." (That's a dismissive reference to the upcoming Mike Myers comedy, which is being written off as DOA in Hollywood. In spite or because of that, the impossibly difficult Myers is said to be driving the folks at Paramount so crazy that some say—jokingly, we think—that the studio set the film to open in June against the presumably more commercial Get Smart as payback.)

And Paramount should have its attractions for the DreamWorks crew. At this point, our observer notes, Paramount is largely staffed with DreamWorks alumni, and they seem to be doing a bit better at marketing movies than their counterparts at Universal. "The question is, what does Steven get out of going back to Universal?" he asks. To him, the answer is: not much.

As for the idea that there's some bidding contest for DreamWorks involving a bunch of studios, that strikes our observer as foolish. The deal goes to Universal or Paramount. Surprise us, David. (link)

Correction, May 29, 2008: This piece originally misspelled Ari Emanuel's last name. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, released his 2006-07 tax information in April, but Cindy Hensley McCain, his wife of 19 years and heiress to a lucrative beer-distributor fortune, did not. (The couple files its tax returns separately.) Cindy refused to make public her tax returns "in the interest of protecting the privacy of her children." Last week she relented a bit and the McCain campaign released a two-page 1040 form from her 2006 return (below and on the following page), showing that she paid $1.7 million in federal taxes. The candidate's wife requested and was granted an extension to complete her 2007 return.

Cindy's annual income for 2006 was more than $6 million, including $4.5 million from "rental real estate, royalties, partnerships, S corporations, [or] trusts" plus over $1 million in capital gains and dividends. Her Schedule B, D, and E forms would shed light on the latter but were not included in the disclosure. Clearly, though, Cindy would benefit from her husband's tax-cut plan, which includes lowering taxes on dividends and capital gains to "promote saving" and to "channel investment dollars to innovative, high-value uses."

Send ideas for Hot Document to documents@slate.com. Please indicate whether you wish to remain anonymous.

Human Nature Home | News | Hot Topics | Blog | Essays | Discussions | Links

Two days ago, I wrote that oral sex was becoming destigmatized and normalized, thwarting parents who had hoped they could "stick to the basics" in talking to their kids about sex. Many of you wrote back, dismissing my assumptions as prude, antiquated, and out of touch. You argued that oral sex has always been more basic and common than vaginal sex and that the idea of recent stigma against it is a myth.

When I said "basics," I meant the facts of life from a parental perspective. In other words, procreation: teaching your daughter how babies are made, not how to go down on the kid next door. But let's set aside semantics and morals. Let's look at the data, starting with a review of the scholarly literature, published last year in the Journal of Sex Research by Wendy Chambers of the University of Georgia.

Historically, fellatio or cunnilingus, hereto referred to as oral sex, were perceived among heterosexual couples as not only more intimate than intercourse but also to be reserved for those who were married (Michael, Gagnon, Laumann, & Kolata, 1994). It took Kinsey's studies to reveal the greater prevalence of oral sex; though it was not until the 1970s that societal attitudes began to perceive it as acceptable for unmarried couples as well (Michael et al., 1994). Thus it is a historical reversal that oral sex has become more common than intercourse among heterosexual, White, and better educated samples as well as a precursor to intercourse (Billy & Tanfer, 1993; Michael et al., 1994; Prinstein, Meade, & Cohen, 2003; Schwartz, 1999). … [S]tudies indicated a rise in oral sex among adolescents (Newcomer & Udry, 1985), university students (Woody et al., 2000; Grunseit, Richters, Crawford, Song, & Kippax, 2005), and adults in general (Laumann, Gagnon, Michael, & Michaels, 1994).

The 1994 study by Laumann et al. surveyed 3,432 Americans aged 18 to 59. According to a Kinsey summary, the survey found that "90% of men and 86% of women have had sex in the past year," whereas "27% of men and 19% of women have had oral sex in the past year."

In 2002, the Kaiser Family Foundation surveyed 505 teens aged 15 to 17. One question asked: "Please tell me how often each of these are part of a relationship with a boyfriend or girlfriend … almost always, most of the time, rarely, or almost never?" Among sexually active teens, 49 percent said intercourse was part of a relationship almost always or most of the time; 43 percent said the same about oral sex. When the question was changed to a "casual relationship such as a hook-up," the gap disappeared: Forty percent said oral was part of the relationship almost always or most of the time; 39 percent said the same about intercourse.

In 2004, AARP surveyed 1,682 Americans aged 45 and older. The survey found, "Compared to 1999, there is … a higher incidence of oral sex among men." Still, the trend was no match for intercourse. The survey asked respondents how often they had engaged in various sex acts in the previous six months. In every age bracket, among both genders, at least twice as many respondents said they had engaged in intercourse once a week or more often as said they had engaged in oral sex with similar frequency.

In 2005, the National Center for Health Statistics analyzed data from its 2002 survey of 12,571 Americans. Among teens aged 15 to 19, 55 percent said they'd ever had oral sex; 50 percent said they'd had vaginal sex. In every other age group, the balance was reversed: Vaginal experience was slightly more universal than oral experience.

One final note, posted by Tim Harford in Slate two years ago:

Johns Hopkins University Professor Jonathan Zenilman, an expert in sexually transmitted infections … reports that both the adults and the teenagers who come to his clinic are engaging in much more oral sex than in 1990. For men and boys as recipients it's up from about half to 75 to 80 percent; for women and girls, it's risen from about 25 percent to 75 to 80 percent.

That's a pretty good variety of samples and age groups. Let's recap the overall patterns: Oral sex was stigmatized. The stigma has faded. Oral sex is becoming more commonly reported, through some combination of increased activity and decreased stigma. Nevertheless, vaginal experience remains more universal, and vaginal sex is far more frequent. Furthermore, as we learned from the timing data in Wednesday's piece, teens aren't starting with a "basic" oral stage followed by an "advanced" vaginal stage. They're losing both kinds of virginity around the same time.

So, this notion that everybody's been going down on everybody all along, and that nobody's been embarrassed or secretive about it, and that it's obviously elementary and vanilla, is baloney. Yes, oral sex is common, and strikingly so among adolescents. But that trend is a novelty, and a story.

(For the latest Human Nature updates and blog items, bookmark humannature.us.com.)

Human Nature Home | News | Hot Topics | Blog | Essays | Discussions | Links

Every day, thousands of parents sit down with their children to talk about the facts of life. They want their kids to know how babies are made, how serious sex is, and how they can protect themselves. For most of us, the topic is awkward enough without getting into advanced stuff. That's why the coverage of President Clinton's blow jobs felt like such a cultural assault. We just want to stick to the basics.

Well, you can kiss that era of innocence goodbye. I'm not talking about your kids' innocence. I'm talking about yours. For your information, Mom and Dad, oral sex is now more basic than vaginal sex. That may not be part of God's or nature's plan. But according to survey data, it's a fact of life.

The latest evidence comes from "Noncoital Sexual Activities Among Adolescents," a study published in the July issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health. The study analyzed the U.S. government's first survey of such practices, conducted in 2002 and released three years later. When the data first came out, I chided the media for ignoring the findings of widespread anal sex. Don't worry: I'll spare you that topic today. What's interesting in the new analysis is the correlation between oral and vaginal sex. If your kid is doing one, he or she is almost certainly doing the other.

The raw numbers indicate that 50 percent of teenagers aged 15 to 19 have had vaginal sex. Fifty-five percent have had heterosexual oral sex. Are kids substituting oral for vaginal? Nope. Among technical virgins—teens who have never had vaginal sex—23 percent have had oral sex. That number sounds high until you notice that among nonvirgins, the oral-sex figure is 87 percent. If your teenager has had "basic" sex without somebody's mouth being involved, congratulations. You're probably the only such household on your block.

The data on timing underscore this connection. Among teens whose first vaginal sex happened less than six months before the survey, 82 percent admit to oral sex. That figure barely increases for teens who began vaginal sex three years before the survey. In other words, teens lost their oral virginity at around the same time they lost their vaginal virginity. If you think your daughter is going to learn the basics now and the advanced stuff later, you've got another thing coming.

Look at the data for older adults, and you'll see similar patterns. At ages 20 to 24, the percentage who admit to oral sex trails the percentage who admit to vaginal sex by around five points. (A study of Georgia college students, published last year, produced similar numbers: 96 percent of those who had lost their vaginal virginity had also lost their oral virginity.) At ages 25 to 44, the gap is around eight points. If anything, these numbers understate the prevalence of oral sex, since they're based on self-reporting. The discomfort most of us feel around this topic surely affects some survey responses, even with guaranteed anonymity.

The near-disappearance of lifetime oral virginity makes sodomy laws fairly ridiculous. The percentage of Americans aged 25 to 44 who deny ever having had oral sex now barely exceeds the percentage who admit to same-sex activity. By empirical standards, if gay sex is deviant, so is chastity of the mouth. Indeed, there's some evidence that what's vanishing isn't oral abstinence—which perhaps never really existed—but stigma. That's the implication of a decadelong Australian college study, published three years ago, which showed a significant increase in female, but not male, admission of oral activity.

So cheer up, Mom and Dad. You don't have to be embarrassed any more about discussing the facts of life with your child. She'll be happy to explain them to you.

(For the latest Human Nature updates and blog items, bookmark humannature.us.com.)

May has been an embattled month for the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, faced inquiries from House and Senate members about the inhumane treatment of people detained for violating immigration laws. This congressional scrutiny followed a special report in the Washington Post (and a rash of articles elsewhere) detailing stomach-turning—and sometimes deadly—mistreatment in immigrant detention centers.

A bill to improve detention center conditions has recently been introduced in Congress, but this legislation would do nothing to address the abuses committed by ICE officers well before the people they pick up reach a detention center. Nor would it alter the framework of immigration enforcement that has led to the mistreatment. Congress should be thinking about these problems, too—and so should the courts.

Since 2006, ICE has been dispatching teams of agents into neighborhoods throughout the country as part of a ramped-up enforcement effort called "Operation Return to Sender." Each team must apprehend an annual quota, currently set at 1,000, of fugitive aliens. These are immigrants who remain in the United States despite outstanding orders to leave.

Unsurprisingly, people who've been ordered deported are not always easy to find. This is not just because undocumented immigrants flee deportation (although, of course, some do). It's also because, according to a 2006 Department of Homeland Security report, about half of the information in ICE's "Deportable Alien Control System"—a database of immigrants to be deported—is incorrect or incomplete. This means that many immigrants never receive a deportation notice and so don't know they've been ordered to leave. It also means that ICE officers, relying on faulty information, don't know where to find them.

And so, to meet their quotas, enforcement teams carry out large-scale sweeps, raiding homes in neighborhoods with a lot of immigrants just after sunrise. Without an accurate list of which homes actually harbor undocumented immigrants, agents often rely on race to figure out who's here legally and who isn't. For example, in Fair Haven, Conn., several residents reported that during a raid last summer, ICE officers went door to door asking how many people were inside each house—and what race they were. In an ICE operation in Willmar, Minn., Latino residents were handcuffed and interrogated while white residents, some even in the same home, went unquestioned.

Race, in fact, is not a very good indicator of whether someone is in the United States illegally. Up to two-thirds of the people ICE arrests have never received deportation orders, frequently because their presence here is lawful. By ICE's own admission, the bureau has mistakenly detained, arrested, and even deported not only legal immigrants but also U.S. citizens. Those caught up in recent home raids include Adriana Aguilar, a citizen living in East Hampton, N.Y., who was sound asleep with her 4-year-old son when ICE officers stormed into her bedroom, pulled the covers off the bed, and shined flashlights into her face before interrogating her. In San Rafael, Calif., ICE detained 6-year-old Kebin Reyes, a citizen from birth, holding him in a locked office for 12 hours after immigration agents, pretending to be police, stormed into the apartment he shared with his father and forcibly removed him from his home.

Aguilar and Kebin are suing ICE for violating their Fourth Amendment rights; in all, civil rights lawsuits against ICE are pending in at least 10 states. The government may not constitutionally detain anyone without a reasonable suspicion that they have violated the law. Suspicion founded on race alone, the Supreme Court has emphasized, can never be "reasonable." The Fourth Amendment also prohibits government agents from entering a home without a warrant unless they have the occupant's consent. Shoving the occupant into the door to get him to open it—as ICE agents did in a New Jersey raid last month—doesn't count. Nor does bursting into a home while claiming to be the local police.

The agency's failure to abide by basic procedural rules threatens not only individual rights but also public safety. During a recent raid in Nassau County, N.Y., ICE agents twice drew their guns on local police officers by mistake. More generally, in the aftermath of raids in which ICE agents pretend to be local police, immigrant communities become fearful of law enforcement, making the work of actual police officers more difficult. Some cities, including Richmond, Calif., and Hightstown, N.J., have even passed resolutions calling for ICE agents to identify themselves as federal immigration officers rather than police.

The government's guidelines for immigration enforcement prohibit these kinds of abuses. Why aren't they being enforced? Theories abound. ICE attorneys have suggested that because most of the rules governing officer conduct were instituted before the Department of Homeland Security took over immigration enforcement, they don't apply to ICE at all. Another explanation is that in the wake of Sept. 11, stepped-up immigration enforcement may have taken priority over careful procedures. Whatever the reason, it's clear that rampant abuses continue So what's to be done? Although Congress could enact legislation to rein in ICE's conduct, it's unlikely to do so anytime soon. Lawmakers have been deadlocked on immigration reform for years.

But courts, too, have tremendous power. The rules judges set for immigration proceedings largely determine how ICE officers do their work. In a criminal trial, the government can't use evidence obtained from an unreasonable search or seizure, and this means that an officer who enters a home without a warrant or detains a defendant because of her race risks the entire case being thrown out. But illegal immigration is a civil, not a criminal, violation, so while immigration judges occasionally exclude evidence obtained through particularly egregious searches, in general these rules don't apply. This lax judicial treatment combined with their stringent arrest quota leaves ICE agents with little incentive to reform.

Twenty-five years ago, in the case of INS v. Lopez-Mendoza, the Supreme Court declined to extend the Fourth Amendment's guarantees to immigration proceedings. But Justice Sandra Day O'Connor recognized that if in the future there were "good reason to believe" that constitutional violations in immigration enforcement were "widespread," the way judges handled these cases would have to change. That time has come. If Congress won't, the courts should force ICE to follow the standard rules of American law enforcement.

Just as some sizable fraction of American children firmly believe in the boogeyman in the closet, many adult Americans cling to a paranoid fear of the election-fraud monster. Too many of us believe in the epidemic of pervasive Democratic vote fraud, and others believe in the specter of systematic Republican vote suppression. The notion that present-day Democrats regularly steal elections by engaging in concerted efforts to vote multiple times in funny mustaches is a myth, unsupported by data or fact. Historically, it's true that conservatives have used voter intimidation, poll taxes, and other skeezy tactics to disenfranchise minority voters. It's also true that some of Karl Rove's flying monkeys have attempted to revive that proud tradition with schemes such as "vote caging" (getting transient students and folks in the military bounced off the voter rolls) and pressuring U.S. attorneys to prosecute vote fraud where none exists. But for the most part, modern polling-place election-stealing has just not been pervasive or systemic.

The more we believe the other side steals elections, the easier it becomes to devalue their votes. And I'm not sure that's a road anyone wants to travel. A recent Rasmussen poll showed 17 percent of voters believing that large numbers of legitimate voters are prevented from voting and 23 percent convinced that a large number of ineligible people are allowed to vote. That's a lot of people certain that the other side is cheating. That's a lot of reasons to cheat first.

The seeds of our current hysteria over election fraud were sown during the 2000 election when the nation watched, slack-jawed, as Florida became a still life in Voting Gone Awry. But in a piece for the Atlantic in 2004, Joshua Green explained that the provenance of this anxiety predated Florida 2000. Describing a 1994 judicial race in Alabama, in which Karl Rove advised one candidate, Green reports that in the midst of a tense re-count, unsubstantiated whispers circulated that the election had been stolen by—among other things—a Democratic strategy of "votes being cast in absentia for comatose nursing-home patients; and Democrats caught in a cemetery writing down the names of the dead in order to put them on absentee ballots."

Paranoia about such tactics by Democrats—especially minority Democrats—morphed from a Bush administration extracurricular activity to its college major during the last eight years. Helped along by bogus think tanks and sketchy research, the boogeyman started to look real. This neatly explains last year's firing of at least two U.S. attorneys for their inability to find genuine vote-fraud cases to prosecute. It also accounts for the takeover of the Justice Department's Voting Rights Division—once devoted to expanding rather than contracting the right to vote—by a handful of myopic vote-fraud crusaders.

And yet a brand-new Justice Department initiative to smoke out rampant liberal vote fraud, with 120 federal prosecutions between 2002 and 2006, resulted in only 86 convictions—mostly of Democrats, and mainly for either filling out forms wrongly or misunderstanding their eligibility. A major bipartisan draft fraud report similarly concluded that there's little polling-place fraud in America and no large-scale systematic fraud. Of course, occasional instances of vote fraud occur. But the claim of massive concerted efforts to organize voters to risk felony convictions at the polls is absurd. As professor Richard Hasen has pointed out in Slate, while there is "a fair amount of registration fraud in this country," it just doesn't translate to mischief at the polls in numbers that swing elections, even close ones.

Why persist in believing in a phantom epidemic? The benefits of a widespread campaign to stamp out fraud pretty much speak for themselves: Voter-ID laws to counter vote fraud disenfranchise minorities, the poor, and the elderly. As former Texas Republican Party political director Royal Masset told the Houston Chronicle last year, while he believed the vote-fraud epidemic to be overblown and opposed Texas' then-pending photo-ID law, the bill "could cause enough of a drop-off in legitimate Democratic voting to add 3 percent to the Republican vote." Score! That bill collapsed last year, but only after debate degenerated into a psychodrama they'll be talking about in Austin for years.

Unfortunately for Texas Republicans, it's just now come to light that despite a zealous two-year, $1.4 million vote-fraud crusade, Texas' Attorney General Greg Abbott's office has managed to prosecute only 26 cases—all against Democrats, and almost all involving minorities. Most were prosecuted for walking absentee ballots to the mailbox for sick or elderly voters, without following the protocol for doing so.

That's why it's doubly tragic that the Supreme Court demonstrated last month what happens when you arm an imaginary boogeyman with a real machine gun: Your pretend problem quickly turns real. Opponents of voter-ID laws say they have the practical effect of suppressing some votes, votes that tend to skew Democratic. Writing for the plurality in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, Justice John Paul Stevens nevertheless upheld an Indiana voter-ID law requiring voters to have government-issued photo ID. Let's grant that voter-ID laws are popular. The question was supposed to be whether they are necessary. Stevens found that even with no evidence of in-person vote fraud in Indiana, "flagrant examples of such fraud in other parts of the country have been documented throughout this nation's history." As examples, he cited only an 1868 mayoral election in New York City and a single 2004 incident from Washington. Stevens was not concerned by the fact of rampant vote fraud but the fear of it. Propping up wobbly "voter confidence" became more urgent than protecting the right to vote. This was so even though voter confidence went wobbly only after partisans started peddling a mythical epidemic in the first place. (This new Harvard Law Review study shows that voter-ID laws do not increase voter confidence anyhow.)

Justice Stevens decided Crawford as he did because he found no good evidence that poor, disabled, and minority voters had yet been disenfranchised by the voter-ID law. Stevens left open the door to such voters to show in future elections that the voter-ID system actually barred them from the polls. At which time the circle is complete, and the crusade to end imaginary vote fraud will result in real vote suppression. Already in the Democratic primary in Indiana earlier this month, a flock of elderly nuns were denied the vote because they lacked the proper documentation.

The seeds of the modern Supreme Court's elevation of rooting out vote dilution over preventing vote suppression were sown in the court's opinions in Bush v. Gore. According to Jeffrey Toobin's book The Nine, when it became clear that the majority of the court planned to halt the Florida re-count via the equal protection doctrine—traditionally invoked to protect minorities from unequal treatment—Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dropped a footnote in her draft dissent. She suggested that if anyone needed protecting, it might be black Florida voters whose ballots were being disputed by state and local authorities. Toobin writes that Justice Antonin Scalia flew into a "rage" and accused Ginsburg of using "Al Sharpton tactics." She removed the footnote. And the modern judicial principle that it's better to suppress minority votes than sanction the appearance of unfair elections was born.

If I am correct that voter mistrust only fosters more voter mistrust, and that the appearance of unfairness on one side simply fuels unfairness on the other, perhaps it's still not too late to disarm bilaterally, before both vote fraud and vote suppression calcify into serious campaign strategies. If Republicans and Democrats can agree that it's not particularly smart or effective to try to steal elections, it may be easier to concede that the other side probably isn't doing it, either.

A version of this article also appears in this week's issue of Newsweek.

Sex and the City, which, as it's hard not to know by now, comes to the big screen this weekend, rarely ventured beyond the island of Manhattan in its six years on television. When the women did find themselves elsewhere, they weren't usually happy about it. This was especially the case in Season 4, when Carrie's boyfriend, Aidan, hamstrings her into a trek to his rustic cabin upstate. Carrie, in turn, pressures Samantha into tagging along, and urban-misfit misadventures ensue—until Samantha spots a hunky, half-naked farmer and seduces him out of his overalls. And thus the show discovers what researchers have been documenting over the last decade or more: It's the country, rather than the city, where more of the sex is.

Several studies have shown that rural teens are more likely to have sex than their urban counterparts, that they lose their virginity earlier, and that they have more sexual partners. This and other research also reveals that country dwellers, both teens and adults, are less likely to use condoms during their rolls in the hay (sorry, couldn't resist). A survey of college students in Indiana, for instance, revealed that students who had grown up in the country were more likely than city natives to skip the love glove when they rendezvous. (The paper doesn't define its terms, but presumably most of the students were from rural or urban Indiana.)

Many factors could contribute to this discrepancy, including rural poverty, limited education, and higher marriage rates for young people in the country. But the city-country gap can't be entirely explained away by these other variables. One study from 2000 controlled for many of these demographic factors and still found that rural high-school males were more likely to have had sex than their urban peers. A 2002 investigation compared the sexual practices of low-income African-American women living in Missouri cities with those living in the Missouri countryside. The groups were relatively well-matched in age (the average in both groups was 26), income, marital status, and other demographic factors. Still, the rural women were twice as likely to report that they never used condoms. And among women in this group, rural women were less likely to say this was because their partners had actually tested negative for HIV. Instead, the country women tended to believe their partners were HIV-negative, without proof.

So, what remains to explain these differences? Maybe boredom. Rural teens may not have the same cornucopia of activities to occupy their free time that their urban counterparts do, experts say. So, researchers suspect that while city teens pack their schedules, their country brethren strip down to their farmers' tans. There's no hard evidence that rural youth are pairing off because of wide-open afternoons, but that's the rationale that researchers tend to mention.

In addition, rural residents seem to believe that their communities are shielded from sexual scourges, maybe because they're geographically isolated. Adolescents have told researchers, for example, that sexually transmitted disease isn't a problem that affects small towns. It doesn't help that many provincial schools offer abstinence-only education, which studies have shown just doesn't work and neither prevents nor delays teens from having sex. Abstinence-only ed may spare students the embarrassment of listening to their gym teachers explain how to put a condom on—but it also means they don't learn how to put a condom on.

All this coupling sans condoms has consequences—teen pregnancy, for one, which is more common among rural girls. (Birth rates, a different category, are also high in the country, where girls are less likely to get abortions.) A high rate of sexually transmitted diseases might also seem inevitable, though the data here are a bit less definitive. National comparisons of STD rates in metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas are hard to come by. Some researchers, however, have done the analysis at a local level, finding, for instance, that syphilis is more common in rural North Carolina than in urban parts of the state. The same holds true of chlamydia in Georgia.

Cities still have the highest prevalence of HIV—they are home to large populations of gay men and intravenous drug users, the communities in which the epidemic first emerged. However, even these numbers are complicated by the fact that many people who live in the countryside get tested, and potentially treated, for HIV in cities. Since the early 1990s, epidemiologists have been documenting the diffusion of HIV from the cities to the countryside, and HIV infection rates grew far faster in the 1990s in small communities than large ones. Despite this trend, studies conducted at the time found that rural adults were far less likely to report that they'd changed their sexual habits as a result of the AIDS epidemic.

If you do contract an STD in the country, you're generally worse off. Because the itchy and afflicted who live in the sticks struggle to get medical care, are forced to travel farther for treatment, and make do with fewer doctors, especially specialists. Country-dwellers with HIV report more discrimination and more fear of being outed as HIV-positive than their urban counterparts. There's even "patient spotting," in which people who live within sight of STD clinics take photos of and gossip about people who go in. Rural patients also have more reason to fear that among the medical staff treating them might be someone they know socially. And whether for these reasons or others that researchers haven't yet identified, their health can suffer in significant ways: One study revealed that though Atlanta had twice the prevalence of AIDS as less populous regions of Georgia, AIDS patients in the city lived significantly longer.

Maybe Carrie had some unconscious sense of the perils of rural sex when she decided that Aidan's rough-hewn cabin wasn't the place for her. When she returns to the streets of New York, she tries to make a tentative statement of solidarity with her rural sisters, proclaiming, "City girls are just country girls—with cuter outfits." As far as epiphanies go, it's a little pat and not entirely true. Unless, of course, Carrie is talking about condom chic.

Smart journalists should never mistake a single data point for a meaningful development. Data isn't the plural of anecdote, as the saying goes. But every so often you have to go with your gut. And so I'm suggesting—not declaring—that the recent results from Pediatrix Medical Group may indicate that the slower economy is causing a decline in births.

Pediatrix owns group practices of neonatal specialists and employs 1,070 physicians and 400 nurse practitioners in 32 states and Puerto Rico. Its teams staff some 257 neonatal intensive care units, about one-sixth of the nation's total. Pediatrix has a market capitalization of $2.5 billion. (Here's the company's history and its 2007 annual report.) The company says that about 12 percent of births require NICU admissions. By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, Pediatrix winds up caring for about 2 percent of the babies born in the United States each year.

In recent years, the birthing industry and Pediatrix have been on a roll. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, births rose 1 percent in 2005 and another 3 percent in 2006 to 4.265 million, the highest number of births since at least 1960. (Page 3 of this portion of the statistical abstract of the United States has birth data going back to 1960.) As the Washington Post reported, in 2006 the U.S. fertility rate rose to 2.1 babies per woman—a rate "high enough to sustain a stable population"—for the first time since 1971. The rising number of newborns has meant more business for Pediatrix, whose stock has doubled in the last five years. While government data aren't available, it seems that 2007 was another good year for births. The company reported that in the 2007 fourth quarter, same-unit volume at its NICUs rose 4 percent from the 2006 fourth quarter.

But this year, things are going poorly for Pediatrix. And that suggests one of two things: 1) Either significantly more babies are being born without need of neonatal care or 2) as the housing slump began to take a bite out of economic growth last year, Americans began to cut back on their fruitful reproductive activity. "Our results are being affected by lower neonatal volume, which is related to a lower rate of growth of births at our hospitals throughout this year," said Dr. Roger J. Medel, chief executive officer of Pediatrix, when Pediatrix reported its 2008 first-quarter results on May 8. Factoring out the extra day in February for the leap year, same-unit NICU patient volume for the 2008 first quarter grew by only 0.7 percent from the 2007 first quarter—well below the 3 percent to 5 percent growth rate the company was expecting for all of 2008. On Tuesday, the company announced it would scale back expectations for the second quarter and the whole year. Why? "Through the first six weeks of the 2008 second quarter Pediatrix's same-unit NICU volume declined by approximately 2 percent when compared to the same period of 2007." In other words, the expected volume of April and May babies, who would have been conceived amid the credit crunch of last July and August, hasn't materialized. Pediatrix's stock (here's the one-year price chart) is off almost 30 percent in the past month.

Pediatrix's numbers may have declined because the hospitals it works with are losing market share. But it could also be that in the areas that Pediatrix serves, people are feeling less inclined to have children. The company generates more than half its revenue in five states—Arizona, California, Florida, Texas, and Washington—with Texas alone accounting for 28 percent. The economies of the first three have been hit especially hard by the housing meltdown. Florida Hospital Orlando, the flagship of the state's biggest hospital system, saw 227 births in April, compared with 263 in April 2007, a decrease of 13.6 percent.

It's hard to isolate the effect of the economy on the rate of child birth since so many other factors (immigration, demographic trends, birth-control use) come into play. But the macroeconomic climate definitely has an impact. Many couples, including my paternal grandparents, waited out the Depression before having children. According to the U.S. Census, both the number of births and the birth rate fell sharply during the Depression, from 2.9 million and 25.1 per 1,000 people in 1925 to 2.618 million and 21.3 per 1,000 in 1930, and to 2.377 million and 18.7 per 1,000 in 1935. A big baby bust preceded the Baby Boom. 2001 and 2002—the years in which babies conceived during the last recession were delivered—were the only two years in the decade from 1997-2006 in which the number of births fell.

For many parents, the decision to have a child is an emotional choice, a biological imperative, or a fulfillment of a religious obligation—and hence one in which dollars and cents don't matter. But for some prospective parents, and certainly for many of those at the margin, concern over whether they can afford to support an additional child or start having children can influence the decision to procreate. And it's a safe bet that as the credit-market and housing tremors shook the economy, as the pace of job creation began to ebb and inflation rose, some people who were on the fence last summer decided to wait. Babies, like corporate earnings, are a lagging indicator. After all, they're produced nine months before they arrive in the marketplace. When Pediatrix reports its second-quarter earnings in August, we'll know whether this single data point is growing from its embryonic stage into a bouncing baby trend.

Slate intern Lucy Morrow Caldwell contributed to this article.

"Find Your Inner Carrie," urges the sign in the window of Plaza Too, an elite accessories boutique on Hudson Street in Manhattan. Evidently you can unleash this spirit by buying a $298 Beirn "Jenna Hobo" handbag inside the shop, conveniently located across the street from a stop on the popular Sex and the City bus tour in New York City.

A shameless, derivative promotion? Of course, but you can't blame Plaza Too for trying to tap into the glitzy consumption that always defined HBO's series Sex and the City. After all, SATC was renowned for bringing product placement to giddy new heights, enticing countless women to gulp down saccharine cosmopolitans and stuff their closets with Manolo Blahnik shoes. If Carrie Bradshaw wore it, retailers bought it, and consumers consumed it—in spades.

Will SATC the movie have the same therapeutic effect for America's ailing retailers? Unlikely. But it won't be for lack of trying. If SATC the series was promotions-heavy, SATC the movie is positively heaving. The film's opening voice-over says it all: New York women crave "the two Ls: labels and love." Costumed by flamboyant designer Patricia Field, the film's over-the-top wardrobe made even Women's Wear Daily queasy.

