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books
Pop Goes Christianity

chatterbox
Defending Hillary

chatterbox
Clinton-Wallace Mix 'n' Match

Convictions
John's Judges

corrections
Corrections

culture gabfest
The Culture Gabfest Summer Movie Bonanza

dear prudence
A Play Date for Mommy

Deathwatch
The Hillary Deathwatch

Deathwatch
The Hillary Deathwatch

Deathwatch
The Hillary Deathwatch

Deathwatch
The Hillary Deathwatch

Deathwatch
The Hillary Deathwatch

did you see this?
Keith Olbermann Rips Hillary

dvd extras
Pop Culture

election scorecard
Honesty Is the Best Policy

explainer
Burma vs. Myanmar

explainer
Can a Campaign Go Bankrupt?

explainer
Who Owns a Suicide Note?

explainer
The Unpopular President

family
I'm Talking to You, Corded!

fighting words
Are We Getting Two for One?

food
Meatless Like Me

foreigners
What Does It Mean To Be "Pro-Israel"?

foreigners
What's Going on in Abkhazia?

gabfest
The Green Shirt Gabfest

gaming
Unjustifiable Carnage, Uneasy Alliances, and Lots of Self-Doubt

hollywoodland
Steven Spielberg's Last Crusade?

hot document
Watchdog, Watch Thyself

hot document
Can't Help Loving

human nature
Not Black and White

juicy bits
Bill Clinton's Post-Presidential Life

jurisprudence
Little Sudan

map the candidates
Feeling Ducky

map the candidates
Clinton Outworks Obama

medical examiner
Stealth Marketers

moneybox
Corn Dogs

moneybox
Obama-nomics

moneybox
Yahoo-bris!

movies
Manhattan Without Car Alarms

other magazines
Return to the Frey

poem
"A Place in Maine"

politics
Slate's Delegate Calculator

politics
Campaign Junkie

politics
It's 3 A.M. What's Your Ring Tone?

politics
Obama Wins Split Decision

politics
Clinton's Final Full Day in Indiana

press box
The Russert to Judgment

press box
Salvia Divinorum Hysteria

reading list
Three A.M. Reading

recycled
Why Did Eight Belles Have To Be Euthanized?

shopping
Getting Steamed

slate v
Interviews 50 Cents: Blitzing Mother

slate v
Attack-Ad Fodder on a Silver Platter

slate v
Dear Prudence: My Friend's Husband is Cheating!

sports nut
87 Is the Loneliest Number

television
Farmer Wants a Wife

the chat room
Don't Let Your Girls Grow Up To Be Child Stars

the green lantern
Thou Shalt Sort Thy Plastics

the highbrow
'Tweenyboppers at Work

the undercover economist
It's Like Money, but With No Dead Presidents

today's blogs
She Said What?

today's blogs
Hill Street Blues

today's blogs
Are We There Yet?

today's blogs
Deal, Er, No Deal

today's papers
Let My People In

today's papers
Her Fight Will Go On

today's papers
The Beginning of the End?

today's papers
Burma Nightmare

today's papers
Out of Sight

today's papers
No Deal

today's papers
Recession Lessened

war stories
Prison Break

war stories
The Army's Math Problem

well-traveled
Baseball, Dominican-Style



Advanced Search
Friday, October 19, 2001, at 6:39 PM ET



books
Pop Goes Christianity
The deep contradictions of Christian popular culture.
By Hanna Rosin
Monday, May 5, 2008, at 7:43 AM ET


One night, a couple of years ago, I walked in on a group of evangelical college boys sitting on a bed watching The Daily Show. I felt alarmed, and embarrassed, as if I had caught them reading Playboy or something else they had to be shielded from. Jon Stewart, after all, spends at least one-quarter of his show making fun of people like them. But they eagerly invited me in. I soon learned that they watched the show every night it was on, finals or no finals. So strong was their devotion to Jon Stewart that I was tempted to ask: If Jesus came back on a Tuesday night at 11, would you get off the bed?

Over time, I came to understand this as a symptom of a larger phenomenon: evangelicals' deeply neurotic relationship with popular culture. Whether or not they were the butt of all of Stewart's jokes seemed irrelevant to them. The point was that the high priest of political comedy spent a lot of time thinking about them. Once, after I'd met Jon Stewart, they all crowded around and asked the same question: What does he really think of us?

At this point in history, American evangelicals resemble the Israelites at various dangerous moments in the Old Testament: They are blending into the surrounding heathen culture, and having ever more trouble figuring out where it ends and they begin. In politics, and in business, they've mostly gone ahead and joined the existing networks. With pop culture, they've instead created their own enormous "parallel universe," as Daniel Radosh calls it in his rich exploration of the realm, Rapture Ready! A Christian can now buy books, movies, music—and anything else lowbrow to middlebrow—tailor-made for his or her sensibilities. Worried that American popular culture leads people—and especially teenagers—astray, the Christian version is designed to satisfy all the same needs in a cleaner form.

The problem is that purity boundaries are hard to police in the Internet age. Show a kid a Christian comedian, and soon he's likely to discover that the guy is a pale imitation of this much funnier guy—Jon Stewart—who's not a Christian at all, and doesn't even like Christians. Which might then lead to a whole new set of anxieties, such as: Why are Christians so constitutionally unfunny? And, what is the point of Christian culture, anyway?

In the '80s, Christians were known as the boycotters, refusing to see movies or buy products that offended them. They felt about commercial culture much the way a Marxist might: that it was a decadent glorification of money and meaningless human relationships. Then, sometime during the '90s, when conservative evangelicals started coming out of their shells, they took a different tack. The boycotters became coopters and embarked on the curious quest to enlist America's crassest material culture in the service of spiritual growth.

Most non-Christians are aware that there is something called Christian rock. We've all had the slightly unsettling experience of pausing the car radio on a pleasant, unfamiliar ballad until we realized … Ahhh. That's not her boyfriend she's mooning over! But few of us have any idea of how truly extensive this so-called subculture is. Reading Radosh's book is like coming across another planet hidden somewhere on Earth where everything is just exactly like it is here except blue or made out of plastic. Every American pop phenomenon has its Christian equivalent, no matter how improbable. And Radosh seems to have experienced them all.

At a Christian retail show Radosh attends, there are rip-off trinkets of every kind—a Christian version of My Little Pony and the mood ring and the boardwalk T-shirt ("Friends don't let friends go to hell"). There is Christian Harlequin and Christian chick lit and Bibleman, hero of spiritual warfare. There are Christian raves and Christian rappers and Christian techno, which is somehow more Christian even though there are no words. There are Christian comedians who put on a Christian version of Punk'd, called Prank 3:16. There are Christian sex-advice sites where you can read the biblical case for a strap-on dildo or bondage (liberation through submission). There's a Christian planetarium, telling you the true age of the universe, and my personal favorite—Christian professional wrestling, where, by the last round, "Outlaw" Todd Zane sees the beauty of salvation.

At some point, Radosh asks the obvious question: Didn't Jesus chase the money changers out of the temple? In other words, isn't there something wrong with so thoroughly commercializing all aspects of faith? For this, the Christian pop-culture industry has a ready answer. Evangelizing and commercializing have much in common. In the "spiritual marketplace" (as it's called), Christianity is a brand that seeks to dominate. Like Coke, it wants to hold onto its followers and also win over new converts. As with advertisers, the most important audience is young people and teenagers, who are generally brand loyalists. Hence, Bibleman and Christian rock are the spiritual equivalent of New Coke. Christian trinkets—a WWJD bracelet, a "God is my DJ" T-shirt—function more like Coca-Cola T-shirts or those cute stuffed polar bears. They telegraph to the community that the wearer is a proud Christian and that this is a cool thing to be—which should, in theory, invite eager curiosity.

Straightforward, if somewhat crude, merchandizing so far. But there is also another level of questions, which the creators of Christian culture have a much harder time answering: What does commercializing do to the substance of belief, and what does an infusion of belief do to the product? When you make loving Christ sound just like loving your boyfriend, you can do damage to both your faith and your ballad. That's true when you create a sanitized version of bands like Nirvana or artists like Jay-Z, too: You shoehorn a message that's essentially about obeying authority into a genre that's rebellious and nihilistic, and the result can be ugly, fake, or just limp.

The Christian rockers Radosh interviews are always torn between the pressure not to lead their young audience astray and the drive to make good music. Mark Allan Powell, a professor who teaches a class on contemporary Christian music at Trinity Lutheran Seminary, describes the predicament for Radosh: Imagine the Good Rubber Tire Co. came out with an awesome rock song that just happened to be about tires. Musicians wouldn't want to play it because they'd think, "We're being used," Powell explains. Creative Christian types find themselves in a similar bind: They want to make good, authentic music. But they are also enlisted in a specific mission which confines their art.

The entertainers in Radosh's book complain about watchdog groups that count the number of times a song mentions Jesus or about the lockstep political agenda a Christian audience expects. They complain about promoting an "adolescent theology" of Christian rock, as one calls it, where they "just can't get over how darned cool it was that Jesus sacrificed himself." In his interview with Radosh, Powell pulled out an imitation of a 1982 New Wave pop song with the lyrics; "You'll have to excuse us/ We're in love with Jesus." This, he explained, was the equivalent of a black-velvet painting of Elvis. Only it's more offensive, because it's asking the listener to base his whole life around an insipid message and terrible quality music.

For faith, the results can be dangerous. A young Christian can get the idea that her religion is a tinny, desperate thing that can't compete with the secular culture. A Christian friend who'd grown up totally sheltered once wrote to me that the first time he heard a Top 40 station he was horrified, and not because of the racy lyrics: "Suddenly, my lifelong suspicions became crystal clear," he wrote. "Christian subculture was nothing but a commercialized rip-off of the mainstream, done with wretched quality and an apocryphal insistence on the sanitization of reality."

Striking a balance between reverence and hip relevance can be a near-impossible feat. Christian comedians, for example, border on subversive, especially when making fun of themselves. In one episode of Prank 3:16, the pranksters fake the Rapture and throw their victim into a panic because she's afraid she's been left behind. With true comedic flair, they're flirting with opposition and doubt, and even cruelty. But "the Christian is supposed to be secure in the loving hand of the almighty God," one of them tells Radosh. So, even if they don't sanitize, they're afraid to step over into the brutal, dirty truth comedy thrives on.

The new generation of Christians is likely to be a different kind of audience. Raised on iPods and downloadable music, they find it difficult truly to commit to the idea of a separate Christian pop culture. They might watch Jon Stewart or Pulp Fiction and also listen to the Christian band Jars of Clay, assuming the next album is any good. They are much more critical consumers and excellent spotters of schlock. The creators of Christian pop culture may just adapt and ease up on the Jesus-per-minute count, and artistic quality might show some improvement. But in my experience, where young souls are at stake, Christian creators tend to balk. It's always been a stretch to defend Christian pop culture as the path to eternal salvation. Now, they may have to face up to the fact that it's more like an eternal oxymoron.



chatterbox
Defending Hillary
Psst. Her cheap pander on OPEC is good policy.
By Timothy Noah
Wednesday, May 7, 2008, at 7:12 PM ET


Hillary Clinton is having a really bad day, what with Tim Russert, George McGovern, and assorted other political experts finally saying, after her worse-than-expected showing in North Carolina and Indiana, that a Clinton nomination is no longer plausible. Hey, I demonstrated that it was no longer plausible five days ago—using data, it turns out, that understated Obama's advantage! But more respectable types held back until yesterday, when Hillary's last-ditch metric—the prospect of winning not a delegate majority but a popular-vote majority in the primaries and caucuses if you included Michigan and Florida, whose primaries, even Clinton previously recognized, lacked legitimacy—became officially unattainable. Now Clinton's only option is what David Corn of Mother Jones calls a "nullification strategy," i.e., "Endorse me, superdelegates, because … because … because I say so, damn it!" Hillary will likely remain in the race until Obama secures the number of delegates necessary to become the presumptive nominee, and as an orthodox arithmecrat I would support that decision. But from now on, the press will pay her minimal attention. A New York Post headline put it with succinct cruelty: "Stick a Fork in Her—She's Done."

Before Hillary departs the stage, though, I would like to defend her against NOPEC nay-sayers.

Clinton has been getting a lot of criticism, most of it deserved, for pandering frantically in a last-ditch effort to seize the nomination. Attention has mostly focused on her gas-tax timeout, a popular but unsound proposition. (Some but not all the reasons why are summarized here.) But the same political commentators who, quite appropriately, mocked the gas-tax suspension as a cheap stunt similarly mocked Clinton's related proposal to bust the OPEC cartel. Maureen Dowd called it "inane." Josh Marshall said it demonstrated "the widening gap between reality and her campaign trail statements." Politico's Ben Smith observed with condescension that it was "very hard to figure out what exactly she means by the threat to break OPEC."

Clinton's plan is neither vague nor foolish. OPEC is a cartel. Cartels violate the Sherman and Clayton Antitrust Acts, and the Justice Department doesn't typically tolerate them. The New Yorker's financial columnist, James Surowiecki, has noted,

[I]n the nineteen-nineties the Justice Department broke up international cartels in vitamins, lysine, and graphite electrodes, fining companies hundreds of millions of dollars and sending executives to prison. OPEC is a much bigger target, but it's no less deserving. If the concern is foreign policy, then use the World Trade Organization. Six OPEC members already belong to the WTO, and Saudi Arabia is eager to join. Perhaps we could ask the Saudis whether, as a condition of membership, they'd be kind enough to stop orchestrating an international price-fixing conspiracy.

Too late for that last suggestion; Saudi Arabia joined the WTO in 2005. Otherwise, though, Surowiecki remains dead-on.

The courts have repeatedly thrown out lawsuits aimed at compelling the Justice Department to bust OPEC just like it busts other cartels. The stated reason is that OPEC enjoys "sovereign immunity." But OPEC isn't a country. It's a cartel. Even if OPEC were a country by some arcane legal definition, that still wouldn't immunize it in any legitimate way from antitrust law. Sen. Herbert Kohl, D-Wisc., has pointed out that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act states explicitly that the doctrine of sovereign immunity does not protect a nation's commercial activity. Since the courts refuse to recognize this, Kohl has repeatedly over the years introduced legislation ("NOPEC") granting the Justice Department antitrust jurisdiction over OPEC. Last year's version cleared both House and Senate with veto-proof majorities as part of an energy bill, but NOPEC was later stripped out by a House-Senate conference committee. Clinton proposes that if Congress and the courts continue to shield OPEC, the executive branch can take its case to the WTO, as Surowiecki suggested.

Hillary's timing, it's true, could be better. If you're going to take on OPEC, it's probably best to do so not when oil prices are up but when they're down in order to minimize the ability of OPEC's biggest player, Saudi Arabia, to retaliate by temporarily reducing or cutting off supply, as it did in 1973. Hence my battle cry in November 2001, "Kick OPEC While It's Down!" (This is a longstanding Chatterbox hobby horse.) But I may be exercising too much caution. It's been argued that the 1973 oil crisis was more the product of President Nixon's wage and price controls and subsequent legislation to ration gas than of the Arab oil embargo, which was ultimately unenforceable because the oil market was and remains international. Steven Pearlstein, business columnist for the Washington Post, notes in a May 7 column that busting OPEC might cause Arab governments to withhold investment capital from the United States. Even so, he agrees that busting OPEC is a good idea:

[O]ne should not underestimate how much Arab elites value the respect they are accorded and their access to our markets, our companies and our top officials. After a couple of years of being treated like political and economic pariahs, they might begin to realize that there will be a cost to their piggy price-fixing behavior.

Are you listening, Barack Obama?

OPEC-Busting Archive:

July 10, 2007 "Go, NOPEC!"

May 19, 2004 "Why $2 Gas Is Amazing"

Sept. 18, 2003: "Is Bremer A Price Fixer?"

April 9, 2003: "Has the U.S. Joined OPEC?"

March 13, 2003: "Spencer Abraham Joins OPEC"

Feb. 7, 2002: "OPEC and the U.N.: How to Tell Them Apart"

Nov. 21, 2001: "Kick OPEC While It's Down!"

Aug. 9, 2001: "Suing OPEC"



chatterbox
Clinton-Wallace Mix 'n' Match
Match the quotation with the angry white male!
By Timothy Noah
Monday, May 5, 2008, at 6:27 PM ET


One of the following quotations is from former President Bill Clinton in 2008—last week, in fact—and one is from the late Alabama Gov. George Wallace in 1968. Can you tell which is which?

Quotation 1: "The great divide in this country is not by race or even income, it's by those who think they are better than everyone else and think they should play by a different set of rules. In [southern state] and [southern state] we know that when we see it."

Quotation 2: "They've looked down their noses at the average man on the street too long. They've looked at the bus driver, the truck driver, the beautician, the fireman, the policeman, and the steelworker, the plumber, and the communication worker, and the oil worker and the little businessman. … [t]he average man on the street in [southern state] and [southern state]. …"

Harder than you expected, isn't it? Welcome to the final weeks of the Democratic primary campaign.

You'll find Quotation 1 here and Quotation 2 here.



Convictions
John's Judges
If you liked the judges picked by Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, you're going to love McCain's picks too.
Friday, May 9, 2008, at 10:45 AM ET



corrections
Corrections
Friday, May 9, 2008, at 6:41 AM ET

In the May 8 "Deathwatch," Christopher Beam misspelled Rep. Heath Shuler's name.

In a May 7 "Trailhead," blog entry Christopher Beam misspelled Mika Brzezinski's name.

In the May 6 "Explainer," Juliet Lapidos originally asked who owns a suicide note but went on to answer a slightly different question about the rights to disseminate the contents of such a note. Technically, the note (and copyright to its contents) belongs to Deborah Palfrey or to her estate. So if her mother inherited her estate, then her mother owns the note. But the sheriff or medical examiner's office has initial, de facto control over the dissemination of the note.

In the May 6 "Hot Document," Bonnie Goldstein misidentified Richard Loving as Thomas.

In the May 6 "Medical Examiner," Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer inaccurately stated that the radio show The Infinite Mind runs on NPR. The show is not produced by NPR and runs on public radio stations.

In a May 5 "Convictions" blog entry, Richard Ford misspelled the title of the movie Gattaca.

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.



culture gabfest
The Culture Gabfest Summer Movie Bonanza
Listen to Slate's new show about the week in culture.
By Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner
Wednesday, May 7, 2008, at 11:39 AM ET

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

Posted by Andy Bowers on Feb. 28 at 3:07 p.m.

Feb. 14, 2008

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



dear prudence
A Play Date for Mommy
In honor of Mother's Day: indifferent mothers, neglected mothers, smothering mothers, and more.
Thursday, May 8, 2008, at 7:06 AM ET

Get "Dear Prudence" delivered to your inbox each week; click here to sign up. Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com. (Questions may be edited.)

Dear Prudence,

My daughter is in her late 30s and lives a day's drive away from me. She recently brought her two young children for a visit. Since her husband had to work, she brought along a single girlfriend. When they arrived, my daughter announced that she and her friend planned to go out partying on the nights they were here and to leave the children with me. I was disappointed not to see more of her but gladly took care of my grandchildren. My daughter and her friend stayed out very late barhopping and came home drunk both nights. Then they left the next day without saying goodbye. My daughter called to say she'd had so much fun that she and her friend were planning to come back with the children during the summer to do it again. I told my daughter that while I'm always happy to see her and the children, she should plan to stay in a hotel if she wants to party all night. My daughter hung up on me, then wrote me an e-mail saying she would not visit again and accusing me of being judgmental. If I'd behaved like my daughter, my mother would have set me straight quick; she called women who act the way my daughter did "sluts." In trying not to be judgmental like my mother, have I created a monster? What, if anything, should I do now to repair our relationship? I love my daughter and want to see my grandchildren.

—Sad and Perplexed

Dear Sad,

I'm trying to figure out whether this trampy persona is new and out of character or whether this is just the latest excrescence of her usual conduct. Any married woman who dumps her children with their grandmother so she can barhop all night is someone with behavior, marriage, and alcohol problems. If you always let your daughter get away with murder when you were raising her just so you wouldn't be like your mother, then you made a terrible mistake. But she's all grown up (at least chronologically), and although she apparently lacks judgment and self-control, she's also a mother now. It sounds as if those kids are going to need comfort and stability, so you don't want your daughter using them as pawns in your relationship with her. Call her and say you are sorry your last conversation ended the way it did. Don't back down about her behavior—what she did is simply not all right. Explain you are not calling to pass judgment, but because you are concerned about her health and safety and you wish she would talk to you about what's going on in her life.

—Prudie

Dear Prudence Video: My Friend's Husband Is Cheating!

Dear Prudence,

I'm a fortysomething mother of two. I live in the same town as my mother, grandmother, and mother-in-law. Every Mother's Day, my husband and I invite all three to go out for breakfast or dinner on us. My mother and grandmother always accept, and my mother-in-law always declines. My husband feels that we must go over to his mother's house. This is his idea, not hers. I don't want to go because her house smells of smoke, the kids have homework, and we see her frequently anyway. She always says she doesn't feel well, but she goes out other places, like to bingo or even out to dinner with my sister-in-law. She just doesn't feel like doing anything with us. My two sisters-in-law live in other towns and just send flowers and get to enjoy their Mother's Day. I think I should be able to relax on Mother's Day. Am I right that by asking her out, we have fulfilled our obligation to her?

—Wants the Day Off

Dear Wants,

Yes, you have fulfilled your obligation—it's your Mother's Day, too, after all. If your husband wants to go over with flowers and cards from your kids, let him; since you see her often, there's no need for you to make the rounds. Your mother-in-law sounds awkward and somewhat difficult and probably feels uncomfortable with your mother and grandmother. But you're making a gracious gesture, so it's her choice not to be feted. (And while I'm happy for all those who enjoy Mother's Day, I consider my greatest gift as a wife and mother to be telling my husband and daughter they can skip this manufactured obligation.)

—Prudie

Dear Prudence,

I am a mother of three young children and have been married for 12 years. We have finally begun to enjoy some financial comfort after years of struggling and juggling bills. By reducing expenses and relocating for better job prospects, things are beginning to look up. However, these expense reductions have meant that I have "done without" many things for years. I haven't had a salon haircut in two years. Buying clothes for myself is a rare treat. Meanwhile, my husband had been wanting a dog "for the kids" for the past several years. I finally relented, and she is indeed a sweet dog, and the kids love her. My problem is that my husband takes the dog to a groomer. I was shocked to learn that it cost $60 for one session. I am feeling resentful that I have scrimped to get us back to a good credit rating only to have him drop $60 on this dog's appearance. When I expressed my shock, he seemed to think I was being unreasonable. Am I just being petty here?

—Hausfrau

Dear Hausfrau,

Maybe you can go along next time your husband takes the dog to the groomer and ask the groomer to give you a quick once-over since you haven't had a professional clipping in two years. No, you aren't being petty, and I can see perhaps how you got into debt if your husband thinks nothing of splurging on your mutt's styling when you can barely clothe yourself. I suggest this as a Mother's Day gift: He buys a doggie brush and nail clipper, and he and the kids figure out how to groom the dog themselves, while you go out and treat yourself with a trip to the beauty salon.

—Prudie

Dear Prudie,

About every other week, all of my friends have little social gatherings, usually dinner and a movie. The school we all attend is very far away from where I live, and most of my friends live downtown. One friend lives down the road from me, so we carpool. His mom usually takes us, and my mom picks us up. The problem is, my mom tries to act like a friend of ours. She talks too much and is repetitive and thinks she's really funny. She's also very loud. When I've confronted her about this, she takes it personally and always uses the excuse that I'm "lucky to even get a ride" and that she is going to be herself if my friends are in her car or her house. When I have friends come over, I try to schedule it for when she will be gone, or we just hang out in my room. She always tries to talk to us. I keep trying to talk to her about it, but she takes it really personally. How can I change this?

—Annoyed Youth

Dear Annoyed,

Probably the easiest way out of your dilemma is to go to college, get a job, and buy your own house and car. Then you won't need to ask your mother for a ride anymore, and the whole house will be your room. By that time, you also might find that although your mother is still a little loud and talks too much, she's somehow gotten to be less embarrassing than she used to be. Hang on until you're, oh, just about your mother's age now, and when you drop off your kids at her house, you will notice that they find grandma to be completely hilarious, and you might even think that, for a mother, she's actually not that bad.

—Prudie



Deathwatch
The Hillary Deathwatch
Dubious supporters and money woes drive Clinton's odds ever downward.
By Christopher Beam
Thursday, May 8, 2008, at 1:12 PM ET

More Clinton supporters get antsy, Obama unveils a bold new strategy to ignore Clinton, and her money woes could be deeper than expected. All of which sinks Clinton's chances another 0.2 points to 2.3 percent.

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, an early and dogged supporter of Hillary Clinton, voiced doubts that Clinton "can get the delegates that she needs" to the Hill yesterday. Feinstein also cited "negative dividends" from the race dragging on much longer. Combined with yesterday's McGovern defection, dissent in the ranks seems to be spreading.

Meanwhile, less money is causing more problems for the Clinton camp. On Good Morning America, George Stephanopoulos claims that Clinton's campaign debt is greater than the $10 million previously reported: "It could be double that, maybe even more." After the announcement yesterday of Clinton's $6.4 million self-loan—in addition to her $5 million loan in January—it looks as if money woes could be even more daunting than the delegate count. She should start referring to herself as "HillaryClinton.com."

There's one mitigating factor for Clinton: Obama only won four superdelegates yesterday, while Clinton netted zero—she won the endorsement of North Carolina Rep. Heath Shuler,* but lost another to Obama. Now Clinton leads by a mere 13 supers. But shouldn't Obama be a super magnet after a seemingly decisive day like March 6? This just confirms what we've known all along: Superdelegates are terrified of Hillary.

Speaking of which, Clinton has a new strategy: Say Obama can't win white voters. This, just as three extremely white states—West Virginia, Kentucky, and Oregon—prepare to vote. Obama's strategy: Ignore Clinton and focus on McCain. Watch this awkward dynamic escalate as long as Clinton stays in the race: Clinton ratchets up the rhetoric, while Obama pretends she doesn't exist. If an attack ad airs in Montana, but no one responds, does it make a sound?

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

Correction, May 8, 2008: Rep. Heath Shuler's name was originally misspelled as Health. (Return to the corrected sentence.)



Deathwatch
The Hillary Deathwatch
McGovern, loans, and superdelegates all continue to sink the ship.
By Chadwick Matlin
Wednesday, May 7, 2008, at 4:53 PM ET

A high-profile change of heart, a multimillion-dollar loan, and more Obama superdelegates drag Clinton down 1.7 points to 2.5 percent.

George McGovern, the Democratic nominee for president in 1972, says he's done supporting Hillary Clinton. He told Fox that she waged a valiant campaign but that it's time for her to drop out because the math is too daunting. McGovern had already flirted with Obama a few weeks ago—he told the Huffington Post that Obama had the better chance of winning in November—but today's announcement is a hiccup that Clinton can't afford.

Not only that, McGovern went vigilante and said Clinton should withdraw. Claire McCaskill, a surrogate in chief for Obama, said it would be "inappropriate and awkward and wrong" to tell Clinton when to quit. (This despite Obama supporters Chris Dodd and Patrick Leahy doling out that very advice before Pennsylvania.) Obama's stance on this seems clear—he's confident that he's going to get the nomination, so there's no need to pour salt on Clinton's wounded ego. Plus, it spares him the embarrassment of sure defeats in West Virginia and Kentucky that would occur even if Clinton were out of the race. He'll still lose with her in it, but he won't lose to a ghost.

In order to get to West Virginia and Kentucky, Clinton will need money—money that she doesn't necessarily have. Revelations that Clinton loaned herself $6.4 million last month raise questions about how long she can compete. (And that loan was before she lost North Carolina and won a Pyrrhic victory in Indiana.) On a conference call this morning, her advisers wouldn't say what their overnight fundraising numbers were, but it's safe to say they weren't spectacular. Clinton has plenty of resolve to keep going, but that doesn't mean she has the money necessary to do so.

One more note: Since last night's results, Obama has netted four superdelegates (two uncommitted from North Carolina, one uncommitted from California, and one Clinton convert from Virginia). Clinton has netted zero. (She picked up a North Carolina super but also lost one to Obama.)

So why isn't Clinton totally submerged? Because she hasn't taken herself out of the race yet. As long as she's hanging around, there's still a remote possibility that she can take Obama's place if the unpredictable happens. Plus, Deathwatch wouldn't be as much fun without her.

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



Deathwatch
The Hillary Deathwatch
A big loss in North Carolina and a small win in Indiana doom Clinton's chances.
By Christopher Beam
Tuesday, May 6, 2008, at 11:21 PM ET

Obama comes up big in North Carolina, and Clinton merely ekes out a win (as of 11 p.m. ET) in Indiana, the combination of which all but ends Clinton's shot at the nomination. Her chances drop 8.4 points to 4.2 percent.

For the past few weeks, Hillary Clinton's candidacy has rested on two possibilities: 1) winning the popular vote and 2) convincing superdelegates that Obama cannot win certain types of voters. (The delegate count is out of reach; she would need at least 70 percent of the remaining delegates to surpass Obama.) Today, Obama exploded both arguments.

The numbers are still trickling in, but it's pretty clear Obama's large win in North Carolina gets him a lot more votes than Clinton's small win in Indiana. If his final North Carolina margin is as high as 14 percent (it's at 15 with 90 percent of precincts reporting), Obama would essentially erase Clinton's popular-vote gains in Pennsylvania. (She netted 215,000 votes in that primary. If 1.5 million people turned out in North Carolina—which looks about right—a 14-point win would net Obama 210,000 votes.) Clinton could still tighten Obama's popular-vote lead by counting votes in Michigan, where Obama wasn't on the ballot, and Florida. But at this point, she doesn't appear able to close the gap. Some superdelegates say they're waiting to see who wins the popular vote. With that metric out of reach, Clinton loses her strongest case to supers.

Her other argument—that Obama is a flawed candidate who can't win white, working-class Democrats—also loses its punch with tonight's returns. The last few weeks have been the roughest of Obama's candidacy, with the Return of Wright, the "cling" thing, and questions about his patriotism. None of that appears to have severely damaged him today. Meanwhile, Indiana is only 8.9 percent African-American. To an extent, demography is still destiny, as it has been in previous contests: Clinton won 60 percent of whites, and Obama won 92 percent of blacks. But Clinton by no means owned lower-income voters—in fact, Obama won the poorest group of voters. Superdelegates may have been concerned that Obama would be abandoned in states like Indiana in the general election—even though there's no evident relationship between winning states in the primaries and winning them in the general. This vote should put that concern to bed.

So, right now her shot at the nomination rests on one thing: Obama messing up big time. Barring this possibility—which certainly is a possibility, but it's out of Clinton's control—she has no arguments left. She may have the most experience; she may still be the best fighter for the middle class; she may be the stronger general election candidate against John McCain. But that's not enough to persuade superdelegates to vote against the candidate who won the pledged-delegate count and the popular vote.

In her speech tonight, Clinton pledged to stay in the race. The question is, why?

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



Deathwatch
The Hillary Deathwatch
And, lo, on the election day, Deathwatch rested.
By Christopher Beam
Tuesday, May 6, 2008, at 1:31 PM ET

Not much changes in the last 24 hours before polls open in Indiana and North Carolina, keeping Clinton's chances of winning the nomination at 12.6 percent.

So, a quick snapshot: Polls show tightening races in both Indiana and North Carolina. Except for the occasional outlier, Clinton leads by a consistent five to 10 points in the Hoosier state, while Obama stays ahead in the Tar Heel state by a similar margin.

Remember how Obama started his "countdown to the nomination" yesterday? Clinton counters, as usual, with her own math. According to her calculations, the magic number to seal the nomination isn't 2025, as the DNC has said. It's 2208—the number you get if you include Florida and Michigan. It fits her argument that those states should be seated at the convention—which Howard Dean says will happen.

The problem is, superdelegates are still running from Hillary. Politico puts her ever-waning lead at 12 supers. Unless Clinton can make a big impression today—either with a blowout victory in Indiana or with an exceptionally strong showing among particular demographics—it's hard to see her stemming the flow.

There is a path for survival, of course, but it looks more fantastical by the day. Right now, she has to 1) win such stunning victories in the remaining states that 2) she wins the popular vote, which would create a small chance that 3) more than 70 percent of the remaining superdelegates decide she is the better nominee, despite Obama's winning the pledged delegate count. She has a better shot if she can force a favorable Florida/Michigan solution through both the DNC's rules and bylaws committee and its credentials committee. But superdelegates will come under intense pressure to make up their minds after June 3. At that point, Clinton's entire (plausible) case would rest on winning a popular-vote tally that included Florida and Michigan, which could be achieved only through a long, painful intraparty battle.

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



Deathwatch
The Hillary Deathwatch
With Indiana within reach, Clinton's chances inch up.
By Christopher Beam
Monday, May 5, 2008, at 2:12 PM ET

The home stretch to Indiana and North Carolina is pocked by negative ads, indecisive polls, and last-minute revelations about Barack Obama and the Teamsters. With an Indiana win within reach, Clinton's chances inch up 0.3 points to 12.6 percent.

Clinton gets a Monday-morning gift in today's Wall Street Journal: Barack Obama reportedly told the Teamsters that he would reduce federal oversight of the union. An Obama spokesman confirmed to the WSJ that Obama believes the current oversight system has "run its course." On Good Morning America, Obama denied having made a "blanket commitment" to scrap federal oversight, which was instituted in 1989 to settle a racketeering lawsuit by the Justice Department. Rather, he said, "the union has done a terrific job cleaning house," and he'll "examine" the issue as president. The Clinton camp today cried hypocrisy—will he or won't he? But Politico points to a similar statement made by Clinton that she would be "very open" to re-examining the decree. The issue won't decide the primary, but John McCain's ad team can probably squeeze a few spots out of it.

Speaking of which, you know it's the eleventh hour when attack ads start flying. Clinton doubles down on the gas-tax holiday angle, despite criticism from her opponent, Senate leadership, and economists. Obama hits back, accusing Clinton of pushing bad policy for political gain. (Look for pundits to treat Indiana's vote as a mini-referendum on this issue, deservedly or not.) Clinton also produces a mailer questioning Obama's support of gun rights.

Obama won Guam by seven votes Saturday, but that doesn't really change math: The candidates each get two delegates. Obama did, however, net four superdelegates to Clinton's zero over the weekend, plus two more today. Clinton's lead still holds at 19 supers, although a couple say they'd consider switching to Obama after June 3 if he wins the pledged delegate count and popular vote.

With these supers in pocket, the Obama campaign starts its official countdown to the nomination. The number of delegates needed to win now stands at 276. It may seem a bit premature, but keep in mind there are 187 pledged delegates at stake in tomorrow's contests and only 217 left after that. Of course, this assumes the magic number is 2,025. If you count Florida and Michigan—as the Clinton campaign insists we should—the number is 2,209.

Two national polls are tantalizingly contradictory. USA Today/Gallup puts Clinton up 51 percent to 44 percent. (Back in February, Obama led by 10.) CBS/New York Times gives Obama the lead, 50 percent to 38 percent. Pick your fave! On the local level, Clinton's Indiana lead seems to be holding: Two out of three weekend polls put her a few points ahead. In North Carolina, Obama's lead hovers around eight points, according to several polls. The scoring isn't too complicated: A Clinton sweep would change the tone of the race, but not the math. (It would, however, inch her toward a potential popular-vote victory.) An Obama sweep would put extreme pressure on Clinton to drop out. So, of course, the result will be as inconclusive as possible: a decisive but not commanding win by Obama in North Carolina and a slight, candidacy-justifying win by Clinton in Indiana.

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



did you see this?
Keith Olbermann Rips Hillary
Wednesday, May 7, 2008, at 12:42 PM ET



dvd extras
Pop Culture
Do boys today still have time for red balloons?
By David Haglund
Tuesday, May 6, 2008, at 11:54 AM ET


The summer when I was 4, my mother took me each Friday to the town library to sit in the dark with a juice box, a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, and 10 or 20 other kids to watch a movie. This was a year or two before VCRs became ubiquitous, when watching movies was still by necessity a communal pastime. These library outings happened each week, but there's only one movie I can remember—vividly—seeing there that summer: a half-hour, nearly wordless French film from the 1950s called The Red Balloon.

Directed by Albert Lamorisse and starring his 5-year-old son Pascal, The Red Balloon, just out on DVD, is about a boy who, seeing the object named in the title tied to a lamppost one morning, shimmies up the pole to untie it and take it with him around Paris. He soon discovers that the balloon has a mind of its own and wants to play. He also learns that adults feel threatened by the distracting, impetuous object: With his bright red companion tagging along, he's tossed into detention at school and out of church entirely. His fellow 5-year-olds, meanwhile, see the balloon merely as something to be grabbed and poked and, eventually, destroyed.

Pascal's devotion to the balloon singles him out from his peers, and viewers (or like-minded 4-year-olds, at least) come to identify with this unassuming outsider. The movie is not straightforwardly allegorical, but the balloon does represent a kind of freedom and individualism at odds with the conformity of school and church and the bullying ways of the mob. When the film debuted, to great acclaim—it won best short film at Cannes and, remarkably, the Oscar for best original screenplay—these qualities had a special resonance: Made a decade or so after the liberation of Paris, the film celebrates a very Parisian balloon, all joie de vivre, surrounded by people who seem more suited to the Vichy era. (The schoolmaster in particular has the look of a collaborator.)

The balloon, in this reading, is the resistance, fighting not only authority but also ugliness—for, above all, Pascal's balloon is pretty, a perfect red orb of extraordinary hue, filmed to contrast with the gray streets and buildings of the city. After a stunning death scene (one of the little bullies punctures the balloon with a slingshot so that it slowly, painfully deflates, at which point another boy cruelly stomps it to death), all the balloons of Paris take flight and alight on Pascal, who wraps himself in their strings and is then carried through the sky above the city. You can interpret this ending in various ways, if you're so inclined, but the primary response to seeing those many-colored dots floating through a cloudless sky is "Wow, that's beautiful."

That is also the response one has to the best work of Hou Hsiao-hsien, the 60-year-old Taiwanese filmmaker whose latest movie, The Flight of the Red Balloon, is an homage to the Lamorisse classic. Or, rather, it's the response some have to his movies, which are characterized by long takes (often with little camera movement) and a disregard for traditional story structure. His champions—like Times film critic Manohla Dargis—speak of his "mastery of film space," the way he arranges people and objects in striking compositions on the screen. Detractors, such as Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic, see a problem with "what happens" in his films—namely, "not enough."

Hou's Flight, now in the midst of a small U.S. run, stars Juliette Binoche, bleach-blond and wonderfully unkempt as Suzanne, a Parisian woman who provides voices for a puppet theater. She also deals with the deadbeat tenants in the apartment below; pleads with an absent husband off writing a novel in Montreal; and takes rather erratic care of her son, Simon. When the movie begins, she has just hired Song (Fang Song) to be Simon's nanny. Both women are artists: Suzanne is a performer, the center of attention, while Song is an observer, collecting material (she's working on her own homage to The Red Balloon). Both are clearly devoted to their work—and, in their different ways, self-absorbed.

Which brings us to Simon, the heir to Pascal. Though he doesn't lack for company, Simon seems just as isolated as his predecessor. With his PlayStation and his piano lessons, he's far busier than his 1950s forebear, who had little in his schedule to interfere with balloon-following. (If Simon ever sees The Red Balloon, it's safe to assume it will not be in a dark library with a bunch of other kids, but at home, and on Blu-ray.) There's a commentary here, also present in Hou's other recent films, on the hectic pace of contemporary life and the sheer number of distractions with which a mere balloon would have to contend for the attentions of a young boy.

In Flight's opening scene, which is directly adapted from the Lamorisse original, Simon tries to get the balloon to join him on public transportation (the subway this time, rather than a trolley). The balloon is coy, floating behind the leaves of a tree for a minute or two, in a manner reminiscent of the original balloon's occasional flirtatiousness. Except that the balloon in Flight never comes back out into the open: It is nearly always behind a window or a door, just outside the world of Simon, Suzanne, and Song. In the movie's longest passage, all three of them sit around their apartment, up to various things, while a fourth person tunes the piano and the red balloon hovers outside. Here, Hou's talent for layering the screen with multiple points of attention—and his patience in allowing the viewer's focus to drift slowly to each of these points—is at its most impressive. The scene is seven or eight minutes long and all a single take.

The argument may seem clear: The enemies of beauty are no longer school and church and the mob but the clutter and distraction of contemporary life. And yet the sheer loveliness of the piano-tuning scene complicates that idea: Hou has crafted an exquisite scene out of just such dissonance and disorder. Perhaps, he seems to suggest, we can find beauty in clutter and distraction, with a little more patience and quiet attention. Hou has not updated The Red Balloon so much as adapted its symbolism for his own purposes.

In the film's penultimate scene, Simon visits the Musee d'Orsay in Paris on a field trip, and we watch as his class discusses "Le Ballon," by Félix Vallotton. In the painting, a child in the foreground runs after a red ball, while two women in the distance go about their business. By reaching a century into the past ("Le Ballon" is from 1899; one of the film's working titles was À la recherche du ballon rouge), Hou implies that the red balloon, and whatever it represents, has always been elusive, and that Simon will chase after it in his own way, as Pascal did in his. One of Simon's classmates describes the painting as "a bit happy and a bit sad," since the foreground is light and sunny and the background is dark and shadowed. This is also true of Hou's film, which, rather than lifting Simon above Paris with a phalanx of multicolored balloons, ends with a single red balloon floating alone above the city—distant, perhaps, but not entirely out of reach.



