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The Spot: A wrecking ball sweeps back and forth, barely missing a pair of identical cars parked just beyond the two ends of its arc. An off-screen child's voice intones, "He loves me, he loves me not" as the ball swings closer and closer to the cars. Finally, one of the cars gets smashed, and the camera trains its eye on the carcass. "Love it or loathe it," says the narrator. "The 2008 Scion xB." (Click here to watch the ad.)

Generally, ads portray products as pristine treasures. Lighting and camera angles conspire to conjure a glossy, gotta-have-it glow that beams out from laptops, cell phones, blue jeans, and hamburgers. Thus it's jarring to come across an ad like this one, in which the product is first obliterated and then put on display as a crumpled mess.

But Scion has lately seemed to harbor a bit of a self-destructive streak. Walking around my neighborhood a little while back, I happened on a large billboard for the Scion xB. It had a photo of the car and two big check boxes. One was labeled "Champ," the other "Chump." Both were empty.

The billboard struck me as a risky ploy, marketingwise. That "Chump" box was far too tempting. Some mischievous kid with a spray can could easily climb up there and X it in. Even nonvandalizing passers-by might feel welcome to place a mental check mark there. Why would Scion invite us to think poorly of its product—and even suggest specific, disparaging language for us to associate with it?

It turns out the Champ/Chump billboard is part of an ongoing Scion campaign called "Polarization." Other outdoor and print ads offer further check-box choices. Among them: "Adore/Abhor," "Eye Candy/Eyesore," and "Hell yes!/Hell no!" This TV spot—with its two identical xBs on either side of the screen and the "he loves me, he loves me not" voice-over—continues to hammer home the stark-duality theme.

Kimberley Gardiner, national marketing communications manager at Scion, explains that the campaign springs from the xB's polarizing design. The blunt and boxy wagon has a vaguely Brutalist, flirting-with-ugly aesthetic. Instead of cracking self-deprecating jokes (perhaps about function trumping form), Scion decided to get confrontational. "It's not something you often see from a car company," says Gardiner. "Usually, a car ad is about how everyone should love it and run out to the dealership to buy it."

The approach is in large part dictated by Scion's target audience: 18- to 24-year-old men. This demographic tends to favor brands with a bit of in-your-face attitude. To reach them, Scion has used niche marketing—street teams, music industry tie-ins, etc.—and is airing this ad late at night on guy-centric cable networks like Spike, G4, Fuse, and the Adult Swim programming bloc on the Cartoon Network.* (Time was also bought on BET and the Spanish-language SiTV. Gardiner says Scion "does well with younger African-American and Latino male buyers.")

The ad itself borrows its mood and direction from horror films. Listen to the opening sounds: dripping water, creaking metal. The spookily flat, disinterested voice of a child is another horror staple, dating back to chillers like The Shining, The Omen, and The Bad Seed. With the wrecking ball's mechanized, impassive destruction, set in a dank void lit by dim fluorescence, the ad seems particularly indebted to the more recent Saw series—a set of torture-gore films that appeals strongly (perhaps only) to young men.

Knowing your core market and how best to grab it by the lapels are of course important marketing skills. But it's also possible to attune your brand to one demographic without pushing away all others. There's a real danger in adopting an aggressive, intentionally polarizing tone, as Scion has: You can repel buyers who might otherwise have considered your product. When the ad shows us the xB after it's been totaled by the wrecking ball (smashed glass, bent metal), it looks like there's been a horrific car crash. This sort of raw, extreme imagery is unlikely to play well with older consumers, who'd rather not imagine exactly how their car would look in the wake of a violent collision.

Scion would argue that older drivers just aren't who they're after, and that the brand is better served by laser-focusing on a specific target. And pissing off the olds is an excellent method of sucking up to aggro youths. According to Ad Age, Scion was the most efficient car advertiser last year, in terms of ad dollars spent per vehicle sold, so they've clearly worked out a cost-effective means of reaching the groups they want to reach. Those young buyers—once roped in by an entry-level Scion—might well graduate to corporate cousins Toyota and Lexus somewhere down the line. But Scion, in its current form, is a very low-volume brand with a lot of room to grow. And the fact is, you never know who a goofy-looking car might end up appealing to.

Consider the Honda Element, another modestly priced, boxy wagon. Honda designed the car with young people in mind, labeling it a "dorm room on wheels," but when the Element hit showrooms the average age of its buyers turned out to be 41. Likewise, the xB—with its generous cabin space, solid engineering, and low sticker price—might, in time, find a fan base among practical-minded car buyers of all ages. Unless Scion succeeds in stiff-arming everyone but the youngsters.

Grade: C. Setting aside the ad's effectiveness as a sales tool, I didn't find the execution of the spot all that artful. I wasn't gripped by suspense, wondering whether or not the wrecking ball would hit a car. I didn't find the cinematography or art direction especially compelling. It was low-grade horror—a neutered version of an R-rated frightfest. If Scion insists on aiming its pitch at young dudes (who are the only people watching the late-night programs these ads are aired against), they'd better make ads that will grab young dudes' attention and hold them riveted to the screen. I just can't see this spot achieving that.

Correction, July 28, 2008: This piece originally stated that Adult Swim is a programming bloc on Comedy Central. It appears on the Cartoon Network. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

Click here for a video slide show on metal heads in the Islamic world.

Pink Floyd's album The Wall takes on a whole new meaning when brought to life by an Arab metal band in Lebanon. Imagine 100,000 teens—Sunni, Shiite, Christian, Druze—headbanging in sync, pumping their fists in unison, screaming, "Hey, teacher, leave those kids alone!" even as another civil war, waged by their parents, threatens to tear their country apart yet again.

Welcome to the new Middle East, a region where, by some estimates, nearly half of the population is under the age of 25. This is a highly literate, politically sophisticated, technologically savvy, and globally plugged-in generation. It speaks English; it knows its way around the Internet; and, according to historian and part-time metal head Mark LeVine, it wants to rock.

LeVine, a professor at University of California, Irvine, has spent the last few years headbanging his way from Morocco to Pakistan and almost everywhere in between. The premise of his book about the Middle East's underground music scene, Heavy Metal Islam, is simple. "To understand the peoples, cultures, and politics of the Muslim world today, especially the young people who are the majority of the citizens," LeVine writes, "we need to follow the musicians and their fans as much as the mullahs and their followers."

Follow them he does, and with all the dogged determination of a seasoned Grateful Dead fan. In Cairo, he rocks with Hate Suffocation, "the best death-metal band in Egypt, if not the Middle East and North Africa," dancing along with a gaggle of screaming girls dressed in tight jeans, torn Iron Maiden T-shirts, and Islamic headscarves: Muhajababes, LeVine calls them. In Beirut, still "one of the world's cutting-edge locations for dance music, hip-hop, and alternative rock," he jams onstage with perhaps the biggest hard-rock band in the Middle East, The Kordz, as they rip through a set in front of thousands of Lebanese kids still reeling from the assassination of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. In Iran, he watches a gang of teenagers gathered illegally at a park for an impromptu rap battle in Persian, the beats echoing through someone's mobile phone. When the dreaded basij, or morality police, show up, everyone scatters.

The danger of arrest, even execution, is real for these young metal heads, and not just in Iran. In Egypt, more than 100 people were arrested when pictures surfaced of a heavy metal concert where fans seemed to be carrying an upside-down cross. "Devil worship!" the Egyptian police cried, rounding up kids as young as 13 and throwing them in prison. In 2003, Moroccan authorities arrested 14 heavy metal musicians and fans and charged them with "shaking the foundations of Islam" and "attempting to convert a Muslim to another faith" with their music, as though heavy metal were a religion.

Yet these musicians and their fans continue to thrive in such authoritarian societies precisely because, as LeVine notes, this is the first generation to arise in the Middle East that has managed to tap into the promise of globalization. For example, when the pioneering Iranian heavy metal band O-Hum (Illusion), which blends hard rock and traditional Persian melodies with lyrics swiped from the famed 14^th-century Sufi poet Hafez, released its first album, the album was, predictably, rejected by Iran's Ministry of Culture. Iran's draconian censorship laws allow the government to ban any music it deems offensive or un-Islamic. If a song has "too many riffs on electrical guitar" or if the musicians display "excessive stage movements," then the CD is confiscated and the band prohibited from any public performances. But rather than surrender their album to the Ministry of Culture, O-Hum uploaded their songs on to the Internet and allowed fans—not just in Iran but throughout the world—to listen to the album for free.

The mullahs rightly fear the heavy metal scene in Iran because it reflects the mood of a volcanic youth culture fed up with religion and desperate for alternative ways of expressing itself. A member of Iran's most popular metal band, Tarantist, tells LeVine, "Metal is in our blood. It's not entertainment, it's our pain, and also an antidote to the hypocrisy of religion that is injected into all of us from the moment we're born." One of the patriarchs of Morocco's heavy metal scene, Reda Zine, puts it this way: "We play heavy metal because our lives are heavy metal."

But can music contribute to cultural and political transformation in the region? It's hardly the first time the question has arisen. Where Tom Stoppard, looking back at Eastern Europe's revolt against Communism in Rock 'n' Roll, answered yes, LeVine is not so sure. The problem, as he sees it, is the failure of the politically active heavy metal scene and the more progressive yet entrenched Islamist opposition groups like the Muslim Brotherhood to make common cause. Indeed, the two are more often in competition with each other, with the Islamists, many of whom have struggled for decades against their authoritarian regimes, fiercely antagonistic toward the young, politically minded metal heads who seem to enjoy a level of freedom that the Islamists could only dream of. A band like Hoba Hoba Spirit, Morocco's insanely popular rock/reggae/African/post-punk rockers, can draw 100,000 kids to one of their concerts, whereas members of Morocco's chief Islamist opposition party, the Justice and Spirituality Association, are prohibited by law from congregating in groups of more than three people. While Egypt's most famous political prisoner, Ayman Nour, rots in a prison cell for his work promoting democracy, his teenage sons, Shady and Noor, are free to preach a watered-down version of their father's message to thousands of Egyptians through their popular metal band, Bliss.

The animosity between the Islamists and the metal heads is partly a result of a generational divide and partly a matter of their differing political and cultural agendas. (The metal heads are hardly interested in building an Islamic state.) But the truth is that these two dissident groups who seem to occupy opposite ends of the political spectrum have more in common than one would think: Both have similar aspirations to build a freer, more democratic society, and both have had their political views shaped by the same sense of despair and lack of opportunity that exists throughout the region.

And yet there seems little chance of a convergence between the two, though not because of an inherent conflict between religion and rock 'n' roll. As a Muslim sheikh in Lebanon proudly declares, "We're doing heavy metal, too." Rather, it is because the Islamists seem not yet ready to expand their political ideals to include activist kids who prefer Ozzy to Osama, while the metal heads are not yet willing to apply their music (and, more importantly, their credibility with the youth) to help the Islamists challenge their governments.

That is too bad. Because as we learned in Eastern Europe, music has the power to express ideas (especially subversive ideas) in a manner that mere words cannot; it can serve as a net to gather disparate elements together under a single identity and with a single purpose. LeVine imagines a day when the mutual mistrust between the metal heads and the Islamists will transform into cooperation, when they will fight the power together as one united oppositional force. But reading Heavy Metal Islam, one cannot help feeling that day is far away.

Throughout his quarter-century in Congress, John McCain has consistently upheld one bedrock fiscal principle: He opposes tax increases. He opposed them in the years prior to 1998, when his voting record in the House and Senate was pretty consistently conservative. He opposed them as he drifted leftward between 1998 and 2006. And he's opposed them since 2006, as he has drifted back to the right. "I've never voted for a tax increase in 24 years," he told columnist Robert Novak early last year. "Never, ever, not under any president including President Reagan, and I will never vote for a tax increase, nor support a tax increase." In 1993, McCain went so far as to seek (unsuccessfully) a change in Senate rules that would have required a 60-vote majority to raise taxes. Read his lips. No new taxes.

Breaking that promise cost President George H.W. Bush the 1992 election. In McCain's case, though, nobody takes the promise seriously enough to care that he's already broken it. McCain voted for a $1.10 per-pack tax on cigarettes in 1998. That measure failed, but in 1983 McCain voted to raise Social Security taxes as part of a reform package that was enacted into law. The payroll tax hike was necessary to maintain Social Security's solvency, but that didn't keep it from being denounced by the Heritage Foundation, bastion of the same sort of red-meat conservatives who constitute the base of today's Republican Party. As recently as July 27 of this year, George Stephanopoulos asked McCain on ABC News' This Week whether he might consider a new payroll tax increase. In response, McCain said, "I don't want tax increases," but "There's nothing that's off the table."

All right, then. McCain has never voted for an income-tax increase, defined as an increase in rates. (You can also raise income taxes by eliminating loopholes, as McCain has supported in the past.) Read his lips. No new tax brackets above the current 35 percent maximum. That's the rock upon which McCain's fiscal principles stand. McCain's campaign tax plan calls for an extension of the Bush tax cuts to block "the Democrats' crippling plans" to raise the top rate in 2011 to 39.6 percent. But McCain himself was happy to live with a top rate of 39.6 percent back in 2001. That was the status quo under President Clinton, and when President Bush's first tax bill phased in a top-rate reduction to 35 percent, McCain voted no. McCain also voted no in 2003 when President Bush proposed accelerating the earlier tax cut. McCain was one of only two Republicans to oppose the first Bush tax cut and one of only three to oppose the second. But, technically, voting against a tax cut isn't the same as voting in favor of a tax increase. In 2006, when it came time to vote on whether to extend the Bush tax cuts McCain had previously opposed, a "nay" vote now constituted a tax increase. Consequently, McCain voted in favor. Explaining his apparent flip-flop on NBC News' Meet the Press, McCain said, "The economy had adjusted, the tax cuts were there, and if it would have been—and that's the way it was designed. It would've been tantamount to a tax increase." (Emphasis added.)

No one bought it, of course, because it was too plainly apparent by 2006 that if McCain continued to oppose Bush's 2001 tax cuts he wouldn't have a prayer of winning the Republican nomination in 2008. "Out of favor with the Republican base," observed the rabidly anti-tax Americans for Tax Reform, "McCain has slowly tried to reinvent himself as a taxpayer friendly Senator." The similarly rabid Club for Growth pronounced, "John McCain is no supply-sider." This year, McCain has tried to recast his earlier opposition to Bush's rate cuts as a vote in favor of budgetary prudence. In a January appearance on Meet the Press, McCain said, "[T]he reason—major reason why I was opposed to it was because there was no spending cuts. I was proud to be part—a foot soldier in the Reagan revolution. And we had tax cuts, but we had spending cuts that went right along with it."

There are three problems with this statement.

1) It's absurd to cite Ronald Reagan as a model of budgetary prudence. Under Reagan, the budget deficit ballooned from $74 billion to $155 billion, setting at one point a still-unbeaten record of 6 percent of gross domestic product. "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter," Dick Cheney famously confided to then-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, a proposition subsequently defended by Irwin M. Stelzer in the Weekly Standard. Cheney and Stelzer were wrong on the economics but right in summarizing the central message of Reagan's domestic policy. Indeed, nine years ago, inspired by Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist's Reagan Legacy Project, I proposed that the budget deficit be renamed "the Reagan." I still think it's a good idea.

2) If McCain is such a deficit hawk, why does he refuse for all time to raise income-tax rates?

3) Look at McCain's Senate floor statement from the 2001 tax vote. It included not one word about the need to keep spending in check. Why should it have? As Jonathan Chait has noted in the New Republic, during that brief historical moment the budget deficit was in surplus. What McCain actually said was, "I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us, at the expense of middle-class Americans who most need tax relief." Six years later, the Club for Growth still couldn't forgive McCain for having "aligned himself with the likes of Ted Kennedy in his rhetorical attacks in 2001 and 2003."

If I had to guess, I'd say that McCain drifted leftward on taxes partly to impress the media, which by the mid-1990s were paying him ever-more attention; partly to piss off George W. Bush, for whom, during the 2000 primaries, McCain had a palpable dislike; and partly out of conviction. He drifted back rightward because, as noted before, he had to get right with the Republican Party mainstream.

But no one should underestimate the role played by sheer irrationality. Take another look at that 2001 floor statement. In it, McCain pointed out something that's seldom remembered. Three days before McCain cast his famous vote against Bush's tax cut (on final passage), he voted for it (on Senate passage). Why the change? It seems that McCain had wanted to cut the top rate one point, from 39.6 percent to 38.6 percent. When the Senate voted that down, Sen. Charles Grassley, who then chaired the finance committee, offered as a compromise to set the top rate at 36 percent. That version cleared the Senate with McCain's support. When the bill came back from House-Senate conference, however, the top rate had been knocked back down to 35 percent. Based on that one-point difference, McCain declared war on his president and his party. Similarly, although McCain campaigned in 2000 in favor of restricting the estate tax to the very wealthiest families rather than eliminating it—a position he still holds, though after 2005 he stopped filibustering against outright elimination—in July 2000 he voted to phase it out entirely. In this instance, he doesn't appear to have made any floor statement or put out any press release. Did he just get out of bed on the wrong side?

In the July 31 "Explainer," Noreen Malone failed to mention that the Israeli newspaper Maariv had retracted its claim about how it obtained Barack Obama's prayer note from the Western Wall. Spokesmen now say the Obama campaign did not submit the note.

In the July 31 "Moneybox," Chris Thompson misspelled Sharon Wienbar's name as "Weinbar."

In the July 30 "Moneybox," Daniel Gross included a significant numerical error. The piece linked to a Bureau of Transportation Statistics report, which can be seen here, that shows public construction spending on roads and highways in monthly totals. That Census Bureau reports the data as monthly totals expressed at an annualized rate. Because we read that annual rate as a monthly rate, the original article overstated public spending on highways and roads by a factor of 12.

In the July 29 "Green Lantern," Jacob Leibenluft incorrectly said that using the revolving door would save about 74 percent of the energy needed to heat and cool Building E25 on MIT's campus. Using the revolving door would save about 1.5 percent of the total energy required to heat and cool the entire building and about 74 percent of the total energy required to heat and cool the air exchanged when people pass in and out of the building.

In the July 28 "Ad Report Card," Seth Stevenson incorrectly wrote that Adult Swim is a bloc of programming on Comedy Central. Adult Swim appears on the Cartoon Network.

In the July 25 "Explainer," Amaka Maduka neglected to mention that an explosion in New Jersey was the result of 16 "bug bombs," not regular cans of bug spray. She also misstated the number of cans of spray necessary to create an ignition hazard by failing to convert the liquid volume of propellants to a gaseous volume.

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.

Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 13 with Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:







You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe to the weekly Culture Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.

In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss Joss Whedon's new Web-only musical miniseries Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog," Starbucks' abrupt move to shutter a number of its stores in the United States and abroad, and Google's newest challenger in the search field, Cuil.

Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned in the show:

The new Web miniseries from Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.

The pre-eminent Joss Whedon Web community, Whedonesque.

The Guild, another Web series (preferred by some Culturefest gabbers) .

Eulogies from Slate readers for some of the 600 U.S. Starbucks stores set to close.

Taylor Clark's Slate piece explaining how Starbucks actually helps mom-and-pop coffeehouses.

The new search engine Cuil.

Slate's reader contest: Figure out the best questions to ask Cuil, or any other search engine, to gauge its strengths and weaknesses.

The Culture Gabfest weekly endorsements:

Julia's pick: the Boggle-like Facebook word game Prolific (Facebook login required).

Stephen's pick: Scottish novelist Philip Kerr's Berlin Noir trilogy.

Dana's pick: WWII-era singer Jo Stafford, as heard on WNYC's Evening Music, hosted by David Garland.

Posted by Matt Lieber on July 31 at 10:59 a.m.

July 17, 2008

Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 12 with Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:

You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe to the weekly Culture Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.

In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss the new Batman movie The Dark Knight, The New Yorker's cover depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as anti-American mujahideen, and the mysterious relationship between Madonna and Alex Rodriguez.

Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned in the show:

The Dark Knight Web site.

The New Yorker cover depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as anti-American fist-bumpers.

Jack Shafer's critique of the members of the press fretting about the corrupting power of the cover.

Christopher Beam's confession that in a roundabout way, he might be the one who gave rise to the cover in the first place.

The New York Times' Bill Carter's piece asking why comedians have such trouble making fun of Obama.

Us Weekly's take on the A-Rod-Madonna liaison.

The New Yorker's explanation of how Kabbalah figures in.

Madonna's history with '80s slugger Jose Canseco.

The Culture Gabfest weekly endorsements:

Julia's pick: Curtis Sittenfeld's forthcoming novel American Wife, a fictionalized portrait of Laura Bush.

Dana's pick: Carla Bozulich's album Red Headed Stranger, a song-by-song remake of Willie Nelson's classic concept album.

Stephen's pick: Haven in a Heartless World, by American historian Christopher Lasch.

Posted by Matt Lieber on July 17 at 10:45 a.m.

July 2, 2008

Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 11 with Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:

You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe to the biweekly Culture Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.

In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss the re-release of Liz Phair's feminist indie-rock masterpiece Exile in Guyville, the media's semihysterical reaction to news of a "pregnancy pact" among teenage girls at a high school in Gloucester, Mass., and the death of comedian George Carlin.

Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned in the show:

Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville.

New York magazine's culture blog Vulture interviews Liz Phair.

Meghan O'Rourke's 2003 critical re-evaluation of Liz Phair.

Liz Phair's response.

Time magazine's original report on the "pregnancy pact" at a Gloucester, Mass., public high school.

Time follows up.

Christopher Caldwell considers the political dogmas at play in the Gloucester story.

George Carlin, RIP.

Jerry Seinfeld remembers George Carlin.

Cullen Murphy explains why flight attendants really talk like that.

The Culture Gabfest weekly endorsements:

Julia's pick: Listener Robin Winning's song of the summer, "That's Not My Name" by the Ting Tings.

Dana's pick: Stephen Colbert's green screen challenge: Make John McCain interesting.

Stephen's pick: The greatest song of any summer ever, the Rolling Stones' "Miss You."

Posted by Matt Lieber on July 2 at 6:02 p.m.

June 18, 2008



Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 10 with Dana Stevens, John Swansburg, and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:

You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe to the weekly Culture Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.

In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss the unexpected outcome of the R. Kelly trial, the song of the summer (or which hit you'll unexpectedly know all the words to by Labor Day), and the Atlantic's recent story: "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned in the show:

Josh Levin's Slate article "Long Live the Little Man Defense!" explains why R. Kelly was acquitted.

R. Kelly and Usher fall for the "Same Girl."

New York magazine predicts the song of the summer. (Leona Lewis' "Bleeding Love," Usher's "Love in This Club," and the New Kids on the Block's "Summertime" are contenders.)

The Atlantic's Nicholas Carr wonders: "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

The Culture Gabfest weekly endorsements:

Dana's pick: MSNBC's surprisingly touching yet seemingly endless tribute to Tim Russert

John's pick: The Mary Tyler Moore Show, now available on iTunes

Julia's pick: Autobiography of a Wardrobe by Elizabeth Kendall

Posted by Amanda Aronczyk on June 18 at 11:54 a.m.

June 4, 2008

Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 9 with Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:







You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe to the weekly Culture Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.

In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss Vanity Fair's sprawling, dishy takedown of President Clinton, Sex and the City's boffo success in movie theaters, and the earsplitting arrival of mixed martial artist Kimbo Slice on CBS.

Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned in the show:

Vanity Fair profiles Bill Clinton, paying particular attention to his post-presidential rat pack and his id.

Clinton responds, officially, in a press release.

Clinton responds, harshly, off the cuff.

Slate's Jack Shafer offers Clinton a lesson in press criticism.

Dana Stevens reviews Sex and the City.

Julia Turner considers the sartorial deficit between the Sex and the City movie and the television show.

CBS' Elite XC mixed martial arts page.

ESPN introduces Kimbo Slice.

David Plotz defends Ultimate Fighting.

The Culture Gabfest weekly endorsements:

Julia's pick: Josh Levin's coverage of the bizarre, sad, and hilarious R. Kelly trial.

Dana's pick: The new D.I.Y. suburban taekwondo comedy, The Foot Fist Way

Stephen's pick: Bo Diddley, The Chess Box.

Posted by Matt Leiber on June 4 at 11:14 a.m.

May 21, 2008

Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 8 with Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:

You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe to the weekly Culture Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.

In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss a New York magazine critique of monogamy, the aesthetically promiscuous—and recently departed—artist Robert Rauschenberg, and Barack Obama's affinity for the work of novelist Philip Roth, the great bard of infidelity.

Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned in the show:

New York magazine's skeptical inquiry into the sanctity of monogamy in American culture

Jim Lewis' fond remembrance of Robert Rauschenberg in Slate

Also in Slate, Jack Shafer's takedown of the overly generous eulogizing of Rauschenberg in the press

The New Republic's Jed Perl's dislike of Rauschenberg's work

Barack Obama's revelation of his affinity for Philip Roth to the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg

The Culture Gabfest weekly endorsements:

Dana's pick: Eric Asimov's eulogy in the New York Times of the Mei Lai Wah Coffee House in New York's Chinatown

Stephen's Pick: John Seymour's great achievement in garden writing, The Guide to Self -Sufficiency

Julia's picks: This American Life's explanation of the housing crisis; the season finale of NBC's The Office.

Posted by Matt Leiber on May 21 at 6:31 p.m.

May 7, 2008

Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 7 by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:

You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.

In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner discuss the rollout of the summer movie season, including the superhero movie Iron Man, Robert Downey Jr.'s nimble performance in it, and which of this summer's blockbusters look most promising.

Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned in the show:

Entertainment Weekly's summer movie release calendar

Iron Man, reviewed by Dana Stevens

The New York Times profiles Robert Downey Jr.

You Don't Mess With the Zohan official site

Indiana Jones official site

A 2006 New York Times profile of Mike Myers and his hiatus from films

Mike Myers and Deepak Chopra, together at last

The Culture Gabfest weekly endorsements:

Dana's pick: Carrier on PBS

Julia's pick: Project Runway

Stephen's pick: Jimi Hendrix's live performance of Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone"

Posted by Matthew Lieber on May 7 at 11:00 a.m.

April 23, 2008

Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 6 with critics Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:

You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe to the new, dedicated Culture Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.

In this week's Culture Gabfest, critics Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner discuss whether personal virtue can solve global warming, the possible failure of personal virtue in the travel writing business, and the utter failure of personal virtue inside Abu Ghraib.

Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned in the show:

Michael Pollan's New York Times Magazine article "Why Bother?"

Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan's Slanted Truths: Essays on Gaia

Thomas Kohnstamm's book Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?

Lonely Planet responds to the Kohnstamm scandal

Errol Morris' Standard Operating Procedure

Film: Iraq in Fragments

"Photo Finish: How the Abu Ghraib photos morphed from scandal to law," by Dahlia Lithwick

Julia's pick: Hot Chip

100 best novels from Random House

Dana's pick: Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart

Stephen's pick: The Bachelor

Posted by Andy Bowers on April 23 at 11:37 a.m.

April 9, 2008

Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 5, with critics Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:







You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.

In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss whether the latest Vogue cover is racist (or just the subject of misplaced outrage in the blogosphere), whether Hillary's tax return explodes the Clintons' middle-class image, and whether the new online sitcom The Guild is for nerds only.

Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned in the show:

Vogue's "King Kong" cover

Slate's take on the Vogue cover

John Lennon and Yoko Ono on the cover of Rolling Stone, photographed by Annie Leibovitz

Hillary Clinton's 2007 tax return (as disclosed by Hillary)

The Guild: official show site, YouTube channel

World of Warcraft

Quarterlife (no longer) on NBC

M. Ward and Zooey Deschanel

AC/DC

Am I That Name? by Denise Riley

BBC Radio 4's Start the Week

Posted by Amanda Aronczyk on April 9 at 11:12 a.m.

March 26, 2008

Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 4 with critics Stephen Metcalf, Meghan O'Rourke, and John Swansburg by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:







You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.

In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss whether Barack Obama was channeling Walt Whitman, whether the head of JPMorgan was channeling Gordon Gekko, and whether English professors should be channeling Wal-Mart associates.

Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned in the show:

Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech

Walt Whitman's Song of Myself

New York magazine's profile of Jamie Dimon

Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko in Wall Street

Joseph Schumpeter's "Creative Destruction"

The New York Times' "You Say Recession, I Say 'Reservations!' "

NOBU restaurant in New York City

Gerald Graff's Professing Literature: An Institutional History

Meghan's pick: The Hakawati by Rabih Alameddine

John's pick: Dispatches by Michael Herr

Stephen's pick: Boys and Girls in America from the Hold Steady

Posted by Andy Bowers on March 26 at 8:16 p.m.

March 12, 2008

Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 3 with critics Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and John Swansburg by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:

You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.

Our newest podcast, the Culture Gabfest, is back just in time to take on the Eliot Spitzer meltdown and how it's echoing through the media. Critics Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and John Swansburg also discuss the recent rash of fake memoirs and a breakout blog that claims to shed light on stuff white people like.

Here are links to some of the items mentioned in this week's episode:

"The Fake Memoirist's Survival Guide" on Slate

A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley

The Stuff White People Like blog

Stuff White People Like on NPR's Talk of the Nation

Dana Stevens' pick: Chop Shop

John Swansburg's pick: Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Women To Play in the National Hockey League by Cleo Birdwell (aka Don DeLillo)

Stephen Metcalf's pick: Top Gear from BBC America

Posted by Andy Bowers on March 12 at 11:55 a.m.

Feb. 28, 2008

Here's the sophomore outing of our newest audio program, the Culture Gabfest, with critics Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner. To listen, click the arrow on the audio player below:

You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.

In this edition, the panelists discuss the aftermath of the Oscars, the challenge Barack Obama poses for comedians, and Lindsay Lohan's Marilyn Monroe impression. Here are some of the links for items mentioned in the show:

Daniel Day-Lewis' Oscar acceptance speech

Saturday Night Live's Obama/Clinton debate sketch

Lindsay Lohan's New York magazine photo shoot

Julia Turner's Oscar fashion dialogue with Amanda Fortini

The Encyclopedia Baracktannica

Feb. 14, 2008

To play the first Culture Gabfest, click the arrow on the player below.

At one point in Michael Ondaatje's book of interviews with Walter Murch, the venerable film editor reflects on how effective cutting keeps audiences grounded as one shot, often imperceptibly, becomes another. The trick is to determine where the viewer's attention is trained in a particular shot and to cut to a shot that contains a focal point in the same area of the frame. But there is at least one major exception to this rule: the fight scene. "You actually want an element of disorientation—that's what makes it exciting," Murch says of his approach to splicing together a fight. "So you put the focus of interest somewhere else, jarringly, and you cut at unexpected moments. You make a tossed salad of it, you abuse the audience's attention."

Attention abuse is certainly one way to describe the on-screen tumult that is by now a summer multiplex ritual and that increasingly suggests even more aggressive terms than Murch's. (Try pureed instead of tossed.) In last year's The Bourne Ultimatum, directed by shaky-cam virtuoso Paul Greengrass, the action often approximates epilepsy (and, according to some, induced motion sickness). This year, the murky, jerky aesthetic dominates the whiz-bang scenes in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight. Despite general enthusiasm for the movie's pop-Nietzschean gloom, some critics have grumbled about the blink-and-miss-it action, especially the sequences of hand-to-hand combat. "Nolan appears to have no clue how to stage or shoot action," David Edelstein wrote in New York magazine, complaining that it was impossible to make "spatial sense" of some of the fight scenes. Even in her New York Times rave, Manohla Dargis noted that the finale was "at times visually incoherent."

The fight scene as it usually turns up in today's action spectacles—smeared, destabilized, fixated on chaos at the expense of clarity and precision—reflects the changing syntax, the all-around acceleration, of movies in general and Hollywood blockbusters in particular. The current vogue for chopped-up fights also raises the question: Are these hyperedited brawls any more successful than their more straightforward predecessors?

Click here for a video slide show on the evolution of the fight scene.

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Human Nature: Gamers To Redesign Real-Life Drones

Raytheon, a contractor to the U.S. military, is trying to improve its drones by calling on video game developers to redesign the controls. Alex Chadwick speaks with William Saletan about the future of military technology. Listen to the segment.

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,

I am a professional in my late 20s and purchased my own home a few years ago. I am also planning to get engaged to a wonderful woman soon. Due to increased work demands, I have gotten badly behind in my housework in recent months. My parents, who live nearby, decided to help by straightening out my house but didn't tell me their plans. They used the spare key I had given them and cleaned the house from top to bottom. Drawers and closets were rearranged and things were moved around—including contraceptives and literature on engagement rings. A personal item belonging to my girlfriend was apparently discarded. Granted, some much-needed repairs were done (blinds put up, a light fixture repaired, etc). But I was furious that my personal space and privacy were invaded. I called my parents and, in a very loud, profane, and mean-spirited rant, told them that they had no right to do what they did and that they were not welcome in my house. I know that I was wrong to lose my temper with my parents, and I want to apologize and restore our relationship. But I don't want to give them the impression that they have the right to come over and rummage through my things. My father is now convinced that my outburst was a sign of a mental-health problem and has demanded that I go to the doctor to discuss going on medication. Now my girlfriend thinks my parents are irrational and controlling, and is nervous that they will continue to do stuff like this after we are married. What can I do to straighten everything out?

—Clean House, Messy Relationships

Dear Clean,

There your parents were, whistling while they worked like a pair of Snow Whites, knowing that you would be stunned with pleasure at the transformation of your home from shambles to showplace. When you called, they were expecting to hear gratitude, but instead, Grumpy lays into them with an invective-laced diatribe. I'm not defending your parents—they grossly violated your privacy. There is a sanctity to anyone's home, and they were treating yours as if it were your teenage bedroom and they'd gotten sick of telling you to clean it up. You had a right to be furious about their "gift." But it's usually preferable to contain your anger before expressing your displeasure, especially when the recipients are your well-meaning parents, who are oblivious to the wrong they've done. So, go see them with a bouquet of flowers. Apologize for what you said and the way you said it. Then explain to them that while you appreciate their generosity—and how much better the house looks—it's your house, and you need them to respect your privacy and territory. Let's hope they forget the suggestion that you seek medical attention. If your father brings it up, laugh it off by saying you temporarily snapped because you missed your dust bunnies. If your parents get it, then you can reassure your girlfriend there won't be anymore break-ins. But if they don't, then change your locks.

—Prudie

Dear Prudence Video: Stop Bringing Kids to Work!

Dear Prudie,

I am in my early 20s and have been in my first and only relationship with a great—perhaps perfect—man for more than two years. The problem isn't him, it's me. I have recently put my foot in the door of the modeling/acting business. This new career has given me the opportunity to meet so many interesting and beautiful people. I've twice been offered a flight to rendezvous with an industry person I had just met! I'm very upset to admit I have been tempted by these offers. I'm flattered that they find me attractive enough to drop some dough and give me a boost in the industry. I can't help but be intrigued by the possibility of new sexual encounters and a leg up in my field. I'm not interested in any emotional relationship because my boyfriend fills me to the brim with his unconditional love and affection. Since I'm inexperienced with relationships, is this just typical temptation that every woman must fight, or is this a warning sign that I'm not in my relationship as deeply as I thought?

—Fighting Temptation

Dear Fighting,

It's perfectly common for a young woman who's had only one relationship, and is just entering the wider world, to wonder what it's like to be involved with other people. It's less common for a young woman to be ecstatically happy in a relationship but think it may be a good idea to let guys fly her around so she can have sex with them. And it's really uncommon for a young woman to be able to convince her perfect boyfriend that flying around and having sex with other guys has nothing whatsoever to do with their relationship—it's just a career-building thing. (It's probably best to leave off your résumé, "Had lots of sex with Client No. 9.") Usually it turns out that beautiful, willing young women are a renewable resource for well-connected men, and that such men aren't actually that interested in making you the next Heidi Klum; they're just interested in making you. But if you do decide to give in to temptation, at least be decent enough to break up with your great guy before you get on the plane.