"They went for visual overload," said a WWD reviewer. "Chanel, Prada, Vera Wang, Oscar de la Renta, Christian Lacroix, Vivienne Westwood … [It was] intense." Sarah Jessica Parker, who plays Carrie Bradshaw, has a reported 81 costume changes, which included millions of dollars of jewelry.

Retailers on all levels are hoping this designer parade will help them revive flat-lining sales. From New York to Dallas to Seattle, Sex and the City-inspired clothing and (of course) shoe sales, spa treatments, and sweepstakes are popping up like desperate little daisies. Burberry is quick to point out that Parker wore a Burberry Prorsum coat in the film; Vogue urges you to subscribe to the magazine and win a chance to "Dress like the Women from Sex and the City," courtesy a $3,700 shopping spree at Neiman Marcus.

"Tons of pitches have been coming in," says Jeralyn Gerba, New York City editor of trends sourcing Web site Daily Candy. "Sex and the City-themed charm bracelets. Sex and the City-themed scavenger hunts. Sex and the City hotel promotions."

Of course, some people stand to make a great deal of money from SATC the movie; advance ticket sales alone predict a blockbuster for New Line Cinema, a division of Time Warner that is now being consolidated into Warner Bros. Yet the prognosis for SATC-inspired spending on the luxury goodies showcased in the movie is grim.

While the film's characters seem to have spent the last four years gorging themselves on designer wares, much of the rest of the nation has been forced to slim down. According to Pam Danziger, a consumer-insights expert at Unity Marketing, luxury consumer confidence hit an all-time low in the first quarter of 2008.

"The movie might sell magazines, but probably not clothes," says Danziger. She points out that not only are consumers cash poor at present, but the price of high-end designer goods has skyrocketed becaues of the decline of the dollar against the euro and luxury companies' strategies to move upmarket.

"A few years ago, you could buy a pair of Manolos for $400, and today they're $800 or even $1,000," she says. "That price inflation hits hard at this time."

In fact, it virtually excludes most aspirational consumers from buying a sliver of the Bradshaw dream, downgrading materialistic participation in SATC to mere voyeurism. And the issue's not just diminished resources of would-be customers. In the fashion world, a quieter aesthetic has replaced the ostentation peddled by the Carrie Bradshaw franchise. Today's chic relies on simplicity, not tutu skirts. For several seasons, designers and magazine editors have eschewed the label-heavy exhibitionism embodied by SATC at its zenith of cultural relevance; the overpowering bling-bling aesthetic of the film almost makes it feel like a time capsule.

"There's definitely been a move away from logo bags and head-to-toe looks off the runway," says Elisa Lipsky-Karasz, an editor at W magazine. "To dress that way today is seen as a faux pas."

Moreover, the fashion industry itself has changed dramatically since the series' launch 10 years ago. The sweeping proliferation of outlets such as H&M, which can replicate runway looks within weeks at a fraction of the price of the designer version, further reduces the allure of throwing rent money on an "it" handbag or dress. Ironically, Sarah Jessica Parker herself has become the public face of this phenomenon; last year, she launched Bitten, a clothing line for discount retailers Steve & Barry's in which all items sell for $20 or less.

Still, luxury retailers may get a small, somewhat surprising boost from the movie. As the owner of one Greenwich Village luxury accessories boutique confesses, not many New Yorkers are shopping in his store these days anyway, but thanks to the anemic dollar, his European customers are flush with cash and "obsessed with Sex and the City."

Maybe Carrie should have stayed in Paris after all.

As we speak, economic stimulus, in the form of about $120 billion in tax rebates, is working its way into America's financial bloodstream. Those taxpayers set up for electronic deposit have already received their cash while those relying on snail mail have started to get checks and will continue to do so through mid-July. For America's retailers, struggling with rising unemployment, inflation, and sluggish sales, this booster shot couldn't have come at a better time. Companies such as Kroger grocery stores have set up programs that permit people to exchange stimulus checks for gift cards with a 10 percent bonus. Other discretionary retailers—apparel, sporting goods, restaurants—are holding out hope that the money will find its way into their registers. After all, when the American consumer has cash, he tends to spend it.

But David Rosenberg, Merrill Lynch's straight-talking chief economist for North America, says it might be different this time. The reason: The chunk of the stimulus package likely to get spent is roughly equivalent to the amount Americans are paying for higher food and gas prices because of inflation. Put another way, you've already spent your stimulus at ExxonMobil.

Here are the numbers. When the president signed the fiscal stimulus into law, gasoline prices were hovering near $3 a gallon. Now they're close to $4 a gallon. Rosenberg says the old rule of thumb is that every penny increase in the price of gas takes $1.3 billion out of the pockets of American households. So he concludes that the higher price of energy is draining about $25 billion out of the discretionary spending pool in this quarter alone. Next, factor in food inflation, which is running at a 9 percent annual rate, compared with the normal 2 percent. Food already eats up about 14 percent of the typical American's household budget. By Rosenberg's reckoning, Americans sticking to their regular diets are paying an extra $25 billion per quarter compared with last year. "The combination of energy and food is draining discretionary spending at a $50 billion quarterly rate," he says.

There is contradictory evidence, but most economists believe Americans spend around 40 percent of their rebates and use the rest to save or pay off debt. Rosenberg believes it's likely that a lot of the rebate cash will be spent simply to keep current on existing debt bills: "We have a record number of Americans behind on their bills, their mortgages, auto loans, and credit cards." So let's assume 40 percent of the $120 billion rebate is spent on nondurable goods: That comes out to $48 billion. Since food and energy inflation is costing us $50 billion (just in the current quarter!), it looks like the rebate could be a bust for clothing and electronics retailers. Americans won't have any extra rebate cash to spend with them.

Since the stimulus is staggered—checks will continue to arrive through mid-July—we won't be able to draw any conclusions for a few more months. But with between 30 percent and 40 percent of the stimulus already disbursed, the early signs aren't encouraging, says Rosenberg. The cash injection hasn't done much to bolster consumer confidence, which slipped to a 16-year low on Tuesday. And the International Council of Shopping Centers reported that chain sales for April were up 3.6 percent year over year—essentially keeping pace with inflation. Data on car sales and early soundings from other retailers have similarly failed to detect a sharp uptick in consumer activity. It's possible that the rolling stimulus may take longer to make its way to the shopping malls than the 2001 stimulus did. It's also possible that the cash may be deployed by many Americans to keep current on car payments and cope with mortgages whose interest rates are adjusting higher. As Rosenberg notes, "We've never had a fiscal stimulus through a credit crunch and a real estate deflation before."

It's that time of the leap year. Personal-finance magazines and investment analysts are constructing political portfolios: market sectors or stocks that will thrive, or dive, should a particular candidate take the White House. Like party conventions, these portfolios are a storied component of the campaign season. Like party conventions, they're not very useful or illuminating. Trust me. I know from experience. In October 1992, a younger, svelter version of this columnist called analysts to find out which stocks would do well if Bill Clinton were to beat George H.W. Bush.

The response: Clinton's proposals for a stimulus package and a Rooseveltian Rebuild America Fund would be a gold mine for construction-equipment makers like Caterpillar. A Salomon Brothers analyst said Clinton's universal health care plan, a pet project of his wife (plus ça change), would be great news for HMOs. But the stimulus package and universal health care were among the early casualties of the tumultuous Clinton first term. Likewise, analysts argued in the fall of 2000 that a George W. Bush victory would light a fire under the already soaring stocks of Microsoft and MCI WorldCom. Why? Bush would likely be more lenient on antitrust policy. As CNBC's James Cramer would say: "Wrong!" (Microsoft's stock is below its level of January 2001) and "Wrong!" (MCI WorldCom went bankrupt in July 2002).

Political market calls are conceived in sin, since most are based on the false premise that the stock market prefers Republicans to Democrats. According to Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at Standard & Poor's Equity Research, between 1945 and 2007 the S&P 500 rose 10.7 percent annually when Democrats occupied the White House, compared with a 7.6 percent annual increase under Republicans. Those who, fearing higher taxes, sold stocks after Bill Clinton's inaugural missed out on a great rally. And those who, anticipating lower taxes, plunged into the market in January 2001 entered what has been a lost decade for U.S. stocks; since 2000, the markets of countries like Brazil and China have lapped their American cousins.

Political portfolios also rely on a similarly simplistic understanding of how Washington works. Analysts seem to believe that political platforms are fail-safe guides to What Will Happen. Bill Clinton's 1992 platform said there would be no capital-gains tax cut for the wealthy on his watch. (He signed one in 1997.) Bush's 2000 platform vowed that "the Social Security surplus is off-limits, off budget, and will not be touched." OK, then. The portfolio makers also seem to assume that once presidents take the oath of office, they remove a magic wand from a special case in the Oval Office and conjure campaign promises into policy instantaneously—without congressional input.

Wall Street types might be forgiven for not comprehending the byzantine path that legislation treads on Capitol Hill. Less forgivable is the way political portfolio construction misunderstands markets. Ultimately, megatrends far beyond the control of government—like the Internet or the growth of China—influence stocks more than small-bore policies. The Medicare prescription-drug benefit, passed in 2003, was seen as a huge boon to Big Pharma. But since the benefit was signed into law in December 2003, the Amex Pharmaceutical Index has woefully underperformed the S&P 500. "Pharma is in the midst of a bad research and development cycle, and Pfizer hasn't had a major new drug," said Les Funtleyder, health care strategist at Miller Tabak.

Even when they're right, politically inspired stock recommendations are often right for the wrong reasons. Oil stocks have done well under the Bush-Cheney administration, as analysts suggested in 2000, but not because the former oilmen made good on campaign promises to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling. Instead, ExxonMobil has soared because breakneck growth in China, tensions in the Middle East, the weak dollar, and speculators have pushed oil higher.

This year, Dan Clifton, the Washington-based head of policy research at Strategas Research, is taking political/stock analysis to a new level by looking at the makeup of Congress. "Reps. Charlie Rangel and Barney Frank will have a say in tax bills, no matter who is elected president," he says. Clifton's Democratic Sweep portfolio, which assumes Democrats win the White House and 60 seats in the Senate, suggests buying an alternative-energy fund and shorting utilities stocks (since increasing the dividend tax, as a President Obama might do, would eat into the value of these dividend-paying stalwarts). Sam Stovall of S&P argues, counterintuitively, that a Democratic president would be better for oil stocks. Why? If a Republican president advocates drilling in ANWR, Congress will accuse him of helping oil-rich friends. "But if the proposal comes from a Democrat, Congress might be more likely to go along."

That's plausible. But it's just as plausible that a massive new find in Canada or a recession in China will roil the oil markets more than anything President Obama or President McCain will do.

Still not convinced of the folly of political portfolios? Consider this: In the fall of 2000, the Platonic ideal of a Bush-era stock would have been based in Texas and involved in energy distribution and trading, would benefit from deregulation in power markets, and would have a CEO with a Bush-bestowed nickname, say "Kenny Boy." And that would have been Enron.

A version of this article also appears in this week's issue of Newsweek.

Sex and the City (New Line), written and directed by Michael Patrick King, opens with a voice-over paean from Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) to the supposed twin aspirations of all New York women, "labels and love." Over the course of the movie's two and a half hours, the central female foursome will wax cynical, then hopeful, then ambivalent, then tentatively hopeful again about the possibility of finding love. But their faith in labels will never budge. No real-life relationship, Carrie and her cohorts reluctantly concede, can live up to the impossible expectations our culture places on romantic love. But luxury commodities? Those are more than capable of fulfilling every fantasy. The right Louis Vuitton bag—hell, any Louis Vuitton bag—can change your life.

Drop the title Sex and the City into a conversation, especially among women, and you're unlikely to elicit a neutral shrug. During the show's six-year run on HBO, people I knew either attended reverently irreverent Sunday-night viewing parties, or felt for the remote at the first notes of that vibraphone theme song. For me, the series functioned as a guilty pleasure that was truly guilty: I would rent a few episodes on DVD on nights when I was home alone and not up to the intellectual challenge of watching a good movie. The show's values are reprehensible, its view of gender relations cartoonish, its puns execrable. I honestly believe, as I wrote when the series finale aired in 2004*, that Sex and the City is singlehandedly responsible for a measurable uptick in the number of materialistic twits in New York City and perhaps the world. And yet … and yet … there's a core truth to the show's depiction of female friendship that had me awaiting the big-screen version with exactly the kind of cream-puff nostalgia the movie's marketers are bargaining for. I want to know how the girls are doing, what's happened to them in the four years since I last joined them at brunch, and what in the name of God they're wearing.

Addressing the wardrobe question would require a separate cross-referenced concordance; let me just note that along the way there are toeless hose, rubber epaulets, pasties made of sushi, and a headdress shaped like a bird. But here's an update on the ladies' whereabouts: Sexually voracious Samantha (Kim Cattrall) is living in Los Angeles managing the career of her model/boyfriend, Smith (Jason Lewis), and chafing under the strain of monogamy. Perpetually cranky lawyer Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) lives in Brooklyn (anachronistically treated as a backwater, rather than the real-estate hot spot it's become) with her nerdy husband, Steve (David Eigenberg), and their son. Perky Charlotte (Kristin Davis, in top screwball form) is almost laughably happy with her husband, Harry (Evan Handler), and their adopted daughter. None of these women are hurting for either money or male attention, but Carrie has hit the jackpot: She's landed her long-elusive lover, superrich financier Mr. Big (Chris Noth) and published three best-sellers with titles like Menhattan. (The movie is mercifully light on those self-searching Carrie-at-the-computer scenes that were one of the series' recurring disappointments: Why did she have to be such a bad writer?)

Big effortlessly picks up the tab for a vast Fifth Avenue penthouse and makes plans to move in with Carrie. But sensing the fragility of their union—this is the man who made her his personal yo-yo for six years—she pushes, tentatively, for marriage. I don't think it's giving away too much to say that what follows includes a shopping montage to end all shopping montages, as Carrie poses in one couture wedding gown after another for a Vogue photographer, (In one of the movie's crasser concessions to product placement, she names each designer in a voice-over.) And—tiptoeing gingerly around further possibilities for spoilage—I'll also add that what happens when she finally dons the winning gown on the big day is genuinely, and believably, awful (even if the director milks it for pathos in an unforgivably corny slo-mo shot).

It's impossible to address the movie's principal failing—the way it insists on both having and eating the Cinderella-themed cake of romantic fulfillment—without revealing more than that. So I'll stick to the good bits: Carrie camping it up in a succession of outfits as her friends help her winnow down her wardrobe for a move by holding up signs that read "take" or "toss." (In real life, Carrie's narcissism would make her a terrible friend, but Sarah Jessica Parker makes bottomless self-absorption look like such fun.) Miranda wrecking the rehearsal dinner in a moment of ill-timed honesty. Charlotte's righteous transformation into a protective lioness when her friend is mistreated—a moment whose high drama Davis skillfully leavens by proceeding to prance offscreen with a ridiculous mincing gait.

The movie's initially brisk pacing slackens when the girls spend a holiday in Mexico that's long enough for them to cycle through an entire resort-wear collection. Samantha disappears entirely for stretches, and her story arc contains some of the movie's most painfully unfeminist jokes (in which we learn, for example, that vigilant pubic grooming and toned abs are essential to female self-esteem). And an attempt to address the series' endemic whiteness by adding a subaltern black character—Jennifer Hudson as Carrie's designer-bag-toting Girl Friday—is a major misfire that only underscores our heroine's oblivious entitlement. But if you bear even a grudging affection for the show's utopic vision of female bonding as the greatest love of all, you may get choked up when Carrie appears at Miranda's door one shitty New Year's Eve (clad only in pajamas, a sequined cloche, a full-length fur, and what appear to be patent-leather spats) and reassures her friend, "You're not alone."

Correction, May 30, 2008: This article originally stated that Sex and the City, the TV series, ended in 2005. It ended in 2004. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

With the death of Sydney Pollack on Monday, Hollywood loses its greatest mensch. The presence of the gruff-voiced, gentle-faced Jew raised in South Bend, Ind.—whether behind or in front of the camera—always reassured audiences that they were in the presence of something warm and real. That anchoring presence could be felt in sweeping romantic epics (Out of Africa), paranoid political thrillers (Three Days of the Condor), and what many argue is the greatest of all American film comedies (Tootsie). Every DVD library should have a copy of Tootsie (preferably the excellent 25^th-anniversary edition released earlier this year), but lesser Pollack deserves a look as well. Look past the dated trappings and check out the keenly intelligent Absence of Malice or Jane Fonda's career-making performance in They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

Slate's Bryan Curtis wasn't wrong, in a 2005 assessment, to call Pollack a "journeyman" director; over a 40-plus-year career, he tried his hand at virtually every genre (with the notable exception of the special-effects blockbuster) and churned out his share of competent schlock (The Firm, The Interpreter, The Electric Horseman). But I can't agree with Curtis' contention that Pollack could "take any scenario … and mold it into benign mush." More often, he took mushy scripts and shaped them into films that were surprisingly sophisticated and adult. I'm sure I'm not the only one who remembers the scene midway through The Way We Were in which Katie (Barbra Streisand), having just been dumped by her boyfriend Hubbell (Robert Redford), calls him up and begs him to come back to her apartment, "just to see me through till morning." So much is at play in this encounter: Katie's raw need for Hubbell, his guilt over the part her Jewish ethnicity (coded as a beauty "of the wrong type") played in the breakup, and the knowledge, shared by both, that she's not above manipulating that guilt to get him back. Pollack films the scene quietly, directly, with a bare minimum of music or teary close-ups. Though The Way We Were is best remembered for its sappy theme song, at the movie's heart is an unidealized portrait of a love affair that's a painful, and ultimately unwinnable, struggle for power.

Sydney Pollack's best movies tended to share this polemical element, the crossing of swords between evenly matched equals. Take, for example, an early scene in Tootsie where Pollack, playing Dustin Hoffman's beleaguered agent George Fields, gravely informs his client that "no one will work with you." Hoffman's character, the unemployable Michael Dorsey, truly is (as Fields believes) an insufferable pain in the ass, and also (as Dorsey himself insists) a brilliant actor who deserves the role of a lifetime. (The fact that Hoffman and Pollack famously butted heads during the filming of Tootsie, with Hoffman wanting to play the character for broader farce than Pollack would allow, no doubt adds to the dialogue's satisfying crackle.) "The essence to me of all good drama is argument. I can't say that either side is a thousand percent right," Pollack once said. In another interview, he elaborated: "Even if it's a thriller or a comedy, it's always a love story for me and that's what I concentrate on, because the love stories are my surrogates for the argument; two people in conflict that see life differently."

Pollack's career as an actor was no crossover stunt, like Hitchcock's cameos in his own films or the motormouthed self-caricatures Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino occasionally pop up to play onscreen. In fact, Pollack originally left Indiana and moved to New York with the intention of becoming an actor. He studied theater with legendary Stanislavsky disciple Sanford Meisner, launched his career as a film actor in the same movie as Robert Redford (1962's War Hunt), and hoped to teach acting himself someday, until Burt Lancaster called him over on the set of The Scalphunters and advised him to go into directing. As an actor, Pollack was often cast as a representative of the Hollywood establishment, the dryly funny pragmatist willing to voice blunt truths about the crass economics of the industry. Last year's Michael Clayton, which he also co-produced, gave him a chance to put a darker twist on that type. As the head of a law firm neck-deep in collusion with an environmentally irresponsible agribusiness client, he dismisses the concerns of the morally conflicted Michael (George Clooney) with chilling cynicism: "This case reeked from day one. Fifteen years in I've gotta tell you how we pay the rent?"

The last film Pollack directed, Sketches of Frank Gehry (2007), was his first-ever documentary, inspired by a longtime friendship with the architect and by Pollack's heart-stopping first viewing of the Bilbao Guggenheim during a demoralizing European publicity tour for his 1999 flop, Random Hearts. In a 2007 interview, Pollack describes his fascination with the playfulness of Gehry's style, "like Don Quixote got stoned and made a building … a crazy dream of a building." Talking to Charlie Rose about the Gehry doc, he connected this dreamlike artistic process to his own: "I've got to know what lenses to use … how to design the set so that it's right. What lights to use and what's going to happen to the film if I mix blue light and yellow light. All of those things which are—which are technical and craft. But it's a combination of craft and kind of daydreaming." Pollack was open to making more documentaries, he told Rose, but was waiting for the right subject to come along, something he truly cared about investigating. (In order to undertake a project, he once said, "I have to be able to be curious for two years.") What a shame we'll never know what would have sparked Pollack's curiosity next.

New Republic, June 11

The cover story investigates the growing number of high-profile jihadists who are "alarmed by the targeting of civilians in the West, the senseless killings in Muslim countries, and … barbaric tactics in Iraq" perpetrated by al-Qaida's brand of militancy. They haven't "suddenly switched to particularly progressive forms of Islam or fallen in love with the United States," but they reject the bloodshed by al-Qaida's attacks on civilians, including Muslims in Arab countries. Regardless, "their anti-Al Qaeda positions are making Americans safer" because they have the legitimacy to "effectively debate Al Qaeda's leaders." … A profile of Nancy Pelosi argues that "for now," the speaker of the House "has quieted the speculation that she lacks the skill, the smarts, and, most importantly, the cojones to lead her caucus." She owes her "newly fearsome stature" in part to Hillary Clinton. Democratic activists, who previously "trash[ed] [her] leadership as timid and pathetic," began to view her as "a bulwark against an out-of-control Clinton machine" when she stood up to the Clinton campaign's attempts to strong-arm the party into revotes in Florida and Michigan.

The New Yorker, June 2

A piece by Lawrence Wright considers the ideological defection of the jihadist thinker known as "Dr. Fadl," who was part of "the original core of Al Qaeda" and whose writings the terrorist group used to "indoctrinate recruits and justify killing." A year ago Fadl, who is also featured in TNR's jidhadist piece, published a book from prison that repudiated the terrorist group for its violence. As current al-Qaida leaders struggle to respond to Fadl's attack, the piece suggests, "Al Qaeda's popularity [has] decline[d] in places where it formerly enjoyed great support." … In a profile of Republican consultant Roger Stone (who sports a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back), Jeffery Toobin reveals why Stone wanted to go after Eliot Spitzer. Stone says, "I thought [he] was punk, and I wanted to fuck with him any way I could," … In a review of ... the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, David Denby declares "it was a mistake for Spielberg and George Lucas … to revive 'Indiana Jones' after so many years."

New York, June 2

An article explores the autistic community's emerging "neurodiversity movement," which holds that people with autism or Asperger's do not need to be "cured," only accepted. One neurodiversity proponent says he was inspired "to do for neurologically different people what feminism and gay rights had done for their constituencies." The activists' beliefs conflict with more-traditionally minded branches of the community, and all groups are "blatantly hostile to one another," explains the piece: "There are in reality three sides to this debate: those who believe autism is caused by environmental toxins (especially vaccines) and should be cured by addressing those pollutants; those who believe it is genetic and should be addressed through the genome; and the neurodiverse, who believe that it is genetic and should be left alone." … A column examines why John McCain and Barack Obama are both eyeing Michael Bloomberg as a running mate. The New York City mayor appeals not just because of his high net worth but also because "voters are yearning for a radical departure from the brain-dead, polarizing, base-driven stratagems that have turned the past several presidential cycles into object lessons in democratic dysfunction."

Harper's, June 2008

An essay reflects on the widespread reports of "magical penis loss" in Nigeria and Benin, in which sufferers claim their genitals were snatched or shrunken by thieves. Crowds have lynched accused penis thieves in the street. During one 1990 outbreak, "[m]en could be seen in the streets of Lagos holding on to their genitalia either openly or discreetly with their hand in their pockets." Social scientists have yet to identify what causes this mass fear but suspect it is what is referred to as a "culture-bound syndrome," a catchall term for a psychological affliction that affects people within certain ethnic groups. … A piece details the history of the U.S. government's treatment of buffalo, concluding with the conflict between the last wild herds in Montana and ranchers desperate to protect their cattle from a virus carried by the animals.

Weekly Standard, June 2

A feature dispatches from a medievalist conference, where one of the hot topics of conversation was the emerging field of "waste studies." Earlier historians avoided a scatological focus, in the phrase of one academic, because of a "repressive Western bourgeois hand-up." Now, argues the piece, "the one thing in which waste-studies scholars seem not to be interested is medieval history." They want to know not "so much how people disposed of waste as what they thought about it—or if you're a cultural-studies type, what 'society' thought about it." … An article observes that the California state Supreme Court's ruling on same-sex marriage has ensured that gay marriage will become an issue in the November election. It will "prompt the long-awaited challenge in federal courts to the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996," which is "the only (very shaky) legal barrier standing in the path of nationally mandated recognition of same-sex marriage."

Newsweek, June 2

In the cover package on Obama's race, an op-ed declares that the Democratic campaign has divided white and black women. The separation that has always existed is now "a chasm of resentment," partly because Clinton "appealed to [white women's] most base racial fears and resentments." … In another op-ed, Richard Rodriguez proposes acknowledging Barack Obama's biracial background by calling him "brown." Rodriguez writes: "I wonder, after centuries of slavery and injury, after illicit eroticism between black and white, after lynchings, and children who had to choose between one parent or another … is it possible to say brown?" … A piece refutes the argument of a new book that claims the digital age has made Gen Y the dumbest generation yet: "The old have been wringing their hands about the young's cultural wastelands and ignorance of history at least since admirers of Sophocles and Aeschylus bemoaned the popularity of Aristophanes … as leading to the end of (Greek) civilization as they knew it."

Listen to Judith Harris read .

Those years, after dogwoods

and purple phlox

the color of dyed Easter eggs,

the screen door rattling like a nerve …

On the porch, a cardboard box

for the stray cats

who stayed just long enough

to swell and litter.

So simple,

my mother, home

from the stenographer's pool,

starlings dangling like keys

over the rooftops,

the late hour pulling us in

like a magnet,

the moon baying,

the solitaire train of cards.

Nothing could budge us

from our own little island,

our own little cushions,

where we stayed,

eating tuna sandwiches,

just her and me,

floating on TV laughter,

her hand clasped over mine

like a first date's.

Primary season is in the home stretch, with just three contests and 86 pledged delegates left. Barack Obama currently leads Hillary Clinton by a margin of 156 in the pledged race. As of Thursday afternoon, DemConWatch reports that Obama has won the endorsements of 320.5 superdelegates, compared with Clinton's 281.5. (Remember, the half delegates come from Democrats Abroad.)

Including superdelegates, this tally puts Obama at 46 delegates shy of clinching the nomination, meaning a solid performance in the remaining three contests could push him over the edge. (Though as reader "kathy in nc" points out in "The Fray," this is based on the assumption that all the superdelegates vote according to their stated endorsements. Nothing prevents them from changing their minds between now and the convention.)

And a programming note: We plan to update the Delegate Calculator after the Democratic Party's rules committee meets this weekend to decide the fate of Florida and Michigan to reflect the party's decision on the two states.

Methodology

• The current number of pledged delegates comes from NBC News' tally. The delegate count prior to March 4 includes the 14 pledged delegates from the Democrats Abroad Global Primary and subsequent convention, who count for half as much as their domestic counterparts'.
• We estimate the number of delegates based on the overall state vote, even though delegates are awarded by congressional district as well. We felt comfortable making this approximation because in the primaries through Mississippi, there was only a 2.9 percent deviation between the percentage of the overall vote and the percentage of delegates awarded in primaries. The proportion of delegates awarded by congressional district, therefore, does not differ greatly from the statewide breakdown.
• The calculator now includes options to enable Florida and Michigan. When you check the boxes next to either or both states, you'll notice that the overall number of delegates needed for the nomination changes. With Florida and/or Michigan involved, there are more total delegates to go around, so the number needed for a majority rises. Our calculator assumes that the DNC will allow both states to retain their entire pledged delegation, and not punish the states by halving their delegate totals like the RNC did.
• The calculator does not incorporate superdelegates into its calculations. Superdelegates are unpledged and uncommitted and therefore can change their endorsements and convention votes at any time. As a result, we've simply noted at the bottom of the calculator how many superdelegates the leading candidate needs to win the nomination in a given scenario.
• All of the calculator's formulas and data come from Jason Furman, the director of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution.

Now he tells us. Scott McClellan's memoir offers more candor in a chapter than he let loose during his three years as the president's spokesman. Often kept in the dark by his boss and, at least in one case, deliberately sent out to mislead the public by his superiors, McClellan writes as if he went home after he left the White House in 2006 and purged. Disgorged onto the pages of What Happened, due out next week, are all of the emotions, regret, and doubt that apparently bottled up even as he eternally presented a sunny, largely unflappable demeanor while on the job selling the president's policies.

Because McClellan was such a team player, the book comes as a bit of a shock to those of us who covered the White House during his tenure. Yes, I knew he was angry at Karl Rove and Scooter Libby for using him to spread the falsehood that they had no role in the CIA leak case. That's in the book: "Top White House officials who knew the truth—including Rove, Libby, and possibly Vice President Cheney—allowed me, even encouraged me, to repeat a lie." But the denunciation expands from there, and it's that breadth I never thought that his memoir would offer. McClellan outlines the "obfuscation, dissembling, and lack of intellectual honesty that helped take our country into the war in Iraq." He suggests the president and his aides were in permanent campaign mode, putting politics above principle, and chronicles how a "state of denial" led to the mishandling of the response to Hurricane Katrina. (He also includes a critique of the press, which he says acted as "deferential, complicit enablers" of Bush administration "propaganda.")

Slate V Video: McClellan scolds an earlier turncoat

In small ways, McClellan still seems at times like he's working for Bush, correcting misperceptions about the president's smarts and absolving him of intentional wrongdoing in the leak matter. But on all the major fronts, the president is still his biggest target. McClellan had worked for Bush since the president was Texas governor, and so he can show us how the scales gradually fell from his eyes over time. In one bizarre episode, during the period of Bush's presidential campaign when the press was constantly chasing rumors about his possible cocaine use, McClellan hears a conversation in which Bush tells a friend that he can't remember if he tried cocaine when he was younger. At the time, McClellan wonders how the then-governor could not remember such a thing but portrays it now as the first inkling of Bush's penchant for self-deception.

In general, McClellan describes the president as someone who lacks inquisitiveness and is also deceitfully self-delusional. Long money quote: "As I worked closely with President Bush, I would come to believe that sometimes he convinces himself to believe what suits his needs at the moment. It is not unlike a witness in court who does not want to implicate himself in wrongdoing, but is also concerned about perjuring himself. So he says, 'I do not recall.' The witness knows no one can get into his head and prove it is not true, so this seems like a much safer course than actually lying. Bush, similarly, has a way of falling back on the hazy memory defense to protect himself from potential political embarrassment. Bush rationalizes it as being acceptable because he is not stating unequivocally anything that could be proven false. If something later is uncovered to show what he knew, then he can deny lying in his own mind."