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The Musee D'Orsay commissioned Hou's film and in return asked that Hou set at least one scene at the museum. The museum has also commissioned films by Jim Jarmusch, Raul Ruiz, and Oliver Assayas. Each is to star Juliette Binoche and have a budget of $3 million. Assayas' movie, L'Heure d'été (Summer Hour), premiered in France in March.



election scorecard
Honesty Is the Best Policy
Voters question Clinton's sincerity but still think she has a shot at winning the nomination.
By Chadwick Matlin
Monday, May 5, 2008, at 3:10 PM ET


We've got two new national polls to discuss before two more states hold their primaries tomorrow, and they have vastly different numbers to offer. A New York Times/CBS News poll says the country prefers Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton by 12 points (50-38), while a USA Today/Gallup poll has Clinton ahead by seven points. A 19-point spread between two respected national pollsters is an unexpectedly wide margin, even if the polls pooled from different sample groups and used different question wording. Overall, Clinton trails Obama by only 0.6 percent in Pollster.com's national poll average.

In the New York Times poll, Clinton was seen as a far more political figure than Obama or McCain. When voters were asked whether Clinton says what she believes or what she thinks people want to hear, the majority said the latter. Fifty percent of Democratic primary voters said Clinton says what she thinks people want to hear most of the time, while 28 percent of people said the same about Obama. Only 26 percent of Republican primary voters said John McCain panders to voters.

Other data of note from the NYT survey:

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

test

Delegates at stake:
Democrats Republicans

Total delegates: 4,049

Total delegates needed to win: 2,025

Total delegates: 2,380

Total delegates needed to win:
1,191

Pledged delegates won by each candidate:

Obama: 1,588; Clinton: 1,419

Source: CNN

Delegates won by each candidate:

McCain: 1,409

Source: CNN



Want more Slate election coverage? Check out Map the Candidates, Political Futures, Trailhead, XX Factor, and our Campaign Junkie page!

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explainer
Burma vs. Myanmar
Why can't the newspapers just pick a name and go with it?
By Chris Wilson
Thursday, May 8, 2008, at 6:28 PM ET


The front page of today's New York Times declares, "Myanmar Junta Accused of Delay in Storm Relief," while the Washington Post's front page reports there is "Scant Aid Reaching Burma's Delta." The papers are referring to the same devastating cyclone that tore through the Texas-size nation south of China and northwest of Thailand, whose ruling military junta changed the country's name from Burma to Myanmar in 1989. How do newspapers decide which name to use?

Some err on the side of letting the country itself decide, while others don't. On the Burma/Myanmar question, both newspapers and countries are divided over whether to recognize the switcheroo. Burma's military leaders changed the English-language version of the country's name to Myanmar in 1989, based on the short version of the country's name in Burmese, "Myanma Naingngandaw." While the United Nations adopted the new name in June of that year, the United States continues to call the country Burma because the change was never ratified by a legislative body in the country.

The Associated Press adopted "Myanmar" into its 2006 Stylebook, after weighing such factors as widespread international use and its recognition by the United Nations. The Times, on the other hand, has an informal policy of going with whatever the country wishes to be called, so long as the new name appears to have stuck; it began referring to the nation of Myanmar back in 1989. Five years earlier, the paper immediately adopted Upper Volta's change to Bourkina Fasso, declaring in an Aug. 5 headline that "Upper Volta, At Fete, Vows To Do Better As Bourkina Fasso." (The name of that nation is now more commonly spelled "Burkina Faso.")

Meanwhile, the Post tends to consult National Geographic in these decisions, though this case is an exception; National Geographic currently lists the country as "Myanmar (Burma)." The Post originally chose not to accept "Myanmar" because the military junta had not been recognized by many nations as a legitimate governing body. Slate uses "Burma" for similar reasons.

While most newspapers use the Associated Press Stylebook as a guideline for usage decisions, they also have an in-house process for arbitrating style quandaries. This is presided over by a "style czar," usually the copy desk chief or someone he or she designates, who consults knowledgeable staff members and outside experts with relevant experience.

Because different papers choose to adopt name changes at different times, it's common for those that use the new name to remind readers somewhere in the article that the country used to be called something else. In its entry on "Myanmar," The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage urges editors to "[g]racefully remind readers of the former names when necessary" and states that "Burmese" is still informally acceptable as a noun or adjective referring to the people. This practice is likely to remain as long as there is significant dispute over the name.

Country name changes are not as common as they used to be, though there was considerable confusion in 2006 when newspapers couldn't agree on whether the city formerly known as Bombay should now be called Mumbai. Because name changes are frequently the result of a nation shirking its colonial or Soviet heritage, the decision on whether to accept them can be politically sensitive. The Times was initially criticized for adopting Myanmar too readily, though several other large publications, such as the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal, have now followed suit.

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

Explainer thanks Scott Bosley of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, David Minthorn of the Associated Press, Don Podesta of the Washington Post, and Craig Whitney of the New York Times.



explainer
Can a Campaign Go Bankrupt?
What happens to Hillary Clinton's debt when the primaries are over?
By Jacob Leibenluft
Wednesday, May 7, 2008, at 6:40 PM ET


Sen. Hillary Clinton has lent her campaign another $6.4 million since April 1, a staffer confirmed on Wednesday. The Clinton campaign began last month with $10.3 million in unpaid bills to everyone from political consultants to caterers. If a candidate borrows money during the course of a campaign, what happens to all that debt when she drops out or the election's over?

It needs to be paid back—unless the candidate is the one owed the money. Lenders want their money back, and they are expected to follow the same practices they would if they were lending to a business or an individual. (If Clinton had borrowed from a bank, for example, she would be required to pay interest on the loans.) Moreover, under campaign finance law, an uncollected loan from a corporation—whether it's a bank or a sign maker—could be construed as an illegal contribution. As a result, even though vendors don't always require campaigns to pay upfront, they must make a good-faith effort to collect on any money they might be owed.

To pay back those loans, a candidate is forced to do exactly the thing she wasn't able to accomplish during the course of the campaign—raise more money. As long as someone hasn't already given the maximum legal contribution for a given campaign, he or she can—subject to the same campaign finance rules—donate to the effort to pay off debts even after Election Day has come and gone. The long-dead presidential campaigns of Chris Dodd, Bill Richardson, and Rudy Giuliani all have active Web sites inviting contributions to the former candidates' debt-retirement efforts—as long as you haven't donated $2,300 already. For candidates who run for office again, campaign debts can roll over to the next campaign cycle—depending, of course, on the terms of their loans. In perhaps the most famous case of outstanding campaign debt, former Ohio Sen. John Glenn remained nearly $3 million in the hole for more than 20 years after a failed bid for the presidency in 1984. (The Federal Election Commission granted him a reprieve two years ago.)

Debt retirement gets a little more complicated when candidates lend their own money to their campaign. After an election is over, any campaign contributions that go toward repaying the candidate's own loans serve, in practice, as money directly into a politician's pocket. As a result, campaign law (PDF) now limits to $250,000 the amount a campaign committee can repay the candidate after the election. In the case of the Democratic primary, the election will end when a nominee is selected in Denver. So unless Clinton is able to raise enough money to pay herself back by then, she'll have to write off millions of dollars she lent to her campaign.

What happens when a candidate has no hope of raising enough money after the election to pay off his or her outstanding debts? Technically, political committees can declare bankruptcy, but the practice is almost unheard of since defunct campaigns don't have much in the way of assets. Instead, losing candidates who aren't running again for political office—and consequently don't have an easy way to raise much money—may go through a process with the FEC called "debt settlement" (PDF). To do so, a former candidate must agree with creditors on how much he or she will pay back, and the FEC must verify that each creditor extended the debt in the "ordinary course of business" and tried its best to collect. (Unlike outstanding payments to vendors or staff, bank loans typically can't be forgiven.) If debt settlement fails, the FEC can eventually engage in an "administrative termination" that shuts down the campaign committee and cancels its obligations.

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

Explainer thanks Jan Baran of Wiley Rein; Joseph Birkenstock of Caplin & Drysdale; and Paul Ryan of the Campaign Legal Center.



explainer
Who Owns a Suicide Note?
How the D.C. Madam's last words made it into the newspaper.
By Juliet Lapidos
Tuesday, May 6, 2008, at 5:40 PM ET


Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the so-called "D.C. Madam," wrote suicide notes to her mother and younger sister before hanging herself last Thursday. On Monday morning, police in Tarpon Springs, Fla., released these documents to the media. Who controls the contents of a suicide note?*

Either the sheriff or the medical examiner. Law enforcement agencies must investigate all unnatural deaths, including suicides, and notes are treated as evidence. Sheriffs or coroners often attach these documents to their official reports. That opens the door for an enterprising journalist to file a request for the documents under the Freedom of Information Act, which grants public access to government records.

Some states, like Washington and Ohio, have specific provisions to block the publication of suicide notes. According to Washington case law (PDF), suicide notes are exempt from public examination. After the sheriff and medical examiner file their reports, the originals are released to family members as personal property. In Ohio, suicide notes as well as preliminary autopsy findings and coroner's photographs are confidential. A journalist may submit a written request to view these documents for research purposes, but he can't copy the findings.

Back in January 2001, former Enron Vice Chairman Cliff Baxter shot himself in his car, leaving behind a seven-sentence note addressed to his wife. Baxter's family argued that disclosing the contents of the note would violate their right to privacy. But the Texas attorney general ruled that Baxter had become a public figure and that the note was public record. In 1996, an admiral in the Navy named Jeremy Boorda wrote two notes before killing himself: one to his wife and another to his sailors. After journalists filed a FOIA request, the Navy released a report of its investigation but argued that publishing the notes would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.

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

Explainer thanks Preston Burton of Orrick, John Langbein of Yale University, and Jon Mills of the University of Florida's Levin College of Law.

Correction, May 7, 2008: The article originally asked who owns a suicide note. Technically, the note (and copyright to its contents) belongs to Deborah Palfrey or to her estate. So if her mother inherited her estate, then her mother owns the note. But the sheriff or medical examiner's office has initial, de facto control over the dissemination of the note. (Return to the corrected sentence.)



explainer
The Unpopular President
Why was Harry Truman as unloved as George W. Bush?
By Jacob Leibenluft
Monday, May 5, 2008, at 6:47 PM ET


A CNN poll released May 1 pegged President Bush's approval rating at 28 percent, among the lowest in modern American history. The rating hasn't yet reached the all-time low of 22 percent, which Harry Truman received in a February 1952 Gallup poll. How did Truman manage to be less popular than George W. Bush?

The Korean War, a weak economy, and "tax fixing." Truman had struggled in opinion polls before—most notably before his comeback victory in the 1948 election—but his approval ratings suffered a steady downward decline from early 1949. By February 1952, military operations in Korea had reached a stalemate, with congressional Republicans hammering Truman for "botching" the war. The conflict was also contributing to rapid inflation, despite an unpopular set of price controls the president had implemented. Although Democrats controlled Congress, splits within the party—particularly between Truman and Southern Democrats—meant Truman faced a constant struggle in moving his agenda forward.

Truman was also mired in the continued fallout of a tax-collection scandal that had erupted a year earlier. Throughout the course of 1951, dozens of Bureau of Internal Revenue officials resigned or were forced out due to allegations of corruption. The White House was initially slow to respond to the wrongdoing, and the effort to appoint an independent investigator became mired in the internal politics of the administration. Coming on the heels of a loan scandal at the Reconstruction Finance Corp., the tax-fixing row tied into long-standing associations between the former "senator from Pendergast" and machine politics. (It didn't help that the chief alternative for the 1952 Democratic nomination appeared to be Tennessee Sen. Estes Kefauver, who had made his name with televised hearings into organized crime.) In a February poll conducted by Gallup, just 22 percent of respondents nationwide—including only 35 percent of Democrats—said they thought the Truman administration would succeed in cleaning up corruption in Washington.

But while Truman spent most of his second term mired in low approval ratings, it isn't obvious why February 1952 was his low point. The president's controversial firing of Gen. Douglas MacArthur had occurred a full 10 months earlier. And his attempted seizure of the steel industry—a move later stopped by the Supreme Court—didn't occur until April. After February, Truman's ratings slowly began climbing upward—particularly after his announcement March 29 that he would not seek another term in the White House. When the final Gallup poll of Truman's administration was conducted in December, his approval ratings had bounced back to 32 percent.

But while Bush still hasn't reached Truman's low point in Gallup's approval ratings, he has earned the highest disapproval rating in the poll's history at 69 percent. (Truman's highest disapproval rating was 67 percent in January 1952.) According to Gallup pollsters, the difference can be explained by the fact that people were more likely in the 1940s and 1950s to give no answer when asked whether they disapproved of the president. Respondents may have been especially shy about criticizing the president in Gallup's face-to-face interviews—which have since been replaced with random calls to respondents' land lines and cell phones. On the other hand, Bush may just be a more polarizing president than Truman was—meaning that fewer people have no opinion about him.

Of course, since modern-day opinion polling dates back only to the 1930s—the Gallup Poll itself was started in 1935—presidential failures like Andrew Johnson, James Buchanan, and Warren Harding were spared the shame of anemic approval ratings.

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

Watch a video Explainer from 2007 that illustrates how Bush stacks up against not only Truman but Martin Van Buren, Andrew Johnson, and other reviled presidents.

Explainer thanks Robert Eisinger of Lewis & Clark College, Charles Franklin of the University of Wisconsin, Alonzo Hamby of Ohio University, and Brandon Rottinghaus of the University of Houston. Thanks also to reader Andrew Fyfe for asking the question.



family
I'm Talking to You, Corded!
The mismatch of technology and picture books.
By Erica S. Perl
Thursday, May 8, 2008, at 7:08 AM ET


Technology, as we well know, has become a ubiquitous part of American children's lives. With their Baby Einstein DVDs and Leapfrog Baby laptops, even little kids are heading all too close to the parody of the cell-phone-gabbing stroller rider in this paradigmatic New Yorker cartoon. And yet there is one place—a whole world, actually—where children are safely walled off from wired and wireless devices. That is the world of picture books.

Click here for a slide show on technology in children's literature.

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fighting words
Are We Getting Two for One?
Is Michelle Obama responsible for the Jeremiah Wright fiasco?
By Christopher Hitchens
Monday, May 5, 2008, at 11:24 AM ET


So numbed have I become by the endless replay of the fatuous clerical rantings of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright that it has taken me this long to remember the significant antecedent. In 1995, there appeared a documentary titled Brother Minister about the assassination of Malcolm X. It contained a secretly filmed segment showing Louis Farrakhan shouting at the top of his lungs in the Nation of Islam's temple in Chicago on "Savior's Day" in 1993. Farrakhan, verging on hysteria, demanded to know of the murdered Malcolm X: "If we dealt with him like a nation deals with a traitor, what the hell business is it of yours?" His apparent admission of what had long been suspected—that it was the Black Muslim leadership that ordered Malcolm's slaying—is not understood or remembered (or viewed) as often as it might be.

I invite you to look at the film of Farrakhan's sweating, yelling, paranoid face and to bear in mind that this depraved thug, who boasts of "dealing with" one of black America's moral heroes, is the man praised by Jeremiah Wright and referred to with respect as "Minister Farrakhan" by the senator who hopes to be the next president of the United States.

Liberal comment on Wright, and on the incredible damage that this conceited old fanatic has done to the Obama campaign, tends to dwell on the negative effect that black chauvinist rhetoric has on white working-class voters. Fair enough, I suppose. But why should a thinking black member of the working class want any truck with a Farrakhan fan or with a moral idiot who thinks that the drugs and disease in the black community are imposed by an outside conspiracy? I don't need any condescending liberal to explain to me why black Americans are inclined to be touchy about the way their forebears were treated any more than I require a patronizing former Harvard law student to guide me through the anxieties of the gun-owning and hunting community. I can quite easily understand these points without pedagogic assistance. What I won't be told is that Tawana Brawley was right, or that AIDS is the fault of the government, or that Jews were behind the slave trade, or that there is a secret Masonic code in the dollar bill. And the apologist for murder "Minister Farrakhan" and his big-mouth Christian friends flirt with this kind of half-baked garbage every day.

Nettled at last by the way in which this has upset his campaign, Sen. Obama last week cut the ties that bound him to his crackpot mentor. Well, high time. But those who profess relief at this should perhaps revisit what they thought (and wrote) about the earlier Philadelphia speech in which Obama was held to have achieved the same result with less trouble. If he was right last week, then the Philly speech was a failure on every level, and if it was a failure on every level, and thus left Obama hideously vulnerable to the very next speech made by his foaming pastor, then that must raise questions of eligibility for the highest office.

What can it be that has kept Obama in Wright's pews, and at Wright's mercy, for so long and at such a heavy cost to his aspirations? Even if he pulls off a mathematical nomination victory, he has completely lost the first, fine, careless rapture of a post-racial and post-resentment political movement and mired us again in all the old rubbish that predates Dr. King. What a sad thing to behold. And how come? I think we can exclude any covert sympathy on Obama's part for Wright's views or style—he has proved time and again that he is not like that, and even his own little nods to "Minister" Farrakhan can probably be excused as a silly form of Chicago South Side political etiquette. All right, then, how is it that the loathsome Wright married him, baptized his children, and received donations from him? Could it possibly have anything, I wonder, to do with Mrs. Obama?

This obvious question is now becoming inescapable, and there is an inexcusable unwillingness among reporters to be the one to ask it. (One can picture Obama looking pained and sensitive and saying, "Keep my wife out of it," or words to that effect, as Clinton tried to do in 1992 when Jerry Brown and Ralph Nader quite correctly inquired about his spouse's influence.) If there is a reason why the potential nominee has been keeping what he himself now admits to be very bad company—and if the rest of his character seems to make this improbable—then either he is hiding something and/or it is legitimate to ask him about his partner.

I direct your attention to Mrs. Obama's 1985 thesis at Princeton University. Its title (rather limited in scope, given the author and the campus) is "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community." To describe it as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be "read" at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known language. Anyway, at quite an early stage in the text, Michelle Obama announces that she's much influenced by the definition of black "separationism" offered by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton in their 1967 screed Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. I remember poor Stokely Carmichael quite well. After a hideous series of political and personal fiascos, he fled to Africa, renamed himself Kwame Toure after two of West Africa's most repellently failed dictators, and then came briefly back to the United States before electing to die in exile. I last saw him as the warm-up speaker for Louis Farrakhan in Madison Square Garden in 1985, on the evening when Farrakhan made himself famous by warning Jews, "You can't say 'Never Again' to God, because when he puts you in the ovens, you're there forever." I have the distinct feeling that the Obama campaign can't go on much longer without an answer to the question: "Are we getting two for one?" And don't be giving me any grief about asking this. Black Americans used to think that the Clinton twosome was their best friend, too. This time we should find out before it's too late to ask.



food
Meatless Like Me
I may be a vegetarian, but I still love the smell of bacon.
By Taylor Clark
Wednesday, May 7, 2008, at 11:51 AM ET


Every vegetarian remembers his first time. Not the unremarkable event of his first meal without meat, mind you. No, I mean the first time he casually lets slip that he's turned herbivore, prompting everyone in earshot to stare at him as if he just revealed plans to sail his carrot-powered plasma yacht to Neptune. For me, this first time came at an Elks scholarship luncheon in rural Oregon when I was 18. All day, I'd succeeded at seeming a promising and responsible young man, until that fateful moment when someone asked why I hadn't taken any meat from the buffet. After I offered my reluctant explanation—and the guy announced it to the entire room—30 people went eerily quiet, undoubtedly expecting me to launch into a speech on the virtues of hemp. In the corner, an elderly, suited man glared at me as he slowly raised a slice of bologna and executed the most menacing bite of cold cut in recorded history. I didn't get the scholarship.

I tell this story not to win your pity but to illustrate a point: I've been vegetarian for a decade, and when it comes up, I still get a look of confused horror that says, "But you seemed so … normal." The U.S. boasts more than 10 million herbivores today, yet most Americans assume that every last one is a loopy, self-satisfied health fanatic, hellbent on draining all the joy out of life. Those of us who want to avoid the social nightmare have to hide our vegetarianism like an Oxycontin addiction, because admit it, omnivores: You know nothing about us. Do we eat fish? Will we panic if confronted with a hamburger? Are we dying of malnutrition? You have no clue. So read on, my flesh-eating friends—I believe it's high time we cleared a few things up.

To demonstrate what a vegetarian really is, let's begin with a simple thought experiment. Imagine a completely normal person with completely normal food cravings, someone who has a broad range of friends, enjoys a good time, is carbon-based, and so on. Now remove from this person's diet anything that once had eyes, and, wham!, you have yourself a vegetarian. Normal person, no previously ocular food, end of story. Some people call themselves vegetarians and still eat chicken or fish, but unless we're talking about the kind of salmon that comes freshly plucked from the vine, this makes you an omnivore. A select few herbivores go one step further and avoid all animal products—milk, eggs, honey, leather—and they call themselves vegan, which rhymes with "tree men." These people are intense.

Vegetarians give up meat for a variety of ethical, environmental, and health reasons that are secondary to this essay's goal of increasing brotherly understanding, so I'll mostly set them aside. Suffice it to say that one day, I suddenly realized that I could never look a cow in the eyes, press a knocking gun to her temple, and pull the trigger without feeling I'd done something cruel and unnecessary. (Sure, if it's kill the cow or starve, then say your prayers, my bovine friend—but for now, it's not quite a mortal struggle to subsist on the other five food groups.) I am well-aware that even telling you this makes me seem like the kind of person who wants to break into your house and liberate your pet hamster—that is, like a PETA activist. Most vegetarians, though, would tell you that they appreciate the intentions of groups like PETA but not the obnoxious tactics. It's like this: We're all rooting for the same team, but they're the ones in face paint, bellowing obscenities at the umpire and flipping over every car with a Yankees bumper sticker. I have no designs on your Camry or your hamster.

Now, when I say that vegetarians are normal people with normal food cravings, many omnivores will hoist a lamb shank in triumph and point out that you can hardly call yourself normal if the aroma of, say, sizzling bacon doesn't fill you with deepest yearning. To which I reply: We're not insane. We know meat tastes good; it's why there's a freezer case at your supermarket full of woefully inadequate meat substitutes. Believe me, if obtaining bacon didn't require slaughtering a pig, I'd have a BLT in each hand right now with a bacon layer cake waiting in the fridge for dessert. But, that said, I can also tell you that with some time away from the butcher's section, many meat products start to seem gross. Ground beef in particular now strikes me as absolutely revolting; I have a vague memory that hamburgers taste good, but the idea of taking a cow's leg, mulching it into a fatty pulp, and forming it into a pancake makes me gag. And hot dogs … I mean, hot dogs? You do know what that is, right?

As a consolation prize we get tofu, a treasure most omnivores are more than happy to do without. Well, this may stun you, but I'm not any more excited about a steaming heap of unseasoned tofu blobs than you are. Tofu is like fugu blowfish sushi: Prepared correctly, it's delicious; prepared incorrectly, it's lethal. Very early in my vegetarian career, I found myself famished and stuck in a mall, so I wandered over to the food court's Asian counter. When I asked the teenage chief culinary artisan what was in the tofu stir-fry, he snorted and replied, "Shit." Desperation made me order it anyway, and I can tell you that promises have rarely been more loyally kept than this guy's pledge that the tofu would taste like shit. So here's a tip: Unless you know you're in expert hands (Thai restaurants are a good bet), don't even try tofu. Otherwise, it's your funeral.

As long as we're discussing restaurants, allow me a quick word with the hardworking chefs at America's dining establishments. We really appreciate that you included a vegetarian option on your menu (and if you didn't, is our money not green?), but it may interest you to know that most of us are not salad freaks on a grim slog for nourishment. We actually enjoy food, especially the kind that tastes good. So enough with the bland vegetable dishes, and, for God's sake, please make the Gardenburgers stop; it's stunning how many restaurants lavish unending care on their meat dishes yet are content to throw a flavorless hockey puck from Costco into the microwave and call it cuisine. Every vegetarian is used to slim pickings when dining out, so we're not asking for much—just for something you'd like to eat. I'll even offer a handy trick. Pretend you're trapped in a kitchen stocked with every ingredient imaginable, from asiago to zucchini, but with zero meat. With no flesh available, picture what you'd make for yourself; this is what we want, too.

For those kind-hearted omnivores who willingly invite feral vegetarians into their homes for dinner parties and barbecues (really! we do that, too!), the same rule applies—but also know that unless you're dealing with an herbivore who is a prick for unrelated reasons, we don't expect you to bend over backward for us. In fact, if we get the sense that you cooked for three extra hours to accommodate our dietary preferences, we will marvel at your considerate nature, but we will also feel insanely guilty. Similarly, it's very thoughtful of you to ask whether it'll bother me if I see you eat meat, but don't worry: I'm not going to compose an epic poem about your club sandwich.

Which leads me to a vital point for friendly omnivore-herbivore relations. As you're enjoying that pork loin next to me, I am not silently judging you. I realize that anyone who has encountered the breed of smug vegetarian who says things like, "I can hear your lunch screaming," will find this tough to believe, but I'm honestly not out to convert you. My girlfriend and my closest pals all eat meat, and they'll affirm that I've never even raised an eyebrow about it. Now, do I think it strange that the same people who dress their dogs in berets and send them to day spas are often unfazed that an equally smart pig suffered and died to become their McMuffin? Yes, I do. (Or, to use a more pressing example, how many Americans will bemoan Eight Belles' fatal Kentucky Derby injury tonight at the dinner table between bites of beef?) Would I prefer it if we at least raised these animals humanely? Yes, I would.

Let's be honest, though: I'm not exactly St. Francis of Assisi over here, tenderly ministering to every chipmunk that crosses my path. I try to represent for the animal kingdom, but take a look at my shoes—they're made of leather, which, I am told by those with expert knowledge of the tanning process, comes from dead cows. This is the sort of revelation that prompts meat boosters to pick up the triumphant lamb shank once again and accuse us of hypocrisy. Well, sort of. (Hey, you try to find a pair of nonleather dress shoes.) My dedication to the cause might be incomplete, but I'd still say that doing something beats doing nothing. It's kind of like driving a hybrid: not a solution to the global-warming dilemma but a decent start. Let's just say that at the dinner table, I roll in a Prius.

Finally, grant me one more cordial request: Please don't try to convince us that being vegetarian is somehow wrong. If you're concerned for my health, that's very nice, though you can rest assured that I'm in shipshape. If you want to have an amiable tête-à-tête about vegetarianism, that's great. But if you insist on being the aggressive blowhard who takes meatlessness as a personal insult and rails about what fools we all are, you're only going to persuade me that you're a dickhead. When someone says he's Catholic, you probably don't start the stump speech about how God is a lie created to enslave the ignorant masses, and it's equally offensive to berate an herbivore. I know you think we're crazy. That's neat. But seeing as I've endured the hassle of being a vegetarian for several years now, perhaps I've given this a little thought. So let's just agree to disagree and get on with making fun of Hillary Clinton's inability to operate a coffee machine.

Because, really, peace and understanding are what it's all about: your porterhouse and my portobello coexisting in perfect harmony—though preferably not touching. We're actually not so different, after all, my omnivorous chums. In fact, I like to think that when an omnivore looks in the mirror, he just sees a vegetarian who happens to eat meat. Or, no, wait, maybe the mirror sees the omnivore through the prism of flesh and realizes we all have a crystalline animal soul, you know?

This is excellent weed, by the way, if you want a hit. Hey, while you're here: Have I ever told you about hemp?



foreigners
What Does It Mean To Be "Pro-Israel"?
The election, and the creation of a new dovish Jewish lobby group, brings the question to the fore.
By Shmuel Rosner
Wednesday, May 7, 2008, at 1:23 PM ET


William Daroff is vice president for public policy and director of the Washington office at United Jewish Communities, an organization representing America's Jewish federations. In other words, he's a lobbyist. Daroff is also one of the country's better-connected Jewish operatives. In recent months, he has been called upon to moderate dozens of panels aimed at Jewish activists and professionals, dealing with the hot topic of the day: the 2008 election and the Jewish community.

This election has reignited an old debate: Which party is better for Israel—the Republicans or the Democrats? Assuming that Jewish voters care about this question, the parties have to make their case if they want Jewish voters to support them.

Jewish representatives of the Democratic and Republican parties are invited to most of the panels Daroff moderates. After a long string of forums, Daroff has noticed that the two parties' line of argument is markedly different.

The Democratic representative will often say: Both parties are good for Israel; it's a bipartisan issue; let's move on to discuss health care or the mortgage crisis.

The Republican will respond: Not so fast. Democrats are trying to avoid the issue because they recognize their weakness and know that Republican support for the Jewish state is much stronger than theirs.

It's a cyclical debate with no end and little meaning until you define what it means to be pro-Israel. Historically, Israel has relied on support from both sides of the aisle, and it would clearly be better off if that situation continues. But at the root of the Republican claim is a niggling kernel of truth: Democratic voters do not side with Israel at the same rate and with the same enthusiasm as Republican voters do. At least if you accept the definitions most pollsters use to define a pro-Israel position.

Take, for example, a recent Gallup poll about Americans' most- and least-favored nations. Israel, fairly popular with Americans, is "viewed more favorably by Republicans than by Democrats," the survey reports. Eighty-four percent of Republicans rank it favorably, compared with only 64 percent of Democrats. This is hardly a new phenomenon: Back in 2006, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll found that Republicans favored alignment with Israel over neutrality in the Israeli-Arab conflict 64 percent to 29 percent. By contrast, only 39 percent of Democrats supported alignment with Israel, while 54 percent favored neutrality.

But is favoring "neutrality" less pro-Israel than favoring alignment with Israel? Does sympathizing with the terrible fate of the Palestinians make someone less supportive of Israel?

This question isn't of concern to only the political parties. A new organization, J Street, presents a similar challenge to those trying to define the meaning of being a pro-Israel American. J Street is a dovish new Jewish-American lobby group—self-tagged "pro-Israel"—that will push the United States to become more involved in its declared "No. 1 priority," achieving piece between Israel and the Palestinians.

Many of the people active in this group don't just believe that the U.S. government should be more active, but also that "active" means pressuring the Israeli government toward compromises. "Like a scout forcefully helping an old lady across the street?" I asked one of its leaders. "Perhaps," he replied. "Before she's hit by a truck." In the eyes of J Street members, this desire to save Israel from itself is what makes the project "pro-Israel." If pressuring the Israeli government was not traditionally considered a "pro-Israel" position, they argue, it is mainly because those traditional definitions were skewed.

"For too long, the only voices politicians and policy makers have heard on American policy toward Israel and the Middle East have been from the far right," complains the group's Web site. In recent years, said Alan Solomont—a leading supporter of the group and a Jewish supporter of Barack Obama's—"neocons, right-of-center Jewish leaders, and Christian evangelicals" were the people tasked with delineating the "pro-Israel" position. Obama himself expressed a similar sentiment a couple of weeks ago: "I think there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you're anti-Israel, and that can't be the measure of our friendship with Israel."

The situation was tilted in one direction—so the new group is trying to tip it the other way.

Obama does not like the "pro-Likud" approach, but he wants the benefit of being seen as a pro-Israel candidate. All American politicians do (except, perhaps, Patrick Buchanan). "In political life in America today, everyone says they're a friend of Israel," wrote Aaron David Miller, a former adviser to the Clinton administration, in his new book The Much Too Promised Land. And it's true: If you lower the bar enough, everybody is a friend; everybody is "pro-Israel" as long as they don't actively agitate for Israel's demise.

Jimmy Carter, one of the most vocal critics of Israeli policies and of the "Israel lobby" in America, said two weeks ago that all he wants is "to bring peace to Israel. … The security of Israel is … paramount." Professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer—authors of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, a book highly critical of Israel—also say that Israel has a moral and legal right to exist. Are they "pro-Israel" because they do not say that they want it to be destroyed?

J Street—whose leaders are also very critical of Israel's policies—is more specific. It states that "U.S. support for Israel as a Jewish and democratic state is an historic and legitimate commitment" and that "maintaining Israel's qualitative military edge" is necessary. Is that the right policy for Israel? That's another debate. But the policy J Street advocates is clearly so different in nature from the traditional positions of "pro-Israel" advocacy groups that having it under the same roof becomes strange. It leaves the wondering citizen with a somewhat redundant definition of the "pro-Israel" camp

And that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Defining someone as "pro-Israel"—or, for that matter, pro-anything or anti-anything—is a way for people to simplify complicated questions when searching for a political party, a candidate, or an organization they would like to support. The problem is that along the way the term has been used so often—to describe so many conflicting positions—that it has become practically meaningless, more confusing than clarifying.

So maybe now, for Israel's 60th birthday, there's one last position that the "pro-Israel" camp can agree on: It is time to dump the term. Those Democrats might be right when they tell William Daroff: "We are all pro-Israel." But Republicans are also right when they insist: "We should still talk about the specifics." Without specifics, being "pro-Israel" is almost like being pro-great-weather or pro-tasty-food.



foreigners
What's Going on in Abkhazia?
The Russians are meddling in Georgia, and America can't do much about it.
By Anne Applebaum
Monday, May 5, 2008, at 7:59 PM ET


Before it happened, nobody imagined that the Archduke Ferdinand's murder in Sarajevo would set off World War I. Before the "shot heard round the world" was fired, I doubt 18th-century Concord, Mass., expected to go down in history as the place where the American revolution began. Before last weekend, when the Russian press agency ITAR-TASS declared that the government of Georgia was about to invade Abkhazia, nobody had really thought about Abkhazia at all. As a public service to readers who need a break from the U.S. election campaign, this column is therefore devoted to considering the possibility that Abkhazia could become the starting point of a larger war.

If you haven't heard of Abkhazia before, don't worry. It's a pretty safe bet that it's probably not the priority of many people in the White House, and it hasn't even been one of those "Who's the president of Pakistan?" trick questions in the election campaign. On the contrary, Abkhazia ranks right up there with Nagorno-Karabakh, Dagestan, South Ossetia, and all the other forgotten Caucasian cities and statelets that no one wants to think too hard about but where, occasionally, something really awful happens.

For the record, Abkhazia is a province of Georgia that declared its independence in 1992. A small war followed, with ethnic cleansing of Georgians from Abkhazia coming after that. There have been some U.N. attempts to make peace, and Georgia has tried offering Abkhazia wide autonomy, but Georgia and Abkhazia mostly maintain an uneasy stalemate, which occasionally turns into an extremely uneasy stalemate. Usually, this happens when an atmosphere of extreme uneasiness is useful to the Russians, who are the Abkhazians' closest military, economic, and political allies and who have a long-term interest in the destabilization of pro-American, pro-Western, pro-NATO Georgia.

Thus, when the Russian press agency announces that Georgia is about to invade Abkhazia, it may mean that Georgia really is about to invade Abkhazia. But it might also mean, as everyone in the region understands, that Russia is about to invade Georgia—as a "pre-emptive strike," of course.

Why would they do that? Or even hint that they want to do that? Russian politics having now become utterly opaque, it's hard to say. Some think Russia began stirring up trouble in Abkhazia in recent weeks to exact revenge for NATO's recognition of Kosovo—or perhaps in order to be able to strike quickly, had the recent NATO summit decided to offer Georgia a clear path to membership, which President Bush vocally supported. Others think recent Russian pronouncements, some of which come close to recognition of Abkhazian independence, are related to the inauguration of the new Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, this week. Maybe Medvedev wants to demonstrate how tough he is, right at the beginning. Or maybe someone else wants to demonstrate how tough Medvedev is, on his behalf. In any case, someone, Abkhazian or Russian, has shot down at least two and maybe four Georgian military planes in the past six weeks, in what looks like a pretty obvious attempt to create a casus belli.

It might not work—and for the moment the Georgians are saying they have no intention of declaring war. But Georgia holds parliamentary elections later this month, under the leadership of a president who might be grateful for a chance to look bold. If the provocation works, or if Russia really does invade Georgia—an emerging democracy, an aspiring NATO ally, a country with troops in Iraq and many implicit assurances of security from Washington and Brussels—then the West will have to come up with a major response, if not military then political and diplomatic.

The timing couldn't be worse. There are many wonderful things about the American political system, but one of the least wonderful is the amount of energy a presidential campaign sucks out of public life. Between now and January, the current president is a lame duck: Could he make any credible response to a Russian invasion of Abkhazia, should such a thing happen now? Is anybody ready to debate a whole new part of the world? Last weekend, the American press focused unprecedented attention on … the Guam primary, in which 4,500 people voted and Barack Obama won by seven votes.

Of course, from another point of view, the timing couldn't be better: If you wanted to attack an American ally, or even if you just wanted to destabilize and unnerve an American ally, wouldn't this be the perfect moment? Perhaps if the Russians don't use it, someone else will.



gabfest
The Green Shirt Gabfest
Listen to Slate's weekly political show.
By Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz
Friday, May 9, 2008, at 10:37 AM ET

Listen to the Gabfest for May 9 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 discuss whether the fat lady is now singing for Hillary Clinton, cyclone damage in Burma, and Barack Obama and patriotism.

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

John discusses Tuesday night's Indiana and North Carolina primaries, which ended with a split result—North Carolina going to Obama, while Indiana went for Clinton.

Lanny Davis defends Hillary Clinton on CNN.

Hillary Clinton touts her support among a wide range of voters.

Is Hillary destroying the legacy of the Clinton presidency?

John McCain says he will appoint more conservative judges to the bench.

The panel discusses the stunning satellite photos showing the extent of damage in some areas of Burma from last week's cyclone.

World aid organizations struggle to provide relief to Burma as the nation's military rulers are slow respond to offers.

A new study shows that conservatives are much happier than liberals.

One way to improve morale in the Army is to provide one-year sabbaticals for officers.



John raises the continuing issue of Barack Obama's patriotism.

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 May 9 at 10:36 a.m.

May 2, 2008

Listen to the Political Gabfest for May 2 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.

On this week's show, John and David try to help Emily overcome her laryngitis while they discuss these topics: Obama's pastor disaster, the gas-tax holiday hoax, and whether Miley Cyrus will become the next Britney.

Here are links to items related to this week's episode:

Melinda Henneberger on Obama's Catholic problem

The Senate declares McCain a natural-born American

HBO's original movie Recount (airs Sunday, May 25)

Behind the scenes of the Miley Cyrus photo shoot

Posted by Andy Bowers on May 2 at 10:57 a.m.

April 25, 2008

Listen to the Political Gabfest for April 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.

On this week's show: why the Pennsylvania primary has left Democrats re-evaluating their infatuation with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, how all three remaining presidential candidates are addressing the world food shortage, and why they all should stop talking about the alleged vaccine-autism connection.

Here are some links to items relating to this week's Gabfest:

John's take on the Pennsylvania primary results

A Slate V video of Emily and Dr. Sydney Spiesel discussing vaccines and autism

The "Jefferson 1" channel on YouTube

And you'll find our sister show, the Culture Gabfest, at its new home here.

Posted by Andy Bowers on April 25 at 10:14 a.m.

April 18, 2008

Listen to the Gabfest for April 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.

On this week's pre-Pennsylvania edition, Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz discuss Wednesday's Clinton/Obama debate (and whether ABC should be ashamed of itself), John McCain's great week, and the Supreme Court's boost for the death penalty.

Here are links related to items mentioned in the show:



John's take on the ABC debate.

Melinda Henneberger on Obama's "bitter" remarks.

Slate V imagines a Hillary ad slamming Bruce Springsteen.



Posted by Andy Bowers on April 18 at 4:35 p.m.

April 11, 2008

Listen to the Gabfest for April 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, John Dickerson, and David Plotz discuss the congressional testimony of Gen. David Petraeus, a political demotion and more polls on the campaign trail, and whether we should boycott the Olympics.

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

Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker testified this week on Capitol Hill.

John, David, and Emily discuss a New York Times editorial on the lack of an administration strategy for dealing with Iran.

David comments on news reports concerning Iran's claims that it is installing 6,000 new centrifuges to enrich uranium.

Emily explains the "status of forces" agreement dealing with Iraq and how it is about to end.

The latest polls show Barack Obama up by as much as 10 points over Hillary Clinton.

National Public Radio had a segment on Thursday discussing the reaction of the Chinese government to protests over the Olympic torch.

Emily brings up an interesting Slate piece using game theory to explain dating.

David comments on the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post Magazine article about noted violinist Joshua Bell playing anonymously in a D.C. Metro station.

John discusses an ABC report that links Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to administration discussions about "enhanced interrogation techniques."

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 April 11 at 11:47 a.m.



gaming
Unjustifiable Carnage, Uneasy Alliances, and Lots of Self-Doubt
What Grand Theft Auto IV gets right about gangland and illegal economies.
By Sudhir Venkatesh
Friday, May 9, 2008, at 6:46 AM ET

If you are a fan of the new Grand Theft Auto video game, I have just the neighborhood for you. The setting of GTA IV, Liberty City, is an amped-up version of the New York metro area. If you want a slice of the real thing, however, I'd recommend Chicago's South Side. The last time I visited Chicago, I stopped by 59th Street, near Washington Park (and only a few short blocks from the picturesque University of Chicago). Two of the local gangs were fighting each other in full view for control of a prime sales spot, a hotel. For a monthly fee, the proprietor had promised to allow one gang to turn the place into a bordello—drugs, prostitution, stolen merchandise. For the gangs, winning meant more than simply getting rid of their enemy. Neither controlled the area surrounding the hotel. Anyone bringing drugs (or women, or guns, etc.) to the hotel would have to run the gantlet formed by other enemy gangs, who would be at the ready to shoot down the transporter.