—Prudie

Dear Prudence,

I have recently started frequenting a popular clothing-optional beach. This beach is fairly secluded, so I feel very comfortable tanning and swimming naked. The other day, however, I had a very embarrassing encounter. As I lay naked on my towel trying to improve my tan, one of my old college professors walked by me. (He was fully clothed, incidentally.) We recognized each other; however, neither of us said hello out of (I assume) mutual embarrassment. Afterward, I felt rude for not acknowledging him and am now concerned that he may feel that I snubbed him. Was it appropriate not to greet him? Do you have any advice on how I should behave if this happens again?

—Not a Never-Nude

Dear Nude,

There are certain situations in which not acknowledging an acquaintance can be the most graceful thing to do. One is if you're in a restaurant, and the spouse of a friend in mid-canoodle with someone who is not your friend looks up and sees you. The other is when you are lying nude on a beach towel and strolling by is your former professor, who may be doing field work, though I doubt his field is conchology. While you are worrying that you snubbed your professor, he's worrying that you think he likes to ogle the shore life. If he comes wandering by again, this is an occasion in which it would be perfectly acceptable to roll over and, figuratively, bury your head in the sand.

—Prudie

Dear Prudence,

My grandmother has dementia and has recently been hospitalized. Every time my parents visit her, they encourage me to tag along. I never go. I love her and all, but she doesn't remember that we've been to visit her. She left me some money, and my dad tries using that to make me feel guilty when I don't go with them. To me, her body may still be there, but her mind is pretty much gone. When I used to go visit her, she often started conversations in her native language. (English is her second.) She has even confused me with her niece that passed away. I can't talk to my dad about this because it's his mom and he's really sensitive about it. I feel I'm too young to be dealing with something like this, so how do I talk to my dad about it without him becoming upset?

—Teen Going on Adult

Dear Teen,

You've probably already discovered that life as a child or teen is full of doing stuff you don't want to do because it's your obligation and because it's the right thing to do. Since you're "going on adult," you might as well know that when you grow up, you're going to have to do lots more unpleasant stuff because … you get the picture. There are few things more depressing than seeing a beloved person be overtaken by dementia. But it doesn't matter that your grandmother is not sure who you are, because when you are there, she will know that a sweet young person kissed her on the forehead and said, "I love you, Grandma." And you will know, especially when you get to be an adult and look back on your teenage self, that you don't have to be ashamed that you abandoned your grandmother because she was sick and visiting her was a drag.

—Prudie

New York state "may have to sell off roads, bridges and tunnels" to address a growing budget deficit, the New York Post reported Wednesday. How would you go about selling someone a bridge in Brooklyn?

Start by offering a long lease with lots of conditions. (New York Gov. David Paterson has clarified that he doesn't want to sell the state's infrastructure outright.) The agreement would transfer control of the bridge—and the right to collect tolls—to a private company in exchange for a large upfront payment. The company would then be responsible for maintaining and operating the bridge for a specified period of time—perhaps the traditional 99 years. Under the terms of the lease, the state and the operator would agree to hundreds of provisions outlining, for example, how much the operator could raise tolls, what kind of safety standards must be maintained, and who would pay in case the bridge were expanded.

If Paterson wants to lease out bridges or tunnels, he'll need to convince the state legislature to give the New York Department of Transportation the right to negotiate a contract with a private company. That legislation could be very broad—giving the state the right to lease out infrastructure more generally—or it could apply to specific projects. (For a model enabling bill presented on the U.S. Department of Transportation's Web site, click here.) Former Gov. George Pataki proposed similar legislation in 2005—the Tappan Zee Bridge was mentioned as a prime candidate for a "public-private partnership"—but his bill didn't go anywhere in Albany.

One high-profile model for leasing out a New York bridge is the Chicago Skyway, a 7.8-mile toll road that had been under public control since 1958. In 2004, the city of Chicago agreed to lease out the Skyway to a private Spanish-Australian consortium for 99 years at a total cost of $1.83 billion. The terms of the agreement—which can be found here (PDF)—specify maximum toll fees through 2017, after which point they will be determined by a formula that takes into account inflation and economic growth. The agreement also specifies how quickly potholes must be repaired (within 24 hours), how often the shoulder must be swept (three times a week), and when grass by the side of the road must be mowed (before the turf gets to be more than 6 inches tall). Similar deals have been signed in Indiana and Virginia. (For Slate columnist Daniel Gross' take on why these deals might not be such a good idea, click here.)

In theory, New York might also be able to sell its bridges outright, but such arrangements are very rare today. Through the 19^th century, it was much more common for governments to issue charters that gave companies the right to build and operate their own toll roads or bridges. (The Brooklyn Bridge itself was initially owned by the private New York Bridge Co., but the corporation got caught up in a political corruption scandal, and its charter was revoked during construction.) There are still a handful of privately owned bridges left in the United States, like the Dingmans Bridge between New Jersey and Pennsylvania, which was created under an 1834 charter that specified it wouldn't charge people traveling to funerals or to church—a rule the bridge still follows today.

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

Explainer thanks Maria Doulis of the Citizens Budget Commission, Karen Hedlund of Nossaman LLP, and Peter Samuel of TOLLROADSnews.

A prayer note that Barack Obama left in Jerusalem's Western Wall was removed last Thursday and published in an Israeli newspaper. Traditionally, visitors fold these notes and leave them wedged between the stones in the wall, where the prayers remain until their official collection and burial. But Obama's note was taken by a student at a Jewish seminary (after several others had searched for it) and passed along to reporters. The newspaper that published the note, Maariv, came under sharp criticism for exposing a private prayer—but did it break the law?

At least from a religious point of view. By publishing the note, the paper certainly went against Jewish law. Prayer notes left on the Western Wall (or Kotel, in Hebrew) can be considered God's property since they are intended for the deity. Thus the notes constitute a kind of hekdesh, or something dedicated to God, and under Jewish law, it's forbidden to take something dedicated to God and use it for other purposes—like selling newspapers. If the notes weren't God's property, they might be the property of the Western Wall Heritage Foundation, which administers the Kotel. In that case, removing them would be a violation of the Jewish law against theft.

Furthermore, the Talmud contains laws meant to protect people from unspecified damages caused by neighbors snooping or eavesdropping on their property. The 10^th-century rabbi Gershom ben Judah extended these laws to private correspondence, making it forbidden to open a letter without explicit permission from its owner. Since the well-known tradition of the Kotel provides for the confidential and anonymous disposal of the letters, it's reasonable to assume that Obama left his written prayer with the assumption that it would remain private. The publication of the note by Maariv could also be considered a behavior that reflects poorly on the Jewish people, known as a Chillul Hashem, since it violates a tradition adopted by Christian pilgrims to the wall (like Obama).

In Israel, however, religious law is only legally binding in cases of marriage or divorce. One Jerusalem lawyer has requested that the attorney general investigate Maariv for violating secular state laws protecting sacred sites and those guaranteeing personal privacy. Desecration of the Kotel is outlawed under the Protection of Holy Places Law of 1967. Israel's Basic Law on Human Dignity and Freedom contains a clause stipulating that "There shall be no violation of the confidentiality of the spoken utterances, writings or records of a person."

But Maariv could make the case that the note isn't part of the Western Wall itself, so the student who took it wasn't desecrating a holy place. The newspaper's lawyers might further argue that a public figure like Obama cannot have reasonably expected privacy at the wall, since he knew it was a public area, and that there was a chance his note would be read and disseminated.

(A spokesman for Maariv originally said that the Obama campaign submitted the note to the newspaper, in which case the senator would indeed have forfeited all legal protection to privacy. The newspaper has since recanted that claim.)*

Bonus Explainer: Has anyone ever grabbed a high-profile note from the Western Wall before? Yes. The last high-profile publication occurred in 1967, when Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan had his prayer note taken from the wall by a reporter covering the Six-Day War.

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

Explainer thanks David Kraemer of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Re'em Segev of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mark Washofsky of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, and Chaim Waxman of Rutgers University.

*Correction, Aug. 1, 2008: This article originally neglected to mention that Maariv had subsequently retracted its claim that the Obama campaign submitted the prayer note to the

newspaper. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

Jim David Adkisson, who confessed to opening fire in a Knoxville church last weekend, told police that he was motivated by a hatred for gays and liberals and, in particular, that "liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country." Authorities are now investigating the shooting as a hate crime. Do liberals get special protections under the law?

Not in Tennessee. The Volunteer State has two laws dealing with crimes motivated by hatred toward a particular group of people, but neither one specifies "political affiliation" or anything similar as a protected characteristic. The first law, Section 40-35-114 of the Tennessee code, allows a court to enhance the sentence for a crime committed because of the victim's "race, religion, color, disability, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, or gender." That could still apply to Adkisson, since he was targeting homosexuals as well as liberals, but any enhancement to his sentence might be superfluous: If convicted, he would likely face multiple life sentences or the death penalty. The second state law makes it a felony to intimidate someone for exercising his or her civil rights, and specifically mentions "race, color, ancestry, religion or national origin," leaving out both political and sexual orientation.

Just a handful of states designate political violence as a "hate crime." West Virginia makes it a felony to target a person because of "race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, political affiliation or sex." Oregon includes labor unions as well, protecting "race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, marital status, political affiliation or beliefs, membership or activity in or on behalf of a labor organization or against a labor organization, physical or mental disability, age, economic or social status or citizenship of the victim." The District of Columbia defines "bias-related crime" according to "race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, marital status, personal appearance, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, family responsibility, physical disability, matriculation, or political affiliation." Iowa also protects political affiliation, and the Louisiana code mentions "creed."(The federal government, like most states, does not include political affiliation in its definition of hate crimes.)

Actual prosecutions of hate crimes based on the victim's political affiliation are rare in the United States, according to legal experts. Annual crime compendiums from the individual states mentioned above occasionally categorize hate crimes as politically motivated, though such cases often involve another protected trait like race or religion. The Anti-Defamation League does not include "political affiliation" in its model legislation for anti-hate laws.

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

Explainer thanks Steven Freeman of the Anti-Defamation League, John W. Gill Jr. of the Knox County District Attorney's Office, Jack Levin of Northeastern University, Philip Morrison of the West Virginia Prosecuting Attorneys Institute, and Jonathan Turley of George Washington University.

Oil prices have dropped to about $125 a barrel this week after reaching a peak of $147.27 earlier this month. Meanwhile, gas prices are still hovering around the $4 mark, down just a few cents from an all-time record average of $4.11 two weeks ago. Why does it seem like gas prices go up faster than they come down?

Because they do. Analyses of gasoline economics show that when the price of oil rises, it takes up to four weeks for gas station prices to catch up, with most of the increase taking place within the first two weeks. But when oil prices sink, it takes up to eight weeks for the savings to be passed along to consumers. The phenomenon is known as "asymmetric price adjustment" (PDF) or, more informally, "rockets and feathers."

A busy gas retailer will take delivery on a daily basis, so there's some pressure to pass along price hikes without too much delay. The stations can't raise prices too much, though, because consumers tend to be extra-vigilant about shopping for bargains when oil prices are on the rise. When the newspapers start reporting upwardly mobile barrel prices, drivers tend to comparison shop down to the penny. This keeps gas prices from rocketing even further.

The asymmetry that economists cite comes into play as soon as oil prices start to deflate. Freed from the constant reminders about rising fuel costs, drivers become less invested in looking for a bargain—and retailers don't have to worry as much about the competition. As a result, station owners can keep drivers happy by knocking just a few cents off the "old" price.

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

Explainer thanks Severin Borenstein of the University of California-Berkeley, Matthew Lewis of Ohio State University, Mariano Tappata of the University of British Columbia, and Bart Wilson of Chapman University.

Barack Obama was vague about key trade issues during his recent trip to Europe, according to an analysis published in Friday's New York Times. The article referred specifically to the 11-year European ban on importing chlorinated chickens from the United States, a sanction that "is less about safety than about taste." Does chlorine really make our chickens taste funky?

It might. In 1999, researchers at the University of Georgia conducted a thorough taste comparison of chlorinated vs. nonchlorinated chicken. The researchers made light- and dark-meat patties out of both treated and nontreated meat, then baked and refrigerated them. An eight-member panel was trained in the use of a standard taste-intensity scale and then sampled reheated portions of the patties over the course of four days. The panelists tested for several distinct aromatics: "chickeny," "meaty," "rancid," and "warmed-over." On the initial day of testing—before the patties had been refrigerated—there was no significant difference in taste between any of the patties. But by the fourth day of testing, the chemically treated patties tasted significantly more reheated than the nontreated ones.

In any case, the chlorine won't make your bird smell or taste like a swimming pool. Since the mid-1990s, when nationwide E. coli and salmonella scares prompted the U.S. Department of Agriculture to establish strict microbiological regulations for the meat and poultry industry, the chemical has become a popular agent for disinfecting chickens. After birds are killed, defeathered, and eviscerated, the carcasses are chilled in massive bathtubs to prevent bacterial buildup. Chemical disinfectants—in about 80 percent of cases, that's chlorine—are added to the water to reduce cross-contamination and stem further bacterial growth. Chlorinated solutions may also be used in the evisceration process as well as during online reprocessing, during which traces of fecal matter are power-washed away.

The USDA has a strict cap on the amount of chlorine that can be used in these chiller baths: no more than 50 parts per million, or 50 ounces for every 7,800 gallons of water. As a point of comparison, the federal limit on chlorine used in drinking water is 4 ppm, and swimming pools usually contain 1 to 3 ppm. (That distinctive pool smell usually attributed to chlorine is actually produced by the combination of chlorine and perspiration, body oils, and urine.) In the disinfection process, the chlorine added to the chiller bath reacts with the meat in such a way that no free chlorine—that's the active, germ-killing stuff—remains. If the chlorine is used correctly, most people won't be able to detect any traces of it, particularly after cooking.

Chlorine is used in the treatment of other food products besides chicken, such as seafood and produce. There are other poultry disinfection options—radiation, for one—but for now, chlorine and other chemical agents remain the most cost-effective options, particularly since the perceived taste difference doesn't seem to be much of an issue for American consumers.

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

Explainer thanks Michael Batz of the Food Safety Research Consortium, Stephen Pretanik of the National Chicken Council, and Scott Russell of the University of Georgia. Thanks also to reader Landon Hall for asking the question.

At what age should children go to kindergarten? At what age should your child go to kindergarten? What if these questions appear to have different answers?

Increasingly, that seems to be the conclusion of upper-middle-class parents who redshirt their kids when it's time for kindergarten. The calculus goes like this: You look at your 4-year-old, especially if he's a boy, and consider that his summer or fall birthday (depending on the state and its birthday cutoff) means that he'll be younger than most of the other kids in his kindergarten class. So you decide to send him a year later. Now he's at the older end of his class. And you presume that the added maturity will give him an edge from grade to grade. The school may well support your decision. If it's a private school, they probably have a later birthday cutoff anyway. And if it's a public school, a principal or kindergarten teacher may suggest that waiting another year before kindergarten is in your kid's interest despite the official policy.

Individually speaking, no harm done, perhaps, though the presumed benefit is an open question. But collectively, delaying kindergarten is a bad idea—especially for poor kids, for whom it often means one more year of no school. Kindergarten is free. In most states, preschool and pre-K are not. Sending kids to school early is a major initiative of the childhood education movement. Putting off kindergarten takes us in the opposite direction, toward less access to school for younger kids.

Fine, but choosing to keep your little Hudson out of kindergarten doesn't affect the low-income kindergartners out there, does it? Well, it might. A new study suggests that the effects of kindergarten redshirting are more serious and long-term than one might have thought.

To begin with, 6-year-old kindergartners create an age span in the classroom that extends not only more than 12 months, but as much as 18 months. That's significant, developmentally, and it can make it harder for the younger ones to keep up—especially in this age of academic kindergarten, which can involve more sitting still and pencil work than play or naptime. In addition, the trend toward older kindergarten among well-off families may be fueling the trend toward state laws that delay kindergarten for everyone. As Elizabeth Weil noted in a great piece on redshirting in the New York Times Magazine last year, almost half the states have pushed back their birthday cutoffs since 1975, several of them fairly recently.

It's easy to see what the states are up to: They're worried about test scores, and they figure that older kids plus academic kindergarten will produce better ones. But this approach turns out to be extremely shortsighted, according to new research by David Deming of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and Susan Dynarski of the University of Michigan. The authors find that starting kindergarten late correlates with dropping out of high school and earning less afterward. "There is substantial evidence that entering school later reduces educational attainment (by increasing high school drop out rates) and depresses lifetime earnings (by delaying entry into the job market)," the authors write. Also, "recent stagnation in the high school and college completion rates of young people is partly explained by their later start in primary school."

This does not mean that redshirting upper-middle-class kids turns them into high-school drop-outs. Deming and Dynarski show that in 1968, 96 percent of 6-year-olds were enrolled in first grade or higher. In 2005, the rate was 84 percent. (Forget about skipping a grade—that went out at least a generation ago.) Redshirting explains two-thirds of the change, the authors find, and changes in state laws explain the rest. The kids who start later because of the legal changes—a group that is socio-economically broad—are probably fueling the second trend that Deming and Dynarski point to: fewer 17-year-olds in 12^th grade or in college, which translates to fewer years of school for more kids. Laws in the United States (as opposed to some European countries) mandate that kids stay in school, not for a requisite number of years but until they are 18. "Poor kids are disproportionately likely to drop out as soon as they can, when they turn 18," Dynarski explains. "If they start at 6 instead of 5, that's one year less of school."

The increasing availability of public pre-K becomes, then, not the additional year of school that early childhood educators and advocates wanted for families that can't afford private preschool. Instead, pre-K, when it's offered, just replaces what the first year of kindergarten used to be.

One more knock against delaying kindergarten: It doesn't produce better test scores over the long run. If this delay did help, we could expect to see a cheery rise in the scores of 17-year-olds along with the rise in the number of 6-year-old kindergartners. Instead, the basic level of proficiency of 17-year-olds on the National Assessment of Education Progress "has not risen at a rate that would suggest the majority of students are learning at a grade level higher than they were 20 years ago," Deming and Dynarski write.

All of this should make us leery of governmental policies that delay kindergarten. But back to your kid, because, well, he's yours. He's little. And immature. He could be the kid who won't sit on the rug for reading time or the one who will cling to his mother's leg. Won't he be better off if he waits?

Deming and Dynarski do their best to argue no. "There is no evidence of a lasting benefit to education or earnings from being older than one's classmates," they write. Another recent study, by Sandra Black of UCLA, crunched data from Norway and actually found a small boost in IQ for starting school early, but little effect on educational attainment—how well kids do in school in the long run. The place where redshirting is a proven advantage is the sports field. For example, 60 percent more Major League Baseball players are born in August than in July, and the birthday cutoff for youth baseball is July 31. But athletics, Dynarski points out, isn't academics.

No evidence of a lasting redshirting benefit, though, isn't the same as convincing evidence of no benefit. What a lot of parents really want to know is whether redshirting improves a kid's chances of grabbing the brass ring—admission to an elite college. Deming and Dynarski say they are "exploring whether age effects persist in this competitive arena." Those are the kind of research results that will interest parents who can afford to choose between another year of preschool and kindergarten. For the sake of parents who can't, it would be better if the perceived advantages of redshirting lose their shine.

It's almost certainly too late, after his coronation tour of the Middle East and Europe, to amend the story and to show precisely how and why the conventional wisdom about Barack Obama and the surge is wrong, but just out of curmudgeonly pedantry, let me attempt the task.

On Feb. 21, Sens. Obama and Hillary Clinton had one of their "debates" in Austin, Texas. The question of the surge—just then beginning to show serious and lasting results—came up. Sen. Clinton, of course, having apparently been decisively out-lefted by Obama at the beginning of the campaign, felt compelled to put the sourest face on all matters Iraqi. And then Campbell Brown of CNN asked the following question:

Sen. Obama, in the same vein, you were also opposed to the surge from the beginning. Were you wrong?

At that point, sitting at home, I suddenly realized what Obama ought to do if he wanted to show that he was capable of thinking on his feet and stealing a march on his rivals. He should praise the surge without withdrawing from his opposition to the war. And so he did, in the following words:

Well, I think it is indisputable that we've seen violence reduced in Iraq. And that's a credit to our brave men and women in uniform. In fact, you know, the First Cavalry, out of Fort Hood, played an enormous role in pushing back al-Qaida out of Baghdad. [APPLAUSE] And, you know, we honor their service. But this is a tactical victory imposed upon a huge strategic blunder. [LAUGHTER] And I think that when we're having a debate with John McCain, it is going to be much easier for the candidate who was opposed to the concept of invading Iraq in the first place to have a debate about the wisdom of that decision [APPLAUSE] than having to argue about the tactics subsequent to the decision. [LAUGHTER]

Not bad for a performance in the liberal-skewed primaries and (with its rather obvious nod to the local heroes of Fort Hood) not entirely unpremeditated, either. I felt almost sure that this—"Obama Has Kind Words for Surge"—would be the headline next day. Instead, there was no mention of it to speak of, and most people with whom I later talked seemed not to have noticed the moment at all. In some way, the notion that Obama was beating Sen. Clinton mainly because he was more anti-war than she was the story, the whole story, and nothing but the story; and no statement that was in any way incompatible with it could be considered newsworthy. I took this up with the late Tim Russert, who shrugged a bit and added that the line of the evening—"Change you can Xerox," a vulgar taunt about Obama's alleged plagiarism from Sen. Clinton via Sidney Blumenthal—had swiftly become the agreed headline among those who decide these things. Really, there are times one is ashamed to be in the profession.

However, it isn't just the famous "liberal bias" that explains all this groupthink and on-the-spot editing. The right wing had no interest in highlighting Obama's nuanced position in Austin, either, because there was (and is) a conservative interest in painting Obama as a heedless and irresponsible pacifist, with absolutely no experience of crashing an expensive aircraft on the territory of a country on which the United States had never declared war.

In fact, the worst you can say of Obama's position on Iraq (where we also didn't declare war but where we did have a long series of U.N. resolutions putting the Saddam Hussein regime outside international law) is that he was a member of that quite large and undistinguished group that constituted the president's fair-weather wartime friends. Shortly after Baghdad had fallen at a then-cost of perhaps 100 U.S. fatalities, he said publicly that there was no serious difference between the Bush position and his own. It was only by retro-engineering his politics, and pointing to a speech he had made in Chicago very much earlier in the Iraq debate, that he was able to create the idea that he had been both braver and more prescient than his rivals for the nomination.

According to your taste, then, this succession of local and national and now international shifts and adaptations makes Obama either a very ordinary politician or a highly extraordinary one. The timing of events in Iraq and Afghanistan seems to make him an astonishingly fortunate nominee. And fortunate, too, it must be said, in his opponent. Sen. John McCain could have said gravely that only the surge made the talk of American withdrawal—whether it came from Nouri al-Maliki or Obama—possible in the first place. He could have taken Obama's words from last February, about the 1^st Cavalry vanquishing al-Qaida, and used them wryly and dryly to congratulate the younger man on being willing to learn. Instead, he peppered everything but the target with the inaccurate charge that Obama had always been anti-war and anti-surge. Obama may indeed have been serially for them after he was against them, but that's different from (and better than) the other way around.

The cliché for the Obama phenomenon is jujitsu, where the strength of your opponent is precisely what you use against him. McCain had one particular strength when this campaign began: his fortitude in respect of Iraq, which entailed (as some people forget) his willingness to criticize the commander in chief in time of war. Now he is in real danger of confusing the two things and trying to make criticism or disagreement appear to be suspect in themselves. If last week hasn't taught him that this is a doomed tactic—and strategy—then he is unteachable.

There's never been a better time to be a half-assed vegetarian. Five years ago, the American Dialect Society honored the word flexitarian for its utility in describing a growing demographic—the "vegetarian who occasionally eats meat." Now there's evidence that going flexi is good for the environment and good for your health. A study released last October found that a plant-based diet, augmented with a small amount of dairy and meat, maximizes land-use efficiency. In January, Michael Pollan distilled the entire field of nutritional science into three rules for a healthy diet: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." According to a poll released last week, Americans seem to be listening: Thirteen percent of U.S. adults are "semivegetarian," meaning they eat meat with fewer than half of all their meals. In comparison, true vegetarians—those who never, ever consume animal flesh—compose just 1 percent.

The flexitarian ethic is beginning to creep into the most ardent sector of the meat-free population: the vegans. In recent years, some in the community have begun to loosen up the strict definitions and bright-line rules that once defined the movement. You'll never find a self-respecting vegan downing a glass of milk or munching on a slice of buttered toast. But the modern adherent may be a little more accommodating when it comes to the dairy of the insect world: He may have relaxed his principles enough to enjoy a spoonful of honey.

There is no more contentious question in the world of veganism than the one posed by honey. A fierce doctrinal debate over its status has raged for decades; it turns up on almost every community FAQ and remains so ubiquitous and unresolved that radio host Rachel Maddow proposed to ask celebrity vegan Dennis Kucinich about it during last year's CNN/YouTube presidential debate. Does honey qualify as a forbidden animal product since it's made by bees? Or is it OK since the bees don't seem too put out by making it?

Old-guard vegans have no patience for this sort of equivocation: Animal products are off-limits, period. Indeed, the first Vegan Society was created in 1944 to counter the detestable, flexitarian tendencies of early animal rights activists. Founder Donald Watson called their namby-pamby lacto-vegetarianism "a halfway house between flesh-eating and a truly human, civilized diet" and implored his followers to join him in making the "full journey." That journey, as the society has since defined it, takes no uncertain position on honey—it's summarily banned, along with bee pollen, bee venom, propolis, and royal jelly.

The hard-liners argue that beekeeping, like dairy farming, is cruel and exploitative. The bees are forced to construct their honeycombs in racks of removable trays, according to a design that standardizes the size of each hexagonal chamber. (Some say the more chaotic combs found in the wild are less vulnerable to parasitic mites.) Queens are imprisoned in certain parts of the hive, while colonies are split to increase production and sprinkled with prophylactic antibiotics. In the meantime, keepers control the animals by pumping their hives full of smoke, which masks the scent of their alarm pheromones and keeps them from defending their honey stores. And some say the bees aren't making the honey for us, so its removal from the hive could be construed as a form of theft. (Last year's animated feature, Bee Movie, imagined the legal implications of this idea.)

So, any vegan who eats honey but avoids milk is making the tacit assumption that the pain experienced by a bee counts for something less than the pain experienced by a cow. It's exactly the sort of compromise that so appalled Watson and the early vegans. Once you've allowed yourself to equivocate on animal suffering, how do you handle all the other borderline cases of insect exploitation? What about silkworms and cochineal bugs? Come to think of it, does a bee feel any less pain than a scallop or an oyster? Why can't we eat them, too?

(For the record, pearls aren't vegan. Oysters are killed during the harvest and often suffer the indignity of having a hole cut into their gonads.)

The flexitarians counter that if you follow the hard-line argument to its logical extreme, you end up with a diet so restrictive it borders on the absurd. After all, you can't worry over the ethics of honey production without worrying over the entire beekeeping industry. Honey accounts for only a small percentage of the total honeybee economy in the United States; most comes from the use of rental hives to pollinate fruit and vegetable crops. According to food journalist Rowan Jacobson, whose book Fruitless Fall comes out this September, commercial bees are used in the production of about 100 foods, including almonds, avocados, broccoli, canola, cherries, cucumbers, lettuce, peaches, pears, plums, sunflowers, and tomatoes. Even the clover and alfalfa crops we feed to dairy cows are sometimes pollinated by bees.

Life for these rental bees may be far worse than it is for the ones producing honey. The industrial pollinators face all the same hardships, plus a few more: They spend much of their lives sealed in the back of 18-wheelers, subsisting on a diet of high-fructose corn syrup as they're shipped back and forth across the country. Husbandry and breeding practices have reduced their genetic diversity and left them particularly susceptible to large-scale die-offs.

Even the vegans who abstain from honey end up dining on the sweat and hemolymph of exploited bees. There isn't really an alternative: We can't replace our insects of burden with machines, as we've done for the mules that once pulled our tractor rakes. You might try to do right by seeking out wind-pollinated grains and fruits tended by wild insects. But what about the bugs that inevitably perish in the course of any large-scale agriculture? Even the organic farmers are culpable: They may not spray synthetic pesticides, but they do make use of natural chemicals and predators to kill off unwanted animals.

In the face of this insectile carnage, vegans fall back on a common-sense dictum that animal suffering should be "reasonably avoided" as opposed to "avoided at any cost." By this logic, it's not a sin to treat a termite infestation that's imperiling your house, nor should you worry over the gnats that get squashed on your windshield whenever you drive to the farmer's market. But that doctrine won't absolve us for eating honey. In the first place, honey is quite easy to avoid—especially compared with everything else in the Vegan Society's codex of forbidden foodstuffs. (A scrupulous eater must also attend to calcium mesoinositol, sodium stearoyl-2-lactylate, disodium guanylate, and dozens more unpronounceable, animal-derived chemicals.) Honey doesn't fill any nutritional gap, nor is it the only acceptable vegan sweetener.

From a practical perspective, all this back-and-forth doesn't help anyone (or any animal). You either eat honey or you don't; to debate the question in public only makes the vegan movement seem silly and dogmatic. According to Matthew Ball, the executive director of Vegan Outreach, the desire for clear dietary rules and restrictions makes little difference in the grand calculus of animal suffering: "What vegans do personally matters little," he says. "If we present veganism as being about the exploitation of honeybees, it makes it easier to ignore the real, noncontroversial suffering" of everything else. Ball doesn't eat honey himself, but he'd sooner recruit five vegans who remain ambivalent about insect rights than one zealot who follows every last Vegan Society rule.

That may be the most important lesson to come out of this debate: You'll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

"This is the hour of Europe."

Way back in 1991, when an otherwise forgettable foreign minister of Luxembourg infamously pronounced that sentence, it seemed to portend great things. It meant that in the post-Cold War world, Europeans, not Americans, would resolve the conflicts that were about to become the Bosnian war—and maybe a lot of other things, too. He was wrong. Those Balkan conflicts were eventually "resolved," up to a point, not by Europe but by the United States and NATO. European influence in Washington dwindled—and then dwindled further during the Bush administration, which mostly treated the very idea of Europe as a kind of pointless distraction.

Fast-forward to 2008: The Bush administration is discredited, leaving a wide, gaping hole where America's Europe policy (or absence of policy) used to be. Once again, an opportunity looms: As a friend in Washington puts it, "three Mongolians and a camel" could have an impact on whichever president takes over in January, so desperate will any new administration be for new ideas, for new policies, for "change."

In a very real sense, 2009, not 1992, truly will be the "hour of Europe." By that, I mean that if the chancellor of Germany, the prime minister of Great Britain, and the president of France—backed by their counterparts in southern Europe, Eastern Europe, and Scandinavia—were to walk into the White House on Jan. 21 and propose serious, realistic, new contributions to, say, the war in Afghanistan, the reconstruction of Iraq, the nuclear negotiations with Iran, and perhaps even climate change, the White House would listen.

Or perhaps I should put it more strongly: Not only would the White House listen, the new administration, Democratic or Republican, would immediately offer the Europeans the "leadership" and "partnership" they so often say they desire. Between the sinking housing market and the soaring price of food, the high price of fuel and low growth, the new president is going to have so much on his plate that a group of Europeans who appear from across the Atlantic announcing, say, a plan to fix southern Afghanistan would be welcomed with open arms. In fact, I'll wager I could find a dozen future members of either administration who would roll out the red carpet and greet them like envoys of a fellow superpower if the Europeans so desired.

Yet at the same time, I'd also wager that I could not find a dozen current members of any European government who have even thought about coming up with any ideas at all. This is the hour of Europe—but do the Europeans even know it?

Judging by the press and the popular reaction to Barack Obama's visit there last week, they don't. Just about every account of the speech noted the dearth of applause for its single line encouraging European participation in world events. "America cannot do this alone. … The Afghan people need our troops and your troops" was not a crowd pleaser. Neither was "We can join in a new and global partnership" to fight terrorism. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, meanwhile, spoke tartly of "the limits" of Germany's contributions to the Afghan cause, making it clear she didn't favor such upbeat talk, while another senior German official worried that his colleagues "will have trouble meeting [Obama's] demand to assume more common responsibility."

In a narrow sense, their reserve is understandable: Nobody is going to break new ground with a visiting presidential candidate. Still, the public reactions to Obama struck me as significant because they match private opinions I've been hearing for months. "Nobody has thought about this yet," said one European diplomat when I asked what plans might be presented to the new administration. The truth, revealed by the brief Obama visit, is that few European statesmen look on changes in Washington as an opportunity to propose something new. Most simply feel relief that Bush will be gone, coupled with anxiety about what is to come next.

And as the election gets closer, the anxiety will grow. In a strange sense, Bush's catastrophic diplomacy was a gift to Europe's politicians. "Bush allowed them to explain away radical Islam as an understandable, even legitimate, response to the hypocrisies and iniquities of American policy," wrote one British columnist this week. Bush also allowed them to blame American "unilateralism" for their own lack of initiative, to use bad American diplomacy as an excuse for doing nothing.

No wonder the adulation of Obama was tempered by a note of unease. What with one presidential candidate talking of "global partnership" and the other reminding Americans that "the United States did not single-handedly win the Cold War," the potential for the renewal of the trans-Atlantic alliance is terrifyingly real—and the election isn't even over.

In recent years, former CIA analyst and Clinton-administration National Security Council staffer Kenneth Pollack has found himself so close to Bush administration Middle East policies—like regime change in Iraq and Gen. David Petraeus' surge strategy—that it's hardly surprising he'd now like to put some distance between himself and an unpopular White House. Thus, in A Path out of the Desert: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East, Pollack adopts a countermeasure perfected over the last several years by Arab liberals concerned that any association with Bush is likely to lose them respect, if not their freedom or their lives: trash the White House pre-emptively and then restate the general principles of its Middle East policy.

Pollack's grand strategy—"an overarching conception of what it is that we seek to achieve, how we intend to do it and how to employ the full panoply of foreign policy tools"—is reform, just as it is for the Bush administration. And yet unlike the White House, Pollack clearly spells out his ideas about the Middle East and Washington's role there in securing U.S. interests. He identifies America's chief vital interest in the region without embarrassment: Persian Gulf energy resources. Until the United States develops an adequate substitute for oil, we are stuck in the Middle East protecting the free flow of affordable fossil fuel that not only fills American SUVs but also ensures the stability of global markets. Pollack makes a good case that were it not for our presence in the Gulf, we would not be such a valuable target on the jihadist hit list, and were we to leave tomorrow, the threat to the United States from Arab terror outfits would largely subside.

Since we are not leaving, we need to repair the region with a broad program of economic and political reform, different from the Bush administration's quick-fix obsession with elections that merely lent democratic legitimacy to Islamist groups in the Palestinian Authority, Iraq, Lebanon, and Egypt. Pollack argues that a process of real liberal reform will take decades, if not longer.

Here he is surely right. The problem, however, is that the U.S. policymaking body whose institutional memory and resources equip it to deal with long-term solutions is not interested in change, whether it be fast or slow. The State Department prizes stability, which is partly attributable to the temperament of people who are likely to seek employment in Washington bureaucracies. But State's caution and fear of unintended consequences also issue from an accurate reckoning of its own priorities and capabilities.

