Table of Contents
The Spot: A man and woman meet cute on a sidewalk as they find themselves both admiring a Sony Bravia TV in a store window. The scene ends on an ambiguous note (is he about to ask her on a date?) but not before a page of text flashes briefly and illegibly across the screen. Upon closer inspection (inspection that's possible only if you have a DVR that can pause the ad), you see that the text reads, "Would you rather be a rebellious, nonconformist maverick coach … or a shoe lover who gets asked to be a shoe model …?" It then directs you to a Web site. The ad's tagline: "The world's first television for men and women." (To view the Web site, click here, and then click "Choose commercials here" to view the alternate endings, or "Hidden TV message" to see the briefly flashed text.)
A previous ad for the Sony Bravia is one of the most talked-about commercials of the past few years. Featuring 250,000 brightly colored super-balls cascading through the streets of San Francisco, this spot won gold at the 2006 Clio Awards. It's now been watched millions of times on YouTube.
It's clear why the unfortunately titled "Balls" is a hit with the average viewer: It's among the more visually stunning pieces of video you'll ever see. (My favorite moment: A small dog takes shelter in a doorway, totally baffled by the onslaught of bouncing balls.) But why are advertising people—who've seen all sorts of beautiful visuals over the years—equally enamored of the ad? Here's what I wrote from the Clios last year: "The ad folks, predictably, loved this spot, because its execution involved lots of expense and complication. 'Can you imagine how many windows they broke?' murmured a guy in the next row at the awards ceremony. He could not conceal his envious smile. 'What an outrageous shoot!' agreed the guy next to him. 'They're still picking up those balls!' "
Ad-industry folks get bored of making conventionally effective 30-second spots and are always seeking out new, ambitious projects for themselves. This sort of thinking will sometimes lead to an attention-grabbing triumph like "Balls." But more frequently, it results in a convoluted dud like this new Bravia campaign, which is a classic example of ad-exec overthinking.
Everyone in the persuasion business is scared of DVRs, because they allow viewers to skip ads. Thus this Bravia spot attempts a bit of jujitsu, using the DVR as a tool to lure viewers deeper into the campaign. But it's not a new trick, and without proper enticement (KFC at least rewarded us with a free chicken sandwich), I doubt that at this point many people bother pausing these gimmicky DVR-specific ads to scrutinize their hidden messages. It's just not worth the time.
Anyway, the enticement here is particularly weak. The idea is that television viewers will be sent scampering to the Web site—which would allow the ad guys to crow at meetings about "multi-platform storytelling." But the initial ad with the couple on the sidewalk lacks a gripping cliffhanger, so we're not left thirsting for more. And that subliminally flashed text about being a football coach or a shoe model isn't nearly intriguing enough to get us firing up our laptops and surfing over to Sony.com.
The thing that would actually bring people to the Web site is compelling content—clips at the site that we genuinely enjoy watching and want to tell our friends about. Sadly, this content ain't so compelling. If you do make it to the Web site, you find four alternative endings, each a parody of a genre movie. (Sony has begun showing some of these endings on TV, too, but the main goal still seems to be driving traffic to the Web.) Choosing the "endings for men" calls up a hokey sports flick or an anime fight scene. The "endings for women" are a musical about high-heeled shoes or a weepy medical drama. Each bit is competently scripted and filmed—there are even one or two funny moments, and a cameo from Peyton Manning (because apparently no ad campaign can proceed without him)—but nothing in any of these shorts left me saying, "Gosh, I'm glad I took the time to download that."
To make sure I wasn't alone, I checked the stats on YouTube to see if the clips were getting any buzz. They were all there to see, but the football-coach ending had been watched only 683 times. The shoes musical did a little better, at 3,492 viewings. Meanwhile, the "Balls" ad had about 3.7 million views, and even a "making of" clip about it had 73,000 views. Which suggests that rather than spending money and effort on four merely adequate shorts (to bring to life some sort of complicated ad-executive dream about platform agnosticism and rapid technological adaptation, or whatever), they should have funneled their budget and energy into one spectacular ad that people actually want to see.
Luckily, Sony did that, too. "Paint"—the follow-up to "Balls"—features endless gallons of paint exploding in and around a Glasgow apartment complex. It's not as breathtaking as "Balls," but it's still fairly astonishing. Both ads use no special effects, so what appears to be happening is really happening. But more important, both ads center on a simple but powerful sales message (our TV's superior design will capture intense color), and both have been viral successes, viewed endlessly on the Web ("Paint" is up to about 500,000 YouTube views so far). Why does U.S. television get a circuitous, uninspired Bravia campaign, while the rest of the world gets iconic spots like "Paint" and "Balls"? Good question.
Grade: C-. And don't get me started on the dinosaur gender-role assumptions. Women can't like anime? Men can't like stylish shoes? I'm guessing the original basis for the ad's never adequately explained tag line ("The first television for men and women") was the notion that men care more about technical specs, while women care more about what the TV looks like on the wall. But even after searching through all the nooks and crannies on Sony's Web site, I've found only minimal evidence to support this hypothesis. The deeper I go with this campaign, the less it makes sense. And the less I care.
Ah, New Year's again, which means it's time for the investment media to remind us that there are fortunes to be made in the stock market—and time for nearly every financial media organization to produce some version of "10 Hot Stocks for 2007!" In the past few weeks, for example, the financial magazines have offered us:
If you delve into the above magazines—and you're not human if the headlines don't make you want to—you'll find that the chosen stocks were handpicked from a universe of thousands, were carefully researched, and, in some cases, were even selected by pros. You will find that the recommendations are the height of reasonable: solid companies in growing industries with reasonable price-earning multiples (implication: investment magazines aren't like those idiots recommending Google). The conclusions will sound so compelling, in fact, that you might feel like a fool if you do not buy the 10 Stocks To Buy Now.
Rest easy. If your New Year's resolution was simply "rebalance my portfolio of low-cost index funds," you are displaying more investment wisdom than all of the magazines combined. Whatever you do, do not buy the 10 Stocks To Buy Now, at least not because you read about them in some magazine. If you want to buy the magazine, fine, just don't buy the stocks.
Why not?
First, because the only reason to buy individual stocks instead of funds is to try to beat the market, and there is no evidence that magazines are any better at selecting stocks that will do this than anyone else. Decades of research have shown that it is so difficult to beat the market that the odds that a professional investor will do it are between 1-in-4 and 1-in-40 (the difference depends on criteria, time horizon, start- and endpoints, and other factors). Common sense and anecdotal evidence, meanwhile, suggest that professional magazine editors are probably worse at picking stocks than professional money managers, if only because money managers pick stocks for a living and magazine editors don't. (Who would you rather hire to kick a game-winning field goal for your football team? A professional place-kicker or a sportswriter?)
Second, anything you read in an investment magazine (or hear on investment TV or radio) was "in the market" the moment the story appeared. This means that, by the time you read it, several thousand professional investors who follow investment news 24/7 will have already scanned it and tossed it in their overflowing trash cans. The average professional will already have known at least 10 times as much about each of the 10 Stocks To Buy Now as the reporter who wrote the story. If, however, by some miracle, the reporter stumbled upon a persuasive fact or insight that previously eluded the money manager, it's a safe bet that the manager will instantly have acted on it. It's also a safe bet that any pro who contributed an idea to the magazine's stock-selection process will already have acted on that. And the pros will no doubt be very tempted to sell into the price surge created by any doctors and dentists (e.g., you) who rush to place buy orders when the latest issue of Fortune, et al., finally hits their desks.
Third, articles touting "10 Stocks To Buy Now" invariably ignore transaction costs, which are one of the major differences between investing in the real world and investing in the you-too-can-be-Warren-Buffett dream world of the investment media. Transaction costs include not only brokerage commissions, but bid/ask spreads, taxes, research, and opportunity costs (what you sold or did not invest in to buy the 10 Stocks to Buy Now). Worrying about transaction costs is often considered wimpy ("Just pick ten-baggers, dude"), but they cripple returns. If some of those 10 Stocks to Buy Now do outperform the market, therefore—and some of them undoubtedly will from luck alone—they need to outperform it by more than the costs you will incur by buying and selling them.
Fourth, in the hierarchy of intelligent-investing priorities, stock-picking is your least important consideration, not your most important. Regardless of how attractive the 10 Stocks to Buy Now sound, therefore, your overriding priority is to make sure you are adequately diversified. Before you even consider buying the 10 Stocks, therefore, you need to determine how adding them to your portfolio will affect its overall diversification and risk/reward profile. Will they make it more risky? Less? Will they increase the expected return? Decrease it? Will they increase the expected return enough to justify any added risk? If you don't know the answers to these questions, you won't be alone. Assessing a portfolio's risk/return profile is complicated enough that most pros buy fancy software to do it. If you're going to let a magazine pick stocks for you, you should get such software, too.
Not all the advice in the "Where To Invest in 2007" magazines is bad. Money, for example, admirably recommends a Vanguard index fund as one of its "best investments," and many other articles provide excellent economic and market overviews and tactical personal-finance advice. Yahoo! Finance's columnist, Ben Stein, even offers exclusively good advice (continue to add money to your portfolio of low-cost index funds), showing that giving good advice does not lead to investment-media-career suicide. Still, it's also no mystery why the magazines run variants of the 10 Hot Stocks articles every year, even though they contain terrible advice: because stock-picking is fun, because such headlines sell magazines, and because investor hope springs eternal.
A number of readers have complained—justifiably—that I often ask questions in the blog, but then never post any of your answers. I can only plead laziness! You send fascinating replies—they're much more insightful than anything I write—but I hardly have time to read them all, let alone pick out and publish the best ones. But my early New Year's resolution is to do better at this. So, let's get started. In my last entry, I asked why, if God is so powerful and good, the Israelites always abandon him, and worship idols such as Baal. Click here to read some of my favorite responses.
The Book of Isaiah
Christians may be wondering why I'm skipping to the Book of Isaiah, which comes much later in the Christian Bible. The Christian and Jewish Bibles part ways at the end of 2 Kings. Christians continue with the book of Chronicles. Jews go from 2 Kings into Isaiah. Since I'm Jewish, I'll read the Jewish way. I will get to Chronicles eventually, but not for a few months, since it comes at the very, very end of the Jewish Bible.
Uh-oh. Isaiah is going to be a slog. I mean no disrespect to Isaiah, who seems a mighty good poet and one heckuva prophet, but his book lacks the kill-them-all Tarantino gore of 1 Kings and 2 Kings or the across-the-desert thrills of Exodus and Numbers. First problem: The book of Isaiah is mostly a poem—a long, long, long poem. Second, reading it sometimes feels like being trapped in an elevator with a highly caffeinated Al Sharpton. Isaiah just won't stop shouting, tossing out one perfect metaphor after another, issuing an endless string of insults and threats. It's a bravura performance, very scary and sometimes quite beautiful, but not a lot of … fun.
Basic summary: Isaiah—channeling the Lord—exhorts various kings of Judah (Jotham, Hezekiah, etc.) and their subjects to return to God, and warns what will happen to them, their descendants, and their land if they don't. (You know, the usual: ruin, desolation, etc.)
Chapter 1 introduces this main theme with some gloriously bitter bullying from God, who spews at His people: "I reared children and brought them up, but they have rebelled against me. The ox knows its owner … but Israel does not know. Ah, sinful nation, people laden with iniquity, offspring who do evil, children who deal corruptly…"—you get the idea. God is particularly annoyed at the Israelites' superficial obedience. They continue to make sacrifices to him and burn incense: "Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood."
This is particularly resonant in the holiday season. Here is God not demanding a public display of obedience—in fact, He loathes the Israelites' offerings and festivals. Rather, He is demanding a much more profound reformation. His people must change their hearts and, more importantly, change how they treat others. To regain His love, they must "cease to do evil, learn to do good, seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow."
As far as I can remember, this is the first time that God has explicitly valued good deeds over professions of faith and obedience to the law. Until now, the Israelites only got in trouble for disobeying God's law—idol-worshipping, Sabbath-scoffing, etc. But now, they're dealing with a Good Works God, who requires righteous behavior toward fellow men, rather than disingenuous prayer. The debate over whether God wants faith or deeds still rages today, but I think this is the first time the Bible alludes to it.
Crudely speaking, there are three sides to in this fight:
1) Those who believe you serve God by obeying the letter of His laws—the position generally staked out today by orthodox Jews;
2) Those who believe you serve God best through personal faith, and salvation comes through that faith—the position taken by most evangelical Protestants;
3) Those who believe you serve God best by acting morally toward your fellow humans—the position held by many liberal Catholics and reform Jews.
Till Isaiah, God has clearly favored Group 1, demanding obedience to His law and smiting for mere misdemeanors. So, as a subscriber to Group 3, I'm surprised and rather thrilled to see God endorsing it here. Let's see if He sticks with it.
Every verse in Isaiah sounds like something out of Bartlett's. This must be the most-quoted book this side of Genesis. For example, at the beginning of Chapter 2, Isaiah takes a break from all the menacing threats and looks forward to when the Lord's kingdom shall finally be established. "They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."
(What's a ploughshare, you ask? I certainly did. It's the metal part of a plough that does the actual soil-cutting.)
Jerusalem is the new Sodom, Isaiah warns. Its moral decay dooms it. ("The people will be oppressed, everyone by another, and everyone by a neighbor; the youth will be insolent to the elder.") Isaiah particularly lays the wood to the women of Jerusalem, whose vanity and sluttiness offend him. "The daughters of Zion are haughty … glancing wantonly with their eyes, mincing along as they go … the Lord will lay bare their secret parts. In that day the Lord will take away the finery of the anklets, the headbands, and the crescents; the pendants, the bracelets … Instead of perfume there will be a stench." Not the most pleasant image, but that is darn good writing!
Here's a passage that was a punch in the gut, because I saw myself in it. Isaiah damns: "You who call evil good and good evil … who are wise in your own eyes and shrewd in your own sight!" (Every journalist reads this and gulps.) The passage also indicts the entire bartending profession, condemning those "who are heroes in drinking wine and valiant at mixing drink." Valiant? I suppose that serving mobs of drunken frat boys at 2 a.m. does require a certain courage.
A truly baffling exchange: The Lord instructs Isaiah to make the Israelites dull, ignorant, and faithless. He seems to want His people to become irredeemably bad, so that He can start over fresh (as with Noah's flood). To achieve this dumbing down, He orders Isaiah to encourage the Israelites to sin and ignore God. It's sadistic: Why does the Lord wish failure on His people?
Don't look now—here comes Jesus! Isaiah counsels a fretful King Ahaz that, "The Lord Himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel. … The Lord will bring on you and on your people and on your ancestral house" glorious days. Maybe this is a Messiah prediction, maybe not. It's not clear who Isaiah is talking about. The woman is unnamed and unidentified. She may be King Ahaz's own wife. She may be just a metaphor, since the rest of the passage is all metaphor, with the Assyrians represented as bees and the Lord as a razor (don't ask). Another reason to doubt that this is a grand, long-term prophecy: This section narrowly concerns the geopolitics of the moment—the Assyrian conquest—not the eternal fate of mankind.
I have no idea what is going on in this chapter. I'm not kidding. It's gibberish to me. Just check out the opening verse:
Then the Lord said to me, Take a large tablet and write on it in common characters, "Belonging to Maher-shalal-hash-baz."
Yeah. Whatever. If you do understand Chapter 8, please write to me at plotzd@slate.com, and I will publish the most persuasive/entertaining answer. Keep it under 100 words, please!
This savior business is getting more serious. Isaiah forecasts happy later days when "a child has been born for us, a son given to us … and he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. His authority shall grow continually, and there shall be endless people for the throne of David and his kingdom. He will establish and uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time onward and forever more."
According to the footnotes in my Bible—the Oxford annotation of the New Revised Standard Version—this passage may only be referring to Hezekiah, a king of Judah. But am I right in thinking that Christians view these verses as a messiah prophecy? Is it, in fact, the source of the Jesus nickname, "Prince of Peace"? (I assume that early Christians intentionally described Jesus in language matching the ancient prophecies, in order to connect him to the prophetic tradition.)
I always suspected Bob Dylan had a lot of Bible in him. Read (or better yet, listen to) the chorus of "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll":
you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears,
Take the rag away from your face.
Now ain't the time for your tears.
Now read the first lines of this chapter:
You who make iniquitous decrees, who write oppressive statutes …
Similar phrasing and rhythm, right?
The Lord isn't peeved at just the Israelites. He has it in for the Assyrians, too. This chapter essentially retells in prophetic poetry the events of 2 Kings Chapter 19, when the Assyrian army was wiped out by plague while besieging Jerusalem.
Another Jesus prophecy—as well as a shocking discovery about one of the most famous phrases in the English language.
First, the prophecy: Isaiah looks forward to the day when the Lord's designated ruler shall reign, constantly judging the poor with righteousness, helping the meek, and killing the wicked "with the breath of his lips." When this savior arrives, the Lord will gather the remains of His people, bringing them back from their exiles in Assyria and Egypt and everywhere else, and they will drive the pagans out of Israel once and for all. This is eerily remniscent of the Christian End Time prophecies (or at least what little I know about them from reading a couple of the Left Behind books). Is Isaiah's prediction about the ingathering of the Israelites and the vanquishing of their enemies a foundation for the prophecies in the New Testament's Book of Revelation?*
Before this final showdown occurs, however:
The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.
Wait a minute! What's missing from this gorgeous, gentle verse? Who is not lying down with whom? Yes, you got it: The lion does not lie down with the lamb! The leopard lies down with the kid, and the lion does with the calf, but no lion and lamb! (Incidentally, here's the story of a lion that does lie down with calves.)
The lion-lamb confusion is a fascinating example of the Bible's extraordinary cultural influence. If you asked 100 people—even 100 literary scholars—99 of them would say that the lion lying down with the lamb was a line from the Bible (and the very educated ones would even know it was from Isaiah). But it's not! It's a misquote, or, perhaps something even better than that. At some point during the 400 years since the King James Bible was written, a clever soul did a Bible mash-up, tweaking a favorite verse to make it sound a little snazzier, adding alliteration to juice up the phrase. Hmm. Wouldn't "lion and lamb" sound better than "leopard and kid"? And all I can say to that lion-and-lamb inventor is: Thanks for the great rewrite, kid!
Thoughts on Blogging the Bible? Please e-mail David Plotz at plotzd@slate.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)
Correction, Dec. 27: The piece incorrectly referred to the New Testament's "Book of Revelations." It is actually singular: the "Book of Revelation." (Return to corrected sentence.)
Lots of readers accepted my challenge to explain Chapter 8 of Isaiah, which utterly flummoxed me. You sent me dozens (and dozens, and dozens, and dozens) of answers that were funny, smart, and sometimes both. Thanks! It's all clear to me now! Click here to read my three favorite explanations.
Oh, and several of you discovered a gaping hole in my education. My Christmas Eve entry about the Jesus prophecies in Isaiah never mentioned one of the most important reasons why they're so famous today: The text of Handel's Messiah—the most popular piece of holiday music ever—is drawn heavily from Chapters 7 and 9.
This chapter is an oasis. In the midst of all the hectoring, screaming, and threatening, Isaiah pauses for a moment of quiet contemplation. It's a very brief respite: The chapter is just six verses—perhaps the shortest in the Bible. But it's a soothing, lovely passage about faith. Isaiah thanks God for His "comfort," then says:
Surely God is my salvation;
I will trust, and will not be afraid,
For the Lord God is my strength and my might;
He has become my salvation.
With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation. And you will say in that day:
Give thanks to the Lord.
The language of the chapter—comfort, salvation, joy, trust, thanks—is very much the language of modern worship. But it is totally, utterly, massively at odds with the rest of Isaiah. Isaiah is difficult to read not merely because it's an endless, plotless, prophetic poem, but also because the God of Isaiah is so cruel and vengeful. He's God as played by Jack Nicholson. He has only two settings: angry and furious. Except for this all-too-brief chapter, He is never a God of love or mercy. Which is why I'm clinging to Chapter 12 like a security blanket.
Chapter 13 and Chapter 14
The first of a series of "Pronouncements" by Isaiah. This one is the Babylon Pronouncement, to be followed in later chapters by, to name a few, the Moab Pronouncement, the Damascus Pronouncement, the Egypt Pronouncement, the Desert of the Sea Pronouncement, the Valley of Vision Pronouncement, the Tyre Pronouncement, and the Beasts of the Negeb Pronouncement. These Pronouncements vary a bit, but they're generally Isaiah prophesying exactly how the particular enemy of Israel will be punished by God. (They eerily correspond to Israel's current foreign-policy complications: Don't the Israelis dream of being rid of the problems of Babylon, that is, Iraq; Damascus, Egypt, and Tyre, that is, Lebanon?)
Anyway, back to the Babylon Pronouncement. The Lord is really going to give those Babylonian brutes a walloping. "Every human heart will melt … [T]he sun will be dark at its rising, and the moon will not shed its light. ... I will make mortals more rare than fine gold. … Their infants will be dashed to pieces before their eyes and their wives ravished." Etc., etc. Babylon will be so destroyed that it will be overrun by wild animals: "There ostriches will live, and there goat-demons will dance"—how's that for a spooky image?
As you begin to see from the mouth-frothing above, the Pronouncements resemble nothing so much as the obsessive, vindictive, logorrheic rants of local sports talk radio, particularly sports talk radio in a city with a losing football team—such as, say, New York. In place of the Babylon Pronouncement, there's the Coach Pronouncement: Coach Coughlin is a friggin' idiot. I can't believe he kept Manning in the game that long. He's gonna get fired—he's definitely gotta get fired if they don't beat the Redskins. A friggin' goat-demon could do a better job coaching than him. Instead of the Damascus Pronouncement, the Quarterback Pronouncement: Eli Manning? Are you friggin' kidding me? I throw better than Eli Manning. Heck, an ostrich throws better than him. They've gotta trade him, right now, even if they just get a third-string safety. He's never gonna be an NFL QB. Instead of the Egypt Pronouncement, the Tight End Pronouncement: Jeremy Shockey—he's a friggin' quitter. What they need to do—today, not next year, not when his contract is up—is just bench that guy and trade him for someone who wants it. I want to rip out his eyes and tear out his heart—not that he has one ... Think of Isaiah as the World's Angriest Fan.)
Chapter 15 and Chapter 16
A similar fate, but not quite as bad, awaits the Moabites. Here's what confuses me: I can't figure out if the tone of this prophecy is sarcastic glee or mild regret. Isaiah advises us to "weep" for Moab and says that "my heart throbs like a harp for Moab." Yet he also clearly delights in the fall of the insolent Moabite king and the toppling of their false idols. So, perhaps his weeping and mourning are actually mockery. I don't know. Do you?
Chapter 17 through Chapter 19
Pronouncements about Damascus, Egypt, and Nubia. These Pronouncements, like the others, obviously relate to the geopolitics of Isaiah's time. When he writes these swooping metaphorical verses about Damascus, he is actually commenting—punditlike—on the state of relations between Assyria and Judah. But because the prophecies are so metaphorical, it's difficult for a casual reader (i.e., me) to understand exactly what Isaiah is talking about. In Chapter 19, for example, he describes the Lord riding to Egypt on a "swift cloud" and stirring up the Egyptians to fight each other. This clearly refers to some kind of Egyptian civil unrest, but what in particular, I don't know. Most of the time, my effort to read the Bible without outside sources works pretty well. But Isaiah is a case where I could really benefit from some historical context.
The most remarkable passage in these chapters begins at Chapter 19, Verse 19, when a group of Egyptians—those very same Ra-idolizing, Israelite-enslaving, plague-suffering Egyptians—start to worship the Lord. And then Egypt, Israel, and Assyria join in a kind of brotherhood under the Lord. God says, "Blessed be Egypt My people, and Assyria the work of My hands, and Israel My heritage." What does this mean? Why is God inviting the Egyptians and Assyrians onto His team? Does His invitation only extend to the diaspora Jews in Egypt and Assyria—that is, the Israelites who were expelled to Assyria back in 2 Kings, and the God-worshipping Egyptians mentioned in Verse 19? Or is Isaiah referring to some alliance that includes all the Assyrians and Egyptians?
The world's first nudist! Isaiah walks around naked and barefoot for three years. This is supposed to be a warning to Egypt and Ethiopia that after Assyria defeats them in war, they will be forced to parade naked. It does seem a little hard on poor old Isaiah, who doesn't otherwise display Anna Nicole Smith-type exhibitionist tendencies.
For the third or fourth time in the book, Isaiah compares someone in trouble to a woman in labor. Back in Chapter 19, he also likened the Egyptians to "women, trembling and terrified." The frequency of these woman analogies is troubling. It reveals a misogyny that's absent in most of the rest of the Bible. The Bible often ignores women, or only notices the hookers, but it hasn't scorned women as a group, or derided them for their cowardice and weakness the way Isaiah does.
The source of another one of the Bible's most famous verses! Yet another disaster is looming for the Israelites, and the Lord expects them to mourn and wear sackcloth. Instead they rejoice crazily, with a bacchanalian feast: "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die." Interestingly, this phrase has come down to us as a good thing, a way to seize life in the face of adversity. (See: countless war movies, Casablanca, any pop cultural representation of Vikings, etc.) But the Lord is not charmed by the frenzied pleasure-seeking. He's infuriated, and vows not to forgive the feasters.
Sidon and Tyre are doomed, too.
Chapter 24 and Chapter 25
Chapter 24 is one of the most ghastly in the entire Bible, rivaling the Noah story for global existential misery. It's awesome in its menace. Everyone will be wiped out. You can't buy your way out of this one: "as with the slave, so with his master; as with the maid, so with her mistress; as with the buyer, so with the seller." Because we have broken our covenant with God, He will break it with us. It actually is the Noah story, minus the water. Again we have "polluted" the earth. But this time, instead of a deluge, the earth "dries up and withers." As in the Flood, the silence and emptiness of the cursed world are most shocking. "The mirth of the timbrels is stilled, the noise of the jubilant has ceased."
But all is not lost. After "the gladness of earth is banished," the Lord comes back, punishes all the wicked kings, and brings justice for the poor and needy. "The song of the ruthless was stilled." Unlike the earlier Pronouncements, this is not some minor geopolitical prophecy. This is the Big One, Judgment Day. For example, on this day, God "will swallow up death forever."
Even so, there's a darkly comic moment in this triumphal celebration. Even as the Israelites rejoice in God's victory, marvel at the greatest day in human history, wonder at the Lord's awesome achievements, they pause to give the poor Moabites one more kick. After all the high-flown rhetoric, the final verses of Chapter 25 gloat that the Moabites "shall be trodden down … as straw is trodden down in a dung pit." That's Isaiah in a nutshell: All praise to our mighty God! OK, now let's go rub our enemies' face in dung! (Just another way, I suppose, that Isaiah is like football.)
Thoughts on Blogging the Bible? Please e-mail David Plotz at plotzd@slate.com . (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)
Several readers complain that I've gotten "punchy" during Isaiah. OK, I confess: I'm having a hard time with this book. The poetry is dense, the metaphors elusive, the history obscure, the themes repetitious. So please cut me a little slack! Compared to Isaiah, a book like Leviticus is The Cat in the Hat.
Chapter 26 and Chapter 27
Another account of a Judgment Day, with the Lord raging wrathfully across the earth. A detail that caught my eye: "Your dead shall live, their corpses shall rise." As I've written earlier, one contrast between modern Christianity and Judaism—at least the worldly Reform/Conservative Judaism I'm exposed to—is Judaism's relative lack of interest in the afterlife and the end times. Jews tend to focus on the here and now, and don't spend a lot of time pondering life after death. Until we got to Isaiah, that has been the Bible's attitude, too. It has been a very life-is-for-the-living book. The laws and stories all concern how we treat each other here on earth. Death is seen as a permanent, final state. There are a few references to Sheol—the place of the dead—but they are cursory. Isaiah, by contrast, is full of messianic and apocalyptic language. It takes a radically different view of life and death: In an earlier chapter, the Lord ends death, and here He proposes to bring all the dead back to life. Isaiah promotes the idea of eternal salvation, and urges Israelites to think about themselves in eschatological terms. In other words, Isaiah feels much more New Testament-y than other Bible books—which may be why it's so popular with Christians.
The Lord—"with his cruel and great and strong sword" (note that revealing first adjective)—slays the sea monster Leviathan. I take it this is where Thomas Hobbes got his title. Isaiah's Leviathan is killed in passing: It's not clear what the beast symbolizes.
Chapter 28 and Chapter 29
Isaiah deplores the corruption of Jerusalem and Judah. He describes their priests as drunks, vomiting all over the temple. The leaders—"you scoffers"—have "made a covenant with death." They're doomed—God will sweep them away. In particular, God and Isaiah really have it in for the schemers and plotters and strategists—that is, the politicians.
Ha! Those who would hide their plans deep from the Lord, who do their work in dark places and say, "who sees us, who takes note of us?" How perverse of you!
I love this passage. The opening "Ha!" is a favorite gimmick of Isaiah's, and it's fabulous, a perfect combination of indignation and mockery. The closing, "How perverse of you!," also has a wonderful condescending smirk to it. And the central point—that God is watching everywhere, even seeing those who think they're hiding—is powerful. In Genesis and Exodus, God was everywhere, sniffing every animal sacrifice, smiting every Sabbath violator. But since the Israelites settled in the Promised Land, back in the book of Joshua, God has only been an intermittent presence in their lives, dropping in occasionally to unleash a plague or two. Isaiah wants to make it clear to his people that no matter their doubts, God is still watching. (As another great wordsmith wrote about a different religious figure: "He knows if you've been bad or good, so you better be good for goodness' sake.")
These verses are also interesting because they demonstrate how ancient, and how effective, the populist conspiracy theory against elites is. Even back in Isaiah's day, apparently, we worried that there were secret scheming cabals that controlled everything behind the scenes. (Exploiting this cabalist fear is still one of the best ways to get yourself elected to office.) As a populist prophet infuriated with his rulers, Isaiah sought to undermine and discredit this elite, and what better way than to expose their secret conspiracies to God and to their countrymen?
Chapter 29 also marks the first appearance of a lovely metaphor that Isaiah will repeat several times. The Lord is a potter, and we are His clay. Therefore, says Isaiah, it makes no sense for us to talk back to the Lord, to doubt Him, or to ignore Him: "Shall the thing say of its maker, 'He did not make me.' " Again Isaiah scores points not only with the vividness of his metaphor, but with the derisiveness of his tone.
Here's an experiment, analogous to the fortune cookie game in Chinese restaurants: Try adding "you idiots!" to the end of any verse in Isaiah. I guarantee that it will make that verse sound even more like Isaiah. I just did this. I put my finger down on a random verse. It was Isaiah 32:11:
Tremble, you women who are at ease,
shudder, you complacent ones;
strip, and make yourselves bare,
and put sackcloth on your loins, you idiots!
Chapter 30 and Chapter 31
God seriously disapproves of any alliances with Egyptians.
Chapter 32 and Chapter 33
These chapters, which describe a future ideal kingdom and a horrifying tyranny, are full of extraordinary wordplay. It's great in English, so I imagine the Hebrew must be amazing. Here's a snippet:
Ah, you destroyer,
who yourself have not been destroyed;
you treacherous one,
with whom no one has dealt treacherously!
When you have ceased to destroy,
You will be destroyed;
And when you have stopped dealing treacherously,
You will be dealt with treacherously.
Chapter 34 and Chapter 35
The Lord threatens universal destruction, again. This time, He's infuriated with the people of Edom, who seem to be aligned with the Babylonians. After He has His day of vengeance, Edom will be in worse shape than Baghdad—soil turned to sulfur, land in flames, deserted except for owls and ravens and, of course, goat-demons. It will be so bad that "They shall name it No Kingdom There." No one delivers a threat like Isaiah!
But then, Lebanon will be restored, and a grand highway, "the Holy Way," will be built to bring joyful Israelites back to Zion. These chapters highlight perhaps the most distinctive structural element in Isaiah: constant reversals of fortune. In Chapter 34 and 35, for example, Edom goes from glory, to total destruction, to renewal. And it's not always the Israelites who triumph and their enemies who are destroyed. Sometimes, the Israelites are the ones who take it on the chin. In any case, you can always be sure that no happy time—and no sad time—will last more than a few verses. Death or glory is always just around the corner.
Chapter 36 through Chapter 39
A very weird interruption to the prophetic poem. These chapters repeat, almost verbatim, the stories of King Hezekiah told in 2 Kings: Chapters 18-20. Isn't the Book of Isaiah long enough? Does it really need this padding?
Thoughts on Blogging the Bible? Please e-mail David Plotz at plotzd@slate.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)
The Book of Isaiah
Say goodbye to the confused, vengeful, wild-eyed prophecies of the first half of the book. Isaiah has calmed down, offering hymns of praise rather than orgies of damnation. Chapter 40 is probably the grandest hosanna to Almighty God ever written. Its basic theme isn't new—God is unimaginably powerful, and we are pathetically weak—but the pileup of metaphors, analogies, images, and rhetorical questions is still astonishing. Taste a little bite:
Even the nations are like a drop from a bucket,
And as are accounted as dust on the scales …
It is He who sits above the circle of the earth,
And its inhabitants are like grasshoppers,
Who stretches out the heavens like a curtain,
And spreads them like a tent to live in;
Who brings the princes to naught,
And makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.
This chapter and the next few sound familiar—almost clichéd—but I think that's for the same reason Casablanca or Romeo and Juliet sound familiar. It is an urtext, so powerful that it actually determined how we think and write about God. Isaiah's over-the-top comparisons ("Lebanon would not provide fuel enough … for a burnt offering") and the rhetorical questions ("Who taught Him knowledge and showed Him the way to understanding?") resonate because we use the very same language today to talk about God.
God is still not excessively pleased with His chosen people. (They're a "worm" and an "insect.") But at least He's back on their team again. "Those who war against you shall be nothing at all."
Again, I'm struck that Isaiah cares so much more about the poor and helpless than anyone else in the Bible. He's always insisting that superficial obedience to God means nothing—only caring for the lowest among us earns His love. It's a wildly different emphasis than everything that has come before. Till now, the Bible has been nominally sympathetic to the poor but mostly concerned with the Israelites as a whole. Isaiah races way off toward radical, liberation-theology egalitarianism. (Surely Jesus borrowed much of his blessed-are-the-meekism from Isaiah?)
Plagiarizing a trick from Elijah, God mocks rival deities and challenges them to a fight. "Set forth your case, says the Lord; Bring your proofs. …Tell us what is to come hereafter, that we may know that you are gods; do good, or do harm, that we may be afraid and terrified." They can't, of course. The Lord dismisses with a gloating sneer: "You, indeed, are nothing, and your work is nothing at all."
I know it's juvenile of me, but I love these catty biblical comments. Here's God acting just like we would if we were God! The Good Book feels most real, and most persuasive, when it's funny, mean, and scornful. It reminds us that the Bible is not an idealization, but a book written by (and written about) real people, who can be both scornful and kind, faithful and cruel, sarcastic and sweet—as their God can be, too.
Chapter 42 and Chapter 43
God instructs Israel to be "a light to the nations." Isaiah tells us: "Sing to the Lord a new song." Hello, Bartlett's.
Isaiah 42:14 offers one of the strangest and most humanizing images of God yet. God is explaining that He has kept silent and restrained himself for too long. Now he's coming back to punish the wicked and lead the righteous. "Now I will cry out like a woman in labor, I will gasp and pant." As I mentioned, the first half of Isaiah is full of misogyny—weakness and women are always linked. But here we have God Himself as a woman undergoing the agonies of childbirth! As far as I can remember, this is the first comparison of God to a woman. Have there been others that I missed?
Like certain in-laws and unbeloved uncles, the Lord just can't let a happy moment pass without a putdown. Here in Chapter 43, He again redeems Israel, but He's bitterly resentful as He does it. Rather than celebrate their new glory, he grumbles at the Israelites for their infidelity: "You have not brought me sweet cane … or satisfied me with the fat of your sacrifices. But you have burdened me with your sins; you have wearied me with your iniquities."
Chapter 44 and Chapter 45
As in Chapter 40, there is fulsome praise of God's awesomeness. Only this time, God is talking about Himself. "I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god. Who is like me? Let them proclaim it. ...There is no other rock; I know not one. … I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I the Lord do all these things."
(Have you ever wondered what inspired Muhammad Ali? Where his florid braggadocio came from? Wonder no more.)
The chapter also riffs on how you make an idol. First, the carpenter cuts down a tree. Second, he uses wood from the tree to bake his bread and warm himself. … It's not clear where Isaiah is going with this, and then—the brilliant turn: "The rest of [the wood] he makes into a god, his idol, bows down to it and worships it." The Lord scoffs at the fool who would fall on his knees before a block of wood, who would think the kindling that cooks his food is a god, who is so stupid that he can't see that the statue he holds "is a fraud." God doesn't merely object to us worshipping other gods. He is actually insulted by the idea we would fall down before an idol. It impugns his "enormous enormance"—I'm quoting Dr. Seuss here—to be reduced to a block of wood. Treating a wooden statue as God Almighty is like calling a Ferrari a nice car, or saying Ella Fitzgerald is a decent singer. It's much better to say nothing—to make nothing—than to offer such insultingly small praise.
Sometimes the Bible and modern geopolitics brush against each other. And sometimes they crash head on at 55 mph like they do in Chapter 45. The Lord sends a huge shout-out to King Cyrus of Persia. God promises to lead him to victory, "cutting through the bars of iron" to help him. Why help this pagan king? Because Cyrus conquers Babylon, frees the Jews, ends the "Babylonian Captivity," and allows the Israelites to return home to Zion. There are so many layers of irony and analogy here, you could practically make baklava. Cyrus remains a great hero to modern Iranians as the father of Persia. Yet Cyrus is also a hero to Jews, because he liberated them and was famously tolerant of Judaism. So, you have Iran, a nation led by anti-Semites, sharing a hero with Jews. Plus, what does Cyrus conquer? Babylon—that is, modern day Iraq. At this moment, Americans are fretting about Teheran's rising influence in Iraq and its possible transformation into a vassal state of Iran. Twenty-five hundred years have passed, and it's the same fights, the same land, the same people.
God makes a very sweet promise to us. He says to the Israelites, "Even to your old age I am He, even when you turn gray I will carry you." There are plenty of good reasons why people get more religious when they get older—the duh! one being that religion offers the consolation of eternal life—but here's another. God doesn't discriminate. He loves us, young and old.
God continues his attack on the Israelites' enemies with a particularly graphic image: Babylon is a "virgin daughter." God orders her to sit in the dust, strip off her robe, and uncover her nakedness—if not quite a rape, certainly a sexual assault.
All families replay the same dramas over and over again.
Dad: I told you to be home by 11. Were you out with that football player again?
Jane: I'm 16, Dad, I can do what I want. And I love him.
Dad: I told you to be home by midnight. Were you out with that Marine again?
Jane: I'm 17, Dad, lay off. And I love him. Etc.
It's no different with the Lord and His Chosen. They must have had the same squabble 15 times in Isaiah alone. Israelites: abject, flattering, hoping for mercy. God: irritated, reluctantly granting forgiveness, rehashing all the Israelites' old mistakes, making the Israelites sorry they ever asked for mercy. To whit: "I know that you are obstinate. … I knew that you would deal very treacherously, and that from birth you were called a rebel."
The line so nice God drops it twice: " 'There is no peace,' says the Lord, 'for the wicked.' " This is the closing verse of this chapter, and of Chapter 57.
Chapter 49 through Chapter 52
The Bible so far has been written for a small audience—a small tribe of Israelites, embattled by enemies, struggling for survival. It never bothers to speak to the rest of the world: Non-Israelites are usually enemies and always irrelevant to God's covenant. But Isaiah makes God a universal God. In Chapter 49, for example, God chooses a "servant" whose job is to speak to the whole world. "I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth." Moses and David did not care an iota about universal salvation or the end of the earth: They wanted Jewish survival. But Isaiah has repurposed God's mission for everyone. Not to belabor a point made by a million people before me, but it's certainly no surprise that Isaiah is popular with Christians, since the book teaches a proto-Christian theology.
Here's another proto-Christian theme in Chapter 51: Don't worry about minor problems here on earth, because "my salvation will be forever, and my deliverance will never be ended."
And here's another! The "servant" is killed, or perhaps only mangled and disfigured, yet returns more exalted than ever.
And even one more, the most obvious yet! The servant is "despised and rejected by others." He is:
wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities … and by his bruises we are healed. … The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter. … Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain. When you make his life an offering for sin … through him the will of the Lord shall prosper.
Wow! The earlier Jesus language in Isaiah is nothing compared to this. This sounds exactly like the prayers I used to hear during chapel at St. Albans. It's obvious that the essential Christian ideas about the redemptive suffering of Jesus are founded in Isaiah. The notion of God sending a servant and making him suffer for our sins, so that we may be redeemed—it starts here.
Question for Jewish scholars: Do we Jews also understand this "servant" to be the Messiah?
Thoughts on Blogging the Bible? Please e-mail David Plotz at plotzd@slate.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)
The Book of Isaiah
I got lots of great mail about the last entry, in which I asked if Jews, like Christians, believe the suffering "servant" in Isaiah 53 is the Messiah. The short answer is: no. For Jews, the servant is the nation of Israel itself. For the long answer—which is also no—I refer you to reader Pam, whose note to me begins: "No, of course not, don't be such an idiot. You've been reading Isaiah and you need to Pay Attention …" (Click here to read the rest of her response, which is learned, derisive, and funny, sort of like Isaiah itself.)
Several eagle-eyed readers noted the peculiarity of Isaiah, Chapter 40, in which God "sits above the circle of the earth." If the earth is "a circle," they wrote, doesn't that imply the ancient Israelites believed the world was round? It sounds that way to me. Are there any historians, archeologists, or scientists out there who can settle this? (I don't think it's a translation anomaly, either, since all the other Bibles I checked also refer to "the circle of the earth.")
Chapter 54 and Chapter 55
That God—He's so Postmodern about gender! A few chapters ago, the Lord was a mother in labor. Now it's Jerusalem who is a barren woman made suddenly fertile, while the Lord is her husband.
Here's an interesting rebuke to those who would try to interpret or explain God. (A rebuke, in other words, to people like me.) "My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts." According to Isaiah, our efforts to humanize Him, to turn Him into a friend or a relative, even to understand Him, are doomed. The impossibility of imagining God may be the essential theme of Isaiah. Isaiah objects to any effort to contain, reduce, limit, represent, or explain God. (This is the source of his rage against idols.) Once you accept that He can be limited, faith is compromised.
God promises eternal glory to "the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths." Eunuchs? Where do the eunuchs come from?
Much of this chapter savages the sorcery-practicing, child-sacrificing worshippers of Molech. This is at least the 37th time Isaiah or another prophet has inveighed against the child-killing Molechites. But I'll bet you a cup of coffee that this is a blood libel—an exaggeration or distortion of Molechite practices designed to dehumanize the enemy. Have you ever heard of any society, culture, religion, or tribe in the entire history of humanity that sacrificed its own children? It's a Darwinian dead end. Of course, there are groups that kill young prisoners and ritually sacrifice a virgin or two, and there are occasional mass suicides that include kids (see: Masada), but no group makes a standard practice of killing its heirs. Wikipedia seems to confirm my suspicion that the Molechites didn't sacrifice their children. (The false murder charge may have derived from a ritual where they harmlessly passed their kids through a fire to give them strength.)
The Lord again demands good works rather than rituals. This is His strongest plea yet. He savages those who pray to Him and observe fast days even as they continue to mistreat others. If you want to get saved by Me, God says, then you better "loose the bonds of injustice … share your bread with the hungry … bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them." Then, and only then, will the Lord bless you. (Oh, and you have to keep the Sabbath, too.)
Isaiah asks the question that has plagued every child since time began. If God is omnipotent, why doesn't He heed our prayers? Of course, if you've read the last 58 chapters, you know exactly how God is going to answer that one. He doesn't pay attention because our sins are too great, our tongues too wicked, our hands too bloody. God's scathing denunciation is followed by this breast-beating passage, one of the most hauntingly beautiful in the Bible:
We stumble at noon as in the twilight,
Among the vigorous as though we were dead.
We all growl like bears;
Like doves we moan mournfully.
We wait for justice, but there is none;
For salvation, but it is far from us.
For our transgressions before you are many,
And our sins testify against us.
"We stumble at noon as in the twilight." That's a powerful image!
Isaiah's getting for a big finish—just a few more chapters to go! Here's a jolly section. The Lord lifts the world out of gloom, and sheds light everywhere. Zion returns to glory. The prophet arrives to deliver the Lord's vengeance against the wicked, and comfort the suffering. It's good news for everyone, but particularly for the Israelites, who will finally reap the benefits of being God's Chosen People. For Israelites, it will be like being seniors during Senior Week, a senator at a Washington cocktail party, the fraternity president at pledge initiation. All the other peoples of the world will pay tribute to the Israelites, tend their flocks, and treat them as God's own ministers on earth. Speaking as a Jew, I must say: All right! Can we set a firm date? How's next Thursday?
The poor Edomites are the battered wife of the Near East. (Remember Chapter 34?) Whenever God's had a bad day, He gives the Edomites another kick in the head, seemingly just for the heck of it. This time, the Edomites are grapes, and God is operating a wine press: "I trod on them in my anger, and trampled them in my wrath; their juice spattered on my garments and stained my robes. … I crushed them in my wrath, and I poured out their lifeblood on the earth." Yeesh.
Changing the subject, our narrator, who seems to be speaking for all of Israel, poses this doozy of a question: "Why, O Lord, do you make us stray from our ways and harden our heart, so that we do not fear you?"
This is the most difficult question in the Bible. It's confounding because it doesn't deny human failure, and it doesn't deny God. It asks God to reconcile His awesomeness and our wickedness. Over and over again in Isaiah, God has emphasized that He is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. And over and over again, the book emphasizes that the Israelites willfully spurn Him and are punished. But if God is as mighty as He says He is, what possible reason does He have for allowing us to fail all the time? Why is He so eager to punish us for failing, when He himself could stop us? Why does He actively encourage us to fail—"make us stray from our ways"? This question poses a profound challenge to the existence of God. It also poses a profound challenge to the existence of a God who is all powerful and all good.
Isaiah doesn't have an answer for its own impossible question. Neither do I. Do you?
Chapter 64 and Chapter 65
These two chapters comprise a fascinating dialogue between us and God. In Chapter 64, the Israelites ask why no one has seen God for ages, why He has withheld his presence from His people for so long. They beg him to end His silence, because silence is the cruelest punishment He can inflict. In the next chapter, He answers. His tone is a kind of wry anger.
"I said, 'Here I am, here I am,' to a nation that did not call on my name. I held out my hands all day long to a rebellious people."
God agrees not to keep silent, but the price will be brutal punishment for all the sins of the Israelites. "My servants shall eat, but you shall be hungry; my servants shall drink, but you shall be thirsty …" etc. God is often like a mean stepfather. Your choice is either having Him talking to you but furious, or ignoring you altogether. And it's not clear which is the better option.
In the glorious new Jerusalem, someone who dies at age 100 will be "considered a youth, and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed." Sort of like Denmark.
This final chapter nicely encapsulates the rest of the book. It includes marvelous verses about God's greatness and the superfabulous future that is to come. But, of course, it also revels in carnage. After an ecstatic description of the coming of God's kingdom, the lucky survivors go outside—to look upon "the dead bodies of the people who have rebelled against Me." That's my Isaiah: God, glory, and guts.
Thoughts on Blogging the Bible? Please e-mail David Plotz at plotzd@slate.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)
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Mike Swartwout writes:
"Though we have only indirect evidence, my suspicion is that Baal was a god who let you do as you please. I'm sure the high priest of Baal enjoyed a cozy life in Jezebel's kingdom because he gave Baal's stamp of approval to all she chose to do. 'Steal another man's vineyard? Of course! Baal always says that the king can do as he pleases!'
But God's prophets were constantly rebuking the kings/nobles/merchants for their injustice and oppression—especially of the widow, orphan and alien.
(This, in turn, is why I think that Josiah's renaissance was temporary—as soon as he was out of power, Judahites went back to selfish oppression. It wasn't that God refused to honor their repentance, but that Judah's repentance was a superficial change imposed by one king—once he was gone, it was back to business as usual.)
Given the choice between a God who told you to stop overindulging yourself and look out for the powerless in the kingdom, and a god who told you that the plight of the powerless was not your responsibility—or, stronger yet, that the powerless deserved their fate as surely as you deserved your trappings of power ... well, it's not a real surprise, is it?"
Chris Yarosh writes:
"Ever since Genesis, man has been trying to reconcile himself with God. For the Jews, this means following the Law, the outward sign of God's covenant. However, the Law is so strict and specific that it becomes overwhelming and too difficult to keep, especially compared to the abhorrent practices of the pagans who worship Baal. That is probably why the Jews ignore it so much despite the awesome presence of God in their midst. This is precisely the reason why St. Paul later advocates freedom from the Law for Christians, basing reconciliation and restoration instead on 'justification by faith.' Justification by faith more resembles Abraham's relationship to God. Abe had no Law and is not known for many 'good works,' but was credited as righteous anyway because of his loyalty to God."
James Hirschhorn writes:
"The local pagan religions seem to have had a very different attitude towards sex, treating it as a positive force essential for the fertility of the land. Ritualized intercourse with women attached to pagan shrines was part of the cult of fertility/mother goddesses like Astarte, and the pillars or columns sacred to Baal were phallic. Note how often the Jewish prophets denounce the 'harlotries,' 'lewdness,' or 'uncleanness' of the pagans. Judaism, and after it Christianity and Islam, view the sexual impulse in general and female sexuality in particular as sinful unless kept within very narrow bounds. That attitude—even more than the dietary lawsset the Jews apart from their pagan neighbors. It also meant, as it does today, that the God of the Jews had a hard time competing with the attitude that getting it on early and often was not only permissible but essential.
And as far as long run competition goes, there are a lot of Baalites around these days. We just call them post-Freudian, modern, enlightened or sophisticated."
Jim Lyle writes:
"Maybe [the Israelites were faithless] for the same reason that I wasn't faithful to a wife who deeply loved me? It wasn't about her. It was about me."
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My three favorite reader explanations for Isaiah, Chapter 8.
1. Evan Donovan writes:
"I'm not sure what the Jewish interpretation, especially for the original audience, would be, but here's a stab at it: Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz, Isaiah's son, is the child referred to in Chapter 7. Here in Chapter 8, the amount of time before Damascus and Samaria will be judged by Assyria is further specified. Isaiah's son will still be a toddler before this happens—thus, the time remaining is even shorter than it seems in Isaiah 7. The latter part of the chapter, beginning 'For the Lord spoke to me thus,' goes on to say that people will find it difficult to believe in this prophecy, since their faith is in geopolitical realities—the seen—rather than the coming judgment of God. But God promises Isaiah that He will be a sanctuary for those who have faith in Him and a "stone of stumbling" for those who do not. Later this will be attributed to Christ, as the last part of the passage segues into another Messianic prophecy."
2. Tom Sellers ignored my request that answers be limited to 100 words, but he's so entertaining that it doesn't matter:
The name 'Maher-shal'al-hash-baz' means 'Plunder hastens; spoil quickens.' The key to Chapter 8 is in Verse 18: 'Behold, I and the children whom Hashem has given me are signs and symbols for Israel ...' In Chapter 7, Isaiah's son Shear-jash'ub (A Remainder will return) and Immanuel (God with us) also serve as Prophetic signs.