There is nothing funny about this situation. The residents of this neighborhood are living a nightmare. Their elected political officials have offered little help, and the police don't answer their calls to stop the gang wars. So you guessed it: Their only hope is to pay yet another crack-dealing gang to intervene and keep the peace between the warring outfits. To put it bluntly, they can rely on street justice by turning an enemy into an ally, or they can sit, suffer, and hope for the best.

I thought of these Chicagoans and their moral conundrum when I played GTA IV for the first time a few days ago. Nearly every review has championed the unparalleled technical accomplishments of the creative team—and there are many. But I also found GTA IV to be a compelling commentary on urban life, gangland, and illegal economies.

This may sound strange, but I found that Grand Theft Auto actually offered a less sensational portrait of gangland and ghetto streets than the one put out by most cops, politicians, policymakers, and even academics. There is nuance in the game that exceeds most of the conventional portraits of American cities; the game goes beyond a black-and-white tale of innocent law abiders fending off the obnoxious criminals. Not that I'm suggesting that we turn to GTA IV to solve the gang problem or that we should we make it required viewing in our high schools. The game is a carnival of violence, deceit, and cruelty that makes you slightly nauseated after playing for only a few hours—I had to periodically rest and play a Neil Diamond song just to calm down. But I have to admit that I was surprised a video game had such a well-developed, fine-grained understanding of human nature.

The game's success can be traced to a simple principle: Niko Bellic, the protagonist who roams around Liberty City, making his way in the world by building relationships. Even in a city dominated by warring gangs and unjustifiable carnage, people have to find ways to work together not only to commit crimes but to resolve disputes, respond to injustice, and otherwise fulfill their assigned missions. As you move the dashing Niko through beautifully rendered streets, you build up his network of friends and comrades. Of course, in the exploitative terrain of the black market, you can't trust anyone for long; this is one of the key challenges that animate GTA IV. But the point is that a lone wolf can't survive. Niko has to take a risk and trust somebody.

Even the criminals must follow this rule. In the real Big Apple, the local gangs are made up of self-interested mercenaries who move about as money and circumstances dictate. A Jamaican "posse" may control one project one day, but they'll move over a few blocks if the money is right. A gang member might also become a turncoat and join another outfit, even one run by a former adversary. In other words, free agents abound on Wall Street and ghetto streets. GTA IV's Liberty City gets this fluidity of enmity and alliance exactly right. A friend can become a foe; a gang member can turn on you; an ally is never to be trusted for too long. You can't do it alone, and the game forces you to make your bets.

The story lines of GTA IV's missions also resonate with life on New York's streets. Should our protagonist help his cousin even if it is not in his own interest? Should Niko remain with his girlfriend, even if it might jeopardize his personal safety? Could an enemy gang be befriended and turned into an ally? I was always left with a residue of self-doubt after making these decisions. Right and wrong are never so clear—at least in terms of the consequences of one's actions—and Niko's mission can fail because you either did or did not do the right thing.

While GTA IV is both a dizzying and dazzling experience, I definitely won't be playing the game up until the final mission. I could never master the joystick in time to stop running over pedestrians while I'm steering Niko's car. But I am curious to see what comes next. GTA IV was, by all reports, a huge improvement over the third version (San Andreas), and I can imagine No. 5 taking us to even greater heights (or depths, depending on your perspective). If the creative team needs some fuel, they might want to visit Chicago's South Side. There, they will find that gang killings and mercenary actions have some interesting consequences—beyond the tragedy of injury and fatality. When a real-life mission fails and gangs are indicted, the remaining players must first form a gang before they can move on. No one can move forward until they come together and develop shared interests. The result can be a powerful feeling of solidarity—albeit in the South Side, it is one often wasted on disreputable pursuits.

Another logical step for the creative crew at Rockstar Games would be to extend the logic of the current game: Why not let us form gangs ourselves in virtual space? Imagine the possibilities: My friend and I could form a gang of nasty South Asian suburban nerds. A bunch of middle-class frat boys might realize their common interests. Let women join in the fun, too. They could create a group of disgruntled ex-corporate lawyers who, after failing to make partner, go after their pig-headed male superiors. In this way, the enemies would depend on the gangs we formed, and, over time, the landscape would reflect our decisions.

And, hey, maybe different gangs can advertise online and play each other? I, for one, would love to form a group of writers who could take on the editors at publishing houses who zap my creative juices with their unintelligible feedback. I'd like to run them over in the streets, get out of my car and bash their heads in, steal their keys and money, break into their homes and destroy their furniture, and then I'd … You get the point.



hollywoodland
Steven Spielberg's Last Crusade?
The marriage between Paramount and DreamWorks might be coming to an end.
By Kim Masters
Thursday, May 8, 2008, at 1:45 PM ET


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


April 30, 2008


Weird: We've never been to the Cannes Film Festival, which is our loss, no doubt. But luckily we've already seen this year's closing-night selection, What Just Happened?, which leads us to ask, what did just happen?

We saw the movie months ago, when it had a much-hyped premiere at Sundance. Robert Redford was there, and Robert De Niro turned up with producer Art Linson to introduce the film. In it, De Niro plays a fictionalized version of Linson—an embattled Hollywood player dealing with an out-of-control director and star (Bruce Willis puckishly playing himself) and winding up with a very bad movie.

Expectations were high that night. The film was directed by Barry Levinson and has a cast that includes Catherine Keener, Stanley Tucci, John Turturro, and Sean Penn. But the film fell flat. After its glittering night at Sundance, it laid there like an overpriced egg—no distributor bought it from that day to this.

So how does this failed venture turn up at Cannes? We asked a prominent producer who has nothing to do with the film to speculate.

"Who is the president of the jury this year?" he asked, as if to imply that we are not very smart. "Sean Penn." And Robert De Niro is a Cannes favorite. "So who promises to show up? Because it's always about movie stars. So Sean Penn shows up, Robert De Niro shows up. … It just seems so unlikely because the movie has been well-roasted. It was a bad move to take it to Sundance. It was considered at best an inside joke."

The most amusing bit in the movie, to us, is when De Niro-as-Linson stands in the shower, his no-longer-firm flesh exposed to the world as he desperately slathers dye on his hair. That scene would seem to show a wry awareness that an aging producer (not to mention an aging star) doesn't appear at his best when struggling to hold back the hands of time. And that it's quite a challenge, in our culture, to stay graceful after 50.

But the handling of this film seems like an exercise in how profoundly all of them—Linson, Levinson, De Niro—don't get that at all. It was an enormous act of ego to spend the estimated $30 million on this film, another one to take it to Sundance. And now, Cannes—which is funny because What Just Happened? ends with the Linson character taking his very bad film (where else?) to Cannes. Wag the Dog indeed.

All this reminded our producer friend of a memo, supposedly created by an anonymous CAA agent in the wake of De Niro's recent departure from the agency. This has been pinging around the Hollywood blogosphere for a couple of weeks now, but we pass it along in part:

Why did Bobby leave us?

They promised they could turn back time.

They promised they could get him 20m a picture.

They promised they could get a release for his "Something happened," a Barry Levinson show biz pic that's has no market, and Mark Cuban lost a fortune on.

They promised they could get him the $1m production fee on every picture he does, that he and his partner put their names on, and do nothing to earn.

They promised they could convince Hollywood that they should still pay that 1m vig on top of his acting fees.

They promised him they'd find a respectable release for the Pacino picture he did last summer, that basically stars two 65 year old guys as detectives—while the audience is under 35, and has no interest in seeing.

As I said, they promised him they could turn back time, and make him 50 again, and relevant, and hot, and interesting to today's moviegoing audience.

And they probably promised that they'd find a way to erase the memory of all of America about the number of god-awful paycheck films he did during the past ten years.

De Niro had a choice ten or so years ago. He could either go the Nicholson route—very selective, very particular, protect the brand—or go out sending himself up in tripe like Analyze This, which made money but turned him into that "old psycho guy."

And he could have concentrated on quality stuff, but instead wanted to keep funding his little empire in New York. …

Bobby blames everybody but himself for the way he's squandered his career, and refused lots of quality pictures because they wouldn't give him producer credit.

Good luck in the Hotel Business, pal. (link)



hot document
Watchdog, Watch Thyself
Did the Office of Special Counsel violate the very laws it enforces at other federal agencies?
By Bonnie Goldstein
Thursday, May 8, 2008, at 5:10 PM ET



From: Bonnie Goldstein

Posted Thursday, May 8, 2008, at 5:10 PM ET

The Office of Special Counsel was created after the Watergate scandal to investigate illegal government personnel practices such as reprisals against government whistleblowers and violations of the Hatch Act, which prohibits the use of federal agency resources for partisan political purposes. At the moment, however, the current special counsel, Scott Bloch, is himself under investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which on May 5 raided his office and home. Neither Bloch, who remains in his job, nor the White House would comment on the inquiry. Appointed in 2004, Bloch has been variously accused of retaliating against the OSC's own whistleblowers; of discriminating against the agency's gay employees; and, when the Office of Personnel Management inspector general looked into this last allegation, of hiring a private technology firm to erase potentially incriminating e-mails.

Among the documents likely to interest prosecutors is a January 2008 13-page draft memo, produced by an OSC oversight task force. The memo, obtained and released yesterday by the nonprofit watchdog organization Project on Government Oversight (excerpts below and on the following seven pages), criticizes the OSC for failing to investigate aggressively a series of Republican National Committee-sponsored pep talks at administrative agencies that appear to have violated the Hatch Act (see below and Pages 2 and 3) and for interfering with a criminal probe into the Justice Department purge of nine U.S. Attorneys (Pages 3 through 7).

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





Posted Thursday, May 8, 2008, at 5:10 PM ET





Posted Thursday, May 8, 2008, at 5:10 PM ET





Posted Thursday, May 8, 2008, at 5:10 PM ET





Posted Thursday, May 8, 2008, at 5:10 PM ET





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hot document
Can't Help Loving
Remembering the woman who defeated anti-miscegenation laws.
By Bonnie Goldstein
Tuesday, May 6, 2008, at 4:48 PM ET



From: Bonnie Goldstein

Posted Tuesday, May 6, 2008, at 4:37 PM ET

Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving* grew up as friends and neighbors in Caroline County, Va. In June 1958, Richard got 18-year-old Mildred pregnant, and the young lovers decided to get married. Ordinarily, that would have been the respectable thing to do. But Mildred was black, Richard was white, and the Commonwealth of Virginia and 15 other states still had laws on the books prohibiting miscegenation. Mildred and Richard had to travel to Washington, D.C., to get married in a civil ceremony. Then they returned home to Central Point, Va.

A few weeks later, the local sheriff literally burst into the newlyweds' bedroom and arrested them for violating Virginia's Racial Integrity Act. ("If any white person intermarry with a colored person, or any colored person intermarry with a white person, he shall be guilty of a felony.") The Lovings were convicted by a judge who wrote, "Almighty God … did not intend for the races to mix" but agreed to suspend their one-year jail sentence provided they left Virginia and didn't return for 25 years.

The couple moved to Washington, D.C., and Mildred, hoping to end this exile, pleaded her case in a letter to Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Kennedy referred her to the American Civil Liberties Union, which agreed to represent the Lovings. In 1967, Loving v. Virginia reached the Supreme Court. Citing the 14th Amendment, the court overturned the Lovings' conviction and ruled that all anti-miscegenation laws would henceforth be null and void (see the opinion below). "Under our Constitution," wrote Chief Justice Earl Warren, "the freedom to marry or not marry a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed upon by the state." At least two subsequent Supreme Court justices have Mildred Loving to thank for the legality of their own interracial marriages.

The Lovings returned to Virginia, but, sadly, they enjoyed only a few years together before Richard was killed in a car accident in 1975. Mildred survived the crash and lived an additional 33 years. She died yesterday at 68.

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



Correction, May 7, 2008: This article originally misidentified Richard Loving as Thomas. (Return to the corrected sentence.)



human nature
Not Black and White
Rethinking race and genes.
By William Saletan
Monday, May 5, 2008, at 8:03 AM ET

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

Five months ago, I wrote a series on race, genes, and intelligence. Everything about it hurt: the research, the writing, the reactions, the regrets. Not a day has gone by that I haven't thought about it. I've been struggling to reconcile two feelings that won't go away: that what I wrote was socially harmful and that I can't honestly renounce the evidence I presented. That evidence, which involved the proposed role of heredity in trait differences by race, is by no means complete or conclusive. But it's not dismissible, either. My colleague Stephen Metcalf summarized the debate better than I did: "It's a conflict between science and science."

When you find yourself in a dilemma this difficult, sometimes the best thing to do is let it sit in your head until you find a way to make sense of it within your value system. I think I'm beginning to find the answer that works for me: I was asking the wrong question.

In last fall's series, I asked myself why I was writing about such an ugly topic. "Because the truth isn't as bad as our ignorant, half-formed fears and suspicions about it," I concluded. "And because you can't solve a problem till you understand it." I wrote my commitment on a piece of paper and leaned it against my computer monitor: The truth doesn't care what you want.

Sometimes, with time and perspective, it's the small, overlooked things that turn out to be big. In retrospect, I was consumed by the wrong word. The flaw in my approach wasn't truth. It was the. Even if hereditary inequality among racial averages is a truth, it's less true, more unjust, and more pernicious than framing the same difference in nonracial terms. "The truth," as I accepted and framed it, was itself half-formed. It was, in that sense, a half-truth. And it flunked the practical test I had assigned it: To the extent that a social problem is genetic, you can't ultimately solve it by understanding it in racial terms.

A study published two weeks ago in Nature Medicine illustrates the point. Gina Kolata of the New York Times explains what happened:

Doctors who treat patients with heart failure have long been puzzled by a peculiar observation. Many black patients seem to do just as well if they take a mainstay of therapy, a class of drugs called beta blockers, as if they do not. [Now researchers] have discovered why: these nonresponsive patients have a slightly altered version of a gene that muscles use to control responses to nerve signals. … As many as 40 percent of blacks and 2 percent of whites have the gene variant, the researchers report. The findings, heart failure specialists say, mean that people with the altered gene might be spared taking what may be, for them, a useless therapy.

In other words, racial observation turned out to be a temporary step toward a deeper genetic explanation. Most blacks don't have the altered gene, and some whites do. Given these findings, prescribing or not prescribing beta blockers based on race rather than genes would be malpractice.

In a similar way, policy prescriptions based on race are social malpractice. Not because you can't find patterns on tests, but because any biological theory that starts with observed racial patterns has to end with genetic differences that cross racial lines. Race is the stone age of genetics. If you're a researcher looking for effects of heredity on medical or educational outcomes, race is the closest thing you presently have to genetic information about most people. And as a proxy measure, it sucks.

By itself, this problem isn't decisive. After all, racial analysis did lead to the genetic findings about beta blockers. But as the conversation shifts from medicine to social science, and particularly to patterns laden with stereotypes, the moral cost of framing such patterns in racial terms becomes unsupportable. We can't just be "race realists," as believers in biological distinctions among races like to call themselves. We have to be realists about racism. No fact in human history is more pervasive than our tendency to prejudge, fear, despise, persecute, and fight each other based on even the shallowest observable differences. It's simply reckless to feed that fire.

The question I set out to explore last fall was how to be an egalitarian in an age of genetic differences. That's still an important project. We're going to find many more genetic and trait differences among populations. You can't meaningfully denounce every such finding or theory as racist. Racism has to mean something else. I think it should mean looking and settling for racial analysis when some other combination of categories—economics, culture, genetics—more accurately fits the data. It's easy to group people by race and compare averages. But it's pernicious.

In the age of genetics, egalitarianism doesn't mean you have to deny differences in racial averages. It means you have to beware the injustice this kind of grouping and averaging does to individuals. That warning goes for the left as well as the right. Last week, Rev. Jeremiah Wright told the NAACP that "European and European-American children have a left-brained, cognitive, object-oriented learning style" whereas "African and African-American children … are right-brained, subject-oriented in their learning style." Before making such generalizations, ask yourself whether you want even four little children to live in a nation where their brains will be judged by the color of their skin.

Drawing a line against racial analysis doesn't solve all the problems I raised about inequality. In fact, it creates new problems. On the right, it leaves the question of whether genetic generalization and determinism are wrong. On the left, it raises the question of whether any policy, including affirmative action, should be based on race. I don't know where those questions will lead. But I'm pretty sure drawing this line is the right first step.



juicy bits
Bill Clinton's Post-Presidential Life
The juiciest bits from a new bio.
By Juliet Lapidos
Monday, May 5, 2008, at 12:49 PM ET


Carol Felsenthal's new book about Bill Clinton's post-presidential years, Clinton in Exile, is often catty, occasionally malicious, and overly reliant on unnamed sources. It's also pretty boring; when Felsenthal's not muckraking, she's content to trot out newspaper accounts of Clinton's foundation work and his appearances on the guest-speaker circuit. But don't fret—with Slate's reading guide, you can zip straight to the water-cooler-worthy gossip.

Clinton the Luddite

Page 35: Shortly after Clinton left office, he went out to lunch in Chappaqua, N.Y., with Jake Siewert, his former White House press spokesman. Clinton wanted to treat but, according to Siewert, he couldn't get the ATM to work. "He had his card, but he did not know his pin number. He was trying to call Hillary to get it, but he could not reach her." They ended up splitting the bill.

Page 198: Clinton hasn't gotten accustomed to the Internet age. He "does not use a computer or send e-mail, and he certainly has never blogged." According to Kinko's founder Paul Orfalea, both he and the former president "have their e-mails printed out for them."

Clinton's Entourage

Pages 103 and 104: Clinton and Ron Burkle, the supermarket magnate, have been buddies since 1992. Felsenthal repeats the old rumor that "Burkle and Clinton are … partners in philandering." She also quotes an unnamed source alleging that "Burkle and Clinton spend time together doing things that Hillary would not want made public" and reports that Burkle calls his private plane "Fuck Jet."

Page 109: In addition to Burkle, Clinton spends much of his downtime with Miami businessman Philip Levine, billionaire money manager Jeffrey Epstein, and movie producer Stephen Bing. An unnamed source told Felsenthal, "Stephen Bing epitomizes that crowd. Clinton's still very much a skirt chaser and these guys in Hollywood are movers and shakers. Stephen Bing [is a] rich, young guy on the loose with power … who is bedding every broad. … That really appeals to Clinton."

Page 110: Felsenthal's sources trash Terry McAuliffe, the one-time chair of the Democratic National Committee. An unnamed Clinton "supporter" wonders why 42 "would want to spend so much time with a man who may be shrewd but seems limited intellectually and whose adoration for Bill and Hillary is creepy." Don Fowler, another former DNC head, says McAuliffe "lives off" his close relationship with the power couple.

Is He Still Cheating?

Page 76: Felsenthal spills a lot of ink trying to figure out whether Clinton cheats at … golf. She interviews people who say he doesn't and people who say he does but ends up giving more weight to the latter because it boosts her argument that the one-time leader of the free world likes to be treated as an exception. According to Robert "Buzz" Patterson, a former military aide, Clinton cheated "pretty much on every hole. … If there was a bad shot, he'd drop two or three balls and hit them all and play the best shot. … On any given hole he might have seven, eight, nine shots and counted it as four or five."

Page 109: Off the golf course, Felsenthal has no doubt that Clinton still fools around. An unnamed source claims that Clinton "has done some things that are wildly inappropriate, even after Monica Lewinsky, even after he's trying to become this venerable sage of American politics, he still does it. He's just fundamentally flawed."

Pages 224-226: Felsenthal repeats the tabloid rumor that Clinton dated Belinda Stronach, a Canadian heiress and former member of the Canadian parliament. She doesn't have any irrefutable evidence, but she quotes Eric Reguly of the Globe and Mail as saying, "Bill Clinton was very much a part of [Stronach's] life." Per Reguly, Clinton was attracted to Stronach because she's rich, attractive, and at one point had a chance to become prime minister of Canada.

Page 226: Never wary of spreading blatantly unsubstantiated gossip, Felsenthal says vaguely, "Closer to home, rumors [have] persisted about a married woman, a neighbor in a woodsy, hilly village north of Chappaqua."

Page 217: So he cheats, but what's his technique? Felsenthal has the scoop from a woman who had seen him around Hollywood. "[H]olding your hand just a little too long, putting the hand on your back, ah, just a little too long."

Hillary's Run

Pages 232 and 233: As recently as summer 2006, Clinton told a financial supporter that Hillary wouldn't run for president "because she can't win. … Do you realize that 51 percent of the people in this country who vote are women? Women don't want Hillary. So I doubt if she's going to run." He's also "been heard to say that Harold Ford Jr. and Barack Obama 'are the two guys with the juice to go all the way some time in the future.' " Sounds like a good attack ad.

Page 240: Clinton's been itching to get back on the campaign trail ever since he left office and has been a bit too eager coaching Hillary. One night at a conference, he felt that Hillary had answered a question incorrectly. According to Peter Hart, a pollster, Clinton called the moderator down and said, "I think my wife's got the formulation wrong. Why don't you call on me and I'll clarify it?" Unsurprisingly, the moderator ignored his request.



jurisprudence
Little Sudan
What should Israel do with its thousands of Christian and Muslim African refugees?
By Emily Bazelon
Monday, May 5, 2008, at 12:51 PM ET


Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert recently referred grumpily to a "tsunami" that "we need to take every measure in order to stop." He was speaking not about Palestinian terrorists but about a wave of more than 7,000 African asylum seekers who have crossed the Egyptian border into Israel over the last year, at least 2,000 of them since January. The Africans crossing into Israel are Muslims and Christians. They come mostly from Sudan and Eritrea but also from Nigeria, Côte d'Ivoire, and Congo. They are refugees looking for a safe haven and legal asylum. And Israel has absolutely no idea what to do with them.

Israel loves to be the first on the scene when there's a humanitarian crisis: In 1977, Menachem Begin welcomed 66 Vietnamese boat people spotted by an Israeli cargo ship near Japan; more recently, Israel sent medical teams to India after the 2001 earthquake and arrived in Asia with emergency aid after the tsunami in 2004. But if Israel embraces thousands of African refugees, millions in Egypt alone could try to follow. All developed countries worry about the effects of an influx of poor refugees. But the problem is especially delicate for Israel, which worries about someday losing its Jewish majority to the growing Palestinian population (especially if it does not relinquish control of the West Bank). And then there's the country's location: It's not as if there are other prosperous democracies in the region for refugees to choose among. Maybe it was only a matter of time before Africans decided to opt for this shorter trek over the long voyages to Europe and North America.


And so for now, the Israeli government stands on shifting and uneasy middle ground. The country has given one-year temporary residency (which comes with medical benefits) to up to 600 Darfurians fleeing genocide and six-month working visas to about 2,000 Eritreans. Meanwhile, it has held thousands of others in desert detention centers while still others live in makeshift, slumlike quarters around the Tel Aviv bus station. Mark Hetfield of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society says that conditions in Tel Aviv are worse than any he has seen in visits to dozens of refugee camps in Africa and East Asia. "There are 150 people using one bathroom. There is rotting food. There is no discipline or taking of ownership, because everything is so temporary," he said. (For photographs, . More images here.)

Olmert is talking both about erecting a border fence and establishing clear asylum procedures for assessing cases individually, which Israel currently doesn't really have. The systems of the United States and Canada are good models that civil rights lawyers in Israel say they'd love to follow. But it won't be easy to do so. And if Israel's asylum procedures get fairer, will that just encourage more refugees to come?

Like more than 140 other countries, Israel is a party to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which forbids expelling or returning a refugee to a country where his or her life or freedom would be threatened. The convention also says that refugees should not be punished for entering another country illegally. It's up to individual countries to put these principles into law. In Israel, those seeking asylum used to turn to the office of the U.N. High Commissioner on Refugees, which heard their stories and made a recommendation about whether Israel should grant temporary residence. The governmental committee that reviewed UNHCR recommendations almost always followed them and granted residency in about 11 percent of cases.

In the last two years, because of the overwhelming numbers, these minimal procedures have broken down. Instead, UNHCR and Israel have made group designations based on refugee nationality: Roughly speaking, Darfurians have gotten residency, blocks of Eritreans have gotten work permits, and other refugees have been out of luck. They generally haven't been deported, but they're not in the country legally, either. Often, the country's approach seems entirely "ad hoc and arbitrary," says Anat Ben-Dor, a clinical law professor at Tel Aviv University who represents the immigrants. If there is room at a detention center when the police pick up refugees at the border, they can be jailed for many months. If not, they can end up, right away, on a bus bound for Tel Aviv.

To Alexander Aleinikoff, who worked on immigration for the Clinton administration and is now Georgetown's law school dean, Israel is fumbling as the United States did 15 years ago, when thousands of pending cases were swamping the Immigration and Naturalization Services (since absorbed into a different alphabet soup, the Department of Homeland Security). The INS needed a fair and efficient procedure, and Aleinikoff thinks it devised one. Asylum applicants go before an asylum officer (and often an immigration judge as well) and plead their case. Refugees have a chance to tell their stories, and they're allowed to bring lawyers to their hearings. About 35 percent of asylum requests are granted by the asylum officers, who conduct a relatively informal interview. Of the remaining claims forwarded on to immigration judges, the approval rate is about 40 percent for those decided on the merits. Asylum applications can appeal an initial ruling if it goes against them.

Which isn't to say that the American asylum process couldn't be improved upon. The United States doesn't pay for lawyers for asylum petitioners, and as Adam Liptak noted in the New York Times, refugees with lawyers succeed 46 percent of the time, compared with 16 percent of those without lawyers. Those statistics come from a 2007 Stanford Law Review article, which also found that the rate of asylum grants varied wildly by the region of the United States in which one applies—from 62 percent to 26 percent between 1999 and 2005. The grant rate for Chinese asylum seekers, for example, ranged from 7 percent to 60 percent in different immigration offices across the United States. On another front, the group Human Rights First criticizes U.S. asylum policy for broadly barring refugees who are believed to have provided material aid to terrorists—so broadly that people fleeing terrorists are sometimes caught in this net.

Still, the immigration lawyers I talked to generally credited America's asylum procedures, and Canada's, as an improvement on those in Europe, where the approval rates for persecuted refugees is far lower. Ideally, from the lawyers' point of view, Israel would do the United States one better by paying for representation, for the sake of the system as well as the seekers. "Most immigration judges will tell you that they're much more effective and efficient if they have competent counsel on both sides," said Andrew Schoenholtz, one of the authors of the Stanford article and the deputy director of Georgetown's Institute for the Study of International Migration.

Where are the Israeli courts in all of this? The country's Supreme Court has been presented twice with aspects the immigrants' plight: In 2006, the government agreed before the court to review the detention of 300 Sudanese, which led to their release (a result the government did not foresee). And in 2007, the court instructed the government to initiate border procedures, which in effect ended the Olmert administration's policy of "hot return," or sending refugees back to Egypt if they were caught within 48 hours. Ben-Dor said that the court has so far been hesitant to interfere beyond establishing these basic principles, because the government invokes national security and executive prerogative on its side. Then there's the sensitive matter of the long term: So far, the Africans have received only temporary status, without a route to naturalization and citizenship. Given the sensitivity of allowing a potentially sizeable group of non-Jews to settle in Israel permanently, the Supreme Court may want to stay out of that one, too. Instead, Ben-Dor said, she and other lawyers need to bring the kinds of incremental cases that will frame the refugees' problems in terms of administrative law and fairness. Those are grounds on which the court might be more comfortable taking a stand.

The tricky part is that the release of the 300 Sudanese from detention (as well as threats of mass deportation from Egypt to Sudan around the same time) may have played a significant part in increasing the immigrants' numbers. The more effort it puts into handling cases fairly, the more hospitable Israel may seem, despite the refugees' poor living conditions.

But in the end, the notion that no law is best seems untenable. If anything, Israel may have more reason than the United States or other developed countries to handle asylum seekers with fairness and decency for the sake of its international reputation. It's not clear that the country can afford to act as the United States does when it ships home truckloads of Mexicans. The uncertain plight of the Africans has already prompted protest and bad press in the Arab world. And if Israel eventually refuses to admit incoming Africans because it can't handle the numbers, the government will want to point to an established set of asylum procedures to justify itself. Olmert might be happier talking about a border fence. But he's probably better off lining up a whole bunch of asylum lawyers and immigration judges.



map the candidates
Feeling Ducky
Obama and Clinton are both in Oregon, but Clinton continues on to Kentucky later in the day. McCain is in South Carolina and New York.
By E.J. Kalafarski and Chadwick Matlin
Friday, May 9, 2008, at 11:04 AM ET



map the candidates
Clinton Outworks Obama
In Indiana and North Carolina, Hillary holds more events than Barack.
By E.J. Kalafarski and Chadwick Matlin
Tuesday, May 6, 2008, at 12:22 PM ET


It's Election Day, which means Map the Candidates breaks down how much time the candidates spent in the states going to the polls. The takeaway: Hillary Clinton has been packing far more on-the-record events into her schedule than her opponent. This, despite an emphasis on smaller venues for Obama.

We should note that over the last few weeks, Obama's campaign has stopped announcing full details about some of his campaign events. As a result, several stops didn't make it into the MTC database, which weighs down Obama's average stops per day.

Without further ado:

Indiana

Hillary Clinton: 37 stops in the state, 14 days spent there (2.64 stops per day).

Barack Obama: 25 stops in the state, 16 days spent there (1.56 stops per day).

North Carolina

Hillary Clinton: 24 stops in the state, 10 days spent there (2.40 stops per day).

Barack Obama: 15 stops in the state, nine days spent there (1.66 stops per day).

We've updated Map the Candidates' look to offer you even more information than before. Click here to explore the country's political landscape, and be sure to tap into the candidates' and states' statistics pages by clicking the popout symbols next to their names.

Map the Candidates uses the candidates' public schedules to keep track of their comings and goings. A quick primer on your new election toolbox:

Click here to start using Map the Candidates.



medical examiner
Stealth Marketers
Are doctors shilling for drug companies on public radio?
By Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer
Tuesday, May 6, 2008, at 1:06 PM ET

A few weeks ago, devoted listeners of public radio* were treated to an episode of the award-winning radio series The Infinite Mind called "Prozac Nation: Revisited." The segment featured four prestigious medical experts discussing the controversial link between antidepressants and suicide. In their considered opinions, all four said that worries about the drugs have been overblown.

The radio show, which was broadcast nationwide and paid for in part by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, had the air of quiet, authoritative credibility. Host Dr. Fred Goodwin, a former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, interviewed three prominent guests, and any radio producer would be hard-pressed to find a more seemingly credible quartet. Credible, that is, except for a crucial detail that was never revealed to listeners: All four of the experts on the show, including Goodwin, have financial ties to the makers of antidepressants. Also unmentioned were the "unrestricted grants" that The Infinite Mind has received from drug makers, including Eli Lilly, the manufacturer of the antidepressant Prozac.

We don't know just how much funding or when the show last received it, since neither Goodwin nor the show's producers responded to repeated requests for interviews. But the larger point is that undisclosed financial conflicts of interest among media sources seem to be popping up all over the place these days. Some experts who appear independent are, in fact, serving as stealth marketers for the drug and biotech industries, and reporters either don't know about their sources' conflicts of interests, or they fail to disclose them to the public.

Take the November 2006 NBC Nightly News story that asked, "Can lung scans really prevent cancer death?" Reporter Mike Taibbi, a former smoker, underwent scanning by Dr. Claudia Henschke, a professor of radiology at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. Henschke claimed on the show that early detection with lung scans could prevent 80 percent of deaths from lung cancer. Although Taibbi included another expert who said that Henschke's claim was "outrageous," viewers were left with little way to evaluate the two conflicting viewpoints. And Taibbi himself concluded that early detection was his "best chance." At no point did viewers learn that Henschke's research was funded by a tobacco company, which has an investment in making the risks of smoking appear to be manageable—or that many experts warn that more research is needed to determine whether the potential benefits of scanning outweigh its harms.

How frequently are journalists glossing over such conflicts? Gary Schwitzer, a professor of journalism at the University of Minnesota, is the publisher of HealthNewsReview.org, a Web site that reviews health care news for balance, accuracy, and completeness. Schwitzer and his team of reviewers have looked at 544 stories from top outlets over the two-year period from April 2006 to April 2008. Journalists had to meet several criteria in order to receive a satisfactory score, among them: They had to quote an independent expert—someone not involved in the relevant research—and they had to make some attempt to report potential conflicts of interest. Half the stories failed to meet these two requirements, Schwitzer says.

Conflicts of interest abound even in unexpected places. A recent survey of academic medical centers published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that 60 percent of academic department chairs have personal ties to industry—serving as consultants, board members, or paid speakers, while two-thirds of the academic departments had institutional ties to industry. Such ties can be extremely lucrative. And according to these articles in the medical literature, researchers who receive funding from drug and medical-device manufacturers are up to 3.5 times as likely to conclude their study drug or medical device works than are researchers without such funding.

An equally clever way for companies to get out their marketing messages is to go through a consumer group. Drug companies often seed "pharm teams," consumer groups that start out as legitimate advocacy organizations and are subtly manipulated by funding from pharmaceutical companies to convey the desired talking points. Unless reporters ask where groups and individual researchers get their money, they have no idea that their sources may be biased—and neither do their readers, viewers, and listeners.

Which brings us back to The Infinite Mind and "Prozac Nation: Revisited," a show that may stand in a class by itself for concealing bias. In addition to the show's unrestricted grants from Lilly, the host, Goodwin, is on the board of directors of Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, an industry-funded front, or "Astroturf" group, which receives a majority of its funding from drug companies. CMPI President Peter Pitts was one of Goodwin's three guests for "Prozac Nation." We don't know which companies fund his group because when we asked him, Pitts said, "I don't want to go into that." But CMPI took in more than $1.4 million in 2006 and, according to its tax forms, spent $210,000 to influence the media through a large conference, a blog the group maintains, op-eds published in major newspapers, and multimedia programs and podcasts. Pitts has another title that might have been relevant to The Infinite Mind; he is the senior vice president for global health affairs at the PR firm Manning Selvage & Lee, which represents Eli Lilly Inc., GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, and more than a dozen other pharmaceutical companies. Yet on the show, Pitts was identified only by his title as "a former FDA official."

The second guest on "Prozac Nation," Andrew F. Leuchter, is a professor of psychiatry at UCLA who has received research money from drug companies including Eli Lilly Inc., Pfizer, and Novartis. The third guest, Nada Stotland, president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association, has served on the speakers' bureaus of GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer. None of Leuchter and Stotland's ties to industry was revealed to listeners—instead, each was introduced as a prominent academic.

The Infinite Mind's Web site states, "Our independence is perhaps our greatest asset." Perhaps, indeed. Neither Goodwin nor the show's producers responded to our repeated requests for interviews and queries about their funding. Pitts, who to his credit did give us an interview, said he didn't know why his ties to industry weren't revealed on the show. Curious, we tried to learn more about the funding for The Infinite Mind—and could discover only that the show's award-winning production company, Lichtenstein Creative Media, was dissolved by the state of Massachusetts on March 28 for failing to file a single annual report since its establishment in 2004.

Some reporters and producers argue that they can't be expected to ask every source whether he or she gets money from the drug industry. But there are obvious first steps to take. A list of academic researchers who are known to have financial ties to the drug and medical-device industries is available through the Center for Science in the Public Interest. (Yes, the name is a lot like the Astroturf group we mentioned earlier—coincidence?) To be fair, the list is inevitably incomplete, and Astroturf groups and academics with undeclared financial ties can make it difficult to ferret out their financial conflicts.

In hopes of making reporters' jobs a little easier, we've created for journalists an international list of prestigious and independent medical experts who declare they have no financial ties to drug and device manufacturers for at least the past five years. We have nearly 100 experts from a wide array of disciplines. E-mail us at Brownlee.Lenzer@gmail.com, and we'll be happy to name names.

Correction, May 6, 2008: The original sentence incorrectly stated that The Infinite Mind is carried on National Public Radio, rather than public radio stations.(Return to the corrected sentence.)



moneybox
Corn Dogs
Fuel prices are at record highs, so why are ethanol producers struggling?
By Daniel Gross
Wednesday, May 7, 2008, at 6:23 PM ET


The continuing crisis over high food prices has inspired a round of global finger-pointing. Politicians blame speculators, and speculators blame the Federal Reserve. Free-traders blame countries with agricultural subsidies, and countries with agricultural subsidies blame free-traders. And everyone blames the ethanol industry: The current mania to turn food crops, especially corn, into gasoline is pushing up the global price for maize, crowding out the production of other crops and generally creating an unfair competition between gas tanks in Missouri and poor consumers in Mumbai.

But judging by recent financial results, the big villains in this story—the American companies that are responding to government mandates by buying about 20 percent of the U.S. corn harvest and processing it into fuel—aren't exactly thriving. In fact, their bottom lines and stock prices are suffering pretty badly.

VeraSun is one of the largest U.S. producers of ethanol. Last month it completed its merger with U.S. BioEnergy, giving it an annual capacity of nearly 1 billion gallons. (For 2007, total U.S. production was about 6.5 billion gallons.) In the 2007 fourth quarter, VeraSun ran all out, making 142.1 million gallons, double its output in the 2006 fourth quarter. But prices fell (down 14 percent), and gross profit (broadly speaking, the difference between sales and what it costs to make it) slumped by one-quarter. For all of 2007, VeraSun's gross profit fell to 11.3 percent of revenues from 34.5 percent of revenues in 2006. The stock has lost nearly 60 percent of its value in the past six months.

The chart tells a similar tale at Pacific Ethanol, whose stock has fallen from about $15 to about $3. Pacific Ethanol's gross margin dropped from 11 percent in 2006 to 7.1 percent in 2007 partly because of higher corn costs. Aventine Renewable's one-year chart shows a precipitous fall in stock price from $20 to $4. And a Wall Street analyst recently noted that it faced a potential cash shortfall. When it reported quarterly earnings last week, Aventine said that its average sales price per gallon rose from the first quarter of 2007 enough but not enough to outweigh the rise in corn. And thanks to the high price of energy (it takes energy to produce energy), the cost of converting corn into ethanol rose more than 10 percent per gallon during the same time period. So, between the first quarter of 2007 and the first quarter of 2008, Aventine's operating margins shrunk from about 6.5 percent of sales to 4.7 percent of sales. And MGP Ingredients said profit margins in its distillery products unit fell to 2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007, down from 22 percent in the final quarter of 2006.

What gives? In theory, business should be gangbusters in the ethanol patch. Government policy has mandated consumption of the fuel, thus stimulating investment. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 called for 5.4 billion gallons of renewable fuels to be sold in 2008 and 7.5 billion gallons by 2012. Last year, the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 dramatically jacked up the short-term targets (9 billion gallons by 2008) and the long-term targets (36 billion gallons by 2022), with corn-based ethanol expected to meet most of this demand.

But just because the government forces people to buy your product doesn't mean it's a surefire win. The combination of high oil prices, tariffs that protect domestically produced ethanol from imports, and tax credits for companies that blend ethanol into gasoline has stimulated something of an ethanol bubble. And as always happens during a bubble, excess capacity—and the vicious competition it creates—winds up eroding margins. The Renewable Fuels Association has excellent data on ethanol production that show a massive spike in capacity. The U.S. industry has grown from 3.4 billion gallons of capacity in 2004 to 6.5 billion in 2007. Today, some 134 plants with a capacity of 7.23 billion gallons are in operation, and another 77 with 6.2 billion gallons of capacity are under construction. Capacity has more than doubled since 2004, and, once all the plants in the works are completed, it will nearly double again. But with demand for gasoline declining nationwide, and with ethanol an imperfect substitute for gasoline (not all vehicles can use it; the distribution network isn't fully built out), producers aren't always able to dictate prices to the marketplace.

As for the bottom line, processors and distributors of agricultural commodities—from Kraft to Morton's Steakhouse—are being pinched by rising costs of grains and energy, tough competition, and softened demand stemming from the weakening economy. These factors are shrinking margins at every rung of the food-processing business. Ethanol producers are no different than cookie-makers and restaurants in this regard. After all, their biggest inputs include an agricultural commodity (corn) and energy.

While environmentalists have warned that the rapid growth of ethanol posed a danger to sustainability, the alarm may be somewhat misplaced. Oil has topped $122 a barrel and could be heading to $150. But the ethanol bubble has already popped. The recent poor results from ethanol producers is far more likely to hinder further development than any change in government policy.



moneybox
Obama-nomics
Barack and Michelle are very cautious with their newfound wealth.
By Sam Grobart and Tara Siegel Bernard
Wednesday, May 7, 2008, at 3:44 PM ET


It's not as if the Obamas are some modern-day version of the Clampetts, but compared with the competition, they're at best nouveau riche. As recently as 2004, the Obamas' adjusted gross income was $207,647, according to their federal tax returns. That's much higher than the national median household income of $48,201, but for a family of four living in high-cost Chicago, $200K isn't exactly rolling in it.