Consider Egypt. For more than two decades, Washington has provided Cairo with $2 billion annually, a deal that binds the Egypt-Israel peace treaty, guarantees our carefree passage through the Suez Canal, and buys a certain amount of cooperation on military and security issues. President Hosni Mubarak's regime is not the easiest friend we have in the world, but for a bureaucracy with a lot on its hands already, our bargain with Egypt gives us one less thing to worry about. Should we pressure Cairo to make reforms? Sure, and we do. However, as Pollack notes, our capacity is limited. Even if there were 50 people at Foggy Bottom tasked specifically to the Egypt desk—instead of the two there are—we are still up against a regime whose sole strategic goal is to ensure its own survival at any cost. Multiply that by 22, the number of Arab League member states, and it is clear that we just can't afford the luxury of employing thousands to push a stone up a hill only to see it roll most of the way back down again.

In Pollack's view, it is the regimes themselves that are largely responsible for the state of the region. "The principal problem of the Middle East," he writes, "is the failure of the contemporary state system." Again, this is a diagnosis widely shared on both sides of the aisle in Washington. Immediately after 9/11, the charges against Arab regimes were direct: Through violence, repression, and incitement in the media, mosques, and educational system, Arab rulers had turned their people into a fanatical anti-American and anti-Semitic horde. In time, the rhetoric mellowed some, but still, the chief goal of the current administration's democratization program was to make Arab countries responsible for the welfare and actions of their citizens within and beyond their borders—i.e., to stop dispatching jihadists to kill and die in foreign lands. Indeed, trying to make Arab regimes act like real states is the only good reason U.S. policymakers continue to keep a Palestinian-Israeli peace process on life support. We want a Palestinian state because our bureaucracy deals effectively with states and less well with armed NGOs.

But here's another way to look at it: The Palestinian Authority is neither a nascent state nor a failed state project. Rather, it is a clan system of frequently competing interests that no Palestinian leader in his right mind would try to turn into a state, regardless of how much financial incentive the international community makes available. The problem is not that the Arab state system is breaking down, but rather that it never existed. And the proof is unfolding before us in, among other places, Hamas' Islamic Republic of Gaza, the autonomous Hezbollah regions of Hezbollah Lebanon, and perhaps even someday soon in Iraq, as the Arabs redraw the borders of the region to their own taste with little concern for the international state system.

So, let's step back for a second: Given that Arab states do not act like real states, why try to democratize them and push for a reform agenda like Pollack's that aims to promote freedom of speech and "protections for minorities so that the state or the majority cannot oppress unpopular groups"? Because the Arabs want democracy, writes Pollack—albeit without some of the elements that the West tends to associate with the social values of Western democracies, "like gender roles, abortion, homosexuality," and other issues like "sex on television and anti-religious speech and behavior." Well, which is it: Arab reform or respect for Arab cultural norms? It is one thing to say that Arab democracy will embody the traditions and morals of Arab society. But a polity that continues to limit freedom of expression and persecute Middle Eastern minorities like, say, homosexuals, is a very poor version of "representative government," and it is not clear why Americans have any stake in funding and fighting for it.

A Path out of the Desert reflects not only the confusion of Washington officials but also the idées fixes of a great many Americans. For instance, Pollack seems to be channeling the junior senator from Illinois when he writes, "The fear and frustration that so many Arabs feel comes from the cultural clash between the forces of modernity and their own traditions. … Historically, this clash has often prompted people to retreat into religiosity."

Muslims in the Muslim Middle East are religious because they believe in God, the perfection of his final revelation in the Quran, and his prophet Muhammad. And Islamism, which Pollack is at pains to distinguish from Islam, is a vital force in the region precisely because it represents the progressive and rational current of Islam that sought to reconcile a society marked by fatalism and backwardness with "the forces of modernity" embodied by the West.

That trend, starting with 19^th-century Muslim reformers Jamal al-din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abdu, gave rise to the Islamist movement, from the Muslim Brotherhood all the way down to the most notoriously violent organizations in the region like Hamas and al-Qaida. For Pollack, as for many U.S. policymakers, a key question is whether Islamists should be allowed to participate in the democratic process and, if so, which ones should qualify. However, the Islamists, both moderate and extreme, are already a part of Middle Eastern political culture, whether we like it or not. The problem is with our intellectual framework: By focusing on how to jump-start the "democratic process," we have failed to recognize what the region really looks like.

Besides Lebanon and now Iraq, there is no mechanism for power-sharing or transmitting authority from one ruler to the next, except through inheritance or coup d'état. Arab politics is a fight to become what Osama Bin Laden called the "strong horse," which means if you want power, you have to take it. Islamist violence is not attributable to a lack of economic opportunities, as Pollack contends, or to any other "root cause." The Islamists are simply playing by regional rules, where terror and repression are two sides of the same bloody coin—insurgents and oppositionists wage terror campaigns to win power, and the regimes use torture and collective punishment in order to repress their domestic competition.

That is to say, Middle Eastern regimes are not the source of the region's problems. As the decapitation of Saddam Hussein's regime showed, the psychopaths, princes, and presidents for life who rule Arab states are merely the hothouse flowers of a poisonous political culture. "The States are as the men are," Plato writes in The Republic. "They grow out of human characters." The failure to respect this basic and ancient political principle marks by far the greatest intellectual error of neocon Middle East policy and thus of the entire liberal intelligentsia from which it arises. As we saw with Hezbollah's orgiastic celebrations for released child-murderer Samir Kuntar, the problem with the Arab world is Arab societies themselves.

The Iraq war should have cured us of any illusions about the Middle East, but the administration's incoherence let us put many of the region's problems on Bush's tab. American opinion will be easier on the next president and harder on the Middle East itself as we come to distinguish between our problems, mistakes, and limitations and those of the Arabs. The paradox is that one of our sharpest limitations is that we believe democracy is a universal cure-all, good for all people at all times, when that is almost certainly not the case. However, as Pollack argues, democratic reform seems to be the only thing that will save the Middle East from consuming itself in violence, for the region can get worse than it is now, much worse.

Listen to the Gabfest for Aug 1 by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:







You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.

Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, nad David Plotz talk politics. This week, John McCain accuses Barack Obama of playing the race card, Obama's law school exams are under review, and the Justice Department faces charges of illegal hiring.

Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned in the show:

McCain accused Obama of "playing the race card."

David says McCain can win the presidency only by scaring people into voting for him.

This week, the New York Times put class materials from Obama's time as a law professor at the University of Chicago Law School on its Web site.

The inspector general of the U.S. Justice Department testified on Capitol Hill this week, telling a Senate committee that Bush administration appointees politicized the hiring process at the DoJ.

John chatters about a new book that explains all the policy decisions the next president will face.

David talks about a new study that shows it might one day be possible to take a pill to increase your athletic endurance without exercise.

Emily discusses LifeStyles Condoms' offer to teenage singing star Miley Cyrus to become the company's spokeswoman in return for $1 million.

David and Emily speculate about how much money it would take for Cyrus to promote condom use, comparing it with the hypothetical posed in the overrated 1993 movie, Indecent Proposal, starring Woody Harrelson, Demi Moore, and Robert Redford.

The e-mail address for the Political Gabfest is gabfest@slate.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)

Posted by Dale Willman on Aug. 1 at 12:23 p.m.

July 25, 2008

Listen to the Gabfest for July 25 by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:

You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.

Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz talk politics. This week, it's Barack to Iraq, the state of the presidential race, and John Edwards vs. the National Enquirer.

Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned in the show:

Sen. Barack Obama completes a trip to the Middle East, including Iraq. It was considered a major success. However, he has not done so well in talking about his Senate vote against supporting President Bush's surge strategy. When asked if he would still vote the same way today, he said that he would.

John reminds critics of Obama's trip to Iraq that they should also remember John McCain's visit there in 2007. McCain said Iraq was safe enough that "there are neighborhoods where you and I could walk through those neighborhoods, today." It was later revealed that during his stroll, McCain wore body armor and was accompanied by U.S. soldiers and that several attack helicopters were flying overhead.

McCain, meanwhile, continues to criticize Obama's trip as well as his position that the troop surge was not the only reason for recent success in Iraq, saying it is "pretty obvious he [Obama] took this position in order to secure the nomination of his party by taking the far-left position and being dictated to by MoveOn.org and others.''

There are conflicting public-opinion polls. According to a poll from Quinnipiac University, McCain is gaining ground in three key states—Colorado, Michigan, and Minnesota—despite the positive coverage of Obama's Middle East swing. Yet polling by the Gallup organization finds Obama's lead growing in a number of key swing states.

The Gabfest goes nuclear over a story in the National Enquirer alleging that John Edwards recently met with a mistress in a Los Angeles hotel.

John chatters about political columnist Robert Novak, who struck a pedestrian while driving on a Washington, D.C., street earlier this week. Novak drove on after hitting the 66-year-old man, only to be stopped a short time later by a witness to the accident. Novak said he was listening to National Public Radio at the time.

Emily talks about a release on Thursday of three more documents pertaining to the Bush administration and torture. The documents were obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act.

David is frustrated with a series of books he is reading with his daughter. Called Percy Jackson and the Olympians, they are suspiciously similar to the Harry Potter series.

The e-mail address for the Political Gabfest is gabfest@slate.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)

Posted by Dale Willman on July 25 at 1:25 p.m.

July 18, 2008

Listen to the Gabfest for July 18 by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:

You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.

Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz talk politics. This week, the economy takes another hit or two, Barack Obama tries to improve his foreign-policy credentials, and the flip-flop stages a comeback.

Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned in the show:

The economic outlook for the United States is rough. The fallout surrounding Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac continues as Congress attempts to ride to the rescue. Also, a California bank failed this week, and inflation was up for the month of June.

David discusses John McCain's former economic adviser Phil Gramm and what he had to say about whiny Americans.

Despite all that is happening with the economy, the two presumptive nominees seem to have relatively little to say about the country's problems.

A new Washington Post/ABC News poll has some interesting findings.

Obama's plan to withdraw troops from Iraq continues to evolve.

Is good news from Iraq better for McCain or Obama?

The trio discusses whether it would help the economy to lift tariffs on ethanol from Brazil.

David asks whatever happened to the plan for a series of town-hall debates between Obama and McCain.

The e-mail address for the Political Gabfest is gabfest@slate.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)

Posted by Dale Willman on July 18 at 11:21 a.m.

July 11, 2008

Listen to the Gabfest for July 11 by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:







You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.

Emily Bazelon, David Plotz, and Lynette Clemetson, the managing editor of The Root who is substituting for the vacationing John Dickerson, talk politics. This week: Barack Obama and Jesse Jackson clash, Iran launches some missiles, and the Gabfest crew discusses the way the cookie crumbles.

Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned in the show:

Jesse Jackson threatens Barack Obama's manhood in a comment picked up by a live microphone. There are a number of possible explanations for Jackson's gaffe, for which he has since apologized.

The accusations of Obama as flip-flopper continue to gain traction this week, leading to an interesting analysis on Slate.

Obama appeared on Access Hollywood this week with his wife and two daughters. It's the first time the entire Obama family has taken part in an interview.

Iran launched missiles, drawing two very different responses from the presumptive nominees. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice issued a strong statement.

Emily complains about the hedonism of a recent New York Times article about the search for the perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe.

Emily chatters about a study by researchers at Brigham Young University that finds sitting down to a family dinner not only helps keep kids healthier, it's better for working parents as well.

Lynette says the Asian tiger mosquito has become a major menace for barbecues in the Washington, D.C., area.

David says McCain is missing a lot of votes. He has missed more than any other member of the Senate, 374 so far in the 110^th Congress. Obama has missed 263 votes.

The e-mail address for the Political Gabfest is gabfest@slate.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)

Posted by Dale Willman on July 11 at 12:20 p.m.

Yes, it's charming and thought-provoking and amazing. But for those of us in the green world, the really striking thing about the animated film Wall-E is that a plant is the object of desire, the grail, the Ark of the Covenant. This happens so rarely in movies. (One exception is an obscure but admirable satire, released a couple of years ago, called Idiocracy, in which the hero teaches really dumb people on an apocalyptic future Earth that plants need to be properly tended so that people will have food to eat and air to breathe.)

The precious little green thing on which the Wall-E plot turns consists of just a few leaves clasping a viney stem.

To get a botanist's perspective on the plant as plot-driver, I took Gerry Moore, director of the Department of Science at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, to the movie. Moore, who monitors the rise and fall of plants within a 50-mile radius of New York City, was looking quite collegiate in shorts and a Phillies baseball cap that belied his weighty résumé. He was modest and flexible enough to say, "I hate to impose scientific rigor on a movie."

Maybe the exercise he got pushed into (I paid for his ticket) is a bit on the literal side, but it is interesting to see where he found the movie departing from credibility.

The movie's setup: Apparently nothing is left on Earth but ruins, piles of trash, and Wall-E, a solar-powered, trash-compacting robot. It seems that the only living thing around is a single cockroach. Earth's human population has fled to a gigantic space colony. A scout from the space ship, the feminine and graceful robot Eve, meets Wall-E and returns to the ship with a plant he's discovered. The small green plant registers with some back at the colony as a foreign contaminant, dangerous to the status quo, but with others—including the good-guy captain—as a sign that life on Earth might be possible again.

The biggest problem for Moore is that only one plant was found. "It's a stretch to believe that the Earth could be restored to life-sustaining status because of the presence of a single live plant," he said over dinner after the movie.

Behind the closing credits, we saw plant life unfurling quickly on Earth—sunflowers, fruitful vines, trees.

"They're down to one plant—a seedling of some kind of vine," observed Moore. "There's no way a single individual plant could give rise to wheat, grapes, and re-vegetate the earth. Not in human time, anyway. In evolutionary time, of course, that's what really happened."

Still, Moore was thrilled to have green things seen as important. "The story line puts plants front and center. It wasn't the roach they were looking for."

One of the merits of the movie is that it avoids being obviously didactic; no one ever uses the word photosynthesis. But, implicitly, the movie stresses the life-giving talent plants have—that is, to make an organic product from strictly inorganic ingredients.

Provide a little carbon dioxide, water, and sunlight, combine those with a molecule of the green pigment chlorophyll, and the plant can feed itself and, happily for us, release oxygen as a byproduct.

We know there is sunlight on the degraded Earth; Wall-E himself is solar-powered. He finds the precious plant in a closed refrigerator, which is worrisome from a scientific point of view. Green plants can't live long without sunlight. But, even without light, a plant can sprout and live for a while by using the reserves in its seed coat.

The plant, rooted in some soil in a boot, gets tossed around like a football in the chase scene on the space ship. I wondered how realistic that was, considering the care we gardeners take not to jostle our petunias as we drive them home in the back of the Forester. "That, I can live with," said Moore, "Think what you see plants go through in vacant lots."

The space colony's captain says, "You made it somehow, little guy. You didn't give up." Because there was no green growing thing in evidence on the ship, Moore observed, "A plant is not only front and center, but it's assumed that human beings passed the concept of a plant down through many generations."

"Life is sustainable now," says the captain to his passengers. "Look at this plant. It's green and growing."

The movie's last utterance from a human being is the captain speaking to toddlers as they disembark on Earth and plant the little vine: "This is called farming."

We get a glimpse of a hill with other plants, but they're the same kind as the little vine. It's going to take a long time, especially with no pollinating insects, to spread out from monoculture.

It's good the movie ends there, with the line about farming, Moore said. I thought so, too, because the next line might be: "Who here knows how to find clean water or build a latrine?"

We agreed on what we believed to be the two major lessons from the movie. First, honor your trash collectors. Not since pitcher John Franco regularly wore a New York Department of Sanitation T-shirt under his Mets uniform as a tribute to his father has a garbage man been as honored. Wall-E is a hero. This, too, happens rarely in movies.

Second, treasure the wide variety of plants we have and, for god's sake, save seeds. The 52 acres of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden are home to 10,000 species of plant from all over the world. (The whole state of New York has only about 4,000 naturally occurring species.) The Millennium Seed Bank based at Kew Gardens is well underway, so we're already far more provident than the human beings depicted in the movie.

Incidentally, and maybe this is a hopeful note, the trash piles alone wouldn't have wiped out almost all plant life. Moore and I assumed there must have been some additional catastrophe—to kill plants you need long-lasting drought or dramatic temperature change, which the optimists among us think can still be avoided.

The war on fat has just crossed a major red line. The Los Angeles City Council has passed an ordinance prohibiting construction of new fast-food restaurants in a 32-square-mile area inhabited by 500,000 low-income people.

We're not talking anymore about preaching diet and exercise, disclosing calorie counts, or restricting sodas in schools. We're talking about banning the sale of food to adults. Treating French fries like cigarettes or liquor. I didn't think this would happen in the United States anytime soon. I was wrong.

The mayor hasn't yet signed the ordinance, but he probably will, since it passed unanimously. It doesn't affect existing restaurants, and initially it will impose only a one-year moratorium. But that period is likely to be extended to two years or more, and the prohibition's sponsor hopes to make it permanent.

What we're looking at, essentially, is the beginning of food zoning. Liquor and cigarette sales are already zoned. You can't sell booze here; you can't sell smokes there. Each city makes its own rules, block by block. Proponents of the L.A. ordinance see it as the logical next step. Fast food is bad for you, just as drinking or smoking is, they argue. Community Coalition, a local activist group, promotes the moratorium as a sequel to its crackdown on alcohol merchants, scummy motels, and other "nuisance businesses." An L.A. councilman says the ordinance makes sense because it's "not too different to how we regulate liquor stores."

A few other cities and towns have zoned restaurants for economic, environmental, or aesthetic reasons. But L.A. appears to be the first to do it for health reasons. Last year, a public-interest law group at Johns Hopkins outlined the rationale: "Given the significance of the obesity epidemic in the United States and the scientific evidence and legal basis supporting the zoning of fast food outlets, municipalities have an effective, yet untried, tool to address obesity in their communities."

I assumed this idea would go nowhere because we Americans don't like government restrictions on what we eat. You can nag us. You can regulate what our kids eat in school. But you'll get our burgers when you pry them from our cold, dead hands.

How did the L.A. City Council get around this resistance? By spinning the moratorium as a way to create more food choices, not fewer. And by depicting poor people, like children, as less capable of free choice.

Start with the press release (PDF) issued a week ago by the moratorium's sponsor, Councilwoman Jan Perry. Its subhead says the ordinance will "help spur the development of diverse food choices." In the second paragraph, Perry declares,

This ordinance is in no way attempting to tell people what to eat but rather responding to the need to attract sit-down restaurants, full service grocery stores, and healthy food alternatives. Ultimately, this ordinance is about providing choices—something that is currently lacking in our community.

How does blocking new fast-food outlets provide more choices? It helps local officials "attract grocery stores and restaurants to the area, by preserving existing land for these uses," says the release. And why does the moratorium apply only to the poor part of town, around South-Central L.A.? A fellow council member explains: "The over concentration of fast food restaurants in conjunction with the lack of grocery stores places these communities in a poor situation to locate a variety of food and fresh food." Supporters of the moratorium call this state of affairs "food apartheid."

It's an odd slogan. As the encyclopedia Africana notes, apartheid was a racially discriminatory policy "enforced by white minority governments." Opening a McDonald's in South-Central L.A. is not government-enforced racial discrimination. But telling McDonald's it can open franchises only in the white part of town—what do you call that?

And what about the argument that people in South-Central need the government to block unhealthy food options because they're "in a poor situation" to locate better choices? This is the argument normally made for restricting children's food options at school—that they're more dependent and vulnerable than the rest of us. How do you feel about treating poor people like children?

It's true that food options in low-income neighborhoods are, on average, worse than the options in wealthier neighborhoods. But restricting options in low-income neighborhoods is a disturbingly paternalistic way of solving the problem. And the helplessness attributed to poor people is exaggerated. "You try to get a salad within 20 minutes of our location; it's virtually impossible," says the Community Coalition's executive director. Really? The coalition's headquarters is at 8101 S. Vermont Ave. A quick Google search shows, among other outlets, a Jack-in-the-Box six blocks away. They have salads. Not the world's greatest salads, but not as bad as a government that tells you whose salad you can eat.

Already, the majority leader of New York's city council wants to adopt food zoning, and several cities have phoned L.A.'s planning department to request copies of the ordinance. Hey, I'm all for better food in impoverished neighborhoods. Incentives for grocery stores are a great idea. But telling certain kinds of restaurants that they can't serve certain kinds of people is just plain wrong, even when you think it's for their own good.

Client states can be so annoying. You can't get them to police terrorists along their borders; you can't get them to countenance publicly your troops inhabiting their country. So when you can't be there in the flesh—and you can't persuade your ally to help—the next-best thing is to be there in the nonflesh. Send in the drones.

That's what we've been doing in Pakistan. Remotely operated American unmanned aerial vehicles have been hunting and killing al-Qaida and Taliban honchos there for years. Six months ago, we took out a high-level al-Qaida commander. Monday morning, we took out another. After complaining for weeks that Pakistan isn't doing the job, we took care of it ourselves, killing a top al-Qaida trainer and weapons expert with missiles fired from a "remotely piloted aircraft." In an interview with Reuters, a local tribesman identified the killers: "We had heard the sound of a drone engine just before the explosions. These drones have been flying since late Sunday night."

Drones, as I've said before, are the future of warfare. The tactical reason is that they don't bleed. They let us hunt enemies abroad at no risk to ourselves. The political reason is slightly different: They spare us the difficulties of an official troop presence. Pakistan's government doesn't have to approve or explain our incursion into northwest Pakistan on Sunday night, because, strictly speaking, we weren't there.

The U.S. military doesn't even control our killer drones over Pakistan. The CIA does. This doubly insulates the Pakistani government from responsibility. "The Pakistani military, as is its custom, denied knowledge of the missile strike and whether it had been carried out by the United States," the Los Angeles Times reports. "One U.S. official familiar with the incident said the Pentagon was not involved and that 'it was an agency-run op all the way.' "

That deniability came in handy Monday morning, when Pakistan's prime minister met with President Bush at the White House a few hours after the killer-drone attack. Here's a lovely picture of them standing together on the South Lawn. "Pakistan is a strong ally and a vibrant democracy," the president declared. "The United States supports the democracy and supports the sovereignty of Pakistan." The prime minister proudly agreed. He said of the insurgents on his border, "This is our own war."

An hour later, reporters asked Bush's press secretary about the missile strike. "I'm not able to comment," she replied. They ask three more times. She repeated her nonanswer.

So that's our M.O. in Pakistan. And guess how we're going to patrol Iraq after we "pull out"? That's right: with drones. According to the New York Times, Iraqi leaders and American politicians of both parties agree that

there are three critical military tasks the Iraqi forces still cannot fulfill: providing combat support and logistics, carrying out high-tech surveillance and conducting close-air support for combat missions. So American forces can be expected to perform those three requirements for the foreseeable future.

Lt. Gen. Gary North, commander of allied air forces in the Middle East, tells the Times that he plans to "complement our manned airplanes with an increased amount of unmanned attack platforms." In fact, the transition is already underway:

For the first time in Iraq, the Air Force is flying missions this month with the new Reaper, a large remotely controlled vehicle that carries not only advanced surveillance sensors, but also bombs and missiles comparable to those on top-of-the-line piloted fighters. Not only do Reaper pilots sit in a trailer at a safe distance from the front lines, but the vehicles require less refueling and thus can stay aloft for long periods, so the number of airborne tankers would diminish as Reapers take on a growing role. "The capability that I am providing comes at less manpower on the ground," General North said.

That's our future in Pakistan, Iraq, and the next theater of war: less manpower on the ground, more unmanned power in the sky. We promised to pull out our troops. We didn't promise not to replace them.

Could this guy really be running for president? I asked myself this question about Barack Obama after reading his, at turns, quite angry memoir Dreams From My Father. I'm asking it again today after reading through the exams he gave when he was a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago—and in particular the model answers he wrote up for his own questions.

It's not that the book or the class materials scream fomenting liberal or fomenting anything. If they did, you'd have heard about it already. These writings are tempered and thoughtful and sophisticated and nuanced, as the law professors asked to comment on the exams point out on the Web site of the New York Times, which posted the exams. Obama either kept sharp or out-there views out of the classroom because he had an eye on his political future or because he wanted to make sure his students felt comfortable expressing opposing ideas. (For what it's worth, most of the professors I took classes from in law school did the same, at least in front of the lectern.)

But even more than his memoir, Obama's exam answers offer complex ruminations on some of the most contentious social and legal questions out there. Can a state pass a law barring doctors from treating unmarried couples for infertility, with a special slap at gay couples embedded in the statute? Can a city in which black students are failing open a special career academy for black boys?

Can a presidential candidate really afford to sail into these roiling waters, however skillfully? Obama gets away with it—if he does, come November—primarily because … law exams are hard! The questions are long fact patterns that branch out in all directions. The answers rely on tracking the facts through a series of doctrinal moves and countermoves—this Supreme Court case sends me north, but then this other one turns east, or is that ruling heading upside down? You can write a lot that's descriptive rather than proscriptive. As in, "The courts have never recognized unmarried persons as a 'suspect class.' "

At one point, Obama asks his students to sound off about their own policy views. But after asking whether the hypothetical "Ujamaa School" for black boys is "good public policy," he doesn't write out his own potentially enlightening model answer. Instead he retreats to finding it "interesting" that a slim majority of students came down on Ujamaa's side, "based on a justifiable skepticism in the prospect of truly integrated schools and an equally justified concern over the desperate condition of many inner city schools." Isn't it lucky that cagey politics is consistent with respectfully deferring to students' views?

More revealing, however, are passages in Obama's 1996 discussion about whether a lesbian couple could successfully challenge the constitutionality of his made-up "Preservation of Family Values Act," which would block the women from conceiving via in vitro fertilization. Obama writes of a "troubling" issue: "the Court's tendency, in cases since Roe, to embrace notions of 'tradition' as a means of curtailing the potential expansiveness of rights recognized under the Due Process Clause." Then he starts duking it out with Justice Antonin Scalia. As Chapman University law professor John Eastman points out in the NYT discussion, Obama calls Scalia's approach to defining the scope of substantive due process rights "cramped." And then he parries. Scalia would argue, he thinks, that the right to procreate applies only in the context of a "monogamous, heterosexual marriage." But how do you square that with the court's abortion jurisprudence and with Eiesenstadt v. Baird, the 1972 case that gave unmarried couples the right to have contraception? Scalia isn't just cramped; when Obama reads the justice against his colleagues, he also finds him to be wrong.

This mano a mano repeats in Obama's answer to a 1997 exam question about whether a state ban on cloning violates the constitutional rights of parents who want to clone their daughter, who is in a vegetative state, after turning off her life support. Obama channels Scalia here by pointing out that the justice might argue that cloning isn't even "procreation," according to the dictionary definition of that term. He goes on, "In the absence of any deeply rooted tradition, Scalia would argue," the Supreme Court should mind its own business and let the state ban stand. But whether a majority of the court would "embrace such a cramped reading"—that word of distaste again—Obama says, "is not entirely clear." In some ways, the argument for upholding the cloning law is stronger than the one for upholding the fertility-treatment ban in the earlier exam, because the science behind cloning is so much less certain than for in vitro and because there's no anti-gay impulse at issue. But Obama doesn't give Scalia an inch. The justice gets his due, and then he gets stuffed into the box for judges who talk loudly but don't carry a majority.

And then there's this flourish in Obama's model answer to his 1996 question: He picks up on a suggestion from some of his students "that courts do not use the tools of Equal Protection or substantive Due Process doctrine … to guide their analysis, but rather, use these labels to justify, after the fact, what are inescapably decisions based on policy calculation, ethical and political considerations, and the idiosyncratic values of particular justices." Here's another similar sentiment, "What is safe to say is that the views of particular justices on the desirability of rearing in [sic] children in homosexual households would play a big part in the decision."

Whoa. So here are the roots of Obama's statements that he will pick judges who have "heart" and "empathy" because he thinks that in a small but key set of cases, a judge must fall back on "his or her own perspectives, his ethics, his or her moral bearings." Obama is not a man, or a lawyer, who believes that at least in these hellishly difficult matters of constitutional interpretation, judges are truly guided by legal precedent, or abstract reasoning, or anything other than their gut and the outcome they prefer. This is not the way most politicians talk about the court. Certainly not John McCain. And it's not clear that Obama's candor about the role of the judicial gut is a political winner. "These are tricky questions," Obama confides to his law students at another point in his exam answers. No kidding.

Everyone needs a hobby. Mine is Fun Name Change Cases. I first got hooked 15 years ago, when I read about Michael Herbert Dengler, who wanted to change his name to 1069. "The only way [my] identity can be expressed is 1069," he insisted. Twice. To state supreme courts. With an elaborate theory for each digit: For instance, "The third character, 6, is equal to the relationship I have with the universe in my understanding of space of my spatial occupancy through this life." Now this was a field of law to watch, I knew.

Then came the news last week about Talula Does the Hula From Hawaii, a 9-year-old New Zealand girl. A New Zealand Family Court judge apparently viewed this name as a form of child abuse—the girl had complained that "[s]he fears being mocked and teased" about it—and asserted legal custody over the child so as "to ensure that a proper name was found for her."

Now that this has been validated as a matter of global legal significance, I present the following brief work of legal scholarship. Would-be 1069s and Talulas Do the Hulas, here are the precedents:

1. 1069. No dice. The North Dakota Supreme Court (1976) and Minnesota Supreme Court (1979) both say: Names can't be numbers. [Petition of Dengler, 246 N.W.2d 758 (N.D. 1976); Application of Dengler, 287 N.W.2d 637 (Minn. 1979).]

2. III, to be pronounced "Three." Nope, on the same grounds, said the California Court of Appeal in 1984 to Thomas Boyd Ritchie III. A concurring judge asserted that the problem was that III was a symbol, rather than just that it was a number. Such subtle distinctions are what law is all about. [In re Ritchie, 159 Cal. App. 3d 1070 (1984).]

3. Mary R. No, decided the Pennsylvania Superior Court in 2000, dealing with a petition by Mary Ravitch, who no longer wanted to use her ex-husband's last name and who didn't want to return to her maiden name (Gon). "Appellant's desired surname is so bizarre that it would likely be met with repeated suspicion and distrust in both business and social settings." [In re Ravitch, 754 A.2d 1287 (Pa. Super. 2000).]

4. Misteri Nigger, second "i" silent. No, said the California Court of Appeal in 1992, because it constitutes "fighting words": "[I]f a man asks appellant his name and he answers 'Mister Nigger,' the man might think appellant was calling him 'Mister Nigger.' Moreover, third persons, including children hearing the epithet, may be embarrassed, shocked or offended by simply hearing the word. This example illustrates how use of the name may be 'confusing' with the potential for violence." Definitely does sound like asking for trouble; "Russell Lawrence Lee" is much safer. [Lee v. Superior Court, 9 Cal. App. 4th 510 (1992).]

5. Santa Claus. A split among the courts: An Ohio judge in 2000 rejected Robert William Handley's attempt to become Santa Robert Clause, because:

The petitioner is seeking more than a name change, he is seeking the identity of an individual that this culture has recognized throughout the world, for well over one hundred years. Thus, the public has a proprietary interest, a proprietary right in the identity of Santa Claus, both in the name and the persona. Santa Claus is really an icon of our culture; he exists in the minds of millions of children as well as adults.

The history of Santa Claus—the North Pole, the elves, Mrs. Claus, reindeer—is a treasure that society passes on from generation to generation, and the petitioner seeks to take not only the name of Santa Claus, but also to take on the identity of Santa Claus. Although thousands of people every year do take on the identity of Santa Claus around Christmas, the court believes it would be very misleading to the children in the community, particularly the children in the area that the petitioner lives, to approve the applicant's name change petition.

But the Utah Supreme Court in 2001 let David Lynn Porter become just plain Santa Claus, and never mind the children: "Porter's proposed name may be thought by some to be unwise, and it may very well be more difficult for him to conduct his business and his normal everyday affairs as a result." (D'ya think?) "However, Porter has the right to select the name by which he is known, within very broad limits." [In re Handley, 736 N.E.2d 125 (Ohio Prob. Ct. 2000); In re Porter, 31 P.3d 519 (Utah 2001).]

6. Koriander, with no last name, apparently chosen because of Rosa Linda Ferner's "attraction to a name that sounds appropriate for her work as an artisan." Just fine, a New Jersey judge ruled in 1996. [In re Application of Rosa Linda Ferner to Assume the Name Koriander, 685 A.2d 78 (N.J. Super. L. 1996).]

7. They, again with no last name. OK, said a Missouri judge to a petition by the inventor formerly known as Andrew Wilson. They (not they, They) explained the rationale: "'They do this,' or 'They're to blame for that.' Who is this 'they' everyone talks about? 'They' accomplish such great things. Somebody had to take responsibility."

8. Darren QX [pronounced 'Lloyd'] Bean!. No problem!, holds our friend the California Court of Appeal in 2006. [Darren Lloyd Bean v. Superior Court, 2006 WL [pronounced 'Westlaw'] 3425000 (Cal. App.).] Bean!, who recently sat for the Oregon State Bar, reported that, "Many of his close friends greet him as 'Bean!' When saying his name, friends raise the pitch and the volume of their voices above their usual spoken tone." The court didn't opine further on this, because "this information is not contained in the appellate record." Still, the court reasoned, if O'Rourke is fine, so is Bean!. What's more, the court reported,

At least three people have changed their names to the names of websites with a ".com" in the name. Virginia animal rights activist Karin Robertson legally changed her name to GoVeg.com in 2003 to bring attention to a website of her employer, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Other activists also changed their personal names to websites with ".com" in the names, including "Kentucky fried cruelty.com" and "Ringling beats animals.com." We do not find a legal distinction between a period inside a word, a hyphen between words, an apostrophe in a word, and an exclamation point at the end of a word.

Speakers of !Xóõ and similar click languages must be happy about that.

9. Boys changing their names from, or to, Sue. No known cases.

Indiana v. Edwards, decided at the end of the Supreme Court term, hasn't gotten a lot of press. Ostensibly, it's about a technical matter of criminal procedure—the Sixth Amendment right to represent yourself in a criminal trial. But the case deserves a close look because at root it's about the nature of human dignity, a term that appears nowhere in the Constitution yet permeates its meaning. Plus, this June sleeper features a lesson by Justice Antonin Scalia to liberals on the court about what civil liberties should mean.

Ahmad Edwards is a schizophrenic. In 1999, he came to the attention of the Indiana police after he tried to steal a pair of shoes from a department store. When he was discovered, he shot at a store security officer and wounded a bystander.

After Edwards' arrest, there were periods of time when his mental illness made him so addled that he could neither understand the charges against him nor aid in his defense. By that measure, he was legally incompetent to stand trial. The state of Indiana spent the better portion of the next six years medicating and treating Edwards so that he might be lucid enough to be found competent. In 2005, a judge finally found that Edwards met that standard.

Competence meant going to trial. Edwards, determined to take his newfound stability out for a spin, asked to represent himself. He told the trial judge that his court-appointed lawyer wasn't spending enough time on the case, wasn't sharing with Edwards legal materials for use in the defense, and wanted to pursue a line of defense with which Edwards didn't agree. In response, the trial judge said that Edwards was "competent to stand trial, but I'm not going to find he's competent to defend himself." In short, the judge forced Edwards to accept representation by a lawyer Edwards didn't want along with a defense in which Edwards didn't believe.