Prophets of Israel often used symbolic actions and events to dramatize their messages and to testify to their validity. Isaiah wants to communicate a very important message to Israel in regard to the threat of Syria and Samaria. What's the best way to do this? Suppose I'm a prophet of Israel and predict that "Christmas" will be no longer be celebrated. When will it happen? I could say, 'Scribe Plotz will have a son with the name Merry no more and before his son calls him Papa, you will receive word that Christmas is against the law.' (Especially sending Christmas cards).
Does this get your attention and keep it? I'm also going to write this prophecy down before it happens in front of reliable witnesses in very clear language on tablets that even, say, Mr. Plotz could understand. Folks will say, "'eah, it was written right here before it all happened. It's not just rumor or hearsay. Prophet Tom received a true revelation.'
Substitute Syria and Samaria for Christmas, Maher-shalah-hash-baz for 'Merry no more' and you get the gist of Chapter 8. Syria and Samaria are no threat to Judah because Assyria will plunder them like the namesake of Isaiah's son. As for those who have allegiance to Syria and Samaria (put in metaphorical terms of 'rejecting the flowing water of Shiloah'), you will receive the drowning river of the Euphrates from the homeland of the Assyrians. But for those who are faithful (Immanuel), God is with us.
Now I wonder what effect these names had on Isaiah's children? Can 'Plunder hastens, spoil quicken' come out to play? It has to be hard to be the preacher's son."
3. Christopher Blair has an alternative reading:
" 'Then the Lord said to me, Take a large tablet and write on it in common characters, 'Belonging to Maher-shalal-hash-baz.'
... da doo run run run
da doo run run ..."
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Pam writes:
"The answer is, no of course not, don't be such an idiot. You've been reading Isaiah and you need to Pay Attention. The 'suffering servant' is of course Israel personified. God has been addressing 'Israel' personified over and over again. See Isaiah. 44:1 and 2 for one example. The 'nations' have been personified as well—you noticed 'Fair Maiden Babylon,' didn't you?
If you'd paid even minimal attention in Hebrew school, you'd know that. It is clear from the text—if you were Paying Attention.
Trust me, we know perfectly well how Christians view that bit of Isaiah. … Do please remember that the first century writers of the New Testament had Isaiah available right in front of them for reference."
"Today I heard from some opinions that matter a lot to me, and these are the opinions of those who wear the uniform."—Washington, D.C., Dec. 13, 2006
Click here to see video of Bush's comments. The Bushism is at 8:19.
For more, see "The Complete Bushisms."
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If you had asked any other President in American history during a time of war whether they had a credibility problem because they had not foreseen changes on the battlefield, you probably would have had plenty of cause. I mean, Abraham Lincoln constantly guessed from Manassas straight through until the final months of the war.
—White House press spokesman Tony Snow, Jan. 9, 2007
So now it's Abraham Lincoln. Seems like only yesterday that President Bush was the reincarnation of Harry S. Truman, the patron saint of low approval ratings. Last month Sen. Richard Durban, R.-Ill., told reporters that at a meeting with congressional leaders, Bush compared his trials in Iraq to Truman's at the dawn of the Cold War. Bush even gave Truman biographer David McCullough a Presidential Medal of Freedom. But that was last month. Maybe somebody in the White House read Slate's Fred Kaplan, writing in his Jan. 3 column ("Iron Man") that presidents who compare themselves to Truman were like "failing artists who take solace from the fact that van Gogh didn't sell many paintings in his lifetime. … [M]aybe they're just lousy artists." Or maybe Bush's handlers figured that if you're going to be an unpopular previous president, why not be the best?
By my count, Lincoln is the fifth dead president who has inhabited the body of George W. Bush. First Bush was William McKinley resurrected. That was for the purposes of the 2000 campaign, in which Bush sought to move the GOP past Clinton-hatred in the same way that McKinley had tried to move Republicans past recriminations over Reconstruction and the Civil War. Karl Rove fancied himself the reincarnation of Mark Hanna, the inspired political hack who pulled McKinley's marionette strings. This is of course somewhat insulting toward Bush, which may be why the comparison was eventually jettisoned. (Or possibly it was that unpleasantness at Buffalo's Pan-American Exposition.)
Next, Bush was Ronald Reagan, who, though still alive in 2001 when the comparison began to catch on, was afflicted with Alzheimer's. Reagan's spirit passed into Bush's body as the press began to figure out that Bush was not the moderate he'd presented himself as during the campaign. Bush's ideological stubbornness and his indifference to policy details invited the comparison, which was codified in January 2003 in the New York Times Magazine in an article by Bill Keller ("The Radical Presidency of George W. Bush"), who subsequently became that newspaper's editor. A year and a half later, when Reagan died, Bush gave the eulogy at Washington's National Cathedral, inviting further comparison. By that time, though, word had spread that Bush was even more closed-minded and further to the right than the Great Communicator. Since then, Reagan's reputation has lofted heavenward, while Bush's has taken a nosedive.
Earlier this year, the president became possessed by McKinley's successor, Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt's spirit had flitted in and out of the White House ever since Edmund Morris published Theodore Rex, the second volume of his Roosevelt biography, late in 2001. (Presidential shape-shifting is highly susceptible to the publication schedules of trade hard-covers.) Like Roosevelt, Bush was a blustery blueblood. But, as Slate's David Greenberg pointed out in 2002, the comparison was inapt in many other ways. Among other difficulties, Teddy Roosevelt was a trust-buster, a prolific author, and a voracious reader. The Iraq war, however, revived memories of Roosevelt's big stick and restored the word "imperialism" to national discourse, rendering the comparison more plausible. Earlier this year, Rove codified Bush-as-TR with an essay in Time magazine ("Lessons From a Larger-Than-Life President") playing up Roosevelt's fondness for big ideas, his eagerness to exert military power, and his generally combative temperament. In a later Time essay, though, conservative writer Andrew Ferguson found the comparison apt but not particularly flattering, reminding readers that TR has never been a favorite of small-government conservatives. As the Iraq war has grown more unpopular, the Bush White House has grown less enamored of the Bull Moose. And so to Truman, and, finally, Lincoln.
It isn't unusual for presidents to conduct imaginary séances in the White House to commune with the spirit of this or that predecessor. I suppose it's hard not to. But George W. Bush seems to have communed with more spirits than most. The reason, I suspect, is straightforwardly Oedipal. It's a way to exorcise the spook he's most haunted by, the president and father with whom he shares three out of four names. The antecedents Dubya has imagined himself to be have mostly moved up the greatness ladder—I'd flip Truman and Roosevelt—which reflects, I think, Bush's growing sense that his presidency isn't going very well. Who can afford modesty when your approval rating hovers in the mid-30s? At this late date, though, I think we'd all be willing to settle for the current president to emulate the prudent mediocrity of Poppy Bush. You can do a lot worse, and Dubya has.
Dinesh D'Souza has found common cause with Osama Bin Laden. The al-Qaida leader, it turns out, didn't strike out against the United States on 9/11. He struck out against the American cultural left, which—not content to promote homosexuality, divorce, The Vagina Monologues, and other morally bankrupt causes across the United States—has been promoting them abroad, too. When, this past September, I expressed horror (Coulterized Conservatives) at the catalog copy for D'Souza's new book, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, an impartial reader might have protested that I was being unfair to a tome that I had not yet read. Now that I've read it, I can assure this hypothetical referee that I was more than fair. What follows is not a parody, but the author himself:
[I]f the political left and the Islamic fundamentalists are in the same foreign policy camp [because they both hate American imperialism], then by the same token the political right and the Islamic fundamentalists are on the same wavelength on social issues. The left is allied with some radical Muslims in opposition to American foreign policy, and the right is allied with an even larger group of Muslims [which includes radical Muslims] in their opposition to American social and cultural depravity. This is the essential new framework I propose for understanding American foreign policy and American social issues.
We didn't have it coming. The left had it coming! D'Souza and his comrades at the Hoover Institution were just innocent bystanders!
For the record, I don't buy into D'Souza's notion that Bin Laden and the American left share the same foreign policy goals. D'Souza triumphantly notes that in his speeches, Bin Laden has cited, with approval, Robert Fisk of the London Independent and William Blum, a former Vietnam protester and author of Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower. But Fisk isn't even American, and Blum, I blush to admit, is someone I'd never even heard of before reading D'Souza's book. D'Souza inflates Blum's importance by stating that in 2002 he "joined Jane Fonda, Barbara Ehrenreich, and a host of other prominent liberals in denouncing Bush's preparation for the invasion of Iraq." But D'Souza is no better able than anyone else to sketch a plausible link between 9/11 and the Iraq occupation save that Bin Laden opposes the latter. William F. Buckley has called the Iraq mission a failure. Does Buckley share Bin Laden's foreign policy, too? What about D'Souza himself? After denouncing war critics for giving aid and comfort to the enemy, D'Souza himself admits (on Page 239) that, ahem, well, "In retrospect, Bush was wrong to invade Iraq at the time that he did, in the way that he did." Excuse me? Then why so hard on the people who opposed it?
The heart of D'Souza's book isn't his libeling of the American left, but rather his libeling of the American right. D'Souza notes, correctly, that al-Qaida's hatred toward the West in general, and the United States in particular, is animated to a great extent by America's permissive culture. But Bin Laden isn't some Michael Medved figure grumping about the vulgarity of American Pie. He's got bigger fish to fry. Al-Qaida's enemy isn't the excesses of secular culture; it's secular culture itself. And to a surprising degree, D'Souza is willing to go along for the ride. Theocracy, D'Souza argues, is misunderstood to mean "rule by divine authority of the priesthood or clergy." Not so! There are checks and balances, just like in the U.S. Constitution. In Iran, for instance, "the power of the state and of the mullahs is limited by the specific rules set forth in the Koran and the Islamic tradition. The rulers themselves are bound by these laws."
I heaved a sigh of relief when D'Souza conceded, "The Islamic system of enforcing piety and virtue through the heavy hand of the law seems to me both unreasonable and imprudent." But D'Souza makes no bones about believing, along with Islamic fundamentalists, that the following things are an affront to civilization: equality for homosexuals ("[W]hy would a sane people jeopardize an indispensable and already fragile institution such as marriage by redefining it away from its central purpose? Is the point of marriage to ensure that children have a father and mother, or is it to make Edgar and Austin feel more accepted by society?"); working motherhood ("[M]any mothers choose to have a career because it is more self-fulfilling than the life of a full-time mom"); divorce ("Now you hear people say things like, 'I feel called to leave my marriage. My life would be wasted if I stayed' "); and contraception ("Rather than call for non-Western women to have fewer children, the left speaks of a woman's right to determine the number and spacing of her pregnancies").
D'Souza's refusal to recognize, say, that a gay couple might need to share health benefits, or that a father might share equal responsibility in raising his children, offends and dismays me. Ordinarily, though, I would never equate hard-right views on these matters—even from a Dartmouth Review alumnus—with the rantings of an Islamist terrorist. I do so now only because D'Souza has written an entire book encouraging me to do just that. He wants his fellow conservatives to embrace their inner mullah. D'Souza scolds conservatives for seeking in the past to win over American leftists and European allies to the war on terror, and for reaching out to liberals in the Islamic world "who can be recruited the cause of 'civilization' against 'barbarism.' " Not gonna happen, baby! Conservatives, he argues, should instead demonstrate "common ground" with Muslims sympathetic to Bin Laden—earlier D'Souza has cited a 2004 poll by the Pew Global Attitudes Project showing that Bin Laden is viewed favorably by 45 percent of all Moroccans, 55 percent of all Jordanians, and 65 percent of all Pakistanis—by:
attacking the left and the Europeans on the international stage. Instead of trying to unify America and the West, the right should highlight the division between red America and blue America, and also between traditional America and decadent Europe. By resisting the depravity of the left and the Europeans, conservatives can win friends among Muslims and other traditional people around the world.
As a strategy, forging a values-based alliance with foreigners against your fellow countrymen strikes me as a tad, well, unpatriotic. But making culture war a weapon in the war against Islamist terror would serve to elevate conservative crotchets and prejudices to the higher theoretical plane of national security. I wonder whether that opportunity will persuade other right-wingers to risk ridicule by joining D'Souza's loopy jihad.
Two had seemed like the right number to both of us until we had two, and even then it seemed sort of like the right number to me. Two was always the plan; five years ago, at fantastic expense, with the view to maximizing our living space while giving each child her own room, we'd torn up a four-bedroom house and made it into a three-bedroom house. Then one day Tabitha began to shoot me long, soulful looks at night and say things like, "I just feel like someone's missing." She thought we should at least discuss the idea of having a third child, but of course all that meant was that she'd already made up her mind. It was up to me to prevent it, which is to say that it was only a matter of time before it happened. And that was that. Tabitha called the architect who had torn out the fourth bedroom, and told him we'd be building an addition.
Beep! Beep! Beep!
To the shriek of an alarm I awaken but don't move. What with the extra pillow and the warm blanket, the delivery room couch had proved surprisingly comfortable.
Beep! Beep! Beep!
Having witnessed childbirth twice before, I have acquired this expertise: I know that alarms on delivery room machines are nothing to fear. Along with smoke detectors and airport security machines, they belong on the long list of devices in American life designed to cry wolf. Apart from that, here is the sum total of what I've learned waiting for my children to be born: 1) arrive sober; 2) do not attempt to be interesting, as it makes the nurses uneasy; 3) never underestimate your own insignificance; and 4) try to get some sleep, as no one else can. Of course, it is important to be present and conscious for the birth of your child. To miss it would be to invite scorn and derision and lead others to speak ill of you behind your back. But up until the moment the child is born, the husband in the delivery room is in an odd predicament. He's been admitted to the scene of the crisis but given no serious purpose. He's the Frenchman after the war resolution has passed.
I had just pressed a second pillow hard over my head to mute the alarm—it sounded as if it might be coming from the painkiller pump—and was very nearly asleep, when I heard a new voice. "You're 10 centimeters," it said.
The last time they'd brought the chains out onto the field, they'd measured her at a mere 4 centimeters. Ten was clearly forward progress, but it had been nearly five years, and I couldn't recall how many centimeters there were in a first down. I rose on the couch, and in the unnaturally bright tone of a man pretending he hasn't just been asleep, asked, "So … how many more centimeters we got to go?" That's when I noticed we had a new doctor. She looked at me strangely. "Ten centimeters means the baby's coming," she said.
"Oh."
She'd been in the room only a couple of minutes, as it turned out. Before that, Tabitha had never seen or heard of her and—as the doctor now mentions—she's about to quit delivering babies and move to Detroit, so this is likely to be the extent of our relationship. "I'm Dr. Vay," she says, and grabs a stool and a mask. It's 4:23 in the morning and the mood in the air, as far as I'm concerned, is giddy exhaustion. "Oy vey!" I holler as Dr. Vay moves into the catching position. Only somehow it comes out "Ai Vay!"
"It's Oy vey, honey," Tabitha says calmly. "Can you get the mirror?"
I find the mirror. In Berkeley, no birth is complete without a mirror. The belief here is that the mother, as she grunts and groans, should have all five senses fully engaged and pumping meaning into the experience. The ideal Berkeley birth has probably never actually happened, but if it has, it happened far from civilization, in the woods, without painkillers or doctors or any intervention whatsoever by modern medicine. Along one side of the birthing mother was a wall of doulas wailing a folk song; along the other, all the people she has ever known; at her feet, a full-length mirror, in which she watched her baby emerging; at her head, a mother wolf, licking and suckling. Incense-filled urns released meaningful, carbon-free odors. The placenta was saved and, if not grilled, recycled.
Tabitha never wanted the full Berkeley. But back when we started, seven years ago, she gave a passing thought to employing a midwife instead of a doctor, and thought that it might make the experience more meaningful if she skipped the painkillers. She picked out music and found scented oils with which to be rubbed. To the immense irritation first of her obstetrician and then of herself, she hired a doula, who was meant to use said oils to massage her feet during the delivery, but instead went out for turkey sandwiches and never came back.
That was seven and a half long years ago. With her slender build and narrow hips and near total intolerance of physical discomfort, my wife was ill-designed for childbirth. The first time around, in this very hospital, she began to hemorrhage. The doctors saved her life, and with so little drama that we didn't realize what they'd done until well after. The second time around, again in this hospital, they saved not only her but our second daughter, who had entered the birth canal at a historically tragic angle. Entering her third pregnancy, my wife's lost interest in doulas and incense. She longs only for painless, antiseptic, impersonal modern medicine. Numb is good. If they ran tubes underground from hospitals to homes so that painkillers could be delivered in advance of labor, she might well have been their first paying customer. Of the original Berkeley Dream, the mirror's all she's got left.
"Can you feel the contractions happening?" the doctor asks.
"Slightly." She's lying, thank God. If she felt a thing she'd be hollering.
Beep! Beep! Beep! The painkiller pump, again. Another nurse appears—another stranger we're almost surely never again to lay eyes upon. "Angie needs a break," she says. Angie's the nurse who still hasn't worked out what's going wrong with the painkiller. Angie exits. Dr. Vay prods and pushes and massages and waits. Behind her on the wall is a small sign, bearing the first words my child will see: We Strive To Give Five Star Service.
"I think you're having one now. Push."
Tabitha pushes, turns beet red, and goes all bug-eyed.
"Maybe you shouldn't hold your breath," I say, helpfully. No one notices. A single 30-minute nap and I've lost what little right I had to be heard.
"Can you feel anything at all?" the doctor asks.
"Not really."
"Imagine you're trying to poop," says the doctor.
Worried that imagining might make it so, I retreat up and away from ground zero, and stroke the tippy-top of my wife's head. But this just further isolates me as the character in search of a role—the carrot in the school play. Out of nothing more than a desire to seem busy, I grab hold of one of Tabitha's legs and pull it backward. Then, like the master on a slave ship counting the strokes, I begin to chant. "One, two, three …" I half-expect the doctor and nurses to fall about laughing and tell me to stop, but they don't. I seem, in fact, to have written myself a speaking part. "One! Two! Three!" "One! Two! Three!" Tabitha pushes harder. Her eyes look as if they are about to pop out of her head and ricochet off the ceiling.
"Here it is."
There comes a moment when I cease to be able to watch the birth of what is presumably my child with anything but horror. This is that moment. It's meant to be a beautiful sight—a thing to be videotaped or at least remembered, and played over and again in the mind—but it feels more like a hideous secret to be kept. But the damn mirror makes it hard to avoid. Ten minutes ago there was no place to hide; now there is no place to look. Boy or girl? We didn't know. But girls were all we'd ever done, and we'd spent a lot less time arguing over boys' names than girls'. She'd gone from Clementine to Penelope to Phoebe to Scout and then back to Penelope. At midnight when the water broke all over the living room floor, we were just starting what I assumed would be a long creep back to Clementine. I liked the sound of Penny Lewis but Clementine made you want to sing.
"That's the best push yet!" says the doctor. "One more time."
"One, two, three …" I feel like Richard Simmons in one of his videos. You can do it!
"One more just like that."
"One! Two! Three!"
Next comes the sound of a hairless dog escaping from quicksand. Sluuuuuuuurrrrppp!
"It's a boy!"
And with that, Walker Jack Lewis came into the world.
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 sister has an old dog, part pit bull. The dog has always been very skittish, and over the years, has nipped at the ankles of men and on occasion a woman (including myself). My husband, brother, and two older sons have been nipped on several occasions, and the dog is now starting to nip at the ankles of my 7-year-old son. We really never made much of an issue of this. Recently, my sister attempted to take the dog outside, when it bit her and held on to her hand, causing puncture wounds and resulting in a hospital stay for a severe infection. She insists this was not the dog's fault because he is deaf and was startled. Whenever my parents have a gathering at their home, my sister insists on bringing the dog. Last night, my mother asked me if my family would like to come over for a get-together. I respectfully requested that she ask my sister to leave the dog home. This morning my mother told me that the gathering has been canceled because of my request. Please let me know if I am out of line.
—Wants My Son in One Piece
Dear Wants,
So, collectively, the family leaves with fewer limbs than it came with—what is this compared to the happiness of a demented pit bull? No, you are not out of line, but something is awry with your family dynamics if your mother would prefer to cancel the event than tell her daughter she has to leave Cujo at home. Untrained dogs who view grandchildren as appetizers should be banned from family social events. Don't back down.
—Prudie
Dear Prudie,
Several years ago I began dating a well-mannered gentleman. We married a couple years later and sometimes his thoughtfulness continues. My problem is that I guess he really feels comfortable around me—some of his bodily functions are taking over and making it hard to see him for who he really is. I can hear him walk out of a room—flatulating with each step. He burps whenever and wherever the need strikes him. When we're in the same room, he at least says excuse me, but I can hear most of the rest of it (our home is quite open). In the past three months, I have convinced him to close the door when he uses the bathroom—yes, even when he's in there for that. Most people go into the bathroom to blow their noses—he comes into the kitchen. Then we have the mucus issue: He brings up phlegm from his throat and about 80 percent of the time just swallows afterward. I am not without some function myself, but I contain it to the bathroom at all costs. How can I tell him his manners are so lacking that I am about to lose it? Am I too sensitive? Surely, if so, there must be some happy medium?
—Disgusted
Dear Disgusted,
Hey, get your hands off my man! If you've come to me for advice on how to get your husband to stop farting, burping, and clearing his nasal passages, you do have a problem. You may find your husband's level of comfort disgusting (being disgustingly comfortable seems to be an occupational hazard of becoming a husband), but what's the point of marriage if you have to hold in your gas for the rest of your life? Still, given your door-closing victory, it sounds as if he's educable. Explain that when he's constantly firing on all cylinders, it takes some of the magic out of your marriage. But while you may prefer to hide your functions in the bathroom, sometimes you just have to let a guy rip.
—Prudie
Dear Prudie,
Although my wedding is still two years down the road, I want to tell my bridesmaids who they are now, but am worried the financial burden will be stressful for some of them. About half of my bridesmaids will come from the rural Southern town where I grew up and half from Southern California, where I live now. Between the bachelorette party in Las Vegas and the ceremony here, travel, hotel, dress, etc., the whole affair will put a financial strain on the families of three of the girls from my childhood town (two have young children). Is it appropriate for me to pay for their transportation and hotel? I'm afraid they may be insulted if they found out that I only did this for them or that the other girls may be resentful they've had to pay their own way. I considered paying a percentage of everyone's, but it seems as though my less well-off friends will still struggle, and the girls who are, quite honestly, loaded don't need the money. When I share the news that I want them in my wedding, I would love to tell these girls I'm covering the expenses so this is not a stressful event. I have asked my family and fiance and can't seem to find anyone who agrees.
—Bewildered Bride
Dear Bewildered,
When a social event requires a financial aid package for the participants—and the planning takes as long as getting an MBA—maybe it's time to rethink the scale of the whole thing. A wedding should be a lovely occasion that launches a couple on their new life. Instead, planning and celebrating one has mutated into a life project itself. As for your bridesmaids, asking someone to commit two years in advance is too much notice. You may find over time that some of these women insist on being more wrapped up in their own lives than in what you perceive as their obligations to help you. So, see who you're still talking to a year from now. Since it sounds like you're loaded, too, if you want to pick up the airfare for the bridesmaids who will have to fly to the wedding, that shouldn't cause resentment among the locals. When you do bestow your honor, let them know you're having a multicity extravaganza. Of course, you need them at the rehearsal and wedding, but explain that you understand the shower and bachelorette party may have to be electives (and if you don't understand, again, you need to rethink the role your getting married plays in everyone else's life).
—Prudie
Dear Prudie,
This is my first relationship ever, first everything, in fact. It's been a little bit over a year now, and I find myself constantly wondering if things are normal. Is it normal to see each other only twice a week, despite the fact that we live 10 minutes from each other? We both have very busy schedules, but as excited as I am to see him, our conversations are so dull and flat that I could scream. Dinners in restaurants and outings make me nervous, because there's a high chance that the conversation will be strained and I will be depressed, chiding myself for not connecting with him. He doesn't get a lot of my jokes and I don't get a lot of his. But then there are wonderful moments of intimacy that come much too infrequently. A lot of my girlfriends tell me that I'm expecting too much out of two people who aren't perfect, and I have problems with insecurity and dealing with criticism, but I constantly wonder if I should move on whenever things don't go as planned. What to do?
—Wondering
Dear Wondering,
Your conversations leave you depressed or wanting to scream; you each tell a joke, the other stares uncomprehendingly; you could get together more often, but you don't. On the other hand, you say you're excited to see him and have wonderful, though rare, moments of (unspecified) intimacy. What a topsy-turvy world we live in! Overall, your relationship seems unpromising—except for the other clues about this being your first romance of any kind and your girlfriends pointing out that this lack of relationship history may be due to some personality problems on your part. Remember, if you end this relationship, you'll take your anxieties and insecurities into the next one. It sounds as if in order to make this, or any romance work, you need to work on your own problems. Consider group therapy, which could help you learn how to connect—with your boyfriend and others—in a more satisfying way.
—Prudie
Dubai's economic success story is not a new one, but the sheer scale and pace of the city-state's development now looks to rival the growth of Shanghai. Even more remarkable is that this postmodernist explosion of glass and steel has arisen so near the heart of an increasingly volatile Middle East.
Dubai's development is fueled not just by petrodollars—though they are clearly a big contributor—but also by the foresight of Sheik Maktoum bin Rashid Al Maktoum and Dubai's remarkable diversity. U.A.E. officials say 80 percent of Dubai's 1.4 million people come originally from someplace else. Others insist the true percentage is above 90 percent. These foreigners have come to Dubai mainly to make money.
Dubai's current ruler, Sheik Mohammed, understands this. Dubai's diversity allows him to ignore the domestic and regional political controversies with which leaders in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Qatar must contend and has transformed the capital city into a Middle Eastern amalgam of Singapore and Las Vegas.
Still, Dubai cannot remain a safe haven from politics much longer. During my recent visit there for the Arab Strategy Forum, I encountered a deep foreboding about the region's future, an anxiety—and anger—unlike any I've seen in the Gulf in more than a decade. My conversations with Arab officials and businessmen revealed three sources of this extraordinary pessimism.
The first is centered in Iraq. The forum revealed near-total Arab opposition to the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, unveiled in early December by James Baker and Lee Hamilton. The view expressed most often and most emphatically during the meetings, both publicly and privately, was that the study group's plan addresses domestic U.S. political needs at the expense of realistic solutions to the problems the war has created for Iraq and the region.
The widespread fear in the Gulf is that the U.S. policy will create security hurdles that Iraqis cannot possibly clear in the time the study group provided. Were the report's recommendations to be implemented, the country's fledgling army and police would be given another 15 months of training before they would be expected to accomplish on their own what the U.S. military has been unable to do in three years—disarm those who threaten the country's stability.
Iraqis—and their Arab neighbors—also believe that the Bush administration will soon withdraw U.S. combat troops, whatever the state of Iraq's security forces. The White House has made clear that no immediate drawdown is in the offing, that a short-term surge of up to 20,000 troops is the preferred option, and that the president will not be bound by the study group's recommendations. But now-majority Democrats in Congress will use the document to add political pressure to the president's problems, feeding Arab frustration with America's unwillingness to see the mission in Iraq through to some form of sustainable stability. Nearly every political conversation I had in Dubai included some version of this simple verdict: The United States broke Iraq, and the United States should fix it. Virtually no one in this part of the world believes that will happen.
Almost everyone I encountered predicted that Iraq's neighbors will be left to re-establish order once Americans have gone home, an issue the study group essentially ignored. The strong Shiite showing in Bahrain's November elections has exacerbated both their fear and their anger. Many Gulf Arabs insist that the growth of Shiite influence in the region is a direct result of the war in Iraq and the sectarian violence it has unleashed.
The second source of pessimism flows directly from Washington and generates stronger anti-American sentiment than I've experienced in the Gulf before. U.S. support for democratization in the region makes Arab officials more than a little uneasy. Signs of trade and investment protectionism in Washington make matters worse.
The controversy over Dubai Ports World's failed bid to acquire operations at several U.S. ports may have been largely forgotten in the United States, but it's alive and well in the Gulf. The Emirates were taken completely by surprise by the ports uproar in February 2006, and the sense of grievance in Dubai lies just beneath the surface of any conversation on U.S. policy.
But the greatest source of pessimism in the region centers on Tehran. The most provocative speech during the forum came from Ali Larijani, Iran's top national-security official and lead nuclear negotiator, who pointedly rejected the prospect of talks with the United States until Washington renounces its "unilateralist policy" in the region and completely withdraws U.S. troops. (He was deliberately vague on whether he meant from Iraq or the entire Middle East.)
Without so much as perfunctory mention of the importance of diplomacy, Larijani complained that the United States wants Iranians to "spend their time producing mineral water and tomato paste" and asserted that under no circumstances would Iran renounce its right to a nuclear program. He then called on his visibly uneasy Arab audience to develop nuclear programs of their own and to join Iran in the creation of a nuclear OPEC.
This is where Middle East politics crashes the gates of Dubai's prosperous isolation. What local officials (and investors) don't yet seem to realize is that, as the international conflict over Iran's nuclear program comes to a head, Dubai will become increasingly (and directly) involved.
The U.S. Treasury Department is now pressing a number of states to freeze the assets held in their banks of high-ranking Iranian officials with connections to the country's nuclear program. Dubai is the primary conduit for Iranian capital flows. That's a primary reason why President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld passionately, though unsuccessfully, defended Dubai Ports World during the controversy last year. Still, U.S. ties with Dubai are strong—and U.S. pressure for Sheik Mohammed's assistance on Iran will continue.
Iran still has plenty of influence with Dubai's leadership, as well. Tehran recently filed a formal protest with the Emirates government over a decision to allow an Iranian dissident to speak there, quickly winning a government reversal on the issue. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has complained directly to the sheik about his willingness to allow U.S. troops to train on his territory. Anxious as ever to ensure politics does not interfere with business, Sheik Mohammed's government would very much like to avoid even the appearance of choosing sides. In 2007, that will no longer be possible.
In June 2005, we walked into the Washington office of National Nuclear Security Administration chief Linton Brooks. He was leaning over his shoes, looking slightly flummoxed. He paused and looked up at the visiting reporters, still holding his shoelaces.
"Yes, there's the headline," he sighed. "The man responsible for nuclear weapons can't even tie his own shoes."
Brooks' fatalism was not unfounded. Recent news reports had not been kind to his agency, an arm of the Department of Energy that oversees the nuclear weapons complex. In particular, reporters were fixated on security woes at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the disappearance of classified computer disks had prompted a monthslong shutdown of the facility.
Those "missing" disks, in fact, never existed. But it was a major blow to the NNSA's credibility, and it amplified perceptions of mismanagement at Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atomic bomb.
Unfortunately for Brooks, Los Alamos was unable to shed its image as the problem child of the nuclear labs family. In late October 2006, police stumbled upon thumb drives containing classified information from Los Alamos during a meth bust in a trailer park.
On Jan. 4, Brooks finally took the fall.
While news of his dismissal was overshadowed by a major shake-up in the top echelons of the military and the intelligence community, it came at a critical time for the future of the nuclear weapons complex. With very little public attention, the NNSA is embarking on a project called Complex 2030—an ambitious plan to modernize U.S. nuclear weapons facilities. That effort is about to build serious momentum with the selection of a design for the Reliable Replacement Warhead, a new nuclear weapon that some critics worry could lead to the resumption of underground testing.
For Brooks, the firing offense may not have been the security breaches but failing to inform his boss, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, about computer hacking that compromised the personal information of Energy Department contractors. Brooks learned in September 2005 that the computers were hacked, but he didn't inform senior Energy Department officials until months later.
Brooks' explanation for the delay was the political equivalent of fumbling with his laces.
"It appears that each side of that organization assumed that the other side had made the appropriate notification to the deputy secretary," Brooks told members of a congressional oversight committee.
"That's hogwash," replied Joe Barton, the Texas Republican who is now the committee's ranking minority member.
Barton and another Republican sent a letter to Secretary Bodman in June demanding Brooks' ouster. With usual Washington speed, six months passed before Brooks got the ax.
That Brooks presided over a nuclear weapons complex with serious problems is not in doubt: Security lapses led to clampdowns, which in turn hurt morale at the labs. But it's hard to square the unceremonious dismissal of Brooks, a highly regarded public servant, with the treatment that other administration appointees got. After all, while New Orleans drowned, Michael ("heckuva job") Brown was praised by President Bush for his work at the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Paul Wolfowitz—who predicted that Iraqi oil revenues could pay for reconstruction—sits comfortably at the World Bank. And even Donald ("freedom is untidy") Rumsfeld, the recently ousted Pentagon chief, won final commendations from Bush as a "superb leader in a time of change."
The signs pointing to the NNSA chief's downfall, it turns out, were there in our 2005 interview with Brooks.
"I've been a little surprised at the insatiable desire—a combination of the 24-hour news cycle and the Congress—to know everything now," he said of the security breaches. "In fact, when problems occur, the one thing you can almost always be certain of is that your initial understanding is wrong."
An example of that, Brooks continued, was the case of the "missing" Los Alamos disks.
"Almost everything we thought was true in the first 96 hours turns out not to have been true," he said.
Brooks was right. The disks never even existed; a simple clerical error—nonexistent bar codes—led officials to chase after phantom equipment. That same summer, the Project on Government Oversight, a frequent critic of the nuclear labs, had hosted a dramatic press conference featuring the tearful wife of Tommy Hook, a Los Alamos whistleblower who had just been hospitalized after a savage beating. The assault, it was hinted, was linked to upcoming congressional testimony on fraud at the lab. His wife's dramatic appearance sparked a flurry of press stories. Was Hook the victim of official reprisal? Were rogue operatives at work? Had nuclear weapons scientists taken matters into their own hands?
In fact, the truth was more banal: According to later accounts, Hook's night of whistleblowing activities included a lap dance and drinks at the strip club where he was beaten. Few papers reported the eventual unfolding of events.
NNSA is an obscure agency in a department that has long been considered a government backwater. Created in 2000 amid the fallout from the Wen Ho Lee scandal, NNSA's official status is "quasi-autonomous." That adjective gets to the heart of the problem: The agency has multiple lines of authority and overlapping responsibilities that make decision making hard and accountability elusive.
"In theory, it was a good idea to separate nuclear weapons from the day-to-day White House political considerations that encumber any Cabinet-level agency," said Phil Coyle, a former associate director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and now a senior adviser at the Center for Defense Information. "But in practice it has only played into the perception that the NNSA and its contractors are not accountable to higher-level authorities, in this case the secretary of energy."
But firing Brooks won't fix the labs, and the administration has yet to answer a fundamental question: What would they have had him do differently? We suspect Brooks' answer would have been much like his response to our questions. When we asked him 18 months ago about why he was unable to persuade Congress to fund the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, a controversial push to design a bunker-busting nuke, he said, "I don't know what I would have done differently, but we'll see."
The critics were right: Linton Brooks failed to fix the labs, but who can? Like Charlie Brown in his eternal quest to kick the football, we wonder if Brooks ever really had a chance. As for why he was fired—and why now—we suspect that Brooks is asking the same question.
Watching Mike Judge's Idiocracy, which finally hit the shelves this week on DVD, I couldn't help noticing its uncanny resemblance to Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men. Sure, Idiocracy is a low comedy, full of kicks to the groin and monster-truck rallies, while Children of Men is a serious dramatic thriller about the extinction of humanity. But both movies are chilling visions of a future dystopia extrapolated, with pitiless logic, from our current moment. Both feature a reluctant hero (Clive Owen in Children of Men, Luke Wilson in Idiocracy) who's jolted from his depressive complacency and asked to save the planet from destruction. And both posit human reproduction (or the lack of it) as the problem that threatens the future of the human race.
One other commonality: Both movies were scandalously underpromoted by the studios releasing them. Judge's film sat on a shelf for two years at Fox before being hacked down to its current 84-minute running time and dumped, unadvertised, into only a few cities on the slowest movie weekend of the year. Children of Men's fate has been slightly less ignominious; it was released nationwide, largely untrumpeted, on Christmas Day, and only this week, after countless critics (including me) put the movie on their 10-best lists, has Universal rushed to mount a too-little-too-late push for Oscar consideration.
The burial of Children of Men was lame, but comprehensible. Figuring that few viewers would flock to such an unremitting downer of a film, Universal must have decided to market the movie modestly, hoping at least to break even with attention from art-house audiences. But Fox's choice to withhold Idiocracy even from the markets where it was most likely to find cult viewers—New York? San Francisco?—and to eschew all advertising is simply bewildering. The shrouding of Idiocracy in what amounts to a marketing burqa is especially ironic given that the film's most pointed satire is aimed at the ubiquity of advertising in American life.
Since Idiocracy was reviewed in Slate during its sort-of-release in September, I'll keep the plot summary minimal here: After being cryogenically frozen for an Army experiment, Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson) sleeps for five centuries. He wakes up in the Great Garbage Avalanche of 2505, when his hibernation pod crashes into the living room of one Frito Lexus (Dax Shepard), a barely functioning life form who spends his days watching a TV show called Ow, My Balls!
After centuries of mental devolution caused by the overbreeding of dumbasses (more on that later), average Joe has become, by default, the brainiest person on earth. He's recruited as the Secretary of the Interior, but his attempts to persuade the citizens of "Uh-merica" to irrigate their crops with water instead of a bright-green sports drink called Brawndo result in his near-execution at a gladiatorial event known as Monday Night Rehabilitation. At the last minute, though, Joe is saved by his fellow cryogenic freeze-ee, a shrewd prostitute named Rita (Maya Rudolph), with whom he goes on to procreate, hence raising the global I.Q. for future generations.
Where Judge's project meets up, improbably, with Cuarón's—and what makes Idiocracy so successful as satire, even if it occasionally flounders as a coherently told story—is in the two directors' visions of the endgame of our culture, the decline of capitalistic democracy as we know it. Cuarón takes our current obsession with "homeland security" to its nightmarishly logical conclusion by imagining a world that's nothing but borders and checkpoints, government propaganda, and caged refugees. Judge focuses more on the capitalism side of the equation. The film's best jokes—and Idiocracy is a very joke-dense film—trace the steady and inexorable crassification of the cultural landscape into a future where the Fuddrucker's hamburger chain has become "Buttf***er's" and Starbucks offers hand jobs along with its lattes. Nike's slogan is "Don't Do a Thing" and Carl's Jr.'s is "F**k You, I'm Eating." Slot machines in hospital waiting rooms promise a shot at free health care, and language has devolved into a mixture of "hillbilly, Valley Girl, inner-city slang, and various grunts."
Both directors use the details of production design brilliantly to show us, rather than tell us, how their respective dystopias function. A TV in the background of Clive Owen's apartment in Children of Men advertises a product called "Quietus" … and we realize the government is providing suicide kits for its citizens. Character after character in Idiocracy sports the same shiny T-shirt covered in product logos … and we understand that a few corporations have taken over the world with the willing cooperation of sheeplike consumers. Cuarón's and Judge's future cities (London and Washington, D.C.) even look a little alike, with heaps of garbage rotting in the street and peeling slogans plastered on crumbling walls, and both directors share a marked disinterest in technological gadgetry, usually a mainstay of futuristic fantasy.
Ultimately, Children of Men's vision of the future is more inclusive, and kinder, than Idiocracy's. Judge's gimlet eye is so ruthless that at times his politics seem to border on South Park libertarianism—a philosophy that, as has often been observed about South Park, can flirt with the reactionary. And there's more than a little classism in Idiocracy's fear that the dumb—here pictured as trailer-park trash and fast-food-swilling losers—will inherit the earth. Would we be better off in a world in which the brittle, infertile yuppies shown in the movie's opening moments had populated the earth with their spawn?
More to the point, Children of Men is a beautifully crafted work of art, arguably a masterpiece, while Idiocracy is a shambling cult comedy, by turns genius and jury-rigged. But is it paranoid to wonder why the two most underappreciated films of 2006 also happen to be the two that ask us to peer deep into the mirror and contemplate our future?
On Thursday, a group of American protesters stood at a fence near the Guantanamo prison and demanded its closure. The activists, among them Cindy Sheehan, held a press conference in Havana before heading to the eastern end of the country to march on the military base. How do you get to Cuba to stage a protest?
Fly in from the Bahamas, or another nearby country. The U.S. government keeps tight restrictions on any financial dealings with Cuba, which include travel to and from the country. The Treasury Department does grant travel licenses to certain people, like journalists, athletes, and Americans with immediate family in Cuba. But the feds aren't likely to make exceptions for peace protesters. Without a government license, the activists have to buy a round-trip ticket to Cuba from a third country, like the Bahamas or the Dominican Republic.
When they get back to the United States, they'll be asked which countries they visited on their trip. If they're honest, they could be in trouble. When more than two dozen activists returned from a similar march in late 2005, they gave the U.S. customs officials a full accounting of their trip, including a list of the names and addresses of everyone who participated. The treasury sent threatening letters to nine of the activists a few months later, but none of them have heard anything since. (In theory, the government could levy fines and bring criminal charges against anyone who breaks the rules.)
If you don't want to sneak in from a third country, you have to apply for a government license. Anyone who's visiting family, traveling on official government business, or working for the news media can get one, although they'll also need permission from the Cubans. (Havana has often denied entry to reporters from the Miami Herald, for example.) Special licenses are sometimes given out to students, freelance reporters, religious groups, performers or athletes, and people working on projects to aid "the Cuban people."
There's also an exemption for "professional research," which includes attending international conferences that happen to be in Cuba. The organizer of this most recent protest told the Associated Press that Cindy Sheehan and the other marchers were eligible for a travel license because they are "professional human rights activists," and would be attending an international conference in Guantanamo on Wednesday. One of the 12 protesters did, in fact, fly direct from Miami on a government-approved airline.
Once you arrive in Cuba, it's easy enough to travel to the city of Guantanamo, all the way at the eastern tip of the island. From there it's a short trip to a Cuban military checkpoint, where both the 2005 and 2007 protest marches were stopped. The American checkpoint—and the fence around the prison—are several miles farther away, down a road surrounded by landmines.
Not everyone needs to pass through Cuba to get to the prison. Soldiers' spouses and journalists, for example, can get permission to take a direct flight to the facility without ever crossing into the rest of Cuba.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Medea Benjamin of Global Exchange, Matt Daloisio of Witness Against Torture, and Charles Savage of the Boston Globe. Thanks also to reader Caroline Godkin for asking the question.
After a steamy video of Brazilian model Daniela Cicarelli leaked onto the Internet, a judge ordered YouTube banned in Brazil until the site took down all copies of the video. (Click here to see the video, which may not be appropriate for the workplace.) How does a government block a Web site?
Any way it can. For starters, the government can tell its Internet service providers to cut off their customers from a certain site. Through a process called "packet filtering," ISPs can enforce a government blacklist by scanning data entering the ISP's network from abroad and then blocking information from certain domains or IP addresses. (Blacklists are usually top secret. Usually.) This method tends to be inexact, because many IP addresses host thousands of sites, which may get inadvertently banned. When Pakistan tried to embargo a handful of blogs hosted by Blogger.com during the Muhammad cartoon uproar, every single blog on the site was blocked. Some ISPs also filter less efficiently than others, so a ban might not be enforced the same way in every part of a country. (In Brazil, for example, people in Rio de Janeiro could see the beach sex video while people in Brasília were cut off.)
Filtering becomes a lot simpler when a country's networks are centralized, in which case all ISPs receive information through the same hub, sometimes called a "gateway." Blocking information at this level makes filtration uniform across the country, instead of leaving it up to each ISP. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Tunisia all have centralized networks; the United States does not.
Some countries opt for more sophisticated techniques that look for specific words in a site's Web address. With software like SmartFilter, a government can censor the results of a search engine query, since sites like Google and Yahoo! append the search terms to their URLs. This also helps keep out mirror sites, which usually incorporate the original sites' URLs in their own. Some filtering programs will allow a government to ban entire categories of sites, like pornography, gambling, or advocacy groups. This often means a country doesn't even know what sites it's blocking. In one case, Saudi Arabia unblocked two gay and lesbian Web sites that had been mistakenly categorized under pornography.
Filtration is becoming even more sophisticated—some programs have even tried to filter out pornographic images based on perceived levels of flesh color. But so is anti-filtration. Determined Web surfers can try to access a computer in another country as a proxy for getting to sites they want. The filter knows they're visiting the benign server site, but it doesn't know they're using it to access banned information. Governments sometimes discover these servers and ban them, too, resulting in an ongoing cat-and-mouse game. (Want to turn your personal computer into a bypass server? Download a program here.) Programs called "anonymizers" let you circumvent filtering systems and browse undetected. Another option is to dial up another country and use the phone line as a modem, which lets you access Web sites under the foreign country's rules. Linguistic differences provide yet another loophole: Most countries only censor sites in their local language, so CNN is accessible just about everywhere. In Iran, you can read any BBC site except BBC Persian.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Nart Villeneuve of OpenNet Initiative.
Later this week, the Council of Fashion Designers of America will issue guidelines for runway shows that encourage a healthier lifestyle for models. In New York, catwalkers won't be tested for a minimum body mass index, as they are in Madrid and Milan. Is it possible to have a very low BMI and still be healthy?
Only if it's completely natural—and that's rare. Many people are predisposed to be thin, but if a model has a BMI of below 18—the threshold used in Madrid—she is almost certainly practicing unhealthy habits, such as restricting food intake or overexercising. Someone who's 5-foot-11, like most female models, would have to weigh less than 130 pounds to fall short of the threshold. To get to that point, even a natural waif would likely have to skip meals, exercise too much, or use diet aids.
People who engage in these activities can face a myriad of health problems, often because of their low body-fat levels. BMI doesn't measure body fat directly; it looks only at the ratio of a person's height and weight. Doctors say direct fat measurements—via skinfold calipers, for example—tell you more about someone's health. (BMI is popular because it's so easy to calculate.) Women with less than 12 percent body fat can be at risk for serious health problems or starvation.
Human bodies have evolved to be able to withstand starvation on occasion. In the absence of sufficient caloric intake, the body's metabolism slows down, and the liver, heart, and other organs may reduce their tissue reserves. For instance, the heart keeps backup capacity so that we can run very fast when we need to get away from a bad situation. The heart of someone who is starving, however, may not be able to hold extra muscle mass stockpiled for that sort of occasion.
Because of these adapting body changes, people who are too thin can function normally much of the time. But a major blow to the system, like a bad bout of influenza or gastroenteritis, could throw off the tenuous balance and lead to cardiovascular problems and fainting. Other long-term potential complications of being too thin could include a diminished ability for the bowels to absorb nutrients, lost menstrual cycle, and decreased thyroid function.
The standards set by Milan fashion-industry heavyweights require models to obtain a license issued by a panel of experts before being allowed to walk the runway. This panel is supposed to take models' ethnic and geographical background into consideration before issuing or denying someone a permit. Some research suggests that Asians, as well as members of some Australian Aboriginal tribes, may have a naturally lower BMI than Caucasians. However, the details on this are still unclear.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Ovidio Bermudez of the National Eating Disorder Association, Bill Dietz of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Boyd Swinburn of Deakin University, and Terri Wheeldon of the Mayo Clinic.
Powerful earthquakes near Taiwan shut off international phone and Internet service for the Far East just after Christmas. Five repair ships have been working on the damaged undersea cables since late last week. How do you repair a cable that's lying across the ocean floor?
Drag it to the surface. Earthquakes—like ships' anchors and fishing trawls—can cause undersea fiber-optic cables to malfunction or break many miles below the surface of the water. When this happens, a telecom operator has to find the location of the accident, hoist up the damaged part, and replace it with a new stretch of cable.
First, the telecom operator has to locate the part of the cable that's no longer working. Cable engineers can figure out the general neighborhood of the problem based on the reported phone or Internet service outages. From terminal stations on shore, they can zero in on more specific coordinates by sending light pulses along the fibers in the cable. A working fiber will transmit those pulses all the way across the ocean, but a broken one will bounce it back from the site of the damage. By measuring the time it takes for the reflections to come back, the engineers can figure out where along the cable they have a problem.
Once they know that, the company can send out a large cable ship with a few miles of fresh fiber-optic lines on board to make the repairs. If the faulty part of the cable is less than about 6,500 feet down, the crew will send out a submersible tanklike robot that can move around on the sea floor. A signal can be sent through the cable to guide the robot toward the problem spot. When the robot finds the right place, it grabs ahold of the cable, cuts out the nonworking section, and pulls the loose ends back up to the ship.
The robot doesn't work in very deep water (with very high pressure). In those situations, the technicians aboard the cable ship use a grapnel, or a hook on a very long wire, to snatch up the cable from the sea floor. The grapnel uses a mechanical cutting and gripping device that can split the cable on both sides of the break and drag the loose ends to the surface. One end is hooked onto a buoy so it won't sink, and the other is hauled on board.
The malfunctioning cable section can be fixed on board the ship. A skilled technician or "jointer" splices the glass fibers and uses powerful adhesives to attach the new section of cable to each cut end of the original—a process that can take up to 16 hours. The repaired cable is then lowered back to the seabed on ropes.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Bill Burns of Atlantic-Cable.com, Victoria Dillon of Tyco Electronics, Paul Kravis of International Telecom Inc., and Anne Smith of Global Marine Systems.
Correction, Jan. 10, 2006: The subtitle of this piece originally read "Electrical repairs at 20,000 leagues," a reference to Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. In fact, the measurement in Verne's title refers not to a depth under the ocean, but to the distance traveled by submarine.
It was quite witty of Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., to short-circuit the hostility of those who criticized him for taking his oath on the Quran and to ask the Library of Congress for the loan of Thomas Jefferson's copy of that holy book. But the irony of this, which certainly made his stupid Christian fundamentalist critics look even stupider, ought to be partly at his own expense as well.
In the first place, concern over Ellison's political and religious background has little to do with his formal adherence to Islam. In his student days and subsequently, he was a supporter of Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, a racist and crackpot cult organization that is in schism with the Muslim faith and even with the Sunni orthodoxy now preached by the son of the NOI's popularizer Elijah Muhammad. Farrakhan's sect explicitly describes a large part of the human species—the so-called white part—as an invention of the devil and has issued tirades against the Jews that exceed what even the most fanatical Islamists have said. Farrakhan himself has boasted of the "punishment" meted out to Malcolm X by armed gangsters of the NOI (see the brilliant documentary Brother Minister: The Assassination of Malcolm X, which catches him in the act of doing this). If Ellison now wants to use his faith to justify an appeal to pluralism and inclusiveness and diversity, he needs to repudiate the Nation of Islam, and in much more unambivalent terms than any I have yet heard from him.
As to the invocation of Jefferson, we know that when he and James Madison first proposed the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom (the frame and basis of the later First Amendment to the Constitution) in 1779, the preamble began, "Well aware that Almighty God hath created the mind free." Patrick Henry and other devout Christians attempted to substitute the words "Jesus Christ" for "Almighty God" in this opening passage and were overwhelmingly voted down. This vote was interpreted by Jefferson to mean that Virginia's representatives wanted the law "to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahomedan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination." Quite right, too, and so far so good, even if the term Mahomedan would not be used today, and even if Jefferson's own private sympathies were with the last named in that list.