McClellan's account adds another set of insider anecdotes to the already heaping stack built by previous Bush officials and advisers. Paul O'Neill first described the president's blindness to inconvenient facts six years ago when he talked about Bush's lack of appetite for "analytical rigor, sound information-gathering techniques and real, cost-benefit analysis." The list of administration officials turned bashers includes John Dilulio, Larry Wilkerson, Rand Beers, Richard Clarke, David Kuo, Paul Pillar, and Matthew Dowd.

The volume of defections from the party line—enough to form a choral group!—makes it harder to knock McClellan down. That has not stopped his colleagues, both past and present, from trying. The response has been withering and coordinated. Several made the case that he'd raised no objections while in the White House and that he was not in a position to know about some policies he assailed. "I think his view is limited and some of this may be misunderstanding on his part of what he saw and heard," said former Homeland Security adviser Frances Townsend on CNN. Karl Rove compared McClellan to a left-wing blogger. White House spokesperson Dana Perino called McClellan "disgruntled."

McClellan's predecessor, Ari Fleischer, suggested that McClellan had told him privately that the publisher had "tweaked" the book. This passing on of a private conversation, if it happened, is dirty pool and the kind of thing Fleischer would never have countenanced from a reporter. But Fleischer's ghostwritten charge has been picked up by other critics who have all said a version of something like, "It just doesn't sound like Scott." Said one former senior Bush official, "It sounds like his publisher was ticking off a punch list making sure to hit all of the liberal complaints against the administration."

McClellan's publisher, Peter Osnos, denies that a ghostwriter worked over McClellan's draft (though an extra editor, Karl Weber, was brought in to meet the fast publishing deadline). Since McClellan signed off on the work, the point is moot anyway. The other criticisms don't really undermine McClellan's case either. The attacks on his character tend to reinforce the heart of McClellan's account of the CIA leak case—that the White House smears its critics. And even if McClellan was out of the loop on the response to Katrina (it appears lots of people were) and may not have been in on Iraq planning (er, neither was then-Secretary of State Colin Powell very much), that doesn't undermine his central and most damning critique about the administration's utter lack of candor. He describes the administration as one "that, too often, chose in defining moments to employ obfuscation and secrecy rather than honesty and candor." As the press secretary who transmitted the president's message, McClellan has standing to talk about whether the messages he was transmitting and shaping had truth behind them.

It's hard to feel great sympathy for McClellan. If he felt strongly that the president was deceiving the country, or that he had been deceived by Karl Rove, he should have left his job. That's what former press secretary Jerald terHorst did when he disagreed with Ford's pardon of Nixon, a minor offense compared with what McClellan says are the deceptions that led to an unnecessary war. It's also hard to feel bad for the treatment McClellan is getting when he said this about Richard Clarke's tell-all book in 2006: "Why, all of a sudden, if he had all these grave concerns, did he not raise these sooner? This is one-and-a-half years after he left the administration. And now, all of a sudden, he's raising these grave concerns that he claims he had. And I think you have to look at some of the facts. One, he is bringing this up in the heat of a presidential campaign. He has written a book and he certainly wants to go out there and promote that book."

And yet, I do feel a certain compassion for McClellan after reading a book that is full of regret, soul-searching, and shame. McClellan certainly isn't presenting himself as a hero for finally coming out against policies he once advocated. If he'd left in the middle of the CIA leak scandal, he would have given an enormous gift to the president's political opponents. It would have been the right thing to do. But I can imagine when you're in the thick of political combat, your bosses are keeping you in the dark, and you are constantly being praised for your loyalty, it can be hard to find your way to the right thing. In the end, though, that the author of this book stayed, given his strong views, still seems as puzzling as Bush's claims that he couldn't remember whether he'd once used cocaine.

In August 2007, John McCain came through New York to promote his latest book, Hard Call: The Art of Great Decisions. McCain's editor, Jonathan Karp, was kind enough to offer me one of the hourlong slots set aside for back-to-back interviews in his office. The new book, written with (all right, by) McCain's literary alter ego, Mark Salter, was evidently meant to serve as a kind of Profiles in Courage for the Arizona Republican's presidential campaign. It recounted moments in which wise leaders made brave choices: Lincoln's issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation, Branch Rickey's hiring of Jackie Robinson to break baseball's color barrier, etc. I sampled a few of these vignettes just before our meeting and found them characteristically well-done.

But the book, at that moment, seemed rather beside the point. While Salter was hard at work on Hard Call, McCain's presidential campaign had fallen apart. Instead of breaking away from the Republican pack, McCain was loping after it from a considerable distance. At that point, McCain was trailing Rancorous Rudy, Mutable Mitt, and possibly even droopy-eyed Fred Thompson in the polls. McCain had raised a pitiful amount of money and quickly run through it. He'd just fired his longtime campaign manager and laid off three-quarters of his feuding and divided staff. Esquire reported that he was personally scrutinizing the campaign's daily doughnut order as a cost center. Unlike his first book, Faith of My Fathers, the Salter-abetted autobiography that had launched his 2000 bid, Hard Call, was looking like a tough sell.

I hadn't seen much of McCain since his famous insurgency in the Republican primaries that year, which I covered for Slate. Like most other reporters who spent time trailing his campaign, I retained fond memories—of the candidate's unprecedented candor, his gleeful mischief-making, and the sheer fun of hanging around with him. In the intervening years, however, the spirited maverick had seemed to turn into a weary dray. Preparing his presidential bid, he had mended fences—albeit with evident insincerity—with the Christian evangelicals, corporate lobbyists, and anti-tax ideologues who composed his party's power base. Worst of all, McCain was making nice to his 2000 nemesis George W. Bush. With a few exceptions, his idiosyncratic conservatism had turned ordinary.

Yet I held out hope that McCain might not really have changed, and that proximity to defeat might put him in the subversive frame of mind I remembered so fondly. So when we sat down, I prodded the senator politely but as obnoxiously as I could. I was just back from a book-writing leave myself, I told him, and hadn't been following the Republican primaries very closely (which was true). But from a distance, his campaign sure as hell looked like a train wreck.

"Jacob," he answered with a sigh, "you don't know the half of it." Where another politician would have been spinning madly to disabuse me of the erroneous assumption that he was somehow not on the verge of victory, McCain launched into his own epic kvetch about how screwed-up his campaign was. He hadn't been able to raise the money that his aides said would pour in, he'd been wildly overspending, he'd been too inaccessible, and he wasn't connecting with voters. He sounded as if he was criticizing his opponent. I don't think Mark Salter, who was sitting in a corner of the room, disagreed with anything McCain said. But he was beginning to look a bit queasy.

I apologized that I'd only had a chance to read a little of his book in preparation for the interview.

"I don't expect you to read every part of it," McCain replied with a gesture that suggested he might not have gotten all the way through this one himself. And here Salter, who was no longer drawing a salary from the insolvent campaign and who derives the bulk of his income from McCain book royalties, began to look more seriously dismayed.

The conversation continued in that vein for a spell. I'd riffled enough pages of Hard Call to recognize that McCain was trying to bolster his tenuous credentials as an executive by associating himself with heroic figures like Churchill, Reagan, and Truman. Some of the leaders he considered in the book cast a spell through charisma, others through domineering energy, still others through a broad vision of change. But McCain himself didn't seem like any of those leaders, I pointed out. He wasn't charismatic, had little vision of the future, and was more satirist than autocrat. No argument from the author here, either. "Whether I'm a leader in the category of people I was just talking about I think is doubtful," he said.

At this point, I glanced over at Salter, whose face was now buried in his hands.

Off, off message, McCain merrily went. What, I asked, did he think about his new best friend George W. Bush as a leader? Why wasn't he in the book? "I think that the very significant failing was to not question the course of the war in Iraq for too long," he said. "I'm told that the president would say to the generals on the teleconference, 'Do you have everything you need?' 'Yes sir!' End of conversation! I think General Eisenhower would have said, 'Well, what about the casualties in Anbar Province? What about the suicide bombers?' He'd go down the list of challenges we were facing. 'How's it going with the de-Ba'athificaiton? What's happening with the oil revenues?' "

I noted Bush's curious quality of taking strenuous opposition as proof that he must be right. McCain concurred. "I really feel that to somehow be encouraged by opposition is not a productive exercise," McCain replied. "Because if you continue to have American public opinion opposed to our involvement in Iraq—no matter what I think the consequences of failure are—we're not going to be able to sustain it, period." When I got back to my office, there was a message from Salter saying he hoped I hadn't misconstrued any of those comments as, ahem, critical of the president.

In 1993, novelist Michael Crichton riled the news business with a Wired magazine essay titled "Mediasaurus," in which he prophesied the death of the mass media—specifically the New York Times and the commercial networks. "Vanished, without a trace," he wrote.

The mediasaurs had about a decade to live, he wrote, before technological advances—"artificial intelligence agents roaming the databases, downloading stuff I am interested in, and assembling for me a front page"—swept them under. Shedding no tears, Crichton wrote that the shoddy mass media deserved its deadly fate.

"[T]he American media produce a product of very poor quality," he lectured. "Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it's sold without warranty. It's flashy but it's basically junk."

Had Crichton's prediction been on track, by 2002 the New York Times should have been half-fossilized. But the newspaper's vital signs were so positive that its parent company commissioned a 1,046-foot Modernist tower, which now stands in Midtown Manhattan. Other trends predicted by Crichton in 1993 hadn't materialized in 2002, either. Customized news turned out to be harder to create than hypothesize; news consumers weren't switching to unfiltered sources such as C-SPAN; and the mainstream media weren't on anyone's endangered species list.

When I interviewed Crichton in 2002 about his failed predictions for Slate, he was anything but defensive.

"I assume that nobody can predict the future well. But in this particular case, I doubt I'm wrong; it's just too early," Crichton said via e-mail.

As we pass his prediction's 15-year anniversary, I've got to declare advantage Crichton. Rot afflicts the newspaper industry, which is shedding staff, circulation, and revenues. It's gotten so bad in newspaperville that some people want Google to buy the Times and run it as a charity! Evening news viewership continues to evaporate, and while the mass media aren't going extinct tomorrow, Crichton's original observations about the media future now ring more true than false. Ask any journalist.

So with white flag in hand, I approached Crichton to chat him up once more. Magnanimous in victory, he said he had often thought about our 2002 discussion and was happy to revisit it. (Read the uncut e-mail interview in this sidebar.)

Although Crichton still subscribes to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, he dropped the Los Angeles Times a year ago—"with no discernable loss." He skims those two dailies but spends 95 percent of his "information-gathering time" on the Web.

He concedes with a shrug that the personalized infotopia he crystal-balled in 1993 has yet to arrive. When we talked in 2002, Crichton scoffed at the Web. Too slow. Its page metaphor, too limiting. Design, awful. Excessive hypertexting, too distracting. Noise-to-signal ratio, too high.

Today he's more positive about the medium. He notes with satisfaction that the Web has made it far easier for the inquisitive to find unmediated information, such as congressional hearings. It's much faster than it used to be, and more of its pages are professionally assembled. His general bitch is advertisements in the middle of stories, and he's irritated by animation and sounds in ads. "That, at least, can often be blocked by your browser," he says.

In 1993, Crichton predicted that future consumers would crave high-quality information instead of the junk they were being fed and that they'd be willing to pay for it. He's perplexed about that part of his prediction not panning out, but he has a few theories about why it hasn't.

"Senior scientists running labs don't read journals; they say the younger people will tell them about anything important that gets published—if they haven't heard about it beforehand anyway," he says. "So there may be other networks to transmit information, and it may be that 'media' was never as important as we who work in it imagine it was. That's an argument that says maybe nobody really needs a high-end service."

It will take a media visionary, he believes—somebody like Ted Turner—to create the high-quality information service he foresaw in his 1993 essay. In addition to building the service, the visionary will also have to convince news consumers that they need it.

Sounding like a press critic, Crichton criticizes much of the news fed to consumers as "repetitive, simplistic, and insulting" and produced on the cheap. Cable TV news is mostly "talking heads and food fights" and newspaper reporting mostly "rewritten press releases," he says.

Crichton suggests that readers and viewers could more objectively measure the quality of the news they consume by pulling themselves "out of the narcotizing flow of what passes for daily news." Look at a newspaper from last month or a news broadcast.

"Look at how many stories are unsourced or have unnamed sources. Look at how many stories are about what 'may' or 'might' or 'could' happen," he says. "Might and could means the story is speculation. Framing as I described means the story is opinion. And opinion is not factual content."

"The biggest change is that contemporary media has shifted from fact to opinion and speculation. You can watch cable news all day and never hear anything except questions like, 'How much will the Rev. Wright hurt Obama's chances?' 'Is Hillary now looking toward 2012?' 'How will McCain overcome the age argument?' These are questions for which there are endless answers. Contentious hosts on cable shows keep the arguments rolling," he says.

Crichton believes that we live in an age of conformity much more confining than the 1950s in which he grew up. Instead of showing news consumers how to approach controversy coolly and intelligently, the media partake of the zealotry and intolerance of many of the advocates they cover. He attributes the public's interest in Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul, and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to its hunger for a wider range of viewpoints than the mass media provide.

He tosses out a basket of questions he'd like to see the press tackle, some of which I've seen covered. "What happened at Bear Stearns?" got major play this week, after Crichton answered my questions, in a Wall Street Journal series. And I know I've seen "How much of the current price of gas can be attributed to the weak dollar?" answered a couple of times but can't remember where. (Answer: a lot.) But such Crichton questions as "Why have hedge funds evaded government regulation?" and what specific lifestyle changes will every American have to make "to reduce CO₂ emissions by 60 percent?" would be great assignments for news desks.

"I want a news service that tells me what no one knows but is true nonetheless," he says.

******

Me, too. What do you want? Send your requests to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (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 mediasaurus in the subject head of an e-mail message and send it to slate.pressbox@gmail.com.

Return to article

Interview With Michael Crichton

Crichton's answers were received May 23, 2008

How do you cull your news these days? If it's not too much of a bother, describe how you consume news each day.

I long subscribed to three newspapers, the L.A. Times, the N.Y. Times, and the WSJ. I canceled the L.A. Times a year ago, with no discernable loss. I skim the other papers. The rest of my time is spent on the Web. I would say 95 percent of my information-gathering time is spent on the Web.

Has the collapse of the classified-ad market at the hands of Craigslist surprised you? Or the massive migration of ads to the Web? Your '93 essay didn't really talk much about changes to come on the ad side of the mass media. Last year, the Web ad-sales passed those on radio.

Sorry, I don't think about ads much. I do think it is interesting how much of the real-estate market, for example, has moved onto the Web. You will recall that I argued the Web was the true home-shopping channel, and it certainly is proving to be that.

Do you think the media's factual content and accuracy is up or down from 2002 (when we last corresponded)? Do you still think it's flashy but junk?

Surely you jest. Factual content approaches zero, and accuracy is not even a consideration. I think many younger reporters aren't really sure what it means, beyond spell-checking. And in any case, when the factual content approaches zero, accuracy becomes meaningless.

Why do I say factual content approaches zero? The easiest way is to record a news show and look at it in a month, or to look at last month's newspaper. That pulls you out of the narcotizing flow of what passes for daily news, and you can see more objectively what is actually being presented. Look at how many stories are unsourced or have unnamed sources. Look at how many stories are about what "may" or "might" or "could" happen. Look at how many news stories have opinion frames, i.e., "Obama faced his most challenging personal test today," because in the body you probably won't be told much about what the personal test was, or why it was most challenging (which in any case is opinion). In summary, reliance on unnamed sources means the story is opinion. Might and could means the story is speculation. Framing as I described means the story is opinion. And opinion is not factual content.

Have you noted any news-industry innovations since last we talked?

No.

You had very negative notions about Web-page design and implementation when last we talked. Do you still feel that way? RSS feeds have really changed the way I get news, especially RSS feeds of Google News alerts.

I no longer feel so critical. Web pages are more professional now, and we've established some conventions. And connection speeds are faster. It's all better. I personally dislike ads in the middle of stories, and I loathe animation and sound in ads anywhere, but that, at least, can often be blocked by your browser.

In your essay, you wrote: "As the link between payment and information becomes more explicit, consumers will naturally want better information. They'll demand it, and they'll be willing to pay for it. There is going to be—I would argue there already is—a market for extremely high-quality information, what quality experts would call 'six-sigma information.' "

I don't think there has been the emergence of much of a market for six-sigma info outside of the data manipulations you can do on a Bloomberg terminal. What do you think?

I agree, and I must say I am perplexed. Several thoughts come to mind. Senior scientists running labs don't read journals; they say the younger people will tell them about anything important that gets published—if they haven't heard about it beforehand anyway. So, there may be other networks to transmit information, and it may be that "media" was never as important as we who work in it imagine it was. That's an argument that says maybe nobody really needs a high-end service.

A second thought concerns Ted Turner. It may be that instead of waiting for audience demand, we are waiting for a visionary entrepreneur to create a service that most people think can't be done. As Ted Turner once did.

A third thought concerns changes in our society. I have been very interested in the differences between how scientists and engineers treat information, for example. The fact is, engineers are much more rigorous about information, and it has legal consequences for them. In contrast, scientists (and politicians) are just playing with information. Broadly speaking, they have no responsibility for what they say at all. Now, as our society shifts away from manufacturing (now something like 15 percent of workers are engaged in making something), I speculate that this is having an effect on what we regard as information. I speculate we are moving from the rigor of engineers to the free-for-all of politicians. In which case, nobody is interested in high-quality information. It only gets in the way.

Arguably, contemporary media has made that shift away from hard information toward free-for-all opinion and speculation. This shouldn't cost a lot, and indeed modern media peddles an inexpensive product. Most cable television "news" is just talking heads and food fights; they don't even change the heads very often—they hire regulars who appear week after week. Most newspaper reporting consists of rewritten press releases and faxes. Many reporters don't go after stories, they wait for the stories to be fed [to] them by publicists and flacks. Now if you set aside this cheap model and instead start staffing bureaus around the world, putting reporters and cameras on the ground, assembling smart teams to do real investigative work in business, high tech, and so on, that costs a lot of money. I remain convinced that plenty of people would pay for a good news service—who stayed with a daisy wheel printer once laser printers arrived? We didn't know we wanted laser printers, as we didn't know we wanted digital cameras, but it turns out we did. In any case, what we are now being fed as news is repetitive, simplistic, and insulting.

The biggest change is that contemporary media has shifted from fact to opinion and speculation. You can watch cable news all day and never hear anything except questions like, "How much will the Rev. Wright hurt Obama's chances?" "Is Hillary now looking toward 2012?" "How will McCain overcome the age argument?" These are questions for which there are endless answers. Contentious hosts on cable shows keep the arguments rolling.

Here are some important questions that I don't hear [being] asked: "Why has the dollar been allowed to fall so far?" "Why have hedge funds evaded government regulation?" "How much of the current price of gas can be attributed to the weak dollar?" "Does the Fed control the price of the dollar?" "What happened at Bear Stearns?" "How exactly are you going to reduce CO₂ emissions by 60 percent? What specific lifestyle changes does that require for every American? What nation in the world now has per capita emissions at 60 percent less than the US?"

No one hears the answers to these questions, and if they did, they would start a mini revolution.

Maybe the questions are too sophisticated and difficult for television? Then it ought to suit the sophisticated N.Y. Times. The notion that we have no source in any media for and extended and detailed discussion of economics is frankly astonishing. (A special note of appreciation to Robert Samuelson of the WaPo, always excellent, frequently prescient.)

How many years do you think we are from the futurism predicted by your essay?

Intelligence agents roaming the Web, televised congressional hearings on demand, etc.

People are having second thoughts about Web-roaming agents, and they'll probably have second thoughts about congressional hearings, too, if they watch a lot of them. But actually an awful lot of hearings are already televised and already available online. Just hard to find, sometimes. (This is not new. When I gave my Senate testimony two years ago, it was on the Web.)

Do you think the media are more entertainment oriented today than they were in 1993 or less?

Far more.

Just as you were slammed as a Japan-basher, you've been called a denialist (and worse) for your climate-change views. Do you think that stands as another example of how the media stifle debate?

The truth is, we live in an age of astonishing conformity. I grew up in the 1950s, supposedly the heyday of conformity, but there was much more freedom of opinion back then. And as a result, you knew that your neighbors might hold different views from you on politics or religion. Today, the notion that men of good will can disagree has disappeared. Can you imagine! Today, if I disagree with you, you conclude there is something wrong with me. This is a childish, parochial view. And of course stupefyingly intolerant. It's truly anti-American. Much of it can be laid at the feet of the environmental movement, which has unfortunately frequently been led by ill-educated and intolerant spokespersons—often with no more than a high-school education, sometimes not even that. Or they are lawyers trained to win at any cost and to say anything about their opponents to win. But you find the same intolerant tone around considerations of defense, taxation, free markets, universal medical care, and so on. There's plenty of zealotry to go around. And it's hardly new in human history.

The media might stand as a corrective, cool and a bit detached, showing by example how to approach information and controversy. Instead, the media has clearly caught the fever of our intolerant times. Formerly, news people would never openly state their allegiance; young reporters understood it was poor form, and a senior person would carry the caution born of the experience that at least some of what one believes in the course of one's life turns out to be wrong. But it's a new era. Now, media reporters are proud to pound the table and declare their advocacy. Since so few of them have any training in science, they don't really know what they are pounding about, when it comes to global warming. They couldn't tell you even in general terms how the global mean temperature is calculated, for example. But it doesn't matter anyway. They just want to declare they believe what "everyone" believes. Who values such a news source?

I want a news service that tells me what no one knows, but is true nonetheless. That's what I would value.

Second, the media narrows the expression of viewpoints to an extraordinary degree. We've already discussed the small population of talking heads on cable shows. At the same time, the interest aroused by figures like Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul occurred because, in my view, the American public had never heard people talk that way. Similarly, the Rev. Wright is espousing views that are hardly rare, but people react with shock and awe. People should take it as a sign that something is wrong—the media isn't giving them the full story. By a long shot.

How much has the ability to surf foreign news sources upset the monopoly on news that the U.S. media had over news consumers?

I don't think it's really foreign sources; the BBC has had scandal after scandal of late, which has greatly tarnished its former splendid image. But I do think that in essence, anybody on the Internet can get the equivalent of a wire service feed, and that means you are not waiting for the news. By the time 6 o'clock rolls around, or you open the paper the next morning, you already know the headlines and the talking points. The problem is that the TV and the newspaper don't give you much more than you already have. Hence the endless decline.

I might add as a personal note that we have been talking about the quality of the media and the quality of information they pass on, but from a broader perspective, the present situation scares the hell out of me. A democracy needs good information. A rapidly changing, highly technological society in a global economy really needs good information. We don't have it. We don't have anything remotely approaching it. On the contrary, we have an increasingly constricted media run by increasingly partisan forces, to the detriment of our society. For example, the tendency of media to lock in a single story day after day, like the Hillary [Clinton in] Bosnia story, effectively prevents a leader from getting any other message out. Even in its decline, the media is all we have, and thanks to Sullivan, it operates entirely free from litigation, or other forms of regulation that might make it more responsive to public needs. Not good.

In what I interpret as retaliation, the McCain campaign froze the New York Times out of direct access to the candidate's medical records last week.

The campaign picked a "pool" of news outlets—including ABC News, the Arizona Republic, the Associated Press, Bloomberg, CBS News, CNN, Fox News, NBC News, Reuters, and the Washington Post, but not the Times—to take notes from the records for three hours on Friday, May 23. No photocopying was allowed, and nonpool news organizations had to rely on the pool's reports for their stories.

I rarely feel sympathy for Times reporters, and if you've ever met one, you know why: They whine whenever the world dares to stop revolving around them. The clearest demonstration of Times egomania comes from a friend who served as a foreign-service officer in Saigon during the Vietnam War. One afternoon his phone at the Embassy rang, and the voice on the other end said, "Please hold for the New York Times."

Obviously, I don't think the Times deserves an automatic invitation to every party. But the campaign has some explaining to do if it lets five TV news outlets inspect McCain's medical records but excludes the Times. This looks like payback for the Times' Feb. 21 story about McCain and the female lobbyist, which had him and his campaign spitting nails (and even outraged the Times public editor).

The McCain campaign is free to talk to whomever it wants, whenever it wants, to share medical records selectively, and to punish the Times for ripping its candidate. (I thought the Times story was good and fair.) But it's not in McCain's short- or long-term interests to retaliate against a news organization, even if he has a good case. A reporter denied is a vengeful force. He'll only dig deeper, perhaps dislodging information that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. (See also the Richard Nixon administration.)

"Fishy Friday." Over at the Politico, Ryan Grim tracks what he calls "Fishy Friday" stories. When potentially damaging news is dumped to the press on Friday, the first assumption among reporters is that the dumpers chose the day so the articles would appear on Saturday newspapers, the least-read edition of the week. An expertly deposited Friday news dump can often limit a contentious story's play to just one day.

The McCain dump came at the cusp of a three-day weekend, when most Americans were occupied with something other than the campaign, making it a "Super Fishy Friday" story.

As awful as the McCain campaign's treatment of the Times may be, the candidate and the campaign are still a million times more open than the zipped-lip, locked-down, maximum-security, unapproachable Obama campaign. Why isn't the press complaining about Obama's lack of transparency?

The Economist Style. Scholar Mark Falcoff cracks the British newsweekly's code in his recent review of a book by the Economist's Michael Reid. The magazine's house style, Falcoff writes, is a

… conflation of condescension, hard economic data, and on-one-hand-but-on-the-other-hand pronouncements which seem always somehow to come down (just barely) on the side of optimism.

JFK, Speed Freak. Last week, a journalist and a scholar argued in a May 22 New York Times op-ed that President John F. Kennedy made a mistake by meeting with archrival Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev so early (June 1961) in his administration. Khrushchev took advantage of the green president, the authors write. If Obama really wants to follow in Kennedy's footsteps, he should realize that "sometimes there is good reason to fear to negotiate"—namely inexperience.

Former Times reporter Boyce Rensberger (a friend of mine) published a letter in the May 24 Times suggesting that Kennedy's performance at the summit may have been inhibited by something other than inexperience. Rensberger writes:

… Kennedy may well have been high on amphetamines.

As Lawrence K. Altman and I reported in The New York Times on Dec. 4, 1972, [PDF; purchase required] Kennedy was accompanied to the summit by Dr. Max Jacobson, a physician who routinely injected the stimulant into many prominent figures.

Dr. Jacobson told us that he injected Kennedy there. White House records confirm that the doctor was on that trip. It is not certain that the shots contained "speed," but Dr. Feelgood, as patients called him, is known routinely to have mixed amphetamines into his potions.

The drug causes not only feelings of euphoria but also an exaggerated sense of power and superiority.

Affordable Housing. Where do I go to register my annoyance over the appearance of the phrase affordable housing in the news?

In most newspaper stories, affordable housing is code for "subsidized housing," with either the government or somebody else (a nonprofit; a coerced developer) covering the difference between the market price and what the resident pays.

The earliest newspaper mention of affordable housing I found this afternoon was an Aug. 23, 1970, New York Times letter to the editor (PDF; purchase required), although I'm sure it's not the first. The euphemism is so common that Nexis dredges up more than 1,800 examples of it from the nation's top six dailies in the past year. Over the same period, the phrase subsidized housing scores only about 160 hits.

In his book Unspeak, Steven Poole explains that phrases like affordable housing are usually created and popularized by advocates as a linguistic dodge. Such phrases allow a speaker or writer to say something without saying it, to express a view without getting into an argument, and to make a point without having to justify that point. (Other prime examples of unspeak: pro-choice, pro-life, tax relief, tax burden, community, reform, intelligent design, regime change, and sharpshooters.)

Affordable housing, like other virulent forms of unspeak, disarms its critics before they have a chance to argue. Anybody against affordable housing must be for unaffordable housing, i.e., homelessness, and hence a real shit.

Editors of the world, delete this phrase from the lexicon!

******

Run into any unspeakable unspeak lately? Here are examples culled by my readers last year. Send your new discoveries to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (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 affordable in the subject head of an e-mail message and send it to slate.pressbox@gmail.com.

The depth of Burma's misery is difficult to fathom. The destruction wrought by Cyclone Nargis—with an unofficial death toll already exceeding 100,000 people—has been compounded by the ruling junta's incompetence and paranoia. The tragedy comes just months after the brutal suppression of Burma's "Saffron Revolution," the latest in a long series of failed pro-democracy efforts. How did this gorgeous land, so rich in culture and natural resources, end up an impoverished, totalitarian nightmare?

George Orwell would place a good deal of blame on Britain, Burma's colonial overlord from the mid-19^th century until 1948. In his 20s, Orwell (né Eric Arthur Blair) served as a policeman in Burma for five years. The experience soured him on British imperialism and inspired both his classic novel Burmese Days and the haunting essay "Shooting an Elephant." Both works reflect Orwell's dismay at the callousness of British rule, which helped sow the anti-Western sentiment that Burma's junta now exploits to such great effect.

When the Japanese conquered Burma in 1942, they were largely greeted as liberators—"Asia for the Asiatics," the invaders promised. The fleeing British, meanwhile, burned the nation's oil fields as they retreated to India, leaving the economy a shambles. It wouldn't take long for the Burmese to realize that their new colonial masters were every bit as cruel as the Brits. Burma's suffering under the Japanese yoke is expertly recounted in Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941-1945.

The pseudonymous Emma Larkin, an American journalist fluent in Burmese, looks back on the ravages of British imperialism and World War II in her masterful Finding George Orwell in Burma. Traveling through the tea houses of Yangon and Moulmein, she finds a nation living in constant fear of the omnipresent secret police, whose mission is to sniff out the plots—more imagined than real—of foreign spies and ethnic militants. Yet Larkin also discovers a clandestine network of intellectuals who traffic in books, ideas, and other "dangerous" materials.

Larkin's book is best read in conjunction with From the Land of Green Ghosts, Pascal Khoo Thwe's account of growing up in Burma's remote Shan State as a member of the Kayan tribe (celebrated for its practice of using brass rings to elongate female necks). Khoo Thwe eventually became a student activist, then an armed insurgent after the Burmese army raped and killed his girlfriend. He was able to tell his harrowing tale after escaping to Thailand and, through a fantastic stroke of luck, earning a place at Cambridge University.

Thailand is home to an enormous community of Burmese expatriates, many of whom, like Khoo Thwe, are members of ethnic minorities who risked their lives to flee. These exiles are responsible for such indispensable information sources as the Irrawaddy, an independent newsmagazine, and ALTSEAN Burma, which pressures the Southeast Asian economic community to ostracize the junta. Given the tight state control of news media in Burma, little would be known of the nation's plight without the exiles' efforts.