Which makes all the hubbub about Barack Obama's elitism seem pretty hollow. "The irony is," Obama said last week, "I think it is fair to say that both Michelle and I grew up in much less privileged circumstances than either of my two potential opponents." Indeed, if Obama is the nominee and wins in November, he would have one of the most modest backgrounds of any president in recent memory; he has noted, for example, that his mother "had to go on food stamps at one point." Both Bushes came from family wealth, and Bill Clinton married Hillary Rodham, who would ultimately rake in more than $200K annually (in 1992 in Arkansas) while she was a partner at the Rose Law Firm. Ronald Reagan made money in movies before becoming president; we'd probably have to go back to submariner/peanut farmer Jimmy Carter or career soldier/college president Dwight Eisenhower to find another elected president whose financial picture was as comparatively humble.

But the increase in the Obamas' wealth has been swift and strong. Their glory days started in 2005, when the couple earned $1.7 million. In 2006, they earned $983,000. Last year, they pulled down an impressive $4.1 million. And no, Tony Rezko had nothing to do with this: Obama's newfound wealth comes from the success of his two books: Dreams From My Father and The Audacity of Hope have sold more than 2.25 million copies since publication, according to Bookscan. Obama has not donated the proceeds from his books to charity, as John McCain has, but then Obama did not marry an heiress with $40 million in assets.

How do the Obamas invest their money? Very, very safely—like a couple who wants no risk of ever being middle-class again. There are no hedge funds, trusts, or other fancy alternative investments to speak of—just, for the most part, a collection of run-of-the-mill mutual funds. Unlike the average American, however, Sen. Obama had the wherewithal to save the maximum allowable amount ($45,000) in his retirement plan last year. The Obamas also had two sizable joint checking accounts at JPMorgan Chase ($100,001 to $250,000) and Northern Trust ($50,001 to $100,000) at year-end 2006, according to his Senate financial disclosure report (PDF). Perhaps they wanted to have enough cash readily available while they're on the campaign trail?

For a couple in their mid-40s, the Obamas' investment holdings are arguably too conservative. One of the single largest chunks of their money (between $150,000 and $350,000 as of year-end 2006) was invested in the Vanguard Wellington Fund, which has about 65 percent in stocks, 33 percent in bonds, and 2 percent in cash. Obama reportedly sold this fund after learning it was invested in Schlumberger Ltd., a French oil-field-services company that does business in Sudan. He put that $180,000 in proceeds into the Vanguard FTSE Social Index Fund, a socially responsible fund that invests in large- and midcap stocks. The Obamas had another $100,000 to $250,000 in Vanguard's Wellesley Fund, which allocates 60 percent of its money in high-quality bonds. Considering the Obamas have more than 20 years to go before retirement, many financial advisers would tell them to be more aggressive and increase their stock exposure to 80 percent of their portfolio.

The rest of their money—as much as $75,000—is invested across five other mutual funds. This appears to be part of Michelle Obama's 403(b) retirement plan from her tenure as an administrator at the University of Chicago Hospitals, where she earned around $275,000 over the past two years. Michelle Obama also has three batches of unexercised options to purchase shares of Tree House Foods—a Westchester, Ill.-based food supplier that counts Wal-Mart as a big customer—on whose board she served for two years (a paid position that netted her roughly $50,000 a year). She resigned last May after her husband criticized some of Wal-Mart's policies. The options' value is tenuous; currently, shares of Tree House are trading below the options' strike price of $29.65. Sen. Obama also listed his State of Illinois General Assembly Pension Plan, which is valued somewhere between $50,001 and $100,000.

In 2005 the Obamas did make some seemingly speculative—and ultimately controversial—stock bets (PDF) that made headlines last year. They bought shares of AVI Biopharma and SkyTerra Communications (for a reported total up to $100,000) in February of 2005, before selling later that fall. The sales resulted in a net loss of $13,000. The purchases caused quite a hubbub after the media learned that the two companies were backed by some of Obama's top donors. Obama has said his UBS broker bought the shares without his knowledge in a quasi-blind trust.

The Obamas have significantly increased their charitable contributions since declaring his candidacy. Last year, they gave $240,370, or about 5 percent of their income, to charity, with their largest contributions going to the United Negro College Fund ($50,000); CARE, the global poverty charity ($35,000); and Trinity United Church of Christ ($26,270), home of the Obamas' infamous former pastor the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. Contrast that amount with the couple's charitable giving in 2004, when only 1.2 percent of their income went to worthy causes.

Compared with John McCain and his $270,000 in expenditures on household help, the Obamas lead a much more middle-class lifestyle. Between 2000 and 2007, they spent anywhere between $6,000 and $24,000 annually on household expenses, which appears to include child care for their two daughters, Malia, 9, and Natasha, 6, according to their tax returns. That said, their house is pretty plush: The Obamas purchased their $1.65 million Chicago home three years ago and took out a mortgage of $1.32 million through Northern Trust.

It's unclear whether the Obamas have invested in a 529 college-savings plan for the girls. (Contributions to their home state's 529 would show up on their Illinois state return, which wasn't made public) If they haven't, they probably should: The Illinois Bright Start College Savings Program recently made it onto Morningstar's list of best college-savings plans. By investing in Illinois' plan, those funds would grow tax-deferred, and they'd receive a state income-tax deduction.

Obama is familiar with the costs of higher education—he paid off his loans only recently (reportedly after his book money came in). The first bill he introduced in the U.S. Senate would have increased the Pell Grant maximum (that's college money you don't have to pay back). If elected, he said he would eliminate the Federal Family Education Loan program, in which private lenders provide loans that are guaranteed by the government to borrowers. He said this program is more costly than the federal government's direct-loan program, in which students borrow from the government through their schools, eliminating private lending middlemen. He would direct the savings toward student aid. You can argue about whether that's good policy, but it's a treat to have a presidential candidate discussing student aid with recent, firsthand knowledge of the subject.



moneybox
Yahoo-bris!
A company with a history of overpaying lost a great deal when it couldn't force Microsoft to overpay. Now what?
By James Ledbetter
Monday, May 5, 2008, at 3:06 PM ET


It is axiomatic in the online world that no one knows what anything is truly worth. Yet for practically all of its corporate life, Yahoo has been comfortable with the answer: It's worth more.

That perspective has gotten Yahoo into trouble, certainly when it sat on the buying side of the table. Think back to early 1999, when Yahoo purchased GeoCities, a service that allowed users to build their own Web pages. Given that GeoCities at the time had 3.5 million users, it was not unreasonable to think that it was worth more than nothing, even though its mounting losses were about $8 million a quarter. To say that it was worth $5 billion took a supreme act of hubris—but that's what Yahoo paid in a stock swap. (Technically, GeoCities still exists, almost as a museum piece.)

Later that year, Yahoo bought the Web-radio outfit Broadcast.com from brash entrepreneur Mark Cuban for, yes, $5 billion. Cuban is still with us, but Broadcast.com is long gone, and Yahoo's audio services are either shuttered or also-rans. Again, you could make the case that Yahoo got some kind of value out of Broadcast's technology—but could almost certainly have found it elsewhere for less than one-tenth of that sum.

Over the weekend, Yahoo experienced the downside of hubris from the other side. On Jan. 31 of this year, the stock market thought Yahoo was worth $19.18 a share, or a bit more than $25.6 billion. The next day, Microsoft announced its intention to buy Yahoo at $31 a share, or $44.6 billion—62 percent more than what the market said the company was worth a few hours earlier.

Many people would look at a 62 percent price bump and say, That's a good deal. Yahoo said, It's worth more. The board sniffed that Microsoft's offer "substantially undervalues" the company. Maybe this stance was a good negotiating tactic; maybe it was a bluff. The thing about a bluff, though, is you don't want to be caught before the other guy folds.

Microsoft came back and sweetened its offer to $33 a share, and Yahoo said: It's worth more. That's when Microsoft's Steve Ballmer decided to walk away from the table. So, as of today, Yahoo is trading at below $25 a share, or an overall value of less than $33 billion.

No doubt there are some heavy Yahoo shareholders who simply didn't want to give up their independence to the Dark Star of Redmond, but such prejudice is no long-term substitute for strategy. What Ballmer and just about everyone else could see is that Yahoo failed to make the case that it has a plan for future growth. Yahoo's net income declined in both 2006 and 2007. For years, Yahoo has watched as Google snatched the momentum from Yahoo's greatest strength—search. In response, Yahoo hyped for more than a year an ad service called Panama that was supposed to compete with Google's AdSense. Panama may some day prove valuable, but Yahoo's announcement last month that it would begin testing a version of AdSense—in which Google ads would appear alongside Yahoo search results—was practically an admission that Panama has failed. And Yahoo's arguments that it would help turn Microsoft into an Internet ad giant both in the United States and abroad brought little more than embarrassed grimaces from most seasoned observers.

There are focus problems, too. Yahoo over the years has acquired a thicket of Web properties that it doesn't seem to know how to handle. Some of these—like photo service Flickr and social bookmarking site del.icio.us—are cool Web 2.0 tools that may yet find productive ways to integrate into Yahoo's broader business. Others are wooly legacies—like MusicMatch and auction sites in Asia—that no longer seem to fit with what Yahoo does. When Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang took back the CEO seat last summer, he promised a fresh look at the company's strategy, but aside from laying off 1,000 workers earlier this year, nothing has emerged.

So what are Yahoo's options now? Yang needs a plan, and fast. The $14 billion of shareholder value that evaporated this morning is going to attract lawsuits, and fast. Yahoo has played footsie with other Web companies, including Time Warner's AOL and News Corp.'s MySpace. But neither of those deals was an outright purchase that could rival Microsoft's offers. Some hold out hope for a deal with Google, though it's hard to see what Yahoo has to offer Google. Paul LaMonica of CNN Money makes the case this morning that Yahoo may find itself crawling back to Microsoft, much as BEA Systems was ultimately bought by Oracle in January after months of squabbling and an Oracle walk-away. If such a deal happens at less than $35 a share—which is the only imaginable way—it might finally put an end to Yahoo-bris.



movies
Manhattan Without Car Alarms
Tim Robbins plays a sound-pollution vigilante in Noise.
By Dana Stevens
Thursday, May 8, 2008, at 11:07 AM ET


Tim Robbins generally appears in one of two kinds of movies: well-meaning but bloated tearjerkers about serious issues (The Shawshank Redemption, Catch a Fire, Mystic River) and odd, scrappy little indie comedies about (and for) people too brainy for their own good (High Fidelity, Human Nature). Noise (ThinkFilm) is a minor but endearing entry in the latter category. The story of a New York yuppie who embarks on a one-man vigilante campaign against sound pollution, Noise is never quite as smart as it tries to be. But as summer and its mouth-breathing blockbusters loom large on the horizon, there's something touching about a movie that even tries.

At the start of the film, David Owen, a middle-aged lawyer with a hot cellist wife (Bridget Moynahan) and a young daughter (Gabrielle Brennan), has already gained a Gotham-wide reputation as "the Rectifier," a mysterious hoodie-wearing figure who prowls the city with a tool belt, destroying all sources of needless racket (car alarms, backup beepers, malfunctioning doorbells) and leaving behind a telltale sticker as his calling card. In a series of oddly staggered flashbacks, we see the bookish David transform into the righteous Rectifier. Driven half-insane (and nearly impotent) by the constant bleating of car alarms outside his window, he breaks a car window one night and discovers his life's calling: to smash the shit out of anything that goes "beep" in the night.

Getting caught and arrested twice does nothing to stem David's passion for his newfound hobby. Soon he's risking his job and his marriage to pursue that most quixotic of dreams: a quiet Manhattan. He's eventually joined by Ekatrina Filippovna (Margarita Levieva), a luscious Russian sprite who shares his predilection for kinky sex, philosophy, and vandalism, and together they collect signatures for a ballot initiative to outlaw car alarms. But they meet their match in the vulgar, Giuliani-esque mayor, Reinhardt Schneer (William Hurt, wearing a red comb-over and enjoying himself so hugely he seems to be licking invisible cream from his whiskers).

Like writer/director Henry Bean's first film, The Believer, which starred Ryan Gosling as a self-hating Jew turned Nazi skinhead, Noise bites off much more than it can chew—an indigestible wad of broad social satire and sincere political commentary, with one too many Hegel references for even this former grad student to endure. But it masticates that wad with admirable vigor. Robbins has a knack for this kind of character, idealistic but not overly endearing—much as we may identify with his pro-silence crusade, this guy is borderline certifiable. The secondary characters, especially Moynahan's watchful, dry-witted Helen, are prone to unexpected moments of insight (even a floozy David and Ekatrina pick up for a threesome has some deep thoughts to offer about how "a human being is nothing but a question"). More often than not, these insights seem to issue more from Henry Bean's brain than from the character speaking his lines, but it's an interesting enough brain that you're willing to cut him some slack. Noise has a way of making the audience sit up and listen, without any bells and whistles.



other magazines
Return to the Frey
Vanity Fair revisits one of the publishing industry's biggest fake-memoir scandals.
By Morgan Smith
Tuesday, May 6, 2008, at 2:21 PM ET


Vanity Fair, June 2008

In a column, Michael Wolff explains why "sex … in politics is as significant a subtext as race." The public and the media fixate on politicians' sex lives because "how you handle your sexual embarrassment, because you will have to handle it, has become a major political test and skill." A piece argues that discredited memoirist James Frey could have been enabled (and encouraged) by publishers and editors eager for a best-seller: "[I]t now turns out that it was something of an open secret in the publishing word that the industry had been complicit in the scandal, and that Frey, though he was not innocent, had become a whipping boy." Frey, who claims he initially labeled his book a novel, "embraced the badass role he'd written for himself" and "began standing by his book as straight nonfiction." The article accompanying the much-discussed seminude photo of Miley Cyrus considers the success of the teen juggernaut. Part of her popularity stems from the fact that she's "cute, but not too cute, and she sings with more character than most pop stars her age." (Meghan O'Rourke weighs in on Cyrus in Slate.)


Newsweek, May 12

The cover story, an excerpt from Fareed Zakaria's recent book, suggests Americans are gloomy because a "seismic shift in power and attitudes" is taking place as the world moves from "anti-Americanism to post-Americanism." The growth of nations like India and China is "naturally an unsettling prospect for Americans, but it should not be" because the post-American world "will not be a world defined by the decline of America but rather the rise of everyone else." (The Post-American World just happens to be the book's title.) A profile of the late Deborah Jean Palfrey reveals the so-called D.C. madam said she identified with the "stifled, battered, but sultry small-town girl" played by Meryl Streep in The Deer Hunter. On the 10-year anniversary of Seinfeld's final episode, dueling op-eds argue for and against the sitcom's cultural legacy.


New York, May 12

The cover story interviews Sarah Jessica Parker on the eve of the Sex and the City movie's release. Parker says New York City has changed since she first arrived in 1976: "[T]here's just so much money now, and the city is so affluent, and all the colors, all the shops, the look of a street from block to block is just terribly absent of distinguishing coffee shops, bodegas. All of that stuff that made it possible to live in New York is gone." A harrowing feature investigates the working conditions of New York subway employees, who toil where "there's so much steel dust swirling around that when you blow your nose your snot is black" and "[o]n summer days, the temperature regularly exceeds 100 degrees; in the winter, it's below freezing." Worse than their working conditions is the danger they encounter underground, where they have to clean and repair the tracks, and have little space to avoid oncoming trains.


The New Yorker, May 12

In the "Innovators Issue," an article reviews the history of animal-language studies. It focuses on the story of Alex, the late African gray parrot who could converse using about 50 words. Language researchers have long been interested in birds because of their ability to mimic human speech, and recent studies have bolstered the theory that "avian brains, long regarded as primitive, are not so different from mammalian brains after all." A profile of prominent chef Grant Achatz explores the phenomenon of taste while detailing his fight to save his tongue from cancer. Achatz, a molecular gastronomist whom critics have called "a successor to Alice Waters and Wolfgang Puck," refused to have his tongue removed in the conventional treatment for the disease to save his sense of taste. A review of Barbara Walters' autobiography observes she is "among the few remaining on-air television journalists whose careers encompass almost the entire history of television news."


Vogue, June 2008

A piece on Jenna Bush's upcoming nuptials reveals that the first daughter did "feel some pressure" to marry at the White House but decided against "a public, almost 'state' event on taxpayer-funded property." Bush says, "There's a glamour to it, I know, but [Bush's fiance] Henry and I are far less glamorous than the White House." An article on Patrick Robinson, Gap's head designer, explains why his company, which was the "symbol of all that was shiny and clean and optimistic in the Bill Clinton nineties," has "now slumped into a coral-sweatered, baggy-cargo'ed mess." Gap's fall from its "glory years" can be blamed on poor corporate management that "disastrously undermin[ed] the individual specialness of Gap's offer" by bulk-ordering material for the company and its sister brands. Robinson, who is a "guy equipped with both the silo-shattering, snowflake-killing determination of a design warrior and a collegial lack of ego," hopes to turn the company back into a destination for "super-cool American classics."


Weekly Standard, May 12

In the cover story, a former student examines the life of William Bee Ravenel III, an instructor and mentor who John McCain said "helped teach me to be a man." Ravenel taught English to McCain at Alexandria, Va., Episcopal High School and "was always reaching out, always trying not so much to instill as to bring out the qualities McCain would need in the future" A piece debunks a Gallup poll that states only 7 percent of the world's Muslims are radical—that is, believe "the attacks of September 11, 2001, were 'completely' justified" and "view the United States unfavorably." The piece argues that the poll is misleading because they did not include the "23.1 percent of respondents … who told pollsters the attacks were in some way justified." An op-ed derides a Swiss ethics panel that recently "weighed in on the 'dignity' of plants and opined that the arbitrary killing of flora is morally wrong." The move, the piece claims, represents "the triumph of a radical anthropomorphism that views elements of the natural world as morally equivalent to people."



poem
"A Place in Maine"
By Sherod Santos
Tuesday, May 6, 2008, at 7:29 AM ET

Listen to Sherod Santos read .



"Face it"—this said with such urgency,

it's hard to tell who it is she's talking to,

herself or me—"I just can't live like this anymore."

Never more at home, I realize it's over now,

the gesture forged as finally as the front door slamming

(or my memory of it), and perhaps as well,

beneath it all, some inkling of the reason why:

It hurt for her to see me see what I couldn't,

in my heart, quite pity. And yet, across the lesser

distance of some forty years, she invites me

over drinks to think how hard it must've been for her.

And didn't I remember, six months later,

the note she'd sent me from that place in Maine?

"You mustn't forget I'm still your mother."



politics
Slate's Delegate Calculator
Obama now looking at 11-delegate pickup from Tuesday.
By Chadwick Matlin and Chris Wilson
Friday, May 9, 2008, at 6:40 AM ET


With most of the delegates from Tuesday's primaries in North Carolina and Indiana counted, the damage for Hillary Clinton has shrunk. On Wednesday, it appeared that Barack Obama was on track for a 15-delegate pickup, with a 17-delegate lead in North Carolina and a two-delegate deficit in Indiana. Now, it appears his 14-point victory in North Carolina will award him 65 pledged delegates to Hillary Clinton's 50 while Clinton's two-point win in Indiana will give her 38 pledged delegates to Obama's 34. That's a net gain of 11.

With this adjustment, Obama now leads Clinton by 165 pledged delegates. This correction in Clinton's favor isn't too surprising. As we've noted before, the district-by-district numbers tend to err in favor of the loser compared to estimates based on the popular vote.

Methodology



politics
Campaign Junkie
The election trail starts here.
Friday, May 9, 2008, at 6:39 AM ET



politics
It's 3 A.M. What's Your Ring Tone?
New from Slate: The Hillary laugh and more political sound bites for your phone.
Thursday, May 8, 2008, at 7:07 AM ET


Already got a dozen Barack Obama headbands? Worn out your "Hot for Hillary" T-shirt? It's time for a new campaign accessory: Slate's political ring tones. Get one of these clips, and you'll hear John McCain say, "My friends," every time you get a call. Or if you're in a less friendly mood, you can switch to the "Shame on you, Barack Obama!" ring tone.

To get a ring tone, send a text message with one of the order codes listed below to the number 98999. For the Hillary laugh, for example, text SLATE LAUGH to the number 98999. We'll send the ring tone to your phone as a text message that includes a downloadable link. For more detailed instructions, click here. Or if you just want to listen to the clips on your computer, click one of the embedded players below or use the "Download MP3" links to save to your hard drive.

Slate's political ring tones are free of charge, though standard text-messaging rates may apply. Please see our terms and conditions for more details.

Ring tones are available only for AT&T, Cellular One, T-Mobile, and Sprint. (Downloading by Verizon customers is currently unsupported.) In order to download ring tones, you must have text-messaging and data-download services enabled on your mobile phone. If you're not certain whether your phone is SMS-enabled or Internet-enabled, please check with your wireless carrier. Unfortunately, there's too much variation among phones to describe the download and installation process for each handset. Please don't blame us if you can't get your ring tone to work—blame the wireless carriers for failing to come up with a simple, common procedure to do this sort of thing. Good luck, because we think the payoff is worth the minor hassle. (And a reminder that if you need more detailed instructions, click here.)






The Hillary laugh.

Order code: SLATE LAUGH

...........Download MP3 (107KB)






John McCain calls a young questioner a "little jerk."

Order code: SLATE JERK

...........Download MP3 (58KB)






Barack Obama shouts, "Yes we can!"

Order code: SLATE YES

...........Download now (54KB)






Hillary Clinton says, "Shame on you, Barack Obama!"

Order code: SLATE SHAME

...........Download MP3 (69KB)






The John McCain "my friends" compilation.

Order code: SLATE FRIEND

...........Download MP3 (175KB)



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Depending on your phone model, the ring tone download should be initiated in one of the following two ways:

If you see a highlighted link (URL/address) in the SMS message, select the link to start the download.

If the link is not highlighted, select "Save Address/URL" using the Options menu on your phone. Once you have saved the URL, click on "Go to URL" from the Options menu.

Your phone will now download the ring tone file.

Once the ring tone has been downloaded to your phone, you will be prompted to listen to or save the tone. You should also be able to set it as your phone's default ringer. If you do not see the prompt, the downloaded ring tone can be accessed via your phone's Content Manager, Downloads, Fun & Apps, My Files, Sounds, My Music, or a similarly named folder.



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SLATE RING TONE DOWNLOAD AND SMS TERMS AND CONDITIONS

You must read these terms and conditions ("Terms and Conditions") and accept them in order to be able to download and use ring tones ("Ring Tone Downloads") and receive SMS messages ("SMS Content") from Slate (the "Service"). If you do not agree to be bound by these Terms and Conditions, you may not use the Service.

1. You must be at least 18 years of age to agree to and enter into these Terms and Conditions on your own behalf and to use the Service. If you are under 18, but at least 13 years of age, you must present these Terms and Conditions to your parent or legal guardian, and he or she must agree to be bound by these Terms and Conditions on your behalf.

2. Slate does not charge you for Ring Tones Downloads or SMS Content; however, you may incur charges from your wireless service provider/network operator. Please check the terms of your wireless service agreement and/or service plan for more information regarding the fees associated with sending/receiving SMS messages and data download charges. Other charges may also apply. Contact your wireless service provider/network operator if you have questions about fees/charges. SLATE WILL NOT BE RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY CHARGES YOUR WIRELESS SERVICE PROVIDER/NETWORK OPERATOR MAY LEVY AS A RESULT OF YOUR USE OF THE SERVICE.

3. The Service is not compatible with all mobile devices/carriers. You must have a SMS-enabled mobile device to receive SMS Content and an Internet-enabled mobile device in order to access Ring Tone Downloads. The Ring Tone Downloads are available on the short code 98999 on the following carriers: AT&T Mobility, Cellular One Dobson, Sprint PCS, and T-Mobile.

4. You will not use the Ring Tone Downloads or the SMS Content for any purpose that is unlawful or prohibited by these Terms and Conditions. The Ring Tone Downloads and SMS Content are the property of Slate or its licensors. You may not distribute, duplicate, or resell the Ring Tone Downloads or the SMS Content without the authorization of Slate or use the Ring Tone Downloads or SMS Content for any commercial purpose. You may not use the Ring Tone Downloads or the SMS Content in any manner that could damage, disable, overburden, or impair any website or network or interfere with any other person's use and enjoyment of his or her mobile device.

5. In consideration of your acceptance of these Terms and Conditions, Slate grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, single-user right to download and use the Ring Tone Downloads and receive the SMS Content on your personal mobile device.

6. THE SERVICE AND EACH RING TONE DOWNLOAD AND SMS CONTENT IS PROVIDED ON AN "AS-IS" BASIS. SLATE PROVIDES NO TECHNICAL SUPPORT OR WARRANTIES. SLATE DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES AND REPRESENTATIONS, WHETHER EXPRESS, IMPLIED, OR OTHERWISE, INCLUDING THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. SLATE PROVIDES NO WARRANTY OF NON-INFRINGEMENT, TITLE, OR QUIET ENJOYMENT AND DOES NOT WARRANT THAT THE SERVICE OR ANY RING TONE DOWNLOAD OR SMS CONTENT WILL BE UNINTERUPPTED OR ERROR-FREE.

7. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHALL Slate, WASHINGTONPOST.NEWSWEEK INTERACTIVE, LLC, The Washington Post Company, and its divisions and affiliates, OR their directors, officers, managers, employees, shareholders, agents, SERVICE PROVIDERS, and licensors ("SLATE PARTIES") BE LIABLE TO YOU OR ANY THIRD PARTY FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, SPECIAL, PUNITIVE, OR EXEMPLARY DAMAGES OF ANY KIND, INCLUDING LOST REVENUES OR PROFITS, LOSS OF BUSINESS, OR LOSS OF DATA, IN ANY WAY RELATED TO THE SERVICE, THE RING TONE DOWNLOADS, OR THE SMS CONTENT, OR FOR ANY CLAIM, LOSS, OR INJURY BASED ON ERRORS, OMMISSIONS, INTERRUPTIONS, OR OTHER INACCURACIES IN THE SERVICES (INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION AS A RESULT OF BREACH OF ANY WARRANTY OR OTHER TERM OF THIS AGREEMENT, TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE), PRODUCT LIABILITY, OR OTHERWISE).

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9. These Terms and Conditions shall be governed by the laws of the United States and the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Service Details:

TO DOWNLOAD A RING TONE

Text the download keyword and the ring tone order code (e.g., "SLATE LAUGH") to '98999'. The download keyword 'SLATE' should be followed by a space and the ring tone order code (e.g., 'LAUGH'). You can visit www.slate.com/ringtones for a complete list of order codes.

OPT-OUT

You can cancel your receipt of SMS Content by sending STOP, END, or QUIT to any text message you receive or to the shortcode 98999.



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Return to article

Depending on your phone model, the ring tone download should be initiated in one of the following two ways:

If you see a highlighted link (URL/address) in the SMS message, select the link to start the download.

If the link is not highlighted, select "Save Address/URL" using the Options menu on your phone. Once you have saved the URL, click on "Go to URL" from the Options menu.

Your phone will now download the ring tone file.

Once the ring tone has been downloaded to your phone, you will be prompted to listen to or save the tone. You should also be able to set it as your phone's default ringer. If you do not see the prompt, the downloaded ring tone can be accessed via your phone's Content Manager, Downloads, Fun & Apps, My Files, Sounds, My Music, or a similarly named folder.



politics
Obama Wins Split Decision
Clinton survives, but barely.
By John Dickerson
Wednesday, May 7, 2008, at 1:16 AM ET


It was fitting that this Democratic primary, which has seemed at times designed by Willy Wonka, should head to a close in a flurry of confusion and drama. It looked like Hillary Clinton had won Indiana. Obama congratulated her on her victory. Clinton declared victory. CBS said she'd won it. All the other networks waited, though—and not just because HBO's movie on the Florida recount is coming out. Obama's strongest county had not reported, and that gave the networks pause. They were right to wait, since Obama lost Indiana by only a handful of votes.

When Hillary Clinton questioned Gen. David Petraeus last September, she famously said that to believe his description of progress in Iraq required "a willing suspension of disbelief." After the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, the same may now be true about her case for winning the Democratic nomination. It's not that she can't win, but with only 217 delegates up for grabs in the six remaining contests, the scenario for victory has become more fantastical, narrow, and painful.

Clinton won Indiana, but, as she pointed out repeatedly to Petraeus, individual victories—even a surge of them in Ohio, Texas, and Pennsylvania—don't change the whole story. The larger reality still holds. Barack Obama has the lead in elected delegates and the popular vote. Those leads increased Tuesday as he widened his margin by 15 delegates and roughly 200,000 more votes. For Clinton to move ahead in those numbers now, she must bring more states into the union.

Since the remaining contests are not likely to change the count, attention now turns almost exclusively to the uncommitted superdelegates who will be necessary to give either candidate a victory. Since Super Tuesday, Obama has picked up 100 superdelegates at a pace of 5 to 1 over Clinton. To win now, Clinton would have to reverse that dynamic. She'd have to take 70 percent of the remaining superdelegates and then ask them to reverse the will of the elected delegates and deny an African-American the nomination.

The picture was already grim for Hillary Clinton going into Tuesday. If she'd won in Indiana and North Carolina, it would have only minimally changed the daunting math, but victories would have given fresh evidence to present to undecided superdelegates that Obama had an irreparable flaw, that the good voters of Indiana and North Carolina recognized that and voted accordingly.

She didn't get that evidence. The exit polls give her some data to make her case, but not as much as she needs. Clinton's aides will continue to press the case that Obama has a problem he can't solve among white working-class men. He tried very hard after Pennsylvania, tweaking his message to appeal to the economic concerns of regular people and shrinking his stadium-size rallies to show a more approachable side. Still, white voters with no college degree went for Clinton 65 percent to 34 percent. "The composition of his vote remains the same," said a Clinton aide. "He didn't resolve the issues that have dogged him, namely his ability to expand his base beyond African-American voters and liberal rich eggheads."

But Obama has some facts he can use to refute the ideas that he can't appeal to downscale voters or that he's too elitist. Clinton ran hard as the blue-collar candidate, promoting a gas-tax holiday, standing in the back of pickup trucks, and repeating her mantra of "jobs, jobs, jobs" at every stop. But among those making less than $50,000, she beat Obama by only four points in Indiana. When voters were asked which candidate was most likely to improve the economy, Clinton and Obama tied. Among those who listed the economy as their top issue, Clinton won by only two points in Indiana. In Pennsylvania and Ohio, she had won those groups by vast margins.

The elitism label does not seem to have stuck to Obama, either. Obama was so concerned that Hoosiers would think he was out of touch that he devoted his final days of campaigning to explaining his values. His two-minute advertisement unveiled at the end of the campaign started with an announcer saying, "They're Indiana values. Hard work, community, keeping your word. And there's a candidate who shares those values, who thinks differently than those who've spent decades in Washington." When voters were asked which candidate "shares your values," Obama performed just a little better than Clinton.

In his victory speech in North Carolina, Obama delivered a supercharged version of the biography- and patriotism-laden stump speech he'd been giving over the weekend, referring to his grandfather's flag-draped coffin and his life's journey. "That's why I'm in this race. I love this country too much to see it divided and distracted at this moment in history. I believe in our ability to perfect this union because it's the only reason I'm standing here today. And I know the promise of America because I have lived it."

While Clinton gained no new argument to make to superdelegates, Obama's showing allows him to assert his durability. He weathered the worst week of a multiweek pounding on the hot-button topics of race, religion, and class. After the problems with his pastor, he still got 36 percent of the white vote in North Carolina.

Robbed of the evening's best result, the Clinton team is now aggressively returning to its campaign to seat the Florida and Michigan delegates stuck in limbo. Their argument, as Obama draws closer to the 2,025 magic number required to win the nomination, is that the real target for victory is 2,209. That's a tough case to make since it penalizes Obama for the behavior of Democratic officials in the two states that broke the rules.

But tough arguments are all that's left for Clinton since she didn't get the win she needed. Once again, Clinton's words to Petraeus could be read as advice to her after Tuesday's primaries: "I give you tremendous credit for presenting as positive a view of a rather grim reality. I believe that you … were dealt a very hard hand. And it's a hand that is unlikely to improve, in my view."



politics
Clinton's Final Full Day in Indiana
Plus, Obama shows he's patriotic and personable.
By John Dickerson
Monday, May 5, 2008, at 10:20 AM ET


SOUTH BEND, Ind.—Hillary Clinton's rally at Indiana Tech. on Sunday afternoon started to sound like an auction. She mentioned that it had cost a supporter of hers $63 to put gas in his tank. Audience members started shouting out what they'd dropped at the pump. "Ninety-five!" yelled a woman. "A hundred and two!" shouted another. If gas prices keep rising, Clinton may start handing out little cupfuls of unleaded at rallies.

While Obama was talking about his patriotism and downscaling his rallies to appeal to downscale voters, Clinton was trying to expand her differences with him on the gas tax into a broader critique. She said Obama also had the wrong plans to address the foreclosure crisis and the uninsured. "I understand what folks are up against," she said. "There is a big difference between us, who understands what you are going through and who can you count on to be on your side to get the solutions that are going to help you."

Despite criticism of her gas-tax cut, Clinton is happy to embrace her new populism. At a town hall appearance hosted by ABC's This Week, when Clinton was asked to name an economist who agreed with her plan, Sen. Clinton returned to her Bush-like posture on the value of expert opinion. "I'm not going to put in my lot with economists," she said. "Elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantages the vast majority of Americans."

Clinton delivered a clipped version of her stump speech in three stops across Indiana today, and at its heart were these tidy little stomach punches to her opponent. "He attacks me because he doesn't have a plan for immediate relief," she said in South Bend. In Fort Wayne, she said that Obama would rather side with the oil companies than Hoosiers.

The crowds were ready to hear about Clinton's plan to lower the gas tax for the summer, but they didn't seem ready to take it out on Obama. When Clinton took her shots at him, she got no particular reaction. The Obama crowds, by contrast, booed when Obama mentioned Clinton's plans to peel off the 18-cent gas tax. Saturday, he pointed out that Clinton had such trouble finding an economist to support her plan that she had to rely on a Shell Oil Co. lobbyist to speak in favor of it. "It's a Shell game," said Obama to a big laugh.

Obama kept up the pressure Sunday by releasing his third ad on the gas-tax legislation, calling it a "bogus" idea. It was his second negative ad on the topic, which the Clinton campaign predictably tried to paint as an act of panic. "The Obama campaign is running scared right now," said deputy communications director Phil Singer.

The two candidates have been spending so much of the last week debating the gas tax that it's going to be tempting to view the results of the primary as a referendum on that debate. If Obama loses, we'll have to see if there's any evidence to conclude that voters rejected his straight talk on the gas-tax gimmick. If Clinton loses, we might be able to make the case that Obama successfully tapped underlying fears about Clinton's trustworthiness to make his argument that she was pandering by offering a solution that was no real solution at all.

Right now, the polls show that the people are with Sen. Obama on the issue. Seventy percent of respondents in a recent New York Times poll (PDF) said they believed the proposal to lift the gas tax was mainly promoted to help the politician proposing it rather than voters.

At the Democratic fundraising dinner where both candidates ended the day Sunday, the reaction to the gas tax was more difficult to decipher. Clinton won big applause when she framed the issue as a "choice between whether you pay the gas tax or going after the big oil companies. The choice to me is clear: We need to go after the oil companies." Obama said the only way people would get relief is if the oil companies passed on the savings. "Do you trust the oil companies to give you the profits?" he asked the crowd. The room shouted back, "No." He continued: "Are we the party of expediency? Are we the party of just getting by? To the next election?"

Overall, Obama won the better reaction from the crowd of party loyalists. Clinton was well-received, but when Obama was announced, people got up from their tables and moved toward the stage. When he finished, the room erupted in a standing ovation.

The Indiana primary is the last contest that seems really up in the air. The polls are close and both campaigns and candidates have been working all-out. After Tuesday's contests in Indiana and North Carolina, the candidates will continue to trade off contests that favor them, and the superdelegates will continue to slowly make up their minds.

It's true, as it has been for more than two months, that Clinton has a narrowing and ugly path to victory. NBC's calculation, based on likely outcomes, looks like this on the eve of the vote: "Assuming Obama wins half of the delegates tomorrow (93), he needs just 38% of all remaining delegates to get to the magic number of 2,025. If Clinton wins 94 delegates on Tuesday, she will need 66% of all remaining delegates." Since Super Tuesday, Obama has received the support of roughly 100 superdelegates, picking up five for every one who sides with Clinton.

The outcome Tuesday will be less about the numbers of votes cast and delegates won and more about the questions the contests might help answer for both candidates. Can Obama show that his former pastor's remarks have not hurt him with voters? Can Clinton show that voters still think she should be considered a viable candidate even if the press doesn't think so? And can she gain more evidence to make the case that Barack Obama is a fundamentally flawed candidate?

Though the math is against her, Clinton looked buoyant and carefree Sunday as if she were the front-runner. She stood atop the stairs to her plane watching her aides toss a football (a time-honored way to pass the time while waiting for the candidate to get into the motorcade). When one made a particularly good catch, Clinton applauded. On This Week, she joked that Rush Limbaugh had a crush on her, and she needled host George Stephanopoulos. After her last rally, Clinton stopped at Dairy Queen to order a Blizzard with Snickers and pose with voters and employees. Barack Obama wasn't the only candidate trying to look comfortable among regular people.

Posted Monday, May 5, at 9:15 a.m.

LAFAYETTE, Ind.—The first photo-op of the soft-focus portion of Sen. Obama's day on Saturday was to be a potluck supper at his ancestral home. He'd already held two events outlining his personal and patriotic closing argument for primary voters. The end of the day was to be devoted to events that would show him interacting on a personal level with human beings.

When we arrived at the farmhouse in Kempton, Ind., where his great-great-great uncle once lived, there wasn't a scrap of food. The wind was blowing so hard they'd put away the tables, chairs, and chafing dishes for fear that someone would get hurt. Only a Japanese game show would make people eat under such gale-force conditions.

Surrounding the white clapboard home in all directions was acre after acre of brown dry stalks, which elevated the apocalyptic feel. So did the house, which was devoid of furniture. The event also seemed to be devoid of voters. Had they been blown away? How could the candidate create a warm tableau with rural folk if they were not extant?

Suddenly, they came into view. A small tribe had huddled behind the industrial-looking shed that jutted out from the back of the dwelling. They had migrated there to find protection from the wind. One woman wore a comforter wrapped around her waist. If they were any kind of stout-minded rural voters at all, they would have been down in the root cellar.

Obama met with the shivering and windswept band for about 15 minutes. We learned that the building had recently been a funeral home, which seemed like a bad omen (until Hillary Clinton's pick for the Kentucky Derby had to be euthanized, which won the day's prize for bad political omens).

Those of us covering the event never heard the candidate say anything. We were too far away, especially given the conditions. He did try to shout something to us, but the wind took his words away immediately. I think they landed in Kentucky.

The photo-op was not a very nourishing moment for anyone. Photo editors did get a snap for any stories that suggest Obama is facing stiff political winds in the state.

The last event of the day was held at Great Skate in Lafayette, Ind. Walking into the dark, close room was to be transported in time. Mirrored disco balls hung from the ceiling; outdated video games and carnival games like Skee Ball lined the walls. It seemed like we should have been covering the 1976 nomination.

Obama was not going to get on roller skates, but he did spend an hour or so meeting with supporters who did not look elite and aloof. In the close quarters, the press was once again relegated to watching him interact but not hearing much of what Obama had to say. Some of us took the opportunity to rent skates and take several laps around the ring.

Obama's daughters, Sasha and Malia, did skate—tentatively but adorably. Obama and his wife, Michelle, walked alongside while a ring of photographers and cameramen captured the scene. At one point, Obama's youngest, 6-year-old Sasha, skated a short nervous distance into her father's outstretched arms. If the point of the scene was to make the candidate look just like any other (well-dressed) Indiana father out on a Saturday night, then campaign strategists got what they wanted.

Posted Sunday, May 4, at 1:05 p.m.

INDIANAPOLIS—With 96 hours to go before the voting starts in Indiana and North Carolina, Barack Obama is coming home. He's talking about himself and his family, and he's returning to his campaign's bedrock theme of political reform.

In his first event Saturday at an Indianapolis high school, Obama often sounded like he did when the campaign started 15 months ago. He emphasized his call to a new kind of politics and wrapped his message and himself in the American tradition. "America is a place where you can make it if you try," he said before launching into a tour of his own family's history that demonstrated this truth. "This is the country that gave my grandfather a chance to go to college on the GI Bill when he came home from World War II; a country that gave him and my grandmother—a small-town couple from Kansas—the chance to buy their first home with a loan from the government. This is the country that made it possible for my mother—a single parent who had to go on food stamps at one point—to send my sister and me to the best schools in the country with the help of scholarships."

Speaking later in shirtsleeves at a park just outside of Indianapolis, Obama told the crowd shivering in the stiff wind, "There is no country in which my story is even possible than the United States of America."

Obama's heavy emphasis on biography is an effort to beat back the elitist label that even he admits has stuck. Now he's in a race to show he's not some exotic character with a nutty former pastor. A new two-minute advertisement unveiled today starts with an announcer saying, "They're Indiana values. Hard work, community, keeping your word. And there's a candidate who shares those values, who thinks differently than those who've spent decades in Washington."

The entire Obama family is on the campaign trail today. It's the first time Obama's daughters (ages 6 and 9) have been with him on the stump since the Iowa caucuses. At the park rally, Michelle Obama introduced her husband by saying, "Barack Obama is the real deal" and framed his campaign in a family way. "What keeps us together [on the campaign trail] is our family and the view and vision we have for our girls," she said. (The girls, for their part, blew off their father's speech and slid down the twisty slide across the park among a pack of other kids.)