A few years later, in 1786, the new United States found that it was having to deal very directly with the tenets of the Muslim religion. The Barbary states of North Africa (or, if you prefer, the North African provinces of the Ottoman Empire, plus Morocco) were using the ports of today's Algeria, Libya, and Tunisia to wage a war of piracy and enslavement against all shipping that passed through the Strait of Gibraltar. Thousands of vessels were taken, and more than a million Europeans and Americans sold into slavery. The fledgling United States of America was in an especially difficult position, having forfeited the protection of the British Royal Navy. Under this pressure, Congress gave assent to the Treaty of Tripoli, negotiated by Jefferson's friend Joel Barlow, which stated roundly that "the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion, as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen." This has often been taken as a secular affirmation, which it probably was, but the difficulty for secularists is that it also attempted to buy off the Muslim pirates by the payment of tribute. That this might not be so easy was discovered by Jefferson and John Adams when they went to call on Tripoli's envoy to London, Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdrahaman. They asked him by what right he extorted money and took slaves in this way. As Jefferson later reported to Secretary of State John Jay, and to the Congress:
The ambassador answered us that [the right] was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.
Medieval as it is, this has a modern ring to it. Abdrahaman did not fail to add that a commission paid directly to Tripoli—and another paid to himself—would secure some temporary lenience. I believe on the evidence that it was at this moment that Jefferson decided to make war on the Muslim states of North Africa as soon as the opportunity presented itself. And, even if I am wrong, we can be sure that the dispatch of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps to the Barbary shore was the first and most important act of his presidency. It took several years of bombardment before the practice of kidnap and piracy and slavery was put down, but put down it was, Quranic justification or not.
Jefferson did not demand regime change of the Barbary states, only policy change. And as far as I can find, he avoided any comment on the religious dimension of the war. But then, he avoided public comment on faith whenever possible. It was not until long after his death that we became able to read most of his scornful writings on revelation and redemption (recently cited with great clarity by Brooke Allen in her book Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers). And it was not until long after his death that The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth was publishable. Sometimes known as "the Jefferson Bible" for short, this consists of the four gospels of the New Testament as redacted by our third president with (literally) a razor blade in his hand. With this blade, he excised every verse dealing with virgin birth, miracles, resurrection, and other puerile superstition, thus leaving him (and us) with a very much shorter book. In 1904 (those were the days), the Jefferson Bible was printed by order of Congress, and for many years was presented to all newly elected members of that body. Here's a tradition worth reviving: Why not ask all new members of Congress to swear on that?
And here's a tradition worth inaugurating: The Quran repeats and plagiarizes many passages of the New Testament, including some of the most fantastic and mythical ones. Is it not time to apply the razor and produce a reasonable Quran as well? What could be more inclusive? What could be a better application of Jeffersonian original intent?
Like so many other scandals, this one unfolded in a pattern at once familiar and depressing. First there was an unsubstantiated leak in a somewhat marginal weekly; then there was a denial. Then came more substantial leaks in more mainstream media; then more denials. Then, all at once, there were behind-the-scenes maneuvers, interventions at high levels, and finally, at the last possible minute, a resignation.
But this scandal had a few twists: Instead of a politician, the authority figure in question was the newly appointed archbishop of Warsaw, Stanislaw Wielgus. Instead of political hacks and advisers, the behind-the-scenes maneuvers featured Pope Benedict and a slew of high-ranking priests. Instead of sex or money, the scandal resolved around the archbishop's alleged collaboration with the Communist secret police in the 1970s. And instead of announcing his resignation at a press conference (supportive wife weeping softly in the background), the archbishop made his surprise resignation speech during the live transmission of the mass being held to celebrate his new appointment.
This could only have happened in post-Communist Poland. Where else would millions of people be avidly watching the live transmission of an archbishop's inaugural mass? Where else would absolutely everyone—from the Vatican to the national archives to the presidential chancellery—be leaking like a giant sieve? There are no secrets in Warsaw, a city that—not unlike Washington, D.C.—often feels more like a village than a metropolis.
Coming now, more than two years after Poland's accession to the European Union, this little morality play also usefully illustrates the weird crossroads at which the citizens of formerly Communist Europe now find themselves. On the one hand, many have truly absorbed, with amazing rapidity, the Western "normality" to which they so long aspired. The Warsaw dinner parties that once ended in gloomy discussions of the Yalta agreement now feature lively discussions of property prices, just as in London or Paris. The same supermarket chains sell the same products in Poland as in Germany or France. The same range of media exists here, too, everything from satellite television to scandal-driven tabloids to newspapers with serious foreign coverage. They vary in quality, from excellent to mendacious, and act with enormous speed, also just like everywhere else. For all its attempts at modern media-friendliness, even the Catholic Church couldn't keep up with their rapidly reported leaks.
Yet however dreary and however ancient this city of new office buildings and 24-hour news may seem, the past just will not go away. Behind this scandal, there are layers upon layers, starting with the still-open and still-bitter debate about the compromises people made in the Communist era. After all, the archbishop's past collaboration was in some ways very typical. Intelligent and ambitious, he wanted to study abroad. The secret police told him that, in exchange for a passport, he would have to report what he heard when he got there. He apparently agreed. Many others, offered the same deal, did not agree—and as a result they did not study abroad and possibly did not advance as far in their chosen professions as Wielgus. Some of them are still angry about it.
It is true, of course, that the archbishop has said that he "never informed on anyone and never tried to hurt anyone." It is also true that nothing about him has been proved: This was trial by media, not a balanced judgment. It is equally true that the documents that would clarify the extent of his collaboration, one way or another, apparently no longer exist. But their absence is also a historical legacy, this time from 1989, when the last Communist chief of secret police—who remained in charge rather longer than is generally remembered—destroyed most of the files concerning the church, and possibly those of other public figures, too.
Odd though it sounds, in some ways the memory of 1989 bothers Poles more than the memory of the 1970s. Certainly the deals done at that time—political power to the former dissidents in exchange for amnesty for the former rulers—laid the foundations for the country's perpetual bad mood. Contrary to some Western reporting, the first Polish post-Communist governments did not conduct any significant investigations into the affairs of their predecessors. At the same time, laws neatly allocating shares in privatized factories to their former managers—allowing Communist cadres to transform themselves into capitalist owners—in Poland as in Russia, Hungary, and elsewhere were allowed to remain. Thanks to those shady privatizations, the former ruling class got rich in the 1990s, and their former opponents did not. Hence the generalized gloom, which has never been justified by the economic statistics, and the prevailing sense that justice was not done. Hence the lack of tolerance for archbishops who made mistakes as younger men.
This discussion of Polish Communism and post-Communism isn't going to go away anytime soon, and perhaps it shouldn't. After all, Germans are still talking about the Third Reich; Americans were still talking about slavery and segregation when Trent Lott resigned from the Senate majority leadership. Maybe these overheated arguments about things that happened 30 years ago are a sign that Poland has, at last, truly joined the West.
The annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is the place where the world's leading tech companies claw and scratch to get their products seen by an invite-only media crowd. Every company, that is, except Apple. This year, Steve Jobs stole the show by scheduling his own company's trade show, Macworld, for the very same week in San Francisco. Apple's iPhone debut Tuesday morning sucked the oxygen out of CES. "The whole place is moping like a dumped boyfriend," an NPR reporter wrote me from Vegas. "It's as if everyone here went to the wrong party."
If you're not one of the jilted tech journalists stuck on the ground in Las Vegas or San Francisco, it's easy enough to roll CES and Macworld into one big trade show. The unofficial theme of this year's presentations is the Internetification of consumer electronics. TVs and phones are becoming nodes on the network, just like your PC.
Apple's iPhone is this week's superstar. It's not an iPod that makes calls, it's more like a Mac Nano for your pocket. It runs OS X, the same operating system that powers Apple's $5,000 professional workstations. The iPhone, which doesn't hit stores until June, will have a set of familiar Mac applications, like the Safari browser, iTunes, and iChat, that have been customized for use on a cell phone. There's also built-in e-mail through Yahoo! and maps from Google. Apple touts it as three gadgets in one: It's a revolutionary phone! It's a widescreen iPod! It's a, uhm, "breakthrough Internet device," or something. And buried down the list is a two-megapixel camera.
The iPhone's whiz-bang touch is the no-buttons touchscreen interface. This includes a keypad mode, plus special sensors that detect when the phone is next to your ear and whether you're holding it vertically or horizontally. It knows whether to display the screen in portrait mode, landscape mode, or dim it altogether, changing settings mid-call as necessary should you move it from your ear to your face to look up a contact. In a far more impressive tech industry breakthrough, Jobs arm-twisted Cingular to change the data structure of their voice-mail system so iPhone users will be able to pick and choose messages rather than having to listen to all of them in order. If your time is money, that's probably worth the $499 entry price alone. (That price will get you an iPhone with 4 gigs of storage. It's $599 for the heftier 8GB model.)
At Apple events past, journalists were often invited to a room lined with a dozen or two of the products Jobs had just shown onstage, for unscripted hands-on test-drives. This time the iPhone is being kept behind glass. So, I can't tell you whether it'll rock my world or drive me nuts with a fatal flaw akin to my old iMac's noisy fan. I'll have to settle for linking to David Pogue's one-hour test for the New York Times, and note that Pogue, a notorious Apple fan, complained, "Typing is difficult. The letter keys are just pictures on the glass screen, so of course there's no tactile feedback."
You've got close to six months before you can own one, so no rush. My suggestion: If you're tempted by an iPhone, pay attention to how much time you spend typing on your current phone. My Blackberry is my last line of defense against marauding editors, co-workers, and my wife, the speed-thumbed executive. I'm sure an iPhone would be a better Web surfer and music player, but I worry the touchscreen keyboard won't let me type back at everyone fast enough to survive. Also, I've already quit Cingular once; do I really have to sign up with them again? And unless I can install third-party applications, as I do on my Mac, I'll surely get frustrated. I'll have to do a shootout against the real thing in June.
Five hundred miles away in Las Vegas, there are countless more phones, TVs, and other gadgets on display. I picked three that plot the future direction of consumer gadgets as Internet devices.
Sony Bravia Internet Video Link
Available: 2008
Price: Not yet decided
Sony's prototype add-on for Bravia flat-panel TV sets—so proto Sony didn't hand out press photos—promises to let viewers download video directly over the Net without a computer in between. In this PC World video from CES, Sony demonstrates a mix of big-name HDTV content and amateur home clips. The drawback: The Bravia link won't play just anything on the Net. It only connects to a Sony service populated with content from partners. The big picture here isn't the Bravia gadget itself. It's that Sony will probably have competition from Comcast, TiVo, and everyone else to merge TV shows, movies, live broadcasts, and YouTube clips into a single feed.
Dell 27-inch widescreen PC display
Available: Now
Price: $1,399
Apple showed a new Apple TV gadget that plays iTunes videos and DVDs. But what do you plug it into? Computer monitors make lame TV screens. They have low contrast ratios, and their pixels aren't designed for viewing from the couch—rather, they're packed close together for reading tiny text. Dell's solution: a compromise monitor that takes the 1920x1200-pixel array of its 24-inch PC display and stretches it another 3 inches to a more TV-like size and appearance. Its contrast ratio, at 1000-to-1, is a letdown. That's better than my Mac but still far behind the 10,000-to-1 of a top plasma set. I wouldn't hang this Dell screen on my living room wall, but this display is an indicator that TVs and PCs are becoming more alike than different.
Nokia N800 Internet Tablet
Availability: Now
Price: $399.99
Nokia's gadget has been buried by iPhone hype, but tech trend-spotters have jumped on the N800's built-in Skype software. Skype is the program that allows users to plug in a headset and make free phone calls over the Internet. It seems Rube Goldberg-like to use a phone to run a Net application to make phone calls, but the truth is that many calls are already partly routed over the Net behind the scenes. The iPhone still dials over Cingular's voice network, but the Nokia proves phone service is on its way to becoming one more application over a wireless Net connection. Instead of buying minutes, you'll buy a data plan for everything. In at least one way, then, the iPhone is already behind the times.
Crystal Ball: Nominations ballots for the Oscars are due on Saturday. The best-picture contenders are still in doubt, but let's call it this way: Dreamgirls, The Departed, Little Miss Sunshine, The Queen, and Babel.
Best actress: Helen Mirren and others. Best actor: Forest Whitaker and others.
A disclaimer: Prognosticating is silly and pointless, especially this year. But a spirit of foolishness grips the town annually around this time, and we do not claim immunity. Besides, some of the politicking is kind of fun.
The influential Directors Guild has revealed its nominees, and the news was not good for Clint Eastwood or United 93 director Paul Greengrass. The guild went with the directors of the films that we listed above as likely Oscar contenders for best picture. Some handicappers were surprised to see the guild nominate Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton, the wife-and-husband team that directed Little Miss Sunshine. The Directors Guild doesn't normally permit team directing (Robert Rodriguez has resigned over this in the past). Exceptions are made when a true and lasting collaboration has been established, often for brothers like Weitz and Coen. Since Faris and Dayton have been married for some years, the guild apparently gave them the benefit of the doubt.
Nominations for teams are not common: Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins won as a team for West Side Story in 1961. Three directors were nominated in 1962 for The Longest Day. The last time this happened was 1978, when Warren Beatty and Buck Henry were nominated for Heaven Can Wait.
Even as the best-picture nominees seem to come into sharper focus, there is a bit of pandemonium over who gets to hop up on the stage on Oscar night. This has been a touchy issue since a group the size of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir trooped up to claim the award for Shakespeare in Love in 1998.
The Producers Guild has tried to get a grip on the matter in recent years, creating an elaborate vetting system to decide who actually produced a film. Studios can confer the title on whomever they choose for the credits, but if a film is in contention for a guild award, the guild decides who did the work. The academy follows the guild's lead when it determines who can pick up the best-picture statuette—usually.
This year, the Producers Guild surprised itself by recognizing no fewer than five individuals as producers of Little Miss Sunshine. Even though all five passed the guild's test, the academy allows only three to have that moment of Oscar glory. So who gets left out? The news could be bad for two Sunshine producers: Ron Yerxa and Albert Berger. They're part of a team, so by the guild's standards they count as one producer. That means the academy—which does not seem inclined to bend the rule of three—can get to the desired number by taking advantage of an ampersand.
It may not seem fair, but there's another spat that may, in the minds of many industry folks, balance the academy's harsh justice. The guild refused to recognize Paramount chief Brad Grey as a producer on The Departed. (Brad Pitt was also passed over, too, leaving Graham King as the sole producer for purposes of the competition.) Grey has appealed the decision with support from director Martin Scorsese, to no avail.
An appeal has worked for Grey in the past, when the guild didn't want to recognize him as a producer of The Sopranos. Series creator David Chase went to bat for him, and the Guild relented. The difference between then and now is that Grey was not running Paramount during the argument over The Sopranos. It strikes some as unseemly for the head of one studio to seek an Oscar for a film released by another studio (The Departed came from Warner Bros.). Grey is said to be contemplating an appeal to the academy but few expect him to succeed. Considering that his studio—Paramount—has likely contenders in Dreamgirls and Babel, it seems awkward for Grey to clamor for more. On the positive side, it might not be so difficult for Grey to decide where to sit on Oscar night. Somewhere near Yerxa and Berger, perhaps.
Hard Times Ahead: There it is again, in the New York Observer, the one that names martyred Los Angeles Times Editor Dean Baquet as Mensch of the Year: "The fantasy around the [Times] newsroom is that he'll be back! As Dean the Dream, working for DreamWorks executive and Dreamgirls producer David Geffen."
That reporting seems to be accurate, since two L.A. Times reporters—two of the paper's top-dog entertainment reporters, no less—said during a recent panel discussion that they believed Geffen would be the best owner for the paper.
With plenty of respect to both of those reporters, what could they be thinking? Is life under the Tribune Co. so nightmarish that Geffen seems like a dream? Both of them should know what Geffen can be like.
I've heard from multiple sources in L.A., including an editor at the Times, that Geffen told a Timesman that were he to succeed in buying the paper, his first order of business would be firing a reporter in the business section who had crossed him. If Geffen has that on his to-do list—much less at the top—he is the wrong man at the wrong Times. Yes, he has a canny eye for quality, from Joni Mitchell to Jackson Pollock. But he could make Wendy McCaw, the multimillionaire owner who has decimated the Santa Barbara News-Press, look Pulitzer-obsessed.
Those who have dealt with Geffen while covering this business should find that obvious. Geffen is famously vindictive. One reporter now at the Times once called me in tears after an encounter with him on the phone (one truly has to be on the receiving end of his verbal savagery to appreciate it). And does anyone think he'll tolerate articles that annoy him or his friends? And he has lots of friends—from Hollywood to Washington, from Steven Spielberg to Hillary Clinton.
Maybe Geffen has changed, but that seems doubtful. It was tragic when Tom King, the author of The Operator: David Geffen Builds, Buys, and Sells the New Hollywood, died suddenly in 2003 at the age of 39. Certainly, as a student of Geffen, King would have been fascinated by the notion of Geffen as newspaper savior—and he would have been fascinating on the subject.
Maybe King would have thought it was a fine idea. Or maybe he would have told, again, how even those people who had Geffen's permission to talk to him didn't because they were too scared. Maybe he'd recount how Geffen agreed to cooperate with his book and then, after perhaps a year, went berserk when King tried to talk to Geffen's brother, Mitchell. In The Operator, King reported how Geffen screamed at him, threatened to stop cooperating with the book, and insisted that King had agreed never to interview his only sibling. King responded that he'd made no such agreement and reminded Geffen that just a week earlier, he'd directed King to ask his brother for an answer to a question. After that, King did not get to interview Geffen again.
So, maybe Geffen starts out with good intentions but finds them hard to sustain when things get uncomfortable. And maybe if the Times folks want a savior with respect for a fair and balanced press, they should call Rupert Murdoch. They might be better off. (link)
Let the Handicapping Begin: When it comes to the Oscar race, this is the weirdest year in a long time.
December has essentially ended, and no one can predict with confidence which five films will be nominated for best picture, much less which will win. Usually, by now the best-picture contest has narrowed to one movie that's marching to victory (The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King) or a couple of real contenders (Brokeback Mountain versus Crash, Million Dollar Baby versus The Aviator).
This year, it seems likely that nominations will go to Dreamgirls, The Departed, and The Queen. But a surprising number of films could still make the list: Letters From Iwo Jima, Babel, Little Miss Sunshine, Little Children … Who knows? There is no front-runner or even top two.
Dreamgirls was supposed to march like Sherman heading for the sea, but its legs are wobbly. The movie plays well in theaters—even at the screening for academy members, the audience burst into applause in the middle—but the reviews are not all adoring and the critics' groups have been snubbing it.
One could see the academy going for Dreamgirls, or finally cutting director Martin Scorsese a break by voting for The Departed, or cozying up to The Queen. The creative team behind The Queen has been invited to lunch at Buckingham Palace! That kind of thing could curl the toes of many academy voters.
The Los Angeles Times reports that one of the most accurate best-picture predictors in recent years has been the Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association. In that case, United 93 is the winner, which would be astonishing considering that most members of the academy probably haven't brought themselves to watch it.
Babel was falling back when it picked up the leading number of Golden Globe nominations. But aside from the Chicago critics, it's not feeling much love.
Babel is the international version of Crash, with clever—or is that contrived?—interconnected stories. That big global canvas might explain its appeal to the inconsistently credentialed Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the group behind the distended annual Golden Globes extravaganza. The movie also stars the highly telegenic Brad Pitt. The HFPA is all about ratings for its television show and this group makes sure the stars come out. (That doesn't unravel the mystery of nominating Leonardo DiCaprio twice in the same category for The Departed and Blood Diamond. Seriously, he'd show up even if he were only nominated once!)
The Globes don't predict Oscar winners, but all that attention has to help Babel. It makes one wonder whether the race could come down to a strange echo of last year. If Dreamgirls doesn't win gold, some will contend that race was an issue, just as some thought Brokeback Mountain lost to Crash because the older voters of the academy were homophobic. (The academy is just recovering from a long history of snubbing African-American talent.)
Of course, if Dreamgirls loses, it might mean something or nothing. Consider Martin Scorsese. He's acknowledged as a great filmmaker, he's been in the on-deck circle for years, and he's got no Oscar to his name. All he's got is one lousy Golden Globe—and he won that for Gangs of New York. Which just goes to show, de gustibus non est disputandum. (link)
John Lennon (1940-1980) was one of the most popular and enduring musical influences of the 20th century. But in 1972, when today's "Hot Document" was written, Lennon's music had become slightly strident. Lennon had replaced his Beatles songwriting partner Paul McCartney with his bride, politically iconoclastic artist Yoko Ono, and the couple turned to protesting the world's injustices, including the Vietnam War.
The FBI began shadowing the singer. The report below and on the following two pages was obtained on Dec. 20 by Jon Wiener*, author of Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon F.B.I. Files. Wiener had been petitioning for this document's release since 1981, but until now the FBI repeatedly refused, citing the potential for, ahem, "military retaliation against the United States."
According to the FBI, "Lennon encouraged the belief that he holds revolutionary views ... by the content of some of his songs." The memo cites a published interview with writers for the Red Mole, the magazine of a thousand-member, United Kingdom-based Trotskyist organization bearing the unimaginative name International Marxist Group. The FBI reported that the British Trots were hoping the singer would "finance a left-wing bookshop and reading room in London." In the end, though, the bureau could find "no information that these expectations ha[d] been fulfilled." Evidently all Lennon (previously author of the Beatles' deviationist "Revolution") really wanted to say was, "Give Peace a Chance."
*Correction, Jan. 10: An earlier version of this column misspelled Wiener's last name as "Weiner."
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Today the two "Marxists" referred to in this report, Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn, are at New Left Review and the University of Essex, respectively.
(For the latest Human Nature columns on lesbianism, gluttony, and cloned food, click here.)
The U.S. House passed legislation to fund embryonic stem-cell research. The White House pledged to veto it because it requires the destruction of embryos. Supporters lack enough votes to override the veto. Opponents touted new research suggesting that some amniotic cells might permit the same research and therapies without requiring embryo destruction. Liberal view: Our opponents are overselling what the amniotic cells can do. Conservative view: Our opponents are overselling what the embryonic cells can do. Cynical view: They're both right. (For Human Nature's previous takes on stem-cell alternatives, click here, here, here, here, and here.)
Los Angeles County supervisors voted to consider a ban on trans fats. This follows a ban adopted last month in New York City. The L.A. city council has already requested a study on possible restrictions. California Restaurant Association's question: "What's next? Butter, cheese or anything that has saturated fat?" Political answer: What's next is L.A. (For Human Nature's take on banning trans fats, click here.)
Prostate cancer treatment reduced penis length by 40 percent in a Turkish study. The treatment was "androgen suppression plus radiation"; the result over 18 months was a reduction in average "stretched penile length" from 5.6 to 3.4 inches. Authors' proposed warning: If you choose this treatment, you may lose some of your penis. Human Nature's proposed warning: If you don't choose this treatment, your penis may lose you. (For a previous update on condoms and short Indian penises, click here. For insects with two penises, click here. For the first penis transplant, click here.)
Weight-loss surgery increased more than 900 percent in the United States between 1998 and 2004. This isn't liposuction; it's constriction or partial removal of the stomach or intestine. Key stats: 1) Surgeries increased from 13,000 in 1998 to 121,000 in 2004. 2) Inpatient hospital costs for these surgeries rose from $147 million to $1.26 billion. 3) In 2004, roughly 350 teens aged 12 to 17 had weight-loss surgeries. 4) Among all age groups in 2004, 82 percent of such operations were done on women. Government spin: More people are having these operations because the operations are becoming safer. Cynical view: The operations are becoming safer because more people are getting fat and giving surgeons experience at doing them. (For Human Nature's take on weight-loss surgery, click here.)
Pfizer is considering an over-the-counter version of Viagra. Reports indicate it may be sold as a mouth spray. GlaxoSmithKline is developing an over-the-counter impotence gel, and a generic knockoff of Viagra is already sold over the counter in China. Viagra is under pressure from Cialis, which lasts up to 36 hours, compared to Viagra's four. Principled reaction: Let's think carefully before letting people buy Viagra without a doctor's supervision. Practical reaction: Dude, have you glanced at your spam lately? (For a previous update on impotence drugs, click here.)
Apple introduced the iPhone. It makes calls, plays music, takes photos, handles e-mail, and surfs the Web. Price: $500 to $600. Hype: Computers and music players are turning into phones! Rebuttals: 1) Phones have been turning into computers and music players for years. 2) Unlike the iPhone, some can stream TV shows, too. 3) Most are a lot cheaper. 4) The iPhone isn't really a computer if it won't work with third-party software. Consensus: Everything's converging in "multimedia wireless devices." (WSJ link requires subscription.)
Bangor, Maine, is banning smoking in cars when anyone under 18 is present. Arkansas and Louisiana have adopted similar bans; other states are considering them. Ban supporters' arguments: 1) Passive smoke poisons kids. 2) They can't protect themselves. 3) Their illnesses raise health-care costs for everyone. 4) If we pass this, other cities will copy us. Opponents' arguments: 1) Smokers are decent enough not to smoke around kids. 2) This is anti-smoking jihadism dressed up as child protection. 3) Government has no business meddling in our cars. 4) Kids get more passive smoke at home than in cars. Human Nature's prediction: Next, a ban on smoking at home when kids are present. (For previous updates on the Arkansas ban and a similar proposal in New Zealand, click here and here.)
Cells from amniotic fluid might substitute for embryonic stem cells. For research and therapy, scientists need cell lines that can renew themselves and make specific cell types. A study shows some amniotic cells can do both, without requiring destruction of embryos. Better yet, they match the DNA of the fetus in the fluid, so they might substitute for therapeutic cloning. They also seem less tumor-prone than embryonic stem cells do. Vatican's take: Hooray for science! "We say 'yes' to genetic engineering as long as it respects life." Scientists' take: Amniotic cells are great, but we still need embryonic stem cells. Political take: How convenient that this alternative arises just in time for President Bush to tout it when he vetoes the stem-cell bill Democrats are pushing. (For Human Nature's previous takes on stem-cell alternatives, click here, here, here, here, and here.)
U.S. fashion designers are resisting pressure to regulate the thinness of models. Doctors say extreme thinness endangers models' health and the health of girls who emulate them. Designers in Spain and Italy have required models to maintain a minimum weight relative to their height, but U.S. designers are proposing less rigorous guidelines, such as healthier backstage food to replace the usual booze and cigarettes. Designers' excuses: 1) Weight-height ratios are an unfair standard because they vary naturally with age. 2) We can't tell each designer what to do. 3) Don't make models jump through a lot of hoops. 4) Thinness isn't our fault; it's growing among celebrities generally. 5) It's a problem only for models who aren't "emotionally stable." 6) Fashion will eventually solve the problem by shifting back toward curvier women. Designers' spin on their easier guidelines: We're trying "to show our interest and see what we can do because we are in a business of image." Cynical view: Exactly. (For a previous update on thin models, click here.)
A U.S. clinic is selling human embryos. You can pick your embryo based on the egg and sperm donors' race, education, and looks, including childhood photos. All egg donors have some college education; all sperm donors have graduate or professional degrees. Objections: 1) It's baby-selling. 2) It's eugenics. 3) If you want an embryo, adopt one of the 400,000 frozen IVF "spares" that will otherwise be chucked. 4) This is the moral disaster we invited when we commercialized eggs and sperm and let people screen donors for looks and education. Defenses: 1) "We're just trying to help people have babies." 2) The embryos aren't made to order; they're prefabricated. 3) They're healthier than IVF spares. 4) This is cheaper and faster than IVF or adoption. 5) It's morally fine, since we've already commercialized eggs and sperm and let people screen donors for looks and education. (For Human Nature's takes on embryo eugenics, click here and here. For David Plotz's take on sperm-bank eugenics, click here. Plotz donated at the same sperm bank that's being used by the embryo sellers.)
The FDA approved the first weight-loss pill for dogs. It's supposed to block fat absorption and suppress appetite. One in three U.S. dogs is overweight, and the problem is growing. Reasons: 1) We eat too much bad food, so our dogs do, too. 2) We don't exercise, so our dogs don't, either. 3) Sitting around as we do, our dogs keep eating out of boredom, as we do. 4) We're too weak-willed to stop feeding treats to our beseeching furry friends. Official argument for the pill: It'll help control your dog's weight while you put him on a diet. Unofficial argument: It'll help control your dog's weight while you keep feeding him treats, you spineless loser. (For Human Nature's take on weight-loss technology for spineless losers, click here.)
Latest Human Nature columns: 1) The bum rap on cloned food. 2) Lesbians of mass destruction. 3) The Best of Human Nature 2006. 4) Unhealthy food outlawed in New York. 5) Food and sex without consequences. 6) Rush Limbaugh's reality problem. 7) The eerie world of policing cybersex. 8) Pro-lifers against contraception.
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? People have puzzled over that question for at least 2,000 years. In the eternal cycle of natural reproduction, they saw no answer. But the cycle turns out not to be eternal. Last week, the Food and Drug Administration tentatively approved the use of cloned animals to make food. Natural reproduction is giving way to artificial reproduction. And with the new era comes a new question: Which came first, the steer or the steak?
Case in point: Elvis. He's a 19-month-old Angus calf. You can view him on the Web site of ViaGen, a cloning company. In a recent slide presentation from the Biotechnology Industry Organization, the caption below his photo reads, "Elvis was cloned from a side of Prime Yield Grade 1 beef."
No joke: The calf came from the beef. And Elvis is no freak show. He's a business plan. "Some of your animals have more income potential than others," ViaGen reminds farmers. "Our services help you identify, preserve, and reproduce the genetics of those animals." If a steer is already dead, no problem. In fact, the best way to judge its steakworthiness is to cut it open and hang it on a hook. That's what happened to the original incarnation of Elvis. "Biopsy samples should be collected from your animal as soon as possible," ViaGen advises. If you like that side of beef and want another just like it, we can grow it for you.
A steer from a steak from a steer. Ladies and gentlemen, Elvis has re-entered the building.
The political fight over animal cloning is just beginning. It's a lot like the fight over human cloning, except that the roles are reversed. Right-wing groups and Republican senators fanned fear and ignorance about human cloning; left-wing groups and Democratic senators are fanning fear and ignorance about animal cloning. Moderates on both sides get trampled. So do principles. The same liberals who demand stem-cell research using human embryos and who blasted the FDA for delaying approval of emergency contraception now accuse the FDA of recklessly approving cloned food.
The left-wingers want the FDA, Congress, and President Bush to keep clones off the market. Their case, laid out in a petition to the FDA, is a mess of anecdotes, obsolete data, speculation, and ideology. Like right-wingers in the human cloning debate, they expect the government to honor even their "religious" objections. But their strongest argument is that cloned food is unsafe, since cloning, unlike fertilization, often fails to reprogram genes for normal embryonic development.
It's a sensible worry, but the facts don't bear it out. The FDA's review, based on exhaustive and fully disclosed analysis of scientific journal articles, health records, blood samples, and meat and milk composition, found no "food consumption risks or subtle hazards in healthy clones of cattle, swine, or goats." The agency concluded that "food from the sexually reproduced offspring of clones is as safe as food that we eat every day."
Why don't reprogramming errors taint your food? Because if they're serious, they kill the animal before it's old enough to be milked or eaten, or they cause defects that make the animal flunk federal food safety inspections. They don't carry over to a clone's offspring, since fertilization, like rebooting, cleans up programming errors. And the offspring are where the milk and meat will come from. ViaGen charges $15,000 to clone a steer. You don't butcher a $15,000 clone. You use it for breeding.
Critics say cloning often causes health problems for cloned animals and their surrogate mothers. That's true, but less so in some species, and the rate of complications is falling as the technology improves. Opponents of cloning also suggest we should ban it because it's unethical "to alter the essential nature of animals." Essential nature? We've been breeding animals for 15,000 years. We've been artificially inseminating them for nearly 700 years. Most apples, bananas, grapes, peaches, and potatoes are clones, and a lot of meat sold today was produced through in vitro fertilization, embryo transfer, or embryo splitting.
The silliest rap on cloning is that it offers "no consumer benefits." That's insane. Cloning means total genome control. It bypasses the uncertainties of breeding. It also improves breeding, since five clones of your best bull or cow produce five times as much sperm or eggs. Theoretically, you can target any trait for cloning: more muscle, less fat, more omega-3 acids. You can even help the environment by cloning animals that eat grass instead of grain.
In principle—with apologies to Bill Clinton—there's nothing wrong with biotechnology that can't be cured by what's right with biotechnology. Yes, poorly cultivated clones may require antibiotics. But efficient cloning can reduce the use of antibiotics, not to mention growth hormones, by spreading healthier genes. Yes, factory farming can transmit mad cow disease. But guess what blocked mad cow disease in a study released this week? A combination of genetic engineering and cloning.
Cloning can be humane, too. Farmers don't want their animals to get sick. Instead of calves that are born big, they'd rather get calves that are born small—so their mothers can deliver them easily—and grow quickly thereafter. Dairy farmers prefer female calves to males, which get slaughtered for veal. Cloning could address all three problems. Biotechnology might even help us grow meat without growing and killing whole animals.
Messing with nature at this level is never simple. It requires ongoing debate, monitoring, and regulation. But we're not even getting that debate. Instead, opponents are relying, as they have in the human cloning debate, on the sheer fact that cloning freaks people out. To reinforce this revulsion and intimidate regulators, politicians, and food producers, they constantly emphasize surveys showing that Americans are uncomfortable with cloned food, think it's unsafe, and won't buy it. As though polls settled the matter. As though the FDA should put science before politics, but only when it suits liberals.
Yes, we're scared of cloned food. But according to the same polls, most of us have heard little about animal biotechnology, don't know biotech food is already in supermarkets, and, against all reason, are more afraid of cloning animals than of genetically engineering them. Don't be cowed. Question your fears. That's the difference between us and the animals.
A version of this piece appears in the Washington Post Outlook section.
New York, Jan. 15
New York Rep. Charles Rangel, now chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, is the object of much newfound affection from fellow politicians, according to one article: "I've got so many new friends these days," he jokes. If the Democrats hadn't won the majority in November, Rangel might have quit. But now he continues to push for policies that some deem controversial, including his support for the draft: "I didn't want to have my grandchildren ask, 'What did you do when the Constitution got ripped up?' and have to answer, 'I quit.' " … The cover piece profiles three successful young artists living on the Lower East Side. Among the three are Ryan McGinley, a natural extrovert, who takes photos that offer "not just an artist's vision of a free and rebellious alternative life but also the promise that he [is] actually living it" and the notoriously private Dash Snow, whose work features ejaculate smeared across tabloid newspaper clippings. "They are at the phase in their career when they have to get people's attention," says friend and mentor Jack Walls.—C.B.
New York Times Magazine, Jan. 14
A profile discusses the politics of Abraham Foxman, the fiery director of the Anti-Defamation League. Since taking over in 1987, he has turned it from a civil rights organization with broad goals into "a one-man Sanhedrin doling out opprobrium or absolution for those who speak ill of Israel or the Jews." Foxman denies allegations that he urged the Polish embassy to cancel a speaking engagement featuring New York University professor Tony Judt: "Abe Foxman isn't doing the stifling—he's the one being muzzled with the charge of stifling." … Another piece narrates author Ishmael Beah's time fighting rebels as a "child soldier" during the civil war in Sierra Leone. At age 12, separated from his family, Beah witnessed battle after gory battle: "[K]illing had become a daily activity. I felt no pity for anyone. My childhood had gone by without my knowing, and it seemed as if my heart had frozen."—C.B.
Weekly Standard, Jan. 15
In the cover piece, Andrew Ferguson looks askance at the Democratic celebrations in the Capitol, which he finds "oddly subdued." Comparing the Democratic majority—which outlined its 100-hour agenda—to that of the Republicans in 1994—who outlined their plan for the first 100 days—he feels "sick and tired of this partisan one-upmanship." There are differences: Reporters treat Nancy Pelosi with none of the derision they reserved for Newt Gingrich. But Ferguson also focuses on the similarities: "[T]his is just another collection of professional pols, … with the same ratio of nutters, ideologues, incompetents, egomaniacs, and borderline crooks spread among the usual mass of grinning mediocrity." … Another piece imagines the fallout of an American withdrawal from Iraq and contends that a new counterinsurgency plan by Gen. Jack Keane and historian Frederick Kagan has a "decent chance of success." A "strong, aggressive American military presence" is necessary to halt radicalization of Shiites, the author argues, while pulling out would encourage Islamists to keep fighting.—C.B.
New Yorker, Jan. 15
Jeffrey Goldberg examines divisions among Democrats over the Iraq war. The likely Democratic presidential candidates, so unified on issues like the Middle East peace process, are approaching Iraq differently: John Edwards favors withdrawal, Barack Obama opposes a marginal increase in troops, and Hillary Clinton declares herself in the "lonely middle" between idealists and realists. Whatever the outcome in Iraq, the winner will still have to deal with Iran and North Korea: "The next President is heading into the biggest, most dangerous set of problems that we've faced since the Cuban missile crisis," says former Council of Foreign Relations chief Leslie Gelb. … Another article traces Denver superintendent Michael Bennet's attempts to reform one of the worst schools in Colorado. When Bennet tightened graduation requirements, more students started dropping out, prompting a backlash among community members: "You might as well put us in jail/because your plan sets us all up to fail," one student wrote in a poem.—C.B.
Time, Jan. 15
The cover story anticipates President Bush's call for a troop surge in Iraq. Michael Duffy writes that increasing troop levels would be "a strange half-measure—too large for the political climate at home, too small to crush the insurgency in Iraq and surely three years too late." After the internationalists on Team Baker recommended withdrawal, neoconservatives charged them with defeatism and proposed an aggressive alternative: "We were hearing all this talk of pulling back and pulling out and how not to lose," says a retired senior officer. "But we're looking for a way to win." But an increase in troops would also raise American casualties. … Another piece considers the legacy of Saddam Hussein, who before his execution was "obsessed with his place in history." The sectarian chaos that surrounded the Iraqi dictator's hanging, contrasted with Saddam's calmness, already has Sunnis calling him a martyr: "When they hang Saddam, they will make him once again powerful," a former Republican Guard officer said.—C.B.
Newsweek, Jan. 15
An article contrasts the stances of Sens. John McCain and Chuck Hagel, who, despite shared experiences during the Vietnam War, have emerged on opposite sides of the Iraq war debate. McCain has advocated increasing troop levels since the war began, while Hagel is "almost angrily dismissive" of the idea. The two men talk regularly, but their clash over the war has strained their friendship: "Chuck believes the war in Iraq has deflected from the war on terror, that it was a war of choice," says Sen. Lindsey Graham. "John sees Iraq more like Bush, in that he sees it as the central front on the war on terror, and it was unavoidable." … Another piece contends that the United States is losing the information war in Iraq because insurgents understand better than Americans do how to reach Iraqis. Whereas the military relies on bureaucratic-sounding press releases, insurgents use sophisticated technologies to record attacks on American troops and disseminate footage hours later.—C.B.
Economist, Jan. 6
The Economist uses the retirement of Kofi Annan to take stock of the United Nations. Its lead editorial condemns the lack of action on Darfur and calls for new permanent member countries on the Security Council. However, it says the organization is exceeding some expectations by feeding millions and peacekeeping in Africa. Despite the "dire headlines" powerful members are more likely to cooperate to maintain order in hot spots like Lebanon and to make trade deals for the sake of their interdependent economies. … An article recounts the turbulence in Thailand, after eight bombs simultaneously exploded in Bangkok on New Year's Eve, shutting down the city and injuring dozens. No one knows who did the bombings. The military junta that promised security when it took power in September may be losing popular support, having both failed to stop a violent insurgency in the south of the country and effectively discredit the (popular) policies of ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.—A.Z.
Reason, February 2007
A gaggle of prominent libertarians sounds off on the "much-anticipated return of gridlock" in Washington, D.C. Two-party government will mean a "return to a system of partisan checks and balances," stagnant government, and limited presidential power. One writer predicts that both sides will agree to increase education spending, while ignoring underperformance; another counsels that Democrats will be too busy investigating the Bush administration to enact "wealth transfers"; the consensus is summed up by Ryan Sager, who warns, "bipartisanship is just another word for 'terrible idea.' " … Supreme Court decisions and the federal DEA may pose less of a threat to medical marijuana in San Francisco than the local zoning boards. An article contends that a California public that "seems to favor an approach to medical marijuana that combines Communism with imminent death" has started to deny local "dispensaries" the ability to sell pot (and possibly attract riff-raff).—A.Z.
The Nation, Jan. 8 and 15
The cover piece examines the rise of antiwar sentiment in the military. Nearly 1,000 uniformed Americans have signed an appeal for redress asking Congress "to support the prompt withdrawal of all American military forces and bases from Iraq." While signatories are protected from reprisal under the Military Whistleblower Protection Act, some soldiers fear less overt forms of punishment, such as denial of promotion. But, unlike the dissenting GI movement during Vietnam, the appeal takes a nonconfrontational tone: "This is not about resistance," says a lawyer who advised the appeal organizers. "This is about working inside the democratic process." … A piece praises Kofi Annan's "quiet authority and palpable decency" as U.N. secretary general. Bill Clinton supported Annan's appointment, hoping to avoid a combative bureaucrat with "big ideas and a big mouth." "They were right about the big mouth," the author contends, "wrong on the big ideas."—C.B.
New Republic, Jan. 1-15
The cover piece examines the challenges facing Mitt Romney as he prepares a run for the presidency. Romney may have more difficulty defending Mormonism to Americans than John F. Kennedy did with Catholicism. While Kennedy swayed skeptics by declaring the separation of church and state "absolute," Romney's reliance on Christian conservatives means he can't distance himself from religion. Also, educating Americans about Mormon theology is less likely to ease their concerns than exacerbate them. Joseph Smith's teachings place the United States "at the focal point of sacred history" and make American politics a stage for the "ultimate divine drama," with the "Garden of Eden … located in Jackson County, Missouri." … In a travel piece, Tom Bissell visits Estonia and finds "what appear[s] to be paradise." While other former Soviet states take awkward half-steps toward democracy and capitalism, Estonia has embraced reform. "[T]his country is about proving that Estonia is not Russia," says a Canadian-born ethnic Estonian.—C.B.
Texas Monthly, January 2007
The cover piece honors Dick Cheney with its 2007 "Bum Steer of the Year" award, lauding the VP as "a man who's a real blast to go hunting with, who this year gave the country (and his friend Harry Whittington) a shot in the arm, among other places." … A piece examines the debate over proposals to build 17 new coal power plants in Texas—a plan that would more than double the state's reliance on the "dirtiest energy source." What environmental advocates portray as an issue of public good versus private interest is complicated by the growing population, the rise in natural-gas prices, and the decline of nuclear power in the region. … Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey argues in an interview that the Republicans lost the elections after botching key issues like Terri Schiavo and illegal immigration: "Who is the genius that said, 'Now that we've identified that [the Hispanic community] is the fastest-growing demographic in America, let's do everything we can to make sure we offend them'? Who is the genius that came up with that bright idea?"—C.B.
When Earl Warren relinquished the chief justiceship of the United States in 1969, he had reason to fear the worst. He gave his vacancy to the man in politics he most despised, President Richard Nixon, a man determined to undo Warren's work. Not surprisingly, Nixon set out to reconstitute the court along the lines he had promised during the 1968 campaign, and by the beginning of 1972, four of the Supreme Court's nine justices had been placed there by Warren's nemesis. The retirement and subsequent death of William O. Douglas in 1975, the court's uncompromising and cantankerous liberal, gave Republicans a solid hold on the majority—and thus, it seemed, on the future.
And yet, the counterrevolution predicted for the court in the Nixon-Ford years never materialized. Instead, the liberals held on, protecting and in some cases extending the civil liberties' edifice erected by the Warren Court. That remarkable—and, to some, infuriating—achievement was the result of many forces: Warren Burger proved singularly incapable of leading the court, while Justice Harry A. Blackmun, advertised as Burger's "Minnesota Twin," instead emerged as an independent centrist. But one factor stood above all others in those years: the subtle, effective leadership of Justice William J. Brennan Jr., who guided the court's dwindling liberal bloc to influence well beyond its votes and solidified the work of the Warren Court into a set of accepted norms of American life.
The story of Brennan's work helps explain why conservatives still feel that despite Republican domination of today's court (seven of its nine members were appointed by Republican presidents), their cause does yet not prevail there, and why the appointment of Harriet Miers so enraged them. It illustrates why the nomination of Samuel Alito was so tensely contested and why the court's current term is being closely watched for signs that the break back to the right may at last be at hand. The legacy Warren built and Brennan protected includes: the elevation of federal authority over state power; the protection of a robust press; the insistence on desegregation, then integration of public services and facilities; the development of rules of criminal procedure to protect suspects and defendants; the insistence on voting equality; the enshrinement of a right of privacy and its application to abortion. Today, the ideas Brennan successfully defended—ideas so controversial at the time—set the parameters of much American debate.
How Brennan achieved what he did is understood mostly in the abstract. But his methods warrant closer scrutiny. Many of his papers—including a set of extraordinary annual memoranda documenting the court's work from the perspective of Brennan's chambers—have been largely kept out of public hands, stored at the Library of Congress but protected by conditions Brennan placed upon them and yearned for by scholars. Before he died, however, Brennan's son, William J. Brennan III, allowed me access to his father's papers, including those memoranda. They are a historian's trove.
The memoranda initially were modest efforts to record the negotiations on cases in which Brennan wrote; later, they were more elaborately styled as "case histories." They vary in style and approach—some exceed 150 pages, a few come in at less than 25; in some years, Brennan's clerks drafted the histories in their voices; in others, they were written in the first person, as recollections of Brennan himself. But they share the common aspect of observing and revealing the high court as Brennan saw it—"as accurate as possible a record of what we accomplished each year," said Robert M. O'Neil, who clerked for Brennan beginning in the summer of 1962. And together, they provide a running account of the Supreme Court's history through one of its most fascinating periods, as the work of the court unfolded amid a tense and sometimes angry nation. As Brennan's son told me a year before he died, the story those papers tell of the Burger Court period is that of the "greatest rear-guard action in the Court's history." Slate here presents these documents, most for the first time, as originals, with my own gloss.
Part I—The Death Penalty
William J. Brennan Jr. was, even to those who opposed him, delightful. Born in 1906 in Newark, N.J., he was the child of Irish immigrants, a Catholic like his parents, son of a labor leader and politician, second in a line of eight brothers and sisters. He was a New Jersey Supreme Court justice when Dwight Eisenhower picked him for the U.S. Supreme Court in 1956, and his early years there were productive and happy, eventually coalescing into history's Warren Court.
That ended with Warren's retirement in 1969 and Richard Nixon's appointment of Warren Earl Burger to succeed him as chief justice. Burger was mirror image to his predecessor in more ways than their curiously transposed names. Where Warren was friendly and garrulous, Burger was pompous and aloof, preoccupied with the trappings of his office. Brennan took an instant dislike to him. Burger's first term was one of missteps, which Brennan gleefully recorded in his histories for that year. Brennan's clerks cite Burger's isolation in one case and confusion over his position in another. One Burger opinion was described as "clear only as to the result." In describing a customs case involving the power of the government to conduct strip searches at border crossings, the history states: "The Chief's first circulation—typed—appeared on May 26 and ranked among the most ludicrous of his many ludicrous circulations of the year."
Brennan viewed Burger as "blinded by emotion" in one labor case, and when Burger attempted to analyze the First Amendment's application to obscene material, his "disingenuous treatment" of the matter was "too much to bear." Examining one particularly exasperating Burger opinion, Brennan's history practically sighed. "[T]he ways of the chief," it notes, "are oft mysterious." Even Burger's grammar and punctuation came in for contempt: Typos in Burger's drafts were highlighted with a sic. It was Brennan who had nicknamed Warren "Super Chief." He demoted Burger to "Chiefy."
Burger tried his best to marginalize Brennan, but he was difficult to contain. When the 1971 fall term began, for instance, it seemed clear to Brennan that the court would uphold the death penalty against challenges that its imposition was cruel and unusual. But as the justices began to discuss the issue, Brennan reported to his clerks that "there might be more dissenters than he had thought." While Burger, Lewis Powell, and William H. Rehnquist all supported capital punishment, Brennan, Douglas, and Thurgood Marshall seemed clearly inclined against it. Brennan suspected Byron White, Blackmun, and Potter Stewart would likely control the outcome; he also held out hope for Powell.
Over the next six weeks, Brennan and his clerks roughed out a draft arguing for abolishing capital punishment as it was practiced by the states because it was physically cruel and so rarely and arbitrarily imposed that it violated the Constitution's prohibition against "unusual" punishments. It did not go as far as Marshall would have liked, but it was crafted to appeal to the moderates in its arguments and to the liberals in its conclusion. A section examining the role of judicial review in assessing the death penalty was drafted specifically to win Powell's vote, as he had raised that issue in conference. Brennan sent a private draft to Stewart and White. Stewart "said he thought it was excellent," Brennan's history notes, "but [White] said nothing." On March 29, he sent his final draft around.
Responses trickled back, some from the justices themselves, others through the clerk network. Stewart appeared likely to join Brennan. Douglas was unusually quiet, and the clerks heard that Powell was writing an opinion of his own. Burger circulated his own opinion supporting the death penalty on April 24, and it received the customary mocking in Brennan's chambers. The chief's position, as one clerk noted in the history, came down to the promise that "[t]here will be no boiling in oil so long as this Court sits." In consultation with Stewart, Brennan and his clerks rewrote parts of their draft, honing their arguments and trolling for the one vote needed for a majority. At the justices' conference on June 9, Burger announced that he counted five votes for upholding the death penalty, while Blackmun said he counted five votes for striking it down. Both tallies included White, yet White "never said a word."
Then, on June 13, Stewart's clerk "called to say that there would be a real surprise very soon. The surprise arrived at 4:00." It was two opinions, one by White and the other by Stewart. Brennan took them in his office and read them aloud. Neither White nor Stewart was prepared to declare the death penalty unconstitutional, but they agreed that it was invalid as applied, and voted to strike it down. Brennan had found his votes.
Brennan had one last fire to extinguish. Douglas already had left for summer but sent word that he intended to write a separate opinion accusing White of hypocrisy in light of his previous writing in favor of the death penalty. Brennan worried an attack from Douglas might push White back into the other camp. "We [didn't] want Douglas messing things up," his history states. When it arrived, Douglas' opinion was a "rather violent attack" on both Stewart and White, so Brennan's clerks interceded and "were successful in toning it down." The fragile coalition held. Brennan was elated: He "couldn't get over the fact that at this time last year there was only one vote—his—against the death penalty." His work had cobbled together justices of varying views and had achieved an extraordinary result. "It was all over at last," Brennan's history of the cases concludes. "We kept pinching ourselves to make sure it had really happened. It was a great day for the country."
Click here to read some of Justice Brennan's memos.
Part II—Abortion
So grave and important were the issues surrounding the death penalty that the justices put over their work in another landmark area that year. Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton had come to the court in its 1971 term, challenging abortion statutes in Texas and Georgia. Just before the term began, the court's senior justice, Hugo Black, retired, then died eight days later. The same week, its beloved and principled conservative, John Marshall Harlan, succumbed to his failing health and retired as well. A shorthanded court thus initially took up what was to become the commanding issue of its generation. After a confusing debate in conference, Burger equivocated as to his own position, taking it upon himself to assign the opinions to Blackmun. Douglas objected—and, being Douglas, he objected testily. Still, the assignment stuck, and after five months of work, Blackmun circulated a draft on May 18.