There is also a sizeable expatriate community in London, and it has been instrumental in organizing the Burma Campaign U.K. The "News & Reports" section of the group's Web site is a must-visit, especially the compendium of rare videos. (There is a sister organization in the United States, the U.S. Campaign for Burma, but its Web site is less essential as a news source.)

Burma has a rich artistic tradition, and examples of its finest ancient sculptures and manuscripts can be viewed on the website for the Center for Burma Studies at Northern Illinois University. The most famous Burmese artist working today is Htein Lin, who honed his painting technique while jailed for pro-democracy activism. His "prison paintings," made on the cotton inmate uniforms he was forced to wear, are among the most powerful artworks of recent decades. If such beauty can emerge from such despair, then surely there is hope for Burma itself.

A version of this article also appears in the Washington Post's "Outlook" section.

It's sad. It's just sad. In all my years of public service, I am one of the finest people I have ever had the privilege to know and work with. I cannot imagine why I have chosen this moment to turn against everything I have always stood for—lies, deception, secrets, double talk—unless it was for a six-figure book advance. But the me I knew believed that some things, such as duty, are more important than money. That me saw misleading the public as the highest of missions. That me would never betray me the way this me has done. Frankly, it's a puzzle. But I will be talking with me later this afternoon, on Oprah, and maybe then I will get some answers. Until then, all I can say is that it's just very, very sad.

Frankly, I don't recognize the me I describe in my book. This isn't me. This is some other me that I have conjured up for reasons I can only imagine. In fact, I don't think that I could even explain them myself. I have known me for almost my entire life, and I thought I knew me pretty well. And I always assumed the opposite was true, too. But apparently I harbored some kind of bitterness against me that I never told me about. I don't know what other explanation there could be.

And another thing: If I did not support the policies that I advocated—important policies, vital to my entire philosophy of government, such as making things up and challenging the patriotism of opponents—why didn't I say something at the time? As I used to tell me, my door was always open to myself. But as far as I know, I never uttered a peep of complaint or disagreement. And I ask you: Who would know if I didn't?

Actually, as I think about it, I start to get really angry. Who the hell do I think I am? Some pipsqueak from nowhere who was hired to tell lies and suddenly thinks he has some sort of mission to tell the truth? I mean, who cares what I think the real reason was for the invasion of Iraq? I wasn't hired to figure out the real reason. I was hired to put out the phony reason, which I did without objection. But all of a sudden I'm too good to lie. Condi Rice will. Dick Cheney will and loves it. Absolutely loves it. But me? No. I suddenly feel I have some kind of duty to tell the truth. Well, excuuuuuse me!

People have asked: Is this a permanent breach? Will I ever be able to work with myself again? Will I ever trust myself to betray the truth as I did for so many years? Or were those years of deception nothing but a lie? And the honest answer (or dishonest answer, as the case may be) is: I'll have to get back to you on that. However, once a person has started telling the truth, it is very hard to trust his lies completely ever again. I'm sure that when the wounds have been given time to heal, I will work with myself again. But there will always be that small shred of doubt: Am I truly following the line that has been so carefully crafted by people much smarter than myself, or am I just saying whatever comes into my head for no better reason than it happens to be the case?

And if my sudden eruption of truth-telling means that my career as a professional liar is over, I will have no one to blame but myself.

Director and producer Sydney Pollack died Monday at his Los Angeles home at age 73. Pollack, who referred to himself as "Mr. Mainstream," is best remembered for the 1982 comedy Tootsie and the 1985 romance Out of Africa, for which he won an Oscar. In a 2005 "Middlebrow" column, Bryan Curtis dissected Pollack's ability to "take any scenario—from the ridiculous to the horrific, from Streep to strife—and mold it into benign mush." The article is reprinted below.

Sydney Pollack's The Interpreter begins in Africa about seven decades after the director last left us there, with Meryl Streep holding a bullwhip. That picture was called Out of Africa, and it also contained the unnerving sight of Robert Redford participating in a world war. In The Interpreter, Pollack lets the continent off easy: It's merely being ravaged by a genocidal lunatic. Whether this represents a leap forward in artistry is debatable, but it does point out Pollack's great talent. He can take any scenario—from the ridiculous to the horrific, from Streep to strife—and mold it into benign mush. This is the source of Pollack's enduring popularity and why some of us find his recent pictures so maddening.

Pollack was born in Lafayette, Ind., in 1934—raised around a "suspiciousness of sophistication," he says, by a father who wanted him to become a dentist. He lit out for New York, where he fell in with Method students at the Neighborhood Playhouse; then he studied at the knee of John Frankenheimer and began directing for TV. Before he was 35, Pollack had helmed episodes of Ben Casey, The Fugitive, and the Bob Hope Chrysler Theater (where he directed Claude Rains' final performance). He jumped ship for the movies in 1965, and a year later the journalist Peter Bart quoted Pollack deriding the "horizontal" storytelling favored by American directors and offering paeans to Fellini and Truffaut. But by then it was too late. Pollack's rough edges had been shorn off by television. He had become a dedicated middlebrow artist, suspicious of sophistication and concerned with nothing so much as being an entertainer.

Pollack's admirers often find themselves unable to describe the trajectory of his career. Like a TV journeyman, he slips from genre to genre, rarely leaving his fingerprints on any of them. "He can do a Western and he has," Cliff Robertson said, in the DVD series The Directors. "He can do an urban thing like Tootsie and he has. He can do a political thing or a business thing like The Firm or the cowboy thing, Electric Horseman, or the thing, Jeremiah Johnson. … He has what I call an 'omni' talent."

What moves Pollack? Well, for one, stars. Pollack's casts bulge with big-timers whose personalities often stand in for character and motivation. Witness his 1993 film The Firm, which accommodates Tom Cruise, Holly Hunter, Ed Harris, David Strathairn, Gary Busey, and Paul Sorvino by more or less asking them to play themselves. For the heavies, Pollack recruited Gene Hackman, Hal Holbrook, and Wilford Brimley—enough superannuated horsepower to shoot another Cocoon sequel. Pollack's title cards often sag so heavy with stars that the films themselves seem to melt away. All that remains of 1973's soapy The Way We Were is its marquee: "Redford and Streisand." The same goes for Out of Africa ("Redford and Streep") and The Electric Horseman ("Redford and Fonda"). One of the reasons Pollack's films feel so reassuring is that they pander to our basest moviegoing instinct: "Well, if it's a turkey, at least it's got…" That this is also the base instinct of studio executives explains a bit about why Pollack is a Hollywood treasure.

Another key to Pollack's genius is his leading men, who often take the form of Redford, Cruise, or Harrison Ford. The Pollack hero undergoes a ritualized breaking-in: He begins as a handsome loner, self-sufficient and set in his ways. Then he meets a she. She (Streep, Fonda, Streisand) is overly idealistic or else overly prim. He is smitten. He opens himself up. Together, he and she overcome a hostage crisis, evil lawyers, or African colonization. Two and a half hours later, he is a slightly better he. If you think I'm oversimplifying things, listen to Pollack: "It's usually the same guy in a different place," he told The Directors. "Sometimes he's in Africa, sometimes he's in the West. ... And often it's Redford."

It's often suggested that Pollack has an unrivaled knack for wringing great performances out of his actors. On the set of Tootsie, his best film, he butted heads with Dustin Hoffman, and the battles lent Hoffman's performance an electricity, a great unease. (And for once Pollack juggled the embarrassment of talent, with bit parts for Terri Garr, Bill Murray, Charles Durning, and Pollack himself.) Pollack's later work rarely betrays the notion that his leading men have been given any direction at all. How else to account for Redford's All-American gauziness in Out of Africa—he "looks as if he'd been blow-dried away," quipped Pauline Kael—or Ford's low-decibel mumbling in Sabrina? As Pollack has retreated as a director, he seems to bring out the very worst in Redford and Ford and Cruise. They revert to their virgin states: elusive, grinning blanks.

Hollywood has a word for people who join big stars with big literary properties and then leave the film to make itself—producers. Indeed, Pollack spends most of his time away from the camera these days; The Interpreter is his first directorial effort in six years. In his capacity as a frontman, Pollack has lent his name to some fine movies (The Talented Mr. Ripley) and acted in others (Husbands and Wives), but what does one make of Pollack's languid directorial efforts? I'm sorry to report that the real star of The Interpreter is not Nicole Kidman or Sean Penn but the United Nations building. Pollack's camera treats the General Assembly Hall with the same quiet reverence it used to lavish on Redford's sun-kissed cheeks. "There's music the U.N. makes just by being there," Pollack told Entertainment Weekly, adding, "I don't have to do much except photograph it properly so that it sings along with them."

Even committed multilateralists might find this a little tough to swallow, but I think I see what Pollack is up to. The high-end stars, the soupy thrillers, the multinational institutions—Pollack, who is about to turn 71, is creating an alternative cinema for the old. (A not-unreasonable strategy, given the demographics at the screening I attended for The Interpreter.) In that most major directors set out to honor their audiences' inner 13-year-olds, it may well be the most revolutionary thing Sydney Pollack has ever done.

The most famous card in the history of pictures on cardboard is the T206 Honus Wagner, so rare that one of them sold for more than $2 million last year. The most well-known card of the modern era is the 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr., the No. 1 card in the company's inaugural set. As Griffey nears the 600-home-run landmark, sales of the Upper Deck No. 1 are as brisk as always, with buyers snapping up a couple of dozen every day on eBay at prices ranging from $15 to $300. These two cards, the bookends of the collecting phenomenon, are exact opposites. The Wagner is the white whale of the card trade: elusive, highly coveted, and known to drive men to madness. The Griffey is the childhood lust object that everyone's mother saved, arguably the most popular, most widely held baseball card of all time.

When Griffey welcomed collectors to the very first Upper Deck set, investment was just about to trump fun in the card world. Kids had started putting their collections in plastic sheets and hard cases rather than bicycle spokes and shoe boxes, and investors would cross-check every card picked from a pack against the latest issue of Beckett's price guide. It was in this environment that Upper Deck launched in 1989 as the first premium baseball card, protected from the threat of counterfeiting with a hologram on each card, protected from the stain of the wax pack thanks to its unprecedented foil wrappers. There was no gum included, and packs cost an industry-high $1. Baseball cards were serious business.

The Griffey card was the perfect piece of memorabilia at the perfect time. The number the card was given only furthered the prospect of his cardboard IPO. Junior was chosen to be card No. 1 by an Upper Deck employee named Tom Geideman, a college student known for his keen eye for talent. Geideman earned his rep by consistently clueing in the founders of The Upper Deck, the card shop where the business was hatched, on which players would be future stars. Geideman took the task of naming the player for the first card very seriously. Using an issue of Baseball America as his guide, Geideman knew that card No. 1 would belong to Gregg Jefferies, Sandy Alomar Jr., Gary Sheffield, or a long-shot candidate, the phenom they called "The Kid." It's probably the most thinking Geideman ever did compiling a checklist, save for the 1992 Upper Deck set when he assigned numbers that ended in 69 to players with porn-star-sounding names. (Dick Schofield at No. 269, Heathcliff Slocumb at No. 569, and Dickie Thon at No. 769.)

Despite the fact that Griffey had yet to crack the majors, Geideman had the confidence that the top pick in the 1987 draft would live up to his pedigree. It goes without saying that this was a genius selection. You could imagine how the people at Topps felt when Junior became an instant superstar—and they hadn't even included him in their 792-card set.

From the very beginning, card buffs saw the Upper Deck No. 1 as not just a collectible, but as an investment. Baseball card fans, who had once traded away duplicate cards in a quest to compile a complete set, started hoarding as many Griffeys as they could. Collectors' hands would shake when they saw Griffey's face in their pack, confident that this card would be the key to financing a college education.

But the truth was that even though Upper Deck printed fewer cards than its contemporaries—Donruss, Fleer, Topps, and Score—in this case, supply came close to meeting demand. Today, many people face the reality of unloading their Griffeys at a heavy discount on eBay. On May 4, for example, you could find two people selling two separate lots of 11 Upper Deck card No. 1s. One guy was selling a lot of 26, which eventually went for $760.

It comes as no surprise that the Griffey card is the most-graded piece of cardboard in the history of the hobby. (Card grading, if you're unaware, is done by services that slap a card in between plastic and evaluate exactly how pristine it really is.) Professional Sports Authenticator has graded 51,800 Griffeys, while Beckett has graded about 25,400. (PSA's second-place card is the 1985 Topps Mark McGwire Olympic rookie card, with 46,000 grades. Beckett's No. 2 is the 2001 Upper Deck Tiger Woods card, which has been graded about 21,500 times.)

A Griffey that was graded a perfect 10 once sold for north of $1,000. Now it would go for closer to $275. "Raw," ungraded Griffeys sell for $15 to $50. (By comparison, Donruss and Fleer versions of the Griffey rookie, from graded to ungraded, usually range in price from $1 to $20.)

Despite Griffey's illustrious career—some might call it disappointing relative to all the hype—it's amazing that the card could even command a couple hundred bucks, given how common it is and how many of them seem to be in great condition.

More than 1 million Griffey cards were printed. In Upper Deck's original mailing to dealers, the company said it would sell 65,000 cases of card packs. With 20 boxes in a case, 520 cards in a box, and 700 different cards in the set, there would be about 965,000 of each card produced for the boxes. Combine that number with the amount of Griffeys in the untold number of "factory sets," and you'd have your production run.

Given the number of Griffey cards in circulation, there have long been rumors of an illicit reason for the card's ubiquity. Upper Deck, the legend goes, knew that printing the cards was just like printing money. As such, there was a sheet the company could run with 100 Griffey cards on it, instead of the standard sheet that had just one Griffey in the top corner along with 99 pictures of other players.

"If that existed, I never saw it," says Buzz Rasmussen, Upper Deck's plant manager at the time. Rob Veres of Burbank Sportscards, a memorabilia dealership with a warehouse of 30 million cards, says that if Griffeys were produced in greater quantity than other cards, he would've expected to come across larger collections of the card.

If there was no funny business, why are the Griffey cards so abundant? The most natural explanation is that more were saved. Figure that about 95 percent of Frank DiPinos, Henry Cottos, and Steve Lombardozzis have hit the garbage can, while a huge percentage of the Griffeys have survived. Some dealers also swore to me that, although Upper Deck claims its packs were sequenced randomly, there was in fact a predictable pattern in the company's boxes that became valuable to learn. Therefore, the unopened Upper Deck packs that remain are less likely to have Griffey cards stashed inside them.

There's one more reason for the Griffey profusion. While the card might not have received an extra production run, there was extra attention paid to its condition coming out of packs and factory sets. Because the Griffey was card No. 1, it resided in the upper-left-hand corner of the printing sheet. It was therefore more susceptible to miscuts and corner bends. Being the first card in the factory set also turned some of the Griffeys blue, the color of the box.

Card collectors and dealers who received less-than-perfect Griffeys would write in to complain to Upper Deck. The nascent company—surely understanding that its products would be seen as investments—couldn't afford any bad PR at that early stage. According to Jay McCracken, then the company's vice president of marketing and sales, the customer service desk was the place to find stacks of new Griffeys. The company was more than happy to exchange the bad card for a pristine one to keep its customers happy. That came in handy a decade later when the value of a Griffey would be determined by the card graders.

When Griffey hits home run No. 600, don't look for the value of Upper Deck No. 1 to skyrocket. After all, there's likely a card in circulation for every person living in the city centers of Cincinnati and Seattle. That sheer quantity, though, does mean that the lasting image of Ken Griffey Jr. won't be anything he does on the baseball field. It will be a picture of an overjoyed teenager in an airbrushed Mariners hat.

I remember my first visit, several years ago, to a video game arcade in Tokyo. I was amazed at the popularity of games that seemed to function not just as entertainment, but as training aids for various physical and mental skills. There were dancing games for coordination, drumming games for rhythm, and puzzle games for math and spatial relations. The mainstream American video game formats of the time (first-person shooters, sports, driving) may have honed reaction times and finger dexterity, but they rarely tested other skills and were almost never explicitly about self-improvement.

I became certain that Japan would soon produce a generation of highly athletic, rhythmically attuned, mentally acute uberchildren—while America would produce kids with lumpy bodies, cloudy minds, and lightning-fast thumbs. In the past few years, though—thanks in large part to the success of Nintendo's Wii console and DS handheld—those Japanese-style enrichment games have begun to invade American living rooms. Titles like Brain Age (full of timed quizzes aimed at stimulating mental activity) and Endless Ocean (basically a low-level marine biology course) have found an audience here alongside the Halos and Maddens.

Now comes the release of Nintendo's Wii Fit, the latest and perhaps most ambitious effort yet in a category I'll term "didactic gaming." Wii Fit is less a video game than a solicitous personal trainer. It offers yoga, strength training, aerobics, and balance drills. It tracks your weight and body mass index, and records the frequency and duration of your exercise sessions. (It does not charge by the hour, show up late for appointments, or gossip with other personal trainers when it should be paying attention to you.)

At the heart of Wii Fit is a "balance board" that comes packaged with the game. This small, white, rectangular platform senses subtle weight shifts in any direction. It can measure how steadily you're holding that one-legged yoga pose, or it can mimic a snowboard and let you lean fore and aft to carve turns down a slalom course. (Here's a short video that covers most of the functions.)

The Wii Fit experience begins with a weigh-in, the balance board serving as an accurate scale. Once you've created your profile, you choose a trainer (male or female—both are hot). Then it's on to the workouts.

I'm in pretty good shape, and I found the initial aerobic exercises much too easy. The basic step routine (you hop on and off the balance board in time to an up-tempo beat) seems tailored for folks who've been sedentary for decades, and it didn't manage to make me breathe hard or break a sweat. When I'd finished, the game unlocked a more challenging level—but this "advanced" step routine was still not as demanding as I'd have liked. I'm hoping future, yet-to-be-unlocked levels will ramp up the intensity.

Likewise, the introductory strength-training exercises are very low-key. Only the push-ups had me feeling any burn. Of course, Nintendo is understandably terrified of pushing too hard. (It's just a matter of time before people wearing neck braces start showing up at plaintiff-side law firms, balance boards in hand.) But the result is that those of us who are already physically active will wish Wii Fit's training wheels would come off much faster.

I did very much enjoy the yoga section of the game. I've taken a couple of yoga classes, and I found Nintendo's version quite acceptable. The poses are demonstrated clearly by the virtual trainers, and the game even tells you how fast to breathe.

The other night, a friend came fresh from her yoga class, and I asked her to try out a few poses. As she extended into "tree," rising up on one leg, I could see her balance was rock steady because the onscreen dot that measures weight shifts barely moved from its target spot. She got terrific scores on everything she tried, which suggests to me that the game does a decent job of gauging actual yoga proficiency. She did, however, warn me that the Wii can't tell if my body is in proper alignment, and that I could easily injure myself with an incorrect pose. She also noted that the game completely ignores yoga's spiritual components. To which I say: Meh.

Wii Fit's final section, the balance games, will be the biggest hit with kids and at social gatherings. These quick challenges include ski jumping, tightrope walking, and snowboarding. Some of the games are terrific fun (particularly the snowboarding slalom, for which you stand on the balance board sideways, as you would on an actual snowboard), and they really do put your balance abilities to the test.

Balance is an oft-overlooked skill that's a vital asset in any sport. The Japanese are obsessive about it: It's at the heart of sumo, for instance, and it's the secret to Ichiro's unorthodox hitting approach. Sadly, I discovered—after trying out several of these games—my balance sort of sucks. The good news: My failures drove me back to the yoga and strength-training sections of Wii Fit, where many of the drills are designed to address this shortcoming. After doing a round of the more balance-focused exercises, I played the games again to see if I'd notice a difference. I did.

This is perhaps Wii Fit's best selling point: It keeps you coming back. Like a real personal trainer, it graphs your progress, giving lots of positive feedback along the way. It knows how often you've been playing and gently chides you if it thinks too many days have passed since your last session. Should you step off the balance board in the middle of a routine, your trainer needles, "Hey, your muscles aren't going to train themselves!" Since the game keeps a history of your scores in each exercise, you can track exactly how much you've improved. Your effort is constantly refueled by your desire to post a new high score.

Wii Fit will not disappoint those who are fans, as I am, of Nintendo's patented brew of cuteness and whimsy. One of the balance games turns you into a penguin sliding on your belly to catch fish. During the jogging exercises, adorable puppies scamper by you, yapping down the road. Miis, the characters you design to serve as your Wii avatars, also play a big role, their cartoon faces popping up everywhere you look. The only cuteness-quotient misstep: One of the games has you heading soccer balls while avoiding airborne panda heads. Yes, severed panda heads—mouths open, frozen in rictus—come flying through the air at you. I imagine it's because their black-and-white color scheme is easy to confuse with that of a soccer ball. But I also suspect this may be a subtle swipe at China. If subsequent games involve severed Mao heads, I'll know I'm right.

Will I keep using Wii Fit as a regular workout? I'd definitely like to keep plugging away at the balance exercises, since I feel like I could make some valuable improvement with a little more practice. I'm unlikely to stick with the aerobics stuff, though, unless the exercises get significantly harder. As it is, they aren't enough of a challenge, and I'll soon revert to visiting my local JCC gym when I want to raise my heartbeat.

If you're out of shape and won't join a gym—due to cost, distance, or time constraints—the Wii Fit is a very reasonable alternative. It'll get you off the couch and into some mild aerobic activity. Likewise, if you have a chubby kid who doesn't like sports, this may be what the doctor ordered. But better get cracking, kid: Those Japanese uberchildren are way ahead of you.

The Independent Film Channel—the network that brings you the scattershot sketch comedy of The Whitest Kids U'Know, the brawny chatter of The Henry Rollins Show, and, as I type this, yet another airing of Slingblade—has a Web site that has recently upped its commitment to serving video series of a very particular flavor. Once you set aside the site's triumphant hosting of "Trapped in the Closet," R. Kelly's epically strange multi-chapter R&B video, you'll notice a uniformity of thematic concerns and goofy haircuts addressed in the two-to-seven installments of its signature minishows. I imagine that the IFC.com viewer is found wherever American Apparel unitards are sold, but while these Web series unquestionably function as lifestyle accessories, they're also trying to pose, in their studiously disheveled way, some questions about young love in pseudo-bohemia.

New to the scene is Young American Bodies, which moved to the site this week after debuting on Nerve.com. It hails from the school of "mumblecore," a subgenre marked by nonprofessional actors delivering naturalistic performances, earnest directors employing low-fi production values, and cameramen suffering from the shakes. "Mumblecore narratives hinge less on plot points than on the tipping points in interpersonal relationships," Dennis Lim wrote in the New York Times awhile back, his analysis happening to capture in a nutshell the texture of this cashew-sized show.

On Young American Bodies, people with names like Kelly and Dia and Maggie talk, in person or via webcam, about relationships. The substance of these conversations—about pending engagements and promised homecomings—is not worth relating, but it does seem noteworthy that the tone is upbeat even when the talks are Serious. Where characters in similar shows natter on about love and sex in a brooding and melancholy fashion, the mouths on these bodies natter on in a cheerful and sunny way, as if the director, Joe Swanberg, knows that this is just a racy little comic strip. This constitutes an advance. When these people have finished talking, they take off their clothes and they do it. The sex here is neither artistic nor pornographic, but it's pretty enough and mildly arousing in a way that suggests episodes are being used as an overture to foreplay in neighborhoods from Greenpoint to the Mission.

Meanwhile, hinging less on interpersonal tipping points than on wry mayhem and post-Tarantino banter, Getting Away With Murder represents the perhaps-inevitable synthesis of Say Anything ... and Grosse Point Blank, the John Cusack role falling to one John Gilbert, who looks like a slightly darker, earthier version of indie actor James Urbaniak. Gilbert's character, Seth Silver, is a shaggy-haired professional killer, a hipster hit man.

At 25, Seth still lives at home with his mom, an absurdly over-mothering mother in the grand tradition of Jewish mothers, a kind of Sophie Portnoy in zebra print. His best friend, having learned of Seth's secret job after popping the trunk of his car and discovering the corpse of a hooker, cannot understand why the guy has such trouble asking women on dates. ("You know, for a hit man, you're a huge pussy.") When Seth finally does take a woman out, the dinner is interrupted by a work obligation. He kills four gangsters, one of whom barfs on his pants leg, which he describes to the lady as his own vomit, regurgitated in a panic attack. With Seth's situation requiring him to be a sensitive man and a stone-cold killer, Murder emerges as a quick-cutting parable of the artistic yuppie's divided self. He's an American psycho in Elvis Costello glasses.

The show's rival in drollery is Wilfred, an Australian import about a talking dog. To be precise, Wilfred is about a man dribbling dirty gems of passive aggression and fatalistic philosophy while wearing a dog suit. One night, after seeing a band, soignée Sarah brings fine young Adam back to her place, where he meets her pet, who's seated in an armchair with his legs crossed politely. The dog offers Adam a rip from his homemade bong. Adam and Sarah disappear into the bedroom for a while, and then Wilfred taunts Adam into staying up late doing dude stuff—eating nachos, watching Face/Off, literally talking about bitches. "I hooked up with this little piece outside of the 7-Eleven a while back and that was all right," Wilfred remembers. This is the beginning of a beautifully uneasy friendship, with the dog as the man's rival, double, mentor, and id, not to mention a sort of floppy-eared ghost of boyfriends past. Despite its existence as a stoner comedy—great plumes of ganja waft through the episodes, which come online daily at 4:20 p.m.—the absurdism of Wilfred is actually quite clearheaded. Actor Jason Gann plays the pup with a scowl that Russell Crowe might envy, and he does so in the service of a relationship comedy that, with every silly gesture, goes digging for emotional truth as if it were a bone.

Slate editor Jacob Weisberg was online on Washingtonpost.com to chat with readers about John McCain's strengths and weaknesses and to speculate on what makes the Republican candidate tick. An unedited transcript of the chat follows.

Fourth Estate: Look, I'm doing everything I can to help voters understand this campaign. I've ignored John's mix-up of "Sunni" vs. "Shiite"—it really doesn't matter. I attended John's BBQ at his ranch and picked up all the talking points to use this Fall. I've written extensively about every smear against Obama I've seen in the e-mails, because they're out there, and I have a journalistic responsibility to discuss them. I regularly write out Obama's full name, including his middle name of "Hussein." Yet Obama seems to be strengthening. What else can I do?

Jacob Weisberg: The question of press bias has gotten really tedious. With McCain and Obama, I think we have two nominees (nearly) who are widely liked and admired by reporters. Both are sure to cry foul when it suits their purposes, but I don't see any meaningful media slant in a race between them.

_______________________

Harrisburg, Pa.: Jacob, I actually am reading the news from my studio in Paris (which I have leased for the month of May). I have read your articles in the past, but my question is perhaps more of a comment. I found your last paragraph "flat." It took away from the earlier part of it. The piece certainly convinces a reader that you know your way around the D.C. circuit, but it just sort of hangs there ... at the end. Was there a reason for doing that in this article? I am a writer, also. Just had my first book published: a novel, The Widow's Web.

Jacob Weisberg: Sorry about that. It ends abruptly because it's an excerpt to a longer introduction to David Foster Wallace's book McCain's Promise. In printed form, my piece goes on to consider DFW's view of McCain and the paradox of a candidate who succeeds politically by acting as if he's not that political.

_______________________

Anonymous: If McCain is at his best when he is losing, then I am certain Democrats would love to make him great. Why does he seem to be more outspoken and more of a maverick when he is not comfortably ahead?

Jacob Weisberg: Obvious, isn't it? The stakes get higher in proximity to victory. Last August, McCain probably thought he didn't have much to lose.

_______________________

Savory Goodness: As a fun Wednesday afternoon exercise, read the entire Slate article then review the associated posts. Many learned Frayers post all of the usual "four more years" blather, while this Slate piece is one of many which give evidence to the contrary. Further evidence can be derived from Sen. McCain's record in the Senate, and in the conservative media's reactions to him.

John McCain—whatever else one might think of him—is nobody's lapdog; not Bush's, nor Limbaugh's, nor Fox News's, nor the religious right's, nor the lobbyists', nor even the GOP's. We are unquestionably, finally going to have palpable change in Washington after this election, no matter which side wins. 'Bout damn time.

Jacob Weisberg: I agree that McCain is driven to an unusual degree by his own conscience. He has never been a good team player, and Republican party-liners are right to mistrust. I don't think he has any real respect or affection for George W. Bush (or vice-versa), though their views on Iraq happen to be closely aligned at the moment.

_______________________

Reading, Pa.: If Sen. McCain had a "senior moment" on the trail and said something truly ridiculous or out of touch, would it be fair to report that, or do you think the media would look the other way? Would you report it?

Jacob Weisberg: Are you kidding? The press will be over any gaffe or slip of any kind, by either candidate. But "senior moment" implies that he's gone foggy in some way that his campaign is trying to conceal. I don't think that's true. My sense is that he's as energetic and on the ball as he was eight years ago.

_______________________

Hope, Ark.: Jacob, do you think the town-hall-type debates McCain has proposed to Obama actually will happen? Given that both candidates weren't really such great debaters, who do you think it would benefit more?

Jacob Weisberg: I'd love to see a more open-ended type of debate between McCain and Obama, and I think there's a decent chance of it happening. As you say, neither has been terribly impressive in debates so far.

_______________________

San Francisco: Sen. McCain has sold out most of the principled stands that earned him the maverick reputation in the 2000 campaign. (Embracing Jerry Falwell after calling him an agent of intolerance and supporting Bush after the Bush campaign's despicable slurs against his family in South Carolina, for example.) Is his popularity likely to fall as people realize that McCain 2008 is not the same as McCain 2000?

Jacob Weisberg: McCain is certainly challenging his side less than he did in 2000, but probably more than Obama has ever challenged his own side. McCain still comes into conflict with most Republicans on immigration and campaign finance reform. The maverick streak is still there, but without the self-immolating dimension.

_______________________

Eastern Shore Conservatives: In private, how much does McCain hate conservatives like me?

Jacob Weisberg: I don't think he hates you all, but I remain skeptical that he's really one of you. McCain is genuinely hawkish, but he doesn't think like a natural conservative about social or economic policy. In fact, he doesn't seem to think much about social and economic policy at all, so he can tilt in a conservative direction as easily as in a liberal one. His economic plan looks equally shameful from a liberal or conservative perspective.

_______________________

Charleston, S.C.: Jacob, how do perceive McCain's temperament in comparison to other past presidents or candidates? About the same, or worse?

Jacob Weisberg: His temperament does worry me. McCain can be a loner, and can be extreme in adherence to his principles. This is a guy, remember, who chose to remain a POW in Vietnam for five years rather than violate his code. I worry that in certain confrontational situations, McCain might be inclined to escalate where it would make more sense to compromise or back down. I wouldn't have wanted him making the calls in the Cuban Missile Crisis, for instance.