Obama isn't just trying to show he has the right values. He's trying to prove that he's not simply offering the same empty promises voters get every four years at election time. Politics didn't lead me to working people. Working people led me to politics, he's been saying.

By returning to his core message of bringing people together and changing the Washington system, Obama challenged his audiences to not get distracted by recent controversies. "This election is bigger than flag pins and sniper fire and the comments of a former pastor," he said.

Today is not a day for big rallies. There are two more stops on the day's agenda aimed at putting Obama in situations where he can be seen connecting with voters. Next we're going to a potluck dinner at a home built by his great-great-great uncle. When Obama talks about his humble roots, he often mentions having gone to potluck dinners as a child. The day will end at an ice cream social at a roller rink. (Unless he's a natural skater, we won't be seeing the senator strap on any wheels. A stumble on skates would be a metaphor too delicious to resist applying to a candidate who for the last couple of off-balance weeks has been doing the arm windmills of a man trying to get his skates under him.)

Posted Saturday, May 3, at 5:05 p.m.



press box
The Russert to Judgment
So now the TV pundits tell us an Obama nomination is certain.
By Jack Shafer
Thursday, May 8, 2008, at 6:32 PM ET


About 40 hours ago, the klieg-baked TV anchors and commentators started shaking the sweat from their brows to declare that the race for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination was over.

Jim Rutenberg collects their election night wisdom in today's New York Times:

"We now know who the Democratic nominee's going to be, and no one's going to dispute it."

—Tim Russert on MSNBC

"I think the Clinton people know the game is almost up."

—David Gergen (the master of political androgyny) on CNN

"I think there's an increasing presumption tonight that Obama's going to be the nominee."

—Chris Wallace on Fox News Channel

In the early morning, CBS correspondent Bob Schieffer added, "Basically, Maggie, this race is over," and ABC's George Stephanopoulos said the same: "This nomination fight is over." Not to be left out, the new issue of Time magazine, just hitting my desk, depicts Barack Obama on the cover with the headline, "And the Winner* Is …" The small type at the bottom reads, "*Really, we're pretty sure this time."

Were the latest election returns so conclusive that the TV correspondents couldn't have arrived at the same conclusion days or weeks ago? It's not as if Obama's landslide in North Carolina and Clinton's Indiana squeaker sent a flood of superdelegates to the game-ending, presumptive, and indisputably victorious Obama. The only super-D to dismount Clinton and climb atop Obama this week is Virginia's Jennifer McClellan. The Kentucky super-Ds pledged to Clinton are holding their ground, according to the Lexington Herald-Leader, awaiting their state's May 20 primary. Obama has a very nice lead in pledged delegates, popular vote, total number of states won, and dollars in the bank, but neither candidate has enough votes to win. So while it may be over, it can't be over-over until the superdelegates speak, and so far they ain't saying nothing.

My intention here is less to light a candle for the Clinton candidacy—which remains the long shot it was even after her Pennsylvania primary win in late April—than to give Russert and company the hot foot for their dramatic exuberance.

Whether covering politics, the stock market, or sports, television reporters live inside the moment, and the fundamental questions before them are always "who's winning, who's losing, and why" (which just happens to be the tag line of Slate's "Politics" department). If a TV reporter can peg a winner, he will. If no winners are in attendance, he'll identify a loser. If no winner or losers can be found, he'll drum up that somebody has "gained" momentum. The medium doesn't reward procrastinators or qualifiers.

Although TV reporters may expect thing X to happen while they're on the air, they plan for contingencies Y and Z. Before going on camera, they stuff their cheeks with a huge assortment of pithy insights so that, no matter what happens, they have something smart to mouth. The most excitable of the TV news chipmunks was usually Dan Rather, whose election night scripts—"Bush is sweeping through the South like a big wheel through a cotton field"—covered events that ultimately may have occurred only in parallel universes.

When Russert exclaimed the inevitability of Obama's nomination, it was an act of recall, not an act of cognition. At the moment he bestowed the nomination upon Obama, his network had yet to call Indiana for Clinton. Shuffling his mental notes and calculating the possibility of an Obama victory in Indiana, how could he resist speaking the words he had composed in his head two months ago?

Russert and company expected Obama to win North Carolina and expected Clinton to win Indiana, so they weren't reading that much into his landslide and the narrowness of her victory. They've wanted to say that Obama has cinched the nomination since his March victory in the Mississippi primary—or before. None had the stones to say it with so many primaries left on the calendar. That would be read as too "elitist," too "anti-democracy." Russert gave them the stones.

******

Getting stoned with Russert—there's an image for Big Russ. Send your images to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum, in a future article, or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)

Track my errors: This hand-built RSS feed will ring every time Slate runs a "Press Box" correction. For e-mail notification of errors in this specific column, type the word stones in the subject head of an e-mail message and send it to slate.pressbox@gmail.com.



press box
Salvia Divinorum Hysteria
The press helps fuel the next "drug menace."
By Jack Shafer
Tuesday, May 6, 2008, at 7:11 PM ET


The normally staid Associated Press attached a headline to a March 11 story that inquired, "Is Salvia the Next Marijuana?" If the AP meant to ask whether Salvia divinorum is the next misunderstood recreational drug to be both demonized and popularized by the press, the answer is yes.

Although the hallucinogenic properties of Salvia have long been known to the natives of Mexico's Sierra Mazateca range, it wasn't until the middle of the last century that anthropologists and drug researchers learned of the herb. A mere footnote in the psychedelic explorations of the 1960s and 1970s—see this 1963 report by scholars Richard Schultes and R. Gordon Wasson—the drug didn't earn its first Nexis mention until 1991—and even then as a throwaway reference in a Vancouver Sun article about cooking with sage.

A hokey 1998 TV documentary about the plant produced a flurry of Nexis mentions in the British press. The next Nexis hit came in 2000 in a squib picked up by the University Wire about Salvia use on the University of North Dakota campus. "This is another drug that is very new to mainstream drug use. Neither the Grand Forks Police Department or UND's had any information on this drug," wrote student Tom Schauer.

The next year, 2001, proved to be Salvia's breakout year in the press, with 35 mentions. By 2005, it recorded 67 and has steadily increased. In 2007, it earned 271 mentions and in the first four months of 2008 has almost equaled that mark. Soon you'll have to wear blinders to avoid the Salvia coverage.


The substance is still legal in all but eight states, and it's openly sold in smoke shops and via the Internet. Just run a Google search for "Salvia divinorum" and consult the ads Google displays in the right margin. Another marker of the drug's ubiquity is the hundreds of videos of purported Salvia experiences hosted on YouTube.

Smoked Salvia can be a brute of a drug depending on the dose, as this FAQ on the Erowid drug site explains. (The drug can also be consumed orally.) "Generally, smoked salvia effects come on quickly, peak for 5-20 minutes, and then begin to subside," the FAQ notes. Users report visions; feelings of fright; loss of physical coordination; uncontrollable laughter; confusion; feelings of being underground, or underwater, or flying, or floating; experiences of "non-Euclidean" spaces; and more, according to Erowid.

Does that sounds like the next marijuana to you? Truth be told, not even the AP—whose headline likens Salvia to marijuana—thinks the two drugs deliver the same psychic wallop. I think the AP headline writer equated the two compounds because both are cheap, easy to obtain, and vegetable.

Although coverage of Salvia is almost universally negative, nobody in the press has made a good case for criminalizing its sale and use. It doesn't appear to be addictive. (Most of the users I've talked to say once was enough for them.) A recent Los Angeles Times article calls it "potentially dangerous" but concedes, "[L]ittle is known about the effect of the drug on health and safety." The best argument the St. Petersburg Times could present for criminalizing Salvia was this bit of nanny-statism: "If it's legal, people think it's harmless." The logicians who write editorials at the Topeka Capital-Journal, citing the AP story, advocate a ban on Salvia in part because "[s]ome believe the drug … is poised to become a legal alternative to marijuana among teenagers."

Sgt. Gordy Disch of the Dane County Sheriff's Department tells the Wisconsin State Journal he worries about folks driving while tripping on Salvia, but he's obviously not viewed the YouTube videos. Salvia users tend to recline or go catatonic immediately after inhaling, so unless they've decided to commit suicide with their car, the rest of the motoring public is probably safe. Based on a column in today's Wall Street Journal, I think Sgt. Disch should worry more about Ambien users and less about Salvia smokers. The column reports that after taking such potent sleeping pills, some people "eat, walk, make phone calls or get behind the wheel." Others have consumed "inedibles like buttered cigarettes and woken up gasping for air with their mouths full of peanut butter, a sleep-eating favorite."

(A certain Slate staffer who will go unnamed—oh, hell, it was Tim Noah—took three Ambien by mistake one morning a few years ago instead of his regular morning meds. Driving his two kids to elementary school, he sideswiped several cars before coming to a restful halt. Noah's kids tried to wake him, and when that didn't work, they seized his cell phone and called their mom to rescue them.)

How big is the Salvia divinorum menace? The AP story notes that no known deaths on Salvia have been recorded. Based on a survey taken in 2006, the U.S. government estimates that 756,000 people aged 12 or older had taken the drug in the previous year and that 1.8 million have taken the drug in their lifetimes. This compares to the 23.3 million who have taken LSD in their lifetimes and the 666,000 who took it in the previous year. Ecstasy users? Lifetime, 12.3 million; previous year, 2.1 million.

The strongest personal argument against Salvia probably belongs to Kathy Chidester, who lost her 16-year-old son, Brett, a Salvia user, to suicide. Although Brett reportedly suffered from depression, his parents believe the drug played a role in his death. Her story helped convince the Delaware legislature to ban Salvia.

According to the AP, 16 states are considering bans on Salvia, which means a federal prohibition can't be too far off. Parents have a right to be terrified of their kids getting zonked on Salvia, but in the absence of any concrete evidence that the drug does lasting harm, can the cure promised by new legislation be worse than the disease?

Allow me to direct your attention to Licit and Illicit Drugs (1972) by Edward M. Brecher and the editors of Consumer Reports. In a chapter titled "How To Launch a Nationwide Drug Menace," Brecher shows how legal efforts to suppress glue-sniffing in the 1960s and sensational press coverage of the "menace" helped spread the practice.

In one sense the current alarm over Salvia is worse than the glue-sniffing panic. The adverse health effect of many kinds of "huffing" are well-established, while the dangers posed by Salvia are still conjecture. If the past is any guide, the coming bans on Salvia will 1) transmogrify youthful and stupid experimenters into criminals, 2) add violence to the peaceful Salvia trade, 3) publicize and popularize the use of the drug, and 4) encourage users to experiment with more dangerous substances. The drug warriors will end up wishing that it was May 2008 again and that all that bedeviled them was this containable Salvia "problem."

******

Whatever happened to robotripping? Send your personal accounts to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum, in a future article, or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)

Track my errors: This hand-built RSS feed will ring every time Slate runs a "Press Box" correction. For e-mail notification of errors in this specific column, type the word Salvia in the subject head of an e-mail message and send it to slate.pressbox@gmail.com.



reading list
Three A.M. Reading
Still can't get enough of the campaign? Here are the most interesting Web sites, books, and magazines about American politics.
By Bruce Reed
Saturday, May 3, 2008, at 7:32 AM ET


When CBS broadcast this year's NCAA basketball tournament over the Internet, businesses supposedly lost an estimated $1.7 billion as an entire nation paid attention to the office pool instead of customers. If sports junkies could cost the country that much during a few days of March Madness, imagine the productivity we political junkies in the nation's capital must be losing to the distractions of a primary campaign that has been in overtime for months.

How best to turn productivity lost into perspective gained? In a primary season defined by sharp demographic divides, the most unconventional wisdom can be found on Jay Cost's HorseRaceBlog on RealClearPolitics.com. Cost, a doctoral student at the University of Chicago, devised an ingenious project-your-own-popular-vote tabulator for the remaining primaries. Don't expect to outguess Cost, whose March estimate for Pennsylvania—a month before the actual primary—missed Hillary Clinton's 214,000-vote margin by just 3,000 votes.

Of course, pearls of exit-poll wisdom won't do you much good on the cocktail-party circuit unless you know which candidate your host is backing. Thanks to new mash-ups like HuffingtonPost's Fundrace 2008, you can avoid a faux pas—or prepare for fisticuffs—by looking up whether your friends and neighbors have given to McCain, Clinton, or Obama.

If the 2008 race goes to the convention, bring along Senate historian Donald Ritchie's entertaining Electing FDR: The New Deal Campaign of 1932. This year isn't the first Democratic contest to turn on whiskey shots and calls at 3 a.m. That's what time it was when FDR's campaign decided to ask for the first of three roll calls at the 1932 convention in Chicago. FDR came up short each time, as many delegates wandered off to nearby speakeasies. He eventually prevailed on the fourth ballot, and won big applause for promising to repeal Prohibition.

The longer the race goes on, the more time we have to pore over the numbers at stake in this election. Bipartisan budget analyst Charles S. Konigsberg's paperback America's Priorities: How the U.S. Government Raises and Spends $3,000,000,000,000 (Trillion) per Year could be called Deficits for Dummies, if that niche weren't already filled by the Bush administration budget.

It's never too early to start worrying about 2010. The latest issue of Politics, a slick makeover of Campaigns & Elections, says redistricting after the next census will alter the political landscape—but the key battlegrounds will be awfully familiar: Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Michigan.

Where can political junkies turn when the primaries end June 3? An Australian site called Adam Carr's Election Archive tracks every political contest on the planet, with detailed electoral maps from some 60 countries. While we may tire of staring at red and blue, mapping the February elections in Pakistan took seven colors—a real political spectrum.

Across the other pond, we can picture elections yet to come at the official blog of British Foreign Secretary David Miliband. It's hard to see Condi Rice engaging in blog diplomacy, and certainly nothing like Miliband's recent post blaming his favorite soccer team's defeat on an inept Swiss defender and a "dodgy" Swedish referee. While the post caused a minor diplomatic flap on the Continent, Brits make Miliband the heavy favorite to be the next Labor prime minister after Gordon Brown. Miliband's team lost 4-2, but London bookies now put his odds at 3-1.

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



recycled
Why Did Eight Belles Have To Be Euthanized?
The reason a broken leg is such bad news for a horse.
By Daniel Engber
Sunday, May 4, 2008, at 3:57 PM ET

After finishing in second place in Saturday's Kentucky Derby, Eight Belles fell to the track with two compound ankle fractures. The horse, the first filly to run at Churchill Downs in nine years, was immediately put down. Two years ago, when Barbaro broke his leg at the Preakness, Daniel Engber explained why such an injury is so devastating for a horse. The full article is reprinted below.

Barbaro's veterinarians say the champion racehorse has a 50 percent chance of survival after breaking his leg at the start of the Preakness. He may not recover even after a successful five-hour surgery on Sunday, during which he had almost two dozen screws implanted to stabilize his bones. Why is a broken leg so dangerous for a horse?

There's a high risk of infection, and the horse may not sit still long enough for the bone to heal. Infections are most likely when the animal suffers a compound fracture, in which the bones tear through the skin of the leg. In this case, dirt from the track will grind into and contaminate the wound. To make matters worse, there isn't much blood circulation in the lower part of a horse's leg. (There's very little muscle, either.) A nasty break below the knee could easily destroy these fragile vessels and deprive the animal of its full immune response at the site of the injury.

Barbaro was lucky enough (or smart enough) to pull up after breaking his leg. If he'd kept running—as some horses do—he might have driven sharp bits of bone into his soft tissue and torn open the skin of his leg. Though his skin remained intact, he still faces the possibility of infection; any soft-tissue damage at all can cut off blood flow and create a safe haven for bacteria.

It's not easy to treat a horse with antibiotics, either. Since the animals are so big, you have to pump in lots of drugs to get the necessary effect. But if you use too many antibiotics, you'll destroy the natural flora of its intestinal tract, which can lead to life-threatening, infectious diarrhea. You also have to worry about how the antibiotics will interact with large doses of painkillers, which can themselves cause ulcers.

If the horse manages to avoid early infection, he might not make it through the recovery. First, he must wake up from anesthesia without reinjuring himself. Doctors revived Barbaro by means of "water recovery." That means they suspended him in a warm swimming pool in a quiet room and then kept him there for as long as possible. Not all horses are willing to sit around in a sling, and the antsy ones can thrash about and break their limbs all over again. (In 1975, the filly Ruffian managed to break a second, healthy leg in the process.)

If Barbaro starts favoring his wounded leg post-surgery, he may overload his other legs, causing a condition known as "laminitis." If that happens, the hooves on the other legs will start to separate from the bone, and his weight will be driven into the soft flesh of the feet. He may also develop life-threatening constipation as a side effect of the anesthetic.

Doctors will often put down a horse that develops a nasty infection, reinjures its broken leg, or develops laminitis in its other hooves. (A horse that's unable to stand will develop nasty sores and can be expected to die a slow and painful death.) A few horses have had broken legs amputated and replaced with metal, but the equine prostheses don't have a great track record.

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

Explainer thanks Rick Arthur of the American Association of Equine Practitioners and Carl Kirker-Head of the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University.



shopping
Getting Steamed
What's the best handheld fabric steamer—and can it replace your iron?
By Laura Moser
Tuesday, May 6, 2008, at 7:38 AM ET

I recently traveled many thousands of miles to attend a college roommate's wedding in Hawaii. For several reasons—the over-the-top destination, the formal toast I was slated to give, my all-but-unprecedented approval of a friend's choice of groom—I decided to splurge on a new dress for the occasion. The simple silk sheath that I bought was perfect: For once, I would look just right.

Except for one thing: My suitcase's contents really did shift while in flight. I mention this because, to my mother's lifelong anguish, I've never been a great believer in garment bags (or umbrellas or hair dryers). And when I opened my suitcase, I was horrified to find my beautiful dress crumpled beyond recognition.

The concierge regretted to inform me that the hotel offered no garment-freshening service, though I could pay $28 to have the dress professionally dry-cleaned by Monday—two days after the wedding. Since ironing the delicate fabric was out of the question, I saw no choice but to hang the dress in the shower and encourage fellow wedding guests to bathe at my place. By the following evening, with the dress no less wrinkled, I could hope only for a fast-setting sun.

Soon after I arrived at the reception, a relative of the bride bustled up to me with upraised eyebrows. "Oh, my," she said, looking me up and down. "I would've been happy to lend you my steamer." Her—steamer? This seemingly not-insane woman traveled with a steamer? "Well, of course," she said. "I never go anywhere without it," and no wonder, her expression implied.

Before that weekend, I'd assumed clothing steamers were unwieldy, industrial items. Was I ever wrong. These days, there is a range of handheld fabric steamers on the market—and they often cost less, and take up less suitcase real estate, than traditional irons. Best of all, portable steamers free you from the space constraints of an ironing board, an advantage not just for travelers but for small-apartment dwellers like me. You need only hang the garment against a wall before getting to work.

Sold and sold. Within hours of getting home, I went online in search of a fabric steamer that could rescue me from future on-the-road fashion disasters. And if a steamer could also replace the bulky iron that I am often too lazy to yank out of my closet, all the better.

Methodology

I tested six handheld fabric steamers ranging in price from $24.99 to $69. I used the steamers on various types of garments: men's dress shirts, linen pants, cashmere sweaters, pillow shams, and a profoundly ugly silk kimono. I then handed over the steamers to my kempt-to-a-fault mother for a second, more seasoned opinion.

Portability (10 points)

I considered both size and weight in determining whether a fabric steamer is really and truly a practical travel accessory. A steamer gets an extra point if it's dual voltage and works in other countries.

Design/ease of use (10 points)

The travel clothes steamer is a simple beast. There are two types: steamers that resemble power drills and ones that look like electric teakettles. Which style is more effective? Other considerations: Is the steamer comfortable to operate for a prolonged period? Does it have an on/off button or any temperature-control options? Does it come with attachments—lint brushes, fabric combs, and the like—and are these attachments useful?

Performance (20 points)

Most critical of all: Does the steamer work, and on what types of clothing? On button-down dress shirts—the ultimate steaming challenge—does it pass the placket test? What about collars and cuffs? (Unless a shirt's extremities are crisp, says my mother, you might as well walk around in a sweat-stained T-shirt.) How quickly does the water heat up, and how hot does the steam get? Does the steamer dribble water and/or spit out excessive steam? Any burn risk? Last but not least: Will any of these steamers ever replace the good, old-fashioned iron?

Here are the results, from slovenly to silky smooth …


Samsonite Dual Voltage Garment Steamer, $30

The sweet little Samsonite falls into the electric-teakettle category. These machines are as uncomplicated as it gets: You pour water into an opening in the steamer's top, and once that water boils, it emerges as steam through a grill dotted with holes. This Samsonite is commendably compact, but you pay a price for portability. While I loved the design—not just the suitcase-friendly dimensions but the dual-strip fabric brush and folding handle—this 200-watt steamer just didn't do the job. The tepid steam barely straightened out the kimono and made almost no impact on the dress shirts I tested. Recommended for emergencies only, or for those who prize traveling light above all else.

Portability: 10

Design/ease of use: 10

Performance: 1

Total: 21


Rowenta Ultra Compact Steambrush, $39.95

The 800-watt dual-voltage Rowenta is a classic "power drill" steamer. Unlike the electric teakettles, which produce a steady flow of steam until switched off or unplugged, the more sophisticated power drills eject steam only when you press a button (similar to the steam button on a traditional iron). They also produce a not-unpleasant burring sound. To use these steamers, you hold the fabric taut against a wall and press down with a brushing motion.

I found much to admire in the large but lightweight Rowenta: the efficient test-tube-shaped water tank, the dial that controls steam output, the fabric brush that removes cat hair and lint (both plentiful commodities in this household), the canvas zip-up bag for travel. Too bad it was marred by some serious technical glitches. After just a few days of use, the steam-activation button overheated within seconds of my pressing it, singeing my thumb. The replacement model that I tested, while certainly safer, was still a bit on the ornery side. It clicked on and off without warning, as if disagreeing with my choice of outfit.

Portability: 5

Design/ease of use: 7

Performance: 10

Total: 22


Conair Deluxe Hand-Held Fabric Steamer, $42.99 (on sale for $27.99)

The other power-drill-style steamer I tested, the Conair, bore the closest resemblance to a traditional iron. Indeed, if you remove the dual lint/fabric brush attachment, the exposed soleplate can double as an iron. But if you're whipping out the ironing board, why not just iron?

This is not to say that this Conair was entirely without merit. I particularly liked the high-medium-low dial, the fabric brush, and the triangular shape, which outmaneuvered other steamers on corners and seams. But even though this 1,000-watt steamer is dual voltage, it's probably the least sensible travel companion of all the models I tested. It's bigger and heavier than the others—an issue not just at the airline check-in counter, but in medias steaming as well. My arm tired swiftest with this steamer; for my mom, the heftiness was a deal-breaker. And like the Rowenta, the Conair had its share of semi-scary moments (for example, puffing out steam for several minutes after being unplugged). I thought I'd prefer these higher-tech power-drill steamers, but the rudimentary teakettles proved more reliable in the end.

Portability: 3

Design/ease of use: 9

Performance: 12

Total: 24


Joy Mangano My Little Steamer, $29.98

My Little Steamer has the details down. It comes with—count 'em—three fabric-brush attachments and a drawstring travel bag. I loved the Eisenhower-era mint-julep color; my mom applauded the retractable power cord (the only steamer I tested with this feature). The My Little Steamer is easy to fill, holds a fair amount of water, and was the only teakettle model I reviewed with an on/off switch. The wattage—850—surprised me, though, since the steam just didn't get all that hot. And piping-hot steam, I've found, is the make-or-break test of a good steamer, way more important than a selection of attachments, which in this case were frustratingly difficult to muscle onto the steam head. It was also on the heavy side, and the five larger-than-normal steam-ejecting holes encouraged excess dribbling and sometimes left fabrics damper than desired. Single voltage.

Portability: 5

Design/ease of use: 9

Performance: 10

Total: 24


SteamFast Compact Fabric Steamer, $39.99 (on sale for $24.99)

My mother's enthusiasm for the SteamFast surprised me. A fairly primitive teakettle model, the single-voltage SteamFast has no on/off switch; you just plug in to operate. The size is certainly right—it's the second smallest, next to the Samsonite—and my mom liked the ergonomic finger grips. This 800-watt steamer delivers a continuous flow of just-hot-enough steam through nine small holes that minimize leakage, especially compared with the My Little Steamer. The SteamFast's water capacity could be better: Its max-fill line is much lower than on similarly proportioned steamers. And while the two attachments (a lint and fabric brush) worked pretty well, the sticky rubber head was a schmutz magnet. Even so, for the price, you can't go wrong with this unobjectionable little machine.

Portability: 8

Design/ease of use: 8

Performance: 12

Total: 28


Jiffy Esteam Travel Steamer, $69

The Jiffy Esteam isn't much to behold: a simple teakettle-style apparatus with no on/off button, no temperature controls, no fun brushes or lint-remover attachments. It's not particularly small or light, and it isn't even dual voltage. Why, then, the steep price tag? Perhaps because the steam produced by the Jiffy is really, really hot—a little mysterious, considering it's only 600-watt. The Jiffy is the only steamer I tested that achieves anything like the power and precision of a regular iron. Whatever the explanation, merely aiming the Jiffy in the general direction of a garment conquered crinkles and creases more aggressively than any competitor.

The Jiffy is definitely coming along to my next destination wedding. Does this mean I'm ready to give up ironing for good? Not just yet. These steamers are great for travel, for straightening out delicate silk, and for freshening up cashmere. Steaming is also a good deal quicker (and less backache-inducing) than ironing. But it is also, for now, a much less exact art. For the heavy-duty jobs—or if you require a super-smooth, boardroom-ready dress shirt—you still can't get around dragging out the old ironing board. For ultimate crispness, the iron is still king.

Portability: 6

Design/ease of use: 6

Performance: 20

Total: 32



slate v
Interviews 50 Cents: Blitzing Mother
A daily video from Slate V.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008, at 11:58 AM ET



slate v
Attack-Ad Fodder on a Silver Platter
A daily video from Slate V.
By
Tuesday, May 6, 2008, at 1:59 PM ET



slate v
Dear Prudence: My Friend's Husband is Cheating!
A daily video from Slate V.
Monday, May 5, 2008, at 2:10 PM ET



sports nut
87 Is the Loneliest Number
Hyping Sidney Crosby won't fix hockey's problems. Here's how the NHL will win over new fans.
By Patrick Stack
Thursday, May 8, 2008, at 1:56 PM ET


After three straight seasons of warm-weather cities greeting a hard-won Stanley Cup with a yawn, the 2008 NHL playoffs have been a boon for old-fashioned hockey fans. Original Six franchises have locked horns. Three-fourths of the remaining teams are from cities that actually experience winter. And I'm particularly happy, because my hometown Pittsburgh Penguins have won eight of nine games to reach the Eastern Conference finals against the archrival, cross-state Philadelphia Flyers.

Lest hockey fans think the rest of the sports world shares this enthusiasm, there are always people like my friend Elizabeth—a native New Yorker and avid baseball fan—to remind us otherwise. On the day of Game 4 between the Penguins and the New York Rangers, with Pittsburgh up 3-0 in the best-of-seven series, she asked me if I thought the Pens were going to triumph. I answered enthusiastically that they would, prompting her to respond: "So, when's the first game?"

There's nothing new about the American public's lack of interest in hockey: The amount of media space given to the NHL's unpopularity rivals that devoted to coverage of the sport itself. Glowing pucks, teams in the desert, and national television coverage have all failed to budge the sport's popularity needle upward. The only way the league has been able to get any traction in the States outside of the insular hockey-fan community is to shoehorn a few individual superstars into the national consciousness: Gordie Howe, Mario Lemieux, and most of all Wayne Gretzky. (I've provided helpful links for each player in case you don't even know who those guys are.)

The NHL has now pinned its hopes on Sidney Crosby. The Pittsburgh captain's youthfulness, leadership skills, and "aw shucks, eh" attitude are reminiscent of Gretzky's makeup in his early years. With Crosby's hockey talent apparent from an early age, the NHL has eyed him as the Great One's successor since the now-Penguin's early teens. If you've seen a hockey player in a commercial, it's probably Crosby skating around on behalf of Gatorade and Reebok. The Penguins are regulars on Versus and NBC hockey broadcasts—great for Pittsburgh expats like me—most notably during the NHL's heavily hyped Winter Classic in Buffalo, N.Y. The New Year's Day outdoor game at Ralph Wilson Stadium drew the league's highest regular-season ratings since 1996; league executives had to be particularly thrilled when Crosby won the game in an overtime shootout.

Marketing Sid the Kid seems to be working for the NHL on at least a superficial level. Elizabeth later told me that hearing about Crosby made her want to attend a hockey game for the first time. Still, the NHL's one-great-player marketing strategy is doomed to failure. Promoting individual stars just doesn't work for hockey for three simple reasons.

Any given hockey player is only on the ice for a fraction of the game. During Game 5 of the Penguins-Rangers series, a game that went into overtime and lasted 67 minutes, Sidney Crosby was on the ice for just 23 minutes. Hockey fans know that's a lot of ice time in a grueling sport, but newbies tuning in to see Crosby tear up the opposition probably aren't aware that they'll have to go to the trouble of figuring out when he's actually playing. Tune in to a Cavs game in the fourth quarter, and you know LeBron James will be on the court. That's just not the case in hockey, and while the constant substitution adds an extra level of intrigue for die-hards, the finer points of line changes are always going to flummox new fans.

Hockey equipment is bulky and obscuring. The easiest player to find on the ice in the 1990s was the bare-headed Craig MacTavish, who stood out as the only player in the league who still had an exemption to the NHL's helmet requirement. Hockey players are mostly the same size, shape, and color—the last representing another big marketing problem for the NHL—and are dressed in heavy gear that's tough to see past even in close-ups, much less during the fast-flowing action. Sure, football players wear facemasks, but they vary greatly in size and shape and tend to line up in the same spot at the start of each play. NFL broadcasts also have long breaks between plays that are usually filled by tracking shots of individual players. The most exciting aspect of hockey is that there's no dawdling, but this constant speed and flow makes it challenging for neophytes to tell what's going on. Which brings me to the third point.

New fans need to be taught which parts of the play to watch. The typical hockey goal comes from a quick centering pass to an open player, who often skates in from the blue line at high speed. Seasoned hockey fans know to watch for players skating into slot openings and the subsequent centering pass. To a new viewer, this all looks like pinball. It's even more difficult to predict when a goal's about to happen when the camera can't show the complete area between the goal and the blue line.

Fortunately for the NHL, technology has come to the rescue. High-definition television has brought televised hockey closely in line with the thrilling experience of watching a game in person. Most important for new fans, HD goes a long way toward solving two of the problem areas I've described. Not only does HD turn the faint black blur of the puck into a well-defined punctuation mark, it makes sweater names readable and toothless smiles recognizable. The 16-to-9 aspect ratio of HDTV also offers a broader horizontal view of the ice than standard-def television's 4-to-3 aspect ratio. Players don't just appear out of nowhere, charging the net at full speed. Rather, plays develop in real time, allowing you to follow the action and learn how the action builds and goals get scored.

It's unlikely that Best Buy will sell more HDTVs by offering better rink clarity. But as HD broadcasts increase, the hardware spreads, and the majority of NHL games are (hopefully) once again carried on a channel that some people have actually heard of, sports fans who've only seen Sidney Crosby in commercials will become more inclined to watch an actual hockey game. Once they do, they'll see that the NHL is one of the world's greatest team games, not just Sid the Kid's personal playground.



television
Farmer Wants a Wife
Gets Carrie Bradshaw wannabes instead.
By Troy Patterson
Wednesday, May 7, 2008, at 6:22 PM ET

Farmer Wants a Wife (The CW, Wednesdays at 9 p.m. ET) moseyed onto the air last week bearing the best title of any pop-culture commodity of the year to date and, given its standard-issue inanity, a surprising subtextual richness. The initial impulse is to capsulize this reality show—starring one rural prince, an ever-dwindling cast of urban-dwelling maidens, and a barnyard of docile livestock—as The Bachelor-meets-Green Acres. It strikes a bit closer to the mark to label it a synthesis of the first season of The Simple Life (in which Paris Hilton and her dearest frenemy did not quite deign to immerse themselves in agrarian matters) and those episodes of Sex and the City involving Aidan's country cabin (on which Carrie could not, despite a sincere effort, accommodate herself to things rustic). Farmer Wants a Wife stands as an exploration of the tensions between red and blue America and a treatise on contemporary (wo)man's alienation from nature. But it is first and last a cheesy dating show, one equipped with its own cheddaring machine.

Matt is a third-generation family farmer in Portage Des Sioux, Mo. His style sense is less "hick" than it is "Kansas City metrosexual." His hair is expertly gelled, his soul patch assiduously tended, his chest flagrantly smooth. Boldly, the show introduced his mother, herself a city-bred woman who said goodbye to all that, 13 minutes into the debut—both a hint that family values will be a subtheme and a promise that, in reward for attempting to coop up chickens while wearing Daisy Dukes, the gals might be rewarded not only with E-list celebrity status but also with the love and stability only a mama's boy can provide.

The female players all come, in Matt's phraseology, from "the city," as if Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and Dallas were all the same place, an impersonal Sodom and Gomorrah megalopolis fueled by greed and Pike Place Roast, which maybe they are. Stephanie: "Everybody looks at me and they think, OK, she has everything she wants!" Ashley: "Guys are shady!" Stacey: "Christian Louboutin!" Et cetera. For variety, the producers have tossed in two virgins, one a theology student, and they allow them to offer some cogent sound bites about the value of celibacy before cutting to the eye-rolling reaction shots.

I'm rooting for New York bartender Christa—"Christa with a C-H"—winner of the first solo date, partly because she has evinced an interest in staying out until 8 a.m., partly because she was the lone dame with the good sense to wear flat-heeled shoes en route to the initial meeting with Matt. She stepped off the prop plane in sneakers and stood there in them, cool and natural, as he shirtlessly piloted a John Deere tractor into the frame. Where the other girls are essentially doing drag performances—flitting about in a hair-tossing projection of Carrie Bradshaw-style femininity—Christa is pretending to keep it real.



Her opposite number would be—no, not blowzy Josie, who has said, "I think of myself as a 10-plus. That's part of being Republican. I feel like a winner." Josie is amusingly demented, sui generis. Rather, Christa exists in starkest contrast to Stephanie, the first eliminee. She first sunk a 4-inch heel into a cow patty, then recoiled at the sight of those chickens, which she feared would attack. "I like seeing things," said Stephanie, "and I definitely need my eyes." This called to mind The Birds and Hitchcock's declaration that Melanie Daniels—the Tippi Hedren character, the prank-playing socialite encountering chaos in the country—represented "smug complacency." We urbanites can thank Farmer Wants a Wife for encouraging us to examine our reflexive self-satisfaction. And also for delivering the best reality-show dismissal sequence of the year to date. "One of you does not have an egg under your chicken," said Matt. "That's the gal who's goin' back to the city."



the chat room
Don't Let Your Girls Grow Up To Be Child Stars
Meghan O'Rourke takes readers' questions about Hannah Montana and the Miley Cyrus photos.
Thursday, May 8, 2008, at 5:46 PM ET

Slate literary editor Meghan O'Rourke was online on Washingtonpost.com on May 8 to chat with readers about Miley Cyrus and the unreal lives of child stars. An unedited transcript of the chat follows.

Meghan O'Rourke: Hello everyone, and thanks so much for joining me here for a live chat.

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Waldorf, Md.: My 6-year-old daughter "loves" Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus. At first I was relieved that there was an actual celebrity that she could look up to—Miley seemed "normal." This made me realize that no celebrity is "normal." I'm not going to make my daughter stop watching the show (she hasn't seen any of the pictures) but now I don't think I like the fact that she looks up to her so much and wants to be just like her. I'm actually quite disappointed, because I did think she was different than the others (Lindsay Lohan, Paris, Mishca Barton etc....). However, there is one that I think really is different than the rest, and that is Hilary Duff. Too bad she's not on Disney anymore.

Meghan O'Rourke: One of the striking things about the popularity of Hannah Montana is how broad the age range of its fans is. You say your daughter is 6 and loves it, and I know other 6 year olds who love it. But the show also appeals to 14 year olds (and Cyrus is 15). It seems to me that one of the complicated things about the "tween" category is just that—that at the high end of it, the stars and fans are starting to move into adolescence proper, but there are lots of 6 to 9 year olds watching the show, and observing the stars for cues about how to behave.

I think it's true that no celebrity today can live a "normal" life, however hard her parents work to give her one.

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Dallas: A question and a comment: Don't you think the photo "controversy" might have been invented by the Cyrus PR machine to generate interest in the article? Isn't it possible that the Cyruses weren't at all unhappy or embarrassed by the photos, but they saw an opportunity to make sure the whole world looked at them? And the Slate article describes Hannah Montana as a show about being normal, only it's not. I disagree. The show is a classic fairy tale, about a normal girl plucked from obscurity to become a princess—that's why kids love it. It's sort of like Harry Potter—a normal kid who finds out he's extraordinary. Wouldn't we all love to have that experience?

Meghan O'Rourke: You're absolutely right that the show is a princess story—in an early draft of the Slate piece, I described it that way, and noted that of course Disney has always been in the business of selling princess stories, from its animated Cinderella on. But what's telling is that it's a particular kind of princess story (a Cinderella one), where there's a transformation of a "normal" girl into a "special" one. And what I was trying to get at in the piece is that the special gift that's bequeathed upon the modern-day princess is... celebrity. Not so much even talent. There have been other stories like this on TV—think even about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or, more analogously, Nancy Drew, who was enormously popular among girls precisely the age of those who watch Hannah Montana. But both Buffy and Nancy had gifts that had to do with talent and application, not with living in a milieu of advertising and performing on TV talk shows.

As for your interesting proposition that the Cyrus PR machine invented the controversy: Nothing would surprise me in this day and age. But I don't think they did invent it. They seemed genuinely surprised and I don't see the upside for them in alienating Disney at this point. It would make more sense if Cyrus were say 16 or 17 and ready to move on to adult roles. Still, you never know.

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Washington: I have many thoughts on this issue—one being that once again organizations who have a particular agenda to push are making a much bigger deal out of something which, at worst, is a slight mistake. I can understand the worry about younger children being influenced by this picture, but the picture is in Vanity Fair, a publication that is targeted to and should be read by adults.

Do you think that the attempts by corporate America to keep these young teen starlets acting like children ultimately is hurting the starlets and their admirers? They should allow them to grow up at their own pace instead of trying to keep them at an artificial place in their lives (to sell more "widgets" the starlet is promoting).

Meghan O'Rourke: Certainly there are a lot of people and companies highly invested in Miley Cyrus—most notably, of course, Disney. In this case, though, it seems like it's parents on blogs who were most put off and upset by the photos in Vanity Fair, and not corporations. Of course, the media jumped all over the first grumblings, giving the story new life.

I do think it's very hard for starlets to grow up in the public eye; growing up is hard in any case, and must be even harder where you have on the one hand Disney telling you to keep your image "clean" and on the other the intuition that to stay successful as a young female actress you have to be sexy and attractive. And there's a conflict between those two pressures.

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New York: How many of Miley's fans would be aware of these photos if the media hadn't made such a stink about them? I mean, how many 12-year-old girls read Vanity Fair?

Meghan O'Rourke: Exactly—I was thinking a lot about that earlier this week. It's one of the great ironies of this whole "controversy." It's not as though the photos were published in Seventeen.

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Alexandria, Va.: In a world of Bratz dolls and Girlicious, parents have to be the ones their children look to. If you still are sitting your kids in front of the television and say "okay, pick someone you can admire," then you really need to spend more time with your children.

Meghan O'Rourke: I'm sure that's true in many ways. But I also wonder—don't kids really like to have role models their own age (or, ideally, a little older)? I certainly did. But for me the models out there were people like Nancy Drew (also a very "clean" tween star, before "tween" was a category) or Laura Ingalls Wilder on Little House on the Prairie. You hit on something crucial when you say we live in a world of Bratz dolls and Girlicious. We certainly do. And entertainment and pop culture seem to be everywhere. I'm not sure how parents manage to monitor all of it.

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The "morning after" look: The issue with the Miley photo is not the level of skin (had she been photographed in a backless gown a la John Singer Sargent's paintings it would have been no big deal) but rather the implications of having just had sex: tousled hair, appearance of bedsheet, faint lipstick. America is just not okay with teen sexuality from someone marketed as "a good girl" role-model. Hence the freakout.

Meghan O'Rourke: That's true. The photo is at once highly classical and a bit sexually suggestive. (Mainly, it was the tousled hair, I thought, that really freaked people out.) And I tend to agree that Americans are not comfortable with suggestions of teen sexuality—especially female teen sexuality, and especially at that middle adolescent age range of 15. Since the show itself doesn't have that particular brand of sexual suggestiveness, it's not entirely clear to me why it matters if Cyrus (who is of course making a bit to become an enduring star) is photographed in a slight sexy way OUTSIDE of the show.

If the answer is that she's too cravenly pursuing a career by playing up her sexuality, then I just have to wonder whether people are watching the show closely, since the show is so full of coy participation in pop culture materialism.

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St. Mary's City, Md.: Certainly the handlers for underage teen celebrities deserve some of the blame, but I suggest the real problem is that many sick men are unhealthily attracted to these girls. The handlers may feed into that mindset, but they certainly didn't create it. During Britney Spears's heyday, it was obvious that a huge percentage of her "fans" were adult men who probably didn't care much about her music. The Olsen twins got this same type of disgusting attention. Is it fair to suggest that these men may have the same general psychological profile as the men who end up being grilled by Chris Hansen?