"It was," Brennan's history of the case bemoans, "disappointing to say the least." Blackmun had not reached the central question of a constitutionally protected right to an abortion, dismissing the Texas law for its vagueness rather than by asserting a protected right of choice. Blackmun had accompanied his draft with a memo indicating that he was still flexible. He then followed up his draft in Roe with a more extensive and, to Brennan, more acceptable, opinion in the companion case, known as Doe.
Brennan took that as an opening and used it to push Blackmun toward finding a fundamental right to abortion. Following memos from Brennan and Douglas, Blackmun circulated again. Brennan's history notes with satisfaction that Blackmun appeared to be edging his way toward asserting that a woman's "interest in making the fundamental personal decision" of whether to abort a fetus was "within the scope of personal rights protected by the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments." Brennan was not satisfied, however, and continued nudging Blackmun for revisions. The liberals believed they were making progress toward an opinion they could accept, when in June, they were stung by a proposal to hold the cases over until the following term. "Justice Blackmun urged that it would be politically unwise for the Court to strike down both the death penalty (which he assumed it would) and the abortion laws at the same time," the history notes.
Brennan saw darker motives. The new term would bring two new Nixon appointees. There was also a political angle: "One suspects," the history darkly states, "that both he [Blackmun] and the Chief were also concerned about the impact of Wade and Bolton on the upcoming presidential election."
When the matter returned to the court in the fall, Brennan was downcast. "It is fair to say," that year's history notes, "that it looked extremely doubtful that there would be a majority for the position that restrictive abortion laws are unconstitutional." Brennan was notably a good vote counter, but his pessimism was misplaced. The vote at that week's conference was, his case history notes, "a surprising 7-2 in the Texas case and 6 to 2 (with the Chief Justice passing) in the Georgia case to hold the statutes unconstitutional." Only White and Rehnquist disagreed. Blackmun continued to draft, with Brennan gently pushing him, particularly on the question of when the state assumed an interest in a woman's pregnancy—at the end of the first trimester, for instance, or at the point of fetal viability. As Brennan pushed, however, he was self-consciously mindful of Blackmun's prickliness. "I do not mean to add confusion to such an admittedly complex problem," Brennan wrote his colleague, "but I offer these suggestions with the thought that logically—from both a medical and a legal standpoint—they might complement the excellent medical and legal discussion which you have put together in the opinions." Brennan, as he confided in his history, could be obsequious when it served his purposes.
The court handed down Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton on Jan. 22, 1973. Although it was to become one of the most contested opinions in Supreme Court history, response initially was muted by that day's superceding news event, the death of former President Lyndon Johnson. But within days, the court was besieged by letters, 2,000 to 3,000 a day by Brennan's count, most addressed either to Blackmun, as the decision's author, or Brennan, the court's only Catholic. Some were supportive; many were fierce. Brennan shrugged them off: "I rarely read any of the letters and responded only to a select few."
Part III—The United States v. Richard Nixon
Testifying in July of 1973 before a Senate select committee, a former aide to Richard Nixon revealed that the president had tape-recorded calls and meetings in the Oval Office. A special prosecutor investigating the Nixon White House demanded the tapes, as did Congress. Nixon refused, citing executive privilege, and had the special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, fired.
When Nixon relented to pressure and appointed a new prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, he too sought a subpoena for the tapes, and Judge John Sirica issued it. Nixon refused again and took his appeal to the Supreme Court.
The case arrived in the summer of 1974. Brennan was ready: He quickly began sounding out his colleagues for their early impressions of the case. "From discussions with my brethren about the issues as research proceeded, I early gained the impression that we were thinking very much along the same lines and for that reason, was encouraged that a unanimous opinion affirming Judge Sirica was entirely possible."
Bothered by the Nixon White House's suggestion that it would only obey a "definitive" ruling of the court, Brennan approached the justices individually to suggest a joint opinion, along the lines of the one it issued in Cooper v. Aaron, when a united court issued a historic command to Arkansas' governor ordering him to comply with its authority. Douglas, Marshall, and Stewart liked the idea. Powell and Blackmun were open to it, although Blackmun thought he should be the principal author. (He believed it would have more force coming from a Republican Nixon appointee, and that Burger should not author it, because he might be asked to preside over Nixon's impeachment.) White was skeptical of the idea, and Burger opposed it. Burger believed he should lead the court on an issue of such national importance—just as Earl Warren had written Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
But Burger was no Warren, and Brennan worried about Burger playing the lead role in this case. "Compromises would be necessary before we could agree on a single opinion," Brennan realized after the justices' first conference on the case, "and the CJ [Chief Justice] had often displayed an unwillingness to change opinions he authors." This case, Brennan mused, called for a "delicate hand at the wheel."
Brennan resolved to play that role, initially by continuing to press for a joint opinion of the court. Though he failed in that, his proposal helped encourage various justices to tackle portions of the opinion. Brennan himself drafted a section on justiciability that Burger countered with portions of his own opinion. That backfired. Burger's work was, Brennan said, "wholly unsatisfactory to me," and also to other members of the court. Douglas, then Stewart, indicated that they preferred Brennan's draft to Burger's, and White won support for his analysis of a different question. No one, meanwhile, was prepared to join Burger's drafts as written.
So frustrated was the chief that he complained to Blackmun of the insurrection among the brethren. "It's my opinion," Burger told his colleague, according to Brennan's history. "They are trying to take it away from me." Burger was right. "By Saturday, July 13, [Burger] had not responded to a single suggestion from the rest of us," Brennan's history states. So, Brennan asked White and Stewart to join him for lunch—he wanted Douglas there, too, but he had already departed for his summer home in Goose Prairie, Wash. Over that meal, the three crafted a strategy for fusing the work of various justices into a single opinion, one that barely drew upon Burger's writing at all. They agreed to use Blackmun's analysis of the facts, Douglas' section on jurisdiction, Brennan's on justiciability, and White's analysis of the presidential subpoena in the context of a criminal case. By Monday afternoon, Burger realized his work was in trouble: "My effort to accommodate everyone by sending out 'first drafts' is not working out," he acknowledged in a memo to the justices. Burger said he needed a week to polish his material and, apparently recognizing that he could not command a majority without incorporating the work of others, borrowed liberally from their writing in his next draft. Still, his work fell short of what the others wanted—one section in particular was "totally unsatisfactory to everyone," Brennan's history bluntly asserts, while a counterproposal by Stewart was vastly preferable. Brennan decided it was up to him to tell Burger that only Stewart's proposal would win the court, and he stayed late one night drafting a letter to Burger to that effect.
Just after 9 p.m., Burger showed up at Brennan's door. Brennan broke the news to Burger that his draft was unacceptable. "The Chief seemed surprised and then said casually" that he had already made some revisions, "thus ending, as he put it, 'the little word discrepancies' " between his own draft and Stewart's. The two walked down the hall to Burger's chambers, where Brennan read the new version. "Still in rough form, the draft had indeed not only jettisoned the entire [section] but indeed had accepted [Stewart's] approach hook, line and sinker, even using much of [Stewart's] wording verbatim. … The fight was over. I was enormously relieved and delighted and told the Chief so."
The court handed down its opinion rejecting the president's claims of his effective immunity from the court and, thus, the law. Nixon complied with the order to turn over the tapes, and resigned the presidency on Aug. 9. So amazed was Brennan by Burger's about-face acceptance of the changes to his draft that Brennan added a postscript to his history of the Watergate tapes case. After stories appeared in the press hinting at the divisions within the court over the opinion, Burger circulated a memo, typical in its prickly exasperation and in its odd use of quotation marks around meaningless phrases. "We are all hardened to the nonsense peddled as 'inside information' by some reporters," Burger wrote and Brennan recorded, "and with our 'vows of silence' there is nothing we can do about it. All of us know that from the day of our Conference on July 10 we were in accord on every major point and that our only differences (and few they were) related to semantics and detail, not substance." Brennan memorialized that with undisguised bemusement: "The reader of this history must decide for himself whether he shares the opinion of the Chief Justice … ."
Part IV—The Colleagues
William Rehnquist was in many ways Brennan's antipode, as fiercely conservative as Brennan was liberal, yet as intellectually capable and, at times, as charmingly friendly. But even as Brennan's admiration for Rehnquist's intellect comes through in the memos of the Burger years, so too does his distaste for his colleague's behavior and integrity. Brennan recorded in his histories a number of instances in which Rehnquist misrepresented the record in cases. Probably as a result, one senses in Brennan's memos a deepening distrust for his colleague.
By 1976, Brennan described Rehnquist's contribution to a contraception case in dismissive terms. "The vehemence of the dissent," Brennan's memo for that term notes, "did not surprise us, but the absence of a reasoned attack did." By 1978, even the absence of reason from Rehnquist would not surprise Brennan. A case posing the question of the right to counsel in misdemeanor trials left Brennan on the losing side but, his memo for that year states: "I find some consolation … in the hope that [Rehnquist's] decision in this case is so unprincipled and inherently unstable that it will prove only a temporary setback in the line of decisions developing the right to counsel under the Fifth and Sixth Amendments."
In the privacy of the justices' weekly conference, Rehnquist had a tendency to drift beyond pungent. In 1981, the court accepted a case that tested the limits of its commitment to equal protection under the 14th Amendment. The case, Plyler v. Doe, challenged a Texas law barring children of illegal immigrants from attending public schools, enforcing that bar by withholding state funds used to educate any child not "legally admitted" to the United States.
In conference, as the case history notes, the justices squared off to their familiar positions: Brennan believed the Constitution extended equal protection to all people, including children of illegal immigrants. Marshall sided with him. Burger confusingly compared the right to an education with the right to receive welfare ("as if that was the issue," Brennan's history of the case notes grumpily), but White joined the chief justice. Blackmun and Powell joined Brennan's side. The most startling remarks, however, came from Rehnquist. He emphasized that many of the children demanding an education were not 5 or 6 years old but, rather, those who'd come to the country on their own. At conference Rehnquist referred to those illegal immigrants, shockingly, as "wetbacks."
Marshall had heard his share of slurs over the years—much of his career, after all, was in the practice of NAACP law in the Deep South, below what he called the "Smith and Wesson line." But to hear such an epithet in a conference of the U.S. Supreme Court was more than he could bear. Marshall exploded at Rehnquist, who lamely attempted to defend himself by saying in his part of the country the term wetbacks still had "currency," as Brennan recalled it. Marshall fumed that by the same reasoning, he'd long been called a nigger.
Even after that, Rehnquist did not let up on Marshall. The following year, Marshall delivered a spirited presentation at the conference in favor of staying an execution so the court could consider the appeal of a black defendant convicted in the murder of a Texas used-car salesman. As Marshall attempted to persuade his colleagues, Rehnquist interrupted him: "You can turn off the tears now." Marshall demanded an apology; Rehnquist refused. The defendant, Charlie Brooks, was executed.
As Brennan searched for ways to construct a majority, he took a particular interest in Sandra Day O'Connor, who arrived in 1981, fulfilling Ronald Reagan's pledge to put the first woman on the Supreme Court. Early in her first term, Brennan sized her up and spied what he thought was an opportunity: "I viewed her at that time as potentially an independent 'swing' vote on the Court," his 1981 memorandum states, prophetically.
But Brennan disagreed with her in an early case and soon came to regret it. O'Connor had voted with Brennan's side during the conference discussion of a challenge to a Texas law regulating legislators and elections. Brennan wrote for the majority, but his opinion went further than O'Connor was prepared to go. She withdrew her support and joined the other side, giving it a majority. Bad enough to lose the case, but Brennan was even more concerned about what it foretold: "Perhaps the most troubling part of the history of this case is the change it signified in my relationship with Sandra," the history states. "It turned out that Clements was the beginning of a consistent pattern for the rest of the term. From March forward Sandra did not join a single opinion that I wrote for the Court during that term. … "
Brennan persisted with the charm offensive, however, even after O'Connor wrote a blisteringly anti-abortion opinion in her second year. In close cases, he often wrote with O'Connor's vote in mind. He strategized with his clerks about how to win her support, and sometimes this pursuit pushed her away.
Part V—The Legacy of Earl Warren and William Brennan
Brennan did not always win in the Burger years. His early victories over capital punishment gave way to defeat in 1976, and the march to the gas chamber and electric chair resumed, to Brennan's anguish. His histories of those death cases show the justices in wrenching, often angry debate. Similarly, in the areas of criminal justice and the rights of suspects and defendants, Brennan's rear-guard action often more closely resembled a tactical retreat, as he fought to retain the broad principles established by the Warren Court against colleagues determined to wear down or overturn those earlier rulings.
That was particularly evident in the sustained conservative attack on Miranda, the Warren-era decision requiring police to inform suspects of their rights during interrogation. Throughout the Burger years, the court, over Brennan's objections, carved out exceptions to the rule as laid down by Warren, and flirted with overruling that case directly. Still, while Brennan lost ground on the specifics, he held the wall on Miranda itself, sometimes to his own surprise. In a 1975 dissent, Brennan, joined by Marshall, predicted that the court's erosion of Miranda was a step toward its ultimate "overruling of Miranda's enforcement of the privilege against self-incrimination." Thirty-one years later, that privilege survives.
Brennan's successes were largely the result of his painstaking efforts, intellectual and political. Sometimes, he just got lucky. In early 1986, the government came to court to ask the justices to limit the right of two suspects to claim the spousal privilege—the right not to testify against one's spouse—because, the government alleged, they were not just husband and wife but co-conspirators. At their conference to discuss the case, the justices dumbfounded Brennan by voting 7-2 not just to create an exception to the privilege in that case, but to abolish the privilege altogether. Burger then assigned the opinion to O'Connor (her clerk complained to Brennan's that O'Connor's chambers had expected to get the opinion since it was just like Burger to treat a spousal immunity claim as a "girl's case."). But before O'Connor could get to work on the opinion, the U.S. government traded the defendants to the Soviet Union as part of the prisoner swap that freed Soviet dissident Anatoly Scharansky. That rendered the case moot, to Brennan's immense relief. "The parties," his case history notes, "never had any idea that there was a Court to abolish the spousal privilege."
By the time Warren Burger retired that summer, Brennan had stood his ground for more than a decade. He would lose some of that ground during the Rehnquist years, and illness eventually forced his retirement in 1990. By then, however, the superstructure Brennan had helped erect around the Warren Court's work would prove stubbornly difficult to dismantle. Roe survived the Burger Court, as did the underlying principle of constitutionally protected privacy. So did affirmative action. So did the First Amendment bulwarks of a free press.
Given the limited access to the Brennan case histories, lawyers, journalists, and scholars have been left with an incomplete understanding of the patient brokering required to achieve a majority in areas as far-flung as the Nixon tapes and affirmative action, free speech, voting rights, and abortion. With the case histories in hand we can begin to see for ourselves how Brennan worked with the tools of patience, charm, and persuasion.
Judge Raymond C. Fisher, who clerked for Brennan in the 1967 term and remained close to him afterward, is among the many who admires the justice's record and one of the few who appreciates what it took to achieve it. "Brennan was friendly, he was collegial, but he thought strategically," Fisher says. "He looked at the evolution of the law, where it was going and where it ought to go."
Congress is sticking to gestures in expressing its dissatisfaction with the Iraq War. The new Democratic leadership isn't trying to stop President Bush's planned troop increase. Instead, they're just planning a resolution to express disapproval of it, a measure whose only practical impact will be forcing Republicans to take sides on the issue. But what if Congress were to actually exercise its war powers? The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war and also to decide when to fund and how to regulate the military. But generations of presidents have succeeded in expanding their authority as commander in chief at Congress' expense—and with its permission, tacit or otherwise. If Congress wanted to push back in Iraq, here's a list of possibilities for what it could do, from cleanest to messiest, legally speaking:
1. Unauthorize the war. Or reauthorize it.
In October 2002, Congress authorized the use of force in Iraq. It could repeal that resolution and pass another one saying no more war. Or it could reauthorize the use of force on a different and more limited basis. Sen. Robert Byrd argues for reauthorization. The idea is that the reasons we thought we were going to war—Saddam's supposed weapons of mass destruction and alleged operational relationship with al-Qaida—have nothing to do with the current conflict.
Two questions would follow from a de- or reauthorization of war resolution, as they would from any flexing of congressional war-power muscles. Would the president accept Congress' judgment, and which branch of government would the courts side with if he didn't? If Congress spoke clearly enough to repeal the authorization of force, it's hard to imagine the other branches wouldn't listen, no matter what the president's commander-in-chief powers are. As law professor Neil Kinkopf of Georgia State University writes, "When Congress, acting in the vast areas of overlapping power, tells the President 'no,' the President must comply." Harold Koh, dean of Yale Law School, makes a more aggressive argument about the lack of continuing relevance of the 2002 authorization of force.
2. Cut off the money.
This would also be pretty straightforward in constitutional terms. Congress has the power to "raise and support Armies." If Congress votes against spending more on the war in Iraq, the president presumably would have to comply.
There's a delayed-reaction problem, though. Ending future appropriations doesn't mean taking away current ones. Bush has the funds to get a troop surge under way—he's not asking for more money at the moment. So Congress would be a step behind if it tried to club the troop surge with this blunt weapon. And theoretically at least, it could risk putting soldiers in danger, by blocking the replenishment of spent equipment and ammunition.
3. Condition the money.
You want more money, Mr. President? OK, but you have to give us a fuller accounting of how you plan to spend it or a clear strategy for reducing the violence in Iraq. Or—Sen. Kennedy's tough-love version—you can have your money, but not for a troop surge.
The White House would undoubtedly say that such tying of its hands is an unconstitutional infringement on the president's core power as "commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States." Spokesman Tony Snow said Monday that he's demurring from playing "junior constitutional lawyer" but added, "You know Congress has the power of the purse. The president has the ability to exercise his own authority if he thinks Congress has voted the wrong way." At least some Democrats appear to agree with Snow. Sen. Joe Biden last weekend called it "constitutionally questionable" to "micromanage the war." Biden said Congress "can't go in and, like a tinker toy, play around and say, 'You can't spend the money on this piece and this piece.' "
A raft of law professors and lawyers disagree with Biden. They see little problem with Congress attaching strings to future appropriations. They believe Congress can tell the president that he can't use torture or nuclear weapons or 20,000 more troops, as long it does so through the funding power. There's some recent precedent for this. In June 1973, Congress stipulated in appropriating funds at the end of the Vietnam War that they could not be used to "support directly or indirectly combat activities." But according to Peter Irons' book War Powers, when Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman, a New York Democrat, sued to stop the bombing that continued that summer in Cambodia, the courts ducked. The Supreme Court stayed out of the case, and the Second Circuit invoked the "political question" doctrine, which is how judges usually duck out of policing war-powers fights between the executive and the legislature. Since then, courts have rejected efforts by members of Congress to sue the president for exceeding his war powers, ruling that lawmakers don't have standing to bring such a suit. (Though a soldier might.) So it's possible, at least, that making funding for the war conditional could prove trickier than simply shutting it off. On the other hand, if a bill like Kennedy's passed and then was challenged in court, the judicial-hands-off approach of the political question doctrine would favor Congress.
4. Set a time limit.
Congress could pass a law requiring that the president withdraw or redeploy troops according to a set timetable, Georgetown law professor Marty Lederman urges. He invokes the June 1973 law, which gave Nixon an Aug. 15 deadline for ending the fighting in Cambodia and Vietnam by saying no money could be spent on combat after that date. Nixon vetoed an early version of the bill, but in the end he got out on time. This wasn't exactly an act of great congressional self-assertion since it came at the tail end of the war. But it was something, and perhaps the current Congress could impose time limits at an earlier moment, when it mattered more.
Needless to say, the White House wouldn't like this one, either. But presidential commander-in-chief powers appear to trump congressional war powers in large part because presidents say they do and lawmakers let them get away with that claim. Congress will only find out what it can do about Iraq by trying to do something.
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Koh argues that if there's no longer a connection between the war and the basis for the 2002 authorization of force, or the 2001 authorization of force to fight terrorist groups that followed 9/11, then the war in Iraq could already be unauthorized. "The authorizations are being treated as permitting any mode of escalation so long as the war on terror is going on," he says. Instead, Congress should require the president "to have specific authority for specific action." And the framework for that discussion, Koh says, should be the War Powers Resolution. The 1973 law states that unless Congress says otherwise, the troops must come home within 60 days after the president "reports" that he has engaged in hostilities. (The president can extend the deadline for 30 more days to "protect and remove" them.) The War Powers law is often derided as weak, and the courts haven't definitely ruled on whether it's constitutional. But it's a potential tool that Congress could try to get more out of than it has so far.
Auto Snow: Not So Fast, Comrade Kuttner! [Note: It may actually save you time to watch the accelerated video version of this rant.]
The shift lever falls readily to hand for one R. Kuttner, who road tests the Pontiac G6. He doesn't like the door-lock releases. Or the steering. Kuttner concludes the problem wiith GM isn't its workers--or unions--it's GM's incompetent designers and executives:
You might blame GM's woes on poor American workmanship or the cost of American labor. But Japanese total labor costs are comparable, even with Detroit's higher health insurance costs. Increasingly, Japanese cars are being assembled in the USA, and the quality holds up just fine.
So what's wrong with GM? The cars. GM is famous for being run by bean counters and ad men. Toyota is run by engineers.'
This is a common viewpoint, I've found, among my Democratic friends--Jon Alter, this means you!--who would never actually buy a Detroit product but who want to believe the UAW can't be blamed. The argument seems to be roughtly this: a) American cars are now reliable enough, having closed the gap with the Japanese brands, so b) the workers are doing their job; therefore c) if Detroit cars like the G6 are still obviously inferior--tacky and cheap, with mediocre handling--it must be because they're designed badly by white collar professionals, not because they're built badly by blue collar union members.
The trouble with this comforting liberal argument is labor costs. When Kuttner says "Japanese total labor costs are comparable, even with Detroit's higher health insurance costs," he is--as is so often the case--talking through his hat. Look at this chart. GM pays $31.35 an hour. Toyota pays $27 an hour. Not such a big difference. But--thanks in part to union work rules that prevent the thousands of little changes that boost productivity--it takes GM, on average, 34.3 hours to build a car, while it takes Toyota only 27.9 hours. ** Multiply those two numbers together and it comes out that GM spends 43% more on labor per car. And that's before health care costs (where GM has a $1,300/vehicle disadvantage).
If you're GM or Ford, how do you make up for a 43% disadvantage? Well, you concentrate on vehicle types where you don't have competition from Toyota--e.g. big SUVs in the 1980s and 1990s. Or you build cars that strike an iconic, patriotic chord--like pickup trucks, or the Mustang and Camaro. Or--and this is the most common technique--you skimp on the quality and expense of materials. Indeed, you have special teams that go over a design to "sweat" out the cost. Unfortunately, these cost-cutting measures (needed to make up for the UAW disadvantage) are all too apparent to buyers. Cost-cutting can even affect handling--does GM spend the extra money for this or that steel support to stabilize the steering, etc. As Robert Cumberford of Automobile magazine has noted, Detroit designers design great cars--but those aren't what gets built, after the cost-cutters are through with them.
Look at the big Ford Five Hundred--a beautiful car on the outside, based on the equally attractive Volvo S80. But thanks to Ford's cost-cutters it debuted with a tinny, depressing interior that would lose a comparison with a subcompact Toyota Scion. Ford wants $30,000 for the Five Hundred. Forget it!
Is it really an accident that all the UAW-organized auto companies are in deep trouble while all the non-union Japanese "transplants" building cars in America are doing fine? Detroit's designs are inferior for a reason, even when they're well built. And that reason probably as more to do with the impediments to productivity imposed by the UAW--or, rather, by legalistic, Wagner-Act unionism--than with slick and unhip Detroit corporate "culture."
P.S.: If Detroit can only be competititive when the UAW makes grudging concessions, isn't it likely the UAW will only concede enough to make GM and Ford survive, but never enough to let them actually beat the Japanese manufactures? I try to make this point here.
Update: But UAW President Ron Gettelfinger is right about Ford's botch of the Taurus. ...
**--Non-union Toyota's productivity, in terms of hours per car, has actually been growing faster than GM's, according to the Harbour report cited by NPR. So--thanks in part to Toyota's lack of work-rule bottlenecks?--GM is not catching up. It's falling further behind. 1:57 P.M. link
In this video from AEI, Frederick Kagan and Gen. Jack Keane, originators of the "surge" strategy, make it as clear as can be that they do not intend for surging U.S. or Iraqi troops to go after on Moqtada al-Sadr's Shiite Mahdi Army or to attempt to enter and clear out the vast Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City.** Yet in his speech tonight, President Bush said (without mentioning Sadr's name) that Iraqi prime minister al-Maliki had given U.S. forces the "green light" to do just that--and news accounts played up the anti-Sadr angle. ... Either Bush's surge is some other kind of surge from the Kagan/Keane surge, or there's some Kabuki goin' on (e.g., al-Maliki doesn't really mean it, and perhaps the Bush administration knows al-Maliki doesn't really mean it, but wants a) Iraqi Sunnis, b) Americans, c) Sadr or d) himself to think he means it). ...
P.S.: Kagan and Keane also wrote:
It is difficult to imagine a responsible plan for getting the violence in and around Baghdad under control that could succeed with fewer than 30,000 combat troops beyond the forces already in Iraq.
Bush is sending "roughly 20,000" additional U.S. troops, according to the NYT. ..
**--Kagan and Keane want the troops to patrol "Sunni and mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhoods," in part to convince Shiites they don't need Sadr's militias, which is different from taking them on. Attacking Sadr in Sadr City, Kagan says, would be a "very bloody opertation" that would "look something like Fallujah." (See video at 9:58.) While we would "win," he argues that it would have the political effect of "driving all of the Shia parties together to oppose us." 11:27 P.M. link
The old Pelosi is back: How do you go in a week from appearing to be a moon-faced 45-year old to looking your age (66). I'm still mystified. ... 10:24 P.M.
"It's Over:" Kate Hudson's people must be paying US Weekly to feature her breakup on the cover. I contend nobody actually cares about Kate Hudson's romantic life. Do you? She's no Ron Burkle! ... 5:21 P.M.
Looking in a crowd for friends: Supporters of welfare reform have seen caseloads drop dramatically and a employment rise, but we're still looking for unmistakable signs of a dramatic improvement in the culture of ghetto poverty, especially for black men. Jill Leovy's Salon piece on the murder rates for black men seems to offer a potentially significant bit of evidence:
The reality is that blacks in 1976 were almost twice as likely to die from homicide as blacks in 2004, and the disparity between black and white rates was 20 percent higher than today.
What's more, Leovy notes, "[s]ignificant progress has happened very recently. Over the last dozen years or so, the nation has seen a startling crime drops ... and black rates have dropped especially steeply." Hmm. What happened a "dozen years or so" ago? I can't remember. ... Leovy doesn't discuss the possible welfare-reform explanation,** though maybe she should. ...
**--In fact, she credits the continuing breakup of the black family with a decline in the murder of men by "battered wives, trapped and desperate," although she notes that this can't account for the whole drop. ... 4:58 P.M.
Give me 15 more inches of BarryAchenbachStein: Ezra Dyer's auto-show blogging comes in on the good end of Hearty Hack. ... 2:12 P.M.
Catching Up With ... NCLB! The estimable Eduwonk notes that today's NYT coverage of the debate over the No Child Left Behind Act sees the story through the hack pre-neoliberal prism: "more money, less money, Republicans against Democrats." In fact, Eduwonk notes,
the NCLB tension evidenced in this story is less Republican and Democrat than differences between the Democratic committee chairs on the House and Senate education committees and their leadership. The money issue can be resolved in the context of a deal, the bigger problem is that while Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid thinks NCLB is punitive, George Miller and Ted Kennedy don't. [E.A.]
Does Sen. Kennedy mind that the Times cluelessly ignores his non-hack, non-anti-Bush role? Probably not, since the perception that he's in there fighting Bush for more money is what gives him the street cred** to play his non-hack role of warding off the education bureaucracies, including unions, that want to to water down the law's standards. ...
P.S.: Meanwhile. former NCLB enthusiast Mike Petrilli thinks the bold, risky Bush push into education is FUBAR and advocates withdrawal to the Kurdish stronghold. ...
P.P.S.: As a non-eduwonk, I would think if the NCLB were working we'd see the results by now in positive test scores--and if it isn't working, we should abandon the perestroika-like attempt to whip the education bureaucracy into shape with testing and "sanctions"--and move on to the dissolution of that bureaucracy through a proliferation of charter schools. But Eduwonk says, via email, that it's too soon to tell whether the NCLB will improve test scores, since the " law was passed in January of '02, states only had the testing really implemented last year and this year ..." ... .
More: For some broader Eduwonk takes--but still not the one-stop what-to-think-about-NCLB piece concerned citizens demand--see here and here. ... Also note this comment on the power of the anti-NCLB teachers' unions to reshape (i.e. gut) the law:
A Democratic majority doesn't hurt them but doesn't help them all that much either because there are bad feelings on both sides of the aisles about how the unions, especially the NEA, have approached the law since its passage. ...[snip] ... But if things start to look scary for Dems in 2008, the unions stock goes up.
**--that would be the "liberal street," otherwise known as Iowa. 1:29 P.M. link
NPR seems to have a new feature: "Pointless Stories from the Civil Rights Era." Apparently they've run out of the good ones. Enjoy! 2:39 P.M.
Stupidest sentence in the LAT's big Gates Foundation takedown: After noting that Gates invests in oil companies in the Niger Delta, the Times team declares--
Indeed, local leaders blame oil development for fostering some of the very afflictions that the foundation combats.
Oil workers, for example, and soldiers protecting them are a magnet for prostitution, contributing to a surge in HIV and teenage pregnancy, both targets in the Gates Foundation's efforts to ease the ills of society, especially among the poor. [E.A.]
Presumably it helps Nigeria's economy to have an oil industry, and it helps Nigeria's workers to have jobs in that industry. If the oil workers (or soldiers) then see prostitutes, what exactly are the oil companies the Gates Foundation invests in supposed to do to stop it that they are not doing, short of pulling out of Nigeria? ... Maybe there is something, but the Times doesn't say, leaving the impression it's ready to blame Gates for ills that are an indirect byproduct of the sort of ordinary economic development most people would regard as legitimate and beneficial. ... [Many conflicts here: Gates' Microsoft used to own Slate. Former Slate editor Mike Kinsley, a friend, is married to a Gates Foundation official, etc. Still! ] 12:12 A.M.
Great Moments in Public Employee Unionism: Two L.A. traffic engineers have been charged with "sabotaging intersection signal lights" on "the eve of a two-day job action by members of the Engineers and Architects Assn., which represents 7,500 city workers," according to the LAT. The Times says the two allegedly rigged computers to disrupt** signal lights at "four busy intersections."
Union officials were unavailable for comment Friday. Robert Aquino, executive director of the Engineers and Architects Assn., did not return repeated calls. But in an Aug. 21 interview with The Times about the pending two-day strike, Aquino noted: "Los Angeles is not going to be a fun place to drive." [E.A.]
P.S.: There is some logic to paying private sector employees according to how much disruption they can cause during a strike (which is roughly what U.S.-style collective bargaining does). There's a lot less logic to paying government employees according to how much disruption they can cause--that disruption is often immense, even when strikers don't resort to extralegal means. ... [via L.A. Observed]
**--Correction: Text originally said "disconnect." The Times now reports:
They didn't shut the lights off, city transportation sources said. Rather, the engineers allegedly programmed them so that red lights would be extremely long on the most congested approaches to the intersections, causing gridlock for several days ... [E.A.]
9:57 P.M.
Nancy is to Hillary as Arnold is to ______: Just as Hillary Clinton should maybe be worried that a poor performance by Speaker Pelosi will sour voters on women leaders,** should "maverick" Republican presidential candidates like John McCain and Rudy Giuliani worry that Arnold Schwarzenegger's example will sour GOP primary voters on maverick Republicans? ... In Pelosi's case, the worry (for Hillary) would be that she would flop. In Schwarzenegger's case, the worry (for McCain and Giuliani) would be that he'd be successful at implementing non-conservative reforms like his plan to provide guaranteed health care to all children in California including immigrant children in the country illegally. The message, for those conservatives who might be tempted to overlook McCain's semi-Democratic domestic ideas (like his pro-legalization immigration plan and campaign-finance schemes) for the sake of his muscular foreign policy, would be that a maverick Republican is much more likely to get those semi-Democratic ideas enacted than an actual Democrat. ... To Be Sure: This alarmist message might be distorted (the California legislature Schwarzenegger deals with is much more liberal than Congress) and wrong (Schwarzenegger's centrist health initiative, aside from the illegal immigrant part, seems worthy). But that doesn't mean Republican primary voters won't be alarmed. ... [Thanks to alert reader S.A.K.]
**--CW today, but not last October! 9:27 P.M. link
Page C5: The NYT sells moneymaking TV stations to refocus on "synergies" between its struggling newspapers and "digitial businesses." .... "Synergies." Where' did I hear that word recently, in a media context? ... Now I remember. ... P.S.: Stock down 14%. Sell off of profitable assets. We're only just beginning to glimpse Pinch's visionary plan for victory! ... 8:22 P.M.
Naked cars: We read Autoblog for the pictures. The writing is hackwork--even worse than Road and Track, which is saying something. Today, Autoblog sneers at the new Ford Focus, without bothering to explain why it "falls short." ... Maybe they're upset that it's built on the old Focus chassis and not the newer "C1" platform used in Europe and shared with Mazda. But the tinny old American Ford Focus ZX3 hatch is fun to drive. The C1-based Mazda 3 isn't, at least at normal speeds (I think because so much of the design's weight is way up at the front). ... 7:22 P.M.
Saturday, January 6, 2007
What You Mean "They," Kemo Sabe? Sen. McCain woos the GOP base!
"I'll build the goddamned fence if they want it."
[Thanks to reader R.H.] ... 1:58 P.M.
Friday, January 5, 2007
Some old-fashioned schmoozalism on Obama, Hollywood and Hillary. ... 3:12 A.M.
Thursday, January 4, 2007
Capt. Jamil Hussein, controversial AP source, seems to exist. That's one important component of credibility! ... [via Lucianne] 4:48 P.M.
Are photo editors just choosing different shots, or has Nancy Pelosi changed her appearance? I can't figure it out. In this picture for example, she seems almost unrecognizable, based on the photos I've seen previously. But some old photos of her look similar. ... 4:40 P.M.
Don't Leave with the One That Brung Ya: Andrew Sullivan says a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would
doubtless lead to genocide and ethnic cleansing on a hideously cruel scale
but he's for it! ... 1:19 A.M.
The Sadr-Sunni Paradox: Juan Cole responds to kf's confusion and explains the
abiding paradox of contemporary Iraq that the Mahdi Army and the Sunni Arab guerrillas are slaughtering each other daily, but that young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr (the leader of the Mahdi Army) has a better political relationship with Sunni Arab MPs and leaders than any other Shiite. [E.A.] **
Cole's post is concise--I won't try to condense it further here. It would seem to have some possible pessimistic implications (are we backing the wrong Shiite in trying to form a "moderate" coalition between Sadr's rival, al-Hakim of SCIRI, and Sunni MPs?) and some possible positive implications, the main one being this: If the Sadrist Shiites and the non-Sadaamist Sunnis can cut some sort of stable deal, then maybe we can withdraw from Iraq without triggering a Shiite vs. Sunni bloodbath. Cole addresses this possibility as well. ...
**P.S.--It's more paradoxical than even Cole points out, given that the Mahdi army seems to be behind the killing, not just of Sunni Arab guerillas, but of ordinary Sunni civilians in mixed Baghdad neighborhoods. ...12:16 A.M. link
Wednesday, January 3, 2007
It's going to be a long "100 Hours." 10:24 P.M.
A WSJ-Harris "interactive" poll purports to measure public support for various "issues that might be on the agenda of the new Congress." Here is how one of those "issues" is described:
Immigration reform to make it more difficult for immigrants to enter the U.S. and to stay in the U.S. for a prolonged length of time.
Huh? Which legislation, exactly, is this describing? (a) A proposal the Pelosi/Reid Democrats are actually planning to push? (Does it include legalization of many illegal immigrants already "in the U.S. for a prolonged length of time," thereby allowing them to stay a much longer time?) Or (b) the old enforcement-only Sensenbrenner bill? Sounds more like (b). ... The tough-sounding plan got 76% approval. ... 3:29 A.M.
Juan Cole relays non-critically an Iranian report that has the main parliamentary Shiite bloc on in the Iraqi parliament in negotiations with Muqtada al-Sadr
intended to forestall an alliance of the Sadrists with Sunni Arab parties, which would have the effect of dividing the Shiites. [E.A.]
I obviously don't understand Iraq: Aren't the Sadrist militias the ones ethnically cleansing Baghdad by killing Sunnis? (I know Sadr has tried to make alliances with Sunnis in the past, but you'd think it would be beyond that point now, especially after the Sadrist mocking of Saddam on the gallows.) Update: See Juan Cole's explanation. ... 2:44 A.M.
Tuesday, January 2, 2007
Mystery Pollster answers the call, delves deep into the competing methodologies of those crazily conflicting Iowa polls and discovers ... that the methodologies are pretty much the same. Which leaves him stumped along with everyone else, except for the possibility that "voters are not yet engaged in the race enough to have strong allegiances." ... kf's nominee for likeliest possible explanation (informed by an email from Iowa reader G.M.): There's a big difference between 1) asking voters if they "definitely plan" to go to the caucuses, and 2) asking voters if they actually participated in the 2004 caucuses. Lots of people say they "plan" to attend. That's normal! But those who have attended are the sort of pathetically unrepresentative hard core activi ...sorry, committed citizens who make up the tiny sliver (6%) of Iowa voters who actually show up and choose the winner. ... In this case, the merely aspirational caucusgoers pick Clinton, while the hard core goes for Obama--a result consistent with the idea that Obama is capturing those who think a lot about politics, while those who don't think as much about politics haven't yet been hit by the wave. ... P.S.: The Dem hard core would also be more anti-war, and thus anti-Clinton. ... P.P.S.: And the same strategic 'electability' worries that led the hard core geniuses to light on John Kerry in 2004 might cause them to reject Hillary now. ...
Update: MP says the theory is "plausible" and notes that more numbers from the competing pollsters--showing how many people their filters filtered out--might resolve the issue. 8:27 P.M.
Soft hothouse quirkiness pays off in Eat the Press' 2006 Honorable Mentions--much more fun than ETP's actual, predictable (except for Hodgman) Winners. ... P.S.: "What did you do this year?" is not a question we like to ask around here, though. ... 7:21 P.M.
Arguments that Only Work in a Cocoon Dept.: Another sneering op-ed arguing the Mexican border fence has an "effectiveness" problem because in San Diego, when 14 miles were built, people stopped crossing there! They went elsewhere to cross!
A little-noticed Congressional Research Service report issued Dec. 12 indicates that expanding the California wall makes little sense. After the San Diego wall went up, apprehensions in the area were reduced, the CRS reports. But "there is ample evidence that flow of illegal immigration ... shifted to more remote areas of the Arizona desert."
See? It won't work because where it's been tried it worked. Q.E.D. ... 6:53 P.M.
If you can't lick the mob of salivating morons, join 'em! Even MSM-friendly blog victim Eason Jordan is officially frustrated by the inability of anyone to locate the AP's mysterious key Iraqi source, Capt. Jamil Hussein:
But efforts by two governments, several news organizations, and bloggers have failed to produce such evidence or proof that there is a Captain Jamil Hussein. The AP cannot or will not produce him or convincing evidence of his existence.
It is striking that no one has been able to find a family member, friend, or colleague of Captain Hussein. Nor has the AP told us who in the AP's ranks has actually spoken with Captain Hussein. Nor has the AP quoted Captain Hussein once since the story of the disputed episode.
Therefore, in the absence of clear and compelling evidence to corroborate the AP's exclusive story and Captain Hussein's existence, we must conclude for now that the AP's reporting in this case was flawed.
To make matters worse, Captain Jamil Hussein was a key named source in more than 60 AP stories on at least 25 supposed violent incidents over eight months. [E.A.]
[via Confederate Yankee] 10:32 A.M.
Mohammed of Iraq the Model still sees the emergence of a "front of the moderates" in Iraq, presumably excluding the Sadrists, as a possibility--followed by "early general elections towards the end of 2007" designed to weaken Sadr further. ... Have Sadr's Shiite rivals really abandoned the hopes for a military anti-Sunni solution, contrary to what Fareed Zakaria reported two months ago?
The Shia politicians I met when in Baghdad, even the most urbane and educated, seemed dead set against sharing power in any real sense. In an interview with Reuters last week, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki also said he believed that if Iraqi troops were left to their own devices, they could establish order in six months in Iraq. It is not difficult to imagine what he means: Shia would crush Sunni, and that would be that. This notion—that military force, rather than political accommodation, could defeat the insurgency—is widely shared among senior Shia leaders. Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the single largest political party in Parliament, has made similar statements in the past.
Hakim, of course, is one of the Sadr rivals we are courting to join the "front of the moderates." ... 1:59 A.M. link
Monday, January 1, 2007
An ARG poll of "likely Democratic caucus goers living in Iowa" has Hillary Clinton beating Obama 31 to 10%. But a Research 2000 poll taken at almost the same time showed Obama beating Clinton 22 to 10%. I find it difficult to believe these apparent wildly discordant results can be explained by ARG's possible use of a tighter 'likely caucus goer' filter. Pollster.com 's commenters are perplexed too. ... Looks like a job for Mystery Pollster. ... P.S.--Alternative Resolution: Who cares what Iowa caucus goers think? They're the idiots who picked Kerry last time! [You're not allowed to say that about America's historic first-in-the-nation caucuses--ed Sorry. Momentary slip-up. Will care intensely about Iowa from now on.] ... Note: Hillary had a "non-trivial" decline in national polls over 2006 that began "before 'Obama-mania' took hold in late fall," according to Prof. Franklin. ... P.P.S.: What are the chances that Hillary pollster Mark Penn's numbers will show her in a bad light and convince her not to run? Wouldn't Penn be missing out on a lot of remunerative work plus celebrity and excitement if she bails out? Just asking! ... 11:52 P.M. link
Fast: The Giugiaro Mustang, "out" already? It only showed up a month ago--and it's not so badly done. ... 2:46 P.M.
Historic Hillary vs. Obama Clash looms over ... ethanol. Once again, the Iowa caucuses focus our nation's leaders on the big issues. ... P.S.: Clinton opposed allowing Sen. Coburn to continue practicing medicine because "she believes that senators should not have a second source of income." ... ? ? ? ... 1:49 P.M.
Friday, December 29, 2006
Good to see Ann Coulter defending the Black Panthers. ... 6:50 P.M.
Sen. Tim Johnson is still under sedation, and AP's report contains this alarming quote (missing from the version now posted on WaPo):
Dr. Keith Siller, director of the Comprehensive Stroke Care Center at NYU Medical Center and assistant professor at the NYU School of Medicine, said it is unusual for a patient to be sedated after brain surgery for more than a few days.
"The two-week period is longer than I would be happy with," he said.
Siller is not the doctor on the scene, of course. Congressional Quarterly has some more encouraging stats [via IP]. ... He said it: Only Slate 's Tim Noah, however, has had the balls to prematurely speculate about a partisan Schiavo do-si-do in which Tom DeLay suddenly realizes that 'quality of life' is what counts, while Democrats discover that maybe the Schiavo conservatives had a point. ... Backfill: See also Ace of Spades:("Johnson's minor interaction with the world is enough to keep him in the Senate, but wasn't enough to keep Terry Schiavo alive. ... Democrats seem to have newfound respect for an occasional opening of the eyes.") 2:35 P.M.
Thursday, December 28, 2006
Crooks & Liars has 4 of the top 10 blog posts of 2006, according to Nielsen BuzzMetrics, which is pretty impressive. ... 3:20 P.M. link
Sunday Morning Sullivan: Bob Wright engages a Buddha-like Andrew Sullivan in intense theological discussion. Then I try to give Bob grief for not taking the obvious shots at him. Bob takes this rather more seriously than I meant it--and that's always must-see TV! ... P.S.: The Great Plano Controversy comes up during this discussion (except I stupidly call it "Waco")--and I now realize I've never linked to Virginia Postrel's definitive resolution in Texas Monthly. The key point Postrel makes--which Sullivan ignores at his peril, if he thinks reducing the theological sway of fundamentalism is the key to winning red-state approval of gay marriage--is this:
[M]ost Planoites are not ...[snip] "wildly exercised about sodomy." These solidly conservative, mostly Christian families are not about to launch a pogrom against their gay neighbors. "I have yet to know somebody on finding out that an educator or volunteer was gay in to say, 'Oh, gosh, I can't have them working with my child,'" Kelly Hunter says. "I have known them to say that about the mom who drinks before she goes some place." By the standards of twenty years ago, and certainly by those of Peoria, Planoites are positively accepting.
[snip]
Plano residents aren't "wildly exercised about sodomy," notes a gay friend who last year moved from Dallas to Los Angeles, "but most anti-gay people aren't. They are wildly concerned with making sure their kids never hear the word 'sodomy'; never ask, 'Mommy, what's a drag queen?'; and never have to deal with anything even remotely related to sex. ...[snip]"
He exaggerates, of course. But Plano parents want to determine when and where they talk to their kids about sex, and they assume that explaining that some men fall in love with other men is "about sex."
"We don't have control over a whole lot in the world, but hopefully the education of our children is part of it," Hunter says.
Even in a highly Republican town like Plano, in other words, the religious objection to gay marriage isn't the crucial objection. Fear that moral entropy will envelop your family's children is the crucial objection. I don't see how that fear is addressed theologically. I would think it has to be addressed practically, over time, by repeat demonstration . But time is one thing a rights-oriented, judicial route to gay marriage doesn't allow. ... 1:13 A.M. link
Influence Peddler sees ten House seats moving into Republican areas (from the Democratic Northeast, and from Iowa) after the 2010 census--for a potential net change of 20.** ... Doesn't that assume: a) the districts added in Texas, Florida, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and Utah will invariably be Republican (your bailiwick, Barone); and b) "Republican" will mean the same thing in 2012 that it means today. ... Update: IP says he's talking about 10 new reliably Republican electoral votes for presidential purposes, not necessarily 10 Republican House seats. ...
**--Pelosi currently has a majority of 31. ... 12:33 A.M. link
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
Our idea doesn't work! Let's do it! According to Tamar Jacoby, the recent arrest of 1,300 suspected illegal workers at six Swift & Co. meat processing plants demonstrates the need for 'comprehensive immigration reform.' I don't understand:
1) "Comprehensive" reform is supposed to be a deal in which amnesty for current illegals (and a guest worker program) is coupled with a tougher workplace enforcement program to block future illegals. Sounds good, but the last such "comprehensive" reform--the1986 amnesty--failed miserably when its workplace enforcement program turned out to be ineffective at stopping employers from hiring illegals. The idea behind the current Bush proposal is that this time workplace enforcement will work. But, as the New York Times notes, Swift & Co. in fact particpated in the
the federal Basic Pilot program, a system of checking Social Security numbers that President Bush has touted as a way to crack down on immigration fraud.
How does it increase our faith in "comprehensive" reform if the sort of "reliable verification system" that President Bush himself touts failed conspicuously to stop so many illegals from getting jobs at Swift that they made up 10% of the company's work force?
2) Jacoby praises Swift for "trying to comply" with workplace enforcement laws. If this is the result that's achieved by a firm "trying to comply," how awful will the results in the future be with firms that are maybe not trying so hard to comply?
3) Jacoby notes that when Swift & Company "tried inquiring" more deeply into the backgrounds of job applicants, it was "sued for discrimination by the Justice Department." Couldn't President Bush--if he cares so much about workplace enforcement--have told the Justice Department to cut it out? If a conservative Republican president won't rule out crying "discrimination" when immigration laws are applied, why do we think a liberal Democratic administration will? And even if the government doesn't sue to block effective inquiries into illegal status, won't the ACLU and other "civil rights" groups? The ACLU just sued a Dallas suburb that passed a law against renting to illegals. Hispanic activists, including big groups like the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) protested the Swift raids themselves.
"This unfortunately reminds me of when Hitler began rounding up the Jews for no reason and locking them up," Democratic Party activist Carla Vela said. "Now they're coming for the Latinos, who will they come for next?" [E.A.] **
Hmm. If enforcing immigration laws at the workplace before the passage of "comprehensive" immigration reform reminds Hispanic activists of Hitler, won't enforcing immigration laws at the workplace after the passage of comprehensive reform still remind them of Hitler?*** In both cases it will presumably be mostly Hispanic illegal immigrants who are caught in the net. Jacoby allows that the Swift raids "could be justified in the context of an immigration overhaul of the kind proposed by the president." But the reaction of Hispanic activists suggests they will continue to fight in the courts and legislatures to make sure that the enforcement mechanisms on which the immigration bill relies are as ineffective as possible.
None of this makes Bush's proposed amnesty-for-enforcement deal more credible. It makes it seem likelier that, as in 1986, the amnesty part will work but the enforcement part won't. Which may or may not be the real idea behind "comprehensive" reform.
P.S.: After the raids, the line of applicants at the Swift & Co. office in Colorado for the now-vacant jobs--jobs that, according to Jacoby, legal immigrants and Americans won't do--stretched out the door.
P.P.S.: Kausfiles--Solution-Oriented! Why doesn't Congress simply pass a moderate increase in the unskilled legal immigrant quota from Mexico (and other Latin American countries) while an effective enforcement system**** is devised and tested. No amnesty, no guest-worker program. Then, once we know we have an enforcement scheme that actually works--and won't be crippled by lawsuits--Congress could revisit a "comprehensive" legislation that includes amnesty.
**--How come she gets to violate the Hitler Rule with impunity? No fair. ...
***--For example, according to the NYT, even the "comprehensive" legislation expected to be proposed in the Senate would deny amnesty to immigrants who "arrived after a certain date, perhaps 2004 ... ." But would it let the feds actually enforce the law against them? They'll be mostly Hispanics. It will look bad!
****--Including, I'd argue, the border fence Congress authorized last year. ... [Some links via The Corner] 12:59 A.M. link
Tuesday, December 26, 2006
Mo' bama: The kf enthusiasts commenting over at MatthewYglesias.com have a point, in that last week's skeptical Obama item conflated two issues:
1) Has Obama grappled seriously and smartly with the big questions of the day; and
2) Has he, in the course of this grappling, told Dems something they don't want to hear, or demonstrated independence from Dem interest groups that enforce the party's line in unfortunate ways (e.g., teachers' unions impeding education reform, seniors unwilling to accept any Social Security cuts, populists who pretend bargaining-down drug prices will largely solve the problem of health-care costs, etc.).
You'd hope that even Dems who don't agree with the DLC-ish sentiments behind #2 would insist on #1. But, yes, Obama could do #1 without #2.
Has he done that? A few weeks ago, Obsidian Wings catalogued Obama's "wonky" efforts.** He's against loose nukes, avian flu and unregulated genetic testing! That's impressive, but follows a standard good-Senator's path of picking off a chewable, discrete problem and pushing a rifle-shot, programmatic solution (typically involving creation of a small new federal office to control nukes, prepare for avian flu, or establish gene-testing standards, etc.). It's not the same thing as confronting deeper, bigger, less easily addressed problems: How to structure the health care system, how to pay for entitlements, how to confront the terror threat, the rise of China, the problems of trade and immigration, the increase in income inequality at the top.