_______________________

Anonymous: I have to disagree about McCain not liking or respecting President Bush. I could see by the way he made sure Bush got on his plane after that fundraiser the other night that McCain was concerned that the president keep to his busy schedule, even though I'm sure he would have liked to schmooze a bit longer.

Jacob Weisberg: Well, I think he wants Bush to raise as much money for him as possible—and to help with the conservative base. But I've never detected any personal affinity.

_______________________

McCain/The Wire: Isn't it as simple as one of The Wire's themes? A man cannot succeed within the context of the institution without prostituting himself and his beliefs.

Jacob Weisberg: I think the idea that politics entails compromise with one's beliefs may go back a bit farther than The Wire.

_______________________

New York: My wife, who is from Arizona, says that she is amazed that McCain is doing so well because he is, in her words, "a crook." She then cited all sorts of scandals from the '80s and '90s that I never had heard of. Is this past relevant? Did McCain used to be a more divisive figure?

Jacob Weisberg: The most famous controversy was the Keating Five scandal, when McCain helped out a big contributor in an inappropriate way, and was scolded by a Senate investigator. There have been other instances in which he has been criticized for favoring Arizona contributors. He is surrounded by the worst hired-gun lobbyists on the Republican side. But crook is much, much too strong a term for any of that, even if you believe that the worst accusations are true.

_______________________

EarlyBird: McCain is best when he's behind rather than leading the pack, just like conservatism is best as a countermovement rather than a movement. The whole point of conservatism is to conserve what is, to be skeptical of change and giving government power to work grand schemes in the name of its constituents. It is at its best as an insurgency when, as William F. Buckley, Jr. dedicated National Review to doing, it "stands athwart history and yells 'Stop!' " It certainly is not given to interventionism abroad, either.

Goldwater launched the modern conservative movement, Reagan made its values mainstream, and since then it has decayed like any successful movement into politics for politics sake. Ultimately, successful political movements become decadent. Compare the idealist Goldwater, to the corrupted Bush and his veep, who rot at the end of the long 40-plus year movement.

McCain is best when he's behind, having to call bull on the latest "Government as Santa Claus" scheme, because he is a conservative. He's not by nature a builder, but a fighter. He is, at the end of an amazing run of conservative success, now as out of ideas as the conservative movement is. It's why he, along with the Republicans, need to be swept away this year for a long winter, so they can get back to basics, weed out the neocons and Bible-based coercers, and rededicate themselves to core conservative values. Because we will need them healthy and principled and ready to fight that fight again in another eight years.

Jacob Weisberg: I very much agree with the point about conservatism losing track of its principles and being corrupted by power. What's more, most conservatives I know agree with it. Losing control of Congress has begun to provoke some serious rethinking on their side. I agree that losing the White House would help to promote it further.

_______________________

Anonymous: Do you think we'll see an attempt to play out the whole Vietnam War thing before this is all said and done? Aren't McCain's service and prisoner of war ordeal really the only things he has to run on?

Jacob Weisberg: McCain is 71. Obama is 47. If McCain's campaign focuses too heavily on Vietnam, I think it risks turning the race into a past-vs-future content. In that scenario, the past loses. Remember Bob Dole?

_______________________

Huh?: "McCain is surrounded by the worst hired-gun lobbyist in the biz." And all this time I thought he was on a crusade against that kind of influence-peddling.

Jacob Weisberg: My point precisely. McCain is a total hypocrite on this issue. Or, perhaps more precisely, he thinks he is so pure on the issue of political reform that he won't be tainted by having lobbyists all around him.

_______________________

Minneapolis: It seems to me this campaign has revealed a pretty major flaw in McCain's governing style: Though he certainly has core convictions (like reducing the influence of lobbyists, or campaign finance reform), he's clueless about how to actually achieve meaningful results. I mean, after he was worried about the "perception" of lobbyists in his campaign, he rashly created a policy that caused much confusion among his staff, and really didn't do anything to fix the perception problem. The same thing seems to be wrong with the way McCain/Feingold has been almost completely ineffective in reigning in campaign spending. Do you see his potential governing style becoming an issue in the campaign, or is it too abstract an issue for voters to really latch onto?

Jacob Weisberg: It's a very valid issue. McCain has never managed anything significant. He's not detail-oriented. He's interested in policy only selectively. He's not someone is going to delve deeply into the operations of government. As we've seen with George W. Bush, these liabilities can be catastrophic. But I agree, this issue is a bit subtle and abstract to be aired in a presidential campaign. Also, Obama, while somewhat more hands-on, doesn't have real executive experience either.

_______________________

Fighting Back: Great to see the Democrats and Obama loosening the GOP's eight-year lock on their twin trump cards of terrorism and patriotism. It's amazing to me to read Obama's recent retort to McCain, where he said McCain "should explain to the American people why almost every single promise and prediction that he has made about Iraq has turned out to be catastrophically wrong, including his support for a surge that was supposed to achieve political reconciliation." I for one second that emotion! It's about time somebody asked McCain these kinds of questions, as reporters apparently won't.

Jacob Weisberg: I'm not sure McCain's position on the war is as much of a liability as you think it is. For one thing, he was a shrewd critic of the Bush-Rumsfeld strategy from very early on, arguing that the U.S. needed to move to a counter-insurgency strategy. And since Bush finally moved to McCain's preferred strategy in early 2007, levels of violence in Iraq have decreased and the situation has improved somewhat. So while I agree that the invasion of Iraq was a catastrophic blunder, I think there's an argument to be made that McCain's military instincts have been pretty good.

Again, the charge of press bias—which echoes through many of the questions I haven't had time to answer—is wrong-headed and really, really tedious.

_______________________

Black's Ops?: John McCain has repeatedly said to judge him by the company he keeps. Okay—in the past week, six lobbyists have resigned from the McCain campaign under questions about their ties to foreign regimes and corporate interests. Still working for McCain is Senior Political Advisor Charlie Black, whose client list is a who's who of evil men, including Ahmed Chalabi, Ferdinand Marcos, Somali dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi and Nigerian Dictator Ibrahim Babangida. Why do you think Black still is working for John McCain?

Jacob Weisberg: See my early answer. I agree—Charlie Black is a greedy sleaze with a terrible history. And McCain's a hypocrite to keep him on board.

I always idle my engine while stuck in traffic or waiting at the drive-through. My wife insists that the greener move is to turn off the car every time we come to a stop, but I think she's nuts—doesn't restarting a vehicle waste a whole lot of energy? I remember learning that each restart burns the same amount of gas as idling your car for 30 minutes.

The Lantern assumes that you started driving way back in the heyday of the carburetor, when engines started up with a big gush of fuel. But unless you own an automotive dinosaur, your current engine is so efficient that idling would rarely, if ever, be an earth-friendly choice.

Today's cars use electronic fuel injectors, which rigorously control the amount of gas delivered to the engine when you hit the ignition. As a result, virtually no fuel is wasted during startup, and only a thimbleful is burned as the car roars to life. So forget about the 30-minute axiom you were raised on—the threshold at which it makes more sense to shut off rather than to idle should be expressed in seconds, not minutes.

How many seconds, exactly? A lot of environmental organizations advocate the 10-second rule: If you're going to be stopped for more than 10 seconds, it's best to shut off your engine. The one exception is when you're stopped in street traffic—it's illegal to kill the engine in many states, due to concerns that switched-off cars are more easily rear-ended (especially if an absent-minded driver forgets to restart once the gridlock abates).

At first, the Lantern figured the 10-second rule couldn't possibly be legit—surely it's an invention of auto-parts companies for whom worn engines are a boon. But he's slowly come around to buying it, in large part because of this field experiment by the Florida section of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. The researchers concluded that restarting a six-cylinder engine—with the air conditioner switched on—uses as much gas as idling the same car for just six seconds.

Idling is similarly wasteful in frigid temperatures. Contrary to popular belief, cold-weather drivers needn't warm up their cars for longer than 30 seconds. The best way to raise an engine's temperature to optimal levels is to drive it almost immediately after startup; according to a study by the Ontario Ministry of Transportation, a car driven for 12 minutes in 14-degree-Fahrenheit weather will achieve the same temperature as one that idles for 30 minutes. (However, it's best to avoid rapid acceleration during that 12-minute warm-up drive.)

Frequent restarting does create some extra stress on your battery and ignition mechanisms, though probably not as much as you'd think. According to a study by Natural Resources Canada, obeying the 10-second rule will add roughly $10 to a driver's annual maintenance bill. How does that tab stack up against your fuel savings? Well, let's go with the conservative estimate of the Ohio Air Quality Development Authority, which states that the average idling car consumes about 0.156 gallons of gas per hour. (The Lantern has seen other much higher estimates but can't vouch for their veracity.) If you're able to cut out 10 minutes' worth of idling per day, and you need to restart your car an additional four times per day as a result, then you should save around 8.9 gallons of gas a year. At today's gas prices, that amounts to $33.74 annually, leaving you with well in excess of a double sawbuck.

OK, so cutting out idling, though certainly advisable, isn't going to pay for your kids' college tuitions. Nor, for that matter, will it make a huge dent in our national carbon footprint. Keeping in mind that burning a gallon of gas creates 19.564 pounds of carbon dioxide, if every one of the nation's 196 million licensed drivers reduced their idling by 10 minutes per day, we'd cut our annual CO₂ output by 15.48 million metric tons. That would represent about 0.2 percent of the carbon dioxide that was emitted in the United States in 2006.

But if we were able to eliminate idling in stop-and-go traffic, the effect could be more dramatic. Right now, it is imprudent (and often illegal) to cut your engine while on public streets. There are automated systems, such as in the vaunted Toyota Prius, that can rapidly turn engines off and on when the car is, say, stopped at a red light or involuntarily "parked" on a bumper-to-bumper freeway; just apply some pressure to the accelerator, and the engine springs back to life. According to the learned folks at Car Talk, the widespread adoption of such technology could reduce our national fuel consumption by as much 10 percent.

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.

Wednesday, May 27, 2008

Mr. Romney's Neighborhoods: Mitt Romney has a new motto: If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. In the past two months, he has transformed himself from John McCain's sharpest critic to one of his most active surrogates. For more than a year, Romney traveled the country talking up his chances of becoming president. Now he coyly downplays any chance of gaining the vice-presidential nod.

On Saturday, we learned of another surprising reversal. In mid-May, the state Supreme Court voted to allow same-sex marriage in California. This weekend, news leaked that Romney has decided to buy a house there. With property in Massachusetts and California as well as New Hampshire and Utah, the crusader who once warned his son that Democrats would usher in same-sex marriage now owns homes in two of the eight jurisdictions on earth that allow it.

Diane Bell of the San Diego Union-Tribune—who began her column Saturday with the immortal words "Mitt Romney is in escrow"—sparked a rush of rumors by asking: "Could Romney be planning to establish residency in California with an eye on the governor's seat? Gov. Schwarzenegger is forced out by term limits in 2010. Stay tuned ..."

If Romney wanted to buy into a slumping market, his timing couldn't be better. San Diego real estate prices are down 18 percent from a year ago, making even La Jolla beachfront a bargain. When Schwarzenegger's term runs out, the California Republican Party will likewise be the political equivalent of a vacant lot.

Romney's staff quickly shot down any Golden State ambitions. A spokesman told the Associated Press, "Governor Romney has been looking at property on the West Coast because he has family in California, and because his wife, Ann, spends a good deal of time there riding horses." The AP noted that son Matt lives in San Diego, "while son Josh lives in Salt Lake City." That's 750 miles away—less than a month's ride on horseback!

Romney spent the weekend at John McCain's Western getaway with other vice-presidential hopefuls. The La Jolla purchase gives him one more advantage over the rest of the field: He now brings the most undisclosed secure locations.

This isn't the first time homeownership has emerged as an important theme for Romney. When he ran for governor of Massachusetts in 2002, he had to amend his tax returns, which showed he had actually been a resident of Utah. His presidential bid made much of his vacation home on Lake Winnipesaukee, but a second home in New Hampshire wasn't enough to save him after he lost the first caucus in Iowa. If Romney had bought a summer place in Cedar Rapids instead, he might be the presumptive nominee today. Then he could have been the one to invite prospective running mates to spend Memorial Day weekend at his home, wherever that might be.

Last week, Mitt launched a new campaign vehicle, Free and Strong America PAC, which is backing candidates like … John McCain. He even has his own blog. While it's a far cry from the Five Brothers Blog, the Mitt blog brings welcome news of how they're doing. Ben is expecting his first child, Craig his second, Josh his fourth. Matt had his fourth a few months ago. Clearly, the Romney boys have put their blogging days behind them.

Remarkably, the Romney plan seems to be working. While housing prices plunge, Mitt vice-presidential futures are soaring. On Tuesday, Romney stock hit its highest price on Intrade in six weeks, moving into first place ahead of Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

Why the rebound? One of Romney's greatest weaknesses may also be his greatest strength: He's always making up for his last mistake. When Politico asked leading Republicans how to save their party, Romney had the best answer: new ideas, a better agenda, and "a very clear set of principles."

The GOP is in trouble if Mitt Romney is its go-to guy for principle. But if a house on your block is for sale, you have to admit: He'd make a great neighbor. ... 9:53 a.m. (link)

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

On the Rocks: After years of comparing illegitimacy rates around the world—which were low in Italy, moderate in Germany, and astronomical in the United States—Sen. Pat Moynihan used to joke that out-of-wedlock birth rates increase in direct proportion to distance from the Vatican. Now another member of the New York delegation has gone out of his way to confirm Moynihan's theory. Vito Fossella Jr.'s office is a long way from Rome.

Moynihan offered an even more prescient explanation of Fossella's behavior in his famous essay "Defining Deviancy Down." Citing a sociologist's rationalization that "the number of deviant offenders a community can afford to recognize is likely to remain stable over time," Moynihan feared a vicious cycle of what another New Yorker, Fred Siegel, dubbed "moral deregulation": The more people bend the rules, the further some will go in bending them.

Human weakness may be a renewable resource, but public attention is not—so, no matter how many cads live in the tri-state area, only the most shameless can make the front page of the tabloids. According to the tabloids, Rep. Fossella's troubles began in December 2002, when he fell for Air Force legislative liaison Laura Fay on a junket to Malta. The Daily News marvels that their union could take root on such rocky soil: "Malta is not an obvious place for a love affair to flourish. Not unlike Staten Island, it tends to be a conservative place."

Of course, in those days, so was the House of Representatives. Speaker Dennis Hastert himself led that congressional delegation to Malta. The following summer, Hastert took Fossella and Fay along on another European junket. One person on the trip told the Daily News that the affair became an open secret in Spain, somewhere near the Alhambra. The newspaper claims that "word about the affair spread, and Republican officials soon became concerned, fearing it would be exposed, sources said." The tabloid implies that the Air Force dropped Fay as a legislative liaison because she was a little too good at it.

Obviously, Vito Fossella's personal life is not Dennis Hastert's fault. Perhaps the speaker had his nose in a guidebook or was rereading Washington Irving's classic Tales of the Alhambra. (Unexplored tabloid angle: The namesake for Irving's most famous character, Ichabod Crane, is buried on Staten Island—just like Fossella's political career.) Moreover, once you've accepted the ethics of congressional leaders and Pentagon staffers taking taxpayer-funded fact-finding missions to the tourist capitals of Europe, you don't have to be above the legal blood alcohol limit to have trouble seeing any bright lines.

Still, the leadership's avoidance and denial in this case is eerily similar to the last great House Republican sex scandal, involving former Florida Rep. Mark Foley. A House ethics committee investigation determined that Hastert's chief of staff, Scott Palmer, learned of Foley's page problem in 2002 or 2003, the same period as Fossella's budding romance. The House leadership did nothing about it. As the ethics committee report declared, "A pattern of conduct was exhibited among many individuals to remain willfully ignorant."

In time, those years may be remembered as the Era of Willful Ignorance. Mark Foley was busy IMing House pages. Jack Abramoff and Ralph Reed were busy e-mailing each other. Tom DeLay was busy hounding the FAA to track down Texas Democratic legislators who had flown to Oklahoma.

Today's New York Post reports that Scott Palmer, the Hastert aide, knew about the Fossella-Fay problem, too. He did something but not about the wayward congressman. Instead, Palmer called the Pentagon and reported Fay for unprofessional behavior. "I lost confidence in her and I'm not going to kid you," Palmer told the Post. "I was also concerned with this other relationship thing. It didn't look like it should."

Five years later, Republicans no doubt wish their leaders had lost confidence in Fossella after the Alhambra instead of waiting for the mistress, love child, and DUI. But as Pat Moynihan warned, there's a limit to the number of ethically deviant members any community can afford to recognize at one time. … 10:52 a.m. (link)

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Three's Company: For Democrats who still can't decide between Clinton and Obama, a third candidate has put his name on the ballot in the Idaho primary later this month. Keith Russell Judd is pro-choice, opposes No Child Left Behind, wants to end the war in Iraq, and once bowled a 300 game. There's just one catch: he's an inmate at a federal prison in Beaumont, Texas, and won't get out until 2013.

Two decades ago, Idaho nearly re-elected a congressman who was on his way to prison. So perhaps it was only a matter of time before someone already in prison would see Idaho as a springboard to the White House.

Asked how a federal prisoner could qualify for the ballot, Idaho Secretary of State Ben Ysursa told the press, "We got conned." The state recently eliminated the requirement for candidates to gather signatures; now they just need to fill out a form and pay a $1,000 fee. According to the Spokane Spokesman-Review, Keith Judd sent forms and checks to 14 states, but only Idaho put his name on the ballot.

Judd isn't the only out-of-state candidate on the primary ballot. Hal Styles Jr. of Desert Hot Springs, California, who has never been to Idaho, is seeking the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate. For all the heartache and suffering that Larry Craig has caused the state, his arrest and subsequent humiliation have done wonders for candidate recruitment. Far from frightening people away, Craig has lowered the bar so much that even hardened criminals think they could win there.

Judd's 35-year membership in the NRA might give him an edge with some Idaho voters. But the road from Beaumont to Denver is a tough one. Idaho already selected its delegates in caucuses on Super Tuesday. The May 27 primary is just a beauty contest, and Judd seems to be going for the Willie Nelson look.

Even in a year when come-from-behind victories have become the norm, a come-from-behind-bars campaign requires exceptional resourcefulness. Judd used a Texas newspaper tip line as the phone number for his campaign office, and an IRS line in Ohio as the number for his campaign coordinator. He paid the $1,000 with a U.S. Treasury check drawn on his prison account.

Although no one has contributed to his campaign, Judd diligently files a handwritten FEC report every quarter. The FEC database shows Judd for President with $532,837 in total receipts, $11,285 in total expenditures, and an impressive $387,561 in cash on hand. With more than half a million in receipts, Judd's reported total exceeds that of Mike Gravel, who is practically a household name. The Huckabee and Giuliani campaigns would have done anything to match Judd's figure for cash-on-hand.

Running for president isn't a habit Judd picked up in prison, where he has spent the past decade since being convicted of making threats at the University of New Mexico. He has been running for office his whole life. He ran for mayor of Albuquerque in the early '90s, and tried to run for governor. He sought the presidency in 1996, 2000, and 2004 – when he won 3 write-in votes. He has filed more than 70 FEC reports going all the way back to 1995.

Judd has shown the same persistence in the courts, firing off appeals at a faster clip than Larry Craig. In 1999, after receiving a dozen frivolous cert petitions from Judd, the U.S. Supreme Court barred him from filing any more non-criminal claims unless he paid the required fees. In 2005, the 3^rd Circuit Court of Appeals prepared an order noting that Judd had filed "at least 70 frivolous, duplicative and repetitive actions in this Court." By the time the order was issued, that number had reached 82.

Idaho has a long history of embracing maverick long shots, and Judd's iconoclastic background and platform won't hurt. He passes the Mickey Kaus test on welfare reform but not immigration. He favors eliminating all federal taxes so "the government can operate on its own self produced money." He wants to require gun licensing but let people carry concealed weapons. He says his national security views are "classified," but his Iraq position is "withdraw ASAP and forget it."

Judd plays the bass and bongos, belongs to the ACLU and the NRA, and admires JFK and Nixon. His nicknames are "Mr. President" and "Dark Priest," and his favorite athlete is a professional bowler. Bowling is hardly the rage in Idaho: In a fitting tribute to Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's famous theory of social alienation, my hometown turned the bowling alley into a self-storage complex. Still, Judd's rivals can only envy his claim to have once bowled a perfect game.

Idaho pundits, who've had their fill of national attention, cringe over Judd's candidacy. "Jailbird Makes Us Look Silly," wrote the Ketchum Idaho Mountain Express. Others around the country note the irony that a felon can run but can't vote. The Illinois State University student newspaper, the Daily Vidette, defended Judd's right to run, but warned voters and party leaders not to support him: "All superdelegates should save their endorsements for candidates with a real shot."

At one particularly low moment of the 1988 campaign, a news crew tracked down Willie Horton and found out that if he weren't behind bars, he would vote for Dukakis. Give Keith Judd credit for passing up the chance to endorse Obama or Clinton, and running against them instead. ... 12:28 a.m. (link)

Monday, April 21, 2008

Running With the Big Dogs: While Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama deflected Charlie Gibson's question about running together, last week was a big one for Democrats' other dream ticket: any Republican pairing that includes Mitt Romney. With a well-received cameo at a national press dinner and nods from Great Mentioners like George H.W. Bush and Karl Rove, Mitt is back—and campaigning hard for the No. 2 slot.

When John McCain wrapped up the Republican nomination back in February, the odds against picking Romney looked long indeed. The two spent the entire primary season at each others' throats. Romney trashed McCain over "amnesty" for illegal immigrants; McCain joked that Romney's many flip-flops proved he really was "the candidate of change." Even Rudy Giuliani, not known for making peace, chimed in from Florida that McCain and Romney were "getting kind of nasty," implying that they needed to come chill with him at the beach.

Sure enough, after a little time off, Romney felt better—good enough to begin his vice-presidential audition. He went on Fox to say, "There really are no hard feelings." He interrupted his vacation in Utah to host a fundraiser for McCain. After months of dismissing McCain as a Washington insider, Romney flip-flopped and praised him as a longtime congressional champion of Reaganism. Lest anyone fail to notice, Romney confessed that he would be honored to be McCain's running mate, and practiced ripping into the potential Democratic nominees: "When it comes to national security, John McCain is the big dog, and they are the Chihuahuas."

Of course, any big dog should think twice before agreeing to a long journey with Mitt Romney. The past would not be easy for McCain, Romney, and their staffs and families to overcome. Before New Hampshire, McCain's alter ego, Mark Salter, called Romney "a small-varmint gun totin,' civil rights marching, NRA-endorsed fantasy candidate." After the primaries were over, Josh Romney suggested that the Five Brothers wouldn't be gassing up the Mittmobile for McCain anytime soon: "It's one thing to campaign for my dad, someone whose principles I line up with almost entirely," he told the Deseret News. "I can't say the same thing for Sen. McCain."

For Mitt Romney, that won't be a problem: Any grudge would vanish the instant McCain named him as his running mate. And by the Republican convention in September, Romney's principles will be due for their six-month realignment.

The more difficult question is, What's in it for McCain? Actually, Romney brings more to the ticket than you might think. As in any partnership, the key to happiness between running mates is a healthy division of labor. When Bill Clinton and Al Gore teamed up in 1992, Clinton had spent most of his career on the economy, education, health care, and other domestic issues; Gore was an expert on national security, the environment, and technology. Even the Bush-Cheney pairing made some sense: Bush cared only about squandering the surplus, privatizing Social Security, and running the economy into the ground; Cheney was more interested in hoarding executive power, helping narrow interests, and tarnishing America's image in the world.

So, McCain and Romney are off to a good start: They come from different backgrounds and share no common interests. McCain, a soldier turned senator, prefers national security above all else. As a former businessman and governor, Romney rarely brings up foreign policy—for reasons that sometimes become apparent when he does so. In his concession speech, Romney said he was dropping out to give McCain a united front against Obama, Clinton, and Bin Laden. "In this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror," he said. "We cannot allow the next president of the United States to retreat in the face of evil extremism!!"

For the general election, the McCain campaign must decide what to do with conservative positions it took to win the Republican primaries. Here again, Romney is a godsend: a vice-presidential candidate who'll flip-flop so the nominee doesn't have to. No one can match Romney's experience at changing positions: He has been on both sides of abortion, talked out of both sides of his mouth on same-sex marriage, and been for and against his own health care plan. It's a market-based approach to principle—just the glue Republicans need to expand their coalition. Moderates might assume Romney was only pretending to be conservative, and conservatives will thank him for trying.

Straight talk is all well and good for presidential candidates. But as Dick Cheney demonstrated, the job of a Republican vice-presidential candidate is quite the opposite—keeping a straight face while saying things that couldn't possibly be true. Take the economy, for example. McCain gets visibly uncomfortable whenever he ventures beyond fiscal conservatism. Romney is more flexible. In an interview with National Journal last week, he had no trouble contending that corporate tax cuts help the middle class. He spent the primaries warning that the United States was on a slippery slope to becoming the next France. Now he's perfectly happy to argue that we have to cut corporate taxes to keep companies from moving to France.

In his surprise appearance at the Radio & Television Correspondents dinner in Washington last week, Romney showed another virtue that makes him perfect for the role—a vice-presidential temperament. With his "Top 10 Reasons for Dropping Out," he proved that he is ready to poke fun at himself on Day 1.

A vice president needs to be good at self-deprecation, yet not so skilled that he outshines the boss. By that standard, Romney's audition was perfect: He chose good material ("There weren't as many Osmonds as I had thought"; "As a lifelong hunter, I didn't want to miss the start of varmint season") and delivered it just awkwardly enough to leave the audience wondering whether to laugh or feel slightly uncomfortable.

After watching him up close in the primaries, Team McCain no doubt harbors real reservations about Romney. Some conservatives distrust him so much, they're running full-page ads that say, "NO Mitt." A Google search of John McCain, Mitt Romney, and food taster produces more than 100 entries.

But looking ahead to a tense fall campaign, McCain should put those concerns aside and listen to voices from across the spectrum. This could be the issue that unites the country across party lines. Democrats like a little fun at Mitt Romney's expense. The McCain camp does, too—perhaps more so. And after last week, we know that—ever the good sport—even Romney's all for it. ... 2:14 p.m. (link)

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Twist and Shout: When the news broke last August that Larry Craig had been arrested in a restroom sex sting, he had a ready answer: The Idaho Statesman made him do it. He claimed that the Statesman's monthslong investigation into whether he was gay made him panic and plead guilty. Otherwise, he said, he feared that what happened in Minneapolis might not stay in Minneapolis, and the Statesman would make sure the voters of Idaho found out.

Craig's jihad against the Statesman didn't go over too well in Idaho, where people are more likely to read the newspaper in the restroom than worry about it afterward. On Monday, the Statesman was named a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News Reporting for what the committee called "its tenacious coverage of the twists and turns in the scandal involving the state's senator, Larry Craig."

The story took yet another strange twist and turn this week. For the past six months, the entire political world has been wondering why Craig promised to resign when the scandal broke, then changed his mind a few days later. In a rare interview Wednesday with the congressional newspaper the Hill, Craig finally found someone to blame for staying in the Senate: The people of Idaho made him do it.

According to the Hill, Craig said "support from Idahoans convinced him to reverse his pledge to resign last year." This was news to most Idaho voters, who have viewed the whole affair with shock, outrage, embarrassment, and dismay. But Craig didn't stop there. The Hill reports that he also said his decision not to run for re-election "pre-dated the controversy."

Last fall, Craig stunned Idahoans by insisting he was not gay, not guilty, and not leaving. Now he says it's our fault he never left, he was leaving anyway, and if he's not running, it's not because we don't believe him when he says he's not guilty and not gay.

Unfortunately, Craig's latest explanation casts some doubt on the excuse he gave last fall. If he had already decided long ago that he wasn't running for re-election, he had less reason to panic over his arrest, and much less to fear from voters finding out about it back home. In September, he made it sound as if he pled guilty to a crime he didn't commit to avoid a political firestorm back home. If politics were of no concern, he had every reason to fight the charges in court. For that matter, if he was so sure he wouldn't run again, he could have announced his decision early last year, which might have staved off the Statesman investigation before it got started.

Craig's latest revelation undermines his defense in another way as well. If he is telling the truth that he had made up his mind not to run before his arrest, that would be the best explanation yet for why he risked putting himself in a position to get arrested. Eliot Spitzer's re-election prospects plunged long before he got caught, too.

Nothing can fully explain why public figures like Craig and Spitzer would flagrantly risk arrest. But we can rule out political suicide if they'd already decided their political careers were over. ... 3:55 p.m. (link)

Wednesday, April 2, 2008

B.Looper: Learned reader Kyle Sammin recalls that Idaho's Marvin "Pro-Life" Richardson has nothing on 1998 Tennessee State Senate candidate Byron "Low-Tax" Looper. Besides changing his name, Looper also murdered his opponent. Under Tennessee law, the names of dead candidates are removed from the ballot. So even though he was quickly charged with homicide, Looper nearly ran unopposed. The victim's widow won a last-minute write-in campaign. Looper was sentenced to life in prison.

Bloopers: The Pittsburgh Pirates are now the most mediocre first-place team in baseball history. In their season opener Monday night against Atlanta, the Bucs provided plenty of evidence that this year will turn out like the last 15. They blew a five-run lead in the ninth by walking four batters and booting an easy fly ball. Pirate players said they'd never seen anything like it, not even in Little League. For an inning, it looked like the team had gone on strike to demand more money.

But to every Buc fan's surprise, the Pirates won, anyway—12-11 in 12 innings—and with no game Tuesday, Pittsburgh has been above .500 for two glorious days. New General Manager Neal Huntington e-mailed me on Monday to promise that the team's new regime is determined to build an organization that will make the people of Pittsburgh proud again. That might take a while. For now, we're content to make the people of Atlanta feel really embarrassed. ... 1:35 p.m. (link)

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Danger Is My Middle Name: Outgoing Senator Larry Craig can take consolation in one thing: out in Idaho, everyone wants his seat. Fourteen candidates have filed to run for the Senate, including eight Republicans, two Democrats, two Independents, and a Libertarian. Hal Styles Jr. of Desert Hot Springs, California, entered the Republican primary, even though he has never been to Idaho. "I know I'll love it because, clean air, clean water and many, many, many mountains," he says. "My heart, my mind, my body, my soul, my thoughts are in this to win."