Meghan O'Rourke: I don't think that this particular controversy has a lot to do with older men being attracted to teen stars, though it does seem to have to do with our infatuation with youth, and the general sexualization of our culture.

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Honolulu: Could you comment on the content of the Thomas Huang piece published online May 5 by Poynter Online that gave the Miley Cyrus coverage serious journalistic analysis? This is the only serious analysis I have seen.

washingtonpost.com: Cyrus Story: Not Much Ado About Nothing (Poynter, May 5)

Meghan O'Rourke: I've only been able to skim the Huang story—I hadn't seen it before you brought it to my attention. It seems really thoughtful. I agree with him that the controversy is not much ado about nothing, and that's in part why I chose to write about it. The "tween" market is a huge, huge market these days (you can't imagine Vanity Fair having profiled, say, Alyssa Milano in quite this way back in the day). And as Huang says, the gender issues at stake—about how young girls transition into sexual adults—are fascinating.

Thanks for pointing it out.

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Washington: Help me out here! I looked at the photos of the teen star in question and they looked just like the usual, customary "glam photos" that high school kids typically take as jokes. I didn't perceive any really suggestive or over-the-top feature to them. What is the huge deal? Is this something causing more grief with the unemployables in Jesusland than with the actual markets near the coasts?

Meghan O'Rourke: I tend to agree with you —the photo of her alone is pretty classical, except that the tousled hair does seem to conjure up some post-coital imagery. I still think the one with her dad is creepy, but mostly for the way that it drives home just how much she's a vehicle for him to stay in the public eye.

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Washington: Who really cares about Miley Cyrus? She's no role model, just like Britney Spears is no role model. I think the press cares more than the average or above-average human being.

Meghan O'Rourke: I think you're right that the press has fed this story and kept it alive. But I also know a number of 6-to-12-year-old girls who are obsessed with Hannah Montana.

This gets to another element of the story, which is the scrutiny parents now pay to so many elements of childrearing. The controversy started with mothers blogging about the photos, as I understand it.

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Bethesda, Md.: Your article was my favorite of all the stories on the photos—I was thinking much the same thing. I'm amazed that the professional handwringers came out crying "exploitation!" because of a photo of her bare back. The only thing that's notable about showing her back is that it's her back that has borne her father's achy-breaky ambitions of stardom for the past five years.

Meghan O'Rourke: Thank you—I'm really glad you liked the article. While I agree with a number of posters here that the "controversy" was fed by the media, I do think that the discomfort many parents felt touches on some larger cultural issues that are pretty fascinating. One of them being celebrity ambition, and how children of celebrities fare.

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Alexandria, Va.: Is it just me, or does this whole controversy about the Miley Cyrus photo shoot seem a mite ... manufactured? I mean, it's not like she flashed the world on Facebook or something.

Meghan O'Rourke: As I said earlier, there is a way in which it is. But it also seems to touch on submerged tensions in our culture about teen sexuality, the popularity of the tween market, and so on. It's funny to me that this photo was such a big deal, though.

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Easton, Md.: Thank you for this piece—you nailed it! I just wish it could be published in some teen magazines where girls might read it. Even my 13-year-old has begun to realize that Hannah Montana's "messages" are more disingenuous than wholesome. As for the regrets and apologies expressed by Miley and her entourage for the Vanity Fair photo, as the saying goes, it's easier to ask forgiveness than beg permission. (And hello, any parent who's thinking about having their daughter "shot" by Leibowitz can look at the famed photographer's celeb portraits and see that, ahem, "provocative" may be a polite word for the end result.) In any case, Disney (and Billy Ray) should milk Miley for all she's presently worth, because unless her singing and acting skills improve (along with the material that's chosen for her), her star may be slipping toward the horizon before she's old enough to vote. Thanks again.

Meghan O'Rourke: Thank you! I'm glad you liked the piece, and especially glad to know that someone with a 13-year-old felt it nailed some of the issues. I did talk to a few kids who watched the show and wish I'd been able to talk to more.

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Parents: I'm a 27-year-old woman and am sick and tired of little girls wearing the same clothes as me or carrying cell phones and Gucci bags or wearing lipstick or have dyed hair. Parents need to step it up—saying no is okay. I swear, my kid will never wear a T-shirt that says "ditch the loser" or "your boyfriend is a good kisser." My child will never have a Bratz doll. And if my kid hates me, so be it. Why not just give your kid a bottle of vodka and some ecstasy ... then they really can be cool.

Meghan O'Rourke: Saying no certainly should be OK. And I confess that why any teenager would need a Gucci bag is beyond me. At that age, I could barely hold on to my fingers, let alone something not attached to my body.

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Buffalo, N.Y.: I still don't see what the big issue is—it's a beautiful picture. There is nothing sexual about it. I'm an thirtysomething woman and have no problem with it. People are making too much over nothing.

Meghan O'Rourke: It's interesting to see how different the responses are. I tend to think the photo is not all that sexual. Except, as I said earlier, perhaps the hair...

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Madison, Wis.: I'm a 30-year-old single female with no kids and no television, so for the longest time I had no idea who or what "Hannah Montana" was, besides hearing the name occasionally. I knew it was some kind of television show involving a young girl, but judging on the name alone I pictured it as being a very innocent show about a freckle-faced young girl growing up in rural Montana, sort of a modern-day Little House on the Praire.

Boy was it a shock when I eventually saw a clip of the show (actually, that's the only clip I've ever seen) in which Hannah Montana was all bedecked in sequined pants and way too much makeup, pushing her way into a posh Los Angeles restaurant, gabbing cattily with a young friend. Maybe I'm hopelessly out of touch, but why aren't there shows like the one I imagined, like the ones I watched and loved growing up (a whopping 20 years ago) like Little House and Anne of Green Gables? Or are there, and kids just don't like them anymore?

Meghan O'Rourke: That was exactly how I felt when I saw the show—horrified and taken aback by the tube tops and stovepipe jeans and general lipglossed ethos. It made me wonder if I'd grown up and become a cultural conservative overnight. I don't have kids, so I don't know whether there are shows like Little House on the Prairie or whether kids like them; I think there must be, but I haven't encountered them.

Interestingly, Hannah Montana's ratings have slipped dramatically over the past year, apparently.

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Washington: I can understand why this photo shoot became news, but why is it still news. Why does this thing have legs? Are we all that bored of Obama and Clinton?

Meghan O'Rourke: Alas, I guess Miley Cyrus is more entertaining than the gas tax. Or Myanmar.

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McLean, Va.: This whole thing reminds me a bit of this huge kerfuffle years ago when the young actor who was on the preschool show Blue's Clues dared to do a guest shot on an late-night crime show. Many parents were enraged. So I think the take-away lesson here is that parents are extremely touchy when actors in kid shows step out of character.

Meghan O'Rourke: Boy, they do seem to be, don't they? I guess it's true that we live in the age of the so-called "helicopter parent," hovering nervously and observing everything their kid does. Given how much junk there is out there, I do understand why (and given the real threats of the Internet). But some perspective also seems in order.

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Baltimore: I am wondering, how is this episode with Miley Cyrus any different from what goes on everyday, and doesn't raise an eyebrow? Magazines like Seventeen, for example, are full of articles and tips on sex and female sex appeal. Movies also often portray this—remember American Beauty (late '90s). Strangely, the public outcry back then was nowhere near what it is now. What gives?

Meghan O'Rourke: Yes, it's not that different from what goes on every day. Except in one regard: Miley Cyrus makes a lot of money for Disney because she is the star of a show celebrated for its "clean" values. So if parents get upset by her actions, Disney starts to worry—and the episode becomes a story, because everyone wonders whether the Hannah Montana financial juggernaut will crash and burn.

In a sense, this is really a story about money.

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Richmond, Va.: I might believe the Cyruses were surprised if they were regular folks with a star daughter, but her dad is a celebrity and knows that world.

Meghan O'Rourke: Absolutely true. And they did see the pictures. I just think they underestimated the response.

_______________________

Arlington, Va.: My 9-year-old goddaughter and all of her friends know about the controversy and, strangely enough, now refuse to wear their Hannah Tees. The Cyrus family may have the long-range in mind, but it sure turned off a lot of girls who bought a lot of Hannah stuff.

Meghan O'Rourke: Interesting; I've heard similar anecdotes over the past week. That's why I tend to think they miscalculated here—and genuinely didn't realize what a controversy this would become. The show's rating are tanking too, according to some things I've read.

_______________________

Concord, N.H.: Miley has started the morphing into a more adult, glamorous young woman already. She wore that slick, floor-length red gown to an awards ceremony. It looked way too old for her in some ways, but strangely not in others. She probably has seen and done more than most adults. I find it funny and a little sad that Ellen Page dresses more in the way you'd want to see from a child star than a 15-year-old does.

Part of this is Miley's willing exploration into her sexuality—she has half-naked pics of her with that non-celeb friend. She wrote that off as stuff teenage girls do, but that's more of what teenage girls do now, largely because of the constant messages in the media that girls should be sexy. That isn't what we did when I was a teenager, some 20 years ago.

And as a young girl, it was the Nancy Drews, Trixie Beldens, etc., who were my role models, because they used their brains to get ahead and didn't traffic in a Lolita appeal. They were growing up but still felt safe. The message now is, do what you have to do for 15 minutes of fame—because that's so important—and if all else fails try taking off your clothes.

Meghan O'Rourke: One thing that seems sad to me about the photos is not the photos themselves and whether or not they're "appropriate" but the fact that Cyrus is such a money-maker that everything she now does is "managed" in some sense. And for better or for worse the whole thrust of adolescence ought to be about finding your own way. You take awkward steps, and make tons of mistakes—but usually they're your own ones, and they're in front of a small group, not millions of people.

_______________________

Meghan O'Rourke: It's 4 PM and I've got to sign out, but I want to thank everyone for sharing their insights and astute questions. Thanks again.



the green lantern
Thou Shalt Sort Thy Plastics
How bad is it to mix your soda bottles with your yogurt cups?
By Brendan I. Koerner
Tuesday, May 6, 2008, at 7:34 AM ET

I've been tossing my used yogurt cups in the recycling bin for years. So imagine my horror when I recently got around to reading the fine print on my city's sanitation guidelines—yogurt cups, it turns out, are supposed to go in the regular trash. Has my inadvertent sorting error ruined many tons' worth of recyclable plastics?


No, there's hardly a need to flagellate yourself over such a minor environmental sin. Sure, you've been making life ever-so-slightly less pleasant for the hardworking employees of your local recycling facility—they exert considerable effort picking through incoming refuse. But your yogurt cups, which are probably made of polypropylene, won't cause much damage to the recycling stream itself. The same can't be said for items made of polyvinyl chloride, such as certain kinds of pipes and food containers. Mix those in with your empty soda bottles and you could be wreaking some serious havoc.

Your recycling center's distaste for yogurt cups is par for the course throughout the United States. Of the seven types of numbered plastics, only No. 1 (polyethylene terephthalate, or PET) and No. 2 (high-density polyethylene, or HDPE) are commonly recycled. Even in those rare municipalities that ask residents to throw all plastics in the same recycling bin, it's mostly just the PET (mostly in the form of beverage bottles) and HDPE (detergent bottles) that get processed. While it's technically feasible to recycle other plastics, the process is expensive and results in plastic that's widely deemed inferior. Products made from plastics No. 3 through No. 7—a range that includes food trays, grocery bags, six-pack rings, and your yogurt cups (designated No. 5)—are typically either landfilled or shipped overseas for incineration. (There's great interest in the developing world in burning plastics to recover the fossil fuels [PDF] from which they're made.)

When loads of plastic are dumped on a recycling facility's floor, the sorting fun begins. Workers often start by picking through the piles in search of obviously discordant items—kiddie play sets, lawn furniture, clothing mannequins. They also scan for plastic mounds that are drenched in nonrecyclable trash, such as food slurries or medical waste. While a little caked-on tomato sauce isn't going to ruin a batch of PET bottles, a Dumpster's worth of nonrecyclable garbage will; if a large apartment building was careless about separating its rubbish, then hundreds of pounds of plastics may have to be sent to the landfill. According to a 2005 Environmental Protection Agency study in the Pacific Northwest, 24 percent of plastic bottles were rejected as too contaminated for recycling. (By comparison, 14 percent of metal goods were rejected, and just 1 percent of newspapers.)

The remaining plastics are then sent along a conveyor belt, where they're sorted by hand—a hazardous task, given the prevalence of syringes and other dangerous surprises in the deluge. Workers mostly look for empty beverage bottles, which are the industry's version of gold nuggets—such bottles are almost always made out of PET, the most easily recycled plastic. This is likely the step in the process at which your erroneously sorted yogurt cups are picked out.

If your misplaced polypropylene slips past the human inspectors, however, it may get caught during the ensuing phase, when the machines go to work. Most use either X-rays or near infrared spectroscopy to analyze the chemical properties of passing plastics. Items that register as either non-PET or non-HDPE are ejected from the sorting belt with jets of air. The best machines claim an accuracy rate of 98 percent; they are occasionally stymied when bottles are stuck together or excessively flattened. As a result, a final manual inspection is often necessary to verify that a load is free of any meaningful contaminants.

The nastiest of those potential contaminants isn't your polypropylene but rather PVC (aka plastic No. 3). Though it's increasingly rare in the United States due to concerns over dioxin emissions during manufacture, PVC is still prevalent enough to ruin many a load of otherwise recyclable PET. The stuff is the bane of recyclers everywhere: A single PVC bottle can irrevocably contaminate an entire 800-pound load of otherwise desirable PET, rendering it unfit to be made into new products—PVC forms acids when mixed with PET, and those acids can make the recycled plastic unacceptably fragile. Because of this danger, many recycling facilities now employ machines such as FlakeSort, which analyzes the PVC content of processed plastic "flakes" before they're sold on the open market.

Those flakes are rarely turned into new food-grade products but are "downcycled" into pipes, fence posts, and picnic tables—exactly the sorts of products that recycling facilities reject during their initial screenings. So when these post-consumer items are no longer wanted, they're ultimately destined for the landfill or for an incinerator in Guangdong Province.

Despite its labor-intensive and relatively inefficient nature, plastics recycling still makes long-term sense. The EPA estimates that making a ton of plastic out of used PET bottles saves 55.9 gigajoules of energy over manufacturing a ton of plastic from scratch. And in 2005, Britain's Waste Resources and Action Programme analyzed (PDF) 60 different life-cycle scenarios for plastics. The organization concluded that recycling was invariably superior to landfilling, in terms of net carbon emissions. Recycling was clearly preferable to incineration, meanwhile, in more than 76 percent of the scenarios. It bears noting, however, that the WRAP study doesn't seem to have factored in the energy used to transport plastics to overseas incinerators nor the possibility that those incinerators lack proper emissions safeguards. (Environmentalists fear that burning PVC, in particular, can lead to toxic emissions, and that even ostensibly safer plastics contain heavy metals in their pigments.)

The equation tilts more heavily in recycling's favor once you consider the recent rise in oil prices. About 8 percent of the world's oil supply goes toward making plastics—half into the actual feedstock and half to power the manufacturing plants. With crude futures currently hovering around $120 barrel, there's a lot of incentive for companies to figure out how to use recycled flakes in lieu of virgin plastic. If this trend continues, maybe they'll even start jonesing for your yogurt cups.

Is there an environmental quandary that's been keeping you up at night? Send it to ask.the.lantern@gmail.com, and check this space every Tuesday.



the highbrow
'Tweenyboppers at Work
The Miley Cyrus controversy.
By Meghan O'Rourke
Thursday, May 8, 2008, at 5:46 PM ET


Call me insensitive, but I didn't think that the supposedly "racy" photo of 'tween star Miley Cyrus holding a bedsheet around her bare torso was as outré as all the fuss made it out to be. Sure, Cyrus' hair is tousled in a sexual way, and she is, technically, topless. But from a less alarmist perspective, the photograph is—as Annie Leibovitz described it—highly classical. It focuses on the contrast between Cyrus' alabaster skin and dark hair, and it captures, in her vulnerable yet adult gaze, the strangeness of the transitional period known as adolescence. To be 15 is to be no longer a child, even if you are not yet an adult.

The most revealing picture in the article, though, was a photo of Cyrus sprawled atop her father, country singer Billy Ray Cyrus (of "Achy Breaky Heart" fame). Billy Ray looked quite at home—hell, even happy—with the fact that his young daughter was the subject of a Vanity Fair shoot and that he was along for the ride. Take one glance at the picture, and something clarifies itself. The issue here isn't the relative appropriateness of a 15-year-old being photographed draped in bedsheets but the degree to which Cyrus' parents and Disney have consigned Cyrus to the excruciating demands of being a thoroughly "packaged" 'tween star. Because if you turn on the Disney Channel and clock a little time with Hannah Montana, what you'll find is that the layers of self-presentation in the photos are nowhere near as weird as those in the show itself.

Hannah Montana is a sitcom, after all, built on the idea that the dilemmas of multimillion-dollar stardom are as relevant as the problems of Marcia Brady. Cyrus plays a girl ("Miley Stewart") plucked from obscurity in Tennessee to become a 'tweenybopper sensation ("Hannah Montana") in Malibu, Calif. Miley's father, Robby Ray (played by Cyrus' actual father), is determined to keep her head on straight, and the show's plots revolve coyly around the predicaments of being a real person and a celebrity at the same time. The fact that this appeals to kids is odd enough: Who knew that 9-year-olds (among the show's core audience) were enthralled by efforts to find a balance between life and career? As Disney's Web site describes it (ungrammatically), "While the glamour and the fame does have its perks[,] limousines cool clothes and hanging out with celebrities, Miley most wants to be treated like any other teenager." What's striking, though, is that we don't see all that much of Miley being a real person, going to school, riding the school bus. Instead, the show is really all about being a pop star. In one episode, Miley feels neglected because her father is writing a song for the Jonas Brothers (another huge teen sensation on and off the screen); in another, he's sick and she wants to go to Florida without him to perform at a big concert with her pop rival Michaela. (The moral of that episode? Dad needs to let his little pop princess grow up and travel with only a family friend as a chaperone.) The parental celebration of Hannah Montana's "clean" values misses the point. The show may not show much skin or make explicit sexual jokes, but it is lousy with a wised-up materialism.

Take an episode in which Hannah Montana realizes she hates the perfume she's about to become the spokeswoman for. She has to choose between keeping her integrity and keeping a convertible the perfume company sent her way. She makes the wrong choice, and finds herself having to lie on a TV talk show about loving the perfume. (The host replies, "I'm glad you're not one of those celebrities who goes out and pushes something you don't believe in.") One thing leads to another, and by the end of the show, she's backed out of her contract; we watch her wince goofily as the prized convertible (which she's too young to drive) is towed away. This is the way the show works: It teaches kids to understand their own experiences—about growing pains, about being honest with their parents, and so on—through the narrow lens of teen celebrity, rather than through broader storytelling. Once, sitcoms taught kids to be true to themselves by showing what happened when, say, Greg Brady thought about cheating on a test, or how Sandy and Bud's adventures with Flipper shaped their character. Hannah Montana instructs them in the proper etiquette of endorsement deals.

Disney's gamble that kids would identify with the problems of fame paid off largely because even 9-year-olds today are obsessed with celebrity. But it also paid off because of the cleverest—and most insidious—thing about Hannah Montana: the way the show presents Miley Cyrus as just a normal girl who became a star by dint of talent and hard work. Each episode carefully maintains a kind of aw-shucks folksiness: Establishing shots of a Malibu beach house are contrasted with crude references to Uncle Earl in Tennessee stinking up his home after making three-bean chili. Billy Ray and Miley drop their g's and ape country dialect when it suits them, playing up the disparity between their hick sensibilities and their upscale surroundings. At the same time, though, Hannah Montana downplays the tolls our entertainment-obsessed culture takes on young stars, trading on the idea of having the best of both worlds: Miley Stewart is just an average kid living a normal life—and then the limo comes to pick her up, her brown hair turns blond, and she becomes glammed-up Hannah Montana. The show's theme song advises, "Chill it out/ Take it slow/ Then you rock out the show/ You get the best of both worlds"—implying that as long as you strive to be a "normal" girl like Miley Stewart some of the time, it's easy to be "pop sensation" Hannah Montana the rest of the time.

But Miley Cyrus has never had a "normal life" like Miley Stewart's. In fact, her entire life has been as managed and staged as a Disney production. Since she was a toddler, she has been surrounded by video cameras and immersed in the world of performance. (Her parents originally named her "Destiny Hope," for God's sake.) In other words, she has always been Hannah Montana, not Miley Stewart. The message of Hannah Montana, the show, is: You can be an ordinary kid and become famous—and still be an ordinary kid. The message of Miley Cyrus, the life, is: You can become famous if you are born into the right family and are willing to sacrifice any semblance of normalcy for your career. (Now, that would be a show worth watching.)

In this sense, the entire show is a canny celebration of pop culture masquerading as a story about hope and family life. What's most interesting about the scandal that erupted last week is that it's an example of the real dilemmas a 15-year-old celebrity has to navigate—one that will never make it into the plot lines of Hannah Montana. The squeaky-clean teen image that everyone keeps talking about was precisely that: an image created, managed, and assiduously maintained by Miley and her parents, at great cost to the product herself. Last December, another group of "racy" photos (of Cyrus and a friend at a sleepover) leaked to the press, and Cyrus spoke about how upset she was that her friend—a "normal" girl—had to deal with the harsh glare of the media. Asked how she felt about the scandal, she told one reporter, "I was really upset. It really sucks, to be honest. It was a friend of mine that's a normal girl and … the worst part is she has to go to school and deal with that crap. I have to deal with that anyways. I deal with it all the time." She does have to "deal" with it—and her word choice gets straight to the market-based heart of the issue.



the undercover economist
It's Like Money, but With No Dead Presidents
Do "local currencies" really help the communities that use them?
By Tim Harford
Saturday, May 3, 2008, at 7:33 AM ET


I was recently invited to appear on radio to provide the economists' perspective on the costs and benefits of local exchange trading schemes, which are alternative currencies that circulate around a small community. This made me scratch my head a bit. I could not think of any real benefits, but then I could not really think of any serious costs, either.

Proponents of community currencies argue that they have social, economic, and environmental advantages. BerkShares Inc., which organizes a local currency in Massachusetts, claims that the currency helps area businesses connect with their customers but also strengthens the regional economy by favoring locals. In the United Kingdom, "transition towns," which are seeking to use less oil, are exploring the environmental benefits of local currencies.

The common-sense economic case for these currencies was summed up for me by John Walker, acting treasurer of Brixton LETS in London: "They're more appropriate for local communities, because the money doesn't drain out of the local community."

That seems plausible: The money (Brixton bricks) goes 'round and 'round Brixton and isn't sucked away by the insidious multinationals of neighboring Clapham. But this is one of those cases in which common sense lets us down. Money, whether pounds or Brixton bricks, isn't wealth. It's just a way of keeping accounts, and swapping one system of accounts for another isn't going to alter the basic productive potential of Brixton.

True, community currencies may very gently encourage trade with locals rather than strangers. But the gains from more trade with locals are more than offset by the losses from less trade with strangers. Otherwise, economic sanctions would be a blessing. That is why no community-currency movement tries seriously to restrict broader trade. Everyone knows that is a recipe for return to the Dark Ages.

There have been times and places when national currencies have so malfunctioned that community currencies would have been preferable: Weimar Germany, modern Zimbabwe, perhaps also the Depression-era United States, where some community currencies briefly flourished. There is also a healthy debate in economics over the appropriate size of a currency union, but few serious economists think that the optimal currency area is the size of Brixton or the southern Berkshires.

Nor are the environmental benefits of community currencies terribly persuasive. Local trade sounds environmentally friendly, but it is a distraction: The environmental cost of driving to the shops or growing food on inappropriate local land is far greater than the cost of the carbon emissions of long-range shipping.

The real benefits, if they exist, are not economic but social, and best explained not by an economist like me but by a sociologist such as Ed Collom of the University of Southern Maine.

Collom's work looks, at first glance, like bad news for the community-currency movement. He has found, for example, that most currency schemes in the United States last only a few years before collapsing. The ones that thrive are in places which already have strong, liberal, middle-class communities, such as Portland, Ore., or Ithaca, N.Y. In the Rust Belt areas that would seem to need them more, they have not taken root. The schemes take a lot of effort to set up: Brixton LETS, for instance, remains nascent.

But despite the obstacles, Ed Collom is convinced that local currencies can strengthen neighborhood ties and allow people to make friends: They are a focal point for the community-minded, even when they do not last.

That is possible. I live near a determined, community-minded entrepreneur who owns the local cafe, the sort of person who helps to get community currencies started. But rather than minting a Homerton dollar, she has founded a traders' association and is trying to set up a street market. I think she has the right priorities.



today's blogs
She Said What?
By Michael Weiss
Thursday, May 8, 2008, at 6:29 PM ET

Bloggers are talking about Hillary Clinton's latest tactics and the boffo sales for Grand Theft Auto IV.

She said what? Hillary Clinton gave an interview to USA Today Wednesday in which she argued her now-anemic case for continuing in the Democratic race: "I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on." She then cited an Associated Press piece that "found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in [Indiana and North Carolina] who had not completed college were supporting me." Bloggers can't contain their anger.

Andrew Sullivan is incredulous: "Does she hear herself? 'Working, hard-working Americans, white Americans.' 'Whites in both states.' If a Republican said this about a black opponent, his career would be in jeopardy for racism." Sebastian at Obsidian Wings agrees, and Workbench calls Clinton's comments "offensive."

Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money is aghast: "See, Obama's coalition is bigger. But Clinton's is broader, because it consists of more Real Americans and fewer [insert adjectives from RNC attack ad here] elitists and Shiftless Negroes." Amen to that, says Oliver Willis, an African-American and an Obama supporter: "Even professional haters like Pat Buchanan and his ilk aren't so balls-out about racism. You've been getting your ass handed to you and especially among black voters. This shows me once again that we - who are apparently lazy and shiftless non-Americans based on your definition - have yet again been a leading indicator."

"The Clintons are using racism to try to win the nomination against a black man," says liberal John Aravosis at AMERICAblog. "And our party leaders are okay with it. (Well, in all fairness, our congressional leaders said that Hillary had better not adopt a 'negative tone.' They never said she couldn't adopt a racist one.) Is it any wonder blacks aren't voting for Hillary? They shouldn't vote for Hillary, ever again." But Markos Moulitsas at DailyKos isn't surprised: "She's already ignored and belittled every state and voter demographic that doesn't support her. So it only follows that since in her world, the only things that are important are things that support her, she'd ignore election results in favor of the one (outdated) poll that confirms her manufactured reality."

Kim Priestap at Wizbang condemns her: "The Clintons are not accustomed to losing and it seems they're going to make the Democratic party pay for not choosing her. This primary may end up in court by the time the dust settles."

Should Obama pay Clinton to get out of the race, which A.J. Sparxx at PoliPundit calls a "slobberknocker"? The Huffington Post's Thomas Edsall raises the possibility. And Ann Althouse smacks it down: "Clinton spent her own money on her campaign. How is it permissible for Obama to refill Clinton's personal bank account? I don't know the election law here. I am simply asking why this outrageous bribery is even allowed." Josh Marshall, who also thinks Hillary wouldn't want to be the vice president, makes the obvious point about why it's a bad idea: "[U]sing more than $10 million raised in large part by small individual donations to pay back the Clintons who appear to be worth many tens of millions of dollars simply seems wrong. … [T]hat is simply too much money raised from small givers to give to people who loaned it with full knowledge of the odds and have more than enough money to really know what to do with."

Finally, Matt Welch at Reason's Hit & Run writes: "I sincerely hope Hillary takes it all the way to the convention, even if that means I won't be able to watch cable TV for a few months. Few prospects would delight me more than seeing the Clintons stand up on a national stage in front of the political party they've long dominated and then get showered with richly deserved boos."

Read more about Hillary's new strategy. Slate's "Deathwatch" isn't giving Clinton very good odds these days.

Grand Theft a boon to the economy: Grand Theft Auto IV has sold 6 million copies and reaped more than $500 million in its first week on the market, breaking every record for video games.

Headerfile does a little math: "But think about this: the last release of GTA (Vice City Stories) was in Oct 2006, so they've been working on this latest release for at least 1.5 years. Let's say it was 2 years. Let's say they had 100 guys working on it averaging $100k each. That's $20M over 2 years. Let's double it to account for overhead expenses. So in 1 week, they've arguably made an 1100% return on their investment." And Michael Gay at Lost Remote compares the haul to Spider-Man 3's $381.6 million weekend take: " 'As I've written off and on over the years, video games are becoming interactive movies, and they'll ultimately replace most of the traditional Hollywood movie industry.' Grand Theft Auto appears to be the first to realize that possibility."

Salon's Machinist reports: "[T]here's another stat worth noting -- 'Iron Man' took in more than $100 million at the box office over the weekend. There'd been some speculation that 'GTA' would cause young men to stay indoors this week, lowering the take at the cinema."

Visual Nightmare points out that haters must be disappointed: "Everyone was probably waiting to see if RockStar would get back at the devil known as Jack Thompson, who's driving a campaign over getting rid of the blasphemy that the game is. Apparently he's the only one by the looks of those numbers." Global Nerdy links to a video that imagines what the crisp, realistic graphics would have been like, circa 1990.

Read more about Grand Theft Auto IV.



today's blogs
Hill Street Blues
By Michael Weiss
Wednesday, May 7, 2008, at 5:02 PM ET

Bloggers are talking about little else besides Tuesday's primaries.

Hill Street blues: A double-digit loss in North Carolina, coupled with a squeaker of a victory in Indiana, makes it all but impossible for Hillary Clinton to get the Democratic nomination, even as she vows to fight on. Most bloggers think she's joined the choir invisible.

Game over, according to conservative Michelle Malkin: "She gave it her all, found her voice, lost her voice, smiled through her lies, lied through her cries, schemed, clawed, and cackled. But alas, it was not enough." Richelieu at the Weekly Standard's Blog predicts: "I think she's out in a week or less." And not a moment too soon, for the Atlantic's Megan McArdle,who is glad Clinton's pandering has failed: "Hillary is here with a plan," McArdle writes. "Specifically, a plan to discourage investment in the oil industry through a windfall profits tax, and to destroy the mortgage market by freezing foreclosures and interest rates. That way, no one has to worry about oil or houses, because there won't be any to worry about. That's just the kind of thoughtful, caring politician she is."

What did Clinton gain by hanging in there for the past two months? "Primarily, she managed to graft Bill Clinton's reputation as the indefatigable fighter who can always come back from the dead onto herself," writes Daniel Drezner. "There's also the working class hero thing, though I suspect that will fade. Finally, she's managed the rare reverse Greenhouse Effect, earning Strange New Respect from Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Patrick Buchanan."

Ron Chusid at Liberal Values hypothesizes: "At this point she might remain in the race a little longer only to attempt to raise a little money to offset her debts, or perhaps to make a deal with Obama to assume her campaign debts." Hot Air's conservative Allahpundit thinks "she has nothing left to commend her to the supers except an electabilty argument unsupported by a single key metric or even circumstantial evidence that Pastorgate has done Obama grievous damage at the polls. Are they going to take the nomination from the first serious black candidate for president without any compelling data to hang their decision on? Not a chance. It's over. Let's move on."

Andrew Sullivan calls Clinton a sociopath, runs mail from a reader comparing Clinton to a drunken co-ed, and discusses the significance of her self-financing her campaign. So, how happy is he Obama came out on top? "After the last month of unremitting Freak Show attacks, that's a remarkable show of strength and resilience. Obama's delegate lead grows. He will have the majority of the popular vote. He has far more money and far more donors. The logic of Clinton's remaining in the race dwindles to the point of vanishing altogether."

In the analogy department, Kyle E. Moore at Comments From Left Field compares the Clinton campaign to the Iraq war, while Slate's Emily Bazelon compares Democratic voters to King Solomon at XX Factor. And at Commentary's Contentions, Jennifer Rubin compares Obama to an appliance: "Like a vacuum cleaner, he is sucking up the Clintonian message to blue collar voters and absorbing the rhetoric which has successfully lured a coalition of working class whites, seniors and women. Don't expect any more Snobgate slip-ups."

Hey, what about those delegates in limbo? History teacher Betsy Newmark at Betsy's Page has advice for Obama: "As for Michigan and Florida, if I were the Obama team, I'd make a gracious concession to those states and let their votes count, even though it would give Hillary a bunch of popular votes and delegates. He's still going to win and he could heal some of the wounds in those states." Jerome Armstrong at liberal MyDD says: "On the allowing for the full seating of MI and FL, if Obama gets to the point where he has enough delegates to win the nomination despite MI & FL being seated, then ultimately, that would be the best route for Obama to go through, even though it seems unlikely."

And James Joyner at Outside the Beltway prophecies: "We'll be hearing murmurs from the Clinton camp for years to come about how this was stolen from her and that, if only Florida and Michigan had counted, it would have been hers. That's doubly true if Obama loses to John McCain in November."

Ready to throw the phrase thrown under the bus, um, under the bus? The new buzzword of the election season seems to be unity. Marc Ambinder writes: "Expect Obama in the next few days to prize unity above all else -- and to turn his attention away from Clinton and towards the notion of a unified Democratic Party and the race against McCain. The Clinton campaign will limp to West Virginia with just enough energy and barely any money." The Moderate Voice says: "If Clinton plays out her campaign based on issues and makes a graceful exit, the Democrats have a chance at unity. If her campaign remains an aggressive negative campaign, complete with eleventh hour negative campaign ads, it could backfire with some superdelegates and will make the Democrats' attempts to unify their fractured party even more difficult — not to mention negate any possibility of a 'Dream Ticket' which more and more seems like an In Your Dreams Ticket."

Read more about Hillary Clinton and the primaries. In Slate, John Dickerson says it's all but over.



today's blogs
Are We There Yet?
By Michael Weiss
Tuesday, May 6, 2008, at 5:55 PM ET

Bloggers are ready for the Indiana and North Carolina results and wondering what Hezbollah is up to.

Are we there yet? Voters in Indiana and North Carolina headed to the polls Tuesday, and the Drudge Report released a red-letter item saying that Hillary Clinton campaign staffers think she will lose North Carolina by 15 points. Howard Wolfson, Clinton's campaign manager, "categorically" denied the scoop, claiming no one from his team talked to Drudge and that according to an internal poll, Clinton is ahead 11 points in North Carolina.

The Moderate Voice sees clever Clintonian scheming: "If the Clinton folks say they're behind by 15 and Obama wins by 5 points the Clinton camp declares it a victory for them. If he wins by 3 points they can say there were some reports saying they were behind by 15 points and it's a huge win. (Of course if Obama LOSES North Carolina the nearly unanimous belief is that he is in political hot water)." AJStrata at the Strata-Sphere also wonders whether the Clinton camp is trying to lower expectations, predicting: "I think Hillary does well in NC [to] bring that state to a near tie—which where the democrat primary has been all season. After today—there will still be no clear winner."

Speaking of predictions: North Carolinian Bob Owens at Confederate Yankee thinks Drudge is "a bit off the mark, but I think that it is still probably more accurate than those who are projecting a close race. There is no severe weather projected to dam. pen turnout, and enthusiasm for Obama is high in major population centers of the state. … Barack Obama will defeat Hillary Clinton here in North Carolina today handily, perhaps by 9 points, more or less." Isaac Chotiner at the New Republic's Plank also predicts an Obama victory in North Carolina by six to 10 points and gives Clinton a narrow win in Indiana: "Remember, the night before Pennsylvania, many in the media were saying that a nine point Clinton win would not be so bad for Obama. Of course when the exit polls showed an even race at 5pm, all the pundits began to write Clinton off, only to later argue that Obama had disappointed."

Jim Geraghty at National Review Online's Campaign Spot cites a late poll in North Carolina that puts Obama ahead 50 percent to 45 percent: "With results like this, Obama will tout a respectable, but not great result that interrupts his rough patch; Hillary will note that he lost his neighboring state and still has problems with the same demographics he did in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Texas. With West Virginia and Kentucky looming, Obama will have escaped disaster, but still be in for some rough sailing ahead."

Finally, Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom wonders how media coverage will affect the campaigns: "CNN's decision to go 'Wright-free' yesterday, for example, might suggest that status quo results would push them even further to the Obama-friendly interpretation of the outcome. … Discussions of topics like whether Obama did better with working-class white voters in IN or NC than he did in PA might be less Obama-friendly, depending on how those numbers come out."

Read more primary predictions.

Hezbollah training Iraqis: U.S. intelligence suggests that Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah is training Iraqi militants in Iran, prompting calls from former administration officials like John Bolton for the U.S. to bomb these training camps.

"We have multiple detainees who state Lebanese Hezbollah are providing training to Iraqis in Iranian (Qods force) training camps near Tehran," Col. Donald Bacon, a U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, told Reuters.

Conservative Allahpundit writes at Hot Air: "Any reason to believe this coordination is going on specifically in training camps outsider Tehran, though? Oddly enough, yeah … the same Iranian dissident who exposed the mullahs' enrichment facility at Natanz in 2002 offered names, maps, and satellite photos of what he claimed were the training facilities. A few weeks later, Gen. Caldwell also accused Iran of training militias."

Middle Eastern-focused Outsider on the Inside reminds readers: "The training of foreign fighters by Hezballah only underscores the point that the battle for Lebanese sovereignty is a primary issue in dealing with the creeping Iranian hegemony in the region. This issue should not be perceived as secondary to Iran's nuclear development or their standoff with the West, but is in fact critical to the resolution of these issues."

Jules Crittenden thinks it's "great news": "It means when they whack that site, they'll be taking out a lot of Hezbollah scum along with the al-Quds scum and the future Shiite death squads of Iraq scum." And Richard at Freedom's Zone writes: "The U.S can't allow Iran to kill American troops indefinitely, be it by proxy or otherwise. … I wouldn't be surprised to see targeted attacks on selected sites in Iran—when the time is 'ripe'—which could be sooner than we think." While Rational International says: "Arms leaking over the border is one thing. I can legitimately imagine that Tehran could not completely control that even if it wanted to. I have a tough time believing, though, that Hezbollah could be operating multiple training camps within Iran without the consent, if not the direction, of the Iranian central government."

Think Progress' Spencer Ackerman thinks it's perfectly logical for Iran to be underwriting Hezbollah: "Not only have we invaded and occupied two of their neighbors, we're involved in a worldwide effort to stop them from achieving any form of nuclear technology, we step up patrols in the Persian Gulf and we even build military bases a stone's throw from their border. In the hands of the dolts and warmongers who both staff this administration and have their designs on the next one, the U.S.-Iran War is a Gulf Of Tonkin incident just waiting to happen."

Read more about Hezbollah training Iraqis.



today's blogs
Deal, Er, No Deal
By Noreen Malone
Monday, May 5, 2008, at 5:57 PM ET

Bloggers dissect the Microsoft-Yahoo nondeal, mull over Eight Belles' Derby death, and discuss Obama's promise to the Teamsters.

Deal, er, no deal: Microsoft withdrew its much-ballyhooed bid to snap up Yahoo after a $5 billion increase failed to impress the dot-com company. Yahoo's stock took a significant hit Monday, while shares of rival Google rose.

At the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Microsoft Blog Todd Bishop shares a Microsoft internal e-mail in which CEO Steve Ballmer declares, "Ultimately, our goal is to build the industry-leading business in search, online advertising, media, and social networking. Kevin Maney at Portfolio's Tech Observer sees software, Microsoft's bedrock, as conspicously and problematically absent in that trinity of goals: "The way to sell, deliver and monetize software may be changing, but the need for great software is only going to grow. Microsoft can't compete with Google in search because, maybe, it shouldn't be trying to. It should be able to kick Google's butt in delivering software for businesses and consumers -- IF Microsoft doesn't get distracted so it puts out products like Vista, which has made a lot of users unhappy."

Slate contributor Henry Blodget thinks that the deal was botched over more than just price disagreements, writing on Silicon Alley Insider: "The only chance a deal like this would have of working would be if both companies were completely committed to making it work. And it's hard to see how Steve ever would have gotten that level of enthusiasm from Yahoo--when Jerry, David, and the board have spent every waking minute for the past three months doing everything they could think of to avoid a fate they apparently considered worse than death: a Microsoft takeover."

What's the next step for Microsoft? Possibly investigating a buyout of Facebook, MySpace, or AOL, the last of which Valleywag's Nicholas Carlson thinks would be ill-considered: "(What, are they pulling for a Nsync reunion tour as well?) … But there's a reason AOL is cheap, people. Compete reports visits to AOL are down 21 percent in the last year. It's 'people count' dropped from 74 million to 60 million in the same time. Face it: AOL remains popular because old people in middle America are too lazy to change their default home page."

As for Yahoo's execs, Kara Swisher writes on BoomTown that "I have to say that your stock drop isn't the worst thing you will have to deal with this morning when you pull up at work. The worst? That'll be the very hairy eyeballs you will be getting from a lot more of your employees, who are scared silly and a lot peeved by the limb many feel you have dragged them and their stock options out onto."

Indeed, though Yahoo's stock sank, it wasn't by as much as many had predicted, leading TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld to explain that "if the shares don't drop much further, that could mean Wall Street is still pricing in another takeover attempt from Microsoft or someone else, or perhaps a Google advertising deal."