Josh Gerstein of the N.Y. Sun makes a better case: Obama listens to Samantha Power and Susan Rice on human rights, Gerstein reports. He wants to talk to Iran, he discounts the Chinese military threat but surprisingly, for an early Iraq war opponent, he has said he'd favor "launching some missile strikes into Iran" if that was the only way to stop "having a radical Muslim theocracy in possession of nuclear weapons." (Does Iowa know this?) He's unpredictable as well on trade. What's less clear is whether that unpredictability reflects a developed world-view or ad-hockery that's fine in a Senator but in a president, not so much.
More talk on these issues, please. And no fair "transcending" them!
Unpredictablity of any sort is a plus when it comes to #2, of course. But so far Obama isn't close to meeting the Joe Klein Piss-Someone-Off Test, despite the efforts of his press boosters to claim he has. Tom Maguire points to a comical attempt by the New York Times, where a mini-profile by Jefff Zeleny declared:
He has demonstrated an occasional willingness to break from liberal orthodoxy, including his vote to confirm Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state, which at the time infuriated liberals (13 Democrats opposed her).
Wow! As Maguire notes: "So Obama boldly stood with a mere 86 fellow Senators .... " P.S.: What's the word for trumped-up contrarianism? Sister Fauxjah? ...
**--Thanks to commenter "Trevor" on bloggingheads for the link. 2:08 P.M. link
Sunday, December 24, 2006
On to New Hampshire! The mighty Hillary juggernaut closes its vise-like grip on the post of Senate Majority Leader. A Concord Monitor poll shows the same weakness as last week's survey from Iowa. RCP summarizes:
Just like in Iowa, Hillary loses to Rudy and McCain but beats Romney. And just like in Iowa, Obama beats them all. Edwards doesn't run as strong in New Hampshire as in Iowa - no surprise there - but he still manages a dead heat against McCain and Giuliani and handily beats Romney. So even though Hillary is clinging to a lead at the top of the field, she's once again giving off the "unelectable" vibe in comparison to her two most serious primary challengers. [E.A.]
P.S.: In light of these poll results, doesn't Dick Morris' theory--that if Obama now doesn't run he'll have done Hillary a favor by clearing the field--have a couple of holes: 1) Obama hasn't cleared Edwards out; and 2) If Obama decides not to run early next year, and Hillary's still this weak, there will be plenty of time for new challengers to jump in. ... P.P.S.: Why does Massachusetts' governor Mitt Romney do so poorly in 'neighboring New Hampshire'? 12:32 P.M. link
Hollywood Hates Obama? Juan Williams on Fox:
The question now is does Obama have any hope of raising money? I don't think he'll raise it out of the New York people, I don't think he's going to raise it out the Hollywood people, so where's the money going to come from for Barack Obama? [E.A.]
That's right, a charismatic black Iraq war opponent has no appeal out here! As always, the entertainment community demands more policy details! ... P.S.: Hello? Juan? You're making Lawrence O'Donnell look like Edgar Cayce! "Hollywood people" will obviously swoon for Obama at least as easily as any other Democratic constituency. ... P.P.S.: Remember when Joe Lieberman was briefly said to be through, after his primary loss, because he wasn't going to be able to raise money? 12:53 A.M. link
kf's First Law of Journalism, Rigorously Applied: If, as Lawrence Kudlow claims, "the Fed has vanquished inflation," why do all the fancy restaurants that used to cost $75 for two now routinely top $100? When the rich-who-are-getting-richer bid up prices, doesn't that count? Just asking. ... P.S.: The food I've gotten for $100 seemed to taste better than the old $75 food. Maybe the statisticians take that into account. ... Update: Alert reader G.J. suggests fancy restaurants are simply victims of Baumol's Disease--they're a labor intensive business that's seen few gains in productivity. But in the rest of the economy productivity improvements could still be driving down prices. Good point. ... 12:15 A.M. link
Saturday, December 23, 2006
Clintonoia Breakdown: Isn't Samuel "Sandy" Berger's explanation for why he snuck classified documents out of the National Archives entirely plausible? Haven't you ever been in a library, reading non-circulating material in an uncomfortable chair under harsh lighting--all the while thinking you could just make sense of it if you could take it home and review it in more familiar surroundings? I faced this dilemma quite frequently at college and law school, and on more than one occasion my reaction was to stuff the papers in my backpack and smuggle them back to my dorm.** You never did that? ...
Sure, the Inspector General's report on Berger's misconduct--obtained and released by Pajamas Media--raises lots of potential questions, some of which are listed by the Pajamas editors here and the Powerliners here. And I yield to noone when it comes to paranoia about possible extralegal skullduggery in the Clinton administration! Well, I yield to only a few. (My bona fides.) It could be Berger was trying to destroy all copies of an early 2000 email that said "Al Qaeda, al Schmaeda. What could they ever do to us?" But if you read through the IG report in a non-paranoid mood and look for facts that are at odds with Berger's plausible 'I-wanted-to-sort-out-this-stuff-at-home explanation,' you won't find much.
I did notice one jarring fact: When Berger is given a second copy of an email he's already taken home--#217--he takes that copy home too. That makes it look like he wanted to remove all copies of #217. But it's also consistent with the familiar last-minute-crammer's habit of wanting to make sure you've scooped up every little bit of material to study during the impending all-nighter. As long as you're stealing stuff, you might as well be comprehensive. Maybe Berger (as he apparently claims) wasn't certain the two copies of #217 were identical.
Meanwhile, in Berger's defense, we learn from the report that he read the documents in an office with an archives employee who was doing his own work, and whom Berger was reluctant to bother. Sounds like exactly the sort of arrangement that would stop me from getting any productive thinking done. Bad Feng Shui! Couple that with a) the requirement that Berger couldn't even remove his own notes from this room and b) Berger's almost certain knowledge that many of the documents subject to these maddening regulations probably shouldn't really be classified in the first place, and you might easily conclude that the IG report does more to back up than to cast doubt on Berger's non-sinister explanation.
**--Admittedly, I didn't then cut them up and put them in the trash. But then, unlike Berger, I wasn't caught before I returned them. 10:51 P.M. link
D____ Cab for Cutie: The car that most impressed me, during my recent Gearbox phase, was the Scion Xb, which only recently went out of production. Perfectly-sized for the city, inexpensive, reliable, handles well, holds a lot, leaves a light footprint on the planet. But jeez, before you buy one, take a look at this picture. Grim! [via Autoblog] 5:33 P.M. link
Friday, December 22, 2006
Thanks, Iowa? Hillary's big Iowa problem. She's running a strong fourth with 10%! ... P.S.: She can't blame lack of "name recognition." [Time for the contest to write her withdrawal speech?--ed We wouldn't want somebody else to steal that gimmick! But there's one way to guarantee that she won't need a withdrawal speech--if she decides not to risk a run that might end in humiliating primary defeat. She doesn't seem like the type who'd handle that well.] ... Caveat: Hillary can always note that Iowa Democratic voters are proven fools. ... 3:28 P.M.
Thursday, December 21, 2006
Obama--He's no Gary Hart! ... 1:08 A.M
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Is that a photo of Rick Stengel or the Madame Tussauds installation of Rick Stengel? 12:35 A.M.
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
My Obama Problem: After reading up a bit on Barack Obama for a temporarily-aborted bloggingheads segment, my tentative working thesis is this: He's too damn reflective! And introspective. ... Maybe it's the writers, or the questions they ask, or the audience they think they're writing for, but all the drama in the stories about Obama comes from his "emotional wrestling match with his background," his overcoming of his "angry sense of racial displacement," his wrenching assessments and reassessments of how to live in "a world that is broken apart by class and race and nationality," etc.
One of those reassessments, according to Obama, came when a friend told him "you always think everything's about you." And he doesn't any more? Obama's favorite complexity still seems to be Obama--it was certainly a subtext of his 2004 convention address. ("We worship an awesome God in the blue states"). At the end of his early Obama profile, my boss Jacob Weisberg says Obama "would never be so immodest" as to compare himself to Lincoln. But a dozen paragraphs earlier, Obama had done just that:
"That kind of hunger—desperate to win, please, succeed, dominate—I don't know any politician who doesn't have some of that reptilian side to him. But that's not the dominant part of me. On the other hand, I don't know that it was the dominant part of—" his voice suddenly trails off as he motions behind him to a portrait of Lincoln, the self-invented lawyer, writer, and politician from Illinois. "This guy was pretty reflective," he says, offering a sly smile.
I'm a "character" voter, not an "issues" voter. But the way you reveal your character is by grappling with issues, not by grappling with yourself. Anguish is easy. Isn't it time for Obama to start being ostentatiously reflective about policies? That's what you want from a Harvard Law Review type.
And on the issues, what's Obama done that's original or pathbreaking? I don't know the answer. But compare his big speech on immigration reform with failed Dem Senate candidate Brad Carson's article on immigration reform. Carson says things Democrats (and Republicans) haven't been saying; Obama's speech offers an idiosyncratic veneer of reasonableness over a policy that is utterly party line and conventional, defended with arguments that are party line and conventional.
OK, that's just one example. Maybe I'm an old-fashioned Joe Kleinish Clintonian self-hating Dem. But I'm not swooning until I hear Obama to tell Democrats something they maybe don't want to hear. Did I miss it? 12:21 A.M. link
Monday, December 18, 2006
Shane MacGowan of the Pogues on Kirsty MacColl, who was killed six years ago yesterday, and their song Fairytale of New York, which won a 2004 poll for best Christmas song. [via Gawker] ... My nominee for best Christmas song is something I've only heard once, The Wedding Present's ecstatically noisy version of "Step Into Christmas." ... P.S.: OK, I've now heard it twice. (It's here.) I stand by my position. ... 8:52 P.M.
And Johnson Walks? So Fannie Mae ex-CEO Franklin Raines may have to give back $84 million in bonuses he received from 1998 to 2004, while his predecessor Dem bigshot Jim Johnson--who apparently got a bigger bonus than Raines did in 1998--doesn't have to give back anything? Hardly seems fair. ... P.S.: Johnson at one point had parlayed his position at the head of the Fannie Mae gravy train into the chairmanship of the Kennedy Center and the otherwise-reputable Brookings Institution. ... Yet even the conservative N.Y. Sun seems to have forgotten that Johnson, who also headed John Kerry's vice-presidential search, is involved in this mess. ... P.P.S.: Here's my attempt to assess Raines' relative guilt or innocence. ... In any case, if Raines had taken kausfiles' 2004 advice--'give the money back now!'--he'd be better off, no? He could be the Tara Conner of overpaid CEOs! And he'd still have a political future. ... 7:15 P.M.
If Judith Regan lawyer Bert Fields' bite were as fearsome as his bark, wouldn't Susan Estrich own the L.A. Times? Just asking! ... 7:14 P.M.
Y.U.: William Beutler, eerily prescient. ... He claims Time magazine is just preternaturally predictable. [via Surber] 4:23 P.M.
Hillary Clinton was asked about a possible troop surge in Iraq:
"I am not in favor of doing that unless it's part of a larger plan," Clinton said. "I am not in favor of sending more troops to continue what our men and women have been told to do with the government of Iraq pulling the rug out from under them when they actually go after some of the bad guys." [E.A.]
Note to WCBS: This does not support the headline "Clinton Opposes U.S. Troop Surge In Iraq." It supports the headline "Clinton Fudges on U.S. Troop Surge in Iraq." On balance, I'd even say it's more supportive than not--any troop surge will clearly be presented as part of a "larger plan," after all. Clinton didn't even say, as Sen. Harry Reid did, that the "plan" has to include "a program to get us out of there ... by this time next year." .... 11:46 P.M.
"Are social conservatives stuck with a pro-golden shower candidate?" Ryan Lizza goes into the hilarious details of Mitt Romney's not-so-long-ago tolerance of Bay State gay activism. ... What's shaping up, Lizza notes, is a battle between cynical inside-the-Beltway conservative pros who are willing to overlook Romney's "pro-gay, pro-abortion record" because "they need an anti-McCain," and actual outside-the-Beltway social conservative voters who might be horrified by state-sponsored fisting seminars and "Transgender Proms." ... P.S.: Instead of trying to persuade social conservatives he's been secretly battling for them all along, wouldn't Romney be better off playing the conversion card? 'Nobody knows the evil of golden showers better than someone who ...,' etc., etc.. I would think it would pack a convincing frisson. ... 11:13 A.M.
Sunday, December 17, 2006
Breast Cancer Rates Fall as Women Abandon Hormone Replacement Therapy. ... Moral: Don't get your medical advice from The New Yorker. ... 11:29 P.M.
Warner rethink: OK, that's enough time with my children! ... And if the need for family time is not the big reason why Mark Warner dropped out, as rumor says it wasn't, what made him change his mind? ... Seems like there must be a story here, though maybe not the kind of story that ever comes out (except in novels). ... [via HuffPo via Goddard] 9:53 P.M.
Mohammed of Iraq the Model is cautiously non-pessimistic about the creation of an anti-Sadr majority coalition in Iraq, but doesn't expect it to move militarily against Sadr. ... Juan Cole, who's been right about Sadr before, argues that any military move will backfire:
The fact is that if provincial elections were held today, the Sadr Movement would sweep to power in all the Shiite provinces (with the possible exception of Najaf itself). It is increasingly the most popular political party among Iraq's Shiite majority. For the US to cut the Sadrists out of power in parliament and then fall on them militarily would just throw Iraq into turmoil. It would increase the popularity of the Sadrists, and ensure that they gain nationalist credentials that will ensconce them for perhaps decades.. ...
Neither thinks al-Maliki will be replaced as prime minister. ... 9:41 P.M.
Saturday, December 16, 2006
First Mark Warner, now Evan Bayh. The solid centrist Dem alternatives to Hillary are dropping out, one by one. Funny how that happens! ... 11:46 P.M.
Friday, December 15, 2006
Malkin and Alterman--Together Again: Lt. Col. Bateman's post on Media Matters ' Altercation--disputing Associated Press in the ongoing controversy over the alleged burning of six Sunnis in Baghdad--seems quite damning. Eric Boehlert's response--'Hey, I'm not defending the AP on this, just attacking the AP's attackers!'--seems quite weak. And Boehlert, while blasting "unhinged" warbloggers, comes unhinged himself, I think, when in his original, near interminable article he writes:
I don't think it's out of bounds to suggest that warbloggers want journalists to venture into exceedingly dangerous sections of Iraq because warbloggers want journalists to get killed.
[via Malkin] ... Update: But see ... 4:44 P.M.
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Fading Reyes? Hmmm. Looks like that big fight over the chairmanship of the House Intelligence committee was a fight over a committee that will soon lose--or at least have to share--a big chunk of its turf. ... It wasn't because of the quiz, was it? ... 1:20 P.M.
Di Bug Bust: That official police report on Diana's death appears to be a bust, as far as alleging spying by the Clinton Administration on Republican magnate Ted Forstmann. Byron York:
[T]he Lord Stevens report contains no mention of Forstmann and no description of anyone like him, nor does it have any evidence that anything like the Forstmann scenario took place. [E.A.]
But the U.S. may have caught Diana talking about hairstyles with her friend Lucia Flecha de Lima! (The report speculates they would have been overheard because we were eavesdropping on the Brazilian embassy in D.C.). ...
P.S.--Keeping Hope Alive: I should also note, at the risk of sounding like a raving conspiracist, that the Stevens report doesn't seem to say anything that would rule out a U.S. a bugging of Forstmann that turned up conversations with or about Diana**--though to be consistent with the NSA's account they would have to be "only short references to Princess Diana in contexts unrelated to the allegations" about her death being the result of a conspiracy. It's just that the Stevens report was what was supposed to substantiate the Forstmann angle, and it doesn't. It's not like there is a lot of other evidence for the Forstmann-bug scenario--unless the credibility-challenged Brit papers can produce some. ...
Still! Diana's apparently famous July 14, 1997 statement to the press--
"You're going to get a big surprise, you'll see, you're going to get a big surprise with the next thing I do"
does seem a lot more consistent with future plans to hook up with a rich U.S. Republican who would run for president than with plans to marry Dodi Al Fayed--whom, the report says, she hadn't yet met "that summer," doesn't it?
**--From WaPo :
[NSA official Louis] Giles said the NSA would not share the documents with investigators on grounds their disclosure could reveal secret intelligence sources and methods. Nor did Giles reveal whose conversations were being targeted by the NSA.
12:07 P.M. link
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Bloggingheads bring sexy back! ... Plus Matt Yglesias does his best Muqtada al-Sadr impression. ... 5:32 P.M.
The Note writes that Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is "looking for ways to sharpen his differences with McCain on immigration." That shouldn't be hard! ... Here comes one now. ... 4:58 P.M.
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Is it possible those British press reports are completely wrong about the bugging of Ted Forstmann and Diana? (See below.) Thursday's publication of the official Scotland Yard report on Diana's death should be near-definitive on the issue, since the Brit papers are supposedly merely offering leaks from that report. But, according to today's New York Daily News, Forstmann thought he was bugged:
A source close to Forstmann told the Daily News yesterday that Diana may have been overheard while traveling with Forstmann on his private plane, which Forstmann believed was bugged by the feds to listen in on his rich and powerful friends. [E.A.]
Note that the Washington Post's Source Close to Forstmann--who seems to know things only Forstmann himself would know--only says that "he had heard rumors that someone had planted listening devices in his plane to listen to the princess," not to listen generally to Forstmann's rich and powerful friends. Of course, targetting the princess is exactly what the Feds are busy denying. Which leaves open ... [via Drudge] 12:44 P.M.
Bloggingheads --Bob Wright's videoblog project. Gearbox--Searching for the Semi-Orgasmic Lock-in. Drudge Report--80 % true. Close enough! Instapundit--All-powerful hit king. Joshua Marshall--He reports! And decides! Wonkette--Makes Jack Shafer feel guilty. Salon--Survives! kf gloating on hold. Andrew Sullivan--He asks, he tells. He sells! David Corn--Trustworthy reporting from the left. Washington Monthly--Includes Charlie Peters' proto-blog. Lucianne.com--Stirs the drink. Virginia Postrel--Friend of the future! Peggy Noonan--Gold in every column. Matt Miller--Savvy rad-centrism. WaPo--Waking from post-Bradlee snooze. Keller's Calmer Times--Registration required. NY Observer--Read it before the good writers are all hired away. New Republic--Left on welfare, right on warfare! Jim Pinkerton--Quality ideas come from quantity ideas. Tom Tomorrow--Everyone's favorite leftish cartoonists' blog. Ann "Too Far" Coulter--Sometimes it's just far enough. Bull Moose--National Greatness Central. John Ellis--Forget that Florida business! The cuz knows politics, and he has, ah, sources. "The Note"--How the pros start their day. Romenesko--O.K. they actually start it here. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities--Money Liberal Central. Steve Chapman--Ornery-but-lovable libertarian. Rich Galen--Sophisticated GOP insider. Man Without Qualities--Seems to know a lot about white collar crime. Hmmm. Overlawyered.com--Daily horror stories. Eugene Volokh--Smart, packin' prof, and not Instapundit! Eve Tushnet--Queer, Catholic, conservative and not Andrew Sullivan! WSJ's Best of the Web--James Taranto's excellent obsessions. Walter Shapiro--Politics and (don't laugh) neoliberal humor! Eric Alterman--Born to blog. Joe Conason--Bush-bashing, free most days. Lloyd Grove--Don't let him write about you. Arianna's Huffosphere--Now a whole fleet of hybrid vehicles. TomPaine.com--Web-lib populists. Take on the News--TomPaine's blog. B-Log--Blog of spirituality! Hit & Run--Reason gone wild! Daniel Weintraub--Beeblogger and Davis Recall Central. Eduwonk--You'll never have to read another mind-numbing education story again. Nonzero--Bob Wright explains it all. John Leo--If you've got political correctness, he's got a column ... [More tk]
Stupidest sentence in the LAT's big Gates Foundation takedown: After noting that Gates invests in oil companies in the Niger Delta, the Times team declares--
Indeed, local leaders blame oil development for fostering some of the very afflictions that the foundation combats.
Oil workers, for example, and soldiers protecting them are a magnet for prostitution, contributing to a surge in HIV and teenage pregnancy, both targets in the Gates Foundation's efforts to ease the ills of society, especially among the poor. [E.A.]
Presumably it helps Nigeria's economy to have an oil industry, and it helps Nigeria's workers to have jobs in that industry. If the oil workers (or soldiers) then see prostitutes, what exactly are the oil companies the Gates Foundation invests in supposed to do to stop it that they are not doing, short of pulling out of Nigeria? ... Maybe there is something, but the Times doesn't say, leaving the impression it's ready to blame Gates for ills that are an indirect byproduct of the sort of ordinary economic development most people would regard as legitimate and beneficial. ... [Many conflicts here: Gates' Microsoft used to own Slate. Former Slate editor Mike Kinsley, a friend, is married to a Gates Foundation official, etc. Still! ] 12:12 A.M.
Great Moments in Public Employee Unionism: Two L.A. traffic engineers have been charged with "sabotaging intersection signal lights" on "the eve of a two-day job action by members of the Engineers and Architects Assn., which represents 7,500 city workers," according to the LAT. The Times says the two allegedly rigged computers to disconnect signal lights at "four busy intersections."
Union officials were unavailable for comment Friday. Robert Aquino, executive director of the Engineers and Architects Assn., did not return repeated calls. But in an Aug. 21 interview with The Times about the pending two-day strike, Aquino noted: "Los Angeles is not going to be a fun place to drive." [E.A.]
P.S.: There is some logic to paying private sector employees according to how much disruption they can cause during a strike (which is roughly what U.S.-style collective bargaining does). There's a lot less logic to paying government employees according to how much disruption they can cause--that disruption is often immense, even when strikers don't resort to extralegal means. ... [via L.A. Observed] 9:57 P.M.
Nancy is to Hillary as Arnold is to ______: Just as Hillary Clinton should maybe be worried that a poor performance by Speaker Pelosi will sour voters on women leaders,** should "maverick" Republican presidential candidates like John McCain and Rudy Giuliani worry that Arnold Schwarzenegger's example will sour GOP primary voters on maverick Republicans? ... In Pelosi's case, the worry (for Hillary) would be that she would flop. In Schwarzenegger's case, the worry (for McCain and Giuliani) would be that he'd be successful at implementing non-conservative reforms like his plan to provide guaranteed health care to all children in California including immigrant children in the country illegally. The message, for those conservatives who might be tempted to overlook McCain's semi-Democratic domestic ideas (like his pro-legalization immigration plan and campaign-finance schemes) for the sake of his muscular foreign policy, would be that a maverick Republican is much more likely to get those semi-Democratic ideas enacted than an actual Democrat. ... To Be Sure: This alarmist message might be distorted (the California legislature Schwarzenegger deals with is much more liberal than Congress) and wrong (Schwarzenegger's centrist health initiative, aside from the illegal immigrant part, seems worthy). But that doesn't mean Republican primary voters won't be alarmed. ... [Thanks to alert reader S.A.K.]
**--CW today, but not last October! 9:27 P.M. link
Page C5: The NYT sells moneymaking TV stations to refocus on "synergies" between its struggling newspapers and "digitial businesses." .... "Synergies." Where' did I hear that word recently, in a media context? ... Now I remember. ... P.S.: Stock down 14%. Sell off of profitable assets. We're only just beginning to glimpse Pinch's visionary plan for victory! ... 8:22 P.M.
Naked cars: We read Autoblog for the pictures. The writing is hackwork--even worse than Road and Track, which is saying something. Today, Autoblog sneers at the new Ford Focus, without bothering to explain why it "falls short." ... Maybe they're upset that it's built on the old Focus chassis and not the newer "C1" platform used in Europe and shared with Mazda. But the tinny old American Ford Focus ZX3 hatch is fun to drive. The C1-based Mazda 3 isn't, at least at normal speeds (I think because so much of the design's weight is way up at the front). ... 7:22 P.M.
Saturday, January 6, 2007
What You Mean "They," Kemo Sabe? Sen. McCain woos the GOP base!
"I'll build the goddamned fence if they want it."
[Thanks to reader R.H.] ... 1:58 P.M.
Friday, January 5, 2007
Some old-fashioned schmoozalism on Obama, Hollywood and Hillary. ... 3:12 A.M.
Thursday, January 4, 2007
Capt. Jamil Hussein, controversial AP source, seems to exist. That's one important component of credibility! ... [via Lucianne] 4:48 P.M.
Are photo editors just choosing different shots, or has Nancy Pelosi changed her appearance? I can't figure it out. In this picture for example, she seems almost unrecognizable, based on the photos I've seen previously. But some old photos of her look similar. ... 4:40 P.M.
Don't Leave with the One That Brung Ya: Andrew Sullivan says a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would
doubtless lead to genocide and ethnic cleansing on a hideously cruel scale
but he's for it! ... 1:19 A.M.
The Sadr-Sunni Paradox: Juan Cole responds to kf's confusion and explains the
abiding paradox of contemporary Iraq that the Mahdi Army and the Sunni Arab guerrillas are slaughtering each other daily, but that young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr (the leader of the Mahdi Army) has a better political relationship with Sunni Arab MPs and leaders than any other Shiite. [E.A.] **
Cole's post is concise--I won't try to condense it further here. It would seem to have some possible pessimistic implications (are we backing the wrong Shiite in trying to form a "moderate" coalition between Sadr's rival, al-Hakim of SCIRI, and Sunni MPs?) and some possible positive implications, the main one being this: If the Sadrist Shiites and the non-Sadaamist Sunnis can cut some sort of stable deal, then maybe we can withdraw from Iraq without triggering a Shiite vs. Sunni bloodbath. Cole addresses this possibility as well. ...
**P.S.--It's more paradoxical than even Cole points out, given that the Mahdi army seems to be behind the killing, not just of Sunni Arab guerillas, but of ordinary Sunni civilians in mixed Baghdad neighborhoods. ...12:16 A.M. link
Wednesday, January 3, 2007
It's going to be a long "100 Hours." 10:24 P.M.
A WSJ-Harris "interactive" poll purports to measure public support for various "issues that might be on the agenda of the new Congress." Here is how one of those "issues" is described:
Immigration reform to make it more difficult for immigrants to enter the U.S. and to stay in the U.S. for a prolonged length of time.
Huh? Which legislation, exactly, is this describing? (a) A proposal the Pelosi/Reid Democrats are actually planning to push? (Does it include legalization of many illegal immigrants already "in the U.S. for a prolonged length of time," thereby allowing them to stay a much longer time?) Or (b) the old enforcement-only Sensenbrenner bill? Sounds more like (b). ... The tough-sounding plan got 76% approval. ... 3:29 A.M.
Juan Cole relays non-critically an Iranian report that has the main parliamentary Shiite bloc on in the Iraqi parliament in negotiations with Muqtada al-Sadr
intended to forestall an alliance of the Sadrists with Sunni Arab parties, which would have the effect of dividing the Shiites. [E.A.]
I obviously don't understand Iraq: Aren't the Sadrist militias the ones ethnically cleansing Baghdad by killing Sunnis? (I know Sadr has tried to make alliances with Sunnis in the past, but you'd think it would be beyond that point now, especially after the Sadrist mocking of Saddam on the gallows.) Update: See Juan Cole's explanation. ... 2:44 A.M.
Tuesday, January 2, 2007
Mystery Pollster answers the call, delves deep into the competing methodologies of those crazily conflicting Iowa polls and discovers ... that the methodologies are pretty much the same. Which leaves him stumped along with everyone else, except for the possibility that "voters are not yet engaged in the race enough to have strong allegiances." ... kf's nominee for likeliest possible explanation (informed by an email from Iowa reader G.M.): There's a big difference between 1) asking voters if they "definitely plan" to go to the caucuses, and 2) asking voters if they actually participated in the 2004 caucuses. Lots of people say they "plan" to attend. That's normal! But those who have attended are the sort of pathetically unrepresentative hard core activi ...sorry, committed citizens who make up the tiny sliver (6%) of Iowa voters who actually show up and choose the winner. ... In this case, the merely aspirational caucusgoers pick Clinton, while the hard core goes for Obama--a result consistent with the idea that Obama is capturing those who think a lot about politics, while those who don't think as much about politics haven't yet been hit by the wave. ... P.S.: The Dem hard core would also be more anti-war, and thus anti-Clinton. ... P.P.S.: And the same strategic 'electability' worries that led the hard core geniuses to light on John Kerry in 2004 might cause them to reject Hillary now. ...
Update: MP says the theory is "plausible" and notes that more numbers from the competing pollsters--showing how many people their filters filtered out--might resolve the issue. 8:27 P.M.
Soft hothouse quirkiness pays off in Eat the Press' 2006 Honorable Mentions--much more fun than ETP's actual, predictable (except for Hodgman) Winners. ... P.S.: "What did you do this year?" is not a question we like to ask around here, though. ... 7:21 P.M.
Arguments that Only Work in a Cocoon Dept.: Another sneering op-ed arguing the Mexican border fence has an "effectiveness" problem because in San Diego, when 14 miles were built, people stopped crossing there! They went elsewhere to cross!
A little-noticed Congressional Research Service report issued Dec. 12 indicates that expanding the California wall makes little sense. After the San Diego wall went up, apprehensions in the area were reduced, the CRS reports. But "there is ample evidence that flow of illegal immigration ... shifted to more remote areas of the Arizona desert."
See? It won't work because where it's been tried it worked. Q.E.D. ... 6:53 P.M.
If you can't lick the mob of salivating morons, join 'em! Even MSM-friendly blog victim Eason Jordan is officially frustrated by the inability of anyone to locate the AP's mysterious key Iraqi source, Capt. Jamil Hussein:
But efforts by two governments, several news organizations, and bloggers have failed to produce such evidence or proof that there is a Captain Jamil Hussein. The AP cannot or will not produce him or convincing evidence of his existence.
It is striking that no one has been able to find a family member, friend, or colleague of Captain Hussein. Nor has the AP told us who in the AP's ranks has actually spoken with Captain Hussein. Nor has the AP quoted Captain Hussein once since the story of the disputed episode.
Therefore, in the absence of clear and compelling evidence to corroborate the AP's exclusive story and Captain Hussein's existence, we must conclude for now that the AP's reporting in this case was flawed.
To make matters worse, Captain Jamil Hussein was a key named source in more than 60 AP stories on at least 25 supposed violent incidents over eight months. [E.A.]
[via Confederate Yankee] 10:32 A.M.
Mohammed of Iraq the Model still sees the emergence of a "front of the moderates" in Iraq, presumably excluding the Sadrists, as a possibility--followed by "early general elections towards the end of 2007" designed to weaken Sadr further. ... Have Sadr's Shiite rivals really abandoned the hopes for a military anti-Sunni solution, contrary to what Fareed Zakaria reported two months ago?
The Shia politicians I met when in Baghdad, even the most urbane and educated, seemed dead set against sharing power in any real sense. In an interview with Reuters last week, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki also said he believed that if Iraqi troops were left to their own devices, they could establish order in six months in Iraq. It is not difficult to imagine what he means: Shia would crush Sunni, and that would be that. This notion—that military force, rather than political accommodation, could defeat the insurgency—is widely shared among senior Shia leaders. Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the single largest political party in Parliament, has made similar statements in the past.
Hakim, of course, is one of the Sadr rivals we are courting to join the "front of the moderates." ... 1:59 A.M. link
Monday, January 1, 2007
An ARG poll of "likely Democratic caucus goers living in Iowa" has Hillary Clinton beating Obama 31 to 10%. But a Research 2000 poll taken at almost the same time showed Obama beating Clinton 22 to 10%. I find it difficult to believe these apparent wildly discordant results can be explained by ARG's possible use of a tighter 'likely caucus goer' filter. Pollster.com 's commenters are perplexed too. ... Looks like a job for Mystery Pollster. ... P.S.--Alternative Resolution: Who cares what Iowa caucus goers think? They're the idiots who picked Kerry last time! [You're not allowed to say that about America's historic first-in-the-nation caucuses--ed Sorry. Momentary slip-up. Will care intensely about Iowa from now on.] ... Note: Hillary had a "non-trivial" decline in national polls over 2006 that began "before 'Obama-mania' took hold in late fall," according to Prof. Franklin. ... P.P.S.: What are the chances that Hillary pollster Mark Penn's numbers will show her in a bad light and convince her not to run? Wouldn't Penn be missing out on a lot of remunerative work plus celebrity and excitement if she bails out? Just asking! ... 11:52 P.M. link
Fast: The Giugiaro Mustang, "out" already? It only showed up a month ago--and it's not so badly done. ... 2:46 P.M.
Historic Hillary vs. Obama Clash looms over ... ethanol. Once again, the Iowa caucuses focus our nation's leaders on the big issues. ... P.S.: Clinton opposed allowing Sen. Coburn to continue practicing medicine because "she believes that senators should not have a second source of income." ... ? ? ? ... 1:49 P.M.
Friday, December 29, 2006
Good to see Ann Coulter defending the Black Panthers. ... 6:50 P.M.
Sen. Tim Johnson is still under sedation, and AP's report contains this alarming quote (missing from the version now posted on WaPo):
Dr. Keith Siller, director of the Comprehensive Stroke Care Center at NYU Medical Center and assistant professor at the NYU School of Medicine, said it is unusual for a patient to be sedated after brain surgery for more than a few days.
"The two-week period is longer than I would be happy with," he said.
Siller is not the doctor on the scene, of course. Congressional Quarterly has some more encouraging stats [via IP]. ... He said it: Only Slate 's Tim Noah, however, has had the balls to prematurely speculate about a partisan Schiavo do-si-do in which Tom DeLay suddenly realizes that 'quality of life' is what counts, while Democrats discover that maybe the Schiavo conservatives had a point. ... Backfill: See also Ace of Spades:("Johnson's minor interaction with the world is enough to keep him in the Senate, but wasn't enough to keep Terry Schiavo alive. ... Democrats seem to have newfound respect for an occasional opening of the eyes.") 2:35 P.M.
Thursday, December 28, 2006
Crooks & Liars has 4 of the top 10 blog posts of 2006, according to Nielsen BuzzMetrics, which is pretty impressive. ... 3:20 P.M. link
Sunday Morning Sullivan: Bob Wright engages a Buddha-like Andrew Sullivan in intense theological discussion. Then I try to give Bob grief for not taking the obvious shots at him. Bob takes this rather more seriously than I meant it--and that's always must-see TV! ... P.S.: The Great Plano Controversy comes up during this discussion (except I stupidly call it "Waco")--and I now realize I've never linked to Virginia Postrel's definitive resolution in Texas Monthly. The key point Postrel makes--which Sullivan ignores at his peril, if he thinks reducing the theological sway of fundamentalism is the key to winning red-state approval of gay marriage--is this:
[M]ost Planoites are not ...[snip] "wildly exercised about sodomy." These solidly conservative, mostly Christian families are not about to launch a pogrom against their gay neighbors. "I have yet to know somebody on finding out that an educator or volunteer was gay in to say, 'Oh, gosh, I can't have them working with my child,'" Kelly Hunter says. "I have known them to say that about the mom who drinks before she goes some place." By the standards of twenty years ago, and certainly by those of Peoria, Planoites are positively accepting.
[snip]
Plano residents aren't "wildly exercised about sodomy," notes a gay friend who last year moved from Dallas to Los Angeles, "but most anti-gay people aren't. They are wildly concerned with making sure their kids never hear the word 'sodomy'; never ask, 'Mommy, what's a drag queen?'; and never have to deal with anything even remotely related to sex. ...[snip]"
He exaggerates, of course. But Plano parents want to determine when and where they talk to their kids about sex, and they assume that explaining that some men fall in love with other men is "about sex."
"We don't have control over a whole lot in the world, but hopefully the education of our children is part of it," Hunter says.
Even in a highly Republican town like Plano, in other words, the religious objection to gay marriage isn't the crucial objection. Fear that moral entropy will envelop your family's children is the crucial objection. I don't see how that fear is addressed theologically. I would think it has to be addressed practically, over time, by repeat demonstration . But time is one thing a rights-oriented, judicial route to gay marriage doesn't allow. ... 1:13 A.M. link
Influence Peddler sees ten House seats moving into Republican areas (from the Democratic Northeast, and from Iowa) after the 2010 census--for a potential net change of 20.** ... Doesn't that assume: a) the districts added in Texas, Florida, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and Utah will invariably be Republican (your bailiwick, Barone); and b) "Republican" will mean the same thing in 2012 that it means today. ... Update: IP says he's talking about 10 new reliably Republican electoral votes for presidential purposes, not necessarily 10 Republican House seats. ...
**--Pelosi currently has a majority of 31. ... 12:33 A.M. link
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
Our idea doesn't work! Let's do it! According to Tamar Jacoby, the recent arrest of 1,300 suspected illegal workers at six Swift & Co. meat processing plants demonstrates the need for 'comprehensive immigration reform.' I don't understand:
1) "Comprehensive" reform is supposed to be a deal in which amnesty for current illegals (and a guest worker program) is coupled with a tougher workplace enforcement program to block future illegals. Sounds good, but the last such "comprehensive" reform--the1986 amnesty--failed miserably when its workplace enforcement program turned out to be ineffective at stopping employers from hiring illegals. The idea behind the current Bush proposal is that this time workplace enforcement will work. But, as the New York Times notes, Swift & Co. in fact particpated in the
the federal Basic Pilot program, a system of checking Social Security numbers that President Bush has touted as a way to crack down on immigration fraud.
How does it increase our faith in "comprehensive" reform if the sort of "reliable verification system" that President Bush himself touts failed conspicuously to stop so many illegals from getting jobs at Swift that they made up 10% of the company's work force?
2) Jacoby praises Swift for "trying to comply" with workplace enforcement laws. If this is the result that's achieved by a firm "trying to comply," how awful will the results in the future be with firms that are maybe not trying so hard to comply?
3) Jacoby notes that when Swift & Company "tried inquiring" more deeply into the backgrounds of job applicants, it was "sued for discrimination by the Justice Department." Couldn't President Bush--if he cares so much about workplace enforcement--have told the Justice Department to cut it out? If a conservative Republican president won't rule out crying "discrimination" when immigration laws are applied, why do we think a liberal Democratic administration will? And even if the government doesn't sue to block effective inquiries into illegal status, won't the ACLU and other "civil rights" groups? The ACLU just sued a Dallas suburb that passed a law against renting to illegals. Hispanic activists, including big groups like the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) protested the Swift raids themselves.
"This unfortunately reminds me of when Hitler began rounding up the Jews for no reason and locking them up," Democratic Party activist Carla Vela said. "Now they're coming for the Latinos, who will they come for next?" [E.A.] **
Hmm. If enforcing immigration laws at the workplace before the passage of "comprehensive" immigration reform reminds Hispanic activists of Hitler, won't enforcing immigration laws at the workplace after the passage of comprehensive reform still remind them of Hitler?*** In both cases it will presumably be mostly Hispanic illegal immigrants who are caught in the net. Jacoby allows that the Swift raids "could be justified in the context of an immigration overhaul of the kind proposed by the president." But the reaction of Hispanic activists suggests they will continue to fight in the courts and legislatures to make sure that the enforcement mechanisms on which the immigration bill relies are as ineffective as possible.
None of this makes Bush's proposed amnesty-for-enforcement deal more credible. It makes it seem likelier that, as in 1986, the amnesty part will work but the enforcement part won't. Which may or may not be the real idea behind "comprehensive" reform.
P.S.: After the raids, the line of applicants at the Swift & Co. office in Colorado for the now-vacant jobs--jobs that, according to Jacoby, legal immigrants and Americans won't do--stretched out the door.
P.P.S.: Kausfiles--Solution-Oriented! Why doesn't Congress simply pass a moderate increase in the unskilled legal immigrant quota from Mexico (and other Latin American countries) while an effective enforcement system**** is devised and tested. No amnesty, no guest-worker program. Then, once we know we have an enforcement scheme that actually works--and won't be crippled by lawsuits--Congress could revisit a "comprehensive" legislation that includes amnesty.
**--How come she gets to violate the Hitler Rule with impunity? No fair. ...
***--For example, according to the NYT, even the "comprehensive" legislation expected to be proposed in the Senate would deny amnesty to immigrants who "arrived after a certain date, perhaps 2004 ... ." But would it let the feds actually enforce the law against them? They'll be mostly Hispanics. It will look bad!
****--Including, I'd argue, the border fence Congress authorized last year. ... [Some links via The Corner] 12:59 A.M. link
Tuesday, December 26, 2006
Mo' bama: The kf enthusiasts commenting over at MatthewYglesias.com have a point, in that last week's skeptical Obama item conflated two issues:
1) Has Obama grappled seriously and smartly with the big questions of the day; and
2) Has he, in the course of this grappling, told Dems something they don't want to hear, or demonstrated independence from Dem interest groups that enforce the party's line in unfortunate ways (e.g., teachers' unions impeding education reform, seniors unwilling to accept any Social Security cuts, populists who pretend bargaining-down drug prices will largely solve the problem of health-care costs, etc.).
You'd hope that even Dems who don't agree with the DLC-ish sentiments behind #2 would insist on #1. But, yes, Obama could do #1 without #2.
Has he done that? A few weeks ago, Obsidian Wings catalogued Obama's "wonky" efforts.** He's against loose nukes, avian flu and unregulated genetic testing! That's impressive, but follows a standard good-Senator's path of picking off a chewable, discrete problem and pushing a rifle-shot, programmatic solution (typically involving creation of a small new federal office to control nukes, prepare for avian flu, or establish gene-testing standards, etc.). It's not the same thing as confronting deeper, bigger, less easily addressed problems: How to structure the health care system, how to pay for entitlements, how to confront the terror threat, the rise of China, the problems of trade and immigration, the increase in income inequality at the top.
Josh Gerstein of the N.Y. Sun makes a better case: Obama listens to Samantha Power and Susan Rice on human rights, Gerstein reports. He wants to talk to Iran, he discounts the Chinese military threat but surprisingly, for an early Iraq war opponent, he has said he'd favor "launching some missile strikes into Iran" if that was the only way to stop "having a radical Muslim theocracy in possession of nuclear weapons." (Does Iowa know this?) He's unpredictable as well on trade. What's less clear is whether that unpredictability reflects a developed world-view or ad-hockery that's fine in a Senator but in a president, not so much.
More talk on these issues, please. And no fair "transcending" them!
Unpredictablity of any sort is a plus when it comes to #2, of course. But so far Obama isn't close to meeting the Joe Klein Piss-Someone-Off Test, despite the efforts of his press boosters to claim he has. Tom Maguire points to a comical attempt by the New York Times, where a mini-profile by Jefff Zeleny declared:
He has demonstrated an occasional willingness to break from liberal orthodoxy, including his vote to confirm Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state, which at the time infuriated liberals (13 Democrats opposed her).
Wow! As Maguire notes: "So Obama boldly stood with a mere 86 fellow Senators .... " P.S.: What's the word for trumped-up contrarianism? Sister Fauxjah? ...
**--Thanks to commenter "Trevor" on bloggingheads for the link. 2:08 P.M. link
Sunday, December 24, 2006
On to New Hampshire! The mighty Hillary juggernaut closes its vise-like grip on the post of Senate Majority Leader. A Concord Monitor poll shows the same weakness as last week's survey from Iowa. RCP summarizes:
Just like in Iowa, Hillary loses to Rudy and McCain but beats Romney. And just like in Iowa, Obama beats them all. Edwards doesn't run as strong in New Hampshire as in Iowa - no surprise there - but he still manages a dead heat against McCain and Giuliani and handily beats Romney. So even though Hillary is clinging to a lead at the top of the field, she's once again giving off the "unelectable" vibe in comparison to her two most serious primary challengers. [E.A.]
P.S.: In light of these poll results, doesn't Dick Morris' theory--that if Obama now doesn't run he'll have done Hillary a favor by clearing the field--have a couple of holes: 1) Obama hasn't cleared Edwards out; and 2) If Obama decides not to run early next year, and Hillary's still this weak, there will be plenty of time for new challengers to jump in. ... P.P.S.: Why does Massachusetts' governor Mitt Romney do so poorly in 'neighboring New Hampshire'? 12:32 P.M. link
Hollywood Hates Obama? Juan Williams on Fox:
The question now is does Obama have any hope of raising money? I don't think he'll raise it out of the New York people, I don't think he's going to raise it out the Hollywood people, so where's the money going to come from for Barack Obama? [E.A.]
That's right, a charismatic black Iraq war opponent has no appeal out here! As always, the entertainment community demands more policy details! ... P.S.: Hello? Juan? You're making Lawrence O'Donnell look like Edgar Cayce! "Hollywood people" will obviously swoon for Obama at least as easily as any other Democratic constituency. ... P.P.S.: Remember when Joe Lieberman was briefly said to be through, after his primary loss, because he wasn't going to be able to raise money? 12:53 A.M. link
kf's First Law of Journalism, Rigorously Applied: If, as Lawrence Kudlow claims, "the Fed has vanquished inflation," why do all the fancy restaurants that used to cost $75 for two now routinely top $100? When the rich-who-are-getting-richer bid up prices, doesn't that count? Just asking. ... P.S.: The food I've gotten for $100 seemed to taste better than the old $75 food. Maybe the statisticians take that into account. ... Update: Alert reader G.J. suggests fancy restaurants are simply victims of Baumol's Disease--they're a labor intensive business that's seen few gains in productivity. But in the rest of the economy productivity improvements could still be driving down prices. Good point. ... 12:15 A.M. link
Saturday, December 23, 2006
Clintonoia Breakdown: Isn't Samuel "Sandy" Berger's explanation for why he snuck classified documents out of the National Archives entirely plausible? Haven't you ever been in a library, reading non-circulating material in an uncomfortable chair under harsh lighting--all the while thinking you could just make sense of it if you could take it home and review it in more familiar surroundings? I faced this dilemma quite frequently at college and law school, and on more than one occasion my reaction was to stuff the papers in my backpack and smuggle them back to my dorm.** You never did that? ...
Sure, the Inspector General's report on Berger's misconduct--obtained and released by Pajamas Media--raises lots of potential questions, some of which are listed by the Pajamas editors here and the Powerliners here. And I yield to noone when it comes to paranoia about possible extralegal skullduggery in the Clinton administration! Well, I yield to only a few. (My bona fides.) It could be Berger was trying to destroy all copies of an early 2000 email that said "Al Qaeda, al Schmaeda. What could they ever do to us?" But if you read through the IG report in a non-paranoid mood and look for facts that are at odds with Berger's plausible 'I-wanted-to-sort-out-this-stuff-at-home explanation,' you won't find much.
I did notice one jarring fact: When Berger is given a second copy of an email he's already taken home--#217--he takes that copy home too. That makes it look like he wanted to remove all copies of #217. But it's also consistent with the familiar last-minute-crammer's habit of wanting to make sure you've scooped up every little bit of material to study during the impending all-nighter. As long as you're stealing stuff, you might as well be comprehensive. Maybe Berger (as he apparently claims) wasn't certain the two copies of #217 were identical.
Meanwhile, in Berger's defense, we learn from the report that he read the documents in an office with an archives employee who was doing his own work, and whom Berger was reluctant to bother. Sounds like exactly the sort of arrangement that would stop me from getting any productive thinking done. Bad Feng Shui! Couple that with a) the requirement that Berger couldn't even remove his own notes from this room and b) Berger's almost certain knowledge that many of the documents subject to these maddening regulations probably shouldn't really be classified in the first place, and you might easily conclude that the IG report does more to back up than to cast doubt on Berger's non-sinister explanation.
**--Admittedly, I didn't then cut them up and put them in the trash. But then, unlike Berger, I wasn't caught before I returned them. 10:51 P.M. link
D____ Cab for Cutie: The car that most impressed me, during my recent Gearbox phase, was the Scion Xb, which only recently went out of production. Perfectly-sized for the city, inexpensive, reliable, handles well, holds a lot, leaves a light footprint on the planet. But jeez, before you buy one, take a look at this picture. Grim! [via Autoblog] 5:33 P.M. link
Friday, December 22, 2006
Thanks, Iowa? Hillary's big Iowa problem. She's running a strong fourth with 10%! ... P.S.: She can't blame lack of "name recognition." [Time for the contest to write her withdrawal speech?--ed We wouldn't want somebody else to steal that gimmick! But there's one way to guarantee that she won't need a withdrawal speech--if she decides not to risk a run that might end in humiliating primary defeat. She doesn't seem like the type who'd handle that well.] ... Caveat: Hillary can always note that Iowa Democratic voters are proven fools. ... 3:28 P.M.
Thursday, December 21, 2006
Obama--He's no Gary Hart! ... 1:08 A.M
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Is that a photo of Rick Stengel or the Madame Tussauds installation of Rick Stengel? 12:35 A.M.
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
My Obama Problem: After reading up a bit on Barack Obama for a temporarily-aborted bloggingheads segment, my tentative working thesis is this: He's too damn reflective! And introspective. ... Maybe it's the writers, or the questions they ask, or the audience they think they're writing for, but all the drama in the stories about Obama comes from his "emotional wrestling match with his background," his overcoming of his "angry sense of racial displacement," his wrenching assessments and reassessments of how to live in "a world that is broken apart by class and race and nationality," etc.
One of those reassessments, according to Obama, came when a friend told him "you always think everything's about you." And he doesn't any more? Obama's favorite complexity still seems to be Obama--it was certainly a subtext of his 2004 convention address. ("We worship an awesome God in the blue states"). At the end of his early Obama profile, my boss Jacob Weisberg says Obama "would never be so immodest" as to compare himself to Lincoln. But a dozen paragraphs earlier, Obama had done just that:
"That kind of hunger—desperate to win, please, succeed, dominate—I don't know any politician who doesn't have some of that reptilian side to him. But that's not the dominant part of me. On the other hand, I don't know that it was the dominant part of—" his voice suddenly trails off as he motions behind him to a portrait of Lincoln, the self-invented lawyer, writer, and politician from Illinois. "This guy was pretty reflective," he says, offering a sly smile.
I'm a "character" voter, not an "issues" voter. But the way you reveal your character is by grappling with issues, not by grappling with yourself. Anguish is easy. Isn't it time for Obama to start being ostentatiously reflective about policies? That's what you want from a Harvard Law Review type.
And on the issues, what's Obama done that's original or pathbreaking? I don't know the answer. But compare his big speech on immigration reform with failed Dem Senate candidate Brad Carson's article on immigration reform. Carson says things Democrats (and Republicans) haven't been saying; Obama's speech offers an idiosyncratic veneer of reasonableness over a policy that is utterly party line and conventional, defended with arguments that are party line and conventional.
OK, that's just one example. Maybe I'm an old-fashioned Joe Kleinish Clintonian self-hating Dem. But I'm not swooning until I hear Obama to tell Democrats something they maybe don't want to hear. Did I miss it? 12:21 A.M. link
Monday, December 18, 2006
Shane MacGowan of the Pogues on Kirsty MacColl, who was killed six years ago yesterday, and their song Fairytale of New York, which won a 2004 poll for best Christmas song. [via Gawker] ... My nominee for best Christmas song is something I've only heard once, The Wedding Present's ecstatically noisy version of "Step Into Christmas." ... P.S.: OK, I've now heard it twice. (It's here.) I stand by my position. ... 8:52 P.M.