The general election will likely be a rematch between former Democratic congressman Larry LaRocco and Republican Lt. Gov. (and former governor) Jim Risch. If Idahoans find those two insufficiently embarrassing, however, a number of fringe candidates have lined up to take Craig's place. According to CQ, one Independent, Rex Rammel, is a former elk rancher who is angry that Risch ordered state wildlife officials to shoot some of his elk that got away. The Libertarian, Kent A. Marmon, is running against "the ever-expanding Socialist agenda" he claims is being pushed by Democratic congressmen like John Dingell.

But by far the most creative third-party candidate is Marvin Richardson, an organic strawberry farmer who went to court to change his name to "Pro-Life." Two years ago, he made that his middle name and tried to run for governor as Marvin "Pro-Life" Richardson. State election officials ruled that middle names couldn't be used to make a political statement on the ballot. As plain old Marvin Richardson, he won just 1.6% of the vote.

Now that "Pro-Life" is his full name, the state had to let him run that way on the ballot. He told the Idaho Press-Tribune that with the name change, he should win 5%. He plans to run for office every two years for as long as he lives: "If I save one baby's life, it will be worth it."

As the Press-Tribune points out, Pro-Life is not a single-issue candidate, but has a comprehensive platform. In addition to abortion, he opposes "homosexuality, adultery, and fornication." He wants the pro-life movement to refer to abortion as "murder," although he has not yet insisted pro-choice candidates change their name to that.

Idaho Republicans and anti-abortion activists don't share Pro-Life's enthusiasm. They worry that conservative voters will check the box next to both Pro-Life and the Republican candidate, thereby spoiling their ballots. So last week, the Idaho Secretary of State persuaded both houses of the legislature to pass emergency legislation to clarify that "voters are casting a vote for a person and not a political proposition." Under the legislation, candidates who appear to have changed their names to "convey a political message" will be outed on the ballot as "a person, formerly known as …." The Prince Bill will go to the governor for signature this week.

According to the Associated Press, Pro-Life accuses legislators of "trying to legislate intelligence"—a charge not often hurled at the Idaho legislature. "The people that vote for me are more intelligent than to have something defined in legislation like this," he says.

Of course, Idahoans who really want to make a political statement will still be able to outsmart the Prince Bill. Nothing in the legislation prohibits Idaho parents who feel strongly about issues from naming their children Pro-Life or Pro-Gun at birth. For that matter, Marvin Richardson has changed his name so many times that if he changes it again, the ballot might have to describe him as "a person formerly known as 'Pro-Life.'" Or he could just change his name to Mitt Romney.

On the other hand, Republicans and Democrats alike can breathe a sign of relief over another unintended effect: the new law foils Larry Craig's best strategy for a comeback. Before the law, Craig could have changed his name to "Not Gay" and won in a landslide. "A person formerly known as Not Gay" is more like it. ... 5:27 p.m. (link)

Friday, Mar. 28, 2008

We Are Family: Midway through the run-up to the next primary, the presidential campaigns are searching for fresh ways to reach the voters of Pennsylvania. My grandparents left Pittsburgh more than 80 years ago, so my Pennsylvania roots are distant. But I still think I can speak for at least half the state in suggesting one bold proposal we long for every April: a plan to rescue one of the most mediocre teams in baseball history, the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Granted, the nation faces more urgent crises. But in hard times, people often look to sports for solace. To blue-collar workers in taverns across western Pennsylvania, watching the Pirates lose night after night is as predictably grim as the Bush economy. The lowly Bucs are the reigning disappointment in the world of sport—with a batting average that seems pegged to the dollar and prospects of victory in line with the war in Iraq.

The Pittsburgh franchise hasn't finished above .500 since 1992. If, as universally predicted, the Pirates turn in their 16^th consecutive losing season this year, they will tie the all-time frustration record for professional sport set by the Philadelphia Phillies in the 1930s and '40s.

Pittsburgh is still a proud, vibrant city, which has rebounded handsomely from losses far more consequential than the Pirates'. The once-proud Pirates, by contrast, show plenty of rust but no signs of recovery. In 1992, the team was an inning away from the World Series, when the Atlanta Braves scored three runs in the bottom of the ninth to steal Game 7 of the National League Championship Series. The Braves soon moved to the NL East en route to winning 14 consecutive division titles, the longest in sports history. The Pirates moved from the East to the Central and began their soon-to-be-record-setting plunge in the opposite direction.

On Monday, the Pirates return to Atlanta for Opening Day against the Braves. Baseball analysts no longer give a reason in predicting another last-place Bucco finish. This year, the Washington Post didn't even bother to come up with a new joke. Last season's Post preview said:

Blech. This Pirates team is so mediocre, so uninteresting, so destined for last place, we don't know if we can squeeze another sentence out of it for this capsule we're being paid to write. But here's one. … The Pirates haven't had a winning season since 1992, and that streak will continue this year. That's still not long enough? Well, here's another line! Hey—two sentences in one line! Make that three! And here's another! See how easy that is?

This year, the same Post analyst wrote:

Okay, folks, here's the deal: We need to fill precisely 4.22 column-inches of type with information about the faceless, tasteless Pirates, and as usual we're not sure we can do it. But guess what? We're already at .95 inches, and we're just getting started! Wait—make that 1.19 inches. ... Should they finish below .500 again (and let's be honest, how can they not?), they will tie the Phillies of 1933-48 for the most consecutive losing seasons. (By the way, that's 3.53 inches, and we haven't even had to mention new manager John Russell, Capps's promise as a closer or the vast potential of the Snell-Gorzelanny duo.) There: 4.22 inches. Piece of cake."

So now the Pirates even hold the record for consecutive seasons as victims of the same bad joke.

Pittsburgh faces all the challenges of a small-market team. Moreover, as David Maraniss pointed out in his lyrical biography, Clemente, the first love for Pittsburgh fans has long been football, not baseball. These days, no one can blame them.

Seven years ago, in a desperate bid to revive the Pirates' fortunes, the city built PNC Park, a gorgeous field with the most spectacular view in baseball. From behind home plate, you can look out on the entire expanse of American economic history—from the Allegheny River to 1920s-era steel suspension bridges to gleaming glass skyscrapers.

The result? As Pittsburgh writer Don Spagnolo noted last year in "79 Reasons Why It's Hard To Be a Pirates Fan," Pittsburgh now has "the best stadium in the country, soiled by the worst team." (The Onion once suggested, "PNC Park Threatens To Leave Pittsburgh Unless Better Team Is Built.") Spagnolo notes that the city already set some kind of record by hosting baseball's All-Star game in 1994 and 2006 without a single winning season in between.

Although the Pirates' best player, Jason Bay, is from Canada, if Pittsburgh fans have suffered because of trade, the blame belongs not to NAFTA but to an inept front office. Jason Schmidt, now one of the top 100 strikeout aces in history, was traded to the Giants. Another, Tim Wakefield, left for the Red Sox. Franchise player Aramis Ramirez was dealt to the Cubs. When owners sell off members of a winning team, it's called a fire sale. The Pirates have been more like a yard sale. In 2003, when the Cubs nearly made the Series, the Pirates supplied one-third of their starting lineup.

In the early '80s, an angry fan famously threw a battery at Pirate outfielder Dave Parker. Last June, fans registered their frustration in a more constructive way. To protest more than a decade of ownership mismanagement, they launched a Web site, IrateFans.com, and organized a "Fans for Change" walkout after the third inning of a home game. Unfortunately, only a few hundred fans who left their seats actually left the game; most just got up to get beer.

This year, fans are still for change but highly skeptical. In an online interview, the new team president admitted, "The Pirates are not in a rebuilding mode. We're in a building mode." One fan asked bitterly, "How many home runs will the 'change in atmosphere' hit this season?"

I've been a Pirate fan for four decades—the first glorious, the second dreary, the last two a long march from despair to downright humiliation. In more promising times, my wife proposed to me at Three Rivers Stadium, where we returned for our honeymoon. On the bright side, the 2001 implosion of Three Rivers enabled me to find two red plastic stadium seats as an anniversary present on eBay.

Our children live for baseball but laugh at our Pirate caps—and, at ages 12 and 14, haven't been alive to see a winning Pirate season. Yet like so many in western Pennsylvania, I've been a Pirate fan too long to be retrained to root for somebody else.

After 15 years, we Bucs fans aren't asking for miracles. We just want what came so easily to the pre-2004 Red Sox, the post-1908 Cubs, and the other great losing teams of all time: sympathy. Those other teams are no longer reliable: The Red Sox have become a dynasty; 2008 really could be the Cubs' year. If you want a lovable loser that will never let you down, the Pittsburgh Pirates could be your team, too. ... 12:06 p.m. (link)

Thursday, Mar. 13, 2008

Craigenfreude: In a new high for the partisan divide, a mini-debate has broken out in far-flung corners of the blogosphere on the urgent question: Who's the bigger hypocrite, Larry Craig or Eliot Spitzer?

Conservative blogger Michael Medved of Townhall offers a long list of reasons why Craig doesn't need to go as urgently as Spitzer did. He finds Craig less hypocritical ("trolling for sex in a men's room, doesn't logically require that you support gay marriage"), much easier to pity, and "pathetic and vulnerable" in a way Spitzer is not. Liberal blogger Anonymous Is a Woman counters that while Craig and Louisiana Sen. David Vitter remain in office, at least Spitzer resigned.

Warning, much political baggage may look alike. So, party labels aside, who's the bigger hypocrite? Certainly, a politician caught red-handed committing the very crimes he used to prosecute can make a strong case for himself. In his resignation speech, Spitzer admitted as much: "Over the course of my public life, I have insisted, I believe correctly, that people, regardless of their position or power, take responsibility for their conduct. I can and will ask no less of myself."

Moreover, for all the conservative complaints about media bias, the circumstances of Spitzer's fall from grace ensure that tales of his hypocrisy will reverberate louder and longer than Craig's. Already a media star in the media capital of the world, he managed to destroy his career with a flair even a tabloid editor couldn't have imagined. Every detail of his case is more titillating than Craig's—call girls with MySpace pages and stories to tell, not a lone cop who won't talk to the press; hotel suites instead of bathroom stalls; bank rolls instead of toilet rolls; wide angles instead of wide stances; a club for emperors, not Red Carpet.

Spitzer flew much closer to the sun than Craig, so his sudden plunge is the far greater political tragedy. No matter how far his dive, Craig couldn't make that kind of splash. You'll never see the headline "Craig Resigns" splashed across six columns of the New York Times. Of course, since he refuses to resign, you won't see it in the Idaho Statesman, either.

Yet out of stubborn home-state chauvinism, if nothing else, we Idahoans still marvel at the level of hypocrisy our boy has achieved, even without all the wealth, fame, and privilege that a rich New Yorker was handed on a silver platter. Many Easterners think it's easy for an Idahoan to be embarrassing—that just being from Boise means you're halfway there.

We disagree. Craig didn't grow up in the center of attention, surrounded by money, glamour, and all the accouterments of hypocrisy. He grew up in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by mountains. When he got arrested, he didn't have paid help to bring him down. No Mann Act for our guy: He carried his own bags and did his own travel.

Larry Craig is a self-made hypocrite. He achieved his humiliation the old-fashioned way: He earned it.

Unlike Spitzer, who folded his cards without a fight, Craig upped the ante by privately admitting guilt, then publicly denying it. His lawyers filed yet another appellate brief this week, insisting that the prosecution is wrong to accuse him of making a "prehensile stare."

While it's admittedly a low standard, Craig may have had his least-awful week since his scandal broke in August. A Minnesota jury acquitted a man who was arrested by the same airport sting operation. Craig didn't finish last in the Senate power rankings by Congress.org. Thanks to Spitzer, Craig can now tell folks back home that whatever they think of what he did, at least they don't have to be embarrassed by how much he spent. In fact, he is probably feeling some Craigenfreude—taking pleasure in someone else's troubles because those troubles leave people a little less time to take pleasure in your own.

Like misery, hypocrisy loves company—which, for both Spitzer and Craig, turned out to be the problem. But Spitzer was right to step down, and Craig should long ago have done the same. Politics is a tragic place to chase your demons. ... 5:30 p.m. (link)

Wednesday, Mar. 5, 2008

All the Way: As death-defying Clinton comebacks go, the primaries in Ohio and Texas were very nearly not heart-stopping enough. On Monday, public polls started predicting a Clinton rebound, threatening to spoil the key to any wild ride: surprise. Luckily, the early exit polls on Tuesday evening showed Obama with narrow leads in both do-or-die states, giving those of us in Clinton World who live for such moments a few more hours to stare into the abyss.

Now that the race is once again up for grabs, much of the political establishment is dreading the seven-week slog to the next big primary in Pennsylvania. Many journalists had wanted to go home and put off seeing Scranton until The Office returns on April 10. Some Democrats in Washington were in a rush to find out the winner so they could decide who they've been for all along.

As a Clintonite, I'm delighted that the show will go on. But even if I were on the sidelines, my reaction would have been the same. No matter which team you're rooting for, you've got to admit: We will never see another contest like this one, and the political junkie in all of us hopes it will never end.

It looks like we could get our wish—so we might as well rejoice and be glad in it. A long, exciting race for the nomination will be good for the Democratic Party, good for the eventual nominee, and the ride of a lifetime for every true political fan.

For the party, the benefits are obvious: By making this contest go the distance, the voters have done what party leaders wanted to do all along. This cycle, the Democratic National Committee was desperate to avoid the front-loaded calendar that backfired last time. As David Greenberg points out, the 2004 race was over by the first week of March—and promptly handed Republicans a full eight months to destroy our nominee. This time, the DNC begged states to back-load the calendar, even offering bonus delegates for moving primaries to late spring. Two dozen states flocked to Super Tuesday anyway.

Happily, voters took matters into their own hands and gave the spring states more clout than party leaders ever could have hoped for. Last fall, NPR ran a whimsical story about the plight of South Dakota voters, whose June 3 contest is the last primary (along with Montana) on the calendar. Now restaurateurs, innkeepers, and vendors from Pierre to Rapid City look forward to that primary as Christmas in June.

But the national party, state parties, and Sioux Falls cafes aren't the only ones who'll benefit. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the biggest beneficiaries of a protracted battle for the nomination are the two contestants themselves. Primaries are designed to be a warm-up for the general election, and a few more months of spring training will only improve their swings for the fall.

And let's face it: These two candidates know how to put on a show. Both are raising astonishing sums of money and attracting swarms of voters to the polls. Over the past month, their three head-to-head debates have drawn the largest audiences in cable television history. The second half of last week's MSNBC debate was the most watched show on any channel, with nearly 8 million viewers. An astonishing 4 million people tuned in to watch MSNBC's post-debate analysis, an experience so excruciating that it's as if every person in the Bay Area picked the same night to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge.

The permanent campaign turns out to be the best reality show ever invented. Any contest that can sustain that kind of excitement is like the World Series of poker: The value of the pot goes up with each hand, and whoever wins it won't be the least bit sorry that both sides went all-in.

No matter how it turns out, all of us who love politics have to pinch ourselves that we're alive to see a race that future generations will only read about. Most campaigns, even winning ones, only seem historic in retrospect. This time, we already know it's one for the ages; we just don't know how, when, or whether it's going to end.

Even journalists who dread spending the next seven weeks on the Pennsylvania Turnpike have to shake their heads in wonderment. In the lede of their lead story in Wednesday's Washington Post, Dan Balz and Jon Cohen referred to "the remarkable contest" that could stretch on till summer. They didn't sign on to spend the spring in Scranton and Sioux Falls. But, like the rest of us, they wouldn't miss this amazing stretch of history for anything. ... 11:59 p.m. (link)

Monday, Feb. 25, 2008

Hope Springs Eternal: With this weekend's victory in Puerto Rico and even more resounding triumph over the New York Times, John McCain moved within 200 delegates of mathematically clinching the Republican nomination. Mike Huckabee is having a good time playing out the string, but the rest of us have been forced to get on with our lives and accept that it's just not the same without Mitt.

But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? Out in Salt Lake City, in an interview with the Deseret Morning News, Josh Romney leaves open the possibility that his father might get back in the race:

Josh Romney called speculation that his father could be back in the race as either a vice presidential candidate or even at the top of the ticket as the GOP's presidential candidate "possible. Unlikely, but possible."

That's not much of an opening and no doubt more of one than he intended. But from mountain to prairie, the groundswell is spreading. Endorsements are flooding in from conservative bloggers like this one:

Mitt Romney was not my first choice for a presidential candidate, but he came third after Duncan Hunter and Fred Thompson. … I would love to see Mitt reenter the race.

Even if re-entry is too much to hope for, Josh hints that another Romney comeback may be in the works. He says he has been approached about running for Congress in Utah's 2^nd District.

That, too, may be an unlikely trial balloon. Josh is just 32, has three young children, and would face a Democratic incumbent, Rep. Jim Matheson, who is one of the most popular politicians in the state. Matheson's father was a governor, too. But unlike Mitt Romney, Scott Matheson was governor of Utah.

If Mitt Romney has his eye on the No. 2 spot, Josh didn't do him any favors. "It's one thing to campaign for my dad, someone whose principles I line up with almost entirely," he told the Morning News. "I can't say the same thing for Sen. McCain."

Even so, Romney watchers can only take heart that after a year on the campaign trail, Josh has bounced back so quickly. "I was not that upset," he says of his father's defeat. "I didn't cry or anything."

In his year on the stump, Josh came across as the most down-to-earth of the Romney boys. He visited all 99 of Iowa's counties in the campaign Winnebago, the Mitt Mobile. He joked about his father's faults, such as "he has way too much energy." He let a Fox newswoman interview him in the master bedroom of the Mitt Mobile. (He showed her the air fresheners.) He blogged about the moose, salmon, and whale he ate while campaigning in Alaska—but when the feast was over, he delivered the Super Tuesday state for his dad.

As Jonathan Martin of Politico reported last summer, Josh was campaigning with his parents at the Fourth of July parade in Clear Lake, Iowa, when the Romneys ran into the Clintons. After Mitt told the Clintons how many counties Josh had visited, Hillary said, "You've got this built-in campaign team with your sons." Mitt replied, to Ann's apparent dismay, "If we had known, we would've had more."

We'll never know whether that could have made the difference. For now, we'll have to settle for the unlikely but possible hope that Mitt will come back to take another bow. ... 4:13 p.m. (link)

Monday, Feb. 11, 2008

Face Time: When Ralph Reed showed up at a Romney fundraiser last May, Mitt thought he was Gary Bauer – perpetuating the tiresome stereotype that like some Reeds, all Christian conservatives look alike. Now, in Mitt's hour of need, Ralph is returning the favor. According to the Washington Times, he and 50 other right-wing leaders met with Romney on Thursday "to discuss the former Massachusetts governor becoming the face of conservatism."

Nothing against Romney, who surely would have been a better president than he let on. But if he were "the face of conservatism," he'd be planning his acceptance speech, not interviewing with Ralph Reed and friends for the next time around.

Conservatives could not have imagined it would end this way: the movement that produced Ollie North, Alan Keyes, and ardent armies of true believers, now mulling over an arranged marriage of convenience with a Harvard man who converted for the occasion. George Will must be reaching for his Yeats: "Was it for this … that all that blood was shed?"

For more than a year, Republican presidential candidates tried to win the Reagan Primary. Their final tableau came at a debate in the Gipper's library, with his airplane as a backdrop and his widow in the front row. It was bad enough to see them reach back 20 years to find a conservative president they could believe in, but this might be worse: Now Romney's competing to claim he's the biggest conservative loser since Reagan. If McCain comes up short like Gerald Ford, Mitt wants to launch a comeback like it's 1976.

Even conservative leaders can't hide their astonishment over finding themselves in this position. "If someone had suggested a year ago and a half ago that we would be welcoming Mitt Romney as a potential leader of the conservative movement, no one would have believed it," American Conservative Union chairman David Keene reportedly told the group. "But over the last year and a half, he has convinced us he is one of us and walks with us."

Conservative activist Jay Sekulow told the Washington Times that Romney is a "turnaround specialist" who can revive conservatism's fortunes. But presumably, Romney's number-crunching skills are the last thing the movement needs: there are no voters left to fire.

To be sure, Mitt was with conservatives when the music stopped. Right-wing activists who voted in the CPAC straw poll narrowly supported him over McCain, 35% to 34%. By comparison, they favored getting out of the United Nations by 57% to 42% and opposed a foreign policy based on spreading democracy by 82% to 15%. Small-government conservatism trounced social conservatism 59% to 22%, with only 16% for national-security conservatism.

As voters reminded him more Tuesdays than not, Mitt Romney is not quite Ronald Reagan. He doesn't have an issue like the Panama Canal. Far from taking the race down to the wire, he'll end up third. While he's a good communicator, many voters looking for the face of conservatism couldn't see past what one analyst in the Deseret News described as the "CEO robot from Jupiter.'"

If anything, Romney was born to be the face of the Ford wing of the Republican Party – an economic conservative with only a passing interest in the other two legs of Reagan's conservative stool. Like Ford, Mitt won the Michigan primary. He won all the places he calls home, and it's not his fault his father wasn't governor of more states.

Romney does have one advantage. With a conservative president nearing historic lows in the polls and a presumptive nominee more intent on leading the country, heading the conservative movement might be like running the 2002 Olympics – a job nobody else wants.

Paul Erickson, the Romney strategist who organized the conservative powwow, called McCain's nomination "an existential crisis for the Republican Party," and held out Mitt as a possible Messiah: "You could tell everybody at the table sitting with Romney was asking himself: 'Is he the one?'"

Romney has demonstrated many strengths over the years, but impersonating a diehard conservative and leading a confused movement out of the wilderness aren't foremost among them. It might be time for the right to take up another existential question: If conservatism needs Mitt Romney and Ralph Reed to make a comeback, is there enough face left to save? ... 3:37 p.m. (link)

Thursday, Feb. 7, 2008

Romney, We Hardly Knew Ye: When Mitt Romney launched his campaign last year, he struck many Republicans as the perfect candidate. He was a businessman with a Midas touch, an optimist with a charmed life and family, a governor who had slain the Democratic dragon in the blue state Republicans love to hate. In a race against national heroes like John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, he started out as a dark horse, but to handicappers, he was a dark horse with great teeth.

When Democrats looked at Romney, we also saw the perfect candidate—for us to run against. The best presidential candidates have the ability to change people's minds. Mitt Romney never got that far because he never failed to change his own mind first.

So when Romney gamely suspended his campaign this afternoon, there was heartfelt sadness on both sides of the aisle. Democrats are sorry to lose an adversary whose ideological marathon vividly illustrated the vast distance a man must travel to reach the right wing of the Republican Party. Romney fans lose a candidate who just three months ago led the polls in Iowa and New Hampshire and was the smart pick to win the nomination.

With a formidable nominee in John McCain, the GOP won't be sorry. But Romney's farewell at the Conservative Political Action Committee meeting shows how far the once-mighty right wing has fallen. In an introduction laced with barbs in McCain's direction, Laura Ingraham's description of Mitt as "a conservative's conservative" said all there is to say about Romney's campaign and the state of the conservative movement. If their last, best hope is a guy who only signed up two years ago and could hardly convince them he belonged, the movement is in even worse shape than it looks.

Had Romney run on his real strength—as an intelligent, pragmatic, and competent manager—his road to the nomination might have gone the way of Rudy Giuliani's. Yet ironically, his eagerness to preach the conservative gospel brought on his demise. Romney pandered with conviction. He even tried to make it a virtue, defending his conversion on abortion by telling audiences that he would never apologize for being a latecomer to the cause of standing up for human life. Conservatives thanked him for trying but preferred the genuine article. In Iowa, Romney came in second to a true believer, and New Hampshire doesn't have enough diehards to put him over the top.

Romney's best week came in Michigan, when a sinking economy gave him a chance to talk about the one subject where his party credentials were in order. In Michigan, Romney sounded like a 21^st-century version of the business Republicans who dominated that state in the '50s and '60s—proud, decent, organization men like Gerald Ford and George Romney. As he sold his plan to turn the Michigan economy around, Mitt seemed as surprised as the voters by how much better he could be when he genuinely cared about the subject.

By then, however, he had been too many things to too many people for too long. McCain was authentic, Huckabee was conservative, and Romney couldn't convince enough voters he was either one.

Good sport to the end, Romney went down pandering. His swansong at CPAC touched all the right's hot buttons. He blamed out-of-wedlock births on government programs, attacks on religion, and "tolerance for pornography." He got his biggest applause for attacking the welfare state, declaring dependency a culture-killing poison that is "death to initiative."

Even in defeat, he gave glimpses of the Mitt we'll miss—the lovably square, Father Knows Best figure with the impossibly wholesome family and perfect life. He talked about taking "a weed-whacker to regulations." He warned that we might soon become "the France of the 21^st century." He pointed out that he had won nearly as many states as McCain, but joked awkwardly with the ultraconservative audience that he lost "because size does matter."

He didn't say whether we'll have the Romneys to kick around anymore. But with the family fortune largely intact and five sons to carry on the torch, we can keep hope alive. In the Salt Lake City paper this morning, a leading political scientist predicted that if Democrats win the White House in 2008, Romney "would automatically be a frontrunner for 2012."

It's hard to imagine a more perfect outcome. For now, sadness reigns. As the Five Brothers might say, somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout; but there is no joy in Mittville—Guy Smiley has dropped out. ... 5:42 p.m. (link)

Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2008

Mittmentum: With John McCain on cruise control toward the Republican nomination, Mitt Romney finds himself in a desperate quest to rally true believers – a role for which his even temper and uneven record leave him spectacularly unsuited. Romney knows how to tell the party faithful everything they want to hear. But it's not easy for a man who prides himself on his optimism, polish, and good fortune to stir anger and mutiny in the conservative base. Only a pitchfork rebellion can stop McCain now, and Luddites won't man the ramparts because they like your PowerPoint.

So far, the Republican base seems neither shaken nor stirred. McCain has a commanding 2-1 margin in national polls, and leads Romney most everywhere except California, where Mitt hopes for an upset tonight. Professional troublemakers like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh are up in arms, trying to persuade their followers that McCain is somehow Hillary by other means. On Monday, Limbaugh did his best imitation of Romney's stump speech, dubbing Mitt the only candidate who stands for all three legs of the conservative stool. Strange bedfellows indeed: Rush-Romney is like a hot-blooded android – the first Dittohead-Conehead pairing in galactic history.

On Saturday, Mitt Romney wandered to the back of his campaign plane and told the press, "These droids aren't the droids you're looking for." Oddly enough, that's exactly the reaction most Republicans have had to his campaign.

But in the home stretch, Romney has energized one key part of his base: his own family. Yesterday, the Romney boys set a campaign record by putting up six posts on the Five Brothers blog – matching their high from when they launched last April. Mitt may be down, but the Five Brothers are back.

The past month has been grim for the happy-go-lucky Romney boys. They sometimes went days between posts. When they did post, it was often from states they had just campaigned in and lost. Bright spots were hard to come by. After South Carolina, Tagg found a "Romney girl" video, set to the tune of "1985," in which a smiling young Alabaman named Danielle sang of Mitt as the next Reagan. One commenter recommended raising $3 million to run the clip as a Super Bowl ad; another asked Danielle out on behalf of his own five sons. A few days later, Matt put up a clip of a computerized prank call to his dad, pretending to be Arnold Schwarzenegger – prompting a priceless exchange between robo-candidate and Terminator. Then the real Arnold spoiled the joke by endorsing the real McCain.

In the run-up to Super Tuesday, however, a spring is back in the Five Brothers' step. On Sunday, Josh wrote a post about his campaign trip to Alaska. Richard Nixon may have lost in 1960 because his pledge to campaign in all 50 states forced him to spend the last weekend in Alaska. That didn't stop Josh Romney, who posted a gorgeous photo of Mount McKinley and a snapshot of some Romney supporters shivering somewhere outside Fairbanks, where the high was 13 below. He wrote, "I sampled all of the Alaskan classics: moose, salmon and whale. Oh so good." Eating whale would certainly be red meat for a liberal crowd, but conservatives loved it too. "Moose is good stuff," one fan wrote. Another supporter mentioned friends who've gone on missions abroad and "talk about eating dog, horse, cow stomach, bugs." Rush, take note: McCain was ordering room service at the Hanoi Hilton while Mitt was keeping the faith by choking down tripe in Paris.

The rest of the family sounds like it's on the trail of big game as well. Ben Romney, the least prolific of the Five Brothers, didn't post from Thanksgiving through the South Carolina primary. Yesterday, he posted twice in one day – with a link to Limbaugh and a helpful guide to tonight's results, noting that in the past week members of the Romney family have campaigned in 17 of 21 states up for grabs on Super Tuesday. Now we can scientifically measure the Romney effect, by comparing the results in those 17 states with the four states (Idaho, Montana, Connecticut, Arizona) no Romney visited. After Huckabee's victory in West Virginia, the early score is 1-0 in favor of no Romneys.

Tagg, the team captain, also posted twice, urging the faithful to "Keep Fighting," and touting Mitt's evangelical appeal: "The Base Is Beginning to Rally." Back in June, Tagg joked with readers about who would win a family farting contest. Now he's quoting evangelical Christian ministers. The brothers are so focused on the race, they haven't even mentioned their beloved Patriots' loss, although there has been no word from young Craig, the one they tease as a Tom Brady lookalike.

Of course, if the Republican race ends tonight, the inheritance Mitt has told the boys not to count on will be safe at last. By all accounts, they couldn't care less. They seem to share Tagg's easy-come-easy-go view that no matter what happens, this will have been the best trip the family has ever taken, and this time no dogs were harmed along the way (just moose, salmon, and whale).

At the moment, the Five Brothers must feel the same nostalgia to keep going that the rest of us will feel for their antics when they're gone. Back when the campaign began, Tagg joked that they would love their father win or lose, although he might become something of a national laughingstock in the meantime. Mitt did his part, but whatever happens tonight, he can be proud the firewall he cares most about – his family – has held up its end of the bargain. ... 6:15 p.m. (link)

Bloggers analyze two stories about how al-Qaida may be alienating fellow jihadists. And should Barack Obama tour Iraq with John McCain?

Al-Qaida's end? Lawrence Wright, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, has a lengthy profile in The New Yorker of Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, a former al-Qaida strategist and now one of the terror group's fiercest critics. Meanwhile, Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank offer their thoughts in the New Republic on the mounting disaffection for Osama Bin Laden and his crew among Muslims in Europe and Asia. Is this the "beginning of the end" for al-Qaida, the "end of the beginning" of the war on terror at large, or neither?

Cruickshank, the co-author of the New Republic piece, elaborates on Counterterrorism Blog: "[T]he new wave of criticism coming from key figures in the jihadist movement has real extra bite, because it is very difficult for Bin Laden to dismiss the arguments of jihadist leaders who once fought at his side. ... To the degree that this makes radical leaning youngsters from London to Lahore think twice about joining al Qaeda, this could be a watershed moment in the war on terrorism." Merv at Prairie Pundit says: "When two liberal publications both published articles premised on our enemy's falling apart, I see a trend. Of course both see the internal disintegration resulting from something other than the pressure put on them by the US war."

But Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA's Bin Laden unit, dismisses the articles in a guest post at Wired's Danger Room: "The recent spate of articles about the so-called civil war within al-Qaeda are the products of Western- and wishful-thinking. Almost all of the 'critics' of bin Laden and al-Qaeda that have been cited are jihadi-has-beens; men with personal grudges against bin Laden and/or al-Zawahiri; or men who are saying what the Egyptian and Saudi governments tell them to say in order to get a bit less horrendous treatment in the prisons in which they are incarcerated." "Dangerous naivety" is how Melanie Phillips terms the New Republic argument in a trenchant post at the London Spectator blog.

Sonny Bunch at Doublethink Online frames the al-Qaida crackup against broader gains in the war on terror: "[N]ote the decrease in attacks around the world that Fareed writes about in this week's Newsweek. [Article here.] Knock on wood, attacks in Iraq are cratering as well, suggesting that we're doing a pretty good job of killing them over there so we won't have to fight them over here."

John Wohlstetter at war-and-security-focused Letter From the Capitol is optimistic: "If winning Afghanistan was the End of the Beginning, this might be the Beginning of the End. Only the specter of WMD terror makes even a failing al-Qaeda potentially very dangerous still." Seattle blogger Martian Bracelets at Hex Message concludes tersely: "[Y]ou cannot read the article without realizing that the angry 'Arab Street' of 2002 is now sitting down at a cafe for a serious re-evaluation." Conservative Diplomad credits the West with inflicting "a series of defeats on the jihadists, and influential Muslims are waking up to the fact that following the violent ones will only lead to more defeat and misery for Muslims."

Steven Corman at COMOPS Journal, a blog that focuses on security and diplomacy from a "human communication perspective," finds much to commend but adds: "Notwithstanding their own image problems, the extremists' propaganda punch relies on damning the West with its own actions, showing how it fails to live up to its own values. I would add that we are also playing into the extremist narrative."

Read more about the al-Qaida stories.

Traveling companions: John McCain's been criticizing Barack Obama for his willingness to sit down with America's enemies but his reluctance to talk to Gen. Petraeus or go to Iraq. Obama last toured the country in 2006, and McCain has offered a joint visit during the general-election campaign, which he hopes will change Obama's perceptions of the war. Obama parried the offer as a "stunt" though now he says he plans to visit Mesopotamia solo in the near future.

Domenico Montanaro at MSNBC's First Read sees a few net positives for McCain: "Has McCain boxed Obama in on this issue—because if he does actually go to Iraq, will it look like McCain's idea? There are certainly a few other pros to McCain's line of attack here: It moves the issue terrain to ground on which the Arizona senator is comfortable (Iraq), and it makes McCain look like the knowledgeable and experienced one." (On the other hand, Montanaro points out, we'll probably see more video of McCain's infamous stroll through Baghdad, and Obama could have a "commander in chief moment.")

Conservative Provocateur Mike Volpe says it was unwise of Obama to refuse the invite: "McCain can claim that 1) Barack Obama is making military decisions without seeing the facts on the ground, and 2) he is more willing to meet with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than General David Petraeus and the men and women that are so bravely fighting for our freedom. Like I said, heads I win, tails you lose."

Lefty Ric Caric at Red State Impressions thinks Obama should go: "[I]t would be a tremendous opportunity for Barack Obama to look presidential. People in the U.S. are dying for some authoritative voice on opposition to the war and Obama could be that voice. Specifically, he could publicly inform Gens. Petraueus and Odierno that the American people oppose the war, he opposes the war, and that he would definitely order a withdrawal if he were elected president."

Allahpundit at Hot Air snarks: "Just so we're clear, a 'political stunt' would be letting McCain cow him into a joint trip to Iraq. Letting McCain cow him into a solo trip? Not a stunt. It's amazing how a townhall meeting carried across the dial on cable news can concentrate the mind, I guess."

Noam Scheiber at the New Republic's Stump thinks it's not the safest political bet: "My hunch is that McCain really wants to debate Iraq. … I guess I respect that on some level. And, politically, it does reinforce his truth-teller, 'I'd rather lose an election than lose a war' image. But, assuming Obama is able to establish a minimum level of national security credibility, which I think he will, McCain may be making a strategic mistake."

Read more about McCain's invitation to Obama.

Bloggers are reacting to former Bushie Scott McClellan's scathing new book and wondering if former-U.N. Ambassador John Bolton will really be subjected to a citizen's arrest in the United Kingdom.

Scott free: Politico has excerpted former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's new memoir, What Happened. And what happened is that McClellan went from Bush loyalist to fire-breathing critic. Among the many charges McClellan levels at the administration are its use of propaganda to coax the country into war in Iraq, its deceptions about the Plame affair, and its "state of denial" after Hurricane Katrina.

At the Tribune Co.'s Swamp, Mark Silva isn't surprised: "Of course, this is the McClellan who had to stand at the press podium of the West Wing and assert that Rove, the president's former deputy chief of staff, had no knowledge of the leaking of the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame to the press after her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, publicly accused the Bush administration of manipulating intelligence to make its case for the invasion of Iraq. Seems like suitable cause for resentment."

Not all liberals are ready to embrace McClellan's new attitude toward the Bush administration. Bill at Daily Kos writes: "Once again, we come face to face with a White House official who could've done the right thing ... but instead decided that the lives of American troops, Iraqi civilians, Katrina victims, and a network of covert CIA operatives were worth less than the luster of his master's lapel pin. When our country needed him to tell it straight, he hid behind propaganda and spin and bogus talking points and outright bamboozlement." David Corn at CQPolitics has an idea for McClellan: "If he were truly contrite about his involvement in a deceptive, propaganda-wielding administration, McClellan could demonstrate his sincerity by pledging that all profits from his belated truth-telling will go to charities supporting the families of American soldiers killed or injured in Iraq." And Jason Zengerle at the New Republic's Plank writes: "So kudos to McClellan. His book displays a calculating mind that was never much in evidence in the White House press room."

Zengerle proves a point made by the Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes, who claims a dim bulb has written a seedy tell-all: "Ask fifty Washington reporters for an assessment of Scott McClellan and forty-nine of them will give you some version of this: He's a nice guy who was in way over his head. (Most of them will be tougher in their analysis of his intellect.)"

Conservatives (well, except for Andrew Sullivan) are predictably unimpressed. James Joyner at Outside the Beltway writes that McClellan "was a Bush confidante, dutifully passed on the administration's talking points, and participated in all the things he's now saying were so awful. So he was either lying to us then or he's lying to us now. Why should we take him at his word? Either a man has integrity or he doesn't." Jules Crittenden says: "There's always a demand for a professional liar. There's always a demand for professional saps who will swallow and spit up whatever you want. The thing is, you want your hired gun to stay bought."

And Seth Liebsohn at National Review Online's Corner sighs: "I think this genre of book is losing its cachet, and people are getting a little tired of the game which goes something like this: Get a high-level job, make your name and reputation, do an average job at it, then write a book after you leave that helps nobody but bolsters your own reputation at the expense of those without book contracts. It's one of the uglier things in Washington, and as I say, I think its days will soon be over. People are tired of it."

A passage about the media's acquiescence to the Bush war plan for Iraq should "forever slay the single most ludicrous myth in our political culture: The 'Liberal Media,'" according to lefty Glenn Greenwald.

Could it be just business? FishbowlDC is "sure that McClellan means what he says, but lots of Washingtonians think poorly of their successors but bite their tongue and play the role of a good soldier. So why didn't McClellan do this? Simple: Speaking out against the Bush administration in such harsh tones is simply a smart career move by McClellan."

Read more about McClellan's tell all.

Put 'em up, John: George Monbiot, a columnist for the Guardian, has called former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton a "war criminal," and planned to stage a "citizen's arrest" when both men are at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival on Wednesday in Wales. (Read his comprehensive list of charges against Bolton here.) Color bloggers skeptical.

Lawhawk at A Blog For All offers a pointed history lesson and adds: "The same people who bray about the US failing to intervene in Darfur and Burma want to see President Bush and other Administration officials hauled up on war crimes charges on Iraq, even though they took down a regime that engaged in the same kind of ethnic cleansing and genocidal activities that they see in Burma and Darfur.""

While Jonathan Stein of Mother Jones' Mojo Blog is more sympathetic to Monbiot's would-be lit-festival collar: "Considering John Bolton thinks attacking Iran is America's 'most prudent' foreign policy option at the moment, it might make sense for somebody to detain him before he (har har!) strikes again. Okay, maybe that isn't funny."

Norman Geras responds in earnest to Monbiot's plaint: "Hasn't George been rather remiss in the matter of arrests up to now? I'm not suggesting that he, personally, should have to make all the arrests that are needed because of the putatively illegal war, but he might have essayed at least one or two before Bolton's visit to Hay. Any member of Tony Blair's 'war criminal' cabinet would have done. It's puzzling why Monbiot should have been so tardy about this."

Rick Moran at American Thinker fumes: "Moonbat's barely concealed call for an assault of some kind on Bolton won't get him into trouble if only because he won't be in the thick of any scrum between the bobbies and the citizens who try to carry out his wacky scheme. He will be too busy composing a column bragging how close he came to bringing Bolton to justice." And Brit blogger Gary Bowman of Fresh Green Beast concludes: "Talk about shameless grandstanding. Monbiot is like the Paris Hilton of politics -- if he weren't so loathsome, I'd probably feel sorry for him."

Read more about Monbiot's planned citizen's arrest of Bolton.

Conservative bloggers are parsing Barack Obama's gaffe-filled Memorial Day speech, and everyone else is in a tizzy over Emily Gould's confessions-of-a-blogger New York Times Magazine cover story.

Obama's forgettable Memorial Day: Conservative bloggers are fired up over Barack Obama's Memorial Day speech, in which he said, "On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes—and I see many of them in the audience here today—our sense of patriotism is particularly strong" and talked about how his uncle helped liberate Auschwitz, a task actually accomplished by the Red Army. (Late Tuesday, Obama's camp clarified that the candidate meant to say Buchenwald, not Auschwitz.)

Ed Morissey at Hot Air sighs: "Does Obama see dead people? Coming from Chicago, one might be tempted to joke that they would form a natural portion of his constituency, but obviously Obama confused this with Veterans Day, which honors our living veterans of war. Unfortunately, most of the nation makes the same mistake, and small wonder when its leadership can't distinguish between the two." Conservative Jimmie at the Sundries Shack says: "I'm going to call his verbal boners 'Duh-bamas' in honor of the man who graces us with them so very, very often."

Riehl World View snipes: "Watch the Left scream about how this was a simple gaffe. But had it been Bush, it would be proof that he's a moron…But given Obama's positioning and the fact that he is a Dem - the party always afraid of looking weak on the military - this was a disastrous place for this type of truly stupid gaffe." Adds conservative Rachel Lucas: "Here's a thought exercise: imagine Dubya making blatant factual errors like these two quotes. Imagine the headlines about how he was disrespecting the memories of fallen servicepeople and how he was such a pompous moron to ignore and belittle the overwhelmingly massive contributions of the Russians in WWII, who frankly had more to do with defeating the Nazis than America did (in my relatively knowledgeable opinion). … The accusations of dumbness and chimp-like brain power would be coming at you like a tsunami."

Conservative Michelle Malkin thinks that Obama has raised the bar for gaffes: "Either Obama's uncle served in the Red Army, or he's spinning Clintonesque lies about Auschwitz to sell his government programs. Hey, it's for a good cause…but it's not enough for him. It has to be personal. It has to be all about him. … I think the Obamessiah just out Tuzla'd Hillary. The man is…nefarious."

McQ at QandO Blog points out that Obama's comment about seeing "fallen heroes" in the audience was an ad-lib (it's not included in the prepared remarks) and decides that Obama should stick to the script: "Of course all pols say things like this from time to time, but in Obama's case, these sorts of utterances seem to be increasing and only reinforcing the growing belief that he's not really ready for prime-time." Tom Maguire at JustOneMinute concurs: "What's interesting is that we have seen that Obama is a very ordinary impromptu speaker who normally does a great job delivering prepared remarks; now he has gotten fluff-mouth even with a teleprompter. Yikes!"

Read more about Obama's Memorial Day gaffe.

Emily exposed: The New York Times Magazine is under fire for its Sunday cover story, written by former Gawker-ite Emily Gould about the perils of blogging about one's emotional and sexual travails. Bloggers are complaining about her narcissism and her failure to distinguish her own confessional style of blogging from the medium's more outer-directed uses.

As might be expected, Gawker was all over the story before, during, and after its publication online. Ryan Tate even contacted a source at the Times to ask why comments on Gould's piece were turned off after 700 had been posted. Evidently, the paper of record needed its comment-trolling staff to redirect their attentions elsewhere. To which Tate says: "It still seems a bit absurd that the Times would take pride in stoking an online discussion when it doesn't have the staff to manage that discussion. It is also self-defeating of the newspaper to rob paying print subscribers of the ability to comment on a story just because it was released early online to freeloaders."

Megan's Minute sort of liked the piece, but: "Yes, she gave us a look into the world of high pressure blogging---12 posts a day after all----yes she shared her eventual regret about revealing personal details of her life and of those close to her, and yes she eventually quit her job at Gawker. But what I didn't get was a genuine sense of where she was in the world and what her aspirations might be based on the experiences in those ten pages."

Municipalist, a blogger who blogs about, um, blogging, banishes Gould from its dominion: "[T]he Emily Goulds of the world have every right to blog and blog and blog, about their boyfriends and breakups and tatoos. But someday, soon we believe, 'blogging' and the 'blogosphere' will mean something completely new. It will mean problem solving and coalition building. It won't mean ranting, and pointless anonymous comments, etc. And it won't mean Emily Gould."

Peter Suderman, guest blogging for Megan McArdle, is more lenient: "The combined lure of easy content and personal attention is tough to resist; Gould didn't, and the distinction between her online life and everything essentially disappeared. The author and the subject became one. Does Gould deserve criticism for this? Perhaps. But it's also a function of the medium -- its pace, its content demands, and even its readers, who encourage personal revelation. The blogosphere always pulls this way. It's magnetized toward self-obsession."

Daily Intel, New York magazine's blog, writes: "Millions of people blog, many of them about themselves. But if past work is anything to judge by, we're not going to be reading about them this weekend. Except for the ones Gould slept with." Rachel Sklar, in a lengthy takedown at the Huffington Post's Eat the Press, concludes: "Not everyone navel-gazes so completely, or uses the pronoun 'I'so reflexively — there are many people doing great work online writing on topics other than themselves. Sometimes, Gould is even one of them; alas, not this time."

Read more about Gould's piece.

The New York Times leads with a look at how one of the most important projects that was supposed to help in the fight against global warming faces an uncertain future. The promise of "clean coal," which involves burying carbon dioxide emitted from coal-burning power plants, has excited many politicians and environmentalists, but developing the technology to turn the dream into a reality has turned out to be more complicated than initially imagined. The Washington Post leads with an interview with CIA Director Michael Hayden, who provided a "strikingly upbeat assessment" on the fight against al-Qaida. Even though the CIA had previously warned that the Iraq war had provided an opportunity for al-Qaida to grow, Hayden now says great progress has been made, and al-Qaida is struggling to survive in Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

The Los Angeles Times leads with word that the UCLA Medical Center performed a liver transplant on the leader of one of Japan's most violent gangs. The surgery was performed by UCLA's "most accomplished liver surgeon," who also performed transplants on three other men who are now forbidden from entering the country because of their ties to criminal activities. Meanwhile, more than 100 people died in the Los Angeles area waiting for a transplant. The Wall Street Journal's world-wide newsbox leads with the Texas Supreme Court's agreeing that state officials acted illegally when they seized hundreds of children from the compound of a polygamist sect. USA Today leads with an analysis that shows there are fewer people living in hurricane high-risk areas, which had experienced huge growth in previous years. Experts say this trend has more to do with the decline of the housing market rather than a growing trepidation of settling down in disaster-prone areas. "Memories are short, and when the economy does recover, you'll see people snap up those properties in coastal areas again," the president of the Insurance Information Institute said.

No one thinks coal is going away anytime soon, because it's "abundant and cheap," so there were once high hopes that burying the emissions from coal-burning power plants would provide an effective way to control global warming. But recently, many projects that were supposed to be the jumping-off point to create "clean coal" have been canceled because of high costs and regulatory problems. There was a huge setback when increased costs led the government to pull out of subsidizing one of the most promising projects to build a plant in Illinois that could have been a test-study on how to build a new type of power plant. Now the fear is that companies are so frustrated with the slow pace of development that the next generation of power plants will be built using existing technology.

In his interview with the Post, Hayden was sure to emphasize that al-Qaida is still a threat that must be taken seriously but that "on balance, we are doing pretty well." Not only has the United States been successful in its attacks against some of al-Qaida's core leadership, the "Islamic world" has also been increasingly rejecting "their form of Islam," Hayden said. Many terrorism experts agree that there have been recent gains, but they also caution that it's too early to know whether they will last. Al-Qaida's "obituary has been written far too often in the past few years for anyone to declare victory," one analyst said. And while experts are sure to credit the intelligence community for some of the gains, they also point out that al-Qaida may ultimately be responsible for its own downfall. "One of the lessons we can draw from the past two years is that al-Qaida is its own worst enemy," a former CIA counterterrorism official said. Now Hayden says one of his biggest concerns is that recent gains will turn into complacency among government officials and the general population.

The LAT reveals that the FBI helped the Japanese gang leader get a visa to enter the United States in exchange for information. But officials say he left after the transplant without providing any useful information. He was then forbidden from entering the United States again, so the UCLA surgeon traveled to Japan to examine the gang leader. Although the surgeon insists it's not his job to pass judgment on those who need his help, some bioethicists and transplant experts said the news is troubling, particularly because there are so few livers to go around. "If you want to destroy public support for organ donation on the part of Americans, you'd be hard pressed to think of a practice that would be better suited," one bioethicist said.

Everybody reports that the two top Democrats in Congress publicly predicted the primary race will come to an end soon after the last two contests on Tuesday. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi both emphasized in separate public appearances that they're determined not to allow the race to continue until the convention. To that end, the two leaders have been contacting uncommitted superdelegates to push them to make up their minds after voters in South Dakota and Montana go to the polls on Tuesday. "By this time next week, it'll be all over, give or take a day," Reid said.

Scott McClellan went on a media tour yesterday to push back against criticism from former colleagues for his memoir that takes a critical look at the Bush administration. "The White House clearly did not want me out talking candidly about these events," the former White House spokesman told USAT. The WP fronts an interview with McClellan, who says he didn't set out to write such a critical book, but his feelings hardened after he started to seriously look back on his years in Washington. "Over time, as you leave the White House and leave the bubble, you're able to take off your partisan hat and take a clear-eyed look at things," he said. Indeed, a "publishing industry insider" said that McClellan's initial idea for a memoir made it seem like he would write "a not-very-interesting, typical press secretary book." In his interviews, McClellan said there were "two defining moments" that really led to his disillusionment with the Bush administration. One had to do with how he was "deceived into unknowingly passing along a falsehood" relating to the outing of Valerie Plame, and the other was when the president admitted he had authorized the leak of classified information.

The NYT reveals the State Department has canceled all Fulbright grants awarded to Palestinian students in Gaza because Israel hasn't given them permission to leave the coastal strip. Many Israeli officials say the policy of isolating Gaza is having the desired effect, since Palestinians are losing faith in the Hamas government. But some say the policy has gone too far if it doesn't allow students to leave and pursue educational opportunities around the world. "This policy is not in keeping with international standards or with the moral standards of Jews," said the leader of the Israeli Parliament's education committee.

The WP fronts, and everyone mentions, news that at least part of the mystery surrounding Stonehenge appears to have been solved. Researchers used radiocarbon dating to determine that the site was used as a burial ground for what archaeologists think may have been a single family that ruled the area for a long time. "Stonehenge was a place of burial from its beginning to its zenith in the mid-third millennium B.C," the archeologist who led the project said.

Will there be slides? The WP's Reliable Source notes La Scala offiicials announced that they have commissioned a composer to turn Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth into an opera. The Milan opera house plans to debut the show in its 2011 season. "We were hoping for interpretive dance, but whatever," the Reliable Source said.

The New York Times leads with news that New York will begin to recognize same-sex marriages legally performed in another state or country. Gov. David Paterson directed state agencies earlier this month to begin revising policies and regulations so the change can take effect. Gay married couples "should be afforded the same recognition as any other legally performed union," the governor's legal counsel wrote in a memo sent to state agencies. USA Today leads with Dow Chemical's announcement that it will increase prices by as much as 20 percent. This marked the latest in a series of price boosts by big companies and is leading to concern that higher energy and food prices will spark "a full-blown episode of inflation."

The Los Angeles Times leads with a look at the Democratic Party's Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting that will take place on Saturday to try to determine whether the delegates from Michigan and Florida will be seated at the convention in August. Many have been lobbying the "obscure panel of 30 party insiders" who are used to working behind the scenes but lately have been receiving hundreds of e-mails from supporters of both Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The Wall Street Journal leads its world-wide newsbox with the Chinese government declaring that its response to the earthquake has been a success and saying that the country would be ready to carry out its duties as host of the Olympics. Almost 20,000 people are still officially missing from the earthquake that killed 68,000. The Washington Post leads with a look at how grass-roots organizations, as well as groups of private citizens, have been providing much-needed aid and relief work to help the survivors of the earthquake. The Communist government, which normally keeps close track of nongovernmental organizations and requires them to register, is standing aside and letting these private citizens help.

Paterson's initiative would make New York the first state to forbid weddings for gay men and lesbians while also recognizing those that are legally performed elsewhere. The NYT says the move is the "strongest signal yet" that Paterson intends to "push aggressively to legalize same-sex unions as governor." Recognizing these unions is as far as the state can go without the state Legislature, which holds the power to allow same-sex marriages in New York. The directive sent to state agencies cited a New York appeals court ruling that said the state must recognize all legal marriages from other jurisdictions unless the Legislature specifically decides to prohibit their recognition.

Dow Chemicals said it is being forced to carry out an across-the-board price hike due to increasing energy costs. The move is particularly significant because Dow Chemicals is one of the world's largest chemical manufacturers, and its products are used to make a wide variety of consumer goods. Dow's CEO issued a statement where he squarely put the blame on Washington for failing to deal with "rising energy costs and, as a result, the country now faces a true energy crisis, one that is causing serious harm."

The NYT off-leads, and the WP goes inside, with news that Clinton's hopes to get the delegates from Michigan and Florida seated at the convention were dealt a clear setback yesterday. Democratic National Committee lawyers wrote a memo saying that both states must lose at least half of their total delegate votes as a punishment for violating party rules and holding their primaries earlier than Feb. 5. That means the state delegations could be cut in half or each delegate would get only half a vote. It seems that Obama's campaign would be willing to accept this outcome, but Clinton and her supporters could decide to take the argument to the convention. As the LAT makes clear, "Clinton would not close the gap" even if she got everything she wanted from the meeting "and went on to perform spectacularly in the final primaries." At least some Clinton supporters in the rules committee seem to accept that this is the case. "At the end of the day, what we do on Saturday is not going to change the fact that Obama is going to win the nomination," said one.

Now that Obama has almost clinched the Democratic nomination, his policy proposals are getting closer scrutiny, and the WP fronts a look at how there simply isn't much there. In his few years in the Senate, Obama hasn't picked up a "signature domestic issue" or given any hints that he intends to take the Democratic Party in a new direction on policy issues. During the primaries it became clear that, unlike Republicans, Democrats pretty much agree on the big issues, a strategy that seems to be working since independents are also more likely to agree with their views. But Obama is sure to come under fire from McCain, who can appeal to independents by highlighting how he has disagreed with his own party in the past. Of course, Obama supporters say their candidate offers more than policy proposals and is advocating for a change in tone and leadership style. His campaign also says that after the primary contest is over, more staff will be dedicated to policy issues so that Obama can go into greater detail about where he wants to take the country.

The LAT and WP front news that more than 100 countries reached an agreement to create a new international convention banning the use of cluster bombs. The United States, along with Russia, China, Israel, India, and Pakistan, refused to support the international ban on the weapons that consists of many "bomblets" designed to explode on impact. In reality, many fail to explode and cause a lasting hazard for civilians. The most important turnaround came when British Prime Minister Gordon Brown ignored pressure from the United States, as well as members of his own military, and decided to back the ban. U.S. officials say cluster bombs are an important part of the country's arsenal and insist that technological advances will mean that future cluster bombs won't suffer from the same deficiencies.

The NYT's Jacques Steinberg writes about how the WP's Howard Kurtz interviewed Kimberly Dozier, a CBS journalist, on his weekend CNN show even though his wife, Sheri Annis, was a paid publicist for Dozier's memoir. Kurtz mentioned the connection at the end of the interview, but some say he shouldn't have even invited Dozier on his show. At first it seems like another story about what Steinberg calls the "complicated tangle in the complex world of Mr. Kurtz," which has been written about plenty. But readers that stay until the end of the story get a little rewarding nugget. As part of her media calls to drum up interest in the memoir, Annis contacted Steinberg "and identified herself, in part, as 'Howard Kurtz's wife.' "

The LAT reports that a small brewery in Weed, Calif., has come under the sights of the federal government because it decided to print the words Try Legal Weed on the bottle caps of Weed Ales. The U.S. Treasury Department says the marketing ploy can't be used because it alludes to using marijuana, and it's "false and misleading" because a buyer could be confused about what's inside the bottle. "They sell Bud. We sell Weed," the brewery's owner said. "What's the difference?"

The New York Times and Washington Post lead with the Supreme Court ruling that federal civil rights laws that protect workers against discrimination also cover those who faced retaliation for complaining about bias in the workplace. The Los Angeles Times devotes its top nonlocal spot to the twin decisions that said workers, including federal employees, are protected from retaliation, even if the federal laws don't explicitly say so. The majority in the 7-2 and 6-3 decisions emphasized that the justices relied on Supreme Court precedent that had previously found an implied right to sue for retaliation. The decisions don't really change the broad outlines of employment law, but they were somewhat surprising coming from a Supreme Court that had been keeping itself busy by issuing a series of pro-business rulings and limiting the rights of workers.

The Wall Street Journal leads its world-wide newsbox with Sen. John McCain announcing that he would reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the United States if he's elected president. In a speech that aides said marked a break with President Bush, McCain vowed to work more closely with Russia on nuclear disarmament. Although McCain said nuclear weapons are "still important to deter an attack," he emphasized that "we must seek to do all we can to ensure that nuclear weapons will never again be used." USA Today leads with economists' warning that housing prices are likely to continue declining, even as a new survey detailed that they've already experienced their sharpest drop in at least 20 years. According to the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index, which was created in 1988, home prices dropped a record 14.1 percent in the first three months of the year compared with the first quarter of last year. "We forecast another 10 percent drop from current levels and bottoming out in 2009," one economic analyst said.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court found itself in an unusual position where it was praised by civil rights advocates and criticized by business groups. The WP mentions that some are wondering whether the court was reacting to the condemnation it received after last year's decision that prevented a worker from suing her employer for pay discrimination. The NYT called it "especially significant" that Chief Justice John Roberts joined a decision that mentioned the importance of adhering to precedent when he has previously spoken about his "distaste for precedents in which the court has gone beyond a statute's text to infer a basis for a lawsuit." USAT says the rulings are an "intriguing development" for a group of justices who chose to go against precedent in several rulings last year that dealt with a variety of issues, including abortion and campaign finance.

The WP fronts an early look at former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's new memoir that is surprisingly critical of the Bush administration. What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception will be released next week, but the WP, NYT, and WSJ were able to buy a copy yesterday. (Politico beat all the papers with its own account that was posted yesterday afternoon.) The NYT points out that the book is particularly notable because it "is the first negative account by a member of the tight circle of Texans" who followed Bush to Washington. McClellan writes that the administration carried out a "political propaganda campaign" to convince the public about the need to invade Iraq.

McClellan also says he was deceived about the role that Karl Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby played in the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame. In a potentially explosive bit, McClellan suggests that Rove and Libby may have coordinated their stories about the Plame leak during a secret meeting. Overall, Bush is portrayed as a president obsessed with winning a second term, which "meant operating continually in campaign mode: never explaining, never apologizing, never retreating." He also has harsh words about the way the administration handled Hurricane Katrina and is critical of the press ("complicit enablers") as well as several members of the administration, including Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney.

The LAT is alone in noting up high that experts say McCain's nuclear policy speech "marked a less dramatic break from the current administration than his campaign suggested." The one thing everyone can agree on, though, is that yesterday provided a revealing glimpse at how McCain is playing a delicate balancing act as he tries to win over big Republican donors while also highlighting his independence from the unpopular president. After the speech that McCain's aides were eagerly touting as a break with the president, the presumptive nominee went to Phoenix and joined Bush at a fundraiser. The event was held behind closed doors, and the two made time only for a brief photo op at the airport that lasted less than a minute. But even though they kept their joint public appearance to a minimum, the day's events provided plenty of material for Sen. Barack Obama to point out that McCain is trying to hide his connections with Bush because he "doesn't want to be seen, hat in hand, with the president whose failed policies he promises to continue for another four years."

The WP fronts a look at how more Americans are filing for bankruptcy even though a 2005 law made the whole process more difficult and expensive. The total number of bankruptcy filings increased 38 percent last year compared with 2006, in an ominous sign of how many people are struggling to get by in the United States. Although filing for bankruptcy was once more common among those who had abrupt life changes, such as a divorce or illness, experts say all types of people who simply have too much debt are choosing to pursue such a drastic measure. "It is pretty widespread because there are widespread problems in the economy," one economist said.

The NYT points out that many angry parents of the estimated 10,000 children who died in China's earthquake are abandoning their usual apprehension about confronting the Communist government. Parents are getting together at informal gatherings to angrily demand that the government investigate why so many schools collapsed and punish those responsible for what appears to have been shoddy construction work. Even more out of the ordinary is the fact that protesters are angrily confronting government officials in the streets, and there have been clashes with the police that left several people injured. Officials are insisting that they will investigate but say they must first deal with the needs of survivors.

The LAT says that the paparazzi have found a new favorite target: Miley Cyrus. Although the 15-year-old star of Hannah Montana is nowhere near as famous as the likes of Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, the number of photographers that chronicle her every move has increased in the past few months. Photographers report that after her infamous not-quite-nude picture appeared in Vanity Fair, following Cyrus around suddenly became more lucrative. But, so far at least, Cyrus has avoided Spears-like attention simply because she's boring by tabloid standards. "You're not going to get cocaine-snorting, addled teen queens, are you?" the co-owner of a big paparazzi agency said. "The first kiss is going to be worth a lot of money."