Read more about the Microsoft/Yahoo fallout. In Slate, James Ledbetter writes that Yahoo goofed.

Derby downer: After Big Brown ran to victory in the Kentucky Derby on Saturday, second-place horse Eight Belles (which Hillary Clinton picked to win) collapsed, having broken her two front ankles, and was euthanized. Bloggers argue over whether Thoroughbred racing constitutes animal cruelty and, sigh, hash out the political parallels.

Wayne Pacelle at A Humane Nation, the Humane Society's blog, argues that whatever outrage Eight Belles' death evokes, it will be all too brief: "We'll say a few words about horse racing, as do the commentators and industry press, but we'll return to our priorities in a couple of days. But that's a mistake for us all. This industry has not had a rigorous critic to set it in the straight and narrow, and major problems have grown and festered." Meanwhile, PETA called for the Eight Belles' jockey to be suspended, prompting reader Ken Letizia at the Beefs to complain: "How ridiculous to blame the jockey for this horse's injuries. Why would he deliberately kill his own bread and butter, his lively-hood ?... This is a sport, whether you agree with it or not, it is just that."

Parallels to the Democratic primary were drawn throughout the blogosphere, since, as D.C. bureau chief Toby Harnden on the Telegraph's blog noted, "If Barack Obama was looking for a good omen at the end of a bad week, the outcome of yesterday's Kentucky Derby might have provided one." However, Slate's Mickey Kaus explains the mainstream media's surprising general abstention from the easy Hillary-Eight Belles comparison: "The Eight Belles Metaphor is so obvious that everyone is embarrassed to use it, figuring that everyone else is already using it—a thought born embalmed as a cliche, already tiresome from anticipated over-expression before being sincerely expressed in the first place."

Read more about Eight Belles' untimely demise.

Teaming up: The Wall Street Journal reports that the Teamsters' February endorsement of Barack Obama may not have been entirely pure of heart (a real, um, break with Teamsters tradition); rather, Obama reportedly made a back-room promise to end strict federal monitoring of corruption in the union, which has historical ties to the mob.

Greg Sargent at TPM Election Central reports that the Obama campaign said the candidate made public remarks on ending federal oversight in 2004 and that the WSJ "overplayed" its story for effect. Politico's Ben Smith features a sound clip he says proves Hillary Clinton shares the same position on the Teamsters and concludes, "This one will, I suspect, be used against either Democrat in the fall." (As a handy reference, at ABC News' Political Punch, Jake Tapper parses both Clinton and Obama's current declared positions on the Teamsters.)

On Hot Air, conservative Ed Morrissey contextualizes Obama's stance, saying that "[t]his answer stands in stark contrast to Obama's response on the DC gun ban. When asked whether the city's outright ban on handguns was constitutional, the constitutional lawyer refused to take a position, claiming he had not read the briefs. Has he done any research on the Teamsters and the status of the oversight effort? Or does he have a different threshold when it comes to pandering to union bosses rather than gun owners?"

Liberal Mahablog is worked up over conservative coverage of what it considers an overblown issue: "In other words, reducing government supervision of the Teamsters is tantamount to 'looking the other way on the issue of corruption.' The Teamsters were corrupt in the past; therefore, they will always be corrupt. They are corrupt by definition. Funny Big Corporations and financial institutions are not held to the same standard, huh?"

Read more about Obama and the Teamsters.



today's papers
Let My People In
By Daniel Politi
Friday, May 9, 2008, at 6:20 AM ET

The New York Times leads with the United Nations' increasing pressure on Burmese officials to drop all restrictions and allow relief workers and aid to enter the country. It's now been almost a week since Cyclone Nargis devastated Burma on Saturday, but emergency supplies continue to trickle in at an unacceptable pace as the military junta is adamant that it won't cede control over the relief efforts. "They have simply not facilitated access in the way we have a right to expect," the U.N. official in charge of the relief effort said. The Wall Street Journal also leads its world-wide newsbox with Burma and points out that the military junta allowed the first U.N. aid shipments to enter the country. The Washington Post leads with a look at how Sen. Barack Obama began an effort to unify the Democratic Party behind his candidacy, even as Sen. Hillary Clinton continued to campaign and insist she has a better chance of winning the November election.

USA Today leads with new data showing that an increasing number of prime borrowers are falling behind on their mortgage payments and that foreclosures are on the rise. Although the numbers are still small and the problem is nowhere near as severe as in the subprime market, if they increase further, it "could prolong the housing crisis." The Los Angeles Times leads with news that the national coordinator of Mexico's efforts to wage war against organized crime was killed in his home by an assassin. Sources tell the paper that the so-called Sinaloa cartel was responsible for the attack against Edgar Milan Gomez, who was the country's third-ranking police official.

Two U.N. transport planes full of relief supplies finally reached Burma yesterday, but no one thinks that's anywhere close to what's needed to assist the estimated 1.5 million survivors. Defense Secretary Robert Gates described how U.S. military transport planes and helicopters are in Thailand just waiting for the go-ahead to begin delivering aid, but the Burmese government has yet to approve their entry. The Post points out that one of the U.N. planes that arrived in Burma yesterday "had sat for two days in Dubai … waiting for clearance." The WSJ devotes a separate story inside to a look at how the Bush administration and aid groups are "examining radical solutions" that include "air drops, border deliveries and helicopter landings." But some warn that such unilateral action will only make things worse.

The United Nations says several disaster experts haven't been allowed inside Burma, and they're also just waiting around in Thailand. It seems Burmese authorities want to pick who can go into the country and who can't and are favoring aid workers from Asian countries while denying entrance to others. "I've never seen an emergency situation such as this before," the regional director of the International Rescue Committee said. "A week after the disaster, the entire humanitarian community is still sitting in another country." The NYT talks to some experts who say the Burmese government is reluctant to receive foreign help because it would prove that it can't take care of its own people. "The disaster has demonstrated that their omniscient power has been greatly exaggerated," one said.

Of course, as time passes, it becomes more likely that the death toll will continue to increase, and there's the very real risk that epidemics of disease will break out. By all accounts, the situation is nothing short of desperate. For the first time since Saturday, the NYT, LAT, and WP all publish dispatches from inside Burma. Staff writers from the LAT and NYT managed to get into the country and file dispatches from Rangoon, Burma's biggest city, where the death toll was relatively small but the destruction caused by the cyclone is still plainly evident, as residents struggle to pick up the pieces. The fact that the government hasn't managed "to clear debris and restore basic services like water and power in what is the country's wealthiest city" is an illustration of how slow the recovery process will be, says the NYT. The LAT reports that "five days later, a semblance of normality was returning" to the city but says residents now have to pay "exorbitant prices for bare essentials." The WP fronts a dispatch written by a freelance journalist from the "midpoint of the storm's path across the delta," where survivors are struggling to stay alive. Although a few aid groups are working in the area, food remains scarce, and Burmese soldiers and police officers appeared more interested in operating checkpoints than carrying out relief operations.

Even as Obama said yesterday that he's likely to win a majority of pledged delegates after Kentucky and Oregon vote on May 20, he's not publicly calling for Clinton to step down from the contest. It seems his campaign is being careful not to make it seem like Obama is trying to push Clinton to quit since he will need the backing of her supporters in November. The chairman of the Clinton campaign suggested yesterday that Clinton won't take the fight to the nomination when he said that "after June 3, this is going to come to a conclusion." The Post's Dan Balz says that while it's possible that Clinton might end her campaign early due to lack of funds, the most likely scenario is that she won't officially drop out until the undecided superdelegates move into the Obama column after June 3.

The WP fronts a look at how Sen. John McCain pushed a land swap deal through Congress that will "directly benefit" one of his top fundraisers. After approval of the legislation, which will allow an Arizona businessman to exchange remote land for valuable property owned by the federal government, SunCor Development was hired to build thousands of homes in the area. SunCor Development is run by Steven Betts, a longtime McCain supporter who has raised more than $100,000 for the Arizona Republican's presidential race. Betts denies he ever talked to McCain about it, but besides that connection, there are plenty of other eyebrow-raising aspects to the deal. McCain wasn't very eager to support the swap at first, but that all appeared to change after the businessman who owned the remote land hired a group of lobbyists that included several people who once worked for McCain. Some have also criticized the legislation, saying that the federal government got a raw deal. This isn't the first time that land swaps pushed through by McCain have come under scrutiny because they benefitted campaign contributors. Last month, the NYT took a look at how McCain has sponsored legislation that helped a wealthy Arizona businessman, who has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the senator, get millions of dollars from the federal government in complex land exchanges.

The WSJ goes above the fold with a large picture (yes, a large picture!) of, and everyone mentions inside, the second day of open street battles in Beirut between supporters of the Lebanese government and Shiite gunmen tied to the Hezbollah-led opposition. The fighting intensified and killed at least four people after Hezbollah's leader accused the government of waging war against the group. Everyone says the fighting could push the country into a sectarian civil war, and the WSJ points out that the conflict "has taken on the feel of a political proxy war between Washington and Tehran."

The LAT's Joel Stein sets out to buy some medical marijuana and finds the whole process surprisingly simple. "I always wondered what would happen if marijuana were legalized for anyone over 18," Stein writes. "It seems it already has been, and nothing happened."



today's papers
Her Fight Will Go On
By Daniel Politi
Thursday, May 8, 2008, at 6:30 AM ET

The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal's world-wide newsbox all lead with the fallout from Tuesday's primaries. Sen. Hillary Clinton was already facing an uphill battle, but she awoke yesterday to a decidedly changed mood and a growing feeling that her quest for the nomination is simply a lost cause. Many are already referring to Sen. Barack Obama as the presumptive nominee. "Suddenly, a primary day that few expected to be decisive in the Democrats' long and close contest was interpreted on all sides as a game-changer," notes the WSJ. But Clinton vowed to stay in the race, and in order to quell any doubts about her determination, she campaigned in West Virginia, where she assured reporters that she'll keep going "until there is a nominee." Her advisers also publicly dismissed the idea that there had been any discussions about dropping out.

USA Today leads with Pentagon records that show how, since 2003, more than 43,000 U.S. troops were sent to Iraq or Afghanistan even though they had been deemed medically "non-deployable" in the weeks preceding their departure. This is seen as yet another example of how the military is short on troops. It's difficult to assess the gravity of the situation because the Pentagon doesn't list what the medical problems consisted of or how severe they were. A servicemember could be included in the category for simple problems, such as the need for eyeglasses or allergy medication, and they might have been resolved before most deployments. But there are at least a few soldiers who had to be sent back home because their medical problems proved to be too severe for a war zone.

In a sign of Clinton's growing financial troubles, her advisers confirmed that she had lent her campaign $6.4 million in the last month, on top of an earlier $5 million infusion from her personal coffers. Though previous signs of financial trouble had brought cash into the Clinton campaign, the NYT says that even her advisers expressed concern that her online fundraising efforts aren't going as well as in the past. Meanwhile, some of her supporters are also expressing doubts about whether there's a path to victory. Everyone points out that Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a big Clinton backer, said that she wants to "get her view on the rest of the race and what the strategy is."

In an interview with USAT, Clinton said she would be a better candidate against Sen. John McCain because she has a "much broader base to build a winning coalition on." She went on to say that an Associated Press article "found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me." Clinton insists, "There's a pattern emerging here."

For his part, Obama took the day off yesterday and spent time at home in Chicago. The LAT notes inside that Obama will begin to implement a new strategy that involves ignoring Clinton and acting like the de facto nominee. Although he won't abandon the primary campaign and still plans to make appearances in the states that will go to the polls in the next few weeks, he might also decide to take detours to important swing states that have already voted, such as Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania.

The WP asks a provocative question on Page One: "Did Rush Limbaugh Tilt Result In Indiana?" There're some interesting data, but the answer seems to be decidedly uninteresting: probably not. Limbaugh urged his listeners to take part in "Operation Chaos," which involved voting for Clinton "to bloody up Obama politically," and since the former first lady's margin of victory in Indiana was so small, some are wondering whether it had any effect. Clinton did hold an edge over Obama among Republican voters, and the most interesting fact is that approximately 60 percent of Republicans who supported the former first lady said they would vote for McCain in November even if Clinton were the nominee. But ultimately, her margin of victory among Republicans was significantly smaller than her overall edge with white Democrats. For what it's worth, Limbaugh called off "Operation Chaos" yesterday because he now thinks Obama is more vulnerable than Clinton.

The WP, NYT, and LAT all front the latest from Burma, where the top U.S. diplomat said the death toll from the cyclone could reach 100,000. Some aid began to arrive, but frustration keeps on increasing among foreign governments and relief organizations who say they're ready to launch a full-scale operation, but their efforts are being stymied by the country's military leaders, who are reluctant to let outsiders into the notoriously closed-off country. Actually, frustration doesn't even begin to describe what people around the world are feeling as the military junta seems willing to do everything in its power to let the suffering continue. Meanwhile, teams from several governments and numerous agencies are standing by in Bangkok just waiting for the go-ahead.

The NYT points out that France's foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, said "it would only take half an hour" for French boats and helicopters to reach the worst-hit areas, but the Burmese government isn't allowing them to proceed. The impatience has grown to such a degree that Kouchner proposed that the United Nations should invoke its "responsibility to protect" doctrine and simply ignore the government's wishes. The idea was shot down by others who said it would make the situation worse. Meanwhile, those on the ground continue to describe horrific scenes of survivors surrounded by bodies and animal carcasses, which, along with a general shortage of clean water, is raising fears that an epidemic could break out.

The NYT fronts, while the WP and LAT go inside with, the increasingly desperate situation in Zimbabwe. The Post reports that gangs loyal to President Robert Mugabe beat 11 opposition activists to death this week. The LAT reports that the main opposition party says 24 of its members have been killed since the controversial March 29 elections. On Friday, Zimbabwe's election commission finally announced the results of the presidential election, saying that although the opposition leader had won, it wasn't by a large enough margin to avoid a runoff. Now the ruling party seems ready to do everything it can to quiet any voices of opposition.

The NYT notes that teachers and aid workers are now being targeted, which means "the widening net of intimidation now appears to be taking a toll on children too." Many schools have closed, and more than 100 of them are being used as bases of operations for the gangs that are attacking opposition members in the countryside. A member of the ruling party's leadership made it clear to a reporter working for the NYT that the party won't be kicked out of power by the elections. "We're giving the people of Zimbabwe another opportunity to mend their ways, to vote properly," he said. And if the majority votes for the opposition? "Prepare to be a war correspondent."



today's papers
The Beginning of the End?
By Daniel Politi
Wednesday, May 7, 2008, at 6:27 AM ET

All the papers lead with yesterday's Democratic primaries, where Sen. Barack Obama trounced Sen. Hillary Clinton by 14 percentage points while the former first lady only managed to win Indiana by two percentage points. The Los Angeles Times easily wins the headline-of-the-day award: "Obama cruises; Clinton clings." It was a devastating night for Clinton because yesterday's primaries made up the largest remaining Democratic contests and were her last real chance to close Obama's lead and convince party leaders that voters are turning her way. If there's one clear theme running through all the papers it's that this may really be the beginning of the end for Clinton, who vowed to continue in the race.

The Washington Post points out that even though Clinton managed to win Indiana, "the night produced a far different outcome than the Clinton campaign had hoped for." Expectations were high that her margin of victory would be larger in Indiana and that she would be able to cut into Obama's lead in North Carolina. But that didn't happen, and Obama's victory address sounded a lot like a general-election speech. The New York Times notes that due to delays in one county in Indiana, "Clinton did not appear on television until well after Mr. Obama, allowing him to put his stamp of victory on the evening." And while Obama "seemed relaxed and triumphant," as USA Today puts it, the LAT points out that "there was a note of wistfulness to [Clinton's] remarks. Clinton lingered over thank-yous to her family and supporters even as she promised to continue campaigning."

Besides being a big night for Obama, the Wall Street Journal is quick to point out that the results "underscored some of the Illinois senator's weaknesses and the party's fissures." Almost half of the voters in both states said the controversy over Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was an important consideration when picking a candidate, and the majority of them supported Clinton. Also, as has become a pattern in the later contests, about one-quarter of each candidate's supporters said they would either vote Republican or not at all if their first choice doesn't end up being the Democratic nominee. And specifically in Indiana the numbers were even starker, as less than half of Clinton's backers said they would vote for Obama in November. Besides these nuggets, the exit polls don't have any huge revelations as each candidate won by mostly holding on to his or her reliable base of support. Strangely enough, the exit polls didn't ask about the gas tax issue, so there's no real new insight into whether it swayed voters in either direction.

It's worth pointing out, as the NYT does in a Page One analysis, that winning Indiana was no small feat for Clinton, since Obama had once expected to easily win the state. But, ultimately, Obama managed to show he could survive some of the roughest weeks in his campaign, while Clinton "gained no new argument to make to the superdelegates," writes Slate's John Dickerson. And in some important ways, making that argument is now even harder. Following the racial divide that has become common in this contest, more than 90 percent of African-Americans voted for Obama, and superdelegates aren't eager to anger one of the Democratic Party's most reliable bases of support. If the margin would have been greater in Indiana, or smaller in North Carolina, it would have been easy for Clinton to dismiss calls that she drop out of the race. But now, the calls are likely to get louder, and she's likely to have a hard time raising money for the remaining contests. The WP notes inside that even Clinton aides were sounding pessimistic yesterday about her chances to win the nomination. Regardless, Slate's Christopher Beam writes that Clinton isn't likely to drop out yet if only because she will probably win the primaries in West Virginia and Kentucky in the next two weeks.

In a front-page analysis, the LAT says that yesterday's results leave "Clinton with one overriding task: to make the path longer." Everyone points out that Clinton's campaign is clearly turning its attention to pushing for a resolution of the dispute regarding the delegates in Michigan and Florida. "It would be a little strange to have a nominee chosen by 48 states," Clinton said last night. In this effort, Clinton's aides are hammering home the idea that the number of delegates needed to win the nomination is 2,209, instead of the 2,025 that would be required if Michigan and Florida are left out. According to the Associated Press, Obama now has 1,815.5 delegates and Clinton 1,672, with 55 still to be divided.

In other news, everyone fronts the latest from the cyclone that devastated Burma on Saturday. Burma's state television announced the estimated death toll has risen to 22,000, and there are still 41,000 missing. In addition, an estimated 1 million survivors are thought to have been left homeless. Some aid began to flow, and the Burmese government has said it will allow international relief organizations to enter the country. But there were complaints yesterday that the Burmese government isn't doing enough to speed up the aid-delivery process and is still requiring foreign workers to obtain visas before they can enter the country. The Post notes that it seems "little or no aid reached the Irrawaddy Delta," the worst-affected region.

The United States offered $3 million in aid, an increase from the $250,000 that was announced on Monday. After signing legislation to award a Congressional Gold Medal to Burma's most famous political dissident, Aung San Suu Kyi, President Bush criticized the military junta and pleaded with the Burmese leaders to "let the United States come to help you help the people." The WP and NYT point out that foreign leaders and aid groups criticized the Bush administration for mixing a political message into the relief talk. "The priority now is rendering assistance to thousands of displaced people who urgently need our assistance," Australia's foreign minister said.

In a Page One story, the WSJ points out that in addition to all the devastation, the cyclone is also likely to create "a second crisis: one of deepening hunger" not only in Burma but across the region. Burma expected to export rice this year, but the cyclone devastated the rice-growing areas, which not only means there will be less food inside the country but also that the rice supply in several neighboring countries could be affected. This, in turn could lead to higher rice prices, which had already been skyrocketing lately.

While the Democratic presidential contenders continue to fight for the nomination, Sen. John McCain is busy trying to unify the Republican Party. Yesterday, McCain tried to reassure conservatives who may be nervous about his record that if elected president, he's committed to appointing justices with "a proven commitment to judicial restraint." McCain vowed to appoint Supreme Court justices that follow the mold of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito Jr. The NYT's editorial board is thankful for the speech, which helped put back into focus "what this year's presidential race is all about." The NYT hopes it will work as a cue for the Democratic contenders to begin explaining to voters "what is truly at stake in this election." Obama and Clinton "can continue to tear each other up and fight over each superdelegate, or they can debate the issues—for the sake of the voters."



today's papers
Burma Nightmare
By Daniel Politi
Tuesday, May 6, 2008, at 6:30 AM ET

All the papers lead with the rapidly rising death toll of the devastating cyclone that hit Burma on Saturday. The New York Times and Washington Post cite government figures released today that say as many as 15,000 people were killed (early morning wire stories report that an additional 30,000 people are still missing). Burma's foreign minister went on state-run television to report that 10,000 people died in just one town. The Los Angeles Times notes that before the number of dead started climbing yesterday the previous official tally was 351 and points out that the cyclone potentially left "hundreds of thousands of people homeless." The Wall Street Journal reports that it was the country's worst recorded natural disaster and points out that the previous record was held by a 1926 storm that killed 2,700. Everybody says that, if the numbers are accurate, it would amount to the worst natural disaster in Asia since the 2004 tsunami. USA Today focuses on the relief efforts and says it could be several days before the victims begin to receive much-needed food, water, and medical assistance.

"The call for international aid quickly became politicized," notes the WP. First lady Laura Bush, who has long taken a special interest in Burmese issues, held a rare news conference where she accused the country's military leaders of failing to issue warnings about the impending cyclone and blocking international aid efforts. (The LAT points out things got even more politicized when the first lady announced that President Bush would sign legislation today awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to political activist Aung San Suu Kyi.) A United Nations spokesman said the Burmese military junta is "receptive to international assistance" and the notoriously closed-off country said it would accept foreign aid workers, says the LAT. But the NYT reports that, so far, "most foreigners and all foreign journalists have been barred from entering the country."

USAT notes that the United Nations said it is ready to give aid worth up to $30 million from its emergency response fund. So far, the United States has made available a pathetic $250,000 to aid organizations, but the first lady promised that "more aid will be forthcoming." Any further assistance from the United States might have to go through separate relief organizations because of U.S. sanctions currently in place, says the LAT. But the full extent of the damage is still not known as many roads are still impossible to traverse, and it might be days before the United Nations can independently confirm how much assistance will be needed.

The LAT, WP, and NYT all hear reports that people in Burma are complaining that the military has been slow to respond and provide relief. "People are saying, 'Last September, they were incredibly efficient at clearing 100,000 people off the street, so why aren't they being as efficient clearing 100,000 trees off the street?'" a "Bangkok-based diplomat" tells the WP.

Despite all the devastation, the papers note that the country's leaders still seem determined to hold a controversial referendum on a new constitution Saturday. The government says the constitution will set the country on the road to democracy, but critics insist it's just a ploy to legitimize the junta's power and the vote won't be anywhere close to fair. Early-morning wire stories report that the government announced today that voting will be postponed until May 24 in many of the hardest-hit areas.

Stateside, it's yet another day-that-could-change-everything as voters head to the polls in North Carolina and Indiana to pick whether they'd rather see Sen. Hillary Clinton or Sen. Barack Obama run against Sen. John McCain. But actually no one really expects today to bring much clarity to anything. A sign of this attitude can be seen in the WP's Dan Balz, who has regularly been writing a feature titled "Eight Questions Today's Primaries Could Answer" before the big primaries this year. Today, Balz nixes the "Could Answer" part and merely asks general questions about the contest. Still, any way you slice it, today's voting is important. North Carolina and Indiana are the last two big primaries with a total of 187 delegates up for grabs. After today, the six remaining contests have a mere 217 pledged delegates to hand out and most already have a clear favorite. The Post says Oregon is the only one that could be considered competitive, but Obama is seen as the favorite in that state.

It's a big day for both candidates, but probably more so for Clinton, who could use today's results to support her contention that the race is turning in her favor. The NYT's Adam Nagourney fronts a look at the three possible outcomes in today's primaries and says that if Clinton manages to win Indiana and at least come close in North Carolina, it will undoubtedly raise more doubts about Obama's chances in November. But if she loses both states, it "would almost certainly mean lights out for the Clinton campaign." The most likely result is that Clinton will get a victory in Indiana and Obama will win North Carolina, which, of course, means the contest will keep going. The Post's Balz says that after today, the most important date that will help determine the outcome of the contest could be May 31, when the Democratic National Committee's rules and bylaws committee will get together to consider what to do about the Michigan and Florida delegates.

The WP's E.J. Dionne Jr. says Clinton has recently found her best campaign strategy by portraying herself as a populist and a fighter. "It took a series of defeats to galvanize her campaign and help her put forward a better self." But in doing so, she began advocating for the gas-tax holiday, which was the best thing that could have happened to Obama. The senator from Illinois had been having a rough couple of weeks and it seemed like he was losing focus, but the tax holiday issue brought back the old Obama who could talk about breaking from traditional Washington politics. "A contest between the old Obama and the new Clinton is a fair fight," he writes. "It's too bad only a few states are left to see it."

The LAT and NYT both front, and the WP goes inside with, looks at how the big winner of Microsoft's failure to buy Yahoo is Google. It's ironic because Microsoft clearly wanted to buy Yahoo in order to gain ground on Google, but it may have ended up strengthening the Internet giant. Google began complaining about the possible merger, but then decided to play nice and offered Yahoo a partnership. That led to Yahoo asking for more money, and Microsoft ended its courtship. Conclusion? Google is the king of the hill. "Microsoft used to set the agenda for technology, period, and Google is setting the agenda now," an analyst tells the LAT.

The WP's Eugene Robinson writes his "annual American Idol column" and says there's something wrong with America's favorite reality program. Ratings are down, and "this season, it was easy to find contestants to root against but hard to find anyone to root for." Robinson says the program "lacks sizzle" partly because producers have been trying to milk as much money from the show as possible and as a result are overextending the contestants to the point of exhaustion. Nowadays, "the most urgent reason to watch the show isn't to see who sings well or gets voted off, it's to see how out of it Paula Abdul appears to be on a given evening."



today's papers
Out of Sight
By Daniel Politi
Monday, May 5, 2008, at 6:32 AM ET

The New York Times leads with a look at how very little is known about many of the people who have died while detained by immigration authorities. The NYT obtained a list through a Freedom of Information Act request and reveals that 66 people died while in immigration custody from January 2004 to November 2007. USA Today leads with figures that show welfare rolls rose in 27 states in the last six months of 2007. This marks a reversal since the numbers had been steadily decreasing for more than a decade. "When the economy starts to tank, that's when our business starts growing," the chief of eligibility for Nevada's welfare agency said.

The Los Angeles Times leads with a look at how health care will provide voters in November with an issue on which the Republican and Democratic presidential contenders offer very different proposals. Although all the candidates say they want more Americans to have access to affordable health insurance, their strategies on how to get there offer a stark choice, ultimately because "they view the problem differently." The Washington Post leads with the latest he-said/she-said from the campaign trail as the candidates campaigned furiously before the critical Tuesday primaries in Indiana and North Carolina. The Wall Street Journal leads its world-wide newsbox with a look at how Sen. Barack Obama has gone back to addressing voters in a more intimate setting. Even though the large rallies draw lots of people, they don't necessarily help him gain new voters, and Obama's campaign now sees the arena-style events as one of the main reasons why he lost the popular vote in Texas.

Although the list obtained by the NYT "is the fullest accounting to date of deaths in immigration detention," the document "raises as many questions as it answers" because there are few details on the list, and the information is "often unreliable." Once a person gets detained by immigration authorities, it is notoriously difficult for friends and family members to get information, "even when they die." The NYT followed up on a few of the deaths and finds family members who still have questions about how or why their loved ones died. Some families say they weren't told when a detainee became sick, and one woman says she only found out her husband had died several weeks after the fact. Critics, including several lawmakers, are calling for greater oversight of a system that has ballooned in size over the past few years.

Both of the Democratic presidential contenders made an appearance on the Sunday-morning talk-show circuit. Sen. Barack Obama once again had to discuss his former pastor, while Sen. Hillary Clinton had to answer questions about her stance on Iran, but they both frequently came back to the issue that has dominated the rhetoric in the last days before the Tuesday primaries: the gas-tax holiday. Obama continued to characterize the holiday as a political "gimmick." When Clinton was asked whether she could name an economist who agreed with her on the holiday, she said, "I'm not going to put in my lot with economists." And then, in a not-so-veiled reference to Obama, she said that "elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantage the vast majority of Americans."

In the last few days, Clinton has been increasing her populist rhetoric in order to make Obama seem an out-of-touch elitist who doesn't understand the problems of regular Americans. The NYT says that as the Tuesday primaries approach, "the candidates were a study in contrasts." Clinton seems to be getting angrier as she talks about how working-class Americans are constantly suffering at the hands of people who couldn't care less about them. For his part, Obama is striking a more conciliatory tone, trying to appeal to Democrats who may like Clinton but mostly just want to win back the White House in November. In a separate Page One piece, the NYT takes a look at how the warrior attitude that Clinton is displaying on the trail also highlights why she's such a divisive figure.

Reviewing the Sunday talk-show appearances, the NYT's Alessandra Stanley says the programs "provided an arresting tableau of the reversal of fortunes in the Democratic race." While Clinton appeared "forceful, confident and at times even frisky," Obama "looked grave and dispirited."

The NYT and USAT both front new polls that show how much Obama's standing has been hurt in the past few weeks. The NYT says that while most Americans think Obama handled the controversies regarding the Rev. Jeremiah Wright appropriately, almost half thought he denounced his former pastor because it would help him politically rather than because of actual disagreements. And even though 24 percent of voters say the issue would affect their vote in November, 44 percent said it would be important to "most people you know." For its part, USAT's poll gives even worse news to Obama because, for the first time in three months, it shows Clinton with more support from Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. (USAT helpfully mentions that other polls continue to show Obama in the lead.) And while Obama used to beat Clinton by wide margins on the question of who would be a stronger candidate against McCain, the former first lady is now ahead by five points. The one piece of good news for Obama is that voters still see him as more honest, and the NYT poll says "an overwhelming majority" see the gas-tax holiday as political pandering.

The NYT fronts word that U.S. officials believe Hezbollah militants are training Shiite militias in Iran. This information apparently came from captured militia members and was given to the Iraqi government, but it's not clear whether the issue was discussed when Iraqi leaders traveled to Tehran last week. Although U.S. officials say the training is overseen by the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, the instructors are from Hezbollah.

Meanwhile, it's not really clear whether the Iraqi government believes Iran is arming and training Shiite militias. The LAT does a good job of explaining the confusion by noting that yesterday it seemed like the Iraqi government was taking distance from the American claims of Iranian involvement when it announced that a committee had been set up to investigate. But a few hours later, the Iraqi government spokesman said his comments had been misinterpreted. He said the proof of Iranian involvement is there, and the committee is tasked with compiling the evidence so it can be presented to Tehran.

The LAT fronts an interesting piece that looks at how more Chinese companies are choosing to set up shop in the United States. Several states are working hard to promote themselves and are offering plenty of incentives. The strategy seems to be working, and more Chinese investors are deciding that it makes economic sense to expand into the United States, despite higher labor costs.

Ever wondered why there are so many Vietnamese manicurists? The LAT describes how it all started entirely by chance when actress Tippi Hedren took it upon herself to teach a group of 20 Vietnamese refugees how to do nails in 1975. Now, approximately 43 percent of nail technicians are Vietnamese Americans.



today's papers
No Deal
By Ben Whitford
Sunday, May 4, 2008, at 7:59 AM ET

The LA Times leads on Microsoft's surprise decision to ditch its proposed buyout of Yahoo; the move, which is expected to send the Internet giant's stock price tumbling, came after the companies' chiefs failed to agree on a price tag for the deal. The New York Times reports that health care is becoming prohibitively expensive even for people with health insurance, thanks to the softening economy and rising premiums and out-of-pocket expenses. The Washington Post leads on news that nearly eight years after al-Qaida almost sank the USS Cole, all those convicted of the attack have either escaped or been released from prison by Yemeni officials.

Microsoft took almost $50 billion off the table yesterday, breaking off merger talks with Yahoo after three months of high-level negotiations. "The economics demanded by Yahoo do not make sense for us," said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Over the past week, Microsoft had increased its buyout offer to $33 a share—a $5 billion increase, but still well short of Yahoo's $37-a-share asking price. The LAT notes that some analysts had predicted Microsoft would withdraw its offer as a "brass-knuckles bargaining tactic," hoping to drive down Yahoo stock and force the company to accept Microsoft's terms. The NYT looks at Yahoo's possible next steps: the need to placate investors might give fresh impetus to a search-advertising deal with Google, or to potential mergers with AOL or MySpace.

The economic slowdown is taking its toll even on people with health insurance, reports the NYT: doctors, employers and union officials say that rising premiums, reduced coverage, and bigger deductibles are making it harder and harder for people to meet the costs of their medical treatment. In many cases, people are reportedly skipping routine medical checkups to save on co-payments; at worst, people are finding that their health insurance is adequate only as long as they don't actually require medical attention. "There's a real shift in the burden of health care to people who happen to be sick," says one analyst.

The Democratic presidential candidates continued to trade punches yesterday over the federal gasoline tax. Hillary Clinton renewed calls for a suspension of the tax, while Obama dismissed the plan as a "gimmick" and asked Democrats to disregard "phony ideas, calculated to win elections instead of actually solving problems." The NYT off-leads with an analysis arguing that the row speaks to the candidates' economic instincts: policy wonks say Clinton's ideas make better political than economic sense, while Obama gets lower marks for fiscal discipline.

Meanwhile, almost unnoticed, Barack Obama picked up another caucus victory, winning Guam by just seven votes. The next contest, of course, is Tuesday's double-whammy in Indiana and North Carolina: The NYT considers the significance of Indiana's splintered demographics, while the LAT looks to North Carolina, where more than a third of a million people have already cast early votes. It's looking increasingly likely, though, that this week's primaries won't be enough to knock either candidate out of the race; the LAT says both camps are poised to keep slugging until the end of the primary season.

Looking further ahead, the Post fronts a report on Barack Obama's attempts to redefine what it means to be a patriot: His argument that true patriotism lies not in flag pins but in responsible leadership might be a hard sell in the face of John McCain's heroic war record. The NYT picks up the theme, questioning Obama's conviction that he can rise above efforts to use patriotic symbols as a bludgeon: Like Michael Dukakis in 1988, the paper argues, Obama is new to the national scene and vulnerable to being redefined by Republican attacks.

From one horse race to another: Big Brown won the Kentucky Derby yesterday, but Eight Belles made the headlines, finishing second before collapsing with two broken ankles and having to be euthanized on the track. "Thoroughbred racing is in moral crisis, and everyone now knows it," says the Post, noting that horses are now so over-raced that an average of two per day suffer career-ending injuries.

Shocks from poorly installed electrical wiring have killed at least a dozen American soldiers at military bases across Iraq in recent years; many more troops have been injured. The NYT reports that the incidents, which continued even after electricians and military officials raised safety concerns, have led to renewed questions about the oversight of contractors in the war zone.

DNA evidence isn't all it's cracked up to be, according to the LAT: While it's incredibly unlikely that any given person's DNA will coincidentally match samples from a crime scene, the odds of an incorrect match increase enormously when investigators check genetic patterns against the millions of records in the national DNA database. Unfortunately, that's seldom made clear to jurors, potentially resulting in unfair convictions in cases decided by DNA evidence.

Researchers have found a way to breed poison-free fugu blowfish, notes the NYT. That's good news for Japanese gourmands, who prize the fish as a delicacy—but bad news for fugu suppliers, who until now have been able to charge high prices for safely cleaned and prepared blowfish. "We won't approve it," huffs an official from Japan's National Fugu Association. "We're not engaging in this irrelevant discussion."



today's papers
Recession Lessened
By Arthur Delaney
Saturday, May 3, 2008, at 5:44 AM ET

The New York Times leads with word that the U.S. economy lost 20,000 jobs in April. The bad news is that it's the fourth consecutive month of losses. The good news is that most analysts expected the losses to be much worse, and some call the better-than-expected numbers a sign that the economy may not be entering a recession. The Los Angeles Times leads with news that the Federal Reserve said yesterday it would give money to big banks to prevent the nation's financial system from "seizing up." The Washington Post leads with the first deployment of U.S.-funded Palestinian security forces in the West Bank. The forces are hitting the streets undertrained and underequipped. The Wall Street Journal tops its world-wide newsbox with election results from England: The Labour Party suffered its worst loss in 40 years, coming in third behind the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats.

The LAT reports that forecasters had expected as many as 85,000 jobs to be shed in April. Despite the not-so-terrible losses, U.S. workers are still feeling pinched, thanks to lessening hours and low wages, reports the NYT. The private research organization that officially determines whether the nation is in recession defines a recession as a "significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months." The Times does not venture a guess at whether the current situation fits the description. Instead, the paper reaches for soon-to-be-laid-off factory worker to illustrate its piece. In its front-page take, the WSJ comes up with an unemployed construction worker but rounds out the optimistic view with a man who found a new job at an Audi store one month after getting axed by a Volvo dealership.

The LAT notes that the Fed's move to pump cash into banks came shortly after it signed off on tough new regulations for the credit card industry. The two initiatives show that the current Fed chairman, unlike his predecessor, is willing to be aggressive in disparate areas of the economy.

The WP reports that the multimillion dollar training program for West Bank security forces, designed to strengthen the Palestinian Authority, is sending its first class into action without some important gear—like helmets, for example. The Post says the lack of equipment is due to interference from Israel. But that doesn't explain the force's unpreparedness. In a final phase of training, some members of the security force "killed" each other in a simulated-combat exercise, according to an unnamed source, who also tells the Post that training supervisors wasted lots of time putting on "dog-and-pony shows" for U.S. congressional delegations. A State Department official in Washington, also anonymous, calls the allegation "complete baloney."

The NYT mentions the new security force in a front-page piece looking at the dilemma posed to Israel by its recent success in preventing suicide bombings. Israel's tactics—nightly raids and arrests in the West Bank— complicate the effort for lasting peace.

Prepare to die, murderers: The U.S. government is ready to start killing you again. The NYT reports that states' execution dockets are filling up after the recent Supreme Court ruling that lifted a moratorium on capital punishment. At least 14 executions are scheduled to take place by October. The Times scores a prison interview with the oldest man on Texas' death row, who says, "If it's my time to go, it's my time to go."

The WP fronts the Chinese government's surprisingly hands-off reaction to trouble in the stock market there, which has hurt small investors hardest. Regulators stepped in only last week after six months of watching the market crash, during which time several investors who had gambled and lost their savings committed suicide. Some are angry at the Chinese government, but analysts say it's time to get used to less regulation. One analyst offers a little tough love: "You lose money, you jump out the window, too bad. It's your problem."

Colleges and universities are hotbeds of support for presidential candidate Barack Obama, but enthusiasm for the Illinois senator hasn't quite bridged racial divides on campus, according to the WSJ. Social self-segregation persists despite shared fervor for Obama. The WSJ offers the scene at Duke University as a typical example.

The WP off-leads a profile of President Bush in his final year on the job. Bush is unwilling to play lame duck, the Post reports, and insists on fighting hopeless battles with the Democratic Congress. Sources say the stubbornness will contribute to Bush's legacy as a "man of principle."

The WSJ fronts the search for the next Howard Stern, who left a talent vacuum when he vacated his seat with CBS. Radio bigwigs see promise in Adam Carolla, of Loveline and The Man Show fame. The WSJ gives lots of space to the failed on-air dynamic between Carolla and Danny Bonaduce, who says he offered "quick wit" and "reasonable knowledge of current events." Carolla pretended to be ill to avoid working with him.

The NYT fronts a photo teasing an inside story about the battle in Los Angeles over taco trucks, whose business some local legislators want curbed. Taco lovers are honking mad. The LAT had the story a couple days ago.



war stories
Prison Break
Maybe the Army's not so hidebound after all.
By Fred Kaplan
Thursday, May 8, 2008, at 6:07 PM ET

On April 23, I wrote a column that turns out to have been mistaken—that, I've since found out, underestimated the U.S. Army's capacity to reward its creative dissidents.

The column praised two recent speeches by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, urging tomorrow's Army and Air Force officers to overhaul their bureaucratic cultures. "I encourage you to take on the mantle of fearless, thoughtful, but loyal dissent when the situation calls for it," Gates told an audience of cadets at West Point. "And … senior officers should embrace such dissent as a healthy dialogue and protect and advance those considerably more junior who are taking on that mantle."

Gates was referring implicitly to Paul Yingling, the Army lieutenant colonel who, a year earlier, had published an article in the Armed Forces Journal that accused the Army's general officer corps of lacking "professional character," "moral courage," and "creative intelligence." Yingling was a veteran of both Iraq wars, and, early in the present occupation, he was deputy commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, the unit that brought order to the city of Tal Afar through counterinsurgency methods well before Gen. David Petraeus took charge of U.S. forces.

Yingling was put in command of the 1-21 Field Artillery Battalion—an assignment that had been in the works months before his article was published. In my April column, I went on:

The real story lay in what happened next. His battalion was assigned not, say, to fighting insurgents but rather to prison-guard detail. Yingling himself has just been redeployed to Iraq, where he will assist in rehabilitating Iraqi detainees. This could be an interesting, potentially important job, but it's hardly in the center of things, and it's the very opposite of a career-enhancer.

I concluded the column: "[A]s long as junior officers see (as Gates put it) 'principled, creative, reform-minded leaders' like Paul Yingling assigned to lowly positions, the military will not nourish many more."