And Johnson Walks? So Fannie Mae ex-CEO Franklin Raines may have to give back $84 million in bonuses he received from 1998 to 2004, while his predecessor Dem bigshot Jim Johnson--who apparently got a bigger bonus than Raines did in 1998--doesn't have to give back anything? Hardly seems fair. ... P.S.: Johnson at one point had parlayed his position at the head of the Fannie Mae gravy train into the chairmanship of the Kennedy Center and the otherwise-reputable Brookings Institution. ... Yet even the conservative N.Y. Sun seems to have forgotten that Johnson, who also headed John Kerry's vice-presidential search, is involved in this mess. ... P.P.S.: Here's my attempt to assess Raines' relative guilt or innocence. ... In any case, if Raines had taken kausfiles' 2004 advice--'give the money back now!'--he'd be better off, no? He could be the Tara Conner of overpaid CEOs! And he'd still have a political future. ... 7:15 P.M.
If Judith Regan lawyer Bert Fields' bite were as fearsome as his bark, wouldn't Susan Estrich own the L.A. Times? Just asking! ... 7:14 P.M.
Y.U.: William Beutler, eerily prescient. ... He claims Time magazine is just preternaturally predictable. [via Surber] 4:23 P.M.
Hillary Clinton was asked about a possible troop surge in Iraq:
"I am not in favor of doing that unless it's part of a larger plan," Clinton said. "I am not in favor of sending more troops to continue what our men and women have been told to do with the government of Iraq pulling the rug out from under them when they actually go after some of the bad guys." [E.A.]
Note to WCBS: This does not support the headline "Clinton Opposes U.S. Troop Surge In Iraq." It supports the headline "Clinton Fudges on U.S. Troop Surge in Iraq." On balance, I'd even say it's more supportive than not--any troop surge will clearly be presented as part of a "larger plan," after all. Clinton didn't even say, as Sen. Harry Reid did, that the "plan" has to include "a program to get us out of there ... by this time next year." .... 11:46 P.M.
"Are social conservatives stuck with a pro-golden shower candidate?" Ryan Lizza goes into the hilarious details of Mitt Romney's not-so-long-ago tolerance of Bay State gay activism. ... What's shaping up, Lizza notes, is a battle between cynical inside-the-Beltway conservative pros who are willing to overlook Romney's "pro-gay, pro-abortion record" because "they need an anti-McCain," and actual outside-the-Beltway social conservative voters who might be horrified by state-sponsored fisting seminars and "Transgender Proms." ... P.S.: Instead of trying to persuade social conservatives he's been secretly battling for them all along, wouldn't Romney be better off playing the conversion card? 'Nobody knows the evil of golden showers better than someone who ...,' etc., etc.. I would think it would pack a convincing frisson. ... 11:13 A.M.
Sunday, December 17, 2006
Breast Cancer Rates Fall as Women Abandon Hormone Replacement Therapy. ... Moral: Don't get your medical advice from The New Yorker. ... 11:29 P.M.
Warner rethink: OK, that's enough time with my children! ... And if the need for family time is not the big reason why Mark Warner dropped out, as rumor says it wasn't, what made him change his mind? ... Seems like there must be a story here, though maybe not the kind of story that ever comes out (except in novels). ... [via HuffPo via Goddard] 9:53 P.M.
Mohammed of Iraq the Model is cautiously non-pessimistic about the creation of an anti-Sadr majority coalition in Iraq, but doesn't expect it to move militarily against Sadr. ... Juan Cole, who's been right about Sadr before, argues that any military move will backfire:
The fact is that if provincial elections were held today, the Sadr Movement would sweep to power in all the Shiite provinces (with the possible exception of Najaf itself). It is increasingly the most popular political party among Iraq's Shiite majority. For the US to cut the Sadrists out of power in parliament and then fall on them militarily would just throw Iraq into turmoil. It would increase the popularity of the Sadrists, and ensure that they gain nationalist credentials that will ensconce them for perhaps decades.. ...
Neither thinks al-Maliki will be replaced as prime minister. ... 9:41 P.M.
Saturday, December 16, 2006
First Mark Warner, now Evan Bayh. The solid centrist Dem alternatives to Hillary are dropping out, one by one. Funny how that happens! ... 11:46 P.M.
Friday, December 15, 2006
Malkin and Alterman--Together Again: Lt. Col. Bateman's post on Media Matters ' Altercation--disputing Associated Press in the ongoing controversy over the alleged burning of six Sunnis in Baghdad--seems quite damning. Eric Boehlert's response--'Hey, I'm not defending the AP on this, just attacking the AP's attackers!'--seems quite weak. And Boehlert, while blasting "unhinged" warbloggers, comes unhinged himself, I think, when in his original, near interminable article he writes:
I don't think it's out of bounds to suggest that warbloggers want journalists to venture into exceedingly dangerous sections of Iraq because warbloggers want journalists to get killed.
[via Malkin] ... Update: But see ... 4:44 P.M.
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Fading Reyes? Hmmm. Looks like that big fight over the chairmanship of the House Intelligence committee was a fight over a committee that will soon lose--or at least have to share--a big chunk of its turf. ... It wasn't because of the quiz, was it? ... 1:20 P.M.
Di Bug Bust: That official police report on Diana's death appears to be a bust, as far as alleging spying by the Clinton Administration on Republican magnate Ted Forstmann. Byron York:
[T]he Lord Stevens report contains no mention of Forstmann and no description of anyone like him, nor does it have any evidence that anything like the Forstmann scenario took place. [E.A.]
But the U.S. may have caught Diana talking about hairstyles with her friend Lucia Flecha de Lima! (The report speculates they would have been overheard because we were eavesdropping on the Brazilian embassy in D.C.). ...
P.S.--Keeping Hope Alive: I should also note, at the risk of sounding like a raving conspiracist, that the Stevens report doesn't seem to say anything that would rule out a U.S. a bugging of Forstmann that turned up conversations with or about Diana**--though to be consistent with the NSA's account they would have to be "only short references to Princess Diana in contexts unrelated to the allegations" about her death being the result of a conspiracy. It's just that the Stevens report was what was supposed to substantiate the Forstmann angle, and it doesn't. It's not like there is a lot of other evidence for the Forstmann-bug scenario--unless the credibility-challenged Brit papers can produce some. ...
Still! Diana's apparently famous July 14, 1997 statement to the press--
"You're going to get a big surprise, you'll see, you're going to get a big surprise with the next thing I do"
does seem a lot more consistent with future plans to hook up with a rich U.S. Republican who would run for president than with plans to marry Dodi Al Fayed--whom, the report says, she hadn't yet met "that summer," doesn't it?
**--From WaPo :
[NSA official Louis] Giles said the NSA would not share the documents with investigators on grounds their disclosure could reveal secret intelligence sources and methods. Nor did Giles reveal whose conversations were being targeted by the NSA.
12:07 P.M. link
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Bloggingheads bring sexy back! ... Plus Matt Yglesias does his best Muqtada al-Sadr impression. ... 5:32 P.M.
The Note writes that Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is "looking for ways to sharpen his differences with McCain on immigration." That shouldn't be hard! ... Here comes one now. ... 4:58 P.M.
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Is it possible those British press reports are completely wrong about the bugging of Ted Forstmann and Diana? (See below.) Thursday's publication of the official Scotland Yard report on Diana's death should be near-definitive on the issue, since the Brit papers are supposedly merely offering leaks from that report. But, according to today's New York Daily News, Forstmann thought he was bugged:
A source close to Forstmann told the Daily News yesterday that Diana may have been overheard while traveling with Forstmann on his private plane, which Forstmann believed was bugged by the feds to listen in on his rich and powerful friends. [E.A.]
Note that the Washington Post's Source Close to Forstmann--who seems to know things only Forstmann himself would know--only says that "he had heard rumors that someone had planted listening devices in his plane to listen to the princess," not to listen generally to Forstmann's rich and powerful friends. Of course, targetting the princess is exactly what the Feds are busy denying. Which leaves open ... [via Drudge] 12:44 P.M.
Bloggingheads --Bob Wright's videoblog project. Gearbox--Searching for the Semi-Orgasmic Lock-in. Drudge Report--80 % true. Close enough! Instapundit--All-powerful hit king. Joshua Marshall--He reports! And decides! Wonkette--Makes Jack Shafer feel guilty. Salon--Survives! kf gloating on hold. Andrew Sullivan--He asks, he tells. He sells! David Corn--Trustworthy reporting from the left. Washington Monthly--Includes Charlie Peters' proto-blog. Lucianne.com--Stirs the drink. Virginia Postrel--Friend of the future! Peggy Noonan--Gold in every column. Matt Miller--Savvy rad-centrism. WaPo--Waking from post-Bradlee snooze. Keller's Calmer Times--Registration required. NY Observer--Read it before the good writers are all hired away. New Republic--Left on welfare, right on warfare! Jim Pinkerton--Quality ideas come from quantity ideas. Tom Tomorrow--Everyone's favorite leftish cartoonists' blog. Ann "Too Far" Coulter--Sometimes it's just far enough. Bull Moose--National Greatness Central. John Ellis--Forget that Florida business! The cuz knows politics, and he has, ah, sources. "The Note"--How the pros start their day. Romenesko--O.K. they actually start it here. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities--Money Liberal Central. Steve Chapman--Ornery-but-lovable libertarian. Rich Galen--Sophisticated GOP insider. Man Without Qualities--Seems to know a lot about white collar crime. Hmmm. Overlawyered.com--Daily horror stories. Eugene Volokh--Smart, packin' prof, and not Instapundit! Eve Tushnet--Queer, Catholic, conservative and not Andrew Sullivan! WSJ's Best of the Web--James Taranto's excellent obsessions. Walter Shapiro--Politics and (don't laugh) neoliberal humor! Eric Alterman--Born to blog. Joe Conason--Bush-bashing, free most days. Lloyd Grove--Don't let him write about you. Arianna's Huffosphere--Now a whole fleet of hybrid vehicles. TomPaine.com--Web-lib populists. Take on the News--TomPaine's blog. B-Log--Blog of spirituality! Hit & Run--Reason gone wild! Daniel Weintraub--Beeblogger and Davis Recall Central. Eduwonk--You'll never have to read another mind-numbing education story again. Nonzero--Bob Wright explains it all. John Leo--If you've got political correctness, he's got a column ... [More tk]
Dear Mr. Bush:
This memo sets forth the terms of the severance agreement reached this morning between your representatives and the Board of Directors regarding your contemplated departure as Chief Executive Officer of United States of America, Inc. (Hereafter: "USA, Inc.").
The Board acknowledges that you believe you are doing "a heck of a job" and that, if not for weak-willed defeatists in Congress, the White House, the news media, the Democratic Party, the military, Iraq, the G7, and the voting public, the rest of the world might agree. The Board acknowledges that your representatives have produced evidence that you believe supports your assessment of your job performance and challenges the expertise and motives of your detractors. Without passing judgment on such evidence, the Board will try to honor your request that it be made available to "patriotic" historians.
The Board agrees to accept any hypothetical resignation you may decide to offer. If you decide to resign, the Board understands that you will do so "for personal reasons" and "to spend more time with your family." The Board agrees that any such resignation would be voluntary.
Lastly, the Board agrees that, if you resign, Mr. Richard Cheney will immediately be sworn in as the company's 44th President. Mr. Cheney will issue two executive orders—the first anointing you the "Freedom, Democracy, and Victory President," and the second pardoning you. Having ensured his presidential legacy, Mr. Cheney will then resign, citing health reasons.
About Your Severance Package:
Your representatives provided the Board with a recommended hypothetical severance package developed by your severance consultants. The Board acknowledges that your severance consultants have extraordinary experience and expertise in this arena, having advised on 185 CEO departures in the last three years. The Board agrees that, should you resign, your Hypothetical Severance Package will become your Severance Package.
Terms of Your Hypothetical Severance Package
In gratitude for your past six years of service as the War President and your future years of service as the Freedom, Democracy, and Victory President, you will receive:
*Lifetime use of U.S. military transport aircraft, as well as complimentary joy rides in all new fighter planes, tanks, assault vehicles, and moon rockets.
*Right of first refusal on all future military contracts for any companies you work for, serve as a director of, or own shares in.
*Full military pension for your service as a member of the National Guard and Commander in Chief.
*Full Social Security and Medicare benefits, even if such programs are eliminated.
*Full government pension and benefits, including full health care, dental care, psychiatric care, and drug and alcohol rehabilitation coverage.
*Full memberships at any clubs you wish to belong to, including Augusta National and the Dick Cheney Memorial Quail Sanctuary and Wildlife Refuge Hunting Club.
*Four full-time assistants to handle your communications needs.
The Board agrees that the terms of this hypothetical severance agreement are merely hypothetical, that you have not decided to resign, and that you may not decide to resign. The Board recognizes that you alone are the Decider, and it does not in any way wish to influence or rush your decision. The Board regrets, however, that given the rate at which USA, Inc. shareholder frustration is increasing, the terms of this hypothetical severance agreement will expire at sundown.
Sincerely,
The Board of Directors
USA, Inc.
This month, Dr. Sydney Spiesel discusses cattle engineered to be free of mad cow disease, a once-and-for-all flu vaccine, fattening bacteria, and Botox as a cure for writer's cramp.
Safe beef
Disease: As my vegetarian friends delight in reminding me, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which attacks and eventually destroys the brain, can be transmitted to humans who eat beef from cattle infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease. Both BSE and Creutzfeldt-Jakob are thought to be caused by something really weird: not a virus, bacterium, or parasite, but a prion—a normal protein called PrPR whose function is unknown, and which becomes infectious when its structure changes because it has misfolded.
Question: What would happen if you used the tools of molecular biology and animal cloning to produce cattle that lack the PrPC protein? Could such an animal survive? What effect would the absence of PrPC have on it?
Answer: Drs. Yoshimi Kuroiwa and James Robl of the biotech firm Hematech and Jürgen Richt of the United States Department of Agriculture have come up with an answer: The cows seem to develop in a completely normal way, unaffected by the missing protein. More importantly, laboratory studies showed that their brain tissue did not allow for the development of prions. This makes it extremely unlikely that beef or products made from animals like these could cause Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans.
Implications: This discovery could have even broader import. Hematech is trying to use biotechnology to develop cattle that produce large quantities of human antibodies directed against specific diseases. Normally, when cow or sheep or horse antibodies are used to treat or prevent human disease, our bodies soon recognize them as foreign and become allergic to or inactivate them (or both). But if cows could produce human antibodies, they would not be deemed foreign and our bodies would not reject them. It would be especially reassuring if these antibodies could be produced in prion-free cattle like the ones described by Kuroiwa and colleagues, since products from those cows couldn't pass on Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease to humans being treated with them.
Bonus: My own interest in all of this is more primitive. I'd just like to go back to eating a few beef products—cervelles au beurre noir, for instance—presently considered too risky for dinner. How perfect that the Food and Drug Administration just issued a report on the safety of cloned meat for human consumption!
A one-shot-forever flu vaccine?
Problem: I'm tired of giving flu shots, worrying about my annual vaccine supply, and (most of all) of the possibility of an avian influenza pandemic. Wouldn't it be great if we could come up with a universal vaccine—one that covered all strains of flu virus and could protect us even against new and dangerous mutations like the H5N1 bird flu?
New research: Current vaccines target structures on the surface of the flu virus, large molecules that promote attachment and penetration of the virus to the human cell. Unfortunately, these structures are the very ones that mutate so readily and for that reason make last year's vaccines useless. But there is another possible molecular target: the "M2" protein, also found of the surface of the virus, and much less likely to mutate. Walter Fiers and his research group at Ghent University in Belgium have been looking for years into a vaccine directed against M2. A recent paper by Fiers, Marina de Filette, and their co-workers describes promising results—though limited to mice—for an M2-targeting vaccine that's administered in a nicer way than usual: by nasal spray.
Results: The vaccine's special feature is that it contains an adjuvant—an additive that enhances the immune response—in addition to an ingredient that stimulates a strong specific immune response to the M2 protein of influenza. In the Belgian experiments, the vaccine-adjuvant combination, sprayed up the nose of mice, completely protected animals exposed to live influenza infection against death and significantly ameliorated their signs of illness. The experimental adjuvant chosen caused no toxic side effects in mice, though it has not yet been tested in humans. It works as an adjuvant for many vaccines, not just flu, so we might look forward to other kinds of nasal-spray vaccines containing it.
Conclusion: If it works as well and as safely in humans as in mice, this vaccine might turn out to be just what we need to protect us from ordinary flu, year to year, and also against new and virulent forms of flu as they arise. What a concept.
Germs that make you fat
Gut feeling: For the most part, we only pay attention to the bacteria in our guts when they attack us with, say, a bout of Montezuma's revenge. But the germs inside of us may affect us every day—by helping to determine our weight.
New research: Two recent papers from the laboratory of Dr. Jeffrey Gordon at Washington University in St. Louis, one whose lead author is Peter Turnbaugh and the other whose lead author is Ruth Ley, are beginning to unravel this phenomenon. Many of the gut bacteria are representative of two large groups of germs: the Firmicutes (which roughly overlap with the Gram-positives of high school biology) and the Bacteroidetes (typically Gram-negative bacteria, which grow without oxygen and are usually sort of smelly). There are other germs in the bowel, as well, but Gordon's group has been particularly interested in the balance between these two large divisions of intestinal bacteria.
Findings: Studying mice that are genetically predisposed to obesity or leanness (but are otherwise similar), the researchers found that fat mice had an abundance of Firmicutes while their lean littermates had more Bacteroidetes. Here's one reason why: When the bowel in a mouse is inhabited by lots of Firmicutes bacteria, the animal harvests energy from its diet more efficiently. So the same amount of food that fattens the Firmicutes-carrying mice leaves the Bacteroidetes-carrying mice slim. More provocatively, when Gordon's team took germ-free, normal-weight mice and infected them with Firmicutes-predominant bacteria taken from obese mice, they fattened up—whereas similar littermates colonized with intestinal bacteria taken from lean mice did not. Something similar seems to occur in humans: The ecology of the bowel shifts toward the Firmicutes in heavy people and toward the Bacteriodetes in leaner people (including those who become thin as a result of dieting).
Conclusion: These findings, taken together, strongly suggest that intestinal bacteria may well play a significant role in how animals and humans absorb energy from the food we eat and turn it into body fat. How comforting: Germs, not gluttony, may be the cause of my weight gain.
The benefits of vanity
Problem: Writer's cramp, or hand dystonia, occurs in about one in 20,000 patients and is characterized by disabling contractions of the finger, hand, and forearm muscles. Though the problem originates deep in the brain, it may be set off by vigorous, repetitive hand and finger work. We don't know much about writer's cramp other than that susceptibility is sometimes inherited (some of the genes involved have been identified). The condition has been exceptionally hard to treat. Hypnosis, biofeedback, acupuncture, drugs, splinting, encouraging the use of the other hand, and even neurosurgery have been tried. None have been consistently successful.
New research: Now J.J.M. Kruisdijk and some fellow neurologists at the University of Amsterdam have presented research on a treatment that helped 70 percent of the patients to whom it was given. The method consists of injections into the finger and hand muscles of tiny doses of a British medication, Dysport, which is much like the drug sold in the United States as Botox. Both drugs are purified forms of a toxin produced by the botulism germ.
Findings: In the Dutch study, 20 patients with writer's cramp were treated with Dysport and 19 with a placebo. Neither the researcher nor the patients knew who got the active drug, and the effects of treatment on each group were measured both subjectively (improvement perceived by the patient) and objectively (improvement in handwriting). The Dysport-treated patients showed better results measured both ways, though a few patients had no response to the medicine and a few others had a positive response but disliked the muscle weakness that the treatment caused. At the end of the experiment, half chose to continue with the injections.
Musicians as well as writers are likely to suffer from hand dystonia and Botox or similar products have helped them, too. For example, the famed pianist Leon Fleisher, in his mid-30s developed writer's cramp in his right hand so severe that it prevented him from playing the piano with both hands for more than 30 years. Treatment with Botox successfully restored his ability to play with two hands. It's a fine, if rare, example of a vanity product being put to serious use.
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Sometimes a molecule of PrPC will be altered in a peculiar way: The underlying chemical structure of the protein remains the same, but it is folded differently than usual. When that happens, apparently the misfolded protein (now called PrPSC) somehow forces other PrPC molecules to become similarly abnormal. The misfolded molecules accumulate, probably because the standard garbage-collecting enzymes that break down and eliminate useless or defective proteins are ineffective against PrPSC. The PrPSC molecules gum up the operation of the cells, usually in the nervous tissue in the brain, leading to cell death. And when enough cells of the nervous system die, so does the patient.
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In the past four years, 261 people around the world have become infected with avian flu. Sixty percent of them have died. So far, bird flu hasn't acquired the ability to easily infect humans. But clusters of cases—in Thailand in 2004, Vietnam in 2004-2005, Indonesia in 2005-2006, and Egypt in 2006—suggest that some human-to-human transmission has occurred. There is legitimate fear that more may be coming.
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The active ingredient in a vaccine, called an antigen, stimulates the body to produce a specific antibody that only fits the antigen (or a close relative) that stimulated its production. It's like a lock and key. Some antigens, for example, those contained in polio or measles vaccines, can stimulate high levels of specific antibody production all by themselves. Other vaccines, like the ones for tetanus and hepatitis, need an additional nonspecific boost to generate high levels of antibody quickly. Adjuvants are added to vaccines to increase the immune response in a general way, enhancing the response to all the antigens. They have been incorporated into most common injected vaccines, but have not previously been available for nasal-spray vaccines.
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Botox, which works by weakening and relaxing muscles into which it is injected, was of course developed as a cosmetic drug. When it is injected into facial muscles, they relax and become weak, and some of the wrinkles and pleats they cause fade away.
The United States is a nation of hard workers. Compared with many other developed countries, the U.S. boasts high rates of labor-force participation and productivity and has a very low unemployment rate. Americans work longer hours than Europeans—1,804 hours per worker for the United States in 2005, compared to 1,434 in Germany and 1,535 in France, according to the OECD.
Yet it's increasingly common to hear politicians, CEOs, and immigration activists impugn American workers as a bunch of shiftless layabouts who regard many good jobs as beneath their dignity. That, they say, is why employers have to turn to immigrants—some of them legal, many of them illegal. To hear CEOs tell it, they'd much rather hire English-speaking, tax-paying U.S. citizens, people who won't disrupt operations by getting rounded up in Homeland Security sweeps. But they just can't find any Americans willing to do their jobs. As President Bush himself said last March, the United States needs a temporary guest-worker program that would "match willing foreign workers with willing American employers to fill jobs that Americans will not do."
What are these jobs that Americans will not do? Do they exist? Or are they a figment of the business community's imagination? It turns out that their claims are largely true—there are plenty of jobs Americans avoid. Let's take a tour of them. Americans shun pretty much any unskilled labor that requires them to get their hands dirty: landscaping, entry-level construction, picking fruits and vegetables (Reuters reports that "up to 70 percent of U.S. farm workers are estimated to be undocumented, totaling about 500,000 people"), cleaning hotel rooms, busing tables, and prep cooking in urban restaurants.
But the refusal to do jobs is moving up the value chain. American workers appear to be less interested in some kinds of factory jobs. The Washington Post, for example, recently reported that Georgia's carpet factories are increasingly dominated by Mexican immigrant workers.
Americans, it seems, are also less willing to take stressful jobs that require lots of training and long hours, and that require them to work in unpleasant environments. For example, the American Association of Colleges of Nursing is warning of a nursing shortage. This survey from the American Hospital Association says there are 118,000 nursing vacancies in the United States. Meanwhile, a 2003 report by the Council on Graduate Medical Education suggested there could be a shortage of anywhere from 65,000 to 150,000 doctors in 2020. (Given the time it takes to educate and train a physician, it's not too soon to worry.)
Spending your days tethered to a computer is also work that many Americans avoid. The Information Technology Association of America notes that 77 percent of companies it polled said there was a shortage of qualified IT talent in the United States. The solution: Import more geeks. The ITAA (and pretty much every technology company) supports boosting the number of H-1B visas above the current limit of 65,000 per fiscal year.
The more one looks, the more shortages of willing workers appear. Bryan Bender of the Boston Globe last month reported that the Pentagon is "considering expanding the number of noncitizens in the ranks—including disputed proposals to open recruiting stations overseas and putting more immigrants on a faster track to U.S. citizenship if they volunteer." Today, about 2 percent of the soldiers protecting America—about 30,000—aren't technically Americans. On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported on a dire shortage of professors of accounting, finance, and management that may cause some schools to curtail course offerings. "AACSB International, the accrediting organization for business schools, estimates a shortage of 1,000 Ph.D.s in the U.S. this year that will grow to 2,400 by 2012." (Apparently, American citizens with Ph.D.s in accounting, finance, and management can get high-paying, satisfying jobs in the private sector. Who knew?)
For the industries involved, and for their customers—everyone from meat-eaters to hospital patients—these shortages are a real challenge. But when employers have difficulty filling jobs at the wages they wish to pay, and as a result seek foreign-born workers, they shouldn't blame it on a fundamental unwillingness of Americans to work in those industries or professions. After all, in many of these fields—construction, nursing, the military, teaching, accounting—Americans still fill most positions. Immigrants tend to predominate only in the least attractive work imaginable—manual, back-breaking, seasonal, benefitless, farm labor.
Americans haven't grown too wealthy and snooty for the kind of work that gets your hands dirty, or for nursing, or for computer programming. Rather, the people who have the skills to enter those fields also have opportunities and skills to enter other fields. And so they have to decide whether the rewards—monetary and psychological—of the opportunity before them are worth it. It's not so much that Americans aren't willing to pick fruit and become computer programmers. Rather, they aren't willing to do those jobs for the prevailing wages and benefits. The Army may need foreign nationals to help fill its ranks, but the private security firms that pay six-figure salaries to ex-military types for security work don't. People without much in the way of skills or education probably prefer to take entry-level jobs at Wal-Mart rather than work at a meat-packing plant, even though it might pay a little less—it's less dangerous and disgusting.
The failure here isn't in the work ethic of Americans. Rather, it lies with the CEOs, business owners, university and hospital administrators, and government officials—and ultimately, with all of us who benefit from cheap labor—to offer the wages and benefits necessary to attract sufficient numbers of legal workers. There's a reason they call the labor market a market.
Run across an example of a job Americans aren't willing to do? Send it to moneybox@slate.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)
Steve Jobs, who has used his "reality distortion field" to mesmerize Apple shareholders and customers, is now exploiting that talent to make Apple's options backdating scandal disappear.
Over the past years, the intrepid duo of James Bandler and Charles Forelle at the Wall Street Journal have helped unearth dozens of examples of options backdating at companies large and small. Their investigations of the dishonest practice have led to the resignation of dozens of top executives and investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission and federal prosecutors. But the options scandal has never touched a more exciting company than Apple or a more thrilling executive than Jobs.
Here's what's happened so far. In June 2006, a special committee of Apple outside directors, chaired by former Vice President Al Gore, hired its own attorneys to investigate options backdating at the company. The committee filed a report on Oct. 4, and on Dec. 29, Apple discussed the report and accounted for the impact of the earnings restatements in its 10-Q.
The report, which leads with the highly convenient conclusion that there was "no misconduct by current management," doesn't reflect well on Jobs.
It turns out there were literally thousands of examples of backdating at Apple—6,428 options grants on 42 dates over a period of several years. After accounting for forfeitures, Apple was forced to recognize stock-based compensation expense of $105 million on a pretax basis that it hadn't done so previously.
Apple has essentially blamed former chief financial officer Fred Anderson and former general counsel and board secretary Nancy Heinen, both of whom are no longer with the company. But Apple makes clear that Jobs was directly involved in some instances of backdating. The investigation "found that CEO Steve Jobs was aware or recommended the selection of some favorable grant dates." The committee hastens to add that Jobs "did not receive or financially benefit from these grants or appreciate the accounting implications." In other words, he didn't recommend backdating his own option grants. Still, given that (a) backdating helps make earnings look better than they are; and (b) Jobs is a huge shareholder of Apple (10.12 million shares, as of last April), how could he not benefit from this behavior?
It turns out that Jobs did, indeed, receive backdated options—just not at his own direction. On Dec. 18, 2001, when the stock stood at $21.01, the company gave Jobs a monster 7.5-million-share options grant dated Oct. 19, 2001, when the stock stood at $18.30. By doing so, the company gave Jobs $20 million in compensation for which it did not account properly. Fudging the date wasn't the only chicanery. It also pretended the options grant was approved at a special board meeting, when no such meeting occurred. Jobs did not know about the ghost meeting.
So let's review. Jobs recommended some backdating dates for other employees. He received a massive grant that was approved at a phantom board meeting, though he didn't know about the phony meeting. And he never cashed in those options because they were replaced in 2003 by a grant of restricted stock.
CEOs at other companies have been forced to resign for such activities. So why is Jobs getting off so easy? His job may be saved by the fact that he did not directly profit. More likely, though, he's been saved by his special status. Jobs is Michael Jordan in the 1990s, Citigroup in the 1980s, Walter Cronkite in the 1960s. He's a revered Hall of Famer who doesn't get whistled for fouls that send other pros to the bench.
Jobs is too big to fail. He is too popular—among investors, journalists, employees, analysts, and in the culture at large—for anyone to recommend that he be deposed. Without Jobs, after all, there would be no Apple. The scandals at Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, and everywhere else ended the era of the rock-star CEO. But Jobs is the lone exception, as revered today as he ever was. Apple's 30-year history is divided into three phases: the golden early years in which Jobs and co-founder Steve Wozniak revolutionized the computer industry (1976-1985), the dark ages in which the company floundered after Jobs was ousted (1985-1997), and the glorious restoration (1997-present), in which Jobs ushered in a new golden age, making hip new computers and revolutionizing the music and entertainment industry with the iPod.
Everybody loves Steven. Employees love their visionary leader who has spread options throughout the company. Stockholders and analysts love him for delivering stunning returns. Consumers adore him for liberating them from the tyranny of expensive CDs and crappy radio. Creative types love Jobs for creating the iMac, a hipper alternative to the blocky PC. As Jack Shafer noted in 2005, even the press loves Jobs. Nobody—no board member, or analyst, or hedge-fund manager, or columnist—will step up to say that Jobs should go. A future without Jobs is simply too grim to contemplate. Writing in New York this week, John Heilemann cites an analyst who believes the company would instantly lose $14 billion in market capitalization if Jobs were forced out.
In the 1990s, nobody—officials, opponents, NBA Commissioner David Stern, television announcers—suggested Michael Jordan be called for traveling when he palmed the ball and took an extra step while driving to the basket. Just so, which midlevel investigator at the Securities and Exchange Commission would have the temerity to recommend to Chairman Christopher Cox that the agency haul the most successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur into court? Which junior federal prosecutor will recommend indicting the guy who smashed the PC monopoly?
As with Jordan, a different set of rules seems to apply to Jobs. "At the worst, Steve Jobs directed his company to issue him stock options on favorable terms, without bothering with the silly legal necessity of having a board meeting to approve it," wrote Thomas Donlan in Barron's.
Silly legal necessities? Some people call them laws.
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Backdating options is a form of earnings manipulation. If the stock is trading at $40 today, and the board wants to give that CEO an option that is worth $10 today, it would grant an option with a strike price of $30. The company would have to count the difference between the strike price and the current stock price—$10—as compensation, and hence as a cost to be subtracted from earnings. But if the company simply falsely dates the option to a point in the past when the stock was at $30, say, four months ago, it will have the same $10 value to the CEO but won't have to be subtracted from earnings. Companies don't willfully alter the day of the option grant—a practice known as lying—in order to hide the amount of compensation from shareholders. They do so to hide the cost of the compensation from public investors. It's a form of cooking the books, conceptually not much different than concocting earnings. When they are found out, companies wind up restating their earnings to account for the true cost of the compensation.
Jimmy Buffett turned 60 this past Dec. 25, a day he undoubtedly spent in a lower latitude, in a meditative frame of mind, in close proximity to a tankard of Captain Morgan. At least that was the case with birthday number 50, which, as recounted in his autobiography A Pirate Looks At Fifty (1998), Buffett celebrated by piloting his private jet from the Cayman Islands to Costa Rica to Colombia and drinking copiously, while contemplating "spirituality" and his goals going forward: "Learn celestial navigation," "Swim with dolphins," "Start therapy." Anyone who has heard a Jimmy Buffett record will know that therapy is totally unnecessary. Buffett has been writing and singing confessional songs for three decades, but he's never shown the slightest sign of discontentment—shrugging away the world's sadness, and his own indulgences, with an amused "I know it's all my fault" while oozing over to the bar for another round.
And who can blame him? Buffett is one of the music business' singular success stories. He has parlayed an unlikely subject—getting shitfaced while cruising the Gulf Coast in your power boat, basically—into a multimillion-dollar industry, a perennial place on Forbes' list of highest-grossing entertainers, and the most passionate concert audience this side of the Deadheads. (He also has written a couple of New York Times best sellers, operates a chain of seaside bars, and has his own seaplane airport, Lone Palm. Take that, Mick Jagger.) Buffett has done all this without altering his music one iota—indeed, without any evident effort at all. He's a bard of hedonism, the sunbaked, can't-be-bothered-to-stir-from-this-beach-chair variety. His songs are nudged along by lazy rhythms and gentle country-rock acoustic strumming, and accented by the rounded ping of steel drums—the universal sonic signifier of Caribbean languor. He takes the stage of sold-out arenas and baseball stadiums in the same T-shirt and baggy beach shorts that he wears aboard ship, and can't even bring himself to put on a pair of shoes. Does he even own shoes?
I learned about the Buffett dress code the hard way, when I turned up wearing street clothes at a Madison Square Garden concert on a chilly evening last September. I had heard tales of Buffett's rabid fans, the Parrotheads, and was prepared for an onslaught of Hawaiian shirts. But that was just the beginning of the Club Med-wear. I came up the subway stairs to find a phalanx of men in their 40s striding down Seventh Avenue in plastic leis and grass skirts. Headgear ranged from Carmen Miranda-style fruit baskets to baseball caps topped with foam shark fins. Waiting in line at the Garden turnstiles, I stood next to a fellow with a papier-mâché outboard motor belted around his waist.
Buffett sells a lot of records—his latest album, Take the Weather With You, topped the country charts when it was released last October. But it's touring that has made his fortune, and to really understand Buffett, you have to spend a couple of hours in a room with 15,000 people singing along with every lyric while batting giant inflatable sharks overhead. "Parrotheads are known, to, um … begin their preparations early," Buffett said to cheers shortly after taking the stage, and indeed, much of the audience was unmistakably blotto well before the first steel drum sounded. Buffett sang a stately new song, "Here We Are," which marvels at the enduring, well-soused fellowship of Parrotheads: "Who would have thought this game, this flame would still be burning?/ Who would have guessed that all these blenders would still be churning? ... Here we are, with our fins up and our feathers flashing/ Here we are, with our coconut shell brassieres, chanting." Video screens flanking the stage played footage of the Parrotheads' famous parking lot antics. It looked like a giant frat party—a Girls Gone Wild video, with the part of the 19-year-old co-eds played by paunchy middle-aged men—but for Buffett, Parrotheads are heroic nonconformists, and their bacchanals have vague spiritual overtones. In "Here We Are" he sings: "Here we are, all the black sheep family outcast and a freak or two. … We're the offbeat Uncle Freds who spill their wine on you. … We're the dreamy Deadheads who just like us and Dave Matthews."
Parrotheads are as devoted as Deadheads and Dave Matthews fans—doubtless many in attendance at the Garden had followed Buffett up the coast in their minivans. But musically, Buffett has nothing in common with jam bands. He fronts a slick 12-piece group, the Coral Reefers, and they breeze through the same songs, in the same way, note for note, night upon night, year after year. Buffett has a knack for ingratiating singalong melodies and sharply detailed lyrics, and he's ruthlessly single-minded. Few pop stars have carved out so distinct a theme and stuck to it unwaveringly for so long, with such fearless zeal for bad puns: "Last Mango in Paris," "Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes," "Off To See the Lizard," "Floridays," "The Weather Is Here, Wish You Were Beautiful," "Jamaica Mistaica," "License To Chill."
Buffett is not the first American pop singer to sell tropical fantasies. The tradition stretches from Tin Pan Alley's Hawaiian ballads of the 1910s, to Bing Crosby's and Elvis Presley's revivals of the theme, to '50s-'60s exotica and Don Ho, on down through Buffett to country beach bum Kenny Chesney. But where the other performers have mystified the islands, Buffett is unsentimental and journalistic. In admirable detail, his songs depict tourist traps, where the locals exist only to pour your drinks and cheeseburgers in paradise are on the menu. Buffett is unambivalent about this ugly Americanism—he's all for it. Buffett's music is often hideously tacky, objectionable on both moral and aesthetic grounds, but you have to give him credit for capturing a milieu and a mindset. He'll never get the respect given to his generation's more celebrated troubadours, but he may prove more valuable to future social historians as a chronicler of late-20th-century American folkways. Go to Bob Dylan and Paul Simon for poetry and pretty tunes, but if you want to know how baby boomers ate, drank, and screwed on vacation, reach for Boats, Beaches, Bars, and Ballads.
By all accounts, Buffett lives the life he sings about. For his fans, most of whom aren't multimillionaires with large pleasure craft, the experience is vicarious: The closest many will come to a Caribbean lagoon is a kiddie pool in the parking lot of a Jimmy Buffett concert. Yet Buffett's songs are not so much about an escape to a place as a flight from time. His true theme is the Me Generation midlife crisis. Buffett's tunes are sunny and easygoing, but they have a desperate undercurrent: the hopeless hope that the party need never end, that you can, as one song put it, "grow older but not up," remaining reckless and responsibility-free deep into adulthood.
Two decades ago, in "Pirate Looks at Forty," Buffett cast his plight in mock-historical terms: "Yes I am a pirate, two hundred years too late/ The cannons don't thunder, there's nothing to plunder/ I'm an over-40 victim of fate." More recently, in the Parrothead anthem "Here We Are," Buffett put it in starker terms. "It's the child in us we really value," Buffett sings. That message has proven to be very good for business, and there's no reason to doubt Buffett's sincerity. Somewhere right now—probably a very warm, palmy place—the pirate is looking at 60 in the same way that he will look at 70, and, if his liver holds up, 80. Through a boozy haze, with the blue ocean gleaming on the horizon just over the rim of a shot glass, it looks awful lot like 18.
"I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron." Thus begins the story collection Tell Me a Riddle, Tillie Olsen's first book, published in 1962. Olsen was born in 1912. Why, we might ask, why did it take her so long to begin publishing? The sentence itself does the unsentimental math: 50 years of housework, of childcare, of standing still. "I raised children without household help," Olsen wrote in an essay some years later, "or the help of the 'technological sublime' (the atom bomb was in manufacture before the first automatic washing machine) … as distant from the world of literature … as literature is distant from my world."
Olsen, who died on Jan. 1, lived an astonishingly long life. She was born the daughter of a Russian Jewish paperhanger in Omaha, Neb., and in her 20s participated in the Young Communist League and in the strikes of the Great Depression; shortly before she died, she had been struggling to persuade the San Francisco Public Library to acquire more books and fewer computers. Her output, from any perspective, was small: one collection of stories, one novel, one work of nonfiction, and the text of a book of photographs. She wrote very little after the publication of her novel, Yonnondio: From the Thirties, in 1974. In some ways, even after her work received great acclaim, she kept the literary world at arm's length, and it returned the favor; her name rarely appears on lists of great fiction writers of the 20th century, and only one of her books is currently in print. Yet she deserves to be remembered—as a writer of lacerating, heartbreaking fiction, and as one of the most insightful, and incisive, critics ever to write about the circumstances under which literature is produced.
One of Olsen's literary heroes was Thomas Hardy, and even, to some extent, Jude of Jude the Obscure; and indeed, her early life had a Jude-like quality of impoverished origins and thwarted ambition. A high-school dropout, she educated herself in public libraries while working a series of menial jobs. As a union organizer and socialist, she began reporting for The Nation in the 1930s. In 1934 she published the first chapter of Yonnondio in the Partisan Review and received a book contract from Random House. Then—married to Jack Olsen, a fellow activist, with a family to support and little income—she had to abandon the novel and return to work and child-rearing full time. Only when the youngest of her four children was in school did she begin to try to write again, with great difficulty. "The habits of a lifetime when everything else had to come before writing are not easily broken," she wrote many years later. "Habits of years—response to others, distractibility, responsibility for daily matters—stay with you. … The cost of 'discontinuity' is such a weight of things unsaid … that what should take weeks, takes me months to write; what should take months, takes years."
The result—Tell Me A Riddle—is some of the most powerfully compressed story writing of our time, written, it seems, without a minute or a word to spare. Speaking of the return of her daughter, whom she had sent to her husband's family during the Depression, the narrator of "I Stand Here Ironing" says,
When she came, I hardly knew her, walking quick and nervous like her father … thin, and dressed in a shoddy red that yellowed her skin and glared at the pockmarks. All the baby loveliness gone. She was two. Old enough for nursery school they said, and I did not know then what I know now—the fatigue of the long day, and the lacerations of group life in the kinds of nurseries that are only parking places for children.
In the story "O Yes," a white mother, Helen, listens to her daughter Carol describing her first day of junior high and realizes just how the black children will be socially isolated and encouraged to drop out of school: "The models showing How to Dress and How Not to Dress—their straight skirt, their sweater, their earrings, lipstick, hairdo. … It was nowhere in Carol's description, yet picturing it now, it seemed to Helen that a mute cry of violated dignity hung in the air." Olsen's descriptions are fleeting, her stories crowded with competing voices and sensations, and yet her authorial presence is one of absolute and unsentimental moral clarity. "Tell Me a Riddle," an account of a Russian Jewish grandmother's bitter, agonizing death, becomes a piercing lament for a generation of immigrant women who sacrificed so their offspring could live "unravaged by disease, in warm houses of many rooms." Yet Olsen excuses neither the grandmother's self-pitying inertia nor her childrens' oblivious resentment; the story ends not with reconciliation, but with the old woman slipping back into memories of her idealistic youth, when she was truly happy.
Once Tell Me a Riddle was published, Olsen turned her attention to an enormously ambitious critical project: She wanted to answer, once and for all, the question of why writers—not only women writers—so often fall silent at the height of their powers. Silences, published in 1978, is a thick compilation of quotations, autobiographical reflections, and critical pieces on Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, and Rebecca Harding Davis, a 19th-century American writer Olsen almost single-handedly wrested from total obscurity. "What are creation's needs for full functioning?" Olsen asks, and answers: "Wholly surrendered and dedicated lives; time as needed for the work; totality of self." That is, a lack of psychic burdens, a feeling of freedom from life's endless responsibilities—for women in particular, the freedom to place their own "infinite capacity" first, ahead of husbands and children. It is no accident, she points out, that the few women writers there were before 1950 were nearly all childless or had servants; male writers, on the other hand, if not independently wealthy, had to rely on fickle patrons (Rilke), support themselves with unwelcome jobs (Melville), or live in abject poverty (ditto). Olsen herself was able to write Tell Me a Riddle thanks to a Ford grant, which "came almost too late." Throughout her later life she was an enthusiastic supporter of public support for the arts; along with other writer-activists of the same generation, she helped ensure that most American writers now receive at least some support from foundations, state and federal organizations, or universities.
Olsen withdrew from writing near the end of her life, and it's difficult to know what she thought of the literary world she helped create. Was she pleased, one wonders, that Toni Morrison's Beloved was recently named "the best work of American fiction in the last 25 years" by the New York Times, or chagrined that only one other woman—Marilynne Robinson—was in the running? Happy at the proliferation of MFA programs, or dismayed by the rise of "chick lit"? Most likely she would focus unswervingly on the one issue that animated everything she wrote: the exclusion from literary life of the underclass, of those too busy working or worrying about their next rent payment or medical bill to have the time or resources for reading or writing. In this way, American culture has changed relatively little since the 1950s—or the 1850s. "We cannot speak of women writers in our century," she wrote, "without also speaking of the invisible, the as-innately-capable: [those] born to the wrong circumstances—diminished, excluded, foundered." Look around you on your way to work, she might say to us, or the next time you eat at a restaurant or visit a nail salon, and listen: That deafening silence is the sound of literature not being written.
Click to listen to Campbell McGrath read this poem.
Browsing, before dinner, at Books & Books,
checking out the new poems
in the new journals, the vast glass panes thrust against
by shoppers and gawkers on Lincoln Road
emit a particular cautionary hum
as they insist upon delimiting inside from out,
tongued and grimed by the fingerless
gloves of the homeless,
bodies gesturing and melding back
into the pyroclastic flow,
someone considering black lingerie next door,
bedside lamps of Italian design,
something sleek to refresh the kitchen—honey,
a silver pasta fork?—
tattooed dance clubbers and waitresses
slaloming trays through the crowd,
a woman selling jewelry knit from optical fibers
lurid as stationary fireworks, pages
of a Carioca newspaper
turning, foil off a champagne bottle golden
against the tile, pink straws, the splash
of modest fountains
in common space, a baby
in green hip-harness
staring back at me goggle-eyed, recording it all
like the tourists with digital camcorders
pre-editing their memories
and the ringing of cellphones broadcasting
a panegyric of need
with whichever hooks and trembles
we have chosen in the darkness to answer.
Two months ago, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley wondered whether Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was clueless, incompetent, or devious. Now, Bush is betting the farm on him. His troop surge is based on a plan that he says Maliki authored. He is banking on the leader's promise to end the vicious cycle of sectarian violence. Bush also promises that Maliki will form a plan to share oil revenues, create new jobs, reform de-Baathification laws, and establish a fair process for considering amendments to Iraq's constitution.
The president isn't just asking the American people to buy into a new military strategy for Baghdad; he's asking the country to embrace Iraqi leadership that, in the same speech, the president portrayed as so fragile it would collapse if U.S. troops pulled back. Two months ago, Donald Rumsfeld considered the government so infantile he referred to giving it more responsibility as "taking our hand off the bicycle seat." Bush's plan takes as a matter of faith that Maliki can deal with Muqtada Sadr and his militia—to which the Iraqi prime minister is politically beholden. It assumes that ragtag Iraqi troops will shortly be trained, equipped, and capable. Bush was admirably blunt this time about his past mistakes and the slog ahead. But the confidence he expressed in the Iraqi government—without caveats, doubts, or warnings—seemed utterly fantastical.
Bush's argument is, essentially: Give Maliki breathing room, and he will perform. This will be a tough sell in Congress. "I've got real questions about Maliki," said Ohio Sen. George Voinovich on Tuesday, explaining his skepticism about a surge. "Every time Maliki gets a call from Sadr, he just capitulates." Democrats who have met with Bush over the last couple of days have come away with two reactions to his extreme faith in the fledgling Iraqi government: Bush is either setting Maliki up as the fall guy for his failed policy (unlikely), or he's so desperate to save his policy that he is putting far more trust in Maliki than is warranted (more likely).
What do supporters think? John McCain, the politician most closely associated with the troop surge, would have preferred more battalions. He called Gen. David Petraeus on Wednesday after he was briefed on the plan and asked if the new top commander in Iraq was happy with the final number of just over 20,000 troops. Petraeus said he thought he could make it work with that many troops, but that if he finds he needs more, he won't hesitate to ask and is confident he'll get them.
Administration officials say they have seen an "expression of will" from Maliki and a recognition among not just the prime minister, but also from other moderate Iraqi leaders, that there is "an imperative to act." That's too vague to sell a position that has so little public support. What's going to happen if Maliki doesn't hold up his end of the bargain? Is continued U.S. presence conditional on Iraqi political progress toward reconciliation or not? The president merely said that the American people's patience is not unlimited. There was no further public ultimatum, but Sen. Trent Lott says that in private, Bush has given the Iraqi leader one: "The president convinced me that he had made it abundantly clear to Maliki that he had to perform," Lott told me Tuesday.
In a briefing with reporters before the speech, a senior administration aide tried to explain that Maliki would feel pressure not from Bush but his own people. "This is, after all, a democracy," he said, as if Iraq really were the land of Bush fantasy, where people take matters into their own hands by voting a weak leader out of power. After Bush's speech, another White House official clarified: Maliki is starting to get serious about quelling the violence not because of pressure from Washington, but because of pressure from within his coalition.
Perhaps the most puzzling assertion during this briefing was that U.S. domestic political pressure will budge Maliki. The Iraqis are "not oblivious to what is going on on Capitol Hill and the kinds of statements that you've been hearing from Leader Pelosi and others," said the official, referring to threats to begin removing troops. Suddenly, threats to withdraw are a good thing because they'll focus Maliki's mind. Isn't that exactly what Democrats have been promising the threat of a troop withdrawal would do?
In the end, administration officials argue that the president's plan is good because the alternatives are worse. "They call it an escalation without explaining how redeployment would not escalate the situation even faster," says a senior White House official of Democratic critics. "Does anybody believe if we were to start pulling out, that the violence and casualties would actually go down? Pulling back now would strengthen the hand of every enemy we have in Iraq, and leave those who want us there high and dry."
Sen. Ted Kennedy is the Senate Democrats' army of one, trying to launch a revolution when they would prefer cordial discussion. Scheduled to discuss health care at the National Press Club, Kennedy uncorked a stemwinder about the Democrats' responsibility to shut down the Iraq war. He is proposing legislation that would prevent the troop surge President Bush will unveil tomorrow night by prohibiting additional troops and additional dollars for it. Kennedy implored his brothers and sisters in Congress to resist the president's specific new plan, and to revive their branch of government—to "reclaim the rightful role of Congress and the people's right to a full voice."
"We have the solemn obligation now to show the American people that we heard their voices," Kennedy thundered. Democrats in Congress must fight Bush with something more than "pale actions, timid gestures and empty rhetoric."
Shortly afterward, across town in the U.S. Capitol, the new Senate Democratic leaders took their place before the microphones just off the Senate floor to put forward their plan: a bipartisan, nonbinding bill called the Pale Action and Timid Gesture Resolution. That wasn't the real name, of course, but it is exactly what Kennedy insisted Congress should not do. Afterward, I asked Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois what had happened to his own suggestion that Congress limit the number of troops that could fight in Iraq as a way to stop the surge. "That's Senator Kennedy's bill," said the second-highest-ranking Democrat. Yes, but didn't you suggest that troops be limited, I asked? "That's Senator Kennedy's bill." You're on your own, Ted.
Senate Democratic leaders say they are merely being sensible. They don't want an effort to stop funding for the new strategy to be misinterpreted as a lack of support for American troops. In two days of reporting on the House and Senate side, it is clear that Democratic leaders are more worried about being tagged as anti-G.I. than being penalized by liberals for not doing all they can to end the war. Their posture may change, but for now, what seems likely is that the Democrats will do no more than put together a nonbinding resolution that would show disapproval.
There are reasons for Democrats to be cautious in challenging the president on Iraq. As Sen. Joe Biden argues, the president has the authority to conduct his war, so why provoke an ugly fight that the Democrats would lose and that would also expose them to easy caricature? Polls show that Democrats do still have to convince the country that they can be stewards of America's national-security interests. The tepid measure also could fracture the GOP. By promoting the less confrontational nonbinding resolution, Democrats can corral uneasy Republicans like Susan Collins, Chuck Hagel, and Richard Lugar, who have said they are against a surge. A bipartisan piece of weak legislation would make more of a public statement than a partisan effort to limit funding.