The New York Times leads with a new report issued by the International Atomic Energy Agency that accuses Iran of failing to answer questions about its nuclear program. In what the NYT characterizes as "an unusually blunt and detailed report," the United Nations nuclear watchdog calls on Tehran to counter allegations of military involvement in its nuclear program. The Los Angeles Times leads with a look at how the two top presidential contenders campaigned in New Mexico yesterday in a poignant sign of how important a few Western states will be in the November election. President Bush won Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico by a very slim margin four years ago, and the three swing states are an important part of Obama's strategy to redraw the electoral map.

The Washington Post leads with word that the Howard Hughes Medical Institute will give $600 million to 56 scientists in the United States so they can pursue risky, but potentially groundbreaking, medical research. This is the latest example of how private philanthropies are swooping in to try to make up for the ongoing decline in federal research funding. The Wall Street Journal leads its world-wide newsbox with aid groups pushing the Burmese government to allow a larger international relief effort in the country to assist the 2.4 million survivors of Cyclone Nargis who are in desperate need of help. USA Today leads with NASA's Phoenix spacecraft that landed on Mars on Sunday night. Investigators will spend the next few days testing the equipment and expect the Phoenix to begin digging into the surface of the Red Planet on Monday.

Besides the NYT, none of the other papers give much play to the IAEA report and emphasize the agency said it has no evidence that Iran's military has gotten involved in the country's nuclear program. For its part, the NYT specifies that 18 documents were included in the report that claim "Iranians have ventured into explosives, uranium processing and a missile warhead design," which could suggest that nuclear weapons are being developed. The nuclear watchdog agency also says Iran has failed to disclose advancements in its nuclear program and suggests the country could be producing enriched uranium. David Albright, a former weapons inspector who is the go-to guy for these kinds of stories, tells the NYT that the "Iranians are being confronted with some pretty strong evidence of a nuclear weapons program" and the report "is very damning." But Albright also tells the LAT there are some key components missing from the report that one would expect to find in a weapons program. Iran insists the documents are fakes but has failed to release evidence and provide access to international inspectors that could verify Tehran's claims.

There are signs that, just like much of the country, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico are turning away from Republicans. This trend could work in Obama's favor, particularly when it's added to the fact that a hard-fought primary campaign has resulted in tens of thousands of new registered Democratic voters. But McCain is a westerner in a region where voters have often turned away from politicians who are seen as big-city liberals and members of the party establishment. Obama has also had trouble wooing Latino voters, who make up a significant part of the population and who could determine who wins the three Western battleground states. It's therefore no surprise that, as the WP notes, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson stuck close to Obama yesterday.

More than three weeks have passed since Cyclone Nargis devastated large parts of Burma and left at least 134,000 people dead or missing, but the vast majority of survivors in some of the worst-hit areas still haven't received any aid. The United Nations said yesterday that it could reach all the survivors by the end of the week if it gets permission from the military junta to carry out operations in the Irrawaddy region. The NYT goes inside with another heartwrenching dispatch from an isolated village in the Irrawaddy delta and tells the story of a woman who lost 15 members of her family to the cyclone. But the survivors have little time to deal with the psychological toll of such huge losses as they struggle to stay alive without help from the government or international aid.

The LAT fronts the latest from China, where the government said that as many as 1.2 million people could be forced to evacuate because a "barrier lake" formed by the earthquake could overflow and cause a new disaster. Chinese soldiers, with the help of international relief efforts, are feverishly working to prevent the flooding, but some have decided not to wait for official word and are already moving to higher ground. Early-morning wire stories report that emergency workers will evacuate 80,000 people.

The WP fronts a look at another example of how the Bush administration doesn't always follow the president's rhetoric on not holding talks with tyrannical leaders and dictators. A special envoy from the administration is set to meet with the Sudanese president "sometime in the next few weeks," in the latest overture to a government that has been accused of perpetuating the Darfur genocide and providing a safe haven for terrorists, including Osama Bin Laden. Several high-level officials, including secretaries of state, have also had direct contacts with the Sudanese president throughout Bush's presidency. "Bush's Sudan policy has relied more heavily on diplomacy than that of the Clinton administration," notes the WP.

The LAT fronts news that Sydney Pollack died of cancer yesterday. The director, producer, and actor worked with some of Hollywood's biggest stars throughout his career and was behind several of the most memorable films from the '70s and '80s, including They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Tootsie, The Way We Were, and Out of Africa, for which he received an Academy Award. More recently, Pollack was a producer and actor in Michael Clayton and was credited as an executive producer for HBO's Recount, which premiered on Sunday. He was 73.

In the WP's op-ed page, Zbigniew Brzezinski and William Odom write that the Bush administration's policy of dealing with Iran by offering "sticks" and "carrots" is a strategy that "may work with donkeys but not with serious countries." The administration could be more successful if it simply stopped threatening a military invasion as well as all calls for regime change in Tehran. "Imagine if China … threatened to change the American regime if it did not begin a steady destruction of its nuclear arsenal."

The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times lead with news that NASA's Phoenix spacecraft landed safely on Mars yesterday. After traveling for 296 days and 422 million miles, the 904-pound spacecraft made the first successful soft landing—using a parachute and thrusters instead of air bags—in Mars since 1976. Phoenix's mission controllers began cheering after the last few anxiety-riddled minutes gave way to a picture-perfect landing on the Red Planet. A couple of hours later, the craft's solar panels deployed successfully and the Phoenix began sending images back to Earth. "It could not have gone better, not in my dreams," the mission's project manager said.

The New York Times leads with a look at how government officials are increasingly questioning whether all of the nation's nonprofit organizations deserve their tax-exempt status. At a time when nonprofits run businesslike operations, and some private universities have endowments that total billions of dollars, there are those who are wondering whether it makes sense for these organizations to retain a status that costs local governments somewhere around $8 billion to $13 billion every year.

Unlike the two rovers that have been exploring the Red Planet's surface, the Phoenix is designed to stay put in Mars' northern pole and dig. The material it digs up will then be analyzed with instruments that are inside the craft, which the WP calls "miniature chemistry labs." The LAT says the Phoenix is the "first spacecraft designed to taste the water of an alien planet." Phoenix is the first to travel directly to a part of Mars where there is water to try to figure out whether the minerals and organic processes that are necessary for life actually exist, or once existed, in the planet. Scientists hope this data will help them determine whether the region was ever habitable. The mission is set to last three months.

Last December, the Minnesota Supreme Court issued a ruling "that sent tremors through the not-for-profit world" when it said that a small nonprofit day-care center had to pay taxes because it charged every parent the same price, regardless of their incomes, reports the NYT. Now Congress is also looking into the issue by inquiring how churches spend their money, debating if universities should be required to spend a minimum percentage of their endowments and looking into whether nonprofit hospitals should really be exempt from taxes when they operate pretty much the same way as their for-profit counterparts. Tax assessors say it's getting increasingly difficult to figure out who qualifies for exemption when many nonprofits are doing the same work as for-profit institutions.

The LAT catches late-breaking news that severe thunderstorms killed at least eight people in Iowa and Minnesota yesterday. Seven people were killed by a tornado in northeast Iowa that injured at least 50. "Occasionally we have a death, but we have a warning system. Seven deaths. It's been a long time since we've had those kinds of injuries and deaths reported," the Iowa Homeland Security administrator said.

The WP and NYT go inside with looks at how Sen. Hillary Clinton continued to deal with the uproar that was caused by her reference to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy on Friday. Some have said the former first lady was trying to suggest that she refuses to drop out of the race because her opponent could be killed. In a letter published by the New York Daily News yesterday, Clinton wrote that some took her words "entirely out of context and interpreted them to mean something completely different—and completely unthinkable." Clinton went on to emphasize that she was only "making the simple point that given our history, the length of this year's primary contest is nothing unusual." Campaign aides said the media and the Obama campaign were partly responsible for turning the statement into such a huge deal. Obama's campaign immediately seized the story on Friday and sent e-mails to reporters to alert them of the Kennedy statement. But yesterday, the senator's top strategist said that "as far as we're concerned, this issue is done."

The NYT's Paul Krugman writes that it may almost be "appropriate" that the last few days of the Democratic primary have been mired by "yet another fake Clinton scandal." Although none of this will matter in figuring out who will get the nomination since Obama has already won, it could have an effect in the general election if disgruntled Clinton supporters refuse to back the senator from Illinois. Obama and his supporters "should realize that the continuing demonization of Mrs. Clinton serves nobody except Mr. McCain."

The NYT fronts a look at how despite the fact that Clinton has received millions of votes and came close to reaching the presidential nomination, she would still go back to the Senate "as No. 36 out of 49 Democrats." Making the awkwardness worse is that, assuming she doesn't become the vice president, Clinton would have to go back to work with colleagues who pointedly supported Obama. Some contend her increased popularity and exposure would help her, but none of that changes the simple fact that "Clinton's relatively junior status limits her options in the Senate." There are suggestions she might immediately jump to a leadership spot, but that would have to come at the expense of more senior members who aren't likely to want to give up their positions of power.

In the NYT's op-ed page, Helen Benedict writes that the Department of Veterans Affairs is failing the women who are coming back from fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Besides the trauma of combat, female veterans often also have to deal with the harassment from their colleagues and nearly a third say they were sexually assaulted or raped while in the military. This abuse can increase the risk of post-traumatic stress disorder, not to mention other health ailments, but there is currently a great shortage of programs tailored specifically for women veterans. "The Department of Veterans Affairs must open more comprehensive women's health clinics," writes Benedict. "The best way to honor all of our soldiers is to do what we can to help them mend. "

In the WP's op-ed page, Maj. Gen. William Troy writes about the Army's practice of "assigning a general officer to attend the funeral of every soldier who falls in service to our country." Troy has attended 23 funerals and struggles to understand the sacrifice of soldiers and their families. "I've learned that war most often claims the lives of young kids who go out on patrol day after day, night after night," writes Troy. "They go with a singular purpose: to not let their buddies down. Each soldier we lay to rest shared that goal. They kept faith with their comrades, even in the face of danger and death. That is the most humbling lesson of all."

The New York Times leads with Chinese parents' concerns that badly built, uninspected schools resulted in the unnecessary deaths of thousands of their children in the earthquake that shook China's Sichuan Province two weeks ago. The Washington Post leads with another story about dangerous buildings killing kids: Trailers used by FEMA to house Hurricane Katrina victims contained high levels of formaldehyde, a cancer-causing chemical found in the low-quality wood used to build the trailers quickly. The Los Angeles Times leads with an "upending" of the American economy—a boom for industries that were previously believed to be fading, even as the technology and finance sectors face large-scale layoffs.

Schools in the Sichuan Province seemed to have borne a disproportionate amount of the destruction in the earthquake that rocked China earlier this month, the NYT reports in a massive piece that gets most of the paper's front-page real estate. Examining the decimated Xinjian Primary School in Dujiangyang, the article notes that the buildings surrounding the school were by comparison relatively unharmed. Turns out, the school had a long history of poor construction—parents, many of whom worked at a nearby cement factory, knew that Xinjian was unsafe when it opened, and a wing of the school was demolished in 1992 because it was so far below standards. A team of structural engineers and "earthquake experts" was asked by the NYT to examine detailed photos of the destruction, and "concluded, independently, that inadequate steel reinforcement, or rebar, was used in the concrete columns supporting the school. They also found that the school's precast, hollow concrete slab floors and walls did not appear to be securely joined together." The 7.9-scale quake was vicious enough to damage even well-built structures, but schools, affected by lack of funding and the Chinese government's helter-skelter building-code enforcements, paid an especially high price. Parents of the dead students are beginning to stage demonstrations and demand that the government be held responsible for the carnage.

FEMA officials ordered $2.7 billion worth of mobile housing for the victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the WP reports, "many of them using a single page of specifications." The 25 lines of specifications made no mention of safety requirements, and the trailers, which were supplied at an unusual speed, led to a public health crisis affecting as many as 300,000 people. Dangerously high levels of formaldehyde, a cancer-causing chemical present in some of the trailers' wood, led to severe illness and several deaths among the flood victims. Many of the injured are joining a class-action lawsuit against the trailer makers and the federal government. "Weak government contracting, sloppy private construction, a surge of low-quality wood imports from China and inconsistent regulation all contributed to the crisis," the piece summarizes, further noting that the situation is now one colossal government blame game, the cost of which "will not be known for years."

The LAT leads with the "twin turns" of the American economy—a boom in the heartland's industrial sector, spurred by global industrialization, as the financial and technologies sectors face a steady downturn. These trends are "letting once-struggling behemoths such as U.S. Steel Corp. put modern marvels such as Microsoft Corp. to shame," the piece reports, noting that U.S. Steel's stock has risen 1,000 percent "in recent years." In national economic terms, the industrial boom is only bittersweet news; it's pushing up incomes but not creating jobs. Thus, the spillover into other sectors is likely to be limited, meaning "the economy as a whole will have to keep relying on high tech and services if it is to experience new growth in income and employment."

The NYT off-leads a pegless piece that editorializes against the "insane, characteristically American" method of selecting judges: by popular vote. Eighty-seven percent of state judges are elected, and 39 states elect at least some of their judges. The stage is set by the story of a Wisconsin judge election, in which the candidates spent $5 million on their respective campaigns and the winner ran false television advertisements before taking 51 percent of the vote. A shining alternative to such barbarics is the nonpartisan, "much more rigorous" method of testing and selecting independent judges employed by France (and all the rest of the world, for that matter). Seemingly culled straight from an introduction to American politics textbook, the pro-con piece searches awkwardly for a satisfying conclusion—and a reason to exist.

The weekend columnists are all over Sen. Hillary Clinton's "assassination gaffe," in which she referenced the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy to point out that Democratic primaries often drag into June. WP style reporter Libby Copeland is not amused, writing that Clinton's allusion to the murder of a candidate "almost sounds like wishful thinking." The NYT's Maureen Dowd is slightly more inclined to take Clinton at her word, helpfully suggesting that she simply meant to say she's staying in the race because "stuff happens."

The Washington Post leads with Hillary Clinton sticking her foot in her mouth big time by mentioning the June 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy as a reason she's not ending her nearly hopeless campaign for the Democratic nomination. The other papers front or tease the story as well. The Los Angeles Times leads with a new poll indicating that California voters favor Barack Obama over Republican John McCain in a general election. The New York Times leads with the sentencing of 270 illegal immigrants rounded up in a raid on an Iowa meatpacking plant.

Hillary Clinton apologized for her assassination statement within hours of making it. The WP emphasizes the notion that the morbid remark undercuts speculation that Clinton wants to wind up on a joint ticket with Obama. The NYT credits the New York Post for first reporting the gaffe and notes the speed with which outraged comments piled up on the Internet. The Times also notices that Clinton made almost this exact same statement to Time magazine back in March.

The significance of the LAT's poll is that California voters like Obama much more than Clinton when it comes to beating McCain, when just four months ago Clinton defeated Obama in the California primary. The Democratic candidate has won the state in each of the last four general presidential elections.

The NYT calls the sentencing of the 270 immigrants to five-month prison terms a sharp, message-sending escalation of the Bush administration's crackdown on illegal workers. The criminal prosecution represents a departure from immigration officials' usual practice of detaining and quickly deporting suspected illegal immigrants using civil statutes. The convictions, doled out in trailers and a converted dance hall on a fairground, were obtained by the feds with what critics call "unusually speedy" plea agreements. The meatpacking plant has been nailed before with repeated sanctions for worker safety violations.

John McCain's doctors say he's healthy, the papers report. Right in its lede, the LAT treats readers to colon polyps, kidney cysts, and stones floating around in McCain's bladder. Doctors say there is no evidence for recurrence of the melanoma skin cancer that required surgical attention in 2000. Digging through the 1,173 pages of medical records made available to reporters for three hours by the campaign yesterday, the NYT finds a discrepancy between pathologists' findings and doctors' public statements about the the candidate's melanoma those eight years ago. The Times also reports that doctors said a surgery scar on McCain's face is 6 by 6centimeters, "a size not previously disclosed."

The WP off-leads word that growing global prosperity is diminishing the role of the International Monetary Fund with developing nations, forcing the fund to become more adviser than lender. The Post says the new trend is the largest upheaval for the IMF since the fall of the Berlin Wall. A senior Ghana liaison to the fund likens the situation to a parent finally recognizing that a child is mature enough to make his or her own decisions.

The Chinese government's rush to dispose of dead bodies in the aftermath of the May 12 earthquake is compounding the agony of survivors who lost loved ones, says a Page One NYT story. More than 60,000 people have died; corpses are being burned or buried in mass graves, leaving little chance for identification and little time for traditional Chinese reverence of the dead.

Turmoil in Zimbabwe continues: The LAT reports that Robert Mugabe's ruling party will cling to power regardless of what happens in the upcoming runoff election. Rights organizations say violence directed at opposition leaders is way worse than it was in 2000 and 2002 elections.

The Wall Street Journal reports that would-be Democratic convention delegates are campaigning hard for the privilege of a "no-expenses-paid trip to Denver," where they will cast their predetermined vote for the candidate of their jurisdiction's choice at the convention this summer. In Colorado, 2,000 people are running for 48 seats, way up from the several hundred who ran in 2004.

New York City is getting readying plans for a "rapid-organ-recovery" ambulance, reports the NYT. The ambulance will be dispatched in hopes of quickly saving good organs when a donor dies. Some people find the plan unseemly; a Boston bioethicist calls it "disgusting."

The NYT fronts word that, with "[t]eeth [g]ritted," Americans are learning to live with high gas prices. AAA reports a 1 percent decline in driving this year, the government estimates the first drop in demand for gasoline in 17 years, and the Transportation Department says that last March Americans drove 11 billion fewer miles than in March 2007. The photo accompanying of the story shows a woman walking past a California gas station sign. The woman's mouth is closed, but it really looks like she's gritting those teeth.

The WSJ wants you to know that 11^th grade is really tough on high-school kids. With all those tests and things to do to impress colleges, junior year has become "a crucible of academic pressure" like never before. Some parents are actually urging their teenagers to work less and play more!

Many foreign-policy mavens have wondered which John McCain would step to the fore once he started running for president in earnest—the McCain who consorts with such pragmatists as Richard Armitage, Colin Powell, and George Shultz; or the McCain who huddles with "neocons" like Robert Kagan, John Bolton, and William Kristol (before he started writing op-eds for the New York Times).

Last month, the Times published a story about the battle for McCain's soul that's being waged by those two factions.

On Tuesday, McCain cleared up the mystery: He's with the neocons. He is, fundamentally, in sync with the foreign policy pursued by George W. Bush for his first six years in office. The clincher is that he has now broken with the president on the one issue where Bush himself reversed course more than a year ago after realizing that his policy had failed. In two op-ed articles and a speech—all of them published or delivered on Tuesday, May 27—McCain called for a return to Bush's original, disastrous approach.

The issue is nuclear negotiations with North Korea.

First, a quick recap (taken mainly from Chapter 2 of my book, Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power):

In 1994, top officials for President Bill Clinton and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il signed the Agreed Framework, an imperfect, interim accord that nonetheless froze Pyongyang's plutonium program, kept its nuclear fuel rods locked up and monitored by international inspectors, and thus prevented the tyrant from developing an A-bomb for the next eight years.

When Bush took office, his secretary of state, Colin Powell, wanted to pick up where Clinton left off—the two sides were on the verge of hammering out a treaty banning the production and export of long-range missiles—but Bush shut him down. The principle, as stated by Vice President Dick Cheney: "We don't negotiate with evil; we defeat it."

So, the North Koreans kicked out the inspectors, unlocked the fuel rods, reprocessed a half-dozen A-bombs' worth of plutonium—and Bush did nothing. Finally, in August 2003, Bush agreed to set up "six-party talks" on the North Korean problem—along with China, Russia, Japan, and North and South Korea—but stopped short of offering Pyongyang any incentives to reverse their course. His position was that Kim Jong-il must dismantle his nuclear program as a precondition to negotiations—an absurd stance on its face, since plutonium was Kim's only bargaining chip, and he wasn't about to cash it in before talks even began.

In October 2006, the all-but-inevitable took place: The North Koreans set off a nuclear explosion at a remote test site.

Nobody said so at the time, but what happened here was that Bush had gone eyeball-to-eyeball with the pygmy of Pyongyang—and lost. He and most of his aides had figured that all they had to do was to hold out—that Kim Jong-il's monstrous regime would collapse before it managed to set off a bomb. They were wrong.

So, at the beginning of last year, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice convinced Bush that it was time to negotiate for real. She sent her emissary Christopher Hill to Berlin to conduct one-on-one talks with his North Korean counterpart—something Bush had said repeatedly that he would never do. Within a few days, the two struck a deal that did not require the North Koreans to dismantle their program as a prerequisite—another violation of earlier principles.

Former Bush officials hit the ceiling—especially John Bolton, who, during the first term, had tried to disrupt the six-party talks, limited as they were. (Some aides still in office also rebelled; Eliot Abrams, Bush's deputy national security adviser, sent out e-mails to his neocon comrades, rallying them to protest.)

But guess what? The deal has worked out pretty well. The North Koreans have halted their plutonium program, shut down and started to take apart their nuclear facilities, and handed over 18,000 pages of documentation on the program to date.

Things are far from perfect. There are still outstanding—and important—questions about North Korea's role in assisting Syria and perhaps Iran in developing a nuclear program. We don't yet know how complete those 18,000 pages are. And nothing has been worked out on how to verify any future North Korean claim that they have destroyed all their nuclear materials.

Then again, it was Bush who forfeited his leverage when he stood by and let North Korea build an A-bomb to begin with. Unable to take military action (the risks of North Korean retaliation against South Korea or Japan were deemed too dreadful) and unwilling to pursue diplomacy, he instead did nothing—and the consequences were inevitable. The deal that Hill worked out isn't great; it's not even as tight as Clinton's Agreed Framework; but the North Koreans hadn't reprocessed their plutonium when Clinton was president. Hill's deal might be the best that could have been negotiated under the circumstances. In any case, it's better than nothing.

McCain wants to undo the deal; he wants to go back to nothing. In an op-ed for the Asia edition of the Wall Street Journal, McCain and his co-author, Sen. Joe Lieberman, wrote, "We must use the leverage available from the United Nations Security Council resolution passed after Pyongyang's 2006 nuclear test to ensure the full and complete declaration, disablement and irreversible dismantlement of [North Korea's] nuclear facilities, in a verifiable manner."

Absent knowledge of the historical context, this sounds reasonable. (Even with such knowledge, it's desirable.) The U.N. Security Council did pass a resolution that condemned the nuclear test and called on North Korea to dismantle its facilities.

However, the members of the Security Council knew, soon enough, that the resolution was unenforceable. Even Bush realized that, contrary to McCain and Lieberman's premise, the resolution gave them no "leverage" whatever.

In a similar op-ed for the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun, McCain and Lieberman urged using the six-party talks "to press for a full, complete, verifiable declaration, disablement and dismantlement of North Korea's nuclear weapons program."

However, the fact is, the six-party talks really don't exist anymore, except as a ratifying body for bilateral talks between the United States and North Korea. (Hill, in fact, is reportedly in Beijing today, continuing these one-on-one sessions.) Bush decided, realistically, that demanding dismantlement as a first step was a nonstarter and that a freeze followed by a gradual disabling—prodded by the delivery of free fuel oil and other economic aid—was more feasible and imminently worthwhile. He had tried cutting off economic aid before, but it had no effect in weakening Kim's hold on power.

As Daniel Sneider, assistant director of the Shorenstein Asian-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, put it in a phone interview Tuesday night: "The policy that John McCain proposes is the policy that George W. Bush pursued—and that policy failed. There's not much to be said for going back to a policy that failed to contain North Korea's nuclear program."

Finally, in a speech at the University of Denver, delivered the same day that the op-eds were published, McCain suggested that his demand for nuclear dismantlement was contrary to the position of the Democrats' likely presidential candidate, Sen. Barack Obama. "Many believe," McCain said, "all we need to do to end the nuclear programs of hostile governments is have our president talk with leaders in Pyongyang and Tehran, as if we haven't tried talking with the governments repeatedly over the past two decades."

In effect, McCain was really criticizing George W. Bush. It was Bush who dropped the demand for North Korean dismantlement as a first step, much less as a precondition to talks. And as for McCain's snide aside—"as if we haven't tried talking with the governments repeatedly"—well, in fact, we haven't, or at least Bush hadn't, until he let Hill talk directly with the North Koreans. And, as it happened, that was all we needed to do to end (or at least to halt and start to tear down) their nuclear program.

And so, if John McCain is elected president, it's not quite true that he'll continue the policies of George W. Bush, as Sen. Obama charges. When it comes to controlling and disarming North Korea's nuclear program, McCain would set back Bush's policy several years.

It's enough to make a girl want to run for president …

With Hillary Clinton edging ever closer to the won't-finish line in the Democratic primary, the inevitable rending of garments that a woman may never again mount a successful run for the presidency has begun. Former Kentucky Labor Secretary Carol Palmore complained to Bloomberg news this weekend, "Never in our lifetime will we have another chance to have a woman president." Last Thursday, Marie Cocco wrote a column for the Washington Post suggesting that "if Clinton is not the nominee, no woman will seriously contend for the White House for another generation." Days earlier, Kate Zernike penned a piece for the New York Times bemoaning the fact that "there is no Hillary waiting in the wings." And in Saturday's Chicago Tribune, Mark Silva asked whether "Hillary Clinton paved the way for anyone but herself?"

No more women candidates in our lifetimes? Not for a whole generation? Can we at least make Sex and the City a box-office success? Do we dare to eat a peach?

Perhaps it's the inevitable byproduct of the accusation that anyone who failed to support Clinton's presidential bid has doomed feminism, but the claim that the doors have slammed on decades of future woman presidents is as maddening as the Olympics of Oppression that preceded it. The folks claiming we've allowed the presidency to slip through our fingers arrive at this conclusion by pressing the same flawed syllogism: The only viable woman candidate thus far has been Hillary; Hillary did not win; ergo there will never be another viable woman candidate.

Zernike thus sets up her article with a composite sketch of qualities any Clinton successor will require: "[S]he will come from the South, or west of the Mississippi. She will be a Democrat who has won in a red state, or a Republican who has emerged from the private sector to run for governor … will have proven herself to be 'a fighter' (a caring one, of course) … She will be young enough to qualify as postfeminist … married with children, but not young children." In short, the first woman president will have to be conservative yet liberal, tough yet caring, and young yet old. … Get it? She doesn't exist! (That's Zernike's next paragraph.)

We all know these double standards exist for females in public life—voters demand toughness but not bitchiness, confidence but not shrillness, authenticity but also glamour. If the Clinton candidacy has taught us anything, however, it's that a woman can straddle all those irreconcilable demands and still win. She can win more than 16 million votes in the primaries and around 1,779 delegates. Clinton has shown that a woman can win huge at the ballot box and bring in huge money, and even if Obama ultimately secures the nomination, those facts will not change. Faced with all that evidence of success, how do the naysayers prove it can never be repeated?

They argue that Clinton had a legitimate shot at the presidency only because she represented a once-in-a-lifetime lightening strike of marriage, fame, and experience that is not only unique to her but that will die with her failed nomination. Silva quotes commentators who have argued that "only Clinton, a former first lady in an administration that presided over eight prosperous years and a second-term senator who has established her own credentials, could have achieved the successes she has this year." Zernike's experts echo this: "Mrs. Clinton had such an unusual combination of experience and name recognition that she might actually raise the bar for women." Under this theory, Clinton was never really a strong woman candidate; she was just the lucky one who'd married a future president.

By advancing the argument that no woman will ever win the presidency without the advantages of a Hillary Clinton because only those advantages account for her success, we do more to disrespect her enormous talents than all of the oily misogynists on Fox News. All across the country, in the most unlikely ways and places, Hillary Clinton kicked ass as a woman. Why take that away from her now?

Not content with this knock on Clinton's accomplishments, the naysayers amplify it with the assumption that no woman will ever manage to pull off what Barack Obama has done: emerge from the ether without decades of experience. Zernike here quotes former White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers as saying that "[n]o woman with Obama's résumé could run." She then quotes Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers, as saying that women lack what she "used to call the John Edwards phenomenon and now calls the Barack Obama phenomenon: having never held elective office, they run for Senate, then before finishing a first term decide they should be president."

Unclear why this is a gender-based phenomenon rather than merely a temporal one. Recall that before it was called the "Barack Obama phenomenon," it was apparently called the "John Edwards phenomenon" precisely because nobody had yet heard of Barack Obama. That's why we call them phenomena. Because they don't usually come with save-the-date cards.

Even if it were true that no new female candidate can appear to amaze and inspire us by 2012, we are already blessed—as even the naysayers concede—with a bullpen that's both deep and wide. It features female talents such as Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, Sens. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Condoleezza Rice, and former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman. Why diminish all these women with claims that whatever qualities of Clinton's they lack are precisely those qualities needed to become president someday? What possible evidence do we have for that?

We have no evidence at all that the next woman who runs for president won't succeed—especially if one or two possible candidates are tapped this summer for a vice-presidential run. And so we arrive at the real stumbling block for any future female candidate. One way or another, the naysayers all want to conclude (indeed, at times, Clinton herself is wont to conclude) that the Clinton campaign was ultimately derailed by the same pervasive sexism that will scuttle the next woman's chances. Never mind that this conclusion is belied by polls Zernike cites, which indicate that 86 percent of Americans say they would vote for a woman. Never mind that it's also belied by Clinton's own historic achievements.

The sexism argument takes two forms: The media itself are too sexist ever to allow a woman to win a presidential election. And (not unrelated to the first) the public mistreatment of Clinton will dissuade future women from trying for that brass ring. Cocco cites sexist coverage of Elizabeth Dole's presidential bid in 2000, which "drowned out discussion of her own record." Yet that didn't stop Clinton from running for office. And Zernike quotes Karen O'Connor, director of the Women and Politics Institute at American University, who asks, ''Who would dare to run?" after Clinton's bid. "The media is set up against you, and if you have the money problem to begin with, why would anyone put their families through this, why would anyone put themselves through this?"

A suggestion: Women will put themselves through this because most of us will have been more inspired by the Clinton run than scared off by it. They'll put themselves through it because—for the first time in history—they'll know what it looks like when a woman almost scores the presidency, and it looks amazing. And some of them will also put themselves through it because having been well and truly sickened by the "iron my shirts" moments, they'll do what women did in 1992 after watching Anita Hill endure outrageous nuts-and-sluts treatment at the hands of an all-male Senate judiciary committee. They'll swarm government.

If Hillary Clinton has taught the women of America anything this year, it's never to say never. Which is why it would be lamentable if the only lesson we take from her candidacy were that nothing like it will ever happen again.