If that result sounds odd, it should. In 1975, in Faretta v. California, the Supreme Court held that the Constitution, by operation of the Sixth Amendment's guarantee of the right to counsel in a criminal case, entitles a defendant to represent himself if he "voluntarily and intelligently elects to do so." Faretta notwithstanding, the Indiana trial judge found Edwards was competent enough to understand the proceedings against him and could assist in his defense but was nevertheless not competent enough to represent himself.

By a vote of 7-2, the Supreme Court agreed with the Indiana trial judge. Justice Stephen Breyer, writing for the majority, reasoned that being competent to stand trial, and even to plead guilty, required less mental faculty than being competent "to conduct trial proceedings." The majority emphasized that mental illness varies by degree and over time and that litigating a case can be a complicated and difficult matter, only more so if the person handling it is mentally ill. With those considerations in mind, Breyer reasoned that a trial judge ought to have the discretion to require a mentally ill defendant to go to trial with an attorney.

Breyer had to contend with Faretta's reasoning, however, that a defendant's Sixth Amendment right to represent himself is grounded in notions of individual autonomy and, implicitly, human dignity. His opinion concedes that those concerns underpin the right of self-representation. But Breyer found them insufficient when weighed against a different sort of indignity. "The spectacle that could well result from self-representation at trial is at least as likely to prove humiliating as ennobling," he wrote. "Moreover, insofar as a defendant's lack of capacity threatens an improper conviction … self-representation undercuts the most basic of the Constitution's criminal law objectives, providing a fair trial."

Justice Scalia, writing in dissent for himself and Justice Clarence Thomas, and channeling Ayn Rand, took the opposite view. Even though defendants who represent themselves usually harm their cases, the "choice must be honored out of 'that respect for the individual which is the lifeblood of the law,' " Scalia wrote. He said that the indignity a defendant suffers by making a fool of himself in court is of less concern than "the supreme dignity of being master of one's fate rather than a ward of the State—the dignity of individual choice." Scalia concluded, "Whatever else may be said of those who wrote the Bill of Rights, surely there can be no doubt that they understood the inestimable worth of free choice." Could any general counsel to the ACLU have said it better? (Evidently not. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once had that job but sided with the Breyer majority in Edwards.)

In short, Breyer is appalled at the prospect of a mentally ill person being paraded to debase himself in a proceeding he can't intelligently navigate. Scalia is equally dismayed at the Kafkaesque prospect of suspending constitutional rights because Important State Officials know best about what makes a fair trial. In the end, Scalia got this one right, and Breyer got it wrong. While both Justices consider the defendant's dignity, Breyer's concern is ultimately about the criminal justice process, while Scalia's is about the individual with skin in the game.

Breyer's majority opinion also has the disadvantage of rendering murky what once was clear in a number of respects. Going forward, mental health evaluators will have the burden of deciding whether some defendants are competent to plead guilty without counsel but aren't competent to plead not guilty on their own. And there is also the unhappy possibility that the court's ruling will primarily serve to conceal from public view the limited capacity of some defendants. A mentally ill defendant who has been found barely competent but can't represent himself despite his wish to do so won't have the opportunity to expose his relative incapacity the same way he might if he were standing up in court. In that manner, compulsory counsel operates not just as a controller of the accused's defense but also as a screen that shields us from the truth of a defendant's limitations.

At the same time there is a heartening aspect of Edwards. The concept of human dignity, explicit nowhere in the Constitution but implicit everywhere, was the touchstone of the court's debate about what the Constitution should mean for defendants like Ahmad Edwards. Breyer and Scalia disagreed about how best to protect his dignity. But they were both asking the right question. If we're to look, for a concept that animates the Constitution's provisions regarding our relationship to our government, we could surely choose worse than "fulfillment of human dignity."

The most influential legal thinker in the development of modern American interrogation policy is not a behavioral psychologist, international lawyer, or counterinsurgency expert. Reading both Jane Mayer's stunning The Dark Side and Philippe Sands' The Torture Team, I quickly realized that the prime mover of American interrogation doctrine is none other than the star of Fox television's 24: Jack Bauer.

This fictional counterterrorism agent—a man never at a loss for something to do with an electrode—has his fingerprints all over U.S. interrogation policy. As Sands and Mayer tell it, the lawyers designing interrogation techniques cited Bauer more frequently than the Constitution.

According to British lawyer and writer Philippe Sands, Jack Bauer—played by Kiefer Sutherland—was an inspiration at early "brainstorming meetings" of military officials at Guantanamo in September of 2002. Diane Beaver, the staff judge advocate general who gave legal approval to 18 controversial new interrogation techniques including water-boarding, sexual humiliation, and terrorizing prisoners with dogs, told Sands that Bauer "gave people lots of ideas." Michael Chertoff, the homeland-security chief, once gushed in a panel discussion on 24 organized by the Heritage Foundation that the show "reflects real life."

John Yoo, the former Justice Department lawyer who produced the so-called torture memos—simultaneously redefining both the laws of torture and logic—cites Bauer in his book War by Other Means. "What if, as the popular Fox television program '24' recently portrayed, a high-level terrorist leader is caught who knows the location of a nuclear weapon?" Even Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, speaking in Canada last summer, shows a gift for this casual toggling between television and the Constitution. "Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. … He saved hundreds of thousands of lives," Scalia said. "Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?"

There are many reasons that matriculation from the Jack Bauer School of Law would have encouraged even the most cautious legal thinkers to bend and eventually break the longstanding rules against torture. U.S. interrogators rarely if ever encounter a "ticking time bomb," someone with detailed information about an imminent terror plot. But according to the Parents' Television Council (one of several advocacy groups to have declared war on 24), Jack Bauer encounters a "ticking time-bomb" an average of 12 times per season. Given that each season allegedly represents a 24-hour period, Bauer encounters someone who needs torturing 12 times each day! Experienced interrogators know that information extracted through torture is rarely reliable. But Jack Bauer's torture not only elicits the truth, it does so before commercial. He is a human polygraph who has a way with flesh-eating chemicals.

It's no wonder high-ranking lawyers in the Bush administration erected an entire torture policy around the fictional edifice of Jack Bauer. He's a hero. Men want to be him, and women want to be there to hand him the electrical cord. John Yoo wanted to change American torture law to accommodate him, and Justice Scalia wants to immunize him from prosecution. The problem is not just that they all saw themselves in Jack Bauer. The problem was their failure to see what Jack Bauer really represents in relation to the legal universe of 24.

For one thing, Jack Bauer operates outside the law, and he knows it. Nobody in the fictional world of 24 changes the rules to permit him to torture. For the most part, he does so fully aware that he is breaking the law. Bush administration officials turned that formula on its head. In an almost Nixonian twist, the new interrogation doctrine seems to have become: "If Jack Bauer does it, it can't be illegal."

Bauer is also willing to accept the consequences of his decisions to break the law. In fact, that is the real source of his heroism—to the extent one finds torture heroic. He makes a moral choice at odds with the prevailing system and accepts the consequences of the system's judgment by periodically reinventing a whole new identity for himself or enduring punishment at the hands of foreign governments. The "heroism" of the Bush administration's torture apologists is slightly less inspiring. None of them is willing to stand up and admit, as Bauer does, that yes, they did "whatever it takes." They instead point fingers and cry, "Witch hunt."

If you're a fan of 24, you'll enjoy The Dark Side. There you will meet Mamdouh Habib, an Australian captured in Pakistan, beaten by American interrogators with what he believed to be an "electric cattle prod," and threatened with rape by dogs. He confessed to all sorts of things that weren't true. He was released after three years without charges. You'll also meet Maher Arar, a Canadian engineer who experienced pretty much the same story, save that the beatings were with electrical cables. Arar was also released without explanation. He's been cleared of any links to terrorism by the Canadian government. Jack Bauer would have known these men were not "ticking time bombs" inside of 10 minutes. Our real-life heroes had to torture them for years before realizing they were innocent.

That is, of course, the punch line. The lawyers who were dead set on unleashing an army of Jack Bauers against our enemies built a whole torture policy around a fictional character. But Bauer himself could have told them that one Jack Bauer—a man who deliberately lives outside the boundaries of law—would have been more than enough.

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

On my first evening as a night-float intern at Memorial, the world-famous cancer hospital in Manhattan, an intern handed me a list of her patients with their major medical problems, allergies, and a short summary of their hospital course. "There is one patient I have to tell you about," she said almost parenthetically. A patient with colon cancer had been hallucinating all afternoon. "He's quiet now, so he shouldn't give you any trouble," she quickly added. "But if he does, just snow him with more Haldol and Ativan." Then she left.

Night float was the scene of my worst moments as an intern. Your shift began at 5 p.m., when the other interns departed for the day, and ended at 7 a.m., when they returned. Meanwhile, you had to make critical decisions for other doctors' patients, about whom you knew next to nothing. You're an inexperienced intern, tackling potentially serious problems with not enough information.

That first night at Memorial, within minutes, my beeper went off. The patient whose care I had just assumed responsibility for was delirious, and his blood-oxygen saturation was dropping. When I went to his room, he was sprawled in bed, his arms and legs tied to the rails. He apparently did not speak English—apart from obscenities—because a German translator was there, grinning nervously. "He says that things are coming down at him," the translator said. "He feels that things are crawling on his skin."

A nurse asked me what I wanted to do. I had no clue. About the only thing my colleague had said to me before leaving was that this patient wasn't going to give me any trouble. I asked about his base-line mental state. The nurse shrugged. "I'm just a float," she said, meaning that she worked only per diem shifts. "I'm meeting him for the first time, too."

When I finally called the delirious patient's family, hoping for a clue, his daughter informed me that he had undergone a brain scan that afternoon. His intern had forgotten to mention it. What were the results? I did not know. So I gave the patient more Haldol and hoped for the best. (Later, I learned the scan showed a vaguely abnormal speck in the brain—a possible metastasis—which could have explained the delirium.)

Night float is the product of reforms in medical education that limit the number of hours that residents and interns—doctors in training—can work. Because they can no longer rely on the same doctor caring for a group of patients day and night, teaching hospitals have had to arrange more cross-coverage when the primary resident is not on duty. Most have created the position of a resident who works the night shift, usually for a few weeks. The upside is that other residents can sleep. The downside is frequent patient handoffs, which can result in the transfer of faulty or inadequate information. The nightmare of night float raises a central question about work limits for interns: Is it better to be cared for by a tired resident who knows your case or a rested resident who does not?

The push to limit interns' and residents' work hours gained momentum with the death of a woman named Libby Zion at the emergency room of New York Hospital, after the intern and resident treating her were slow to respond when she reacted adversely to a drug they gave her. If the young doctors had been more rested, soul-searching medical educators asked themselves, would they have been able to save her? In 1987, a special commission proposed a number of changes in residency training in New York state. Residents were prohibited from working more than 24 hours at a stretch or more than 80 hours per week, averaged over four weeks. They also got one day off a week. After intense debate, in 2003 similar changes were instituted at residency programs throughout the country.

At first glance, reducing the number of hours that residents work would seem a no-brainer. In a survey of American medical residents, 41 percent reported fatigue as a cause of their most serious mistakes. Studies have shown that residents after a call night score lower on tests of simple reasoning, response time, concentration, and recall. Indeed, a single night of continuous sleep deprivation has been shown to be roughly equivalent to a blood alcohol level of 0.10 percent—that is, being drunk.

Once, as a sleep-deprived intern, I had to take an elderly woman with severe angina for a CT scan in the middle of the night. When we arrived in the radiology department, I made what seemed like a reasonable decision: I stopped my patient's IV drips to get her onto the radiology table. Midway through the scan, she started moaning because of severe chest pains. I suddenly realized that I had stopped her nitroglycerin drip, used to treat angina, and that she was in the early stages of a heart attack. I tried to get the drip restarted, but the IV machine just kept beeping, mixing with her groans. Panicking, I raced the stretcher alone back to the cardiac-care unit, getting lost on the way. I finally got her back to the CCU, and experienced nurses took over. My patient ended up fine.

As harrowing as that experience was, it was nothing compared with night float, in which one was operating from a position of ignorance, in the environment of a teaching hospital, which reveres knowledge and competence. That first night at Memorial, I went to see a patient with esophageal cancer and intractable hiccups. Walking into his room, I felt almost relieved. After what I had dealt with so far that night, hiccups seemed almost laughably unserious. But these were no ordinary hiccups. They had been going on for more than 24 hours, leaving the patient sleepless and utterly demoralized.

I didn't know what caused hiccups, let alone how to treat them. When I asked a nurse, she mentioned that a drug called chlorpromazine was sometimes used, so I wrote an order for it. Walking through the nurses' station, I casually checked the patient's chart. There, amid his papers, was a brief note. He had once suffered a severe reaction to this particular drug. It wasn't documented as an allergy on the sign-out sheet I'd gotten but was scribbled in a progress note. I immediately canceled the order, relieved that I had caught the mistake in time but alarmed at how easily it might have slipped through.

Night float felt worse to me than working when I was exhausted, but is it really worse for patient care? The data are mixed. A study published in 2004 in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that interns working in an intensive-care unit made 36 percent more serious medical errors during a traditional schedule as compared with a schedule that eliminated extended work shifts and reduced the number of hours worked per week from 80 to 63. On the other hand, a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association appeared to indict the cross-coverage hospitals have been relying on to conform with the work limits. It showed that increasing cross-coverage in a large urban hospital caused delays in tests and an increased number of complications that could have been prevented, like drug reactions and infections. Work limits have other troubling consequences as well, including interruption of resident learning, fracturing of traditional hospital teams, and the creation of a kind of shift-work clock-watching mentality among young doctors.

If tired residents hurt patients, but the ignorance of night float and cross-coverage also pose a danger, what should hospitals do? No doctor can work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so cross-coverage is essential. The optimal system would provide rested night floats with all the information they need. The best way to accomplish this is for teaching hospitals to have standardized, electronic handoff systems. In medicine, as in aviation, most errors occur at transitions: by pilots, during takeoff and landing, and by doctors, after handoffs. Because of work limits, an intern today might be involved in more than 300 handoffs during an average monthlong rotation. Too many hospitals continue to rely on one intern signing out verbally to another, an invitation for error. Less than 5 percent of hospitals have electronic handoff systems in place.

Without better handoff systems, work limits may well weaken medicine more than exhausted residents ever did. As a doctor in training, you have to see a patient's illness through its course—observe the arc—to get a grip on the dynamics of disease. It is possible to overcorrect for even the most serious of problems. And in trying to get young doctors a bit more rest, we may have come up with a cure that is worse than the disease.

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"These regulations are horrible for teaching, horrible for patient care, horrible for our profession," a former chief resident at a major New York City teaching hospital told me. At least some young doctors agree. In a letter to the New England Journal, two wrote, "Although few residents object to having time off, the change in policy misses the point of why we are physicians in the first place. Physicians have chosen a difficult profession, presumably because they feel called to heal and comfort the sick and dying. We have seen the focus of our training program shift abruptly from the needs of the patient to the needs of the resident, and education has taken a back seat to the calculus of a shift-work schedule."

For weeks, Silicon Valley's tech entrepreneurs slavered over the rumors that Google was in the final negotiations to buy Digg, the social networking and news aggregation site, for a remarkable $200 million. The deal would give them a desperately needed morale boost; if Digg's founders could slap together a Web site with $11 million in venture capital and a few strings of open-source software, and then sell it for almost 20 times what they put into it, maybe there was hope for all the startups. So when Google suddenly backed out on July 25, you could hear the groans up and down Sand Hill Road. The money train, it seemed, was still derailed.

Indeed, there hasn't been a high-tech dry spell like this in decades. According to officials with the National Venture Capital Association, not a single technology initial public offering was made in the second quarter—the first time this happened since 1978. At the height of the bubble in 1999, some 90 IPOs were issued per quarter, and the number had hovered around 25 or 30 as little as a year ago. Now, it seems, no one thinks the public will bite on any tech offering, no matter how cool. "A lot of companies that were vested right around the bubble, they're maturing," says NVCA spokesman John Taylor. "But the IPO market is so inhospitable, these companies aren't even trying to go public. … The public money isn't coming, and the VCs have to write another check."

For startups watching their reserves dwindle, a deal like the one Digg was contemplating is their best hope. If public investors don't have the cash to gamble on an online dating service, the only buyers left are big media companies like Google or Microsoft—and Google announced this week that it will create a venture capital arm—or an old-media firm like Viacom. Yahoo's chaos has taken one of the biggest buyers out of the mergers and acquisitions market, and that leaves only one or two companies with the cash and the will to put it to work changing the face of the Web. This may well be the worst time for tech startups to cash out in history.

But strangely, no one's panicking. Despite the doldrums, despite the fact that tech may not get out of this slump for several quarters, startups and venture capital executives are barely breaking a sweat. Here's why: In the last 18 months, new developments in open-source software and cloud computing have made it cheaper to run a Web company than anyone thought possible. Just a few years ago, startups had to build their own IT services and administrative software, and the costs would soar into the millions. Today, tech leaders can just rent prepackaged software from Microsoft. Operating costs have plunged so low that companies vested with just a few million bucks can easily afford to wait until the good times roll around once more. "It's simply a matter of economics," says Bob Ackerman, a managing director at Allegis Capital. "What would it cost to build a house if you also had to create all the nails?"

Sharon Wienbar*, a managing director at Scale Venture Partners, is flabbergasted at how little it costs to run a digital media company these days. "I have one company, Merchant Circle, that provides advertising businesses," she says. "They have only 15 employees, and they have 5,000 paying customers. I was meeting with a few entrepreneurs from [social gaming site] Playfish who told me they don't own a single server. Everything is on a cloud. E-mail, accounting, file-sharing is hosted on a cloud. And they're serving millions of game players a day. … If you're burning $1 million a month, it's a really expensive experiment to fail. But if your burn rate is $100,000 a month, you can go a long way with just a little bit of angel financing and see if you can tweak your product just right. So you can afford to wait."

According to Maha Ibrahim of the venture firm Canaan Partners, it's not just infrastructure costs that have plummeted. Thanks to Facebook's willingness to let other applications piggy-back on its Web site, advertising and promotions costs for digital media firms have plunged as well. "Before Facebook, in order for a dot-com or an app to woo users to their site and get them go come back 10 or 15 times a week, you had to spend a lot of money with Google and others promoting your wares. With Facebook, an app doesn't have to spend their money on customer acquisition." The same phenomenon will only grow with mobile Web use, as Apple's App Store lets users troll a bazaar of third-party mobile applications.

But there's a downside to all this innovation. Because it's so easy, cheap, and fast to throw together a new digital media company, the window of opportunity in which startups can think of a neat new trick, generate buzz, and cash out has become smaller than ever. Consumer media firms have sunk their costs lower than ever, but now they have an entirely new challenge: how to remain the coolest thing going long enough for the public or one of the big media companies to buy you out.

"The more unique your company, the greater the value of your company," says Ackerman. "If you're one of 20 companies doing the same thing, there's not a lot of differentiation. And if a large company wants to buy one, they have 20 to choose from. The lower the barriers to entry, the noisier the marketplace."

And that means that the companies with the most buzz this month are in a terrible position. Getting hot and popular in a few months is one thing; staying that hot until the investment market recovers is another, particularly when the metric of cool is so viral and intangible.

According to Wienbar, even Facebook has suffered from the vagaries of the digital consumer market. "Facebook could have sold the whole thing for $15 billion, but they won't be able to get that in a year," she says. "Even now, they can't get it. So there was a feeding frenzy six months ago. Maybe they should have taken the money and run."

Which is why the Digg deal's flameout was so telling. At first glance, it seemed like the ideal model for the new digital media. Kevin Rose started the firm in 2004 with a handful of cash; soon, he was on the cover of Business Week, and he barely had to spend a cent. But without a clear plan to monetize the buzz, Rose had no choice but to wait for a bigger company to buy him out. Now that Google's taken a pass, he'll have to wait a little longer, while rival social news sites like Yahoo Buzz are already challenging Digg for supremacy. Rose had no problem dealing with the cost of doing business. Staying cool until the money comes back … well, that's a different kind of animal.

Correction, Aug. 1, 2008: Sharon Wienbar's name was originally misspelled as "Weinbar." (Return to the corrected sentence.)

The Transportation Department reported that Americans drove 9.6 billion fewer miles in May 2008 than in May 2007, a 3.7 percent drop. The result: rising demand for mass transit and declining revenues for the Federal Highway Trust Fund, which is funded by gas taxes. The Bush administration's counterintuitive policy response, as the New York Times reported, has been for the Highway Trust Fund to borrow funds from the department's mass-transit account.

Naturally, many urban-dwelling, car-hating socialists (as well as suburban-dwelling, Jeep-driving moderates like me) believe this is precisely the time to put more government funds—not less—into alternate modes of transportation: natural-gas powered buses, bicycle-sharing programs, trains, light-rail systems, subways, ferries, and rickshaws. The notion that the government should invest more in mass-transit infrastructure has always raised conservative hackles. As they sit on the Amtrak Acela, or ride the New York City subway or Washington, D.C., Metro, to their think-tank jobs or to the Wall Street Journal's offices, free-market types frequently fulminate against the systems that ferry them around. (New York Times house libertarian John Tierney's "Amtrak Must Die" from 2002 is a classic in the genre.) To such critics, money spent on mass transit, such as the $1.3 billion 2007 appropriation for Amtrak (here's Amtrak's 2007 annual report) represents an unconscionable waste of taxpayer funds. With their top-down bureaucracies and public ownership, they argue, mass-transit systems can never hope to compete economically with the private-sector alternative—driving gasoline-powered cars. They can't compete culturally and socially, either, since rugged American individualists prefer sitting by themselves in traffic to rubbing shoulders with strangers. And for those few areas where it does make sense to have mass transit, the market will step in and provide.

This is one of the oldest political arguments in America. For a good chunk of the 19^th century, the prospect of the federal government supporting "internal improvements"—i.e., canals, ports, roads—was a major source of partisan contention. Ultimately, the Jeffersonians and Jacksonians (and their heirs) lost out to the Whigs (and their heirs). Whether it was the Erie Canal, the first transcontinental railroad, or the interstate highway system, state and federal resources have repeatedly been deployed to build new types of transportation infrastructure that the private sector couldn't, or wouldn't, fund. Over time, these investments paid huge economic, social, and national-security dividends to the country.

What hasn't been acknowledged is that the automobile is supported by a government subsidy that dwarfs anything provided to mass transit. How big is the subsidy? By my (admittedly extremely crude) calculations, it could total nearly $100 billion per year*.

Americans can drive so much because there is an extremely extensive system of (largely free) roads for us to use. Despite some private-sector efforts, maintaining and building the nation's roads remains almost exclusively the preserve of government. Data from the Census Bureau on construction spending shows that this year, public spending on highways and streets is running at an annual rate of about $75 billion.*

But that's not all. Tax credits and breaks for particular types of economic activity constitute a public subsidy of that activity. Taxpayers effectively subsidize home ownership through the mortgage interest deduction. They subsidize the use of mass transit through programs that permit people to purchase mass-transit tickets with pretax money. And taxpayers subsidize the purchase and operation of gas-powered automobiles in at least two big ways.

First, just as they can with other types of equipment, businesses and self-employed individuals can write down the cost of cars and trucks they own against their taxable income. This decade, the relevant portion of the tax code dealing with the issue, Section 179, was changed to provide extra taxpayer support for the purchase of very large cars. In 2003, as part of an effort to stimulate business investment, the law was changed to significantly increase the amount of deductions businesses could take on equipment, including vehicles that weighed more than 3 tons. (In the past, that category would have been limited to commercial vehicles, such as pickup trucks and moving vans. But in SUV-crazy America, that also means Hummers and Escalades.) So if a Realtor bought a $75,000 Hummer and used it mostly for business, she could take a $25,000 deduction from her taxable income in the first year of ownership. The stimulus package passed earlier this year included provisions that boosted the amount of total deductions businesses could take on equipment. But taxpayers aren't just subsidizing the purchase of gas-guzzlers by businesses. Thanks to tax credits for hybrids, they're also subsidizing the purchase of gas-sippers by individuals.

Self-employed individuals and businesses can also deduct the costs of operating a car for business purposes from their taxable income. In light of higher gas prices, the Internal Revenue Service this year boosted the mileage allowance to 58.5 cents per mile. A self-employed salesperson who drives 5,000 miles a year and is in the 33 percent tax bracket can thus save about $1,000 in tax payments. (The language of the allowance suggests that it applies only to cars—not to bicycles, scooters, or motorcycles.)

There are doubtless many other examples of taxpayers subsidizing the automobile and its related industries. (The Chrysler bailout comes to mind.) Send your nominations to: moneybox@slate.com.

Correction, July 30, 2008: The original version of this story contained a significant numerical error. It linked to a Bureau of Transportation Statistics report, which can be seen here, that shows public construction spending on roads and highways in monthly totals. That Census Bureau reports the data as monthly totals expressed at an annualized rate. Because we read that annual rate as a monthly rate, the original article overstated public spending on highways and roads by a factor of twelve. Mea culpa 12 times. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

The Federal Reserve's extraordinary efforts to help investment banks have effectively put the taxpayer on the hook for enormous potential losses. If borrowers can't make good on their debts, we could end up paying tens or hundreds of billions to cover losses tied to Bear Stearns, mortgage-backed securities at other banks, and the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac debacle.

But the actual amount of credit extended so far through these public-rescue efforts pales in comparison with the credit that has quietly been extended to banks in the past year—another lifeline that taxpayers could end up paying dearly for. Here's the story: Last summer, as the subprime rot spread throughout the credit market, the process through which banks make loans to borrowers and then package and sell them to investors came to a screeching halt. For the past 12 months, an obscure agency created by President Herbert Hoover during the Great Depression has come to the rescue of the banking industry. It is called the Federal Home Loan Banks.

Like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the FHLB (here's Hoover's July 1932 signing statement, a brief history, and an overview) is a government-sponsored enterprise. But it differs from the wounded giants in some significant ways. Instead of being owned by public shareholders, as Fannie and Freddie are, the 12 independent regional FHLBs are owned by their 8,100 members. Banks large and small, representing about 80 percent of the nation's financial institutions, own shares in the FHLB and share in the profits.

The FHLB has a simple business model (PDF). Basically, it funnels cash from Wall Street to banks on Main Street. Member banks present mortgages they've issued—high-quality ones, not junky subprime ones—as collateral to the FHLB and borrow money so they can have more cash to lend. To finance its activity, the FHLB sells debt to big investors in the capital markets. As with Fannie and Freddie, the FHLB benefits from a unique status. The FHLB doesn't pay federal income tax, and it borrows "at rates just slightly higher than Treasury bonds," thanks in part to the high ratings of its debt. While the FHLB takes pains to note that "Federal Home Loan Bank debt is not guaranteed by, nor is it the obligation of, the U.S. government," there's an assumption afoot in the marketplace that were the FHLB to encounter serious trouble, the government would step in. In return for this special treatment, the FHLB provides some vital public services. Twenty percent of its net earnings are used to help cover interest on debt issued by the Resolution Funding Corp., which paid for the Savings & Loan bailout. The FHLB also channels one-tenth of its profits to affordable-housing loans and grants.

During the mortgage boom, FHLB quietly did its job and avoided many of Fannie and Freddie's excesses. A year ago, loans to member banks accounted for only 62 percent of total assets. The rest was held in safe investments like the government bonds and bonds issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Subprime holdings were minimal. And since commercial banks were able to raise capital from Wall Street to make any kinds of loans they wanted, they didn't have all that much need for the FHLB's services. As the chart below shows, the number of loans extended to member banks rose modestly in the boom years, up 7 percent in 2005 and only 3 percent in 2006. As of June 30, 2007, the FHLB had $640 billion in loans outstanding to members.

But last year the mortgage house of cards began to collapse. And as Wall Street's securitization machine, which had enabled banks to raise cash with alacrity, broke down, banks staged their own run on the FHLB. In its 2007 third-quarter report, the FHLB noted that "in light of the extraordinary events affecting the credit markets during the third quarter," loans to members soared by 28.6 percent from the first quarter, to $824 billion—an increase of $184 billion. Since then, as the broken-down Wall Street mortgage securitization machine was sold for scrap, FHLB loans to member banks continued to rise: to $875 billion at the end of 2007 and to $914 billion at the end of this June. In the past 12 months, FHLB loans to its members have risen by 43 percent, representing an additional $274 billion in real credit provided by the system to its member banks. That sum dwarfs the actual amount of credit extended to investment banks by the Fed—or by the government to Fannie and Freddie.

Does the increase in FHLB's balance sheet mean taxpayers may be on the hook for another trillion dollars in mortgage debt? It's unlikely. FHLB has a much better track record than Fannie and Freddie. Because it maintains high standards, it has never suffered a credit loss on a loan extended to a member. It doesn't spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year on executive compensation or lobbying, as Fannie and Freddie did. And it didn't lower standards or shift into riskier markets as a way of increasing market share, as Fannie and Freddie did. Seventy-six years after it was created by a president whose administration was hostile to government intervention in markets, the FHLB stands as an enduring and (so far) effective example of socialism among capitalists.

Swing Vote (Touchstone Pictures) isn't exactly a toothless political satire. It's something worse: a satire with dentures. What little bite it manages to apply against the American electoral system is fake, to be removed at will whenever a truly chewy topic comes up. Some of the issues the movie gums include abortion, immigration, and the unacknowledged alcoholism of its own main character.

For starters, the moment in American politics this comedy spoofs now feels so remote, it might as well be the Harrison/Van Buren race of 1840. (Tippecanoe and Costner too!) Given our current political reality: two foreign wars, a terrorist threat, and the first racially diverse presidential campaign in American history—the hanging-chad woes of the 2000 election are the last thing on our minds. The film's premise, that a hotly contested presidential race somehow comes down to a single vote, is not without its populist charm. Frank Capra could have done something with it. But I knew Frank Capra (OK, I've seen a lot of his movies) and you, director/co-writer Joshua Michael Stern, are no Frank Capra.

Nor is Kevin Costner a Gary Cooper. But it isn't Costner's fault that Swing Vote is such a formless, pasty blob of a movie. As Bud Johnson, a divorced father on the verge of losing his job at an egg-packing plant, he's in his comfort zone as an actor, playing the kind of dim-bulb, salt-of-the-earth loser he's carried off nicely in movies such as Bull Durham and Tin Cup. (It's when Costner roles get steely-eyed and morally upright that you need to start worrying.) Bud and his young daughter Molly (Madeline Carroll) live in semi-squalor in a trailer on the Texas/New Mexico border. Their relationship—he's a low-functioning drunk; she's a hectoring enabler—is depressing to a near-tragic degree, though the filmmakers seem convinced of its bantering charm.

Molly, a precocious political junkie (when she grows up she wants to be "either a veterinarian or chairman of the Fed"), spends Election Day nagging her father about his civic responsibility to vote. But while she waits for him at the polling station, he's passed out drunk in the cab of his parked truck. Molly then sneaks past the dozing poll workers and tries to vote in her father's stead. Thus, in a series of events as incomprehensible as they are unconstitutional, an incomplete ballot with Bud's name on it becomes the deciding factor in the election.

In the ensuing 10 days before he casts his vote, this apolitical dumbbell is desperately courted by both the fatuous Republican incumbent (Kelsey Grammer) and his spineless Democratic challenger (Dennis Hopper). The efforts of these two are coordinated, respectively, by Stanley Tucci, as a Rove-esque Republican operative, and Nathan Lane, as a Bob Shrum-style Democratic strategist who can't seem to win an election. The scenes of pandering one-upmanship that follow afford some of the movie's rare mirthful moments, including a pro-life political commercial that's just sick enough to be funny.

But the country's most waffling swing voter can't be as confused as this movie's script is. Besides the central have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too problem—how do you combine cynical satire with sappy civic idealism?—there's a fundamental flaw in the father-daughter plot. Costner's Bud Johnson is not a lovable rascal of a dad; he's a boozing derelict who ignores and betrays his daughter in scene after uncomfortably painful scene. But the 12-year-old Madeline Carroll is the only person involved—including the director and screenwriter—who seems to perceive just how terrible Molly's life is. As the grownup actors go through their purportedly comic antics, she skulks at the edge of the frame, her little face pinched in agony. It's a reaction entirely consistent with the crappy treatment her character receives, but the unresolved question of Molly's neglect lends the movie's faux-uplifting ending a sour taste. A late appearance by Mare Winningham as the girl's drug-addicted absentee mother also hits a disconcertingly realist note: Is this a political comedy or a drama about child abuse? If it's the latter, that would at least explain the lack of laughs.

First, a confession. In the 1970s, I got familiar with a recording of avant-garde composer György Ligeti's Adventures and New Adventures for a small group of instruments and "singers" but had to wait 10 years and hear those pieces live before I realized that they're falling-down funny: absurdist chamber "operas" expressed by shouts, wheezes, squeaks, sighs, whoops, blitherings, bellows, and so on—. Before then, it hadn't occurred to me that the avant-garde and the comic could cohabitate. They didn't teach you that in music school. They taught you retrograde inversions, pitch classes, parameters, Klangfarbenmelodie, i.e., the gamut of formal/intellectual shibboleths that were supposed to explain contemporary music.

Ligeti had his own singular and unpredictable parameters. Sometimes he's almost alarmingly funny, other times mesmerizing, uncanny, hyperbolic, touching, ironic—all the good stuff music used to do. It's characteristic of his individualism and rapport with the past that as a nominal "experimental" composer, he could bring it all off. Listening to the two Adventures with enlightened ears, I kept thinking, with a certain manic glee, of Mozart. As with the old guys, here was music that was exquisitely what it was, with a splendid harmony of expression and form and content. It was Ligeti's genius to take the ideas and techniques of the late-century German experimental school and make them musical, which is to say: humanize the avant-garde. Which in turn is to say: To make new sounds and forms expressive is to discover new territories of the human.

Ligeti died at 83 in June 2006, working on a third book of his already legendary etudes for piano. Even though most great artists start off as ordinary blokes in ordinary circumstances, he still managed an unusually long and painful journey. He came from a cultured Hungarian Jewish family that ended up in concentration camps in World War II. His father and teenage brother died there. György managed to escape from a slave-labor camp and walked home to find there was no more home. After the war, he studied music intensely and settled into a teaching and composing career in Budapest. Having survived the Nazis, Ligeti now had to contend with the Soviets. In communist Hungary, writing strange chords could have nasty consequences. Following the Russian clampdown of 1956, he fled Hungary and found himself broke and unknown in Cologne, where Karlheinz Stockhausen was the presiding genius. It was hearing Stockhausen's electronic masterpiece Gesang der Jünglinge on an accidentally unblocked radio broadcast, accompanied by gunfire in the streets outside, that had inspired Ligeti to flee Hungary in search of broader creative horizons.

Ligeti was given a place to work in the studios of Cologne Radio, where pioneering electronic music was being put together with remarkably primitive means. In those days they edited tape pieces with scissors and generated sounds with old engineering equipment. Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez became Ligeti's mentors and friends; the three of them eventually came to be seen as peers. But Ligeti's path diverged from his mentor's in important ways. In the '60s and '70s, Stockhausen was the most visible of the European avant-gardists; he was on the cover of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's as one of their inspirations for doing innovative things with electronics and recording. Stockhausen had decreed that every piece must constitute a revolution, starting with the very tone color of the music.

Ligeti needed models but didn't care for gurus and absolutes. Finding his voice in the heart of the European experimental scene, where ultra-rationality was the answer to the war's irrationality and everything had to be justified by theory, he never fit the mold. Ligeti, responding to the horrors of midcentury he had experienced first-hand, went in a direction more about feeling than intellect. Like his colleagues, Ligeti was all for invention, but new forms and sounds were for him means and not ends. Meanwhile, he had an anti-dogmatic passion for everything musical, including Caribbean, central African, and East Asian traditions, and American Minimalism of the Steve Reich and Terry Riley persuasion.