These arguments will not sit well with the liberal activists who are planning to deluge their Democratic representatives in the coming days with petitions, rallies, and phone calls demanding a strong against the troop increase.
Kennedy may find more allies on the House side. On Sunday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi hinted that Democrats might cut off funding for the troop increase when Bush makes his supplemental budget request to keep the war going. John Murtha, who chairs the defense appropriations committee, where the supplemental would be debated, is planning to hold hearings within a week to pick apart the president's plan and perhaps put forward his own surge-killing legislation to limit funding and troop levels. (The White House no doubt regrets treating Murtha so roughly when he suggested a troop redeployment.)
Democratic leader Reid says the funds-limiting option is still on the table and could come after the bipartisan resolution. Democrats are also noodling other options, including a measure floated by Robert Byrd to rewrite the October 2002 authorization-of-force resolution that opened the door for the Iraq invasion of 2003.
Time matters if Democrats want to take forceful action. Going after the supplemental funding bill will take too long. That request from the administration isn't likely to arrive until early February. By then, troops could be on their way and the question would flip from being about a future action to one already under way. "The horse will be out of the barn by the time we get there," says Kennedy. "And then we'll be asked, are we going to deny the body armor to the young men and women that are over there?"
Republicans are confident that Democrats won't take any drastic action. "It would reinforce a perception in the country," said Sen. Lott on Tuesday. "We want men and women in the military to have what they need." A senior White House aide sounds just as confident: "I think Pelosi leaned out a little too far in her talking points." But just in case they go forward, Lindsey Graham is pre-emptively making the harshest charge—suggesting that those in Congress who would vote against a surge "are definitely sending a signal to terrorist organizations that they're winning."
Those are just the kind of attacks that worry some Democrats. After his speech, Kennedy was asked about Republicans who are prepared to escalate the rhetoric so quickly. He scoffed. It was the Bush administration that had imperiled America's national security, not Democrats. "If you have a candidate and they can't explain that," he said of future Democrats, "they don't deserve to get elected."
For proponents of "media reform," Minot, N.D., carries the same resonance as Three Mile Island does for anti-nuke activists or Columbine, Colo., does for gun-control advocates. Nary an article, speech, or book brushes up against the topic of media reform without retelling the story of how Minot's radio stations responded the January 2002 night that a Canadian Pacific Railway train derailed and discharged a cargo of poisonous anhydrous ammonia a couple of miles from downtown Minot.
Eric Klinenberg begins his new book, Fighting for Air: The Battle To Control America's Media, with the Minot incident, and like other media reformists uses the poor showing by Clear Channel Communications' six Minot radio stations the night of the spill as a symbol of all that stinks about corporate media concentration.
To generalize, the media reformists deplore corporate consolidation of media, especially Clear Channel, which owns about 1,150 of the nation's 13,000 radio stations and owns or operates 40 U.S. television stations. The reformists monitor the press for right-wing and even centrist bias; condemn what they regard as intrusive advertising; urge the creation of a new tier of low-power, noncommercial broadcasters; and call for the breakup of some media conglomerates. (For an overview of the movement, see this 2002 article from The Nation, co-written by media reform godfather Robert W. McChesney.)
Because Minot is so central to media reformists' argument, it's worth revisiting the story to see what happened there. Klinenberg, a meticulous reporter, actually went to the town to recount the story. In doing so, he gets it about 99 percent right but 100 percent wrong.
One of his errors is trivial. Indeed, Clear Channel owned six stations in the town in January 2002, as he reports, but he mistakenly calls one of the town's other stations, KHRT, a "noncommercial" Christian station. In fact, KHRT is for-profit and has always been, according to program director Jonas Nelson, and it is actually two stations—KHRT-AM and KHRT-FM. Asserting that Clear Channel was Minot's only commercial broadcaster in Minot is a mistake that both the Washington Post (May 18, 2003) and the New York Times (March 31, 2003) made, so Klinenberg is in good company.
Another station was broadcasting from a Minot transmitter that night, something that Klinenberg doesn't report: KMPR, a noncommercial station with a big footprint at 88.9 FM. Unlike the Clear Channel stations and Christian stations, KMPR had no local presence at all. All of its programming came from Prairie Public, which is headquartered in Fargo, N.D., 269 miles away.
If the average person knows anything about the Minot story, it probably maps to the folklorical account published by the Washington Post in 2003. The Post stated:
When a train derailment in the middle of the night released a frightening cloud of anhydrous ammonia, Minot police sought to notify the citizenry of the crisis. They called KCJB, the station designated as the local emergency broadcaster, but no one was home; the station was being run by computer, automatically passing along Clear Channel programming from another city.
Clear Channel argues that only a technical glitch prevented word from getting through. But glitches aside, the six stations now have only one news employee among them.
Klinenberg's account of that night is actually more generous to Clear Channel. The Emergency Alert System—a federal system that that takes the place of the old CONELRAD warnings—allows the government or the National Weather Service to break in on the broadcasts of designated stations to dispense lifesaving information during a disaster or crisis. Clear Channel's KCJB was the designated EAS station for Minot, but when Minot authorities attempted to use the EAS, they failed. Their efforts to telephone somebody directly at the station for EAS assistance (nobody answered), or to use the earlier alert technology (EBS) to accomplish the same thing, also failed.
Meanwhile, as a 350-feet-high vapor cloud rose from the 250,000 gallons of spilled anhydrous ammonia to cover a 5-by-2.5-mile stretch, all six of Clear Channel's Minot stations continued to pump out their automated entertainment. One person died, and a thousand were injured.
Clear Channel says that the communication breakdown wasn't its fault. In a Feb. 12, 2003, letter from Clear Channel Chairman L. Lowry Mays to Sen. Byron L. Dorgan, D-N.D., obtained by scholar Benjamin M. Compaine, Mays places the screw-up at the door of the local authorities and a government contractor.
Mays writes that during its post mortem, Clear Channel learned that police didn't "completely understand the new capabilities of the EAS system," that "the government contractor did not correctly install the system," and that "the authorities did not receive complete training on the system."
Mays additionally claims that:
… the police department had changed their EAS frequency, without informing our radio staff, which resulted in incompatible crystals. This meant that the transmitter at the station and the transmitter at the police department couldn't communicate with each other.
(For more detail on the EAS fiasco, see this article from the Law Enforcement News.)
Klinenberg tells me that because he couldn't unearth conclusive evidence as to who was to blame, he reported the disagreement. He does insist, however, that by virtue of owning six stations in such a small town, Clear Channel has an obligation above and beyond its EAS responsibilities to staff its studio with a human being 24/7 who can receive calls and broadcast emergency alerts. Clear Channel says that there was somebody at the studio that night, but Klinenberg says the company has never explained why none of its stations issued an early warning about the toxic cloud. Point to Klinenberg.
Lest anybody accuse me of being a fan of Clear Channel, let me testify that I would rather have my inner ear dug out with an ice pick than have to listen to more than 15 minutes any of Clear Channel's blandly formatted, advertising-saturated stations where I live.
But just because Clear Channel does not fly with the angels does not make it a devil. When the company made its Minot acquisitions in 2000, it merely completed the radio consolidation that was already afoot: The six stations weren't owned by six mom 'n' pop broadcasters but by two broadcasters. Speaking before a Senate committee investigating media ownership, Clear Channel Chairman Mays said the Minot stations represented only three radio formats before the company made its acquisitions—country, adult contemporary, and news talk. Clear Channel diversified the mix by adding a classic rock, a hits, and an oldies station.
Now, you might be right that six of Minot's commercial stations went from serving three kinds of crap to six kinds of crap. But if you're willing to give the devil his due, you can't say that Clear Channel paved Minot's radio paradise.
Wherever a broadcaster consolidates ownership in a region, it will tend to diversify programming for economic reasons. Consider: If six companies own six stations in a small market, all six will tend to gun for the highest ratings possible and put the other stations out of business. Such a strategy will almost always result in duplication of formats, as was the original case in Minot. But when a single owner controls all six stations, there is no incentive to put the other stations out of business. He's more likely to diversify his programming portfolio to reach the largest aggregate listenership, which is what mega-owners like Clear Channel aim for when they own multiple stations in a market.
The economic incentive to occupy as many strong programming niches as possible is so great that the scurvy bastards at Clear Channel even broadcast the liberal Air America network in about 17 markets. Of course, Clear Channel cancels Air America where it doesn't attract a sufficient audience, but it was forced to back down from such plans late last year in Madison, Wis., when thousands protested.
Where I agree with Klinenberg and other media reformists is that the government has been too stingy in freeing up of spectrum and assigning licenses to aspiring broadcasters. If you regard Clear Channel as radio poison, the best antidote is competition. On that note, you'll be pleased to know that Clear Channel's Minot "monopoly" didn't last long. Unreported in Klinenberg's book is the recent arrival of two new, non-Clear Channel commercial stations to the Minot market—KWGO-FM and KTZU-FM.
Addendum, Jan. 11: Peter DiCola offers a learned critique of my piece in the Fray. He also notes that I repeatedly misspelled the last name of Clear Channel Chairman L. Lowry Mays in my piece. I have corrected that embarrassing error.
******
Disclosure: Klinenberg interviews me in his book. Thanks to Thomas Hazlett, a George Mason University professor of law and economics, for his expertise. I expect to return to Klinenberg's book in a future column. Send messages telepathically through the ether or via e-mail: slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)
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The Wrong Time to Find Out That Emergency Alert System Doesn't Work
By Jennifer Nislow
When a freight train carrying anhydrous ammonia derailed last year just outside of Minot, N.D., sending out a deadly plume of gas, the city's police department learned the fallibility of its emergency broadcast apparatus under the worst possible circumstances.
The accident occurred just after 1:30 a.m. on Jan. 18, 2002. Seven of 31 Canadian Pacific Railway freight cars that had been carrying the substance ruptured, spilling an estimated 290,000 gallons into the ground, onto the frozen Souris River and filling the air with a lethally toxic cloud. One man was killed and hundreds of others were injured, along with pets and livestock. In all, 97,000 tons of contaminated soil and 25,000 square feet of frozen river ice had to be hauled away.
"What I would tell other agencies, any dispatching facilities that have the responsibility to disseminate information through" and emergency alert system is "get to know your radio station," said Lt. Fred Debowey.
At the time of the accident, Minot still had what it believed was an operational Emergency Broadcast System (EBS) that would allow police to call up the local radio station and have it issue an emergency warning. The EBS was replaced in 1994 with the Emergency Alert System. Minot had both, Debowey told Law Enforcement News.
Of the city's seven radio and two television stations, six—all owned by Clear Channel Communications—are housed in two buildings some distance apart, with one technician for all of them, Debowey said. One of those, called the LP1, takes the emergency alert signal and either manually or automatically forwards it, depending on whether the equipment is set up to do that. It failed when the EAS signal regarding the derailment was sent from Minot Central Dispatch.
"Part of that was our fault," Debowey acknowledged. "When we put in the new generator for backup power for Y2K, we would get a power surge that erased all the information that was programmed [into it]."
The signal was not received by the radio station, thus the alert could not be sent out automatically. Even if it had worked, said Debowey, the station would have not received it because their radio had the wrong crystal.
"I'm going to say it's a crystal because it's an old radio," said Debowey. "Why that happened, I don't have a clue because I didn't put it in. The technicians tested it and everything like that, but it didn't work."
So the department tried its EBS, which was still up and functioning.
"Lo and behold, the machine that sends it out in the Ward County Jail failed on us," said Debowey. "We were in good form then. It had been tested just a few days before and it worked fine. We took it over to a radio guy afterward, and he said it just needed some routine maintenance and cleaning."
Then the department tried using the telephone to call the radio station, but no one ever picked up. "We rang it and we rang it and we rang it and he never answered the phone," Debowey said. It took over an hour and half for police to make contact.
In the meantime, police alerted some of the news staff from the local television stations, an NBC and a CBS affiliate. But the city's NBC affiliate was down that night, said Debowey. Everything else comes through cable, so there are no broadcast stations. And instead of turning on the station, one of the reporters grabbed a video camera and started recording, he said. "The other stations finally got on the air," the lieutenant said. "It took a while for them to get on line."
What happened in Minot is a stellar example of how little thought has been given to the communication and information systems that are the heart of all public safety and critical incident response, said John Cohen, president and chief executive of PSComm, LLC, a firm specializing in public safety telecommunications issues.
Cohen, who currently serves as a consultant to state officials in Arizona and city officials in Detroit, said that after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, state and local governments were active in setting up operation centers that focused on emergency response. However, Cohen said they generally overlooked what he called the "business process issue," such as the impact on 911 systems that need to off-load non-emergency calls during a incident, how residents would obtain access to social services, how the radio and telephone systems work and how information would be sent out in the event of a catastrophic service outage.
"What you're beginning to see now," Cohen told LEN, "is state and local governments beginning to take more of this a step backwards and say, 'Wait a minute, homeland security is something we're going to have to do forever—it's not simply waiting for a terrorist to run a plane into a building.' It can be a whole host of critical incidents, some of which are terrorism-related and others, the vast majority of which, are not. You're starting to see state and local governments say, 'Let's take a look at our day-to-day infrastructure, our telephone system, our information systems…. How do things work?'"
The time to find out that a 911 system does not have the capacity to handle the call volume is not when a city is under attack, Cohen said.
In the case of Minot, when police could not send out an emergency alert over the radio, the department's four 911 lines and seven administrative lines were swamped. Within two hours, said Debowey, the agency received as many emergency calls as it normally receives in a month.
"We were inundated," he said. "We couldn't talk to people. A lot of them wanted us to console them, and you can't in an emergency, you just can't. And they needed information. Until the radios and the television got on the air, the way to get information out was through that telephone call."
In 14 months since the accident, the city has established a steering committee of police, fire and communications officials through its Office of Emergency Management and its Emergency Resource Council, which has developed a host of new procedures and backup plans.
For less than a $100, a computer battery backup was purchased that has eliminated the type of power surge that caused the EAS equipment to lose its programming. The unreliable Emergency Broadcast System has been discarded.
There is no longer any need for someone to be at the radio station when an emergency message comes through as long as the station, Minot's KCJB, has its emergency alert equipment forwarding the signal automatically. And should the station go down, said Debowey, the department has a hotline to the state capital in Bismarck, the National Weather Service, and North Dakota State Radio.
"All we have to do is get on the hotline and say we have this emergency, and they take care of it for us," Debowey said.
The department has an unpublished telephone number for a radio station in Bismarck that is the state's leading disseminator for the EAS. It created a calling tree that has four emergency cell phone numbers for people in each of the organizations that would have to be contacted, said Debowey.
"We won't publish these, we won't give them to anybody, four-deep, so if someone isn't home, we can go on to the next till we get in contact," he said. "We update that quarterly—we're pestering these people every three months. Now we are keeping track because the public needs to know."
(Reprinted with permission from Law Enforcement News, a publication of John Jay College of Criminal Justice/CUNY, Vol. XXIX, Nos. 595, 596, March 15/31, 2003.)
The DVD of Mike Judge's Idiocracy goes on sale this week. Because 20th Century Fox suppressed the original theatrical release, this is the first time a large audience will be able to see the film—and this is good news for America. In his 2005 review, which is reprinted below, Reihan Salam called Idiocracy "easily the most potent political film of the year," and argued that it provides a necessary wake-up call for a narcissistic culture on the brink of self-destruction.
Mike Judge could have gone the easy route. His last movie, Office Space, became a smash hit on DVD because the frat boy douchebags he mercilessly mocked became its biggest fans. But rather than make another feel-good comedy, he's made the extremely bizarre Idiocracy, which you might call a feel-bad comedy about the silent killer of American civilization, namely our collective stupidity. A feel-bad comedy that has grossed just over $400,000 to date, barely enough to cover the cost of spray-tanning the stars of Laguna Beach. Given that the release was limited to six cities—and that there was literally no promotion—the poor showing makes perfect sense. The tragedy is that Idiocracy is easily the most potent political film of the year, and the most stirring defense of traditional values since Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France.
This should come as no surprise. Office Space, perhaps Judge's most celebrated work, appears at first glance to be a simple shits-and-giggles romp about how work sucks. Buried just below the surface, however, is a critique of the modern American workplace and of the materialism that makes us slaves to our machines (particularly our fax machines). Not only are we supposed to work mind-numbing, soul-sapping jobs without complaint—we're supposed to love every minute of it. When Peter, our hero, leaves his desk job to become a manual laborer, he breaks with bourgeois convention to embrace a vigorous, manlier, more traditional life.
If Office Space is about taking responsibility for your own happiness, Idiocracy is about something larger, namely our responsibility for our shared future. Like all the best dystopian fables, Idiocracy is a scathing indictment of our own society. And so it begins in the present with a brief portrait of the villains who are destroying America, represented here by an affluent couple and an imbecile ne'er-do-well named Clevon. The two yuppies are shown agonizing over the decision to have a child. It's never the right time, until the right time finally comes—and the couple is infertile. The yuppies will leave no legacy behind. Clevon, in contrast, lustily and enthusiastically impregnates not only his wife but a bevy of gap-toothed harridans, each one dumber and uglier than the next. The screen slowly fills with his spawn, foreshadowing the nightmarish future to come.
What follows is a series of events, including an all-too-brief discussion of the distinction between a pimp's love and the love of a square, that send hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold Rita (Maya Rudolph) and the extremely average Army Pvt. Joe Bowers (Luke Wilson) into separate hibernation chambers for a supersecret military experiment. Like so many of us, Bowers has spent his life avoiding responsibility. Whenever his commanding officer tells him to "lead, follow, or get out of the way," he invariably chooses to "get out of the way." So, when he is tapped for this dubious honor, he's none too pleased.
Fully expecting to wake up after a year, Joe instead emerges from his icy casket in the year 2505, a nightmarish future populated exclusively by Clevon-like simpletons. The last geniuses died perfecting advanced methods for regrowing hair and sustaining erections, beautifully illustrated by a quick cutaway shot of a lab monkey with what looks to be a Jheri curl, a lit stogie, and a gigantic boner. As a result, the machines that have kept the masses of morons happy and fed are falling apart. Starvation looms as crops die across the land, all because Americans, or rather Uh-mericans, are too stupid to water them with anything besides a colorful sports drink rich in electrolytes.
At times, you get the sense that Idiocracy is Mike Judge's penance for unleashing Beavis and Butt-Head on the world more than a decade ago. The most popular film in 2505 is called Ass, a lineal descendent of Judge's own outré creation that features two pairs of human buttocks audibly discharging methane gas as though they were dueling banjos. Though no words are spoken, Ass is said to have won an Oscar for best screenplay.
Because Joe occasionally enunciates, he is immediately under suspicion as a "faggy" and otherwise obnoxious person, infractions that somehow lead to his incarceration. Eventually, Joe—with the help of the defrosted Rita—chooses not to "get out of the way." At great personal risk to himself (he narrowly escapes death at the hands of a monster truck built to resemble an enormous metal phallus), Joe saves the world from starvation. But he also saves himself from his own laziness and self-absorption, not least of all when he starts a family with Rita.
Now, Idiocracy isn't perfect. Despite being only 84 minutes long, it drags at points and feels more than a little shaggy. Plus, there's obviously something a little creepy about all this. Is Mike Judge really saying that some people should breed and others shouldn't? Well, sort of. But he's also taking on the laziness and the self-absorption, and the materialism and the willful ignorance, of his own audience. Watch Dogville or Fahrenheit 9/11 or even The Passion of the Christ and you get the distinct sense that you're being congratulated for believing the right things. Rare is the movie that challenges your beliefs. Rarer still is the movie that tells you you're a fat moron, and that you should be ashamed of yourself. The unmarried adultescents swarming the cities, the DINKs who've priced families with children out of the better suburbs, the kids who never read—these are Hollywood's most prized demographics, and Mike Judge has them squarely in his sights. Is it any wonder 20th Century Fox decided Idiocracy would never be boffo box office?
Idiocracy challenges a central article of faith in American life, the notion that we are destined for moral, material, and intellectual progress. And what if things really are getting worse? What if, more to the point, we really are getting dumber? Recently there's been some troubling evidence that the arrow of intelligence is pointing downward. A British study found that the intelligence of British 11-year-olds has actually declined during the last 20 years. Data from the Danish draft board indicate that intelligence peaked in the late-1990s and has now fallen to levels not seen since 1991, when MC Hammer-inspired parachute pants were all the rage. If that's not enough to make you slit your wrists, I don't know what is.
To his everlasting credit, Mike Judge doesn't counsel despair. Instead, he's telling thoughtful Americans that we can't expect other people to solve our problems for us. If you're alarmed by the callousness and the crassness of our culture, which you certainly should be, do something about it. Lead or follow. Getting out of the way is not an option. Failing that, you should at least try to outbreed the people you hate most.
Scooby-Doo creator Iwao Takamoto died this week at the age of 81. After learning illustration from other inmates at a California internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II, Takamoto pursued a career in animation, working for Disney and Hanna-Barbera, and on The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Cinderella, and Charlotte's Web. But he is best-known for creating Scooby-Doo, which Chris Suellentrop called "the most enduringly popular cartoon in TV history" in a 2004 Slate assessment, reprinted below.
Here's the easiest way to comprehend the longevity of Scooby-Doo: Casey Kasem has been doing the voice of Shaggy (Norville Rogers, if you insist on his given name) for longer than he hosted his weekly Top 40 radio show. He started voicing Shaggy in 1969, the year before American Top 40 debuted, and he's still got the part, on television in the WB's Saturday-morning cartoon, What's New Scooby-Doo?, and in the direct-to-video movies the franchise keeps churning out.
Though it's hard to believe—and for animation purists, practically impossible to stomach—Scooby-Doo is the most enduringly popular cartoon in TV history. Starting with the original Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, the show, in various permutations, was produced for 17 years (and, with its latest incarnation, it's in production again), making it the longest-running network cartoon ever. Because of syndication, it's never been off the air since it debuted, and it probably never will be. Now it's expanding its empire: Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed opens today in theaters nationwide, the second of what promise to be many live-action Scooby movies. In 2002, the live-action Scooby-Doo raked in $54.2 million on its opening weekend, on its way to a $153-million box office.
Acknowledging Scooby's durability is easier than explaining it. Scooby-Doo wormed its way into the culture through years of drip-drip accretion. It's the Cal Ripken of cartoons: Not the best, though certainly not the worst, it just shows up day after day after day, and you end up loving it for it.
For years, not even the show's creators at Hanna-Barbera—the first TV animation studio and the inventors of "limited animation," (that is, animation cheap enough for TV-size budgets)—realized the appeal of Scooby-Doo. Instead, The Flintstones, or even The Jetsons, was thought to be the studio's flagship property. The 1989 50th anniversary TV special for Hanna-Barbera was dubbed "A Yabba Dabba Do Celebration."
But Bedrock might as well be the, uh, Stone Age for today's young audiences, while the gang at Scooby-Doo maintains its hypnotic appeal. The eponymous dog star's Q rating tops Bugs Bunny's among kids. The franchise's direct-to-video titles consistently hit the best-seller lists. (And yes, in a nod to changing times, Scooby, Shaggy, and Fred do DVD commentary.) Kid-oriented Scooby-licensed video games have been popular since the mid-'90s. In 2000, Scooby-Doo won a mock presidential election held by the Cartoon Network, which still airs an hour-and-a-half of Scooby shows each weekday as part of its "Scooby Universe" package. Unlike the evening "Adult Swim" fare, the Cartoon Network's daytime audience is dominated by tykes. One key to understanding Scooby is to realize it has never performed the double-ironic back flip that would make it an adult phenomenon. It has always appealed first to little kids.
One early hint of the show's hold on children came in February 1971, when the BBC pulled Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! from the air, and 70 Scottish children staged a protest outside the Beeb's Scotland headquarters. An employee recently told the Scottish Daily Record that the protest remains the biggest at that BBC location's history. But beyond making comparisons to the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, or citing the general appeal of talking dogs, or noting that Daphne is as sexualized as a kiddie cartoon character gets, it's difficult to say exactly why the show has had such a long-standing appeal. It's not as if the show's animator, Iwao Takamoto—his other creations include the Great Gazoo of The Flintstones and Grape Ape—is an unheralded genius, a mystery-genre Tex Avery or Walt Disney. "I never got it," complained Mitchell Kriegman, the creator of Nickelodeon's Clarissa Explains It All, to the Boston Globe a few years back. "It's got kind of a slacker appeal, a no-resistance story line." Animators and children's TV creators around the world must see Scooby and ask themselves: Why can't my crappy show become iconic?
Jim Millan, the writer-director of Scooby-Doo in StageFright—Live on Stage (yes, there was a touring theatrical production of Scooby-Doo) tried to engage in some bigthink about the show's popularity during publicity interviews. "They like Scooby's enthusiasm for life," he theorized to the Baltimore Sun. "It represents a youthful, optimistic America, where you can solve a problem with good intentions." To the Toronto Star, Millan compared Scooby-Doo to 19th-century European commedia dell'arte, with its stock characters and costumes. "Scooby and Shaggy love to eat," Millan said. "But the delight is in seeing the permutations." To Nashville's Tennessean, Millan said of Scooby, "He symbolizes youth, in a way."
TV snobs surely see Scooby's ineffable charms as another brick in the wall of American decline, the latest example of how we're all slouching toward Toon Town. As if our children should all be watching The Sopranos. Maybe Scooby's appeal makes sense when you compare it to the rest of kids' TV. The most ham-handed of children's shows try to stuff a moral message down the audience's throat. But the moral code of Scooby-Doo permeates the entire enterprise without you ever noticing it. The Washington Post's Hank Stuever concisely elucidated the "Scooby worldview" when the first live-action movie came out: "Kids should meddle, dogs are sweet, life is groovy, and if something scares you, you should confront it." What needs to be explained about that?
Seth and Chris:
NFL games in high definition are the greatest product in the history of television. This fact hit me on Sunday afternoon, as I realized how much I'd enjoyed a playoff weekend that included, at most, two quarters' worth of playoff-quality football. The lesson here: If you've got a hi-def camera on a zip line, you have the power to make even the Eagles and Giants entertaining.
If it weren't for Joe Buck, I'd even say this is the golden age of football broadcasting. All the bells and whistles aren't just snazzy to look at. They make it easier than ever to become an informed fan. The bird's-eye shots that follow every important play make casual viewers feel like offensive coordinators—I have a much better understanding than I did, say, two years ago of the nuances of cover 2, how timing routes work, and the subtleties of blitz pickup schemes.
And yet some things in the NFL remain a mystery. Even with those NSA-quality cameras at my beck and call, I still have no idea why the Chiefs and Larry Johnson sucked so royally (or, should I say, Royal-ly) against the putrid Colts defense. I will leave further analysis of this game to our resident Kansan. But Mr. Suellentrop, I must ask: Which was more of an affront to your salt-of-the-earth Midwestern values, this Chiefs loss or the Jayhawks' first-round defeat to Bucknell in the 2005 NCAA tournament?
The rest of the wild-card round is easy enough to analyze. Each of the winning teams—Indianapolis, New England, Seattle, and Philadelphia—had both the home-field advantage and the better quarterback. The only game in which the latter point might be debatable is Seahawks-Cowboys. Dallas' quarterback, Tony Romo, played a half-decent game under center, but as a field-goal holder, he's worse than the Peanuts' Lucy—at least she can hold on to the ball. Since Seattle looks like a long shot to win again this year, the only important consequence of last weekend's game is the toll it takes on Romo's psyche. Has an athlete ever lost his mind on account of botching something that has no connection whatsoever to his usual job? The only thing I can think of is a baseball pitcher getting picked off at first to end a playoff game, but I'm not sure that even happened in Rookie of the Year.
From here on, as you both know, I'm particularly invested in what happens to the New Orleans Saints. As a New Orleanian, it feels exceedingly strange to be paying close attention to the second week of the NFL playoffs. I'm feeling such Saints-induced euphoria right now that my normally poisonous levels of sports pessimism have flat-lined. I'm frightened to say this out loud, but here goes: I think the Saints are going to beat the Eagles on Saturday night.
The credit for the team's huge turnaround belongs jointly to quarterback Drew Brees and coach Sean Payton. In a league where quarterback play has diminished to the point where a past-his-prime Steve McNair is glorified as a "game manager," Brees is a legitimately great quarterback. He throws the ball accurately, avoids sacks, and comes up big on third downs and in late-game situations. In short, he's a lot better than Aaron Brooks. And in a mediocre NFC, he's a hell of a lot more imposing than Rex Grossman, Jeff Garcia, and Matt Hasselbeck.
Even in a year when good quarterback play is hard to find, I think great coaches are an even rarer commodity. Last week, I wrote that NFL coaches should channel the aggressive style of their most successful college counterparts. While I don't think there's anyone with the cojones of Boise State's Chris Petersen in the pro ranks, New Orleans' Sean Payton stands out among his peers as a guy who knows how to impose his will on opposing teams. Instead of obsessing needlessly over running the ball, he hammers the team's strength—Brees' passing. Rather than dither over third-and-short attempts, the Saints run to the line and snap the ball before the defense is set. And when Payton flouts convention—an onside kick in the third quarter, an end around to Reggie Bush from the one-yard line—it usually works.
The NFL coach that Payton reminds me of is a fellow member of the Bill Parcells coaching tree: New England's Bill Belichick. I'll yank my own head down from the clouds long enough to admit this year's Saints aren't nearly as good as the Super Bowl-winning Pats teams of recent years. The Patriots won three championships between 2002 and 2005 thanks to Belichick's aggressive, cerebral game-planning on offense and defense and Scott Pioli's consistently brilliant personnel decisions. But I'm skeptical about Belichick and Pioli circa 2007. A few questions for Seth, who knows more about the Patriots' preseason games than I'll ever know about anything: Are the Pats still a championship-level organization? Will they be able to stop San Diego's unstoppable LaDainian Tomlinson and blitzer extraordinaire Shawne "Needles" Merriman? Are the ex-Florida Gators who make up New England's receiving corps—Reche Caldwell, Jabar Gaffney, Chad Jackson, and Kelvin Kight—100 times worse than the Florida Gators who played Ohio State on Monday? Or is it just 50 times worse?
Josh, you're right about the skillful wizardry of NFL telecasts these days. I'm astonished at the lightning speed of the production. Running back gets tackled, offense heads back to the huddle—and within a second, Troy Aikman is telling me that it was the pulling guard who opened up that hole, and what's more, the truck guys have cued up the perfect isolation-angle replay to illustrate this fact. People often rant about the lack of insightful analysis from the average color guy (and it's true that they mostly just narrate what I can see on my screen), but on a play-to-play basis I really can't complain about the networks' ability to show me what happened in painstaking detail.
Speaking of which, I enjoyed every slow-mo moment of Tony Romo getting busy with the pooch on that field-goal try. Mainly out of sympathy for Dallas' backup quarterback, Drew Bledsoe. Bledsoe is an earnest, clumsy (he once stage-dived on top of a terrified woman at an Everclear concert, injuring her spinal column), well-meaning lump of a guy. He suffered nobly through the 2001 season, when Tom Brady replaced him and led the Pats to the Super Bowl. If he'd been forced to watch from the sidelines as yet another cocky, slick, younger QB took his job and led his previously blah team to the Promised Land, it would have been like a horrific acid flashback come to life. I was glad to see, for his sake, that the anointing oils were apparently smeared all over Romo's fingertips.
Regarding the Patriots: I will grant that the current squad is almost surely not as good as the back-to-back winners of Super Bowls XXXVIII and XXXIX. Tedy Bruschi and Mike Vrabel have grown older and less effective. The safeties are shaky. The receiving corps is untested. Adam Vinatieri left town.
But of course they're still a "championship-level organization." They just went 12-4 in the underrated AFC East. They've got a tremendous defensive line, which is perhaps the most important postseason asset there is on the field (after Tom Brady). And then there's Bill Belichick.
That Wild Card game against the Jets was the brainiest NFL duel I've ever seen. The Jets used only two down linemen on the first series, with linebackers milling around before the snap like it was intermission in a theater lobby. The Pats countered by speeding up their tempo. This forced the Jets to reveal their formations earlier, lest they get caught out of position. (In my analogy, this was the equivalent of flashing the lobby lights on and off before anyone can use the restrooms or bad-mouth the sets.) When the Jets attempted to substitute players, the Pats literally ran to the line of scrimmage, forcing the Jets to either call a timeout or get flagged for having too many men on the field.
Meanwhile, the Jets—under brilliant Belichick disciple Eric Mangini—did a remarkable job on offense, with Chad Pennington finding receivers underneath in open space. They had no trouble moving the ball between the 20s. It was in the red zone, where the field compresses and all that open space suddenly disappears, that the Pats were able to shut down New York's clever passing game. As the Jets had no run game to fall back on, they were forced to settle for field goals—and field goals weren't enough.
Can the Pats beat San Diego this weekend? I won't get into any analysis yet, but I'll say this: I can't bring myself to pick against Belichick in a matchup with Marty Schottenheimer, the Chargers coach who is notorious for postseason boneheadery. Of course, I freely admit that I'm an absurd Pats homer who's decided that Belichick is the great thinker of our age. At this point, I would have no problem letting him coordinate our Iraq strategy.
(If, like me, you obsessively read transcripts of Belichick's press conferences, you'll find this easy to envision: "Look, the insurgents are a tough squad. No doubt about it. Talent up and down their roster. It doesn't get any tougher than Moqtada Sadr. He can do it all. He gave us trouble last year, and we've got our hands full preparing for him now. I can't give you any information on casualties—I'm not a doctor—but we'll just take it day by day and do what we think is in the best interests of the coalition forces. I don't know how to put it any simpler than that. It is what it is.")
Chris, let me extend my condolences on the early exit of your Chiefs. Let me also add that they put on the absolute worst playoff performance I've ever seen. They missed a 23-yard field goal. They didn't get a first down until more than midway through the third quarter. They made the classic dumb move of attempting a two-point conversion with lots of time still on the clock (sure, they made it, but it was still really dumb). Ugh.
On top of it all, Herm Edwards ate dinner with Colts coach Tony Dungy the night before the game? Crikey, is this the NFL playoffs or an Iron John bonding retreat?
Hey guys,
I'm delighted to be here this week talking about the NFL playoffs, or, as I call them, the Super Bowl Championship Series. The SBCS is like the Bowl Championship Series, only it's Super. As for the many barbs from both of you about my Chiefs, I have only this to say: If the Indianapolis Colts win this year's SBCS championship game, I'm going to take a page from Michigan Wolverines fans and assert that we don't really know whether the Colts are better than the Chiefs, because the two teams never played on a neutral field. The Colts are 9-0 at home this year! I support a "plus one" modification to the SBCS, so we can have a game after the Super Bowl to rectify injustices like this. We could play it a month and a half after the real Super Bowl, sometime after the beginning of the NCAA basketball tournament.
And if the Colts don't win (as they surely won't), I think it's time for Tony Dungy to adopt my radical strategy to win the Big Game: Replace Peyton Manning with Tee Martin. It worked for the Tennessee Volunteers!
As a Chiefs fan (and a nonresident Kansan, Josh), I am well-acquainted with both playoff disappointment (though this year's team exceeded expectations by even making the playoffs) and with now-Chargers coach Marty Schottenheimer. At the risk of sounding like Grand Moff Tarkin right before Luke Skywalker blows up the Death Star ("Leave? In our moment of triumph?"), I think you're overestimating the Patriots' chances, Seth. I think this is Schottenheimer's Larry Brown season, when he transforms from having a reputation as an itinerant Mr. Fix-It to that of an all-time great.
My Theory of Schottenheimer Playoff Failure is that he has typically taken teams that should have been 9-7 or 10-6 and turned them into 13-3 teams. When these teams reach the playoffs, they revert to the mean and lose. Marty isn't known for "boneheadery" in the postseason. He's known for tragedy: John Elway driving 98 yards; Earnest Byner fumbling at the goal line; Lin Elliott missing three field goals in a 10-7 loss; Elvis Grbac failing to get the ball into the end zone at the end of a 14-10 loss to the eventual Super Bowl champion Denver Broncos.
Remember that name: Elvis Grbac. To win the Super Bowl, you need a great coach and great players. Don't forget, Marty took a team that was quarterbacked by Steve Bono—yes, Steve Bono—to a 13-3 record. In his long, tortured career, Marty has never had the talent to prove his coaching genius. Until now, he's been Jimmy Johnson coaching the Miami Dolphins, or Bill Walsh coaching the Stanford Cardinal. Yet Schottenheimer has still turned three separate franchises (the Browns, Chiefs, and Chargers) into Super Bowl threats, and his one year in Washington was the most promising season for the Redskins since Joe Gibbs retired (including last year's playoff season). Isn't that worth something?
On the other hand, there is one example of legitimate Schottenheimer boneheadery in the playoffs: his decision to start Grbac against the Broncos in 1997 after Rich Gannon had led the team to a 13-2 record while Grbac was injured. I'm sure Schottenheimer thought he was taking a page from his hero Don Shula's book, but Elvis Grbac is no Bob Griese, and the 1997 Chiefs weren't the 1972 Dolphins. Bill Belichick's truly great coaching move was his decision to keep playing Tom Brady over Drew Bledsoe in the 2001-2002 season. It's easy to forget how crazy most people thought that decision was at the time. So, maybe Belichick is a genius. Somehow I doubt it, though. I remember his record as head coach of the Cleveland Browns. And I remember the record of another so-called genius, Mike Shanahan, after John Elway retired (one playoff victory in eight years). You can't be a great jockey if you don't have a great horse to ride.
So, that's my case for Schottenheimer. It's his turn to win the SBCS, just like it was Bobby Bowden's turn, and later Tom Osborne's turn, and even Mack Brown's turn, to win the BCS (or whatever they used to call the college-football national championship). If a great coach sticks around long enough, eventually things will break his way. (Though I suppose not always. What's the difference, for example, between Marv Levy and Bill Belichick? The difference between Scott Norwood and Adam Vinatieri.)
Things we need to discuss: Is there anything to say about the Seahawks-Bears game? Easily the most skippable game of the weekend, though I, of course, will watch them all. Do the Colts, who are .500 on the road this year, have any chance at all against the Ravens? And Seth, you can't really think the AFC East is "underrated." The only reason the Jets made the playoffs was because the teams in the AFC West and the AFC North had to play each other, which diluted their win totals. And Josh, should the Saints be allowed to count their bye week as a playoff victory, thus doubling the franchise's playoff-win total? More important, if the Saints lose to the Eagles, will you still have fond memories of this season? Or will the whole thing have been, to quote a former Saint, diddly-poo?
Chris, I'll take your bait and spend a moment on the Chicago Bears and their pea-brained, noodle-armed quarterback. What does Rex Grossman have to do to get benched? Since the fifth game of the season, the guy has 13 touchdown passes and 17 interceptions. Last week, Grossman explained that he played horribly—33 passing yards, three interceptions—in the Bears' regular-season finale because, alas, he wasn't really trying. This Sunday, I predict the Bears will overcome eight Grossman INTs to beat the Seahawks 28-24. (Four Devin Hester kickoff returns for TDs.) After the game, Rex will admit that he wanted Seattle to win because he felt bad about last year's Super Bowl, that he prefers New York-style pizza, and that he shot Tank Johnson's bodyguard. Yet Bears coach Lovie Smith will proclaim: "Rex Grossman is our quarterback." Indeed, he is.
This year's Bears have a lot in common with the 1997 Chiefs team that you mentioned, Chris—the team Marty Schottenheimer fouled up by playing the wrong quarterback. As you said, the 1997 Chiefs weren't the undefeated 1972 Dolphins, and the Chiefs' QB Elvis Grbac was no Bob Griese. The 2006 Bears aren't the 1972 Dolphins, either—they're more like the worst 13-3 team in NFL history. But the Bears' backup quarterback is … Bob Griese's son! Come on, Lovie, God's will be done!
Before I put the Bears to rest, can we all agree that the most compelling figure in this year's playoffs is Tank Johnson? This week, the barrel-chested Chicago defensive lineman pleaded not guilty to weapons charges resulting from a raid on his home that netted six guns and 550 rounds of ammo. As alluded to above, Tank's friend/bodyguard/associate was murdered less than 48 hours after the December weapons raid. Earlier this year, Mr. Johnson had these kind words for a local copper: "You ain't the only one with a Glock. If it wasn't for your gun and your badge, I'd kick your ass." Against all odds, Tank will play on Sunday. If I were a Seahawks offensive lineman, I'd tread very carefully.
Two Tank-related questions for you, Seth. 1) Is it possible that the 2006 Bears are, in fact, the cast of the long-awaited second season of ESPN's groundbreaking football soap opera Playmakers? I mean, come on, "Tank Johnson"? 2) This Chicago Sun-Times profile reveals that, like Michael Jackson before him, Tank fled the mean streets of Gary, Ind., as a young boy in search of a better life. As a close M.J. watcher, do you see any parallels in the psychoses of Messrs. Jackson and Johnson?
Before I continue to bore America with thoughts on the Saints, a few quick notes on the Indy-Baltimore game. Like many fans, I think, I'm guilty of underrating the Ravens on account of my extreme loathing for their obnoxious blowhard of a coach, Brian Billick. (Now that's a guy who I definitely wouldn't want conjuring our Iraq strategy: "Do you think I'm arrogant when I say we'll torch the insurgents? Who here thinks I'm arrogant?") The truth, though, is that Baltimore leads the NFL in total defense, and Colts QB Peyton Manning has never beat a great defense in the playoffs. On account of the Colts' awful-except-against-the-Chiefs run defense, Manning must have a huge day—I'm thinking four touchdowns—for the Colts to have a chance. I don't think that's going to happen, mostly because I buy the Weintraub thesis about the importance of the center. Indy center Jeff Saturday will get jostled by the Ravens' fat-but-nimble interior linemen, Manning won't have time to throw, and Billick will cackle his way to the AFC title game.
And now the Saints. Chris, I cannot in good conscience consider the black-and-gold's bye week a "playoff victory." I had the honor of attending the franchise's only postseason win, a first-round squeaker over Kurt Warner's Rams in 2000 in which the Saints blew a 24-point fourth-quarter lead, only to be rescued when a fullback with the mien of a small-time porn star recovered a muffed punt in the final minutes. That, my friend, was a playoff victory.
Your second question is more of a chin-scratcher: Will a loss to Philly ruin the Saints' season for me? I've had a pretty good run of luck recently, sports-fan-wise: The LSU football team just finished third in the nation, the New York Mets made the 2006 NLCS, and the LSU basketball team got to the Final Four. But of those three, only the basketball Tigers' near-miss brings me much residual pleasure. There are a bunch of reasons for this. First, the NCAA Tournament is the greatest three weeks in sports. Second, the LSU basketball team was an underdog bunch, running off a series of upsets against hyped opponents. Lastly, I suppose I've bought into the hype that making college hoops' Final Four is a huge accomplishment, while reaching baseball's final four is no big deal.
Like Major League Baseball, the NFL doesn't glorify the last four (much less eight) teams standing—the conference championship game participants are historical footnotes. But, like the LSU hoops team, the Saints are a Cinderella team that's repeatedly exceeded expectations. So, I think that whatever they do the rest of the way, the Saints will get a pass from me on account of their long-term futility and their current status as one of the only visible signs that post-Katrina New Orleans is alive and kicking. A loss this weekend won't take away the home opener against the Falcons or the Reggie Bush punt return. What it will do is piss me off, a lot. Because they should really beat the Eagles.
Back over to you, Seth. If Marty Schottenheimer outcoaches Bill Belichick, who will you turn to on foreign-policy matters?
Josh, I see few parallels between Tank Johnson and Michael Jackson. Although neither has been convicted of child molestation. So, there's that.
Regarding Playmakers: At this point, there's no way that any fictional NFL could out-crazy the real one. There's the Tank Johnson stuff, the tragic murder of Darrent Williams, the imprisonment of the entire Cincinnati Bengals roster, and of course the whole steroids situation. If I were writing a new season of Playmakers now, I'd just name one of the characters Roidy McGee. He'd jab syringes in his groin during defensive huddles. At halftime, he'd complain of hunger pangs, then rip off the arms of the clubhouse attendant and eat them. ("Oh, that Roidy!" says the indulgent head coach with a smile. Freeze frame on a laughing McGee—blood and tendons trailing from his mouth. Roll credits.)
I was mildly shocked by the interview with Chargers linebacker/steroid abuser Shawne Merriman that took place during halftime of last weekend's Pats-Jets game. The CBS crew noted that he'd served a four-game suspension earlier in the season, yet somehow they never mentioned what the punishment was for. Also, the only question that even touched on the suspension was framed as a softball, asking Merriman whether he thought those missed games had hurt his chances to be named the defensive player of the year. With nary a hint of irony, host James Brown referred to Merriman's "frightening" size, power, and agility.
And was I the only one a bit galled at the fact that Merriman chose to wear a tank top on air, exposing his massive, chemically-enhanced trapezius muscles? Hey kids, look what nandrolone can do for you! And if you schedule your cycle right, you can be both pumped and league-approved by playoff time! (Yes, I'm still angry that Merriman forecast a Jets win during this interview, even though the Pats were up by a touchdown at the half.)
Chris, I can't fully buy the logic of your Schottenheimer defense. If he made teams better than they were, why did this improvement suddenly evaporate once they hit the playoffs? Or, by your reasoning, couldn't we argue that the 14-2 Chargers are really a 10-6 team in disguise, sure to be exposed like all those other overachieving Schottenheimer squads? Lastly, you can't blame it entirely on bad luck. He's 5-12 in playoff games. At a certain point, it's no longer a fluke. I fully expect the boneheadery I referred to earlier—the "Martyball" style characterized by overly conservative, reactive decision-making—to rear its head again. Will the Chargers' talent advantage overcome their coaching deficiency? Quite possibly. I'm having nightmares in which tight end Antonio Gates outjumps the Lilliputian Patriot d-backs, and outruns our plodding, past-prime linebackers.
In the other AFC game: My head says Baltimore is the best team in the playoffs. (And the excellent football-analysis site FootballOutsiders.com has complex statistics to prove it.) But my gut tells me this is a classic reverse-lock. Everyone's saying this is the weakest Colts squad of the past few years. No one's picking them. They looked awful against an even awful-er Chiefs team last week. … And all this just makes me feel like they'll pull off the upset and boot the Ravens.
Chris, you can keep telling yourself Marty Schottenheimer is a victim of bad luck, and I'll do the same with Peyton Manning. Sure, he threw another three playoff interceptions last weekend, but this just means he's even more due to come up big. For proof that we're in opposite land this year: In the Chiefs game, it was the Colts defense bailing out Peyton. Meanwhile, the normally gunslinging Manning did his best Chad Pennington impression, hammering the short underneath stuff for much of the game. This guy is such a joy to watch during the regular season, playing quarterback at insane levels of proficiency. And then every January, he hauls out that furrowed brow, and those upturned palms, as Ty Law steps in front of yet another ill-judged throw or crossed-up pass route. I've almost—almost—been driven to root for the poor guy (in non-Pats games, of course).
How about you, Chris? With the Chiefs gone, who are you rooting for now? (Or is it rooting against?)
OK, Seth, I'll take the plunge and explore my rooting interests. Actually, I can't say I'm "rooting" for any of the remaining teams, because a loss by any of them won't cause me to mope around the house for two days. But I do have sympathies. Let's take them, as Der Schottenheimer would say, one game at a time:
Seahawks at Bears: I have irrational indifference for both of these teams. I just find them dreadfully dull to watch, even though I like Shaun "the Third Barber" Alexander,* going back to his days at Alabama. Plus, if you believe those Football Outsiders rankings, the Seahawks are the 25th-best team in football. The Bears? Josh is right: They remind me of the 1995 and 1997 Chiefs (or the 2001 Chicago Bears), with that inept offense and a ball-hawking, scoring defense. I can't bring myself to think much about them one way or the other. Is there a way they could "auto play" this game, like on Madden, so that it lasts about 10 seconds?
Eagles at Saints: I was born in Louisiana and lived in New Orleans for four years as a Tulane student, so I have residual affection for the Saints. This, despite my father telling me as a young lad, when I asked him as a Catholic and a Louisianan-by-birth about this team called the Saints that I discovered in my football cards: "Chris, that's the worst team in football. They've never even had a winning season." Historically, the Saints treated football games the way Francis of Assisi treated his possessions. They gave almost all of them away.
Kansas City lives and dies by the Chiefs, and Washington is Redskins-crazy, but no town that I've lived in loves its team more than the Crescent City loves its Saints, which is all the more astonishing given how awful they have been. When I was a kid in 1980s suburban Kansas City, you were embarrassed to tell your friends you liked the embarrassingly bad Chiefs. (In my addled, counterfactual universe, KC is still a Royals town, and Buddy Biancalana still shows up for endearingly humble appearances on David Letterman.) But New Orleans never gives up on its team. The typical Saints home game is a jazz funeral, a vibrant, swinging celebration of demise. (I watched the Saints lose to the Chiefs 30-17 in their 1994 home opener, among a crowd of what appeared to be Neil Smith's relatives, all wearing Band-Aids on their noses.)
So, as they say, Geaux Saints! Or, who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints? The Eagles, I fear. I won't predict that it will happen, but I worry that New Orleans is the home team likeliest to lose this weekend. Here's a topic for discussion: Should the Eagles have jettisoned Donovan McNabb instead of T.O.? Sure, he's a jerk, but the Eagles would be a Super Bowl contender (to win, not just to show) with Terrell Owens still on their team.
Colts at Ravens: Like Seth, I have some sympathy for the star-crossed Peyton Manning, and like Josh, I dislike the Ravens. More for Art Modell's Irsay-like abandonment of Cleveland than for the obnoxiousness of Brian Billick, though. Still, I'd like to see Steve McNair win a Super Bowl after falling a yard short in the best Super Bowl in history. So, I'm mostly indifferent to the outcome of this game, though it's the one I'm anticipating the most, after Chargers-Patriots.
Another subject for virtual barroom debate: Are the 2000 Baltimore Ravens the worst Super Bowl champions in history? I'm partial to saying that the 1990 Jeff Hostetler-led Giants are the worst, on the reasoning that their championship was predicated on something the Buffalo Bills did not do (make a field goal at the end of the game). But I'm amenable to deciding it's the 2000 Ravens instead. Their team defense was admittedly great, but its reputation as "the best defense in NFL history" relied in large part on an extraordinarily weak offensive division that included the 4-12 Cincinnati Bengals and the 3-13 Cleveland Browns, a team in their second year after expansion. In addition, they played against Kerry Collins in the Super Bowl. This might be an open-and-shut case.
Patriots at Chargers: I used to serve up Blizzards (he always ordered Tropical) to Marty Schottenheimer as a 16-year-old Dairy Queen wage slave, so my objectivity is suspect. Despite my earnest wishes, Marty never said, "I'm just going to take this one Blizzard at a time. I'll celebrate the delicious flavor of this one tonight and then start planning for next week's purchase on Monday." I would never root for the Broncos or the Raiders in any game, but the Chiefs' rivalry with the Chargers is weak enough that I'd like to see Schottenheimer win it all.