It turns out that I was wrong on two points. First, contrary to my implication, Yingling's battalion was not sent to prison-guard duty as a punishment. There isn't much demand these days for artillery fire in Iraq or Afghanistan. Still, artillery battalions have to do something. There is a shortage of units to guard prisons. So that is where the 1-21 was sent. The planning officers who make such decisions generally have no idea who commands a particular unit. Generals or their aides don't often reach down into the bowels of this network and redirect small-scale units, like battalions, out of spite. I am persuaded that, in any case, this is not why Yingling's unit got the assignment that it did.

More crucial (and here is where some good news enters the picture), "detainee operations" in Iraq have become a lot more important—and more innovative—than they used to be. With no fanfare, they have become a key element in the broader counterinsurgency campaign. If Yingling was singled out for his current job, it was in recognition—not in grudge-slinging defiance—of his talents. And, in fact, it seems that he was singled out.

This morning, I spoke with Maj. Gen. Doug Stone, commanding general of Task Force 134, which runs detainee operations in Iraq. On the speaker phone with him was his deputy commander, Paul Yingling.

About a year ago, Stone told me, he and Gen. David Petraeus realized that something had to be done about the detention centers in Iraq. There were two centers, holding a total of 26,000 detainees, and the few jihadists among them were indoctrinating a large share of the rest. "It was becoming Jihadi U. in there," Stone said.

Stone set out to apply counterinsurgency principles inside the centers' walls. Find the radicals, isolate them from the other detainees, and give the latter some hope for a life on the outside. In short, secure the population, marginalize the extremists, empower the moderates.

Stone brought in 60 imams to conduct religious classes and more than 200 Iraqi teachers to run an education program, as well as vocational trainers, psychiatrists, counselors, and contractors.

This idea is very different from the U.S. Army's traditional view of detention—that it's a one-way street (those going in are never coming out) and that bad guys are bad guys (there's no point in drawing distinctions).

All the detainees are at least suspected of planning or executing violent acts against U.S. or Iraqi forces—setting off bombs or transporting the explosives or selling the supplies. But surveys indicated that only about 6,000 of the detainees were irreconcilables and only a few hundred were foreign fighters. The vast majority of the rest had no ideological leanings. Most were in it for the money or to avenge the deaths of relatives, caused either by the Americans or by rival Iraqi tribes.

Since Stone's reforms were put in place, 8,000 detainees have been released, and only 24 have been rearrested.

Stone is quick to admit that he doesn't know if the program is working. Those 24 returning detainees might be merely the ones who got caught. It could well be that hundreds, even thousands of those let go have not found jobs or peace of mind; they might have gone right back to committing violence.

A monitoring program is set to begin in June. Released detainees will be paid each month to report, and supply some documentary proof, on what they're doing. This, too, might be of limited use; the ex-detainees might simply lie.

But here's the point, as far as my April 23 column is concerned: An assignment to detainee operations does not seem to be the dead end that it was just a few months ago, and the deputy commander of detainee operations does not seem to be a job handed out as punishment for past sins.

One point that I did get right: Yingling was not going to be given this or any other important job through normal channels. Stone says that Petraeus specifically wanted Yingling to be put in charge of the new program. It was so out of line with the Army's traditional concept that the job required a maverick. Yingling was that maverick.

It is not at all clear, however, that this means Yingling will someday be promoted to general or that, once the smoke clears, his superiors will view this job as a laudable milestone on a career path. Despite Gates' urgings that senior officers protect their loyal dissidents, and despite the fact that Petraeus did just that, there are plenty of generals who still don't like what Yingling wrote. There are plenty of officers who consider this concept of detention too coddling. There is plenty of institutional resistance to reforms as a matter of principle. There is a fierce—and honest—debate going on over whether, and to what degree, the Army overall should be shifting toward counterinsurgency and away from conventional combat.

Still, things are not as bleak, not as black and white, as I suggested on April 23.



war stories
The Army's Math Problem
We don't have any more soldiers to send to Afghanistan unless we take some out of Iraq.
By Fred Kaplan
Monday, May 5, 2008, at 4:56 PM ET


Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wants to send 7,000 more U.S. troops—about two brigades—to Afghanistan, according to the May 3 New York Times. But there's a problem, which the story underplays: We don't have any more troops to send. The Army is in a zero-sum state: No more soldiers can be sent to Afghanistan without a one-for-one reduction of soldiers in Iraq.

Let's look at the numbers.

After the last of the five "surge" brigades goes home this summer, the U.S. Army will have 13 brigade combat teams in Iraq (the Marines have two more) and two in Afghanistan. One BCT serves as a "global response force," ready to respond to a small-scale emergency elsewhere in the world. One is in Korea. One is dedicated to homeland defense and security. One, at a base in Fort Riley, Kan., is training soldiers to become advisers to Iraqi and Afghan security forces. That adds up to 19 BCTs. All the other Army brigades are either between deployments or in their 12-month downtime periods, having fulfilled their 12-to-15-month deployment tours. (For a little more detail on these numbers, click here.)

And that's it. There are no more combat brigades left. To send one or two more brigades to Afghanistan would require taking one of five steps:

This last option is the only one that's at all practical. There is no way to put more boots in Afghanistan without taking boots out of Iraq. As one senior Army officer put it to me, having it both ways is, "in a word, impossible," and anyone who thinks otherwise, he added, is "dreaming." Gates, by the way, is not among the daydreamers. His press secretary, Geoff Morrell, said in an e-mail today that Gates well knows that, fundamentally, "the only way he can add significant forces to Afghanistan, while keeping the President's commitment to reduce tour-lengths, is to continue the drawdown of troops in Iraq."

One might wonder: Couldn't the Army just stage another surge? Here's the thing, and this hasn't been well-understood: The surge was always something of an artifice. The term suggests gathering up a bunch of extra troops—in this case, five brigades' worth—and hurling them into Iraq. In fact, there were no extra troops. The surge involved accelerating the departure of brigades already scheduled to go to Iraq—and then keeping them there for 15 months instead of the customary 12. The Army had more troops on the ground, but only because the troops were there for a longer period of time.

These calculations do point up to a larger set of problems. The United States has the world's most powerful military. This military consumes more money (adjusting for inflation) than it did at the height of the Cold War. Not counting the costs of the two wars, it spends as much on the military as the rest of the world's countries combined. And yet, despite all this money and global reach, the U.S. Army finds itself unable to sustain more than 150,000 or so troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The next president has a lot more to mull over than whether to move a few brigades from Iraq to Afghanistan. It's time—it's urgent—to rethink the broad outlines of American foreign and military policy. If such a big budget buys so few combat brigades, should we restructure the armed forces? If we simply need more troops, how are we going to get them—through higher pay, more glittering benefits, a return to the draft? If we need to rely more on allies, what can we offer to get them onboard? Right now, there's a mismatch between our imperial missions and our constricted forces. Either we have to expand our forces or cut back on our missions. To stay the course is to guarantee more stalemates, frustrations, and defeats.



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Here, according to the U.S. Army's own data, is the disposition of its combat brigades:

16 deployed (13 in Iraq, 2 in Afghanistan, 1 in Korea)

20 in downtime between deployments

1 in transit to or from deployment

1 in global response force

1 in homeland defense/homeland security

1 at Fort Riley, training advisers

1 new brigade, being built up, estimated ready in 2010

2 for "usage factor" (see below)

------------

43 Total

Therefore, the number of additional brigades available for, say, reinforcements to Afghanistan = zero.

A word about this "usage factor." When a new brigade combat team arrives in Iraq or Afghanistan, the BCT it replaces stays in place for 40 days to conduct "battle handover." This 40-day period amounts to 0.11 percent of the deployment. So, the Army needs to deploy 1.11 BCTs for each BCT that's needed. So, the 15 BCTs really means (15 x 1.11) 16.65—or, to round up, 17 BCTs. Hence, the "usage factor" of two brigades.

One more note. To put 7,000 more combat troops (two BCTs' worth) into Afghanistan (or, for that matter, Iraq) actually requires more than 7,000 total troops. They need to be supported by what Army planners call "enablers"—military police, headquarters staff, an additional aviation brigade, etc. This is why the surge in Iraq, which President Bush and Secretary Gates thought would amount to 20,000 troops, actually ended up totaling 30,000. Similarly, 7,000 extra troops in Afghanistan would actually mean about 10,000.



well-traveled
Baseball, Dominican-Style
Smoking cigars with a major league MVP.
By Bryan Curtis
Friday, May 9, 2008, at 6:45 AM ET



From: Bryan Curtis
Subject: Baseball, Dominican-Style.

Posted Monday, May 5, 2008, at 1:56 PM ET


Late last summer, when the steroid scandals got to be too much for me, I went to the Dominican Republic. My ostensible purpose was baseball tourism, but this was not one of those trips on which you sun yourself in the bleachers and think happy thoughts about your father; or pester your favorite shortstop for an autograph; or see baseball the way "it's meant to be played," as if such a method existed. No, a trip to the Dominican Republic offered a chance to catch a glimpse of the sociopolitical landscape suggested by David Ortiz's home-run swing, Pedro Martinez's fastball, and Vladimir Guerrero's hypnotically twirling bat. It was a chance to see how a Third World country supports a First World sports league.

If you've been scoring at home, you know that the Dominican Republic—the D.R.—has become the chief foreign source of major league talent, placing nearly 500 players at last count. The players are scouted, trained, and educated at the so-called Dominican baseball academies, outposts owned and operated by major league teams. We wanted to see what those academies were like and how baseball dreams were playing out.

My team: Megan Hustad, my stateside companion, and Alberto Pozo, a Puerto Rican who has set up shop in Santo Domingo, the capital. Pozo was an apprentice TV producer, local fixer, and a fierce Yankees partisan, though you wouldn't have known it from the Red Sox cap that was always on his head. ("I lost a bet," he explained.) The three of us had started in the Zona Colonial, the crumbling, centuries-old center of Santo Domingo, with Pozo at the wheel of my rental car. After weaving through the traffic jams that clog the newer, shinier parts of town, we had emerged in the slums on the city's north side. A few feet from the car, there were lean-tos full of chickens, goats, and a teeming array of food vendors; ramshackle auto repair shops; and unlicensed "sports books," where the poorest of the poor bet on everything from Major League Baseball to cockfights. Everything and everybody seemed to be kicking up dust. Whenever the car slowed to a stop, it was approached by hawkers on bikes selling knockoff sunglasses, guayaba ice pops, or fresh fruit.

After a few wrong turns on unpaved roads, we reached the Philadelphia Phillies' academy around late morning. The academy's buildings sat next to a hillside in a remote stretch of farmland and owed something to Spanish mission architecture. According to the academy's administrator, Elvis Fernandez, the Phillies chose this spot because it is several tape-measure home runs away from girls, shopping malls, and other vices that might tempt a prized 16-year-old prospect. The only thing to do here is play baseball, which the Phillies recruits do morning and night, with an Eastern bloc-style regimentation. Some days will feature a full practice in the morning, a game against another team's academy in the afternoon, followed by post-game hitting and fielding drills before the players return to their bunks for the night.

My team arrived in the middle of a game between the Phillies and the academy squad of the Los Angeles Angels. Habituated as I was to the scowling, thick-legged men of the majors, it is hard to convey just how striking these young Dominicans were: tall with dark, sun-walloped skin; lean muscles; and a youthful spring in their steps. Even their postures seemed optimistic. I was standing along the first-base line watching the Phillies' starter, a kid named Carpio, who had a live fastball and a tendency to get wild. Carpio got bailed out by a few slick defensive plays in the early innings, but by the fourth, his eyes were fixated on the pitcher's rubber, and he looked like he'd rather be somewhere else.

With Carpio in a jam, we ventured from the field to the academy's main building, where the players slept, ate, and studied. The first room Fernandez showed us was a classroom. As he explained it, the academies' educational programs are mostly limited to a smattering of religious study, American law (it doesn't matter that you met her at a 21-and-over club—she could be lying about her age), and the teaching of baseballic terminology like "hit and run" and "cut-off man." ("Those are the first words we teach them," Fernandez said.) The basics established, the academy moves on to the interrogations the Dominican player is bound to encounter from coaches: What's your name? What position do you play? How old are you? (A loaded question, given the long history of fudging Dominican birth certificates.)

"We teach them that American time is not Dominican time," Fernandez told me. Another lesson: The sexual mores of the D.R.—such as aggressively staring down an attractive woman on the street—will not fly in the States.

The Phillies run the academy like a military school, and no one minded saying so. The team enforces a strict 8 p.m. curfew and a 10 p.m. bedtime. The players, who have received signing bonuses ranging from a few thousand dollars to a few hundred thousand dollars, are not allowed to keep cars; if they want to visit the nearest shopping mall, they must take the rickety local bus. They "eat, sleep, and play baseball," Fernandez said, the reliable sports cliché having real meaning for once. For many of the players, the Phillies academy is the first place they've encountered a well-balanced meal; like hungry teenage boys everywhere, they inevitably want more.

The players' sleeping quarters were fittingly monastic. They slept eight to a room in bunk beds, and I noticed a few of the boys had pulled their mattresses onto the floor because of the sweltering heat. The rooms had the sad monotone of summer-camp barracks and buzzed with tropical insects. We saw some small televisions propped up on plastic chairs but no other signs of affluence.

It is the kind of place that reeks of long odds. One scout estimated that for every 100 prospects signed and enrolled in the Phillies academy, only three or four will make the major leagues. And given Dominican baseball fever—"Every father wants his son to be a ballplayer," I was told again and again—it is safe to assume that for those 100 signees, there are many thousands more outside the academy looking in.

With nothing left to see in the dorms, we marched through a dimly lit and spectacularly cluttered locker room and then stepped back outside into the glaring Caribbean sun. We could still hear metal bats striking the ball in the distance, and the occasional muffled cheer. A flock of tiny black birds swooped overhead, darting over and under the laundry lines. Fernandez couldn't identify them. "They're always here," he shrugged.




From: Bryan Curtis
Subject: The Great Rivals

Posted Tuesday, May 6, 2008, at 7:43 AM ET


If the goal of every young ballplayer in the Dominican Republic is one day to make the major leagues, the secondary goal is to spend the winter in the thrall of one's countrymen. Just as the U.S. World Series ends in October, the Dominican Winter League begins. It is a kind of postseason victory lap, a chance for the player to reconnect with his native country. It is in the winter league that one finds the familiar tropes of Dominican baseball: the highly knowledgeable, and therefore raucous, fans; merengue music wafting from the bleachers; and intranational rivalries that put our minor domestic disputes, like Yankees vs. Red Sox, to shame.

The main Dominican rivalry these days is between the Licey Tigers—whom we'll think of as the "Yankees" in our gringo shorthand—and the Águilas Cibaeñas—whom we'll think of as the "Red Sox." When we arrived in the D.R., the two teams had won every Dominican league championship since 1995—Licey last in 2005-06, Águilas most recently in 2006-07. Both had a total of 19 championships. Each club suspected the other was inferior on the diamond and otherwise.

A few notes about the Dominican Winter League: We're not talking about amateurs here. If you are a Dominican wishing to join the winter league, you first have to play your way to the United States and then spend at least two years in the American minor leagues. At that point, your name can appear on a draft-eligible list for the six Dominican teams. (The others are Escogido, Estrellas, Gigantes, and La Romana.) Being drafted by a Dominican club instantly transforms you into a beloved local fixture, and players can be enticed to return to their Dominican club until they reach what in baseball counts as extreme old age. Luis Polonia, who is 44 and whose major league career ended back in 2000, still plays some designated hitter for his Dominican team, Águilas. The Águilas general manager, Winston Llenas, told me that he believes Polonia practiced with Babe Ruth, but he still signs him every year.

Licey (pronounced LEE-say) plays in the Estadio Quisqueya, a park that has the look of a giant concrete conch shell. Of the D.R.'s two great rivals, Licey is the older and (as its partisans constantly remind you) grander of the ballclubs. We were shown into the office of the owner, Jose Manuel "Pepe" Bustos, who went to the immensely unnecessary trouble of assembling the entire Licey front office for my interrogation. Clearly unprepared for my arrival, they sat rigidly in their seats and faced me as though I were a government tax auditor.

The Licey brain trust consists of Bustos; Jose Bustos Jr., his son and the team's general manager; and Miguel Guerra, the team's accountant. What, I asked, separated Licey from the other winter league clubs?

"We treat the players in a way they like to be treated," Jose Bustos said, "because we don't have the money to pay them what they get paid in the major leagues." (A Dominican Winter League salary amounts to a small honorarium, especially for players like Vladimir Guerrero.)

"We're just one big family," Guerra added.

"We call [the players] every week," Bustos Jr. said. "They need something, they call us. Their wives feel good when they're here."

This might sound like so much sports happy talk, but, in fact, Guerrero, the Los Angeles Angels slugger, played for Licey in the winter of 2004—even though he'd just won the majors' Most Valuable Player award. There's another reason for the friendly atmosphere: Major league players often come here and find their natural positions occupied, and they have to be talked into a switch. Carlos Peña, a first baseman who hit 46 home runs and 121 RBI in 2007 for Tampa Bay, couldn't find a position with Licey the previous winter and spent a lot of time on the Tigers bench.

I told the Licey brain trust that I would be visiting the Águilas clubhouse the next day, and they looked at me with astonishment. The whole interview seemed to go rapidly downhill. Answers became clipped, and pauses gained pregnancy. Pozo, my translator, later explained that my statement was an unfortunate faux pas and had rendered me suspect in their eyes. For I was no longer a foreign journalist come to honor the glories of Licey, the greatest team in Dominican history; I was, annoyingly, insisting on talking to "both sides." Adios.

Águilas (AH-gee-las) is headquartered in the D.R.'s second-largest city, Santiago, whose natural insecurity is reflected in the civic motto: "Santiago is Santiago." My team started the two-hour drive north from Santo Domingo under threatening clouds. Santo Domingo's gantlet of bodegas and cell-phone stores gave way to a winding highway lined with hills of thick, verdant forest. It is hard to do justice to the vastness, the greenness of the view—let alone the looming feeling of rural poverty, Dominican-style. Every couple of miles, we'd zoom by a clutch of lean-tos with corrugated scrap-metal roofs, built on the sides of the hills. The huts were staggered horizontally, like terraces jutting off the side of an apartment building. If you squinted, you could see a few faces and loose chickens; skinny babies in dingy, loose-fitting hand-me-downs; animal carcasses for sale. The only sign of modernity is the condition of the highway—surprisingly smooth—and the Brugal Rum-sponsored road signs that announce every town.

Pozo zipped past what little traffic we encountered with the deft hand of someone who had been driving, he estimated, since he was 9. We traveled fast—70, 80 miles per hour—but the traffic slowed as we made our way into Santiago. The Águilas team offices are in a little bandbox of an estadio with palm trees pointing upward near the foul poles. We were greeted by Winston Llenas, the general manager and a fine ballplayer in his own right—he played six seasons with the California Angels in the 1970s. ("I did some damage," he assured me.) Whereas the Liceños had comported themselves as polite technocrats, Winston was expansive, bordering on clownish—a Dominican Charlie O. Finley. Broad-shouldered, with a mane of salt-and-pepper hair and a prominent nose, he commanded me to sit in front of his enormous desk and shouted, "The buck stops here," as he pounded it with mock fury.

As Llenas seemed to have a sense of humor, I took a calculated risk and mentioned visiting the rivals down south. "Licey—since you mentioned the Licey club—it's also a club with a lot of tradition," Llenas said tactfully. "It's the oldest club in the Dominican Republic, actually. They're celebrating their 100th anniversary this year. Of course, we're going to ruin their celebration."

If Águilas had an advantage, Llenas explained, it was its rabid fan base. Cibaeñas like to think that they make up for what they lack in Santo Domingo-style cosmopolitanism with energy and passion—which, at the ballpark, means they are louder and more demanding. Even Licey die-hards can be made to admit that Águilas has the superior crowd. "It's crazy, man," Llenas said when I asked about the scene in the stands. "It's fun. It's noisy. It's music, it's yelling … it's loud … it's unbelievable."

"You can expect anything to happen in the stands," said Santana Martinez, an Águilas play-by-play announcer, who had joined us.

"It's [like] going to the Bronx Zoo or something," Llenas replied.

"Fortunately, you don't have too many fights."

"No, no fights."

There is little rest for the caretaker of a Dominican Winter League roster. For a time, the major leagues were happy to have players, Dominican- or American-born, spend their winter in the Caribbean. (Everyone from Bob Gibson to Orel Hershiser did a winter tour in the D.R.) These days, the American ballclubs prefer to keep prized prospects in "instructional" leagues back in the States. Even the established Dominican stars, like Miguel Tejada and Melky Cabrera, are often barred from playing a full season in the D.R. due to the "extreme fatigue" (the majors' regrettable phrase) brought on by too many regular-season pitches or at-bats. Thus, a Dominican Winter League team must shuffle players in and out, often with top stars dropping out at the last moment. "Plan A?" Llenas said. "Forget Plan A!"

Before the 2007-08 season, Águilas had never managed to surpass Licey in total championships, giving the team a Red Sox-like inferiority complex that occasionally bordered on paranoia. "I don't want to tell you all of our secrets," Llenas said. Even so, Llenas let on that he planned to give up home-run hitting to win with pitching and defense. On opening day, the Águilas pitcher would be Jose Lima, a rotund Santiago native who is familiarly known as "Lima Time" and pitched parts of 13 seasons in the majors. (Indeed, a few months after I left, Águilas would win the league title, while Licey settled for second.)

Llenas took us down the hall, up the stairs, through an Águilas-mascot-festooned conference room, and into the VIP box, from which we could glimpse Estadio Cibao in a moment of rare, off-season repose. Just then the clouds made good on their promise, and rain came pouring down in sheets.




From: Bryan Curtis
Subject: A Tripleheader With Juan Marichal

Posted Wednesday, May 7, 2008, at 6:53 AM ET


Juan Marichal is the first baseball player from the Dominican Republic to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, which makes him the country's baseball patron saint. He lives in Santo Domingo in a sprawling house surrounded by trees and high stucco walls. Like many of the capital city's prominent residences, Marichal's place is guarded by a man in camouflage fatigues who sits in a plastic lawn chair with a machine gun across his lap. One afternoon we were ushered inside the front gate, waved past the watchful eyes of the guard, and shown into Marichal's den. Marichal, who is never late, appeared promptly at 4 p.m., shook our hands, and motioned for us to arrange ourselves on three generously proportioned leather sofas.

Marichal is 70 years old and has salt-and-pepper hair and a smile as wide as a National League strike zone. He told us his life story in three acts. It is a well-rehearsed story, probably delivered many times to different people, but it might be the best encapsulation of how a Dominican baseball player can really make it big.

Laguna Verde: Marichal grew up in Laguna Verde, a small town in the remote regions near the Haitian border. The locals were mostly farmers, growing rice and bananas and yucca. When Marichal was 16 years old, dictator Rafael Trujillo ruled the Dominican Republic, and American-owned United Fruit Co. was Laguna Verde's primary employer.

Marichal was pitching for a team sponsored by the Granada Fruit Co., a subsidiary of United Fruit. He was a side-armed pitcher with a fastball that moved in toward the batter and a curveball that started in the middle of the plate and then broke to the outside. One Sunday afternoon, Marichal was set to pitch against the Dominican air force, a team that was the bauble of Ramfis Trujillo, the dictator's son. Marichal won the game 2-1. It was such a masterful outing that the next morning, a uniformed lieutenant approached Marichal and handed him a telegram that demanded, by order of Trujillo, that he enlist in the air force. Marichal was floored. He retreated to his mother's house in a panic. His mother read the telegram and started pacing nervously. At 4 o'clock that afternoon, with mom still pacing, the air force lieutenant reappeared with a second telegram. "Son, you can't say no to these people," Marichal's mother said. Marichal enlisted in the Dominican air force. He figured that he could play baseball and learn to fly fighter planes, which he'd always dreamed of doing.

Ramfis Trujillo was what you could safely call megalomaniacal, but he took a keen interest in his young conscript's baseball career. Whenever Marichal was scheduled to pitch, Trujillo would come to the base—an arrival heralded by the sounding of a thunderous horn—and take his seat behind home plate. From the mound, Marichal would find himself staring at Trujillo more than his catcher. "He was one of the two handsomest men I ever saw in my life," Marichal says. "The other was Elvis Presley." As a member of the Dominican air force, Marichal got the uniform and the mandatory crew cut. But when he inquired about flying planes, his commanders told him to never mind all that. He should stick to pitching.

Michigan City: Marichal's first stop in American minor league baseball was a brief tenure with a team called the Michigan City White Caps. Marichal got to Michigan City, Ind., by riding in the back of a Greyhound bus from Florida, where the San Francisco Giants held their training camp. Before he left the Dominican Republic, no one had told Marichal about American segregation laws, and he doesn't think he would have understood the concept if they had tried. By this point, Latin Americans had been trickling into the major leagues for more than 50 years, long preceding Jackie Robinson. Many, like Marichal, were neither white nor black, so they fell into a murky third category—"nonwhite," which was effectively black. In a small, segregated town like Michigan City, Marichal saw his white teammates only on the field and in the clubhouse. After the game, Marichal would retire with the black players to boarding houses around town. Marichal didn't speak much English, so when he went to one of the town's black-owned restaurants, he would examine other diners' plates until he saw something he liked, and he would point at it.

As Marichal's pitching garnered him a bit of celebrity around town, one restaurant began to offer him a free fried chicken for every game he won. During the 1957 season, his first in the United States, Marichal wound up winning 21 games and another two in the playoffs, for a grand total of 23 chickens.

San Francisco: Marichal's arrival in San Francisco, in 1960, was the capstone of the Giants' great Caribbean recruiting spree. The team had signed Dominican brothers Felipe and Matty Alou and Puerto Rican Orlando "Baby Bull" Cepeda. But, for all their internationalism, the Giants retained a manager named Alvin Dark, a cuss from Comanche, Okla., who was nicknamed "The Swamp Fox." As Marichal recalls, Dark once told the team's Latin players that they were never to utter a word in Spanish, not even with each other.

Between 1963 and 1966, Marichal won 93 games and struck out 916 batters, which put him on the rarefied plane of great National League pitchers like Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale. Marichal was an aggressive bench jockey, riding teammates and opponents, and he tended to wear an unnverving smile on the mound. "The thing I hate about that s.o.b.," one player told Time magazine, "is that it all seems so easy for him. It's one thing to go hitless against a pitcher like Sandy Koufax or Don Drysdale or Jim Maloney; at least you can look out there and see the cords standing out on his neck. ... Marichal—he just stands there laughing at you."

A typically Marichalian outing was the game on July 2, 1963, that he pitched against Warren Spahn. The two Hall of Fame pitchers were standing at different ends of the rubber—at 26, Marichal had a live arm and a devastating curveball, while Spahn, 42, was running on fumes. On this day, the pitchers found themselves in a game of one-upmanship: Neither gave up a run through nine innings. At the top of the 10th, Marichal went up to his manager and said, "Mr. Dark, the weather's nice, I feel strong, please let me stay a few more innings." Dark said that would be OK, and Marichal threw five more shutout innings. At the end of the 14th inning, Dark tried to bench Marichal, but Marichal pointed at Spahn—who was also still in the game and also hadn't given up any runs—and said, "That man is 42 years old. I'm only 26. Until that man leaves the mound, nobody's going to take me out of this game!"

Dark was perturbed by Marichal's cheek, but he let Marichal go out and pitch the top of the 15th inning. Marichal got three quick outs. Then Spahn went out and pitched the bottom of the 15th, and he also got three quick outs. At the top of the 16th, Marichal could see that Dark was no longer amenable to his suggestion; a Giants relief pitcher was already trotting out of the bullpen. Before the reliever could reach the infield, Marichal grabbed his glove, raced onto the mound, and started throwing warm-up pitches. Marichal got three more outs in the top of the 16th inning.

All this really happened. What comes next is how Marichal tells the story, and, given his extravagantly charmed life, it's quite likely that it might have happened.

Marichal says he met Willie Mays on the way into the dugout and told him, "Willie, I don't want to pitch anymore!" Mays said he would take care of it. Mays hit a home run and won the game.

Sitting in his den now, Marichal has a way of letting his trademark grin serve as the punctuation mark for each anecdote. He took us around the room and pointed at pictures. On all four walls were photos of Marichal with Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, Muhammad Ali, and numerous others, including his five striking daughters and one handsome son. A uniformed maid entered the room and served us coffee and tall goblets of ice water.

Marichal cautioned us not to drink our coffee while standing up. "In the Dominican Republic, that's bad luck," he said. He had a certain authority on the subject of good fortune.




From: Bryan Curtis
Subject: The Mountain of Dreams

Posted Thursday, May 8, 2008, at 10:35 AM ET


The kid who was driving the scooter took his eyes off the heavily potholed road and said, "Bryan, how do you say in your language—muerto?" I was perched on the seat behind him, my hands clutching at his ribs as we weaved between cars, blew through traffic lights, and kicked up dust from the dirt road. I had been thinking muerto a lot over the last 10 minutes, but how did this guy know that?

I was riding with a motoconcho, one of the brigade of helmetless scooter drivers who provide a kind of unlicensed limousine service in the Dominican Republic. Since few Dominicans own cars, hitching a ride with a motoconcho, which typically costs a few pesos, is both a necessity and something of an art form. Men, women, and preteen schoolchildren in their blue-and-khaki uniforms line up along the side of the roads, waiting for a scooter to buzz by. You could be in Santo Domingo sprawl or deep in the countryside. If you wait long enough, you will see a motoconcho.

My team had come (by car) from Santo Domingo to the city of San Cristóbal in search of a baseball academy called Loma del Sueño—the Mountain of Dreams. San Cristóbal is one of the Dominican Republic's most fertile baseball towns, and as we cruised the sandy main drag, we saw the visage of Raúl Mondesí, the former major league slugger, on a billboard endorsing one of the candidates in the country's May 2008 presidential elections. Our directions ended in the center of town, so we pulled up next to a motoconcho who was relaxing under a shade tree. Oye! The motoconcho seemed to know the way to Loma del Sueño, but he kept the directions vague: "Derecho" was all he would say—straight ahead. He was angling to show us the way himself, for a small fee. So in an attempt to get my money's worth, I exited the car and cautiously assembled myself on the back of the scooter. My translator, Alberto Pozo, who would trail the motoconcho in our car, told me that if I felt uncomfortable, I should attempt to exit the bike in a graceful fashion.

Riding with the motoconcho is not unlike taking a turn on those mechanical bulls they have at high-end country-western bars. You must lean into the turns and lift your derriere off the seat about a half-second in advance of every pothole. We finally found a smooth road near an old cemetery. "Muerto," the driver repeated, grinning and pointing at the tombstones. I smiled weakly. We took a left, and we found ourselves under a canopy of lush foliage. Then we were going uphill. The scooter shuddered during the climb, and the motoconcho kept up a long, half-decipherable patter about the high price of gas and the poor condition of the bike. (New York taxi drivers have never done a better job setting up a tip.) Then the road flattened out, we sped across a bridge, and on the top of the mountain, with all the majesty of a hard-to-reach Buddhist monastery, was Loma del Sueño. The Mountain of Dreams.

If the Phillies' academy was a summer-camp-style barracks, then Loma del Sueño looked like a tourist resort. As we passed through the gated entrance, we could see that baseball diamonds had been carved directly onto the mountaintop. The fields were back-dropped on all sides by a valley of bright green trees that stretched into the horizon. To venture a metaphor I have never seen on the sports page, it was a bit like playing baseball on Machu Picchu. Loma del Sueño is the brainchild of José Rijo, who won the Most Valuable Player award in the 1990 World Series and also happens to be Juan Marichal's former son-in-law. As he suffered through a string of arm injuries that would ultimately end his playing career in 2002, Rijo decided to return to his native country and create a piece of the baseball infrastructure. Rijo's brother had suggested the mountaintop. The ball fields, housing complex, and executive offices now serve as baseball academies for the Washington Nationals, San Diego Padres, and Detroit Tigers. A playoff game between the Nationals' academy and the visiting Los Angeles Angels had already gotten under way by the time we arrived, and we found Rijo, a rotund, serene presence, relaxing in the shade of an umbrella on the first-base line, a cigar sticking out of his mouth.

Loma del Sueño was very much a local affair. A crowd of maybe 100 had made its way up the mountain, probably via motoconcho or on foot, and was chattering excitedly along the chain-link fences that surrounded the main field. There was a spontaneous energy you rarely experience amid all the canned stadium rock at a major league ballpark. Here, one twentysomething fan made his way through the crowd with a snake draped over his shoulders. Small boys of assorted sizes, some lovingly attended to and others blissfully free of parental supervision, scampered around. Two young women came dressed and accessorized as if for a night at one of San Cristóbal's finer discothèques. A banged-up 10-gallon water cooler was hauled out to make sure everyone stayed hydrated under the 88-degree sun. When the hometown Nationals took the field, they were serenaded by a three-piece pep band—complete with horn section—that had set up shop near Rijo. The Nationals team broke out in a spasmodic dance and then ran to their positions.

The young players headquartered at Loma del Sueño were experiencing the kind of luxury accommodations normally available only to turistas. They lived in a five-story pink stucco palace, which Rijo, who was concentrating on the game, dispatched us to in his golf cart. The student players' rooms were not unlike those you'd find at any Dominican beach hotel, with wrought-iron headboards and coordinating dressers. Each had a private balcony that overlooked the valley below. "Some kids are very poor here," Rijo told me later. "They don't know how to handle themselves. They do so much damage to the air conditioners, the TVs." An assistant took us up to peek into Rijo's own penthouse apartment, which he had called Suite 27, after his uniform number. It was decorated with African and aboriginal art, flat-screen TVs, embroidered silk pillows, white linen sofas, and top-shelf liquor like Grey Goose vodka and Johnnie Walker Gold whiskey. I could imagine that in the mind of a young, ambitious southpaw, it was a dreamlike vision of the spoils of baseball success.

When we returned to the ball field, Rijo got us chairs and ordered his staff to bring pitchers of passion-fruit juice with ice, along with platters of crackers, cheese cubes, and cantaloupe. He was still engrossed in the game, but he took a moment to make a few remarks over the din of the band. "They've got the Field of Dreams, I've got the Mountain of Dreams," Rijo said. "If you build it, they will come."

Rijo lives at Loma del Sueño pretty much full-time. He pitches batting practice and helps maintain the fields. He preaches about discipline, bringing in police officers to warn the players about the crime and drugs they're sure to encounter in the United States. "The other day, they announced a hurricane," he said. "I told the kids to go home. They said, 'No, no. If we stay here, we know we're going to eat for sure.' So I told them to stay here."

Rijo also pointed out something I hadn't thought much about: The academies are such a booming industry in the Dominican Republic that they produce a number of jobs for locals. "This town is so poor, it needs so much help, I figured this was the best way for me to give back something," Rijo said. Loma del Sueño requires a small army of scouts and groundskeepers and cooks and motoconchos and maids, who enter the ballplayers' rooms with the weariness of a mother entering her 16-year-old son's. It is one thing to think about Major League Baseball sending its agents to the Third World to pluck out young shortstops and leave everyone else to fend for themselves. It's another to think of Dominican baseball, at its core, as a local industry.

That is what surprised me most about our tour of Dominican baseball, this forceful assertion of Dominican-ness. Whereas once the baseball industry may have had the whiff of neocolonialism, it seems to have assumed a homegrown air. A Dominican buscón brings the young ballplayer to the attention of the academy. A major league team pays a signing bonus to the player's family (with the buscón taking his cut). During his three years at the academy, the player trains with Dominican coaches, is tended to by a Dominican staff, and, in the case of Loma del Sueño, is mentored by a Dominican baseball star who has already made the journey to the big leagues. An academy director like Rjio is ultimately working at the pleasure of the American baseball clubs, of course. But it's Dominicans who run the place, rather than American outsiders—there's no reason for the teams to do much more than sign the checks.

As we got up to leave, Rijo turned to me. "Do you smoke cigars?" he asked. "Well, I have a cigar bar in Santo Domingo. I'll be there from 8 until midnight tonight. You should come by."




From: Bryan Curtis
Subject: Jose Rijo Unplugged

Posted Friday, May 9, 2008, at 6:45 AM ET


When Jose Rijo, Dominican baseball eminence and MVP of the 1990 World Series, invited me to join him at his cigar bar in Santo Domingo, I quickly agreed. Here was a chance to witness a retired baseball player living in the afterglow of his career and also to pretend, as best I could, that I belonged at the table.

First, we had a farewell dinner with Alberto Pozo, our fixer. Alberto had promised us a final meal of authentic Dominican food—comida típica—which we had been eating, between sandwiches and Pollos Victorina fried chicken, for most of the trip. Alberto decided on El Conuco, a touristy joint with an extensive buffet and live dancing. We sat at a table close to speakers blaring bachata music, and as the house dancers clapped and twirled in front of us, I picked at a bowl of sancocho, a stew made with seven meats. That conversation was all but impossible wasn't as awkward as it might have been. After dozens of hours in the car with Alberto—and a few with his 6-year-old daughter, Paula—to call him a "fixer" would do him little justice. He was a friend and fount of boundless optimism—his answer to my entreaties for more bureaucrats or baseball players was always "No problem." Alberto has an entrepreneur's zeal, and if anyone can make "baseball tourism" into a Dominican industry, it is he.

Rijo's cigar bar was a few blocks down the road, tucked into one of the giant, neon-lit casinos that line the Malecón on Santo Domingo's waterfront. We rolled up around 9 and spotted the pitcher wearing a lime-green shirt and sitting at an outdoor table with about half a dozen friends. When Rijo saw us approaching, he made a few sharp movements with his hands, and we suddenly found ourselves propelled into seats. Spanish-language torch songs were wafting through the windows of Rijo's white Lexus SC430 convertible, which was neatly parked next to the table. Slowly, as I acclimated myself to the surroundings, something else became apparent: The great Rijo and his friends were not merely listening to Spanish torch songs, they were singing them, in unison—a sing-along that, after pausing a few seconds for our arrival and drink orders, resumed in its full-throated glory. It was the kind of karaoke performance you do not normally encounter on Old Timers' Day.

The lead singer was a Rijo confidant, Ramón Antonio Otero, a pudgy, middle-aged man who later told me, "My name is artist." As he tackled songs like "Que Se Mueran de Enviada" and "Esclavo y Amo," Otero sung in an exaggerated mock-opera style: chest pushed out, palms fluttering against pectorals, lower jaw tucked into his clavicle. A few times, I saw Rijo push buttons on his cell phone and hold it up for Otero to sing into the receiver. When I finally asked Rijo whom he was calling, he said it was his wife's answering machine—he was leaving her a serenade.

The scene was fitting, because as a pitcher Rijo had always been something of an exotic. The San Cristóbal native made his major league debut at 18, in 1984, and by 26 he was on pace to become a Dominican legend on the order of Juan Marichal and Osvaldo Virgil. "I became a king," as Rijo once put it. Injuries cost him a chance to be a transcendent pitcher—he endured five surgeries on his right elbow alone—and he dropped out of the game in 1995. But after a grueling rehabilitation, he was able to claw his way back into the majors, and in 2002, nearly seven years after he'd started his last game, he pitched the Reds past the Cubs. In retirement, Rijo has become rounder and more kinglike, with courtiers inside and outside the game.

Between songs, Rijo introduced the gallery that had arranged itself around him. It was a group of regulars that had come to enjoy Rijo's halo of celebrity, snifters of Jameson, and top-quality cigars. One gray-suited gentleman who stopped by to pay his respects was, someone leaned in to whisper, "in the government." A tall, comically good-looking man in a tight pink polo shirt turned out to be the engineer who designed and was supervising construction of the D.R.'s first subway system, the earthworks for which we had seen earlier in the trip. Linen jackets were held rakishly over shoulders, and every other minute a joke would be made at somebody's expense, bringing the table's ever-simmering laughter to a burst. A couple of young women had taken over a table a few yards away and were making expectant eyes at our group, but this was plainly a boys' night out—an evening of bawdy jokes and gleeful showmanship. I could understand only half of what was said—most of the performance was en español—but it was one of those rare occasions in adult life where you find yourself giggling along like a confused toddler and yet feel no shame. The sole allowance for feminine delicacy was the smaller, vanilla-flavored cigar one member of the entourage deemed appropriate for my companion Megan Hustad; she was duly chastised every time she allowed it to go out.

Alas, thanks to a new anti-crime ordinance, the bars in Santo Domingo shut down at midnight, so a few members peeled off and the rest made motions to take the party inside the casino. Just then, Otero turned to us and said, "Now, I sing for you in English. My English is not good."

"But it is good!" Rijo interjected.

Attempting to prove his friend right, Otero gamely started in on "My Way." Rijo joined him for the chorus and softly shook a pair of maracas. It was at this point that I entered a state of delirious happiness I have rarely experienced since childhood. I was in the company of a pitcher whose baseball cards I had collected, whom I had once watched win two World Series games on television. He was handing me drinks. And cigars. He was performing a song. With maracas. It was a rather grandiose end to our baseball tour, a symbol, I guess, of the extravagant lifestyle that awaits in the major leagues. For the triumphant final verse—"For what is a man, what has he got? If not himself, then he has naught"—Rijo sung harmony, and he and Otero finished the song on their feet. There was a light smattering of applause, a few cat calls.

At one point, Rijo excused himself to take a phone call from Jim Bowden, the general manager of the Washington Nationals, who wanted to talk with Rijo about Dominican prospects. "Bowden told me, 'I need you here,' " Rijo told me later, shaking his head. "I said, 'I'm having too good a time!' "

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