True, his kind of eclecticism was not necessarily comfortable. "I am in a prison," Ligeti once said. "One wall is the avant-garde; the other is the past. I want to escape." He declared his later music to be neither tonal nor atonal. To hell, in other words, with both camps.

One form of escape was an all-consuming outlandishness. He was, after all, a serious student of Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers. In his comic mode, Ligeti was arguably the funniest composer who ever lived, though his humor has an unsettling edge. His full opera, Le Grand Macabre, is an exercise in apocalyptic madness, on the subject of the end of the world as a supernatural scam. Ligeti described it as "some kind of flea market: half real, half unreal ... a world where everything is falling in." Growing up where and when he did, Ligeti knew that things "falling in" can be funny, but ultimately it's no joke. Here's in the opera.

The religious works have an unearthly aura that made them a natural for Stanley Kubrick in 2001. Ligeti's music remains the most sublime element of that transcendent film. Still, if the Requiem and Lux Aeterna used in the movie resemble anything else, it's not apemen and monoliths on the moon; it's the ululations of mythical beasts, the sighing of lonely stars in forgotten nebulae, the ritual songs of wraiths. Try .

Another overwhelming work, alternately hectic and spiritual, is the Violin Concerto. Its hymnlike second movement has a climax on a chorus of ocarinas (that flute thing shaped like a potato) that manage to sound at once goofy and creepy, like . Here Ligeti opened a vein of intoxicating weirdness that, maybe, music had never reached before. But, as always, he wasn't screwing around with sound for the sake of it; he was expressing something beyond analysis, in the realm of the heart.

His hypervirtuosic Etudes for piano are spoken of with awe and fear in keyboard circles. Listen to Ligeti's favorite pianist, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, playing, with his usual aplomb, .

I saw Stockhausen give talks in Boston in the '60s and '70s, and in the '90s saw Ligeti as a guest composer at New England Conservatory. Stockhausen was the image of the German modernist, proclaiming tidily arranged dicta about the imperatives of history. Though in private Ligeti could be quite impossible, at the Conservatory he just charmed everybody. He had no theories whatever to offer. He was unpretentious, witty in his scrambled English, and in contrast to Stockhausen's sharp features and burning eyes, there was Ligeti's wonderful face of an old spaniel. For a taste of his ruminations, here's a late BBC interview.

Ligeti told us that when his music was first being performed in European new-music festivals, he had to hitchhike to the concerts. "I didn't have the money to buy a girl a cup of coffee." Then one day somebody told him, "Did you know there's a movie with your music in it?" Ligeti didn't know. Kubrick had simply ripped off his things for 2001. Ligeti duly sued Kubrick and in the end, he told us, received the grand sum of $3,000. "But do you like the movie?" somebody asked. "Yah, I really like it," Ligeti said. And of course, 2001 did for him what Sgt. Pepper's did for Stockhausen—helped make him famous beyond the esoteric circles of the European new-music scene. By the '90s, the two were the dominant figures of their generation, but by then Stockhausen was mostly out of sight, sunk in his mystical cycle of operas called Licht, or "light."

So via mass media and pop culture some wildly innovative music emerged from underground and made its mark. The difference between that generation and now was that while Stockhausen and Ligeti were not aloof to pop culture, they expected it to come to them. Many of the current generation of classical composers swear allegiance to hip-hop, salsa, and so on. In the arts formerly known as "high," you can't go wrong sucking up to pop culture. I think the older attitude got better results.

In later years, Ligeti and Stockhausen kept their distance. They united in the public mind one last notorious time when, after 9/11, Stockhausen declared of the disaster: "This is the biggest artwork that exists at all in the whole universe. ... I couldn't match it." His statement was condemned worldwide. Actually, what Stockhausen was trying to say, from his distant planet, was that 9/11 was a titanic piece of theater, mass murder created for television. Not so generously, Ligeti declared that Stockhausen had joined the terrorists and ought to be locked up. Even in that, Ligeti was showing his allegiance to the here-and-now in contrast to the remoteness of his old mentor. Stockhausen had not considered what people were going to make of what he did and said. He didn't quite live in this world. Ligeti did.

For me, Ligeti is the most interesting, most expressive, most important tonal artist to appear since Stravinsky died. Stockhausen was a great inventor in sound, but Ligeti was a great composer in a long tradition. I don't see any replacements on the horizon. I doubt anybody alive, for example, could set Lewis Carroll's "A Long, Sad Tale" with anything like his .

New Republic, Aug. 13

The cover story describes the "demographic inversion" occurring in American cities like Chicago, which is "coming to resemble a traditional European city. … The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts" while the white and affluent dwell in the center. The "deindustrialization" of the city, decreased street crime, and higher gas prices contribute to the inward movement. But it's also a case of "young adults expressing different values, habits, and living preferences than their parents." … A piece details John McCain's "lifelong romance" with boxing—and his ferocious opposition to Ultimate Fighting. Boxing is a "cultural throwback … but it also appeals to [his] impish side." It represents "the pure, noble, manly art of fighting"—as one source puts it. To McCain, its no-holds-barred cousin, Ultimate Fighting, violates a "core sensibility: that there is such a thing as a good fight—one that is both clean and fair." (In 1997, Slate's David Plotz detailed McCain's beef with Ultimate Fighting.)

Newsweek, Aug. 4

In the cover package on the Beijing Olympics, an article considers China's national "inferiority complex," arguing that "the most critical element in the formation of China's modern identity has been the legacy of the country's 'humiliation' at the hands of foreigners, beginning with its defeat in the Opium Wars in the mid-19^th century and the shameful treatment of Chinese immigrants in America." One Chinese filmmaker says, "There is something almost in our DNA that triggers autonomic, and sometimes extreme, responses to foreign criticism or put-downs." … A piece looks at the field of "oncofertility," which studies how cancer patients can preserve their fertility after they recover from the disease. Oncologists now refer younger patients to reproductive specialists before they begin cancer treatments. One common tactic is to harvest a woman's eggs and freeze them for later use.

The New Yorker, Aug. 4

An article investigates the legacy of Alan Rogers, a gay soldier who was killed in Iraq. After his death, gay advocacy groups wondered "if he might not qualify as the first known gay casualty of the Iraq war" while some in Rogers' circle moved to conceal information about his sexuality. They removed information about his sexual orientation from a Wikipedia entry and threatened to press defamation charges after the Washington Blade outed him in an article. But "the cover-up, such as it was, was not the result of any coördinated government campaign but a freelance effort enabled by the good intentions of colleagues and friends whose own experiences with Rogers made it hard to conceive of him as a dissident of any kind." … A profile of Tavis Smiley examines his "tangled web of alliances." The political commentator and entrepreneur generated controversy within the black community when he held back support for Obama in the primaries because "[y]ou can't short-circuit the process of holding folk accountable just because you fall in love."

Texas Monthly, August 2008

A piece tells the story of four high-school football stars who, one post-season Friday night, gruesomely clubbed two deer to death in their small West Texas town. A few weeks after the animals were discovered with bashed-in skulls, the boys (who many in the piece describe as "good kids") confessed to their school principal and received light punishments. Almost a year later, after a PETA-fueled online explosion of discussion about the misdeed, those who know the perpetrators still remain "baffled" as to why they did it. … An article explores the Texas School for the Blind, a haven for visually impaired students, where "they can star in a school play, compete on a team, be a cheerleader, have a boyfriend. And they don't have to miss out on that quintessentially American rite of passage, the prom."

GQ, August 2008

In the comedy issue, a profile of cover boy Seth Rogen asks whether he will be "the Woody Allen of Generation Xbox when he's 35—acting, writing, unlikely-sex-symboling, creating his own material, making his own lane." … An article, punctuated by vignettes about the dead, reports on the grisly rapes, killings, and disappearances in Juárez, Mexico. President Felipe Calderón's aggressive offense on drug trafficking "may be hurting the Mexican people more than it hampers the drug trade." More government patrols and conflict between federal and local enforcement means destroying the little order previously imposed by drugs lords, allowing "little gangs" to proliferate. The border city also attracts hopeful immigrants, who frequently fall into drugs, prostitution, and gang life when they can't make it to the United States.

Weekly Standard, Aug. 4

An article criticizes "Every 15 Minutes," a program that stages drunk-driving accidents at high schools to educate teenagers. The program's point, says the piece, "isn't to provide accurate information, it's to scare the bejesus out of a bunch of impressionable kids." Every 15 Minutes "capitalize[s] on the deep love of drama in the heart of every teenager" while exaggerating the number of deaths caused by drunk driving and making money off the "ridiculous" merchandise on its Web site. … A piece advises "anyone who wants to understand Barack Obama … to stay away from the radio and the TV" and read his speeches instead so as not to be distracted by "that rich baritone, the regal bearing, the excellent drape of his Burberry suits." … A piece observes France's reaction to Obama's visit, noting that the candidate, whom the French press calls "le Kennedy noir," is "the ultimate arm-candy for embattled European leaders"—like French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Listen to Dan Chiasson read .

It is impossible for me to remember

the cozy room I slept in as a child.

Somebody made my bed up to be paradise.

It was hard for me, a hard night, when I entered art.

The tendons in my wrist are visible.

What will I do now I have made this fist?

To loosen it feels weird, anticlimactic—

a misuse, a misunderstanding, of fists.

That's how it was with me that night.

And so, mysteriously, I lost my sweetness.

Weird, to feel intended for violence,

when what I wanted was an hour of rest.

2. Wind

Find some other reason to sway, forest;

old people get bent over

from vitamin deficiencies; trees,

take them as your inspiration.

For I have neither time nor energy

any longer to write poems, to make feeling

out of what, without me, is silent;

I find your standing there disgusting.

And you, reader, I see you nod your head,

treelike, appraising these lines;

I find your standing there—

not disgusting, but not inspiring either.

3. Tree

All day I waited to be blown;

then someone cut me down.

I have, instead of thoughts,

uses; uses instead of feelings.

One day I'll feel the wind again.

A moment later I'll be gone.

4. Cause

Whitman wrote this, before he started writing poetry.

He was a journalist for years, you know;

a radical, a partisan for some ridiculous cause.

He wrote this to support—or was it to condemn—a cause.

It doesn't matter since he wasn't Whitman yet.

Now that he's been Whitman for so long, it would.

5. Effect

Everything scatters as the night wears on:

but you, don't scatter, will you?

I think we could make this night last forever.

With our joined heads, like mathematicians,

we could work all night, so that

where night once was, work would be; and night,

as long as work went on, would never end.

It is starting to sound a little tiring:

all this working, just to stave off morning.

6. Sound, 2 a.m.

A minute ago I was a child coughing: having had

too much of everything today, except for air.

Now I am an animal, feeling, tonight, perplexed—

I fled the outside, the cold, the lack of food;

I meant to enter a house, which I connect with warmth,

which my body told me was the appropriate move.

Instead I entered a person's mind. Like the child,

I am trapped: I have no will, no life to call my own.

7. Swifts

Reality isn't one point in space.

It isn't one moment in time—

look at time, a spool of twine

one minute, idle in a sewing kit,

the next minute a shooting star.

Reality is an average of moods,

strike that, a flock of birds,

strike that, a single bird

tracked through dense forest:

you can lose it for hours or days,

but it isn't lost. You tired of the metaphor.

8. Caress

The tendons flattened and the knot untied.

You could do anything, then, with your hand;

you could forget the fact you had a hand.

This lasted, or so you were tempted to think,

for years; winter didn't matter,

yet spring arrived as a blessing to your body.

Sweetness, or what passed for it, returned;

and then, like an anchor yanked suddenly

from the sea, your muscles clenched.

Over the last few weeks, Barack Obama and John McCain have seemed to get perilously close to agreeing on what to do in Iraq. Obama continues to talk about a 16-month withdrawal but would let military commanders determine the pace of the withdrawal. McCain is also now in favor of a 16-month timeline—as long as the commanders determine the pace of the withdrawal. After the withdrawal, how many soldiers would be left and what would they do? Both candidates agree on that, too. U.S. forces would continue to train Iraqi soldiers, fight al-Qaida, assist Sunni tribal leaders, and fight Shiite militias. How long they would do all of this, and in what numbers, would be up to the commanders on the ground.

How close are the two candidates? Below are two mathematical formulas derived from their public statements. Mouse over each number and variable to see the source.

X. Advice from commanders: If conditions improve, X will equal 1 or greater, Obama will bring one to two brigades home each month, and McCain will complete the withdrawal in 16 months. (One brigade=2,500 troops.) If the military advisers recommend a less expeditious withdrawal, X decreases, the number of troops that Obama withdraws each month lowers, and McCain's overall timetable expands. The residual forces both candidates envision (which are a function of X) will also get larger.

Y. Residual Force: The result of the equation equals the number of U.S. soldiers who would remain in Iraq to continue to train Iraqi soldiers, fight al-Qaida, assist Sunni tribal leaders, and fight Shia militias.

The last time a two-term president spoke at his party's nominating convention, he sparked a grand celebration. It was 2000. Bill Clinton was introduced, and the Democrats gathered in Los Angeles went nuts. Instead of taking the stage, though, Clinton first showed up on enormous screens. For the next 30 seconds, the crowd watched as he walked the narrow cinderblock hallway to the podium. By the time he arrived, the popcorn had spilled, the funny hats were askew, and the entire arena was in a deep frenzy.

This happy convergence is not likely to repeat itself when George Bush speaks at the Republican convention in St. Paul, Minn., in September. With approval ratings in the high 20s, Bush has a standing more than 20 points lower than Clinton's at the time of his saunter. In 2000, 51 percent of the country said America was on the right track. Now 13 percent does. The Obama campaign tries to take advantage of the ill will by claiming that John McCain represents merely a third Bush term and by linking the two in an ad. It's working. In recent polls, the majority of respondents believe that McCain, as president, would continue Mr. Bush's policies in Iraq and on the economy. How much of a liability is Bush? One McCain aide refers to him as kryptonite. The irony, says a McCain supporter, is that Bush could end up beating McCain on both his runs for the presidency.

Conventions are usually a place to finesse a candidate's liabilities. And yet McCain has to give kryptonite a prime-time speaking spot. When I asked GOP veterans whether there was any way to minimize the damage for McCain, their first reaction was to laugh. Since the convention starts on a Monday, one member of the McCain campaign joked that Bush could speak on Sunday night. Another veteran Republican suggested putting up an onstage dunking booth for the president. McCain could break tradition by arriving at the convention early in the week so he can take a few throws at the target.

The main trick at a convention, which every campaign faces, is to present a candidate to a general-election audience—which usually means appealing to the political center—at a gathering of his most partisan supporters, who flock to the convention center to cheer loudly for his most conservative appeals. It would be easier for candidates if their conventions were held the day after they grabbed the nomination. Then they could wave to the base and go on to make their move to the middle uninterrupted.

McCain faces an acute version of the usual dilemma. Polls in recent days suggest that disaffected Republicans are coming home to his campaign (or, given his rocky relationship with the party, saying hi for the first time). McCain doesn't want to alienate those party faithful who may not be thrilled with the president but who also don't want to see him insulted. But he also has to show that he's a different kind of Republican in a year when the party brand is so damaged that 10 of the 12 Republicans running in the most competitive Senate races this fall are either skipping the convention or have not decided whether to attend.

So other than crack grim jokes, what should McCain do to limit the damage Bush could do to him? Here are a few suggestions from several people in the business who have planned conventions before:

1. Make it a family affair. Matthew Dowd, Bush's former strategist who is now with ABC, suggests bringing in George H.W. along with his son and maybe other family members as well. While the current Bush is unpopular, voters have warm feelings about his father. (Even Barack Obama praises his foreign-policy acumen.) The downside is that the 41^st president was the last one who was considered sorely out of touch with a bad economy.

2. Make Bush a character witness for McCain. By talking about the arc of his presidency—the attacks of 9/11 and the response of the American people and American military—Bush can stay on relatively noncontroversial ground, which he can link to McCain's biography. His speech could touch on the underlying theme of McCain's message—serving your country in crisis and doing the right thing even when it's politically unpopular. The problem with this approach is that it reinforces the idea that McCain is all about war and military.

3. Talk about conflict. Each night of a convention has a theme. Monday is traditionally former president's night. McCain could change things and make it "gadfly night," in which his GOP opponents testify to his irritating oppositional streak. The night's kickoff speakers could be members of the GOP with whom McCain has clashed over the years: Tom Tancredo on immigration, Dick Cheney on torture, James Inhofe on climate change, Mitch McConnell on campaign finance. Bush would then take over for the keynote, pointing out the various areas in which he and McCain have disagreed. This would highlight McCain's independence. Then they could kiss and make up over their big area of agreement—the latest military strategy in Iraq, which is increasingly viewed as successful. This will never happen.

As the McCain campaign weighs the options, it has no historical precedent to follow. Richard Nixon didn't speak at Ford's 1976 convention. The benefits of resignation. Maybe, one aide suggested, this time around Bush could just embrace his own unpopularity and say: "If John McCain had had his way, I wouldn't be here."

You're welcome to believe otherwise, but I don't think the press has gone in the tank for Barack Obama.

As long ago as March, the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz demolished charges that the press was soft on Obama by cataloging the tough pieces published by reporters exhuming the candidate's past: his financial relationship with friend and fundraiser Antoin "Tony" Rezko, who is now a convicted felon; his friendship with former Weather Undergrounder William Ayers; his casting of 130 "present" votes as an Illinois legislator; his nuclear energy compromise in the U.S. Senate, said to benefit a contributor; incendiary comments made by his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright; and more.

To that list add the recent critical dispatches tarring Obama as a flip-flopper. The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg found "the big papers … assembling quite a list of matters on which the candidate has 'changed his position,' including Iraq, abortion rights, federal aid to faith-based social services, capital punishment, gun control, public financing of campaigns, and wiretapping."

What's unique about Obama and his candidacy is that almost none of the stuff the press throws at him sticks. Nor is the press alone in its inability to stick him. Hillary Clinton hurled rocks, knives, and acid at her rival even before the primaries (see this Jake Tapper piece from ABC News) and later upped the ante in desperation. She claimed that he was unprepared to serve as commander in chief and accused him of insulting gun owners and the religiously faithful. The eleventh-hour tactics may have won Clinton votes, but they failed to undermine Obama.

You could call Obama the Teflon-coated candidate, but this would miss the fact that his slickness goes all the way to the core. What has gone unexplored until now is this: How did Barack Obama achieve superslipperiness without becoming greasy?

In a 2006 profile in Men's Vogue by Jacob Weisberg, Obama acknowledges that every politician, himself included, has "some of that reptilian side to him." To win public office, a politician must powder his scales, trim his nails, and tame his swinging tail. It's called persona-building, and everybody does it. But just compare the persona Obama crafted to the one crafted by Mitt Romney. The Romney bodysuit is all snapping teeth and empty glad-handing. Obama, on the other hand, projects a remarkably appealing and authentic character. He's the koala of iguanas.

Whether by design or by chance (I'd say design), Obama took possession of this public face with the publication of his confessional memoir, Dreams From My Father, in 1995. Written before he ran for office, Dreams shrewdly moots his youthful drug use as "some bad decisions." When the New York Times rereported this period in Obama's life for a Feb. 9, 2008, piece, it probably expected to uncover spectacular dope-crazed tales. Instead it found evidence that Obama's memoir might have exaggerated his drug use. An Obama friend—now a fundraiser—tells the Times Obama was somewhat of a reticent drug user: "If someone passed him a joint, he would take a drag. We'd smoke or have one extra beer, but he would not even do as much as other people on campus. … He was not even close to being a party animal."

Obama's poise and discipline allow him to resist whatever bait the press and politicians dangle in front of him. When he does address scandalous material, he generally does so to his advantage. In June, when the Web and cable news advanced false rumors that Michelle Obama had called white people "whitey" on a videotape, Obama squelched the gossip with a denial and, as Ben Smith of Politico reported, put the press on notice by questioning the appropriateness of the question. Smears undermine a politician only when they appeal to voters' pre-existing idea of what sort of person a politician is. Seeing as the pre-existing idea of Obama is so positive, the Obama-haters have had trouble portraying him either as a literal bomb thrower, like William Ayers, or a figurative one, like the Rev. Wright. When the smear artists dress him up as a radical or as "madrassa"-educated, the ploys only backfire.

Like Chief Justice John Roberts, Obama has constructed a professional résumé low on embarrassing material. In this regard, Obama's lack of legislative accomplishment is a genuine achievement. They can't hit you where they can't find you, which is a gambit that worked for Roberts in his confirmation hearings. Separating the real Obama from the persona is probably impossible, as Ryan Lizza hints in The New Yorker, where he writes:

[Obama] campaigns on reforming a broken political process, yet he has always played politics by the rules as they exist, not as he would like them to exist. He runs as an outsider, but he has succeeded by mastering the inside game. He is ideologically a man of the left, but at times he has been genuinely deferential to core philosophical insights of the right.

Obama has maintained his persona by keeping the campaign press corps on a starvation diet. Yet such a strategy becomes self-limiting as the race for the White House narrows down to a two-person contest. Voters in the general election, as opposed to the primaries, tend to want more answers and fewer gestures.

At some point he's going to have to start answering questions, an observation that shouldn't come as a surprise to Obama's chief strategist, former journalist David Axelrod. Last week, Slate's John Dickerson excoriated Obama for his double-talking ways in an interview with NBC's Brian Williams about his position on the surge. Writes Dickerson: "[H]e suggested that he'd always said the surge would decrease violence in Iraq. That's not just spin. It's not true."

It's one thing to stiff-arm the press, but quite another to lie. Lying isn't something that becomes Obama—or his persona.

******

Throw your correspondence at slate.pressbox@gmail.com and see if it sticks. (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 persona in the subject head of an e-mail message and send it to slate.pressbox@gmail.com.

This week saw the start of jury selection in the first military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay. After six years of waiting, Osama Bin Laden's alleged chauffer, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, went on trial for dangerous acts of driving in furtherance of terrorism. Whether he is convicted or acquitted, Hamdan may live out the rest of his lifetime at Guantanamo. The tribunal probably won't do much to improve the Bush administration's reputation for making up the rules on the run in the legal war on terror. The summer of 2008 offers up a bumper crop of great new reads about law and the war. Will you sleep better or worse at night after reading this stuff? Probably not at all if your last name is Hamdan.

For starters, Howard J. Bashman's law blog How Appealing is as close as you'll get to an up-to-the-minute legal newsfeed. Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog knows more about the ongoing legal happenings at and around Guantanamo Bay than just about anyone. So do the folks at the Brennan Center and the ACLU. So many outstanding bloggers have been on the front lines for years, drilling down to get the real story on FISA violations, torture, the "state secrets" privilege, national security letters, secret renditions, Patriot Act abuses and various other executive branch extracurriculars. Some of the very best include Scott Horton's wonderful No Comment; Jack Balkin's indispensible Balkinization; and TalkingPointsMemo's TPMMuckraker on the U.S. attorney scandal, fun with Alberto Gonzales, and torture policy. Particularly in light of the new FISA legislation, Salon's Glenn Greenwald and group blog Firedoglake are not to be missed.

One of the best ways to keep up on what's happening at Guantanamo Bay is through the foreign papers. Canada's Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star write about Omar Khadr, the young Canadian who's been detained at the camp since he was 15, almost daily. While the happenings at Gitmo rarely break the A section of U.S. papers, the British, French, and Australians are always on top of them.

Some of the best books about how the Bush administration has moved the legal goalposts in the past few years are some of the earliest. Slate contributor Jack Goldsmith's The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration is almost two years old but still invaluable, as is Charlie Savage's Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency. A crop of newer books about torture include Philippe Sands' Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values. Sands argues that the change in torture law came from the highest levels of the Bush administration and not just a few bad apples at the bottom. Darius Rejali's chilling Torture and Democracy is a sort of taxonomy of torture. Jane Mayer's forthcoming The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals offers another behind-the scenes look at the U.S. interrogation policy and the price we've paid by resorting to torture. Each of these new offerings, plus a handful of books from former detainees, remind us of the social and moral costs of hasty decisions to cheat on long-settled humanitarian norms.

Speaking of cheating, another must-read for those curious about the back story in the legal war on terror is Eric Lichtblau's The Remaking of American Justice. Lichtblau won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the secret NSA wiretapping program. His book is a riveting account of the Bush administration's various steps and missteps in chasing down terrorists.

Reading all of these books and blogs together starts to illuminate the connections between the black hole we've built at Guantanamo Bay, the black hole that is our torture policy, and the black hole that is our eavesdropping law. We may not have all the answers yet, but we can begin to understand how we arrived at this point: through a process of secret legal memos, decision-making by a tiny cadre of powerful insiders who could accept no answers but their own, and denials and finger pointing in lieu of legal course-correction.

That's why I want to close with a thoughtful new book by Ben Wittes called Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in the Age of Terror. It is one the first serious attempts to bridge the gap between fear-mongers on the right who insist that the legal nips and tucks of the past seven years have saved lives and the flamethrowers on the left who see every move by the Bush administration as a power grab. Ultimately, Wittes blames a supine Congress for its failure to play any meaningful role in crafting modern solutions to the war against terrorism. You may not agree with him on the merits of U.S. detention, surveillance, or interrogation policies. But Wittes is right to suggest that the time to devise a thoughtful and rational new architecture for a new legal era is before the next terror attack and not in the panicky aftermath.

At some point in the next four months, Spain will likely become the first country to extend legal rights to great apes, thereby protecting gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees, and bonobos from abuse, torture, and unnatural death. The measure will, in practical terms, prevent the inhumane confinement of and testing on great apes, which are singled out among nonhuman animals for their cognitive abilities—on par, it is believed, with a 1-year-old human child. But there's another ape that might be just as sensitive and intelligent as the great apes, and yet the Spaniards are prepared to offer it no special rights or protections. No one stands up for the gibbon.

There are five types of ape. Four are considered "great." The fifth is the gibbon. Greatness in apes is largely a matter of size, and the gibbon, maxing out at 30 pounds, doesn't make the cut. To primatologists, it is known instead as the "lesser ape"—or, as its partisans prefer, the "small ape." As a result, it's overlooked in everything from environmental protections to fantasies of simian domination. (There are no slave-driving gibbons in Planet of the Apes.) Humans have resolved to protect our evolutionary family, yet we continue to ignore one of our closest cousins.

Gibbons may be small, but they bear all the requisites of apehood: large brains, no tail, and rotary shoulder blades. Like orangutans, they populate Southeast Asia. They're typically black with white markings around their faces, as if dressed in furry habits. Swinging through the treetops at speeds up to 35 miles per hour, they look a bit like flying nuns.

The gibbon's arboreal lifestyle is unique among the apes and, along with its small size, often leads people to mistake it for a monkey. (An ape, of course, is not a monkey: Both are primates, but they're not in the same superfamily.) Peter Gabriel, for example: His music video for "Shock the Monkey" stars a gibbon. The creators of the popular YouTube video "Monkey Death Wish" similarly misattribute their leading role. And a child swinging from monkey bars emulates the brachiation of a gibbon more than the movement of any monkey. They should be called gibbon bars.

The laboratory turns out to be no better than the playground. "I think quite often some researchers just look at gibbons like monkeys," says Alan Mootnick, who runs the Gibbon Conservation Center in California. That's one reason so little is known about them, even though they're more common and diverse than any other ape, with four genera and at least a dozen species. (Seventy percent of all apes are gibbons.) Louis Leakey, the famous paleoanthropologist, encouraged Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birute Mary Galdikas to study chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, respectively, but never dispatched an emissary to the gibbons. The practical difficulties faced by primatologists in the field also contribute to our ignorance: Gibbons live in small families in remote tropical canopies, while great apes like the chimpanzees and gorillas stay in large, terrestrial groups.

The scarcity of scientific knowledge about gibbons hampers advocacy on their behalf. In 1993, Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer co-founded the Great Ape Project, a nonprofit animal-rights organization based in Seattle. Singer's group champions the principle enshrined in the new Spanish law—extension of human rights to great apes on account of their self-awareness, sense of the future, and ability to use human language. Does the Great Ape Project leave out gibbons because they don't possess these special abilities? No. According to Singer, it's because "we just didn't know enough about them."

Scientists haven't proven gibbons deficient so much as they haven't bothered looking. The few who have relate encouraging results: Thomas Geissmann, director of the Gibbon Research Lab in Zurich, has observed mirror self-recognition in gibbons, which is generally regarded as a sign of self-awareness; others have observed tool use by gibbons in captivity. Alan Mootnick says he's met a gibbon capable of rudimentary sign language and suggests that gibbons may have more difficulty signing than the great apes because of the unique morphology of their hands—which are equal in length to human hands but half the width. However, all of these observations are anecdotal; high-level cognition in gibbons has not been systematically studied.

Meanwhile, there are whole institutes devoted to the study of the cognitive abilities of great apes. And many of their vaunted discoveries have come only after long and arduous work. For example, gorillas are often celebrated for their ability to recognize themselves in a mirror, but the earliest studies found just the opposite. Scientists began testing for self-recognition in gorillas in 1981 but did not find it until 10 years later. Koko, a research animal in California (and an alleged nipple fetishist), was able to identify her reflection. But she was a very special case: Humans had reared her since the age of 1. Some researchers are skeptical of mirror self-recognition in gorillas, but they have no problem rationalizing its absence, suggesting that the gorillas' aversion to eye contact might prevent them from looking in the mirror long enough. Gibbons have not had the benefit of such attention and large sample sizes. "In the initial studies, they just tested one or two gibbons and said, 'Oh yeah, they failed,' " says Geissmann.

Tests of animal self-recognition sometimes seem more like exercises in human self-recognition: Gorillas appear humanlike, so we test them repeatedly until we can prove they have some form of consciousness. Gibbons, on the other hand, look like monkeys, so we're inclined to dismiss them as "lesser" without a second thought. While it's true that the great apes are more closely related to each other than they are to gibbons, it's also true that the gibbons are more closely related to the great apes, including humans, than they are to any monkey.

As a result, interesting aspects of gibbon ethology have long been ignored. The lesser apes, for example, are the only apes besides humans to live in monogamous couples. Among the apes, their songs are second in acoustic sophistication only to humans', and they walk bipedally when grounded, unlike the great (nonhuman) apes. But it's hard to generate interest in the lesser apes, especially given that no charismatic human researcher—à la Goodall or Fossey—has ever taken up their cause.

What makes this particularly frustrating is that the most endangered species of ape isn't a gorilla, chimpanzee, or orangutan. Certain types of gibbon are in far greater trouble. The orangutan may be the beneficiary of a high-profile conservation campaign in Indonesia, but it's not as rare as the Javan gibbon. In four decades, the western hoolock gibbon has declined in number from 100,000 to just 5,000. The Hainan gibbon, of which only 20 or so individuals survive, is perhaps the most endangered primate in the world. The eastern black-gibbon population in Vietnam has similarly dwindled to a few dozen.

Such species are unlikely to survive as long as humans treat gibbons as second-rate apes. Recently, there have been some encouraging signs: Legislation introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives would prohibit laboratory testing on all apes, including gibbons. This wouldn't have much of a direct impact since small apes are rarely studied in labs. But it would have symbolic importance. The petite, tree-dwelling gibbon may not be as easily anthropomorphized as its great ape cousins, but that's no reason to ignore it. In protecting the great apes, the Spaniards overlooked at least one vital human right: Freedom from discrimination based on appearance or lifestyle.

Most of the time, you can get along fine without in-car GPS. Your daily commute is marked by well-worn drudgery: You drive to work, to the store, and back home, rote trips for which you don't need help. And nowadays when you are lost, your phone can probably assist you. So it's no surprise that GPS firms are suffering. This week, shares of Garmin, the once-high-flying market leader, plummeted after the company lowered its revenue expectations for the year and delayed the launch of its long-promised smartphone, a device investors hoped would unshackle Garmin's fortunes from the apparently sinking GPS market.

But a few months ago, a Silicon Valley start-up called Dash Navigation put out a product that could well revive the sagging business. The Dash Express navigator packs a killer feature that other GPS systems lack: the Internet. Network connectivity powers Dash's primary attraction: what the company calls "crowd-sourced traffic." As you traverse your favored metropolis, the Dash Express anonymously transmits information about its location and speed to a central server. Every other Dash driver does the same. Using this data, Dash can paint a stunningly accurate picture of traffic patterns. Have you ever been stuck in a jam and wished there were some way to look two miles ahead to see whether things are still ugly? Dash essentially does that for you.

I've been testing the Dash Express for a week, and I'm floored. One morning rush hour this week, I drove from my home in San Francisco to Stanford University. At the start of the 30-mile trip, I plugged my destination into the Dash Express. The device gave me three possible routes, each with an estimated travel time based on traffic conditions gleaned from other drivers currently moving down those roads. I chose what Dash said was the fastest route, a straight shot down the congested 101 freeway. The device guessed I would arrive at Stanford in 59 minutes. Sixty-two minutes later, I was there. Along the way, the Dash predicted nearly every hurdle along my trip with eerie accuracy: Traffic slowed down just where the color-coded map showed yellow, orange, and red roads, and speeds picked up again exactly where Dash's map was painted green.

The Dash isn't perfect—its navigator-lady voice-over has terrible pronunciation skills, and its software and hardware isn't nearly as sleek as those in Garmin's GPSes. Plus, at $299 for the device and at least $10 a month for traffic service (after three free months), the Dash Express isn't cheap. Yet its ability to predict traffic and, most important, guide you around congestion makes it a must-have for commuters. Dash transforms the GPS navigator from something most people rarely need into one of those revolutionary applications—think TiVo, the iPod, Napster—that you can't imagine doing without once you've tried it.

It's true that traditional GPS devices can be souped up with traffic-alert services. (Most receive traffic data through an FM-radio receiver; Dash connects to the Internet through open WiFi and cellular connections.) You can also get a picture of road conditions by consulting online maps; the iPhone's Google Maps application colors many highways in red, yellow, or green, for instance.

But the Dash's system is much, much better. First, it's more accurate. To predict conditions on your route, traditional GPS devices and Web maps rely mainly on what traffic scholars call "incident data." These systems get updates about car crashes, road construction, and other slowdowns and then estimate how fast traffic might flow around the holdups. Some systems add information from sensors implanted in major roads. But sensors are also imprecise. In traffic jams, cars move in a stop-and-go pattern—and if the sensor happens to be located just under the "go" portion of the jam, your GPS device will think the road is much kinder than it really is.

Dash also receives incident and sensor data, but it adjusts all its numbers with on-the-ground conditions fed back by real drivers. The system uses this info both to plan your route and to suggest changes as you're driving. If Dash senses a sudden slow-down ahead, it will ask whether you'd like to be routed around it. Sometimes, it will even guide you off the freeway and through surface streets, for which Dash also knows traffic conditions. (The system tracks traffic patterns over time, compiling a database of how quickly all roads move during 672 discrete intervals during the day.)

There's an obvious chicken-and-egg problem with Dash's system. In order to get good traffic data, Dash needs a lot of drivers—but to get a lot of drivers, it needs good traffic data. The company argues, though, that because many drivers follow similar routes, it can achieve a critical mass relatively quickly. In an average-sized metro area, Dash needs only a few hundred drivers before most of its data is coming from the crowd, says Mark Williamson, Dash's director of product marketing. In the largest areas—New York City and Los Angeles—Dash needs only a few thousand devices to get a good picture of traffic. (Dash won't say how many drivers it has in each of those areas.)