Also—and readers should know that I say this at great risk to my personal safety, as my wife and I recently moved to the Boston neighborhood of Jamaica Plain—the hubris of Patriots fans is distasteful. Boston seems to have reached the late stages of dynasty fandom, in which the fans are so confident of victory that they don't even get that excited about the games, because there's no tingling, nervous anticipation before kickoff. The talk-radio airwaves are full of mockery of the "San Diego Super Chargers" song and bluster about how the Genius will outwit the Boobenheimer. I've never seen a No. 4 seed so confident it would defeat a No. 1 seed. And San Diego is not a weak No. 1, but rather the team that is by general acclamation the best in the NFL this year. Marty's first Super Bowl, Manning's first Super Bowl, or McNair's shot at Super Bowl redemption—I prefer all of those story lines to a "Can Brady match Bradshaw and Montana with a fourth ring?" game.
A question for you, Josh: Everyone seems to think the AFC championship game will be "the real Super Bowl" this year, just as the NFC championship game between the Cowboys and 49ers (or whomever) used to be the critical matchup. I've always considered the weekend of the AFC and NFC championship games to be a superior day of football-watching to the Super Bowl, but is that still the case? We've had a string of terrific Super Bowls, in defiance of the conventional wisdom that the big game is always a tedious blowout. By my count, at least six, if not seven, of the last 10 Super Bowls were entertaining well into the second half.
Also, why does a league with such alleged Rozelle-inspired parity have such a small number of franchises (17, barely more than half) that have won it all?
Correction, Jan. 12, 2006: This piece originally misspelled the first name of Seattle Seahawks running back Shaun Alexander. (Click here to return to the corrected sentence.)
Both coaches in last night's BCS Championship game, Ohio State's Jim Tressel and Florida's Urban Meyer, grew up in Ohio, in the shadow of Woody Hayes. But only Meyer has shrugged off the spell of three yards and a cloud of dust and embraced his inner mad scientist. Meyer's innovative spread offense and a tyrannical Florida defense that held Ohio State to a microscopic 82 yards of offense keyed a shocking 41-14 rout of the supposedly invincible Buckeyes.
The pregame buzzword was speed, and Florida definitely made the Buckeyes look like they were wearing anchor chains. More important than mere speed was scheme, and how Florida used all those burners. Meyer deploys a fleet of quick players to engage the defense, spread the field, and keep the other team off-balance and unsure of itself. As Fox analyst Charles Davis aptly put it, "cloudy minds equal slow feet." OSU looked slow because Florida's multiple formations and plethora of playmaking options made the defense have to react rather than attack. So fearful were the Buckeyes of Meyer's ability to get his burners one-on-one with slower defenders that they played a conservative zone all night, and were slowly bled to death.
This Ohio State team was really an unusual product. Tressel's standard approach to the game might be called "Punt Your Way to Victory"—play for field position, concentrate on defense and turnovers, and find a way to win the game in the dying minutes. That's how the coach fondly known to rivals as CheatyPants SweaterVest won a championship in 2002-2003 (with the considerable aid of referee myopia).
This season Tressel abandoned his usual style, thanks to the dynamic duo of quarterback Troy Smith and wide receiver Ted Ginn Jr. All looked well for the Buckeyes when Ginn returned the game's opening kickoff for a stunning score. But he left the game for good soon after with a sprained foot, and Smith turned in a forgettable performance, becoming the latest in a long line of Heisman Trophy winners to struggle in their final game. (Troy Smith, meet Jason White.)
Folks in Columbus will argue that the loss of Ted Ginn, his favorite target, left Smith unfairly handicapped. But Ginn doesn't block, and the game was decided up front—by Florida's front four, specifically ends Derrick Harvey and Jarvis Moss. Harvey turned in the game's definitive play in the opening quarter, hurling an offensive tackle five yards backward and running down the fleet-footed Smith from behind for a sack. Ginn couldn't have saved the Buckeyes, because Smith never had a chance to drop back and throw a deep pass. Strangely, Tressel never went to draws or screens, jujitsu plays designed to slow the upfield rush off the edge. There was a glimmer of this on the Buckeyes' lone TD drive, which pulled them to 21-14 early in the second quarter, but it never returned as Florida pulled further ahead.
After the basketball team cut down the nets last spring, Florida is now the first school to pull off the (Division 1-A) grid-hoops double dip. The football Gators' run to glory was similar to that of their hardwood counterparts. Both teams underachieved during the regular season, failing to pick up any style points during conference play. But when the postseason arrived, both turned it up a few notches and blew away their opponents with breathtaking displays of speed and power.
The fact that Florida never looked this potent during an often-bumbling 2006 is what made this result so unlikely. Much was made of the epoch of time between the end of the regular season and the final game. Ohio State went a ridiculous seven weeks between games, and indeed, the Buckeyes looked sluggish. Florida, by contrast, used its time off to shore up trouble spots like pass protection and the kicking game, both of which were up to snuff last night. And while the disrespect card is the most overused one in the deck, the Gators were clearly irritated by the lack of ardor thrown their way and worked themselves into a frenzy during the downtime.
Fox Sports had the entire season to gear up for the BCS games. The results approximated Ohio State's sluggish effort. Incredibly, Fox's standard lineup graphics failed to note which class a player belonged to, so the casual fan wouldn't know whether one side started a team full of freshmen or a more veteran team. Lead voice Thom Brennaman, like Joe Buck and Chip Caray and Kenny Albert, is an unremarkable product of nepotism that pales next to the old man. His worst moment actually came last week, in the Fiesta Bowl, when he stumped for a playoff system as Boise State came to the line before the game-deciding two-point conversion. Right argument, wrong time. Last night, he couldn't resist a lame attempt at synergy, pointing out that 24's Jack Bauer "would be most pleased with this Gator effort tonight." Ugh. Boothmate Charles Davis, a relative unknown, was much more impressive, showing a nice command of personnel and matchups. Someone should take note and give the man a more prominent regular-season gig next year.
The big winner of the night, though, was Meyer. He is on the vanguard of a wave of successful coaches (including Pete Carroll and Bob Stoops) who aren't afraid to play superb athletes right away. That courage has a feedback effect in recruiting—highly sought-after players have started coming to Florida in bunches, knowing there is a chance to contribute immediately. Case in point: Tim Tebow. Florida's battering ram is poised to take over as ringmaster of Meyer's thick playbook, one that favors a running quarterback who can both dole out punishment and fling the ball deep. In Utah two years ago, Alex Smith rode that system to an undefeated season and the No. 1 spot in the NFL draft.
Tebow is Alex Smith on Nandrolone. He's far better suited for Meyer's offense than Chris Leak, who often struggled to adapt to Meyer's system. Leak played by far his best game under Urban last night, but by this time next year he might just be a faded memory.
Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games (HarperCollins). Chandra's second novel—about cops and gangsters in Mumbai—is 916 pages long, leading NPR to call it "Dickensian in scope." In The New Yorker, Pankaj Mishra observes, "More ardently than most recent chroniclers of India's most hectic metropolis, Chandra embraces the vitality as well as the vulgarity of the millions chasing the 'big dream of Bombay.' " The Los Angeles Times is likewise enthralled by the book, lauding the "crash course it offers in 21st century Indian society and especially the life of Mumbai." While Sacred Games' genre-bending blend of high literary style and a dime-novel plot might turn some readers off, the New York Times Book Review nonetheless concludes, "[I]n the post-9/11 era, madmen intent on blowing up all or even a small part of the world don't seem quite as unrealistic as they once did. If you keep that in mind, you may find Sacred Games as hard to put down as it is to pick up." (Buy Sacred Games.)
iPhone. Apple unveiled its much-anticipated cell phone yesterday to oohs and aahs. The gadget combines a phone, iPod, and wireless Internet browser. At the MacWorld Expo, Apple CEO Steve Jobs stated, "It's the best iPod we've ever made. No matter what you like, it looks pretty doggone gorgeous." In his Bits blog on NYTimes.com, David Pogue raves about the phone's features, including its thin size and built-in camera, though he warns, "Typing is difficult. The letter keys are just pictures on the glass screen, so of course there's no tactile feedback." The phone will come in $499 and $599 models when it goes on sale this June, and the Wall Street Journal muses, "The question is how many consumers will be willing to pay the hefty price."
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Music writers discuss the Cleveland-based museum's 22nd class of inductees: Van Halen, the Ronettes, Patti Smith, R.E.M., and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five—the first rap group to be selected. The Akron Beacon Journal gripes that Iggy Pop and his band, the Stooges, "one of the most influential protopunk and metal bands sonically and attitudinally, aren't good enough to be enshrined in the Cleveland hall." The San Jose Mercury News points out that the members of Van Halen aren't exactly known for getting along, and with all five members invited to the induction ceremony in March, "the amount of bad blood in the room promises to be staggering. Whenever Eddie Van Halen, Roth and Hagar are in a room together, sparks are sure to fly."
Mos Def, True Magic (Geffen). Mediocre reviews for Brooklyn hip-hop maestro/burgeoning movie star (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) Mos Def's latest CD. "Experimentation has been an organizing principle for Mos for some time. … Here, experimentation isn't even on the radar," sighs online music magazine Pitchfork. Style.com is likewise unimpressed, carping, "Mos Def takes a break from mediocre movies to release a mediocre third album." The New York Times piles on, calling True Magic a "bleary hangover of an album," and noting that Mos Def may "deliver tantalizing flashes of lyrical skill, but he doesn't inspire much feeling other than listless dread." (Buy True Magic.)
I'm From Rolling Stone (MTV, Sundays at 10 p.m. ET). Six young Rolling Stone interns compete for a gig as a contributing editor at the venerable music magazine. Naturally, reality-happy MTV is along for the ride, and critics are mostly amused with the results. "[L]ike fashion designers and chefs, writers make superb reality characters; they're weird and talkative," notes the New York Times' Virginia Heffernan. The program spares the cast the worst of a typical internship experience, however, and for good reason: "[It] would alienate a popular audience, only shaping up as a nightmarish hybrid of Beckett, Sade, and The Office," writes Slate's Troy Patterson. But Salon's Heather Havrilesky seems to think this mix represents the show pretty well, calling it "an exercise in sadism that's so mean-spirited and condescending, it could only have been dreamed up by someone who works in the wild and wonderful world of magazines."
Gay, Straight or Taken? (Lifetime, Mondays at 8 and 8:30 p.m. ET). This new reality dating show has women choose between three men, one of whom is gay, one straight … and, well, you get the idea. The Boston Globe bemoans the show's "humorless" embrace of stereotypes, but hopes that "the series could become a frivolous send up of dating reality shows and the absurdity of gender clichés" as the season progresses. Most critics seem to find the show harmless and boring at worst, and mildly entertaining, if misguided, at best. The New York Times muses, "[H]owever dopey the show is in actuality—and it is awfully, awfully dopey—who could not applaud its instincts?" The New York Daily News is more dismissive, calling the premise more appropriate for a bar game: "It's good for 20 seconds, 30 seconds, then you move on."
Freedom Writers (Paramount). Mixed reviews for this true-life tale about a sheltered white teacher taking a job in a tough school in Long Beach, Calif. The Los Angeles Times rhapsodizes, "Among the lessons to be learned from the inspiring, feel-good drama Freedom Writers is never to underestimate the persuasive powers of Hilary Swank." In the New York Times, Manohla Dargis notes that the film "isn't only about an amazingly dedicated young teacher who took on two extra jobs to buy supplies for her students … it's also, emphatically, about some extraordinary young people." But others are not as taken with the film's sentimentality. The Washington Post gripes that Swank's character's "strategic little victories at Wilson High follow excruciatingly familiar patterns, ringing of the trite business we associate with Fame and other hokey classroom fables." (Buy tickets to Freedom Writers.)
Pan's Labyrinth (Picturehouse). Mexican director Guillermo del Toro's fantastical film about a young girl during the waning days of the Spanish Civil War gets rave reviews. Slate's Dana Stevens loves how del Toro "has reached into the depths of our collective unconscious—not to mention the fertile swamp of his own mind—and pulled out a fever dream of a movie." In The New Yorker, Anthony Lane gives the film a nearly unqualified positive review—a rare feat—and muses, "It is, I suspect, a film to return to, like a country waiting to be explored: a maze of dead ends and new life." A.O. Scott sees greater implications in del Toro's masterpiece, intoning, "Mr. Del Toro is helping to make the boundary separating pop from art, always suspect, seem utterly obsolete." (Buy tickets to Pan's Labyrinth.)
There's nothing clear about the legal claims in this morning's consolidated cases of Davenport v. WEA and Washington v. WEA. Indeed the constitutional questions before the court are so fuzzy that the justices spend loads of time just trying to clarify with the advocates precisely what these constitutional questions are.
At issue is Section 760 of Washington State's Fair Campaign Practices Act, adopted in 1992 by state voters as part of a larger campaign-finance-reform law. 760 targets state unions, but this case is not about union members. It's about the nonmembers who are nevertheless assessed "agency fees" that go toward collective bargaining and other union activities from which they presumably benefit. Prior cases have held that those fees cannot be used toward political or ideological activities to which the nonmember would object. Thus, unions give nonmembers the power to "opt out" of any union activities not "germane" to collective bargaining—notably lobbying or political campaigning for ballot initiatives.
But Section 760 went further, requiring unions in Washington to refrain from using those agency fees for political activity unless the nonmembers "affirmatively authorize" them to do so. The burden was essentially shifted from objecting members to the unions, to protect the free-speech interests of nonmembers.
Remember that first day of college, when the dean of students explained to the young women that 19-year-old boys would be inclined to grope them pretty much constantly for the next four years unless they yelled, "No"? Section 760 more or less shifted the burden to the boys to ask if the girls want to be groped.
There are about 80,000 teachers represented by the Washington Education Association—the big teachers union whose case is before the court today, of whom only about 4,000 declined to join the union. The teachers union estimates that the amount of money per person, per year that goes from the pockets of nonmembers to political activity is about $10 per person. Still, the union's current opt-out system makes it arduous for nonmembers to reclaim their funds, requiring them to wade through dozens of pages of materials, write a letter, and mail it back, and do all this faster than the Flash in order to get their refund. No wonder unions don't want to shift to a system where they'd need to get affirmative consent.
In a 6-3 decision, the Washington State Supreme Court struck down Section 760 as unconstitutional, saying the whole provision burdened the First Amendment rights of labor unions. The state of Washington, backed by various conservative legal foundations, anti-union groups, and the Bush Justice Department, appealed. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.
State Attorney General Robert M. McKenna defends the opt-in requirement by characterizing it as part and parcel of a broader effort to promote electoral integrity. Justice Stephen Breyer wonders why this law targeted only unions as opposed to "the local swim team, or bar association, or corporation?" Justice Anthony Kennedy wonders whether the Supreme Court can simply disregard the constitutional conclusion of a state supreme court on a matter of state law. Breyer asks whether the non-union-members get their money back, or if the union can simply spend it on something else?
McKenna points out that crafting an opt-in system isn't a big deal for the unions; they'd merely need to send out an additional form: "When the WEA chose to form a PAC they did a good job of soliciting members. They include a very convenient form encouraging people to check off and send their dues ... yet they have no such form for the opt-out process." Then McKenna sits down (rather abruptly), and Solicitor General Paul Clement takes over arguing Washington's side. Clement uses the same language Scalia will use all morning to describe the unions' "forced extraction of fees" from nonmembers—the constitutional equivalent of pulling teeth without Novocaine.
John West, who represents the teachers union, faces rougher sledding. Kennedy asks him immediately whether, under his view of the case, "the First Amendment rights of the nonmembers are irrelevant?" West shifts his argument slightly to emphasize a claim that the law represents a content-based ban on certain types of political advocacy by unions, gutting core First Amendment rights. Justice David Souter questions whether the funds in question are truly the union's funds.
Scalia continues to club West about the state's "extraordinary power to exact funds from people," gleefully describing the "government as coercer." Justice John Paul Stevens asks whether a far-broader law, limiting unions from participating in any activity beyond those germane to collective bargaining, would be constitutionally permissible since it doesn't single out political speech. When West tries to answer him, Stevens blurts, "Can you just tell me yes or no and then explain?" West replies, "Yes and no," which cracks up the gallery, but not so much the justices.
Justice Sam Alito gets at the heart of the case when he disputes West's assumption that perhaps nonmembers of the union would nevertheless love to see their fees go to union political activity. "These are teachers who have chosen not to join the WEA, right?" Alito asks. "Then isn't it overwhelmingly likely that they, if you spoke to them and said would you like to give money to the union to spend on elections, they would say no?" He is baffled, adding, "Why would I choose to give up the benefits of union membership and yet want to allow the union to spend my money for its political purposes?"
West says he "absolutely disagrees" with that presumption, but it's hard to see why.
Attorney General McKenna makes this same point rather nicely in his rebuttal: "The state of Washington's position," he says, "is that nonmembers should not be required to say no twice. They said no when they chose not to join the union. The union's position now is 'we get to use your money for political purposes unless you say no a second time.' "
This probably isn't good news for the unions, which are about to see their power to engage in political advocacy sharply limited by the high court. But as the justices seem mostly to agree today, it's certainly not illogical to assume that if that cute freshman from your Russian-lit class already told you she didn't want to go on a date with you, it's a pretty safe bet she doesn't want to have sex with you, either.
Endemol—the Dutch production company responsible for crucial advances in the arenas of family-friendly raunch (Fear Factor), impenitent voyeurism (Big Brother), and garish piffle (Deal or No Deal)—has discovered a delightful new barrel to scrape the bottom of. Each episode of dating show Gay, Straight or Taken? (Lifetime, Mondays at 10 and 10:30 p.m. ET) sets up an earnest woman for a three-on-one assignation. If she picks the "straight" guy, she and her choice slab of beef will enjoy their second date in some exotic locale. Thus, in the first installment, a prolifically dimpled woman named Jenner prances into the frame, aglow with the hope that she'll discover "an all-around great guy with no baggage." But she instead has walked, on her wedges, into a dating show animated by a spirit of breezy dementia worthy of Chuck Barris himself. One of the guys is unavailable, and if Jenner picks him, then he and his girlfriend will win the vacation; one of the guys, not happening to swing her way, is doubly unavailable, and if Jenner picks him, then he and his boyfriend will jet away, leaving her alone, unlucky in love, and feeling a touch humiliated, maybe, if anyone's still capable of that emotion.
"I work in real estate," Jenner says, "and I'm also working on my dating life," allowing us to admire the dreariness of that second phrase—to ponder the drudgery of the mating market and, having pondered it, feel either less lonely or more smug. The three suitors are Luciano, Mike, and Chris. The first works as a bartender, while the others say they're employed, respectively, as "a painter, by trade, and also a club promoter" and "a trainer, among other things, freelance," both of which sound less like jobs than bad alibis. Taking a cue from the producers, I will make no further effort to distinguish among the three of them. They're sleek and gelled, strong of chin and hard of ab, hot and harmless. Not only can you picture them appearing together in an ad for boxer briefs, your imagining of such a tableau is the very point.
Jenner and her smooth-chested companions cavort about the grounds of what variously looks like a midrange resort and a pretty nice office park. She evaluates their heterosexuality and availability by, say, straining to detect a standoffish quality in a massage, or wondering at the implications of one dude's seeming discomfort at being lightly molested by a male salsa instructor. Also, she rifles through their cars. Jenner regularly addresses the camera to update us on her thinking as we play along at home: "… I would have to say that Chris is the gay one, just because of the shorts and the opera, so that would make Mike the straight and available one." As pure nonsense goes, Gay, Straight or Taken? is briskly paced, invitingly shot, and painfully contemporary—a Love Connection for the conspiracy-minded.
The show shares its paranoid edge with MTV Exposed (MTV, weekdays at 6 p.m. ET), which squished onto the schedule last month. Here, one member of a very particular demographic (horrible young adults between 18 and 25) goes on a "date" with two others. The two do not realize that everything they say is being fed through a "voice stress analyzer"—that is, a lie-detecting novelty device. The one is wearing an earpiece and getting updates from a pal waiting nearby in a surveillance truck disguised, of course, as a pest-control van. Falsehoods retailed on recent episodes include "I'm about to lay some tracks down with Dr. Dre," and "Never farted in my life," while the editors also had some predictable fun with moments of candor: "Yes, once. It was me and another guy and a girl," and "I'd rather it not be hairy, but I really don't care." But, as none of the MTV teens seems to care whether they're being lied to, the show's really about microminiskirts, provocative T-shirts, the latest trends in prurience, and learning to exist in a world where, no, humiliation does not any longer exist.
Personal to contestants: Use a rubber.
Several decades ago, psychologist Martin Seligman developed his theory of "learned helplessness." Subjected to repeated punishment, animals and humans often come to believe they have no control over what happens to them, whether they actually do or not. In Seligman's original experiment, dogs subjected to repeated electrical shocks would prostrate themselves and whine, even when escaping the abuse lay within their power.
As with canines, so with congressmen. In theory, Democrats now control a co-equal branch of government. In practice, they seem so traumatized by their years of mistreatment at the hands of a contemptuous executive that they continue to cower and simper whenever master waves a stick in their direction.
This phenomenon is at its most pitiable when it comes to Congress' powers over national security, terrorism, and war. Last Sunday, Sen. Joe Biden, the Democrats' dean of foreign policy, was asked on Meet the Press what he intended to do when President Bush announced his intention to send additional American troops to Iraq. "There's not much I can do about it," Biden shot back. "Not much anybody can do about it. He's commander in chief. … [I]t'll be a tragic mistake, in my view, but as a practical matter, there's no way to say, 'Mr. President, stop.' "
This has been, with some variation, the attitude of most of Biden's colleagues in both houses. Nearly all of them think that the war in Iraq is a losing proposition, which Bush's pending escalation will make worse. Most favor gradually reducing the number of Americans deployed in Iraq, which is what the Iraq Study Group recommended. Yet they're acting, for the most part, like onlookers at the scene of a disaster, mysteriously paralyzed and unable to act. At best, they're willing to consider expressing their disapproval to Bush through a nonbinding resolution, also known as "talking to the hand."
In fact, congressional Democrats have the power to stop the war any day they want. Rejecting additional funding for the war, which 12 senators (including John Kerry) voted to do in 2003, is merely the most dramatic and least politically attractive of their options. Congress can pass a law that says the president cannot send more than a set number of troops to Iraq. It can limit the length of military tours of duty. Or it can enforce a specific deadline for partial or complete withdrawal. A few anti-war types are, in fact, proposing such drastic measures. Sen. Ted Kennedy wants to require the president to ask Congress for the authority to send more troops. Rep. Jack Murtha wants to insist that more "ready" troops be stationed at home. But such voices remain a small, if vocal, minority. Most would rather kvetch.
Congress learned to be helpless by standing aside as successive presidents asserted that the war power belongs to them alone. As you may recall, that's not what the Constitution says. Article I, which gives the legislative branch the sole power to declare war, also puts it in charge of creating, funding, and regulating the armed forces. But every president since Harry Truman has taken the position that it's unreasonable to have to ask permission from Congress in advance of military action.
Congress' frustration with being brushed aside boiled over during Vietnam, resulting in the passage of the 1973 War Powers Resolution. Since Nixon, all presidents have maintained that this law—which creates a 60-day period after the onset of hostilities in which they must either get congressional approval or withdraw troops—is an unconstitutional infringement of their Article II powers as commander in chief. Both Presidents Bush have taken the position that they needed no congressional authorization for their Gulf Wars—and Congress, in both cases, chose to avoid a showdown by handing them the authorization anyhow. This has left unsettled the constitutional question of whether the president can go to war over Congress' objection.
But Congress' power to terminate a war seems even clearer than its power to forbid one in the first place. A provision of the War Powers Resolution states specifically that the president must remove forces when Congress so orders. Faced with military deployments they disliked in Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo, legislators did not hesitate to assert this authority during the Clinton years. Perhaps the most striking example was our military intervention in Somalia, which Clinton inherited from his predecessor, and which he was criticized for turning into an effort at "nation-building"—before that went from Republican dirty word to Republican policy in Iraq. In 1993, the House passed an amendment saying U.S. forces could remain in Somalia only for one more year. The Senate didn't follow suit, but two subsequent defense appropriations bills cutting off funding for the deployment did pass. Congress also drew limits around how U.S. personnel and bases could be used.
When they say they're incapable of resisting Bush's plan, what congressional Democrats really mean is that they're afraid to oppose it. With only 17 percent of respondents supporting the "surge," according to a recent ABC-Washington Post poll, it is hard to see how voting against more troops would be an act of political suicide. But after years of being called weak, unsupportive of the troops, micromanaging, and unpatriotic, flinching at conservative stares has become a Pavlovian Democratic response. Earlier this week, White House spokesman Tony Snow said the war in Iraq remained necessary because Americans "don't want another Sept. 11." It's hard to imagine anyone being buffaloed by this non sequitur at this point, yet many Democrats clearly still are. Pretend powerlessness also frees the congressional majority from unwanted responsibility. By feigning helplessness, Democrats leave the onus for whatever happens next in Iraq on Bush.
There are plausible arguments for supporting a surge and some very good ones for rejecting a precipitous pullout. But Democrats who argue for "redeployment" and fail to act on their convictions don't have a leg to stand on. Their passivity does harm that goes well beyond the immediate circumstances. By abdicating their constitutional role, they continue to feed the executive Frankenstein Bush and Cheney have created. If they're serious about ending this war, Democrats should quit yelping and bite back.
Thursday, Jan. 11, 2007
In Search of the Holy Grail: It's a shame that American politics doesn't have splashy trade shows like MacWorld and the Consumer Electronics Show going on this week in San Francisco and Las Vegas. Of course, that would require new products – and President Bush's speech last night showed nothing new in the pipeline anytime soon.
In contrast to the high-tech future gazing of MacWorld, politics has the feel of Tomorrowland at Disney World – displaying different visions of how the future looked in America's past. Republicans long for the '80s, Democrats miss the '90s, and both parties endlessly relitigate the '60s. The Bush administration has sought to recreate the decade nobody else wanted, the '70s, when being unpopular was the only thing presidents were good at.
White House aides had hinted that as a sign of his bold new course, Bush might break with the clichéd Oval Office address by delivering his speech from the Map Room, where FDR plotted America to victory in World War II. Instead, Bush's "New Way Forward" was down the hall in the Library, which appropriately enough once served as the White House laundry.
The bookshelves behind Bush looked like a fake Nightline backdrop. But Bush was eager to show his resolve in the battle that consumed him throughout 2006 – to read more books than Karl Rove. Besides, the Library is the entrance to the men's room, and like the Map Room, gave the White House the picture it deserved: a president stuck in his own basement.
Earlier in the week, another Republican looked backward to roll out a completely different way forward. Arnold Schwarzenegger made headlines for two decisive breaks with conservative orthodoxy. On Monday, he proposed a pay-or-play plan for near universal health care that echoes Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign proposal. On Tuesday, he channeled Al Gore and Tony Blair as he pledged to cut the state's auto emissions of greenhouse gases by 10 percent and require refineries to reduce the carbon content in fuels.
Last year, Schwarzenegger was accused of political expediency for becoming a centrist after seeing the voters trounce his agenda in the 2005 election. This year, he looks more like an action hero. Unlike Bush, Schwarzenegger seems to understand that stubbornness and irrelevance are a sign of weakness, and that leaders are stronger for being what the California governor calls "post-partisan."
State of the State addresses usually invoke a few pioneers and the occasional Founder. The governor from Hollywood drew more of a big-screen historical parallel. "We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta," Schwarzenegger said. "California has the ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta." Compare that to Bush, who has the prospects of 4th century Rome.
After their tragic encounters with national government, Republicans might be wise to go back to the city-state model. Bush seems to view every decision as a choice between the bold path and the smart one. Josh Levin explained last week why a tiny school like Boise State could surprise the football world and end up the only undefeated college team in America – when you're outnumbered, you have to be bold and smart.
Imagine, for example, if Athens were in charge of our national security policy. Athens didn't have the horses to go off and conquer the ancient world on its own. Instead, it managed to create the Athenian Empire by forging one of history's first great alliances, the Delian League, which served Athens' interests by getting other city-states to act in their own.
Likewise, when the combined forces of Athens and Sparta were mired in a seemingly endless war in the Middle East, the Greeks didn't pretend they could end the siege of Troy using the same battle plan and a few more troops. They won the way BSU did – with a really good trick play. The Trojan Horse – now there was a so-called surge worth the gamble.
Alas, bold-and-smart is not in the Bush playbook. Last night, the president admitted that his whole Iraq strategy came from Monty Python: he sent in the Trojan Rabbit and only later realized he forgot the men. ... 5:30 P.M. (link)
Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2007
Word Surge: Despite voters' best efforts in November, the Bush administration didn't get the memo about finding common ground. The gulf between the president and everyone else couldn't be wider: For the Democratic Congress, success means passing the Hundred Hours' Agenda; for a Republican White House, the spread to beat is the Hundred Years' War.
At times, Democrats and Republicans sound like Americans and Brits—two peoples divided by a common language. To be sure, it has never been clear just what dialect George Bush is speaking—but whatever it is, Democrats are determined to speak something else.
The first great battle of the word wars broke out this week between surge and escalation. So far, the semantic skirmish mirrors the real war it is trying to affect: Nobody's winning.
Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, a leading architect of the surge, helped put the word on the map in the Weekly Standard in late November. A week earlier, Kagan and Bill Kristol had called for a "heavier footprint" in Iraq, in a piece that made no mention of surge. In Kagan's second piece, the footprints were gone. Instead, he mentioned surge a dozen times—twice in quotation marks, 10 times without.
By the end of December, however, Kagan and retired general Jack Keane worried that the word surge was spinning out of control. In a Washington Post op-ed called "The Right Type of 'Surge,' " they wrote:
"Reports on the Bush administration's efforts to craft a new strategy in Iraq often use the term 'surge' but rarely define it. Estimates of the troops to be added in Baghdad range from fewer than 10,000 to more than 30,000. Some 'surges' would last a few months, others a few years. We need to cut through the confusion."
In their Post op-ed, Kagan and Keane put quotation marks around surge five times and omitted them 10 times. Counterinsurgency theory dictates 2 troops for every 100 residents. Judging from the Post and the Standard, surgency theory must dictate two quotation marks for every three to five uses of surge.
As John Dickerson points out, Democrats can't agree on how to stop Bush's surge. But the party is united in a rearguard action to rename it. In recent weeks, Democrats from across the spectrum have gone after the term to say that the Bush plan isn't a surge at all—it's an escalation. They argue that surge has a more positive connotation than escalation and leaves the misleading impression that troop levels will rise only temporarily.
If the word surge were so compelling, we wouldn't all spend good money, no questions asked, on surge protectors to prevent it, and you wouldn't have to go all the way to Norway to find the green caffeine drink Surge that Coca-Cola discontinued everywhere else. But on the vagueness charge, Democrats have a point: Even Keane and Kagan fear that surge can mean many different things to different people.
Still, if the best alternative Democrats can come up with is escalation, we have to wonder whether the urge to purge surge—like the surge itself—is really worth it.
If surge is too vague, the word escalation is too clinical. It's the mother of all euphemisms, often used during Vietnam as code to avoid saying "more troops."
Consider this Joint Chiefs of Staff memo from January 1964, urging the Pentagon to stop fighting the Viet Cong with one hand tied behind our back: "A reversal of attitude and the adoption of a more aggressive program would enhance greatly our ability to control the degree to which escalation will occur." In that memo, using escalation instead of a simpler phrase like "more fighting" made it easier to ignore the (now-all-too-familiar) inconsistency of what was being said—that if our side were allowed to fight harder, we'd be able to keep the fighting from getting out of hand.
Some opponents of the war obviously welcome the Vietnam imagery: Last week, Cindy Sheehan and others interrupted a Democratic press conference with chants of "Deescalate!" But to the average American, escalation remains as numbing and bureaucratic a word today as it was in the 1960s. The fog of war has Latin roots and too many syllables.
Democrats' rechristening effort—again, like the Bush plan itself—would seem to be too little, too late. Time dedicated its first Friday cover to "The Surge"—a higher profile than escalation can hope for, no matter how often Democrats repeat it. So far, the main result of the Democratic counteroffensive has been to make newspapers put surge in quotation marks—except, of course, when proponents of the idea beat them to it.
Some critics have started calling it the "so-called surge." Unfortunately, if surge is misleading, "so-called surge" is even more so—leaving the unintended impression that perhaps Bush won't be increasing troops at all. (Then again, as Fred Kaplan has warned, that may be an entirely accurate description of Bush's plan: more troops than we can mobilize and fewer than we'd need to win.) Richard Cohen managed to cram everything into a single sentence: "A so-called surge is a-coming, an escalation all decked out with an Orwellian-sounding name."
Meanwhile, watchdogs on both the left and right have started counting the use of surge and escalation to determine whether news organizations are biased for Bush or against him. At Tuesday's White House press briefing, one beleaguered reporter asked Tony Snow about the "troop increase/surge/escalation."
Ironically, the man sometimes credited with popularizing the term escalation is one of the most ambitious euphemists in history: Herman Kahn, whose 1965 book, On Escalation: Metaphors and Scenarios, included an "escalation ladder" of the 44 steps to mutually assured destruction. Kahn was a military theorist at RAND, and an inspiration for the character of Dr. Strangelove. Louis Menand of The New Yorker called him "the heavyweight of the Megadeath Intellectuals."
Menand writes that although Kahn was a staunch supporter of escalation in Vietnam, he was especially proud of coining the term Vietnamization, which gave the Nixon administration what the Bush lexicon apparently lacks—a face-saving euphemism for throwing in the towel. To Kahn's ear, Vietnamization was better than de-Americanization, although today both sound like two steps high on the escalation ladder toward mutually assured linguistic destruction.
A few years ago, in the depths of Democratic despair, Berkeley professor George Lakoff convinced many Democrats that word control was the only way to snap the country out of some Rove-induced hypnosis. Our side has spent countless hours pontificating about "frames" and "memes" ever since.
The pounding Republicans took in the midterm elections shows that the American people are a lot smarter than Lakoff thinks. A recent CNN poll that described the Bush option as simply "send more troops" got the answer Democrats want: only 11 percent support. That suggests the winning strategy in the word war is, get out now! The way to doom Bush's plan to send more troops to Iraq is to call it exactly that. ... 12:29 P.M. (link)
Friday, Jan. 5, 2007
Why the Long Face?: The best talking points are the ones that go without saying. Since November, Democrats haven't had any trouble convincing the political world that the midterm elections were a resounding vote for "a new direction for America." Today, Republican congresswoman Heather Wilson of New Mexico even borrowed Democrats' slogan for her speech on "A New Course for Iraq."
But the Bush administration has never been good at asking directions, or taking them. So for the moment, the most visible new direction in Washington can be found in the expressions on congressional faces: one side of the aisle has remembered how to smile, while the other side has its turn to do the frowning.
When Nancy Pelosi rose to the speaker's podium after 12 years in the minority, she might well have kissed the ground, if it weren't covered with children. Meanwhile, press accounts portrayed a range of House Republican emotions: "visibly glum," "noticeably glum," "glum," and "glumly."
You can't blame Republicans for the long face, because the minority can be a miserable life, especially in the House. Yesterday, the Democrats with the biggest spring in their step were the 80+ members who were around back when Democrats lost the majority. In their first week in the wilderness, House Republicans have already figured out that the winner-take-all nature of House rules means that the principal role of the minority is to complain about being in the minority.
House Republican leader John Boehner gamely acknowledged that turning the gavel over to the first woman Speaker was an historic occasion that transcends party. But if the new division of power in Washington feels familiar, there's a reason: A Republican president with a Democratic House is the modern historical norm. We've had that combination for 20 of the past 38 years since 1969. All the other combinations – Democratic president and Republican House, Democratic president and Democratic House, Republican president and Republican House -- have been the case for only 6 years apiece.
Indeed, the danger for both parties may be the sheer familiarity of the current arrangement. In the early 1970s, Republicans were so resigned to the inevitability of winning only the White House that the late Gerald Ford happily gave up his lifelong dream of being Speaker to settle for replacing Spiro Agnew as VP. In the 1980s, Democrats grew so accustomed to winning the House and losing the White House that we had trouble adjusting to the new landscape after we won both.
At the moment, Republicans seem more at risk of falling back into that rut than Democrats. The current Democratic glee masks a bitter determination to recapture the presidency, because the Bush years have demonstrated how powerless we are without it. By contrast, for all the glum faces in the House Republican caucus, rank-and-file Republicans have such a bad taste in their mouths from their years in control of Congress that it's hard to see them going all out to win it back. In 2008, beleaguered Republicans may well make the same choice Ford made in 1974, and so many Senators in both parties are making this time around: White House or bust. ... 2:59 P.M. (link)
Monday, Jan. 1, 2007
Modesty Is the Best Policy: For all its trappings, the presidency is a humbling experience. No job on earth comes with greater power or more frequent reminders of that power's limits.
Yet while the White House may be ever so humbling, not all its occupants are so humble. The generous outpouring of affection for the late Gerald Ford is a tribute to a genuinely modest man who rose to the highest office but wasn't afraid to acknowledge his stumbles.
That humility, more than anything else, was Ford's contribution to the nation's recovery from Watergate. As the unelected successor to a failed president who had overreached in every realm, Ford had the good sense not to presume a mandate nor pretend he was the people's choice.
The Bush administration, another accidental and accident-prone presidency, could have used a measure of Ford's humility. Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld may have made their names as Ford's right-hand men, but Bush didn't hire them for their modesty. Far from modeling themselves after their old boss, Cheney and Rumsfeld chose to go the other way—spending the Bush years feasting madly on the executive power they felt deprived of in their younger days in the hamstrung Ford White House.
In the eyes of history, Cheney and Rumsfeld have been badly humbled, but there is no sign they see humility as the cure. At Saturday's memorial service, Cheney suggested that what united America after Nixon's imperial overreach was not Ford's restraint, but Ford's own act of executive excess—the Nixon pardon. "It was this man, Gerald R. Ford, who led our republic safely through a crisis that could have turned to catastrophe," Cheney said. "Gerald Ford was almost alone in understanding that there can be no healing without pardon."
It's one thing, now that both men are dead, for revisionists to conclude that a disgraced Nixon suffered enough for his crimes and Ford suffered enough for the pardon. But as Tim Noah and Christopher Hitchens have pointed out, the Nixon pardon did little to heal the nation; it didn't even heal Nixon. If it helped heal the country at all, it did so in the opposite of how Cheney described: Nixon's sudden resignation meant Americans wouldn't have him to kick around anymore, but the pardon gave voters the chance to unite in meting out their punishment at the polls.
The Nixon pardon was out of line for an unelected president, and Ford was deservedly unelected for it. But the nation healed anyway, and Ford's unassuming manner was a welcome tonic after the Nixon era. Ford's greatest achievement was simply not being the kind of president Nixon had been.
George W. Bush now finds himself in much the same position that Ford inherited when he took office in 1974—preparing to serve out the unexpired two-year term of an extraordinarily unpopular president. The only difference is that Bush himself is the extraordinarily unpopular president.
As Bush decides how to spend those two years, Ford's legacy offers two distinct, opposing choices: flagrantly ignore the will of the country (as Ford did by pardoning Nixon) or make modest attempts to heal it (as Ford did by not governing like Nixon).
Bush and Cheney would no doubt prefer to ignore the country's wishes, and regard the Republican defeat in 2006 as sufficient punishment for their mistakes. But that's the same undemocratic route that got Bush into trouble in the first place.
The better path is Ford's more appealing legacy: his refreshing awareness that Americans put up with him only because he was better than the last guy. Bush's goal for his presidency is now exactly the same as Ford's: to prove he's not as bad as Nixon.
"In 1974, America didn't need a philosopher-king," Dennis Hastert said Saturday. "We needed a rock." In 2007, our expectations are equally modest. After six years of George Bush, we'd settle for anyone who isn't a philosopher-rock.
Americans admired the 38th president's candor when he called himself "a Ford, not a Lincoln." It may be too late, but that may be the 43rd president's last best hope as well: "a Bush, not a Nixon." ... 1:22 P.M. (link)
Friday, Dec. 22, 2006
George Has Two Fathers: Like Bill Murray in "Groundhog Day," George W. Bush seems doomed to wake up every morning in the same Maureen Dowd column about a father's shadow he can darken but not escape. Bush 43 owes much to Bush 41 – his name, his VP and half his Cabinet, his fateful obsessions with Iraq, taxes, and the Republican base. And for his father's troubles, the current president has been singularly ungrateful. The elder Bush handed his son the keys to the car, and the Daddy Party has been paying for it ever since.
Bush the younger watched his father lose the presidency over a brief moment of responsibility, and vowed to avenge the family name by never governing responsibly again. Bush 43 seems to view Bush 41's administration as a zero-sum game: He is willing to add one old Bush hand (like Robert Gates), so long as he can dismiss another (like James Baker). He has dealt with the Iraq Study Group report the way stubborn sons usually deal with parental advice – once they hear something is supposed to be good for them, they'll never do it.
Less has been made of Bush the younger's rebellion against another father figure, his silver-haired predecessor, Bill Clinton. Although the same age as Bush 43, Clinton has a temperament more like his new friend and fellow elder statesman, Bush 41.
While the younger Bush would never admit it, he owes much to Clinton 42 as well. As governor, Bush stole his campaign slogan – "Opportunity and Responsibility" – from Clinton's campaign speeches. In 2000, Bush ran for president as a different kind of Republican, stealing a page from Clinton's '92 New Democrat playbook. No father in history has left behind a bigger inheritance than Clinton: a $5 trillion surplus with no strings attached.
Of course, Bush rebelled against Clinton in just as self-defeating a fashion as against his own father. Within a year of taking office, he squandered the entire surplus. In every possible way, he styled his presidency to be the opposite of Clinton's, even when it meant failing where Clinton had done well.
As Mark Halperin and John Harris point out in their book, The Way to Win, Bush's whole approach to politics is the opposite of Clinton's. Clintonism stresses common ground, evidence, and results. By contrast, Bushism eschews common ground in favor of sharp partisan and ideological differences. This year, Bush proved that when winning elections becomes the only result you value, it's bound to elude you as well.
Bush is a famously stubborn man, and never more so than in his insistence on throwing over the conservative achievements of his predecessors. Clinton kept the elder Bush's pay-as-you-go rules to ensure that government didn't try to do what it couldn't pay for; Bush ditched pay-go so he could spend and give away money with abandon. Clinton renewed confidence in government that had been waning since the '60s. Bush shattered confidence in government by reviving the double-barreled spending of the '60s.
In perhaps the most telling rejection of Clintonism, Bush dismantled the COPS program, which had helped communities put more police on the beat and helped cut violent crime by a third nationwide. Not having enough troops turned out to be a losing strategy here at home, too. This week, the FBI announced the sharpest increase in violent crime since 1991.
Under Clinton, the nation's police forces produced the longest sustained drop in crime on record. Now many cities are becoming murder capitals again. In 2006, robbery went up 9.7% -- the fastest rise in at least the past quarter century.
A Justice Department spokesman said the administration will wait for an ongoing study to determine why crime is going up. But the International Association of Chiefs of Police and other leading crime experts pointed out the obvious: Just as more cops on the beat led to less crime, fewer cops on the beat is leading to more crime.
In fact, the current crime wave represents a convergence of Bush failures. The Post notes that an influx of residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina helped produce a 28% surge in the crime rate in Houston. With many police officers serving extended tours with the National Guard and Reserves in Iraq, the war has further depleted the thin blue line here at home.
The more the son rebels, the more prodigal he becomes. Bush 41 and Clinton 42 look better than ever, while Bush 43 never looked worse. Bush is not the sort to learn from his mistakes. But by now, he ought to realize that resisting his elders is yet another rebellion he's not winning. ... 12:14 P.M. (link)
Saturday, Dec. 16, 2006
Dangerous Liaisons: If you're tired of buying presents for the people you work with, be glad you're not Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. This holiday, he has to find white-elephant gifts for 180,000 employees.
From the beginning, the Bush administration has never wavered in its message about the true meaning of homeland security: keep shopping. So it's fitting that Chertoff chose the holiday rush to deliver his own State of the Union's security speech.
From Katrina to the Dubai Ports World fiasco, Chertoff has endured a rocky tenure at DHS. You have to feel for a guy who gave up a lifetime appointment as a federal appeals court judge for a four-year stint as America's least successful management consultant. On Thursday, he talked about "total asset visibility" and "metrics of progress." If only America's borders could be as impenetrable as our speeches.
Last year, Chertoff promised a major reorganization of the sprawling department. Judging from Thursday's speech, sprawl is winning. Chertoff outlined a five-part mission:
#1: Look out for "dangerous people."
#2: Look out for "dangerous things."
#3: Resist an attack if we fail to stop dangerous people with dangerous things.
#4: Respond to disaster if we fail to prevent an attack by dangerous people with dangerous things.
#5: "Unify the department into a seamless whole, one in which people are both parts of proud components with real legacies, but also working together to build a visionary new 21st century government organization." In other words, look out for dangerous departments who are supposed to protect us from dangerous people with dangerous things.
Chertoff lavished praise on most of his agency. But like Cinderella's cruel stepmother, he berated his unhappy stepchild, FEMA. "We have to make sure that FEMA does not become so enmeshed in its own bureaucratic processes sometimes that they lose sight of the need to have simple common sense," Chertoff said. "We've embarked on a very ambitious program of retooling FEMA to make it a 21st century response organization."
Chertoff has it backwards: FEMA's whole problem is that it was swallowed up by the bureaucratic processes of a 21st century response organization. Back in the late 20th century, when FEMA was independent and capable, director James Lee Witt could call the White House about an impending disaster and speak directly with the president. After FEMA was swallowed by the DHS whale, director Michael Brown's calls to the White House might as well have been forwarded to a call center in India. Or as Chertoff would say, "a 21st century response organization."
The trouble with DHS is that its primary mission is now responding to its own size. Something is wrong when the need to "unify the department into a seamless whole" is as urgent as the need to "protect Americans against dangerous people." If Osama bin Laden runs out of caves in Afghanistan, he might try hiding in a cubicle at DHS.
The sheer size of the department suggests that our survival strategy is modeled on the way the penguin masses endure winter storms in Antarctica – huddle together by the thousands, then move those at the outer edges to the middle when they've been exposed for too long.
Chertoff touted 20 new "intelligence fusion centers," which for a mere $380 million will bring us "embedded DHS analysts in state and local offices and also state and local analysts at DHS, improving the flow of two-way information and fusing our intelligence - not only horizontally across the government, but vertically at all levels, as well." We have embedded the enemy, and it is us.
On the same day Chertoff spoke of his dream of a seamless whole, the Government Accounting Office released a survey of the 1,800 agricultural specialists who became DHS employees as part of the merger with Customs. Earlier this year, the GAO issued a report on the ag specialists entitled, "Management and Coordination Problems Increase the Vulnerability of U.S. Agriculture to Foreign Pests and Disease."
In this week's report, the agricultural experts complained more about the domestic pests they're embedded with at DHS. The GAO asked the specialists what was going well. Their second most frequent response was, "Nothing is going well."
DHS has succeeded in streamlining one mission: handing out contracts. A tab on the front page of the DHS website declares, "Open for Business." Presumably, that message is meant for prospective contractors, not terrorists, but the jury is still out. Chertoff's speech was overshadowed by this week's decision to ditch a costly system to track the departure of foreigners at U.S. borders. Since 2004, the program has recorded 61 million foreigners entering the country, and only 4 million people leaving. That means DHS spent $1.7 billion to lose track of 57 million foreigners in two years. In the Bush administration, these are called metrics of progress.
Sadly, all his organizational jargon makes Michael Chertoff sound more and more like Michael Scott with a really big branch of "The Office." At least the Scranton branch of Dunder-Mifflin doesn't pretend to be a seamless whole. When it comes to shaking things up at DHS, Michael Scott's management philosophy might make him the better choice as Secretary:
"I'm friends with everybody in this office. We're all best friends. I love everybody here. But sometimes your best friends start coming into work late and start having dentist appointments that aren't dentist appointments, and that is when it's nice to let them know that you could beat them up." … 12:02 P.M. (link)
Thursday, Dec. 7, 2006
Snowflakes on Falling Leaders: Donald Rumsfeld's last memo enjoyed quite a run, from lead story in Sunday's New York Times and Washington Post to Slate Hot Document to welcome harbinger of a leaky new era. Amid all that attention, one aspect went overlooked: After half a century in the nation's service, Donald Rumsfeld still can't write a memo to save his political life.
Rumsfeld is not alone—for a variety of reasons, most Cabinet memos aren't very good. Cabinet secretaries are busy people, so their memos are often written by committee. A Cabinet member's world revolves around his or her agency; a memo is an attempt to make the president feel the same way. As a result, Cabinet memos are almost always too long. No president could read 20-page memos from two dozen Cabinet members, but the Cabinet churns them out anyway—and the White House staff secretary dutifully boils each down to a one-graph summary.
Two other flaws plague the Cabinet memo genre. First, White House advisers usually have a better idea what the president needs to learn from a memo, because they spend more time with him—and hear back from him whenever their efforts don't measure up. Cabinet members often have to guess what the president knows or thinks and, unless they really screw up, rarely hear an honest appraisal of what he thinks of their work.
Second, White House advisers can afford to be candid. Their advice is privileged, they can't be hauled before Congress to testify about it, and internal presidential memos rarely leak unless the White House does so on purpose. A presidential memo from a Cabinet member is privileged, but an agency's internal memos are less protected. At a more basic level, the White House hates Cabinet memos because they are usually unsolicited and always a risk to leak. That's a deadly combination, and not unrelated: the less the White House wants a memo in the first place, the greater the chance they'll see it on the front page.
Aside from the leak, Rumsfeld avoided some of these problems. His memo is short, and written in his own pull-up-your-socks tone of voice. But it's still a lousy memo, and a telling one. If, as the Duke of Wellington once said, the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, the war in Iraq may have been lost on the memo pads of the Pentagon.
Consider another famous "leaked" Rumsfeld memo, which made headlines in October 2003. That memo didn't exactly sneak out the secretary's door; as USA Today reported, Rumsfeld sent it to top defense officials and handed it to congressmen. In the span of 13 paragraphs, the memo asked 16 often-unrelated questions, including this impenetrable gem: "Have we fashioned the right mix of rewards, amnesty, protection and confidence in the US?" I don't begin to understand the question, but I'm pretty sure the answer is "no."
"Memos have one purpose in life," according to the award-winning Online Writing Lab at Purdue University, "Memos solve problems."
As a former White House chief of staff, Rumsfeld should know that most basic of rules. Presidents don't read memos for pleasure; for that, they have Albert Camus. A memo reaches the president only when the stakes are high, the choices are difficult, and all other means of resolution have failed.
That makes Iraq a good topic for writing the president. But the Rumsfeld memo doesn't do the one thing a presidential memo is supposed to do—help the Decider decide. Instead, Rumsfeld's "recommendations" are more confusing than the Iraq debate itself.
The Post called it an "unusually expansive memo," but national security adviser Stephen Hadley's term—"laundry list"—seems more on point. Rumsfeld offers 15 "Above the Line" options, and six "less attractive" ones. He says many of the above-the-line options "could and, in a number of cases, should be done in combination with others"—but he doesn't say which ones, or why. He doesn't make a case for the above-the-line options, or against those below the line.
Not only does the memo fail to give the president any clearer idea what to do in Iraq, it doesn't give a clear idea what the secretary of defense thinks. Rumsfeld's memo is a blue-ribbon commission report gone bad—the septuagenarian without the executive summary.
In contrasting Rumsfeld's memo with "the lawyerly memo" from Hadley, the Times says:
At the