Dash's Internet connectivity helps with things besides traffic. Traditional GPS devices ship with databases of millions of shops and attractions across the country. Like a printed phone book, these databases go out of date: If you bought your GPS a couple of months ago, for instance, it will think there are 600 more Starbucks in the country than there now are. Over time, as roads shut down and new developments spring up, maps go stale. In order to refresh your device, you've got to buy an update disk.

Dash updates itself automatically with the latest maps, and it offers something an order of magnitude more useful than a built-in database of attractions: a Web-based search engine. When you look for nearby shops in Dash, you're really searching Yahoo, which already knows about all those shuttered Starbucks.

For all this great functionality, Dash faces a major vulnerability as a business proposition: Many of its features can be replicated on smartphones. Technically, the iPhone can do everything Dash does—it's got the Internet, GPS, and a touch-screen interface. It's possible to imagine another start-up building a Dash clone on Apple's device or on any other advanced phone. Considering how many of them are out there, the crowd-sourced traffic information generated by the iPhone would put Dash's data to shame.

Williamson told me that the company is keenly aware of that possibility. For now, he says, Dash is offering its service on only its own GPS device, but he did mention the possibility of porting it to other gadgets, like the iPhone.

In the meantime, the traffic data that Dash learns from its drivers could also prove valuable. The licensing possibilities look lucrative—Google, Microsoft, and Apple might all want better traffic data for their maps products. UPS, FedEx, and the Postal Service could probably also do with a clearer picture of road conditions. And Dash might even be able to help Starbucks out. At a recent tech conference, a Dash executive pointed out that Dash knows where people drive and knows where people search for coffee. That means it knows exactly where Starbucks should open up its next location in Arkansas: Highway 40, between Little Rock and Memphis, Tenn.

In retrospect, I was a fool to mention Barack Obama in a place where I could get body-slammed. But I was well into my first hour as an avatar in Google Lively, the search company's frustrating and dull new virtual world, and I was bored. I'd already explored the room designed to resemble Google's gleeful corporate headquarters; conversation there never progressed beyond "Hello," "How old are you?" and "What should we do here?" Now I was in a room that looked like a high-school science lab. It was a rough scene. A guy shaped like a bobble-headed baby was punching and kicking the female avatars, and another dude kept blowing things up. "So, have you guys been following Obama's overseas trip?" I ventured, to break the ice. "Didn't catch it," one woman said. Then the baby dropped a huge anvil on me, and that was that.

Digital worlds have won a great deal of press attention—the Sims Online made the cover of Time when it launched in 2002, and there have been perhaps billions of news stories about Second Life. Despite all this hubbub, none of these virtual worlds has managed to gain mainstream appeal. The Sims Online never took off; Electronic Arts, its parent company, plans to shut it down at the end of this month.

Google's new service, which launched in early July, looks like it will fit perfectly in a field littered with failures. Lively is still rough, but even in a more complete form, it seems unlikely to take virtual worlds mainstream. The service is freighted with technical problems: I've had trouble using it for more than an hour without seeing it crash, and even when it works, it's terribly slow (also, it runs only on Windows machines). But tech difficulties are the least of Lively's troubles. Its oppressive dreariness is more worrisome.

Imagine an amusement park that lacks any rides, games, entertainers, and junk food. That's Lively: The place looks fun, and you're sure to spend a few minutes exploring its pretty 3-D landscapes, but then what? Your only option is to talk to people—and that's where the trouble begins. Google's avatar-designing tools are not yet as sophisticated as those in other online worlds, so everyone in Lively looks pretty similar. You find yourself repeating the same questions to every avatar: How old are you? Where do you live? Oh, that's interesting, and what do you do? Fascinating, tell me more.

Some people may find this a thrilling use of their time; I kept switching back to my e-mail, hoping I'd received some interesting spam. And I wasn't alone. Like prisoners in solitary, everyone here keeps lamenting that they've got nothing to do. It's no wonder people turn to violence. Among the actions Lively allows you to perform on others are body-slam, kick, kung fu, punch, slap, and squash. True, there's also kiss and hug, but boredom doesn't inspire generosity of spirit. Lifting another avatar and throwing him to the ground produces a thrilling animated sequence, and for an instant, at least, you're having fun.

It's entirely possible that in my trips to Lively, I simply visited the wrong places. Unlike Second Life, Lively isn't technically a virtual world—it's more like a virtual apartment complex, a common architecture that connects a group of unrelated "rooms." In Second Life, you're allowed to interact with pretty much everyone else who's using the software. In Lively, your conversations are limited to the other people nearby; anyone else using the software is as good as dead to you.

Google's setup is a clever attempt to widen Lively's appeal. Because different groups of people can hang out in different rooms, Lively could become all things to all people: The jocks can party in one room while the nerds study in another, neither troubling the other. Lively works through a Web interface, and each room can be "embedded" on a Web site as easily as a YouTube clip. Google imagines that sites will use Lively to add a three-dimensional chat space to their existing communities. Lefty politicos might hang out in a Lively room embedded on Daily Kos, say, while those on the right congregate in a room on Red State. Perhaps in those niche-interest rooms, conversation would flow more easily than in rooms on Lively's most-popular list. There's always the chance, though, that a griefer will stop in and drop anvils on everyone.

Virtual worlds haven't yet taken off for the simple reason that talking to strangers in a 3-D space is not for everyone. Multiplayer games like World of Warcraft have a built-in advantage here; if people get sick of each other, they can always just play the game. Purely social worlds like Second Life, places that lack any obvious elements of gameplay, are known to have a large "churn rate"—the vast majority of people who try them out don't take up permanent residence.

Second Life, which garnered tremendous enthusiasm when worldwide brands and political campaigns began advertising in it, has had little luck getting users to stick around. Only 500,000 people regularly log in, and when you land there, it's easy to see why. The service seems to offer nothing more than the chance to do what you normally do on the Internet—IM, e-mail, buy stuff—through a harder-to-use interface. The people who take to this tend to be those comfortable with typed banter, people interested in the aesthetics of online space, people looking for cybersex. The one positive note: Second Life has been held up as a bastion for disabled people, who use it as a way to fantasize about life in other bodies.

For the rest of us, virtual worlds can seem pointless. The other day I was in a crowded Lively room, surrounded by avatars who were dancing, punching, screaming, and laughing. "Nothing to do here, I don't think I'll come back," one guy announced to the room. Finally, I'd made a real connection.

The great joke about the original movies on Lifetime, the grande dame of gynocentric cable channels, is that they present unvarying visions of women as victims—pap weepies about cancer and kidnapping or plump melodramas about awful men. No one has made this joke better than the satirists at the Onion, which once reported that wife murderer Scott Peterson was "issued a Lifetime Channel sentence during the penalty phase of his trial" and elsewhere imagined such fare as the "Emotional Manipulation Hour" and "The Abused Wife Who Didn't Mean To Kill Her Policeman Husband in Self-Defense." But the times, they do change, and the network's new slate of Saturday-night movies sees those melodramas getting a moderate makeover. Bright and loud and sort of peewee post-feminist, this is your daughter's Lifetime, belatedly curtsying to the culture of Us Weekly, girl power, and hooking up.

We begin with Fab Five: The Texas Cheerleader Scandal (Saturday at 9 p.m. ET), based on some nonsense that transpired two years ago in the town of McKinney. The new cheerleading coach found herself outgunned by the squad's most imperious clique, students more powerful than administrators. They misbehaved, got drunk rather ostentatiously, and flouted both school rules and "the cheerleader constitution." The coach, daring to challenge them, got fired.

The scenario would seem to call for a John Waters kind of treatment, with tons of fun sadism and salacious kitsch, and Lifetime, within its sappy limits, delivers this—a corruption of the uplifting-teacher plot. The outfits pop with outré color, and the girl-on-girl violence is quite lively. Tatum O'Neal, having developed into a fine camp figure, sells her performance as a cheerleader mom (also the school's principal) whose main concern about her daughter's boozing is that there's enough tequila left over for her to make a decent margarita. Everyone learns an important lesson in the end, of course, but the naughtiness presented along the way intends to thrill.

The same dynamic is at work in True Confessions of a Hollywood Starlet (Aug. 9 at 9 p.m. ET), which stars young pop singer Joanna "JoJo" Levesque. It cannot be a coincidence that Levesque's pinchable cheeks and squeezable chin closely resemble those of Lindsay Dee Lohan. Her character, Morgan Carter, is a hard-drinking movie star. In lieu of a proper stint in rehab, Morgan takes refuge in Fort Wayne, Ind., which certainly does sound sobering. Morgan's guardian is her aunt Trudy, played by Valerie Bertinelli, who, with Meredith Baxter and Judith Light, was a mainstay of the old Lifetime and thus serves as a link between the network of old and this odd new thing, which simultaneously celebrates glamour and valorizes us regular folk.

The premise is that Morgan slips into a public high school incognito, assuming an identity as just your average transfer student and keeping up the ruse well into the film's second act. That she's able to pull this off is an affront to the tabloid literacy of kids today, but whatever; we get to cock our heads at the sight of a Lohan figure enduring the taunts of mean girls and to play along as she develops a crush on a thoughtful young man (She: "You don't watch reality TV?!" He: "No, I read."). Just below the surface of Hollywood Starlet, the only thing below the surface, is the idea that a glossy kind of victimology—one that tweens and twentysomethings might want a vicarious jolt of—is ascendant. Morgan has been abused by the entertainment industry. Tune in!

And how do you follow that? With a flick that seems to be titled Confessions of Go-Go Girl (Aug. 16 at 9 p.m. ET). Are these confessions, in contrast to the starlet's, not true? Absolutely, given their utter implausibility. The setting is Chicago—that urban atrium in the heartland—where lives Jane McCoy. Oh, the prim plainness of that Jane! She's graduated from college to find herself bored with the upper-bourgeois life determined for her by her prissy parents and ratified by her preppy boyfriend. She chucks law school on the eve of matriculation because she needs to express herself and so enrolls in acting school, supporting herself with a job at a department store. But spritzing perfume does not pay the bills. Lugging her pragmatic backpack around campus one day, Jane meets a wanton-eyed minx with a 10-gallon handbag. This is Angela, who is hustling the head-shot skills of her no-good photographer boyfriend and who ultimately explains that Jane can earn great gobs of dough by working the stage at a "go-go club." She doesn't even have to take off her underthings at this establishment! Doing so is forbidden, moreover!

Jane yields to temptation, choosing "Dylan" (with its touch of the rebel poetess) as her stage name, doffing and donning outfits evocative of schoolgirls and farmers' daughters (for that whiff of spoiled innocence). It is not my place to inform anyone's unworldly wife of what adult entertainment consists of, but c'mon. Nowadays, go-go dancing exists as an entr'acte at burlesque shows and as an amusement at nightclubs. If there exist venues where men give scads of cash and pledges of ardor to female performers who do not remove their brassieres, then I would like to know where they are, so as not to lurch erroneously into one.

The concept is perplexing enough to inspire the thought that "go-go girl" here stands as a euphemistic metaphor for more plausibly lucrative types of sex work. But then you get to the scene where the heroine buys an inappropriately racy dress to wear to her brother's wedding, and the possibility slinks into view that Jane/Dylan's situation speaks to the generic nightmare of parents that their little girls will become fast women—and also to the generic daydream of every well-raised daughter of looser inhibitions and tighter skirts. Go-Go Girl, in its synthesis of cautionary tale and very soft-core porn, represents the essence of the new Lifetime movie. It's a guilty pleasure with a traditional sense of shame.

Slate political correspondent John Dickerson was online on Washingtonpost.com to chat with readers about John McCain's campaign and how the candidate should handle President Bush at the Republican convention. An unedited transcript of the chat follows.

John Dickerson: Hello everyone. Lots happening in politics today. I look forward to your questions.

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Alexandria, VA: Thanks very much for attending this chat.

With the initial disclosure that I am an avid Dem, may I ask whether you think there would be value for the Dem spokespeople to entirely stop referring to McCain, and instead adopt the style of "Bush-McCain," as in "the Bush-McCain position," the "Bush-McCain platform," etc? And would it be harmful to Obama to start doing that himself as well?

John Dickerson: Very good question. It's already happening. The Obama campaign has been doing this for some time and they'll keep at it until December. Clinton did this in 96 tying Dole to Newt Gingrich.

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San Diego, CA: How long until we see a 527 ad with the creepy McCain-Bush hug photo?

John Dickerson: You don't have to wait for a 527. The hug (and the kiss) were in Obama's first ad hitting McCain.

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New York: John, hope you can take an early question. I agree Bush is unpopular, but don't the GOP stalwarts at the convention comprise that 20 percent who still like him? Thanks.

John Dickerson: Yes the convention folk still like Bush (although at 65% his approval among Republicans is low). So McCain has to be careful. He can't look like he's casting Bush aside. There will be lots of talk of his effective response to 9/11 and then they'll try to talk about popular Republicans like Arnold.

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Washington, D.C.: Will Slate be doing an Obama/Carter thing like this? When Carter was president...unemployment was double what it is now and we were literally being take hostage all over the world. Seems like a more astute comparison, considering their policy similarities.

John Dickerson: Nice try! There may be similarities but we're talking about a nearly 30 year gap. As a political matter the link to Bush is rather obvious and therefore of greater peril to the nominee whose party leader is at very low approval ratings. That isn't to say McCain didn't try to link Obama to Carter, but he ultimately dropped the idea because it didn't work.

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Kingston, Ontario: Mr. Dickerson: No matter what McCain's original intentions were, it seems he is being forced back into the standard GOP playbook. The opponent cannot be trusted because 1. he is un-American, too concerned about foreigners, etc. 2. he is a defeatist, doesn't support the troops, etc. 3. he will raise taxes, believes that the government should be involved in the economy, etc. These charges have been highly successful in the past. Is there any reason to think they won't be again? Regardless of the actual facts of the case, they cater to an entrenched mindset.

John Dickerson: You've got a very good point. They might work again (though Obama's offbase charge about racism dilutes his more reasonable claims that McCain has been making a series of baseless claims recently). But I wrote last week why this is a problem for McCain: 1. His brand was supposed to be more high-minded. Let's see if independents bolt because of this new harsher attack. 2. People are sick of this kind of campaigning. McCain will be seen as the slasher and people will forget Obama took the first swings (which he did).

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Northvillle, N.Y. : Okay, an obvious question, but I'm sure others want to know: what does he do with the real president, Cheney? Prime time? Middle of the night? Other?

John Dickerson: I don't know what they do with Cheney. McCain's not a big fan of Cheney's so maybe they send him hunting.

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Champaign, Ill.: Hello Mr. Dickerson. Thank you for your great pieces at Slate. The recent polls baffle me. What effect can we expect the conventions to have on the candidates' (as of late, seemingly stagnant) popularity? Will they both receive bumps and cancel each other out, remaining strangely close in the national polls? Or will the visual difference between McCain's convention troubles that you describe here and Obama's stadium-sized victory speech lead to starker differences in popularity?

John Dickerson: The polls baffle me too. They should. It's too early. People are paying attention but not making up their minds much, I don't think. In a lot of ways the polls haven't moved or if they have the movement has been somewhat meaningless—statistical blips or the result of low information voters picking up on the latest ad they've seen. A lot of people out there are undecided. Having said that, and adding normal pound of salt: Some things I'd like to know the answer to. The swing of independents to McCain in FL? Is that about drilling? Also, 17% of D's say they'd vote for McCain only 9% of R'say they'd pick Obama. I thought McCain had the base problem.

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New York: Bush is accused of damaging the Republican Party and diminishing its chances at gaining either the presidency or a majority in congress, but I have the feeling that he really doesn't care—and that he never really did care. If this is true, what does he care about? Only his legacy? Or did 9/11 completely obscure any other issues/beliefs for him? Thanks.

John Dickerson: I think he does care about his party and his legacy. He thinks his legacy will be peace in the Middle East through a free Iraq. He thinks he'll be proven right after he's dead. On politics though, he used to talk about an entire generation of people who would go into the Republican Party saying " I am a Bush Republican," the way they did with Reagan.

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St. Paul, Minn.: Hi John—Thank you for taking questions today. It's always good to hear your insights on Washington Week as well. My question is a little broader than the convention, but somewhat related. It's clear that Sen. McCain, despite promises to do things differently than Bush, is adopting Bush's playbook in terms of the campaign so far (going after Sen. Obama on character issues—witness the "skipped visit with the troops" ad, the "Obama is too famous to be president" ad). Is it your sense that, this time around, these tactics are not being well-received? And even if that's the case, might they still work well enough to hurt Obama?

John Dickerson: Hey, thanks for watching Washington Week, the show in which I somehow can't talk at less than 100 mph. I think these attacks do damage to a candidate with what we might call a nontraditional résumé, but McCain has a big downside I think. He can't talk about Straight Talk when he's been running the ads he has.

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St. Paul, Minn.: John,

Love your reporting keep up the good work!!

Do you think it's possible President Bush won't even speak at the convention? His approval ratings are as low as Nixon's, but didn't have the "benefits of resigning" (as you mentioned in your piece). Could these ratings cause McCain's campaign to ask him not to show? What do they have to lose, especially after the bad summer McCain has had thus far? If Bush does speak at the convention, will this be the first time a sitting President will significantly hurt his own party's nominee by giving a convention speech? Looking forward to my hometown being the center of the storm.

John Dickerson: He can't duck out now. It's on the schedule and the WH has announced it.

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Crestwood, N.Y.: Thanks for the article; I was wondering about this myself. Since the attendees are mostly big fans of Bush, I would think he'll give a valedictory talking about how he saved us from another attack and made the tough choices, blah blah blah with no apologies. A Giuliani speech; 911 all the time. Anything else would be hugely out of character—can't you hear "My Way" playing in the background already? My question is how the nets and cable will cover it, or if they will cover it at all live.

Also, has McCain taken on so many Rove people, neocons and federalistas at this point that the strategy regarding the Bush appearance won't necessarily be that of the candidate, but one made by loyal Bushies? The guy currently calling the shots, who is behind all these crypto-racist ads, is from the Rove family; the former McCain advisers have been shunted to the side.

John Dickerson: I haven't seen a single ad that fits this description or comes close.

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NYC: Bush had several heavy handed domestic policies that mostly failed (Social Security, immigration). How much do you think it hurts McCain that he's more of the same?

John Dickerson: Interesting question. SS was a huge failure. People didn't want it. For a time, the country did want "comprehensive immigration reform." McCain is all over the map on these two issues. He was for SS reform and has talked about it recently (getting in trouble with his base for appearing to countenance a payroll tax increase). On immigration he's moved around some but still ticks off huge portions of his base because he supported what they called amnesty.

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Re: Bush's 20 percent: His base, his supporters will be there. Will we see a convention dedicated to them or to the TV audience that checks in for about 5 minutes a night, 3 times during the week?

John Dickerson: The convention is all about the TV audience.

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St. Louis: Is the Presidential race actually closer than the polls indicate. The reason I ask is I work as a door greeter at a large "box" store, and the only Obama campaign buttons I see are worn only by African-Americans. Seems like even "yellow dog" white Democrats are hesitant about their support. Or, is my impression wrong?

John Dickerson: Hard to say where the race is. It's a horrible year for Republicans so McCain should be in worse shape. But people still have doubts about Obama. McCain is trying to increase those doubts. Here's the question though: when people pay attention to Obama will they buy in. That's what happened in many places during the primaries. He was stuck in July 07 and then he took off—slowly up up he went.

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Pure Cynicism: Do something that temporarily worked for Clinton when the Lewinsky stuff was supposed to be first breaking: Find a new country to bomb, so he gets called away from the convention. How's that work out?

John Dickerson: My former colleague Hugh Sidey used to joke, quoting a Johnson adviser during Vietnam: "we need a new war." Not a joke any more...

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Helena, Montana: President Bush has recently given us numerous glimpses of his sense of rhythm and tap dancing skills. I suggest giving him a 4 or 5 minute slot (and a company of backup dancers) to star in a well-produced number ala the Tony or Grammy Award shows.

This could be construed as below the US President's dignity, but it would be a fitting swan song... and party conventions are all about theatre these days anyway.

John Dickerson: There might be dancers outside the arena during the speech to distract from it.

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Alexandria, Va.: I would just like to comment that it would be a mistake to disrespect the President in any way. Even though his approval ratings are very low, there is a core group of people that really love President Bush. It's amazing to me how high his approval ratings were after 9/11, but then when having to make the tough decisions to prevent another 9/11 many people change their opinions completely. This is the price you pay by not being a poll driven President. Unlike Bill Clinton who didn't kill Bin laden when he had the chance for fear or what the rest of the world would think.

John Dickerson: I don't think there will be any disrespect. I just think the McCain camp will do everything short of putting an enormous book on page and actually having the candidate turn the page.

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Re: St. Louis: The example of "buy-in" I've seen bandied about is the 1980 example. Carter and Reagan were even going into the debates, where neither side really 'won' but people overcame their doubts. So far, it seems like people lean Obama but have doubts rather than are split between Obama-McCain.

John Dickerson: Yes, this example has gotten lots of play. Makes sense to me except for the fact that these historical analogies usually have one huge flaw which we don't discover until after the analogy breaks down. The alternative is Ford/Carter. Carter was up by a big margin but then Ford chipped away and only barely lost because people were worried about Carter's untestedness.

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Green Bay, Wisc.: It seems that the latest Republican scandals (Sen. Stevens, in particular, but also the embezzlement mess with the Republican committees, etc.) have been breaking in time to affect the convention. How will they avoid the glow of indictments and inquiries affecting their big show?

John Dickerson: By holding it in the dark? It's a problem. The Republican brand is a mess.

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Ashland, Mo: The most popular regular TV program is American Idol, which is seen by less than 15 percent of the population. Even fewer people watch the evening news. Newspaper circulation is declining. Few people read many books. This isn't the '60s (or even '70s or '80s) any more. Is it possible political reporters and politicians assume more people are paying attention than actually are? That, in fact, politically-oriented people now live in a bubble or echo chamber instead of the "real" world?

John Dickerson: You can never go wrong questioning whether we all live in a bubble. I think people aren't paying much attestation-- certainly not now. But I think conventions play out in local papers and on the national news in a way the normal day to day doesn't play out. So I think conventions can punch through. Also, team Obama can work hard to make it stick.

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Baltimore: Love the Republican effort to tie Obama to Carter. Not only is Carter's administration ancient history for those 40 and under, but Carter (1) named Paul Volcker Fed chief with the mandate to choke off inflation, which Volcker did after years of its rise under Nixon/Ford (2) forged a still extant piece between Israel and Egypt after those countries had fought 3 wars and (3) correctly prophesied the coming energy crisis and actually began substantive work on alternative energy sources by the federal government, all of which were undone by the Reagan administration.

I would say that wasn't a bad record for four years. The fact is, if the Iranian hostage rescue had worked, Carter would have had a second term and Reagan would not have gotten 200 plus Marines blown to bits in Beirut.

John Dickerson: You make a good case though I think Obama won't make that case. He's also got to keep his distance from Carte on the Israel question. I wonder what they'll do with Carter actually. The hero of the convention will be Kennedy, if he's well enough, Carter' 80 primary opponent.

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Odessa ,Tx: Put a sack over his head & duct tape his mouth?

John Dickerson: The Secret Service discourages this behavior.

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Harrisburg, Pa.: I was just sitting at the bar with some of my fellow Pennsylvanians, debating whether today to turn to God or to our Gods to get out of our dispair, when we saw the new commercial where Britney Spears and Paris Hilton support Obama. We realized that if Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, whom we presume are Republicans, can support Obama, then Obama must not be all that bad afterall.

John Dickerson: I hear many people do still drink at lunch.

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Seattle, WA: Somewhat cynically, is there a way for Bush to speak in a way that's only covered by Fox News or other conservative outlet? That'd be my pick.

John Dickerson: I think it would only happen if Bush held up the Fox logo. It'll be interesting to see what the networks do though. Will they carry the president live?

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Dallas, Tx: Are there any updates on Debates or Co-Hosted Town Halls? Is it going to be a restrictive as 2004?

John Dickerson: There are supposed to be 4 debates but that'll shrink and the town hall idea seems dead for the moment. The Obama team kinda dinked out on it though part of the current back and forth is about whether the idea will come back

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John Dickerson: Okay everyone, I'm off. Thanks very much for your questions.

My office building just had its entryway refurbished. Now, we have a huge revolving door flanked by two regular, swinging doors. I heard somewhere that revolving doors are supposed to make heating and air conditioning more efficient. Is that true, or can I use the regular doors guilt-free?

Right now, it's 71 degrees Fahrenheit in the Lantern's Manhattan office and 87 degrees outside. It takes a lot of electricity to cool this entire office building by 16 degrees—but it would take even more if people didn't use the two large revolving doors between the building lobby and the hot sidewalk outside.

Generally speaking, air flows in and out of a building because of differences in air pressure. (In the winter, heated air rises toward the top of a building, and—as long as there are any openings on the ground floor—cold air rushes in to replace it. The opposite happens in the summer, with the cold air flowing out the front doors.) Regular foot traffic in a large office building can result in air leaks of up to 30,000 cubic feet per minute.

That presents a challenge for engineers: How do you allow people and things to move in and out of a building while minimizing unwanted air flow? The revolving door was presented as a solution for this age-old problem more than 100 years ago, long before anyone was talking about carbon footprints or global warming. (The primary purpose, according to the original patent application—filed by one Theophilus Van Kannel of Philadelphia—was to prevent the "entrance of wind, snow, rain or dust.") A revolving door isn't airtight (PDF), but the barrier it creates makes the impact of that air pressure differential less important. Every time the door spins, some air will leave the building and some will come in, but overall, much less passes.

How big a difference can using a revolving door make? In 2006, a team of graduate students at MIT conducted an analysis of door use in one building on campus, E25, where they found just 23 percent of visitors used the revolving doors. According to their calculations, the swinging door allowed as much as eight times more air to pass through the building than the revolving door. Applying average Boston weather to their equations, the MIT team found that if everyone used the revolving doors, it would save more than 75,000 kilowatt-hours of energy—about 1.5 percent of the total required to heat and cool the building—and prevent 14.6 tons of carbon dioxide from being emitted.* (By way of comparison, the EPA says an average American vehicle emits about six tons of carbon dioxide over a year.) The gains are also big enough that they could easily cover the energy needed to power an automatic revolving door like this one, which has a 250-watt motor.

So, how do you get people to use revolving doors? The MIT group didn't come up with an obvious answer. They were able to increase revolving-door usage by putting up signs, but the rates at E25 never rose above 63 percent (PDF). (A sign that politely asked people to use the door turned out to be more effective than one detailing the energy savings.)

Here's the good news: The research team found that in another building on campus—one where a simple and polite sign had long been posted before researchers started tracking door usage—revolving-door use was higher than anywhere else on campus, even after those signs were taken down. And the MIT team also noticed that there appeared to be a snowball effect—once one person used a revolving door, other people often followed, particularly since it required less force to push through. That's a particularly good finding given that the gains from using the revolving door aren't linear: You save much more energy by raising usage from 50 percent to 75 percent than you would by raising it from 25 percent to 50 percent.

Of course, buildings need to provide options besides revolving doors for people in wheelchairs, parents with strollers, or anyone carrying an unwieldy load. But if you can help it, it makes sense to forget holding the door open for someone and take them for a spin instead.

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.

*Correction, July 29, 2008: The original story incorrectly said that using the revolving door would save about 74 percent of the energy needed to heat and cool Building E25 on MIT's campus. Using the revolving door would save about 1.5 percent of the total energy required to heat and cool the entire building, and about 74 percent of the total energy required to heat and cool the air exchanged when people pass in and out of the building. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Trader Mitt: As if John McCain didn't have enough reason to keep quoting JFK's line that life isn't fair, consider this: According to the political futures markets, Mitt Romney now has a better chance of being McCain's running mate than McCain has of winning.

Since the primaries, Romney has steadily gained ground in the VP sweepstakes through hard work and a disciplined message: He'll help on the economy, he grew up in the swing state of Michigan, and he makes his current home in the right wing of the Republican Party. He seems at ease with the unattractive chores of being the vice-presidential nominee: raising money, playing the attack dog, telling the base what it wants to hear.

On paper, Romney's VP bid looks as picture perfect as his presidential campaign once did. Yet even as Mitt watchers revel in the current boomlet, we can't help wondering whether this Romneymania will last.

With that in mind, Romneystas everywhere need to start making new and urgent arguments on his behalf:

• The French Are Coming!: Romney was widely mocked last fall when he warned that France posed a clear and present danger to the American way of life. But after watching French President Nicolas Sarkozy embrace Barack Obama in Paris last week, conservatives may finally warm to Mitt's "First, Not France" slogan after all. Romney has impeccable credentials as a Francophobe; Sarkozy would never dream of saying of him, "If he is chosen, then France will be delighted." In a few short hours in Paris, Obama claimed the president as a convert. Romney spent two whole years in France and converted no one whatsoever.
• Leave 'Em Laughing as You Go: One of McCain's heroes, Mo Udall, loved to tell the story of primary voters who heard him say, "I'm Mo Udall and I'm running for president," and responded, "We were just laughing about that this morning." Poor Mo wouldn't know what to make of this campaign. Two months into the general election, nobody's laughing about anything. No one much wants to joke about Obama or McCain. If Romney were the VP, pundits across the spectrum would exult that at last they had someone fun to mess with. He's a good sport and a happy square, with a track record of supplying ample new material.
• WALL-E's World: Mitt Romney's Web site is a shadow of its former self—no Five Brothers blog, no ad contests, no animatronic Mitt messages for your voicemail. Yet like WALL-E's stash of charming knickknacks, the few surviving objects on Planet Romney carry greater meaning. For example, a striking photo highlights a strength few politicians reveal: Unlike McCain, Mitt Romney was born to read a teleprompter. In the official campaign photo of him rehearsing his concession speech, Mitt is barely visible. All the focus is on the words in big type to be loaded on the prompter.

McCain doesn't much like giving speeches and treats teleprompters accordingly. But you can see how a campaign that has struggled to follow a script might be tempted by the first completely programmable running mate. In 2000, McCain often joked that he was Luke Skywalker. This time, Romney could be his C3PO. ... 12:47 p.m. (link)

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Make My Day: What a difference a month makes. At its June meeting, the D.C. City Council debated Mayor Adrian Fenty's emergency legislation to ban sparklers. After the Supreme Court struck down the city's gun ban, the Council spent last week's July meeting debating emergency legislation to let residents own handguns. Here in the District, we couldn't shoot off firecrackers over the Fourth because they're too dangerous, but we can now keep a loaded pistol by our bedside, ready to shoot down prowlers in self-defense.

Like most D.C. residents, I have no plans to stockpile guns in the wake of the Supreme Court decision. But if the city wants to take away my sparklers, they'll have to pry them from my cold, dead, slightly charred hands.

When I was growing up, the rights to keep and bear firearms and fireworks went hand in hand. My grandmother used a revolver to shoot garter snakes in her garden. Well into her eighties, however, her greatest pleasure in life was to spend the Fourth setting off massive strings of firecrackers, 200 at a time. When she came to visit, she'd step off the airplane with a suitcase full of firecrackers purchased on an Indian reservation. As soon as we got home, she'd light the fuse with her cigarette, then squeal with delight as serial explosions made the gravel in our driveway dance.

In recent years, firearm regulation and firework regulation have gone their separate ways. The National Rifle Association has successfully opposed most gun laws, even ones aimed primarily at criminals. Armed with Justice Scalia's maddeningly unhelpful ruling on the D.C. ban, the NRA already has begun to target the rest.

By contrast, although fireworks aren't nearly as deadly as guns, the government treats them like what they are – a widely popular, sometimes dangerous American tradition. The federal government long ago banned once-commonplace explosives like cherry bombs. Most states – even the libertarian bastion of Idaho – have banned or restricted the use of firecrackers. According to the website AmericanPyro, five states, including Iowa and Illinois, permit only sparklers and snakes. Five others, including New York and Massachusetts, allow no consumer fireworks whatsoever. In general, states insist that fireworks must be "safe and sane" – a balance that has been all but impossible to strike with firearms.

Thanks to the enduring power of pyromania, sales haven't suffered. Since 1976, fireworks consumption has increased ten-fold, while fireworks-related injuries have dropped. Fireworks manufacturers can take heart in knowing that this year's survivors are next year's customers.

Because there is no Second Amendment right to keep and bear sparklers, fireworks law is a straightforward balancing test – between the individual right to burn a hole in the back porch and the mutual responsibility not to burn entire communities to the ground, the personal freedom to pyromaniacal self-expression and the personal responsibility not to harm oneself and others. These days, the fireworks industry has more to fear from climate change than from the authorities. This summer, the threat of wildfires led Arnold Schwarzenegger to ask Californians to boycott fireworks. Drought forced John McCain to forego fireworks at his annual Independence Day barbecue in Arizona.

The trouble with the Supreme Court ruling in the Heller case is not that it interprets the Second Amendment as an individual right. The Second Amendment is the constitutional equivalent of the grammatical paradox Eats Shoots & Leaves, but whatever the Founders meant by its muddy wording and punctuation, most Americans now take it for granted. The real problem with the Court's decision is that the balancing test for gun rights and responsibilities is even less clear than before. Scalia's opinion devotes 30 pages to a grammatical history of the Second Amendment and a single sentence to how the courts should apply it to most other gun laws already on the books.

Alongside such vast imprecision, the Court went out of its way to strike down the requirement for trigger locks – an extraordinarily modest attempt to balance freedom and safety. Trigger locks can help prevent gun accidents and keep guns out of the hands of children. Far from impeding self-defense, new trigger locks can be unlocked with a fingerprint or a special ring on the gun owner's finger. That means today's gun owner can arm himself to shoot an intruder in an instant – compared to the 30 seconds or more it took to load a pistol or musket in the 18^th Century.

Over the long term, it's not clear how much of a boon the Heller decision will be for gun rights advocates. In winning the case, the gun lobby lost its most potent argument – the threat that at any moment, the government will knock on the door and take your guns away. With that bogeyman out of the way, the case for common-sense gun safety measures is stronger than ever. Perhaps now the gun debate will revolve around more practical and less incendiary issues, like what can be done to reduce illegal gun trafficking and trace guns used in crimes.

If it's any small consolation, the real winners in Heller may turn out to be the sparkler lobby. If cities have trouble banning handguns, they will be hard-pressed to take away sparklers. Of course, as with guns, the threat to sparklers may well have been exaggerated. The D.C. Council rejected Mayor Fenty's sparkler ban by a vote of 11-2, as members nostalgically recalled playing with them in their youth. Councilman and former mayor Marion Barry voted no "with a bang." As Barry knows, there are worse things in life to light than a sparkler. ... 9:51 A.M. (link)

Friday, June 6, 2008

The Fight of Her Life: Ten years ago, at a White House farewell for a favorite staff member, Hillary Clinton described the two kinds of people in the world: born optimists like her husband who see the glass as half-full, and born realists like herself who can see the glass is half-empty.

As she ends her campaign and throws her support behind Barack Obama's remarkable quest, Hillary could be forgiven for seeing her glass as, quite literally, half-empty. The two candidates traded primary after primary down the stretch, two titans matching each other vote for vote. In the closest race in the modern era, she and Obama split the Democratic wishbone nearly right down the middle, but she's not the one who got her wish.

Yet for Hillary and the 18 million of us who supported her, there is no shame in one historic campaign coming up just short against another. History is a great deal wiser than Chris Matthews, and will be kinder, too. The 2008 contest has been one for the ages, and the annals will show that Hillary Clinton has gained far more than she lost.

The Obama-Clinton match will go down as the longest, closest, most exciting, most exhausting ever. Obama ran an inspired campaign and seized the moment. Clinton came close, and by putting up a tough fight now, helped fortify him for the fight ahead.

Our campaign made plenty of mistakes, none of which has gone unreported. But Hillary is right not to dwell on "woulda, coulda, shoulda." From New Hampshire to South Dakota, the race she ran earned its own place in the history books.

While the way we elect presidents leaves a lot to be desired, it has one redeeming virtue, as the greatest means ever invented to test what those who seek the job are made of. In our lifetimes, we'll be hard-pressed to find a candidate made of tougher stuff than Hillary Clinton. Most candidates leave a race diminished by it. Hillary is like tempered steel: the more intense the heat, the tougher she gets.

And has any candidate had to face fiercer, more sustained heat? As a frontrunner, she expected a tough ride, and as Hillary Clinton, she was accustomed to it. But if she was used to the scrutiny, she could not have anticipated – and did not deserve – the transparent hostility behind it. In much the same way the right wing came unglued when her husband refused to die in the '90s, the media lost its bearings when she defied and survived them. Slate at least held off on its noxious Hillary Deathwatch until March; most of the press corps began a breathless Clinton Deathwatch last Thanksgiving. The question that turned her campaign around in New Hampshire – "How do you do it?" – brought Hillary to tears out of sheer gratitude that someone out there had noticed.

For a few searing days in New Hampshire, we watched her stare into the abyss. Any other candidate forced to read her own obituary so often would have come to believe it. But as she went on to demonstrate throughout this campaign, Hillary had faith that there is life after political death, and the wherewithal to prove it.

In New Hampshire, she discarded the frontrunner mantle and found her voice. For a race that was largely won or lost in Iowa, the discovery came a few days too late. But the grit Clinton showed with her back to the wall all those months will make her a force with a following for years to come.

The chief hurdle for Clinton's presidential bid wasn't whether she could do the job; Democrats never doubted she would make a good president. Ironically, the biggest question she faced for much of the race is one she answered clearly by the time she left it: whether America was ready for a woman president. No one asks that question any longer. For all the sexism she encountered as the first woman with a serious shot at the White House, voters themselves made clear they were ready. The longer the race went on, the more formidable she looked in the general election. In this week's CBS News poll, she was beating John McCain by nine points, even as she was losing the Democratic nomination.

Last year, the press and other campaigns insisted that Clinton was too polarizing and that half the country was united against her. Now, a woman who was supposed to be one of the most polarizing figures in America leaves the race with handsome leads over McCain in places like North Carolina, a state her husband never carried.

When her campaign started, aides often described Hillary as the least known, least understood famous person in America. During this campaign, it became clear that in certain quarters she's the most deliberately misunderstood person as well. The recent RFK flap was yet another attempt to suggest that her every miscue was part of some diabolical master plan.

Yet while talking heads imagined the evils of Hillary Clinton, voters finally came to know and understand her. They saw someone who knew what they were going through, who would stick with them, fight for them, and get back up when she got knocked down. The phony, consultant-driven shadow boxing of the last few years has dulled Democrats to the party's historic mission – to defend the values and stand up for the interests of ordinary people who are doing all they can just to get ahead. For those voters, Hillary Clinton was the champion they've been looking for, a fighter they can count on, win or lose, not to let them down.

That's a fight she'll never quit. Like the woman in New Hampshire, we still wonder how Hillary does it, but this time, the tears are on us. As we wish her well, our hopes are high, our hearts are full – and if our glass is empty, it was worth every drop. ... 11:58 P.M. (link)

Friday, May 30, 2008

The Adventures of Bobble-Foot: For enough money, any McClellan or Stephanopoulos in Washington will write a kiss-and-tell book these days. But the memoir Larry Craig just announced he's writing could launch a whole new genre: don't-kiss, don't-tell.

Craig revealed his plans on Boise television during Tuesday's coverage of the Senate primary to choose his potential successors. For the senator, if not his viewers, it was a poignant moment, one last point of no return in a three-decade-long political career.

With a touch of empathy, the local reporter told Craig, "You're looking forward now to a much different life for yourself." Alas, the life Craig described isn't much different from any other retiring pol's, nor does he sound like he's looking forward to it. He hinted that he is entertaining a number of lobbying offers. Because of ethics rules, he explains, "There are some one-way conversations going on, 'cause I've said I can't talk, but I certainly can listen." Perhaps they can figure out some kind of code.

These are heady times for the Idaho senator. Last Sunday, on National Tap Dance Day, the first-place St. Paul Saints, a minor league baseball team, drew their biggest crowd of the year with a special promotion in Craig's honor: a bobble-foot doll commemorating the bathroom stall at Minneapolis-St.Paul airport. The team website reported, "Saints Have Toe-Tapping Good Time, Win 9-3."

The bobble-foot promotion gave Craig a way to test his market value even beyond the lobbying and book worlds. Scores of Craig bobble-feet are now available on eBay, selling for upwards of $75 apiece. You'd better hurry: Like successful appeals of uncoerced confessions, supplies are limited.

The upcoming memoir may be the last we ever hear from the man, so it's worth asking: What kind of book will Larry Craig write? Consider the possibilities:

• The Broken Branch: Left to his own devices (never a good idea), Craig seems likely to write an insiders' version of the woe-is-gridlock lament popularized most recently by political scientists Norm Ornstein and Tom Mann. "The thing that's important for someone with my experience to talk about is the state of politics in Washington," Craig said Tuesday. "It's created what I call a extremely dysfunctional, hyperpartisan Senate. We're getting little to nothing done." Craig cites immigration and energy policy. As his agent and editor will surely tell him, this sober approach is not the way for Craig to put his best foot forward. No one wants to read the case for decisive action written by a man who claimed his innocence after pleading guilty and remained in office after promising to quit. Then again, Craig might not be a household word if he had listened to the advice of Ornstein and Mann, who urged members to bring their families to live with them in Washington.
• The Packwood Diaries: With slight modifications, Craig has modeled his entire Senate career after his friend, former Oregon Sen. Bob Packwood. Craig sobbed on the Senate floor the day Packwood resigned. Packwood dug in his heels and remained in office for three years after his sex scandal became public. Craig has done the same, and is only leaving because his term is up. Considering how much Packwood served as his role model, it's possible that Craig tried to emulate another part of the Oregonian's legacy: the Packwood diaries. Packwood kept a meticulous journal of all his exploits, with an eye to history and none on the lookout for satire or federal prosecution. We can only hope Craig has done the same.
• What Happened: Every publisher is looking for the next Scott McClellan, who told lies for a living but was scared straight after his escape. Craig could play this role with gusto. The pitch: It wasn't his idea to stand up in front of the press time after time and insist he wasn't gay. Karl Rove made him do it, in a deliberate cover-up to protect the Republican brand – and he'll never forgive Rove for it.
• If I Did It: O.J. Simpson never got to keep a dime of his controversial book, If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer. Craig, on the other hand, could hypothesize all the way to the bank. Senators love to write loosely autobiographical fiction. Gary Hart and Bill Cohen wrote The Double Man about a politician who wanted to be president. Barbara Boxer wrote A Time to Run about a woman who becomes a liberal senator from California. Craig could write a great book about an imaginary conservative senator who happens to be gay. His hypothetical musings would wow the critics and sell like crazy. Besides, what does Craig have to lose? Hinting he did it would be no more an admission of guilt than the misdemeanor plea he was just kidding us about last June. ... 8:48 P.M. (link)

Wednesday, May 28, 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)

Kay Ryan, who has just been named America's new poet laureate, is a miniaturist. She favors compression the way Walt Whitman favored expansion. Like oysters, she has said, her poems take shape around "an aggravation." They are also small (most are only about 20 lines long), rich, and dense. A single one might not always make a meal, but a well-selected plate will satiate most readers.

If Ryan's language is spare, her concerns are broad and philosophical. A typical Ryan poem begins with a proposition—"Everything contains some/ silence" or "It's what we can't/ know that interests/ us." She explores old bromides, wondering what the fabric of life is like ("stretchy") or what it might be like to live on an island where silence is revered. Each poem twists around and back upon its argument like a river retracing its path; they are didactic in spirit, but a bedrock wit supports them. Here's "Green Hills," from The Niagara River, her sixth (and most recent) book:

Their green flanks

and swells are not

flesh in any sense

matching ours,

we tell ourselves.

Nor their green

breast nor their

green shoulder nor

the langour of their

rolling over.

This little lyric contains many of Ryan's hallmarks: the juxtaposition of unlike things (green mountains and human flesh); the skinny, syncopated lines ("are not/ flesh in any sense"), which propel the unfolding thought by emphasizing the musicality of the language; and heaps of internal rhyme ("shoulder" and "langour" and "rolling over"), which help create a sense of closure. Internal rhyme and assonance (the repetition of vowel sounds) are crucial to the success of Ryan's poems, in part because her epistemological investigations of the human condition can hardly be called completist or definitive; rhyme adds a crucial layer of complexity. She practices dipstick philosophy, taking a quick reading of the oil in the motor and slamming the hood. She moves away from her themes as rapidly as she engages them, which may be why some critics have compared her to Emily Dickinson, even though her dramatic imagination is far more detached—less blasphemous and exalted—than her predecessor's.

Born in California in 1945, Ryan, who succeeds Charles Simic, has been described as an "outsider," largely because she has managed not to be drawn into the great peristalsis that digests most "creative writers" in America today; she has taught remedial English in California's Marin County for many years. And yet it's hardly a surprise that the Library of Congress tapped her. Ryan rejects the pained, stylized self-consciousness that characterizes so much contemporary poetry. Where many poets today are engaged in issues and questions that would be meaningful mainly to other practitioners of the art, Ryan's concerns about the nature of reality are relatively translatable to a general audience. She has called herself a "rehabilitator of clichés," an apt description of the way the ordinary is transformed through close attention so that a mockingbird becomes a "distempered/ emperor of parts" or the moon becomes "evening's ticket/ punched with a/ round or a crescent." What might be a geyser of explication in another poet's hands is condensed in hers to a single shot: "The satisfactions/ of agreement are/ immediate as sugar—/ a melting of the/ granular, a syrup/ that lingers, shared/ not singular./ Many prefer it."

In a sense, Ryan is an American pragmatist, making her more like Robert Frost (about whom she's written enthusiastically) than Dickinson. Hers is a parsing imagination, given to trying to differentiate between the real and the imagined, the real and the taken-for-granted. In "Carrying a Ladder," she writes "We are always/ really carrying/ a ladder, but it's/ invisible. We/ only know/ something's/ the matter:/ something precious/ crashes; easy doors/ prove impassable." While her work has deepened over the years—The Niagara River is her strongest book—she has always been most interested in the idea that "whatever reality is, it is something we only know in the negative—by being constantly wrong about it." Many of the poems end on a note of deflation, pointing up the traps our expectations set for us.

Of course, being "wrong" is compelling only insofar as it reveals just how limited—or self-serious—our ideas about being "right" are, and Ryan's poems pack the greatest punch when she not only inverts an improbable juxtaposition or takes an old bromide literally—Q: What might "lime light" really look like? A: "A baleful glow"—but presses forward to formulate a more exacting ars poetica. For example, in "Repulsive Theory":

Little has been made

of the soft skirting action

of magnets reversed,

while much has been

made of attraction.

But is it not this pillowy

principle of repulsion

that produces the

doily edges of oceans

or the arabesques of thought?

And do these cutout coasts

and in-curved rhetorical beaches

not baffle the onslaught

of the sea or objectionable people

and give private life

what small protection it's got?

Praise then the oiled motions

of avoidance, the pearly

convolutions of all that

slides off or takes a

wide berth …

The tone is both ironic and sincere; it is the case, I think, that repulsion is genuinely seen as a virtue, but there is a loss that the speaker skates over—namely, the loss of true intimacy, of the possibility of sustaining a genuine "private life" while also not withdrawing from the clamor and love and pain of the world around you.

The risk posed by radical compression is that the poems become merely whimsical. In the lesser work, the poem and reader meet cute ("Outsider Art": "Mostly it's too dreary/ and cherry red") but fail to develop much of a relationship. At other times, Ryan battles with her own highly developed armature. Sometimes her categorical imagination remains resolutely vague, and many poems invoke a "someone" about to do "something" while declining to name just what these forces are. This can make for unsatisfying poetry—sort of B-minus Frost, as in "New Clothes," a revisiting of the fable about the emperor's new clothes that fails to find firm footing:

You will cast aside

something you cherish

when the tailors whisper,

"Only you could wear this."

It is almost never clothes

such as the emperor bought

but it is always something close

to something you've got.

Ryan's sly humor and elusive categorizing is intended in part to subvert the high earnestness of Modernism and Postmodernism. Indeed, her poems could be read as a retort to the sprawling complexities of "ellipticism" and Postmodernism, as well as to any post-Romantic nostalgia that poets may harbor for an age of Keatsian splendors. (As Ryan puts it in one poem, "Romantics are/ always fingering/ some discolored fabric or other/ feeling a deep nostalgia for sepia.") Her dramatic imagination is deeply pragmatic, stressing what is known over what is longed for and choosing diffidence over despair, even if she does so ironically.

It's these layers of complexity that make her best work more nuanced than the Library of Congress' descriptions of its "accessibility" might have you think. A pervasive darkness catapults her strongest poems beyond the more quotidian decrescendos into profundity. And every now and then—because Ryan prides herself on her intransigence—a touch of sublimity creeps into the usual irony. For example, in "Desert Reservoirs," which opens, "They are beachless basins, steep-edged/ catches, unnatural/ bodies of water wedged/ into canyons, stranded/ anti-mirages/ unable to vanish…./ Nothing/ here matches their gift."

Seebohm Rowntree was the son of wealthy Quaker businessman Joseph Rowntree but was acutely aware of the poverty that surrounded him in late-Victorian York, England. In 1899 he set himself the task of defining a "poverty line" by working out how much it would cost to supply basic food, housing, and clothes. Anyone who couldn't afford to buy those basics—including a helping of pease pudding with bacon on Sunday—was below the poverty line.

The idea of a poverty line has stayed with us, but the candidates have multiplied. The World Bank has two poverty lines: $1 a day and $2 a day (strictly, those are 1985 dollars adjusted for inflation). In the United States, the poverty line is $29.58 a day for a single adult under the age of 65. All these are absolute income standards, just as Rowntree's was.

Eurostat, the European Union's statistics agency, takes a different approach: It defines the poverty line as 60 percent of each nation's median income. (The median income is the income of the person in the middle of the income distribution.) This has an unfortunate consequence: Poverty is permanent. If everyone in Europe woke up tomorrow to find themselves twice as rich, European poverty rates would not budge. That is indefensible. Such "poverty" lines measure inequality, not poverty, and they do so clumsily.

On the other hand, absolute standards of poverty are creepy, reliant as they are on expert definitions of a nutritionally balanced diet. (Rowntree was a Victorian philanthropist, so we're willing to make allowances.) The U.S. definition dates back to early 1963 and the efforts of a Social Security Administration researcher called Mollie Orshansky. Lacking decent statistics, she based her poverty line on government nutritional advice. It was a decent estimate given the limited resources of the time, yet the threshold has changed only to take account of inflation.

So, the U.S. definition of poverty is stuck in the 1960s. Had Seebohm Rowntree been working for the U.S. government, perhaps it would now have a poverty standard that was based on the price of pease pudding and that assumed that electricity and indoor plumbing were luxuries. This cannot be right.

Adam Smith put his finger on the problem back in 1776. In The Wealth of Nations, he wrote: "A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessity of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt. ..."

Smith's point is not that poverty is relative but that it is a social construction. A person can lack the money necessary to participate in society. Whatever Eurostat may say, people don't become poor just because the median citizen receives a pay raise, but they may become poor if something they cannot afford—such as an Internet connection—becomes viewed as a social essential.

That is why a new unofficial poverty threshold, published this month by—appropriately—the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, makes more sense than it at first appears. The standard was set by focus groups working out what was and was not necessary "to participate in society." The results are frugal—there is a budget of £40 ($80) every two years to buy a suit, for instance—but they were always bound to be controversial. The list of essentials includes a self-catering vacation, a cell phone, and enough booze to get drunk twice a month.

But the new threshold's apparent weakness—its subjectivity—is in fact its strength. Poverty is not relative, and it cannot be objectively determined by an expert. Adam Smith understood that very well.

The credit crisis turns 1 this month, Business Week writes. What can you say? Certainly not "Many happy returns," given that the latest government data shows the economy is contracting so quickly that a number of economists now believe "that a recession began late last year." Even though President George W. Bush (and the Washington Post) pointed out that gross domestic product rose at a 1.9 percent annualized rate (after adjusting for inflation) during the second quarter, newly revised data showed "the economy contracted at a 0.2% rate in the final three months of 2007," notes the Wall Street Journal. We'll get another barometer today on the potential effects of the credit crunch's terrible 2s when the Bush administration offers up its latest job-market forecast. Analysts suggest 75,000 jobs were lost in July, "signifying the seventh straight month of declines," notes the New York Times.

The grim economic news put a dent in the price of oil, not that Exxon Mobil will worry too much. It recorded the "best quarterly profit ever for a corporation," notes the NYT, with second-quarter returns jumping 14 percent, to $11.68 billion. The previous record for quarterly mega-profits was held by—you guessed it—Exxon Mobil. Not many other companies are smiling. British Airways boss Willie Walsh bemoaned "the worst trading environment the industry has ever faced" as he announced an 88 percent drop in profits (the carrier made $73.3 million pretax) from this time last year. Northwest would agree. It just announced a whopping $80 fuel surcharge for many domestic flights. Even if oil plummets and air travel rebounds, the current crisis guarantees a long-term problem for the industry. As the NYT reports, U.S. airlines are "putting off plans to update and expand their fleets" in the wake of their combined $6 billion losses in the second financial quarter of this year.

You can be forgiven if, up until now, you've not paid too much attention to all the allegations swirling around UBS. The Swiss banking giant has been cited by several regulators for deceiving investors about the arcane financial instruments called auction-rate securities. But now, courtesy of the WSJ, comes the much sexier allegation that one of the key executives who supposedly participated in this scheme is a former Bush administration official: David Aufhauser, onetime general counsel for the Treasury Department. Although Aufhauser hasn't himself been charged, the Journal cites "people familiar with the matter" who say he was one of the UBS officials who personally dumped auction-rate securities even as the bank continued to sell them to customers as safe.

Don't expect Wal-Mart to be stocking extra copies of Barack Obama's books anytime soon. The Wall Street Journal reports the uber-retailer is warning its managers and supervisors that, "if Democrats win power in November, they'll likely change federal law to make it easier for workers to unionize companies—including Wal-Mart." The company is worried that reinvigorated labor unions would agitate for higher payroll and health costs for companies.

For weeks, the technology press had been looking forward to a good old fist fight at Yahoo's annual shareholder meeting. Now that CEO Jerry Yang and activist shareholder Carl Icahn have averted all-out war, the media can't hide its disappointment. "What was supposed to be the season's biggest corporate showdown is now shaping up as a giant snooze-fest," mopes CNN Money, while the Financial Times reports that Icahn won't be attending the event, defusing "what little tension remained around the meeting by announcing his non-attendance on Thursday." At least the WSJ is keeping its hope up, suggesting that Yang and Co. need to bolster Yahoo's "bread-and-butter" display ad business in order to assuage still-fuming shareholders. With those investors "breathing down Yahoo's neck, accelerating [display ad] growth could be the company's best hope for changing its trajectory," notes the WSJ.

Finally, the NYT has a clever spin on the proposed $4.5 billion Bristol-Myers Squibb takeover of the storied biotech firm ImClone. It was an infamously hasty stop-loss sale of ImClone stock, after all, that sent Martha Stewart to prison. Given the stock spike on news of the takeover, had Stewart and her broker held onto their shares back in late 2001, "they might have done just fine, and avoided jail time."

That is the surprising conclusion of a CNNMoney story: While some 7,600 jobs have been slashed on the street in the past year, there is active recruitment going on, especially "at buy-side institutions like hedge funds looking to pick up talent on the cheap," notes writer David Ellis. The Financial Times agrees; it reports that Morgan Stanley chief John Mack is telling associates that the financial sector's recent tumult "is a historic opportunity to recruit bankers, traders and risk managers."

Ironically, there seems to be particular demand for bankers who got us into this credit mess in the first place, those with "experience dealing with some of the structured mortgage and credit products that have fueled billions of dollars in losses and writedowns at the nation's largest financial institutions." They would appear to be the only ones who know how to value these noxious financial instruments.

Outside Wall Street, however, the job environment remains cloudy. More than a few economic observers have asked themselves recently: If, as so many believe, the United States is in the midst of a recession, then why has there not been a major leap in unemployment? The New York Times has a grimly fascinating story that may help explain the anomaly: "The number of Americans who have seen their full-time jobs chopped to part time because of weak business has swelled to more than 3.7 million—the largest figure since the government began tracking such data more than half a century ago."

Involuntary part-time workers, you see, do not get measured as "unemployed." But they nonetheless represent what the Times calls "a stealth force that is eroding American spending power." Drilling a little deeper, the Times cites Labor Department figures indicating that men, and especially Hispanic men, are particular victims of these slow-motion layoffs: "Among those who were forced into part-time work from the spring of 2007 to the spring of 2008, 73 percent were men and 35 percent were Hispanic."

That, apparently, has to do with the decline in the construction industry and other sectors that heavily employ Hispanics. In this election year, some observers think disproportionate economic hardship among Latinos will undermine John McCain's ability to woo that critical voting bloc.

In these lean times for consumers, it might appear counterintuitive that at least some credit card companies are cleaning up. It's easy to forget, but in March, Visa pulled off the largest IPO in U.S. history. Today, the business press is filled with reports that Visa has announced a 41 percent hike in quarterly income over last year. How does that happen? Doesn't nearly everyone cut back spending when the economy sputters, and doesn't the credit crunch curtail Visa's ability to extend credit to its customers?

Not really, because, despite popular perception, Visa is not a credit card firm. As MarketWatch succinctly explains: "Visa processes payments on debit cards and other types of payment cards and charges fees for these services. Unlike credit card companies, it doesn't lend money to anyone. That means it hasn't suffered as the global credit crunch begins to dent consumers' ability to repay debt." Moreover, ample evidence suggests that the more Americans suffer economically, the more debt they put on their credit cards. Visa gets a chunk of the transaction fees without having to assume the debt. Now that's a business to be in.

Unlike, say, the auto industry, which seems to rust by the day. The Detroit Free Press notes that GM is about to slash another 5,000 jobs by Nov. 1 from its depleted payroll and is scheduled to announce a "significant second quarter loss" on Friday. The Wall Street Journal reports that Chrysler, having recently pulled out of the once-lucrative leasing business, "is scrambling to slash costs and line up partnerships with foreign auto makers to shore up its finances amid a painful downturn in sales and a deteriorating outlook for the company."

Specifically, India's Tata and Italy's Fiat are mentioned as partners—none of the major American papers asks today why those companies are doing reasonably well when domestic dinosaurs are on the brink of extinction. Here's a hint from Honda, via Bloomberg: Build affordable cars that appeal to drivers in growing markets like Russia and China.

Most major financial papers and Web sites lead with the collapse of the Doha round of global trade talks, a seven-year tragedy of errors in which the convergent agendas of developed and developing worlds have become starkly drawn. In times of soaring food prices, the United States and Europe are bound to cling to free trade as a solution as fiercely as China, Brazil, and India cling to tariffs. Thus, the papers find plenty of blame to go around; the Financial Times quotes European trade minister Peter Mandelson faulting American agricultural expansion by Congress this spring as " 'one of the most reactionary farm bills in the history of the U.S.', though he did give credit to President George W. Bush for attempting to veto the bill."

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the American papers did not include that quote, even though many have opposed, on their editorial pages, American farm subsidies. Instead, the New York Times cited a European consultant who indicated that "the sticking point this time was countries like China and India, which have become more aggressive in advancing their interests." The Wall Street Journal has for several days been trying to place failure or success on the shoulders of India's commerce and industry minister; in a profile last week, the paper quoted a U.S. Chamber of Commerce official who said, "Success or failure of the Doha Round may very well lie in the hands of Kamal Nath alone."

As we noted Monday, the American auto sector continues to suffer from shriveling demand for those emblematic SUVs of the last decade. A Page One WSJ article notes that Ford and GM "are significantly scaling back their auto-leasing business," echoing Chrysler's announcement on Friday. Maybe it seems inevitable to you that one company's woes would be echoed across the sector—banks don't want to lend money for leases, and fewer people want to buy the used gas-guzzlers. But consider the predictions made on CNBC on Friday by auto analyst Rebecca Lindler: "I don't see Ford or GM doing this. I don't think that they will do that. I think they are going to try and manage their losses in a different way." We'll see if CNBC invites Lindler back for more crystal-ball reading.

Along with free trade and the SUV, another '90s-era icon that seems to be dying is "casual dining." The Bennigan's and Steak and Ale chains closed down and will file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, "the latest casualties in the so-called casual dining sector, considered a cut above fast food," as the NYT puts it. Technically, only the 150 or so corporate-owned branches—not the roughly equal number of franchisees—are immediately affected, "but the franchisees now find themselves owning a brand with no corporate cousins," as the Dallas Morning News points out.

It seems hard to believe, but no one has ever before compiled definitive numbers on how much food and beverage companies spend on advertising to American children; it was $1.6 billion in 2006, according to a newly released Federal Trade Commission report. As the Washington Post notes, "the biggest category, $492 million, was carbonated-beverage advertising." Inevitably, such measurements provoke what the NYT calls a "tug of war" over not only questions of who should regulate these ads, but also over definitions of what constitutes marketing and even, it would seem, what constitutes a child. How else to interpret this sentence—"Cadbury Adams has stopped marketing Bubblicious gum to children, said a spokeswoman, Luisa Girotto"—from the Times? Perhaps the gum is targeted at Wall Streeters, always in search of that next bubble.

Fresh from his lengthy tour abroad, presumed Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama surrounded himself with economic heavyweights on Monday in what the BBC and others labeled an "economic summit," even though the entry on the on the official Obama blog called it an "economic meeting." (The campaign also misspelled the name of legendary investor Warren Buffett.) The account on Marketwatch noted the presence of former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker.

Aside, however, from the rather generic goal of "restoring balance to the economy," it was difficult to find any specific plans that Obama is offering. The Wall Street Journal's version does include Obama's opposition to the Bush tax cuts and his willingness to renegotiate parts of free trade agreements; it also notes that "Sen. Obama will hold town-hall style events in Missouri and Iowa this week where he is expected to focus on job loss and the economy." No doubt those events will yield greater detail.

Regardless of whether Obama wins in November, it is certain that the next occupant of the Oval Office will inherit a budget deficit that, by some yardsticks, is the largest in U.S. history. The projected $482 billion in red ink, says the Washington Post, is "driven by war costs, tax rebates and a slowing economy that will leave the next president little room to fulfill costly campaign promises."

As a strict dollar amount, that unwelcome gift is a record figure, although as a percentage of gross domestic product, the Bush White House can at least claim that Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush had larger deficits. But it seems likely the $482 billion figure is too low; as the Post notes, that number "does not include the costs of the massive housing bill Congress approved last weekend, nor does it reflect the new law reversing scheduled cuts in Medicare reimbursements to doctors."

Merrill Lynch knows a bit about red ink as well. A mere 10 days after declaring a $4.65 billion second-quarter loss, the investment bank announced another $5.8 billion writedown and the need to issue $8.5 billion in new common stock, which will substantially dilute the value of current stock. As the Financial Times disturbingly puts it: "[T]he latest Merrill writedowns raise new questions about whether banks themselves understand the extent of their problems." The Journal puts its Merrill story on Page One and highlights the massive amount of "toxic mortgage-related assets" that the investment bank is selling at a fraction of their once-presumed value. More than other outlets, Bloomberg's story puts particular emphasis on the role played by Temasek Holdings, the sovereign wealth fund controlled by Singapore's government. Temasek will buy $3.4 billion of the newly issued Merrill stock. Has anyone asked Temasek if they'd like to buy the debt-ridden portions of the U.S. government while they're at it?

Finally, the Starbucks implosion has gone global. As Slate amply documented earlier this month, the announcement that 600 Starbucks outlets will close nationwide left many communities—particularly in rural areas—feeling deprived. Now that pain is being felt Down Under: Starbucks International has announced that it is shuttering 61 of its 84 stores—or 72 percent—in Australia, eliminating nearly 700 jobs and leaving just Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane as the remaining Aussie locales for Starbucks.

If anyone has a spare $300,000 to invest in a new manufacturing robot, could you please let Drew Greenblatt, president of Marlin Steel Wire Products, know? Normally he'd be getting this loan from his bank, Wachovia, but nowadays it seems it isn't so keen on lending money. As the New York Times explains, the financial sector's newfound frugality "has intensified the strains on the economy by withholding capital from many companies, just as joblessness grows and consumers pull back from spending in the face of high gas prices, plummeting home values and mounting debt."

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was forced to close two more regional banks, 1^st National Bank of Nevada and First Heritage Bank N.A., on Friday, just two weeks after the run on California's IndyMac. The closed branches will reopen this morning as Mutual of Omaha with no loss of deposits for any customers, the FDIC said. So, how safe is your bank? CNN Money looks to answer that question by analyzing just how the FDIC compiles its quarterly list of banks on the brink—currently standing at 90. When you look at the numbers, banking health is not as bad as you may have been led to believe. "Considering there are about 8,500 banks in the United States, 90 problem banks is not that large a number," L. William Seidman, a former FDIC chairman, tells the site.

An IPO is normally a buoyant time for any company. Not so for legendary private-equity giant Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., says the Wall Street Journal. Though KKR shares could be valued as high as $15 billion when it floats on the New York Stock Exchange, the IPO "reflects the troubled times roiling the investment industry" as KKR is selling the shares partly to bail out its struggling European affiliate, KKR Private Equity Investors. KKR has been angling to go public for nearly a year—part of a strategy to "expand its business beyond private equity to become a much broader asset manager," notes the NYT—but has been stymied by the credit crunch. Famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) for pioneering leveraged buyouts, KKR's newfound desire to go public, along with others from the private-equity ilk, has some investors "questioning whether the firms are undermining the very model that they have said makes their investments so successful," writes the NYT.

The Guardian reports that Ryanair, one of Europe's most bullish budget airlines, has reported an 85 percent fall in first-quarter net profit and warned it could make a full-year loss of up to $94 million if jet fuel prices remain high and passengers continue to cut back on flying. High fuel prices continue to roil the U.S. economy as the WSJ illustrates in two stories, one documenting how "an unprecedented cutback in driving is slashing the funds available to rebuild the nation's aging highway system," and another describing how a combination of falling leased-car values and the credit crunch mean that Chrysler LLC must "refinance $30 billion of its lending arm's working capital by Friday." Chrysler is weighed down by plummeting lease values of its SUV, crossover, and light-truck fleet. (Business Week looks at the dire second-hand SUV market in some detail.) Chrysler's business is so tight that it will stop offering auto leases starting in August.

Just when you thought the trend in American apparel was less is more, skimpy lingerie phenom Victoria's Secret is trying to cover up. Forbes reports that the risque division of Limited Brands has launched the "Collegiate Collection" of T-shirts, tote bags, and panties, branded for the likes of Harvard, UCLA, Boston College, and the University of Michigan. "Co-branding with universities is another way to try to moderate their image, to get to where you can still be sexy but wholesome at the same time," a retail analyst tells Forbes. What is academia coming to? They'll be letting Playboy on campus next.

He dates Chinese superstar actress Zhang Ziyi; he's best buddies with Lachlan Murdoch, Ronald Perelman, and Lenny Kravitz; and he just happens to be the largest private shareholder of Time Warner. Why have you never heard of Vivi Nevo? Because he's the Zelig of the media industry, says a long NYT profile, which, to prove the point, interviews 16 different friends of Nevo's, including Perelman, former TW CEOs Richard Parsons and Gerald Levin, as well as Kravitz ... and still leaves us wondering about this Romanian-Israeli mini media baron.

The Los Angeles Times leads with word that a government scientist who was about to face charges for the 2001 anthrax attacks apparently committed suicide. Bruce Ivins, 62, a "skilled microbiologist," worked at the government's biodefense labs at Fort Detrick, Md., for the last 18 years and, according to people who knew him, had been informed of his impending prosecution. Ivins helped the government investigate the anthrax mail attacks that killed five people shortly after Sept. 11, 2001. The New York Times leads with word that U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that members of Pakistan's intelligence service helped militants plan the bombing of the Indian Embassy in Afghanistan last month, an attack that killed more than 50 people. The link had long been suspected, but intercepted communications finally brought confirmation.

The Washington Post leads with news that five American troops died in combat in Iraq last month. When noncombatant deaths are added, the number increases to 13, which is the lowest American death toll in any single month since the war began in 2003. The Wall Street Journal also leads its world-wide newsbox with Iraq and highlights that President Bush praised the "durability" of the security gains even as he took pains to emphasize that "the progress is still reversible." Bush suggested that the decrease in violence could lead to further U.S. troop withdrawals before he leaves office. USA Today leads with new figures that show state and local governments have been on a spending binge lately. State and local governments increased spending 7.8 percent in the second quarter of this year compared with the same period last year, while revenue rose a mere 2.5 percent. Some states are taking drastic measures to reduce spending, and some predict there will be deep cuts in 2009 as governments begin to feel the effects of a weakening economy.

The news about Ivins, who had never been publicly identified as a suspect, comes on the heels of the FBI's settlement with Steven Hatfill valued at $5.82 million. Hatfill, a former biodefense researcher, was long the main suspect of the anthrax attacks, and the payout "was an essential step to clear the way for prosecuting Ivins," reports the LAT. Ivins was being treated for depression, but his condition apparently quickly worsened after the settlement was announced, and he was committed to a facility for treatment.

Ivins had already been questioned by Army officials for failing to report anthrax contaminations. Ivins admitted he had made a mistake by cleaning up the contaminations and staying quiet, but the Army didn't discipline him. Some now say that the investigation raised some red flags that should have been looked into. The main suspicion comes from Ivins' claim at the time that he couldn't remember whether he tested contaminated areas that had been cleaned to make sure that they were, in fact, free of spores. The thinking now is that he may have been reluctant to give a definite answer in case someone checked and found spores in his office.

The NYT notes that the confirmation of the link between Pakistani intelligence officers and militants in Afghanistan have provided "the clearest evidence to date that Pakistani intelligence officers are actively undermining American efforts to combat militants in the region." Along with the link, officials also say that "new information" gave them evidence that Pakistan's spy service has also provided militants with details of American operations in the region.

Although there's little detail about what this new information consists of, significantly, officials emphasized that the cooperation with militants was not the work of intelligence officers operating on their own, "indicating that their actions might have been authorized by superiors," says the NYT. "It confirmed some suspicions that I think were widely held," one American official said. "It was sort of this 'aha' moment." The WP, which, along with the LAT, also fronts the news but credits the NYT with breaking the story, says there's disagreement within the intelligence community about how much of Pakistan's intelligence service is populated with militant allies. "You will find folks who will say there is significant penetration," one official said. "But others are saying that certainly, there's penetration, but we don't think it's top to bottom."

Bush made his statement about the possibility of withdrawing troops from Iraq on the same date that had originally been informally set as a deadline for Iraqi and U.S. officials to reach a new security agreement. Everyone notes that the two sides are close to reaching a deal. The LAT says the deal won't establish a strict timetable for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq but rather "outline a conditional time frame for Iraqi troops to take charge of the country and U.S. combat troops to be withdrawn." Whatever ends up being decided, it seems clear that it won't look anything like what administration officials had initially hoped. "The whole thing has been spun around," a senior Iraqi politician tells the LAT.

The NYT fronts more bad news from the economic front. New figures showed a weak expansion of the U.S. economy from April to June while numbers for the last couple of months of 2007 were revised and now show "the first official slide backward since the last recession in 2001," says the NYT. Economists say these new numbers increase the likelihood that the country is in a recession. All eyes will be on the jobs report this morning as analysts widely expect that it will show the seventh straight month of losses.

The NYT is alone in fronting, and everyone mentions, how, for the first time, the issue of race was openly discussed on the presidential campaign trail. Of course, race was much discussed during the primaries, but yesterday John McCain's campaign helped push its debut in the general election by accusing Barack Obama of playing "the race card." The statement was a response to Obama's remarks from the previous day when he said that McCain and his allies would try to get voters to be "scared" of the Democrat, who has "a funny name" and "doesn't look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills."

McCain said he agreed with the "race card" comments, while Obama's aides emphasized that the Democrat had uttered similar lines throughout the campaign. Although it's true that Obama has frequently made comments about what the LAT describes as his "otherness," the WP says that "Obama did appear to expand upon the theme by linking the attacks to McCain by name." The NYT points out that by simply raising the "race card" comment, McCain's aides made sure that "race would once again become an unavoidable issue" and "would again be a factor in coverage of the presidential race." Indeed, attention to this issue made sure that Obama's attacks against McCain's energy policies didn't get much coverage.

A dream (could) come true … The NYT and LAT front, and everyone notes, that scientists have discovered a drug that could provide the benefits of exercise without moving a muscle. Yes, it has been tested only on mice, but scientists are optimistic that it could some day help humans, too. In fact, the scientists have discovered two drugs that improved the athletic performance of mice, although one has to be combined with (gasp!) actual exercise in order to work. "It's a little bit like a free lunch without the calories," one researcher said.

The Wall Street Journal's world-wide newsbox leads with word that the White House will announce "the largest overhaul of intelligence powers in a generation" today. President Bush signed an executive order updating spy powers yesterday that boosts the power of the director of national intelligence. The Los Angeles Times leads with a look at how John McCain's campaign is focusing its energies on trying to shape the public's view of Barack Obama. Funnily enough, that's exactly what Obama's campaign is trying to do as well. While McCain has turned increasingly negative—"even derisive," says the LAT—in trying to portray Obama as inexperienced and out of touch, the presumptive Democratic nominee is attempting to convince voters that he can be trusted as commander in chief.

The New York Times leads with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's announcement that he would resign after his party chooses a new leader in the September elections. The Washington Post leads with a new National Defense Strategy that Secretary Robert Gates approved last month and hasn't been officially released. In the document, Gates describes the fight against extremists and terrorists as a "Long War" that will not end with the fights in Afghanistan and Iraq. As a result, the Pentagon must master "irregular" warfare, and the country needs to embrace the use of "soft power" if it hopes to be successful. USA Today leads with a look at how air travelers have been experiencing lots of flight delays despite government efforts to alleviate the problem after last year's disastrous summer. The problem has improved in some airports and worsened in others. But in roughly the first half of the year, the number of on-time arrivals across the country improved by less than one percentage point from last year.

Under the executive order signed by Bush yesterday, the director of national intelligence will have more power over staffing and coordinating work between agencies. The director will also be responsible for nurturing relationships with foreign intelligence services and developing policy, which the CIA would have to implement. The order "largely steered clear of prickly civil-liberties issues" regarding domestic surveillance but did assign the attorney general a greater oversight role, "which intelligence officials cast as an enhancement of privacy," reports the WSJ. Some in Congress expressed frustration that the White House didn't consult with them about the changes.

The news of Olmert's resignation was hardly unexpected because the prime minister has been severely weakened by a series of corruption scandals, although he has never been charged. But the move has raised doubts about the recently stepped-up efforts at peace talks with the Palestinian Authority and Syria. The LAT notes that if the party's new leader fails to form a new government without general elections, Israel could be "without effective leadership" until early next year. And, as might be expected, uncertainty about Israel's political future makes it unlikely that Olmert would be able to reach a deal with either the Palestinians or Syria.

In the new National Defense Strategy, Gates also points to China and Russia as potential threats and says the United States needs to work toward preventing conflict with them by building "collaborative and cooperative relationships." The Post says it is "unusual for a defense secretary to offer a comprehensive military strategy so late in an administration's tenure." But the paper for some reason fails to mention that, as has been widely reported, both McCain and Obama appear open to the idea of asking Gates to stay put at least temporarily. In the document, Gates wrote that it could be used by a future administration as a "blueprint to success."

The WP hears word that the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq may have recently moved to Afghanistan with several of his closest aides. This development comes as U.S. intelligence officials say they are seeing hints that the Sunni insurgent group is encouraging new recruits to avoid Iraq and go to Afghanistan and Pakistan instead. The Post reports that even some al-Qaida in Iraq leaders acknowledge their organization has suffered serious setbacks, but many blame the failures on a lack of leadership, and some say they have split off and created their own insurgent group.

Obama's efforts to "portray himself as presidential … run the risk of appearing arrogant or presumptuous," says the LAT. That's exactly what the McCain campaign is hoping for as it released an advertisement yesterday that compares—"and not in a good way," the NYT helpfully specifies—Obama to celebrities like Britney Spears by showing pictures of his speech in Berlin last week. "Right now, both campaigns have to do the same thing, which is establish who Barack Obama is," a Republican pollster tells the LAT. "That's the real battle going on."

Something the LAT fails to mention but the NYT points out in its off-lead is that McCain's tactic comes straight out of the President George Bush playbook that seeks "to make campaigns referendums on its opponents." The WP goes one step further and directly states that McCain is "adopting the aggressive, take-no-prisoners style of Karl Rove." Everyone says that even some Republicans have been taken aback by the recent aggressiveness of McCain's attacks. Espousing such a persistent negative message about his opponent could easily evaporate one of the main aspects working in McCain's favor—his image as a politician who doesn't play by the normal rules of Washington. Still, it's clear that since much of the public is trying to make up its mind about Obama, McCain has a great opportunity to plant doubts about the Democrat that could persist until Election Day.

That is assuming he can stick to the message. In a front-page piece that almost (but not quite) implies that McCain's aides are thrusting this aggressive style on the candidate against his will, the Post notes that the senator from Arizona is unpredictable and dislikes parroting talking points over and over again. As a result, McCain's "advisers cringe" when he "keeps talking" and subsequently dilutes what could have been a good sound bite. McCain's campaign has been criticized for lacking a consistent message, but to some Republicans that failure has more to do with the candidate's shortcomings rather than the campaign's failures. And the NYT points out that there are those who believe that trying to "apply the Bush model" to McCain simply won't work. "It could be the Coca-Cola strategy of marketing that they're trying to apply to Dr Pepper," a former McCain strategist said.

In the Post's op-ed page, David Ignatius flat-out suggests that what we're seeing now isn't the real McCain. In a fawning piece that goes through McCain's biography, Ignatius says the presumptive Republican nominee needs to stop listening to advisers and start being himself. "What's damaging the McCain campaign now, I suspect, is that this fiercely independent man is trying to please other people," writes Ignatius. "He should give that up and be the person whose voice shines through the pages of his life story."

Not everyone agrees. In a piece that is bluntly (disrespectfully?) titled "Is John McCain Stupid?" the WSJ's Daniel Henninger writes that McCain is constantly making things harder for himself on the campaign trail by talking too much and failing to make things simple. "Someone in the McCain circle had better do some straight talking to the candidate," writes Henninger, who suggests that, essentially, the presumptive Republican nominee needs to be saved from himself. Instead of playing to win, McCain is "competing as if he expects the other side to lose it for him."

In the LAT, Jonathan Chait also essentially says that Obama needs to let go of his instincts, but in the other direction. Instead of just presenting himself as the better candidate, Obama must tell voters why they shouldn't vote for McCain. Just like McCain seems to be following Bush's playbook, Chait says Obama appears to have picked up John Kerry's strategy that worked so well in 2004. Now, instead of relying on his usual "weak-tea replies" that "express 'disappointment' with McCain," Obama needs to go on the offensive and start attacking. "Obama doesn't need to engage in character assassination and baseless charges, as his opponent has done," writes Chait. "All he needs to do is stop letting McCain paint a wildly distorted self-portrait."

The New York Times and Wall Street Journal's world-wide newsbox lead with, while the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post devote their top nonlocal spots to, news that Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska was indicted on public corruption charges. Stevens, the longest-serving Republican in the Senate, was charged with seven counts of making false statements on his financial disclosure forms about more than $250,000 in gifts from VECO Corp., an oil-services company. The indictment states that Stevens "knowingly and willfully engaged in a scheme to conceal" the gifts, which included extensive home renovations and a Land Rover, among other items. "I am innocent of these charges and intend to prove that," Stevens said in a statement. The indictment clearly clouds Stevens' bid for re-election this year, and Democrats quietly celebrated as they savored the prospect of winning a Senate seat in Alaska for the first time since 1974.

USA Today leads with a look at how environmental groups and big businesses are filling a void left by the government by directly cutting "unprecedented deals" that involve trade-offs between new development and conservation. The deals permit businesses to carry out new projects, such as oil drilling or the construction of new power plants, without worrying about opposition from environmental groups. In exchange, companies often agree to preserve undeveloped land or to adhere to strict environmental standards. "These private deals are a pragmatic way to accomplish good things," an environmental lawyer explained.

The NYT and WP point out that Stevens is the highest-profile figure to be indicted in a wide-ranging political corruption investigation in Alaska that was launched in 2004. He also has the rare distinction of being the first sitting senator to face criminal charges in 15 years. And there might be more coming. The WSJ points out that the "indictment was narrow" but the FBI is still investigating "a variety of real-estate deals in Alaska and elsewhere" and is looking into whether friends of the senator benefited from specific earmarks or federal spending that Stevens supported. And there's a lot of that to look into. The LAT notes that Alaska has received the most "pork per capita every year since 1999."

It's no coincidence that Stevens' home state has received so much money from the federal government over the years. He's a powerful senator who has served in some of the chamber's most powerful positions, including as a chairman of the appropriations committee. Everyone describes him as an outsize figure in his home state who was once described by a local paper as "the second-largest engine of the Alaska economy." But the light has been fading, and there were already signs of trouble in his political future before the indictment became public. A poll released earlier this month showed Stevens trailing his Democratic rival by nine percentage points. But before he worries about that election, he must first beat six Republican challengers in the state's primary next month. The LAT reports that some think Stevens might decide to back out before the primary rather than risk losing his seat to a Democrat.

In the Post's op-ed page, Michael Crowley, a senior editor at the New Republic, writes that if Stevens is convicted, "few tears will be shed" for the "meanest man in Washington." Throughout his years in the Senate, "Stevens cultivated a tyrannical image and personalized politics to an extreme degree, dividing the world into friends and enemies," Crowley writes. One of his most famous outbursts involved a promise to travel the country to campaign against every senator who had helped defeat efforts to open an Alaskan wildlife refuge to oil drilling.

Well, in reality, there might be a few tears shed by Republicans. Then again, this was merely the latest in what seems to be an endless stream of bad news for the GOP, so the reaction might not be as dramatic. "We've had nothing but challenges all the way through, so what else is new?" said Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah. The WP notes that some think the Stevens indictment might even help Barack Obama win in a state that hasn't voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964.

The NYT, WP, and WSJ all front the collapse of global trade talks in Geneva after seven years of negotiations. Everyone sees it as a sign of the growing power of developing countries, particularly China and India, to set the global agenda. The talks formally broke down after India and China refused to give up the power to increase tariffs on crops if there is an increase in cheap imports. The so-called Doha Round of talks is now "dead in the water," says the WSJ, and there's little hope that it will be revived anytime soon. Many had described it as the last chance to increase free trade worldwide before protectionist sentiments take over in weakening economies. USAT says that the "talks' failure may mark a watershed after two decades of increasing globalization."

The NYT fronts word that the CIA's deputy director recently traveled to Pakistan to confront some of the country's most senior officials with evidence that members of Pakistan's spy service have deep ties to militants operating in the practically lawless tribal areas. The fact that these ties exist is hardly new, but the White House has often steered clear of directly criticizing Pakistan for fear of alienating an ally. The NYT describes the decision to have such a senior CIA official pass on the message as "an unusual one" and says that it could be "a sign" that the relationship between the two countries' intelligence services "may be deteriorating."

Although talks between Washington and Baghdad about a long-term security pact seemed to have reached a deadlock last month, the WSJ reports the negotiations started to move forward after the White House agreed to a "general time horizon" for troop withdrawals. There is still no agreement on a pullout date. While Iraqis are pushing for a 2010 withdrawal, a compromise could tack on a year or two to that goal, along with the necessary caveat that the plan could change if violence increases.

The WP devotes a front-page story to looking into the allegations John McCain and his allies have been repeating over and over again in the last few days claiming that Obama canceled a visit to a military hospital in Germany because he was forbidden from taking reporters along. This is all part of McCain's strategy to portray Obama as a shrewd political operative who has no real interest in the well-being of American troops. There's just one problem: It's not true. Obama's campaign didn't help itself by "offering slightly different reasons at different times" for canceling the visit. But ultimately, "there is no evidence that he planned to take anyone to the American hospital other than a military adviser," says the Post.

Devoting front-page real estate and more than 1,000 words to debunk what seems to be a clearly scurrilous attack could be overkill, but, as the NYT points out in a piece inside, McCain's claim has received lots of attention lately. The Republican released an advertisement detailing the claim, and although it ran as a paid commercial "roughly a dozen" times, it has been shown repeatedly on newscasts across the country. This all amounts to "a public relations coup" for the candidate who was able to get millions to see his ad, mostly without paying a penny.

The WP fronts news that Scrabulous, a popular Facebook application, was disabled for U.S. and Canadian users of the social networking site. The companies that own the Scrabble trademark, Hasbro and Mattel, had been asking Facebook to take down the application since January, but the action was taken only after a lawsuit was filed last week accusing Scrabulous of copyright infringement. "I was getting creamed, so it's probably a good thing in that respect," a Scrabulous fan tells the Post. "The country is probably 10 percent more productive today."

The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal's world-wide newsbox lead, while the Washington Post goes across its front page, with an internal Justice Department report that details how department aides broke civil service laws by taking politics into account in hiring decisions. Close aides to former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales asked inappropriate questions at interviews for nonpolitical jobs and frequently hired those who were vocal about their conservative and Christian views, even when they were less qualified for the job. The aides also carried out Internet searches to identify conservatives and screen out applicants whose views were seen as too liberal.

The Los Angeles Times leads with word that plans are currently in the works to move a unit of Pakistan's army into the country's tribal regions. The United States has long advocated such a move because Pakistan's Frontier Corps, currently assigned to guarding the largely lawless region, is ineffective. USA Today leads with a new poll taken over the weekend that shows a tightening presidential race. Among registered voters, Barack Obama's lead over John McCain decreased a few points as registered voters preferred the Democrat 47 percent to 44 percent. Among likely voters, McCain comes out ahead 49 percent to 45 percent, although both cases are within the margin of error. Perhaps most worrying for Obama is that 41 percent of respondents said they don't think he has what it takes to be commander in chief, which is at the same levels as last month.

The revelation that the hiring process at the Justice Department was politicized under Gonzales is hardly new. But the report gives more details about how pervasive the problem was and how it affected some of the department's most important positions. For example, everyone mentions the case of an experienced prosecutor who was denied an important counterterrorism job because of his wife's activism in Democratic politics. The report noted that the inappropriate use of politics in hiring decisions was most widespread in hiring immigration judges. The LAT also fronts the report out of Justice and focuses on how it hints that one of the U.S. attorneys who was fired in 2006 may have been dismissed because of rumors that she was having a sexual relationship with a female career prosecutor.

The WP focuses on Monica Goodling, who came under the heaviest criticism in the report for implementing what one senior official described as a "farm system" that was designed to increase the number of Republicans in the department. Democratic lawmakers suggested they would look into whether they could charge Goodling and others with perjury for failing to fully disclose the extent of the practice when they testified before Congress. Realistically, no one expects much to happen, particularly since most of those named in the report are no longer at the department. As many as 40 immigration judges were recruited because of their political views, and they're likely to remain on the job.

In the Post's op-ed page, a former deputy attorney general wonders: "Where were the career people on whom we count to keep the department honest?" Jamie Gorelick notes that the report details how several senior officials at the Justice Department had enough information to know that there was something strange going on but failed to say anything. Besides making sure this never happens again, the department "needs to hold individuals responsible for their actions" and "offer opportunities to those who were improperly denied them."

Even as U.S. officials praised Pakistan's plans to move a regular army unit into the country's tribal areas, they still question how much good it could do if the government continues to be unwilling to recognize the extent of the problem. The unit itself will likely run into trouble because, according to U.S. officials, it has been trained to carry out conventional war and not counterinsurgency operations. It's also unclear whether the unit would be able to do much good in an area that has long resisted military involvement. But some think there might be an opening for progress because there are hints that extremists might have alienated some tribes by betraying or killing tribal leaders.

The WP devotes its traditional lead spot to, and the NYT fronts, the violence that shook Iraq yesterday as four female bombers (the NYT says three were suicide bombers and another left a bomb in a bag and walked away) and the subsequent chaos killed at least 61 people. It marked yet another example of how women are increasingly carrying out attacks because they can evade security checkpoints more easily, and it was a reminder of how fragile the situation continues to be in Iraq. One of the bombers blew herself up in the middle of a political demonstration in Kirkuk, in northern Iraq. As the NYT recounts in detail, many blamed Turkmen extremists for the attack and angry Kurds quickly began to attack Turkmen offices and confront guards who then shot into the crowds. The Baghdad bombers carried out what appeared to be a coordinated attack against Shiite pilgrims.

The LAT and WSJ front looks at how Beijing continues to be shrouded in a gray haze despite recent efforts to curb pollution that have forced hundreds of thousands of residents to change their daily routines. Now the government is considering implementing even tougher measures that could lead to more factory closings, and officials might ban as many as 90 percent of private cars from the streets. If China fails to improve the situation, many athletes are likely to wear masks while in Beijing, which would be extremely embarrassing for the Communist government. The WSJ notes that many are looking to the efforts as a learning experience about what can be done to decrease pollution. Experts say that if an authoritarian government that can order businesses around more easily than most other countries can't control the problem then it's unlikely that other industrialized nations could have much success in reducing pollution.

In other Olympics-related news, the NYT takes a look at how the Chinese government is so determined to show the world a sanitized picture of Beijing that it has put up walls and screens around some of the city's more unsightly buildings and blocks.

The WP says Virginia Gov. Timothy Kaine appears to be on the vice presidential shortlist. Kaine has apparently told "close associates" that he's had "very serious" conversations with Obama. Sens. Evan Bayh and Joseph Biden are also under serious consideration. Besides Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, most of the others being considered are senators with lots of foreign-policy experience. Kaine seems to fulfill many of the characteristics Obama is looking for in a running mate, but he has no foreign policy experience and is a first-term governor. To the shock of no one, the NYT notes that Sen. Hillary Clinton doesn't appear to be a contender for the job.

The LAT fronts a look at how fire commanders are often pressured to deploy military planes to drop water and retardant to fight a wildfire even if they won't do any good. Firefighters call them "CNN drops" because they're often launched because of pressure from politicians who want to demonstrate that everything is being done to put out a wildfire. No one doubts that aircraft can play an important role in putting out a fire, but the increasing, and often unnecessary, use of air power is one of the reasons why the cost of fighting wildfires has skyrocketed in recent years.

In an interesting piece on the first trial of a Guantanamo detainee, the NYT notes that while the proceedings might look like they could take place in the United States, the truth is that things are far from normal. FBI agents have testified about how they didn't inform Osama Bin Laden's former driver, Salim Hamdan, about his constitutional rights, and a psychiatrist has said that the isolation and repeated interrogations have so warped Hamdan's sense of reality that he sometimes thinks the trial itself is another method of interrogation. The whole process sometimes takes on a surreal nature. At one point, a prosecution witness showed a chart of al-Qaida's leadership that includes Hamdan far below the supposed leader, who was released from Guantanamo in 2004. Plus there's the small fact that the administration has made it clear that even if Hamdan is acquitted, he could still face indefinite detention. "Where else in the world," an ACLU lawyer said, "is someone being prosecuted for a crime who is already serving a life sentence and will continue to serve one if he's acquitted?"

One would like to think that when voters weigh in on whether their state's constitution should be amended, they've thought about the issue and have a clear point of view. But those who are campaigning for and against the proposition that would amend California's constitution are betting that how the ballot measure is worded can change votes, notes the LAT. Supporters of the proposition are up in arms because the attorney general's office changed the language on the ballot to say that it would "eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry" instead of stating that the amendment seeks "to provide that only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." Political analysts say people are less likely to vote for something that is seen as taking away existing rights.

The New York Times leads with a look at how banks are reducing the number of loans they give out to businesses. Over the last year, two key credit sources for companies have collectively declined 3 percent, which "is the largest annual decline since the credit tightening that began with the last recession, in 2001." USA Today leads with word that the White House has increased its estimate for next year's deficit to a record $490 billion. A previous estimate for the deficit in the fiscal year beginning on Oct. 1 was $407 billion, but the numbers have been revised to reflect a weakening economy and "larger-than-anticipated costs" of the fiscal stimulus package.

The Los Angeles Times leads with a look at the "rickety calm" that has engulfed Iraq as the last of the "surge" troops leave the country and citizens wait to see what happens next. Even as they're getting used to living with much less violence, Iraqis "tread carefully" out of a generalized fear that gains could quickly unravel. The Wall Street Journal plays weekend catch-up and leads its world-wide newsbox with Saturday's bombings in India, which killed more than 45 people. A group calling itself the "Indian Mujahadeen" claimed responsibility for the explosions. The Washington Post leads locally but goes high with the efforts by Barack Obama's campaign to increase registration and turnout among African-Americans. Black voters could be the key to an Obama victory in several battleground states, including some in the South. But the campaign has a steep hill to climb, and there's uncertainty about whether spending so much time and effort on reaching citizens who have long tuned out of politics will actually pay off in November.

The examples cited by the NYT to illustrate the way credit has tightened for companies make it clear that money is still available, but banks are being more careful about approving loans. Indeed, businesses "with solid credit and profitable businesses can generally still get loans, but rates are higher and wait times are longer," says the paper. The paper notes that until about a year ago, banks could easily sell most of their loans, which passed the risk on to someone else. But now that banks are risking their own money, they're more motivated to make sure a borrower can actually afford the credit payments. That doesn't necessarily sound like a negative development, but some contend that banks have gone from one extreme to the other. Whereas banks used to give almost anyone credit, they now have "an equally arbitrary aversion to lend," and even profitable companies are having to jump through hoops in order to get credit to expand their businesses.

USAT makes clear that the projection for next year's deficit is likely to be even higher than the revised projections because the estimate doesn't take into account the full cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Also, if the economy worsens the number is likely to increase further. Despite its record-breaking sum, as a share of the economy, the 2009 deficit would be 3 percent to 4 percent and falls below the post-World War II record of 6 percent that was set in 1983. Still, it's a sobering reminder of how much the deficit has increased under Bush, who inherited a $128 billion surplus in 2001.

The Post fronts the second story in its series about oil that focuses on China, a country that "accounts for about 40 percent of the world's recent increase in demand for oil." Whereas private cars in China were a rare sight 15 years ago, there were 15.2 million of them last year. That number has plenty of room to grow as fewer than 4 percent of people in China have actually bought a car. Even as demand skyrockets, China, along with other developing countries, heavily subsidizes oil so there's little incentive to conserve fuel. The NYT also takes a look at subsidies around the world and notes that, according to one estimate, countries with fuel subsidies "accounted for 96 percent of the world's increase in oil use last year."

The NYT fronts a look at John McCain's 15-year leadership of the International Republican Institute, a role that has brought him into close contact with many of Washington's most powerful lobbyists. The group's mission of promoting democracy around the world is certainly consistent with McCain's stated values, but a closer examination "reveals an organization in many ways at odds with the political outsider image that has become a touchstone" of his campaign for the White House. McCain has helped the institute raise millions of dollars from lobbyists and companies who have interests before the Senate. And lobbyists have also been an integral part of the institute, as 14 of them served on the group's board during McCain's tenure.

The NYT and WP both note that the Senate will devote much of its time this week to considering a huge omnibus package that contains 35 bills. The brainchild of Majority Leader Harry Reid is officially known as the Advancing America's Priorities Act, but the NYT calls it the "Tomnibus" since it's devoted to thwarting the efforts of one man, Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla. Coburn, known as the Senate's "Dr. No," is an expert at using parliamentary tactics to block the passage of legislation. Much of the legislation in the $10-billion package has overwhelming bipartisan support, but Coburn says it involves unnecessary government spending.

There's such poor oversight of contractors in Iraq that one company got paid for work it never completed, notes the WP. The special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction says Parsons received $142 million of a total $333 million, even though it completed only about one-third of the projects stipulated in one of its contracts. Parsons questions the findings and says its work was hindered by the violence in Iraq. A separate Post story points out that the government has apparently decided that its experience with contractors in Iraq has been so successful that it's expanding efforts to award new contracts for work in Afghanistan.

The NYT points out that the phrase "jump the shark," which is used to denote things that are perceived "as being past their prime," could be on its way out and replaced by a new expression: "nuked the fridge." The original phrase refers to an episode of Happy Days in which a character jumped over a shark while water skiing; the new version was inspired by the latest Indiana Jones movie, in which the rogue archaeologist survives a nuclear blast by hiding inside a fridge. Jason Nicholl, who runs a Web site dedicated to the new phrase, characterized it as a "new, fresh take" on an old expression that probably doesn't mean much to many of those who use it. " 'Jump the shark' is for people over the age of 60, who remember the show."

The Washington Post leads with economists' doubts that the "sprawling" housing bill currently headed for President Bush's desk will do much to soften the crunch. The bill makes the front page in all three papers, but the Middle East also gets plenty of face time: The New York Times leads with the "profound weakening" of the Mahdi Army, Iraq's Shiite milita, "in an important, if tentative, milestone for stability in Iraq." The Los Angeles Times turns the spotlight on the war on terror in Pakistan, leading with a grim portrait of "a counter-terrorism campaign ... that has lost momentum and is beset by frustration."

The Democrat-sponsored housing bill received 72-13 Senate approval in a rare Saturday session, giving the Treasury Department sweeping authority to prop up the country's two largest mortgage finance companies and potentially costing the government billions of dollars. "The bill raises the national debt ceiling to $10.6 trillion … the first time that the limit on the government's credit card has grown to 14 digits," the NYT reports. Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., mentioned in both stories, told the WP that that the Treasury's new authority "crosses the line into socialism"; John McCain and Barack Obama both support the bill. The Post's economist sources say that the end of the crunch won't come nearly as fast as the bill's passing. In fact, one says, the 400,000 households the bill hopes to assist are "a drop in the bucket."

The Mahdi Army's decline is "part of a general decline in violence that is resonating in American as well as Iraqi politics," the NYT reports. The anti-American fighters were the primary defenders of poor Shiites in Iraq, but the miltia's violent tactics weakened its appeal "to the point that many quietly supported American military sweeps against the group." The army formerly held large portions of Baghdad but was forced back by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki's military operation this spring. The weakening is a victory for Iraq's government and particularly for the prime minister, who is increasingly seen as a legitimate national leader. Seventeen Iraqis in formerly milita-controlled areas, each interviewed by the Times, say the group's grip on the local economy has slowly "ebbed"—cooking gas, for example, now costs less than a fifth of its former price under the Mahid Army.

If that's the good news, the LAT has the bad: CIA operations against al-Qaida fighters in Pakistan are all but fruitless. "Dozens of interviews" with (anonymous) senior security officials give a bleak picture of the CIA's attempts to straddle an uneasy dichotomy in Pakistan, a nation that is by turns an ally and a threat. In the current state of affairs, officers are "confined largely to a collection of crumbling bases in northwestern Pakistan. Most are on remote Pakistani military outposts, where they are kept on a short leash under an awkward arrangement with their hosts—rarely allowed to leave and often left with little to do but plead with their Pakistani counterparts to act." The piece is filled with depressing quotes from CIA officials, such as one's observation that "everyone who serves in Pakistan comes back frustrated." The only thing that might change the agency's approach? "Another attack on the homeland," a high-ranking counter-terrorism official says.

The war on terror shares front-page real estate with Barack Obama, whose recent world tour gets A1 analysis in both the WP and the LAT. The Post wonders if the trip, widely considered a success, will have any real payoff for Obama. The candidate himself openly told the paper he hoped it would have an impressionistic effect on voters later in the game: "Hopefully, it gives voters a sense that I can in fact—and do—operate effectively on the international stage," Obama said. "That may not be decisive for the average voter right now, given our economic troubles, but it's knowledge they can store in the back of their minds for when they go into the polling place later." The LAT piece quotes Obama strategist David Axelrod, speaking with a remarkable frankness about the theater aspect of the trip ("Any campaign, in part, is about whether people can picture a candidate in that role"). The Times also notes that a Thursday Fox News poll shows Obama slipping to within a "statistically insignificant" margin over John McCain.

A column by WP ombudsman Deborah Howell examines reader reactions to the paper's 13-part series on the unsolved murder of D.C. intern Chandra Levy. "All but two" readers who called or wrote were critical of the series that, in one's phrasing, "pushe[d] real news off the front page for 13 days." One reader who did like the series compliments the appeal of serial reading, adding to the anticipation of opening the morning paper. Howell ultimately sides with the majority, concluding that "to me, the project wasn't worth 13 days, all on Page 1, and the new information wasn't highlighted sufficiently."

A piece in the NYT's Arts & Leisure section eulogizes album packaging and liner notes, which are increasingly scarce in the digital music age. "Scanning the small-print data crammed into album packaging can be tremendous fun, revealing aspects of an artist not always evident in the music," the pieces muses, amid quotes from various experts who don't seem too worried about the disappearance of physical liner notes. The best part about album booklets? They "are the domain of too-much-information moments," like when Gwen Stefani told her husband, in her latest album's credits, "I still want you all over me."

The Washington Post leads with news that the Federal Communications Commission approved the "long-delayed merger" between Sirius and XM satellite radio companies. The merger passed after the FCC agreed the "marketplace has changed" since the companies started; satellite radio now competes with its Internet counterpart and podcasts for listeners. The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times both lead with California's passage of a law that requires trans-fats to be removed from restaurant cooking by 2010 and retail baked goods by 2011. The Wall Street Journal tops its world-wide news box with an account of Barack Obama's cozy meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, during which he "appeared close to securing an endorsement" from the foreign leader.

The Sirius-XM union, which detractors opposed for fear of a monopoly, won't come without stipulations, notes the WP. The companies "must cap prices for three years after joining and allow consumers to choose the channels they want and pay less for packages of channels." They will also pay a combined $19.7 million in fines because "some of their radio receivers sold to consumers and signal-boosting radio towers violated FCC technical rules." In its B-section coverage, the WSJ says the FCC member who cast the tie-breaking vote in the decision "held off on voting in favor…until she was satisfied that the enforcement part of the deal was completed."

The NYT declares that having the trans-fat ban "imposed on the most populous state's 88,000 restaurants, as well as its bakeries and other food purveyors, is a major gain for the movement against trans-fats." It notes the California Restaurant Association opposed the requirement, arguing that "singling out trans-fats as a singularly harmful food product was arbitrary and that a mandate would prove expensive" and such a job should fall to the federal government. The LAT says that the CRA resisted the legislation since "it would not substantially affect public health because people eat most of their meals at home."

The U.S. military may be restricting photojournalists' access to operations in Iraq, reports the NYT above the fold. Embed rules forbid using images of wounded soldiers without their written consent and prevent "showing identifiable soldiers killed in action before their families have been notified." But some photographers contend the military has been using a catch-all clause in the rules that states "no information can be published without approval" to further limit the photos that come from the war zone.

The WP off-leads with the prevalence of American donations in Israeli politics after recent scrutiny of U.S. tycoon Morris Talansky's "bankrolling" of luxury vacations for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. In Israel, the revelation of Talansky's donations of "expensive cigars," "a fine watch," and "five-star suites" has prompted an examination of foreign political patrons. "[M]ostly American," overseas donors are especially friendly to right-leaning politicians—those who "advocate aggressive military action against Iran and Hamas and who maintain an uncompromising stance against ceding land to the Palestinians." Below the fold, a piece questions the growing number of reality TV shows featuring children that push "the ethical envelope" and wonders if exposing kids' struggles is "exploitation, or edutainment?"

Despite downturns in general consumer spending, luxury-goods-makers say U.S. sales of high-end products remain constant, confirms the WSJ in an above-the-fold article. An increase in "entry-level items" and foreign spending spurred by the low dollar help explain the steady sales, but investors "appear to be betting that the boom won't last." The NYT rounds out its front page with a look at how sleep-away camps cope with "increasingly high-maintenance" parents. Modern moms and dads commit a variety of offenses, including making "unsolicited bunk placement requests," giving their kids illicit items like junk food and cell phones, and deciding that summer is "an ideal time to give their offspring a secret vacation from Ritalin."

Elsewhere, the NYT details molestation charges against a Judo instructor who serves as the top official in two of the sport's national associations. The coach allegedly groped his teenage female athletes during training, provided them with drugs and alcohol, and had sex with them on road trips to competitions. Though one girl's parents brought a complaint to local police as early as 1981, authorities didn't take action because of confusion over jurisdiction, since "the suspected incidents were said to have occurred on the road and at tournaments in different cities." The charges resurfaced when a former student posted on her blog after seeing her former coach at the Olympic trials.

Ever wondered about bartending's competing schools of thought? A WSJ piece dispatches from the "Tales of the Cocktail" convention in New Orleans, where it's avant-garde "bar chefs" vs. the nostalgic "classicists." But don't worry, the two camps are easy to tell apart: the classicists argue "over whether the correct recipe for a Clover Club is found in Albert Stevens Crockett's 1931 'Old Waldorf Bar Days' or Harry MacElhone's 1921 'ABC of Mixing Cocktails,' " while the bar chefs debate "which Sonoma farmer's market is the best source for organic tarragon and consulting on the chemical attributes of emulsions."

In a 1966 review of the new Random House Dictionary, Kurt Vonnegut wrote that the key to understanding a new dictionary was to "look up ain't and like." These two definitions are the quickest way, Vonnegut promises us, to determine whether a dictionary is "descriptive" or "prescriptive"—if it explains how language is used or if it decrees how it ought to be.

Nowadays, not so many people use dictionaries—why bother when you can look up the definition online? Vonnegut's idea is no less relevant today, though. Monday's launch of Cuil, the latest search engine gunning for Google, brings us to this question: What queries can you give a search engine to quickly expose its strengths and weaknesses?

Slate wants your suggestions on the most useful queries that, when given to a variety of search engines, neatly show the differences between them. To borrow an example from my review of Powerset, the phrase "Who shot John Lennon?" demonstrates the semantic search engine's ability to answer simple questions better than Google; more conventional queries usually favor the incumbent. Or, to take another approach, perhaps a given keyword returns pages on one search engine that another refuses to crawl altogether.

When you send us your search queries, make sure to include your thoughts on what the results reveal about Google, Cuil, Ask, etc. Different engines prioritize results in different ways, based on notions of a page's authority, usefulness, or popularity. Like dictionaries, does this make some search engines descriptive and others prescriptive? Or are those terms out of date? If so, send us some new ones.

Please post your submissions to the Fray or send them to slate.search@gmail.com. E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Entries will be compiled for a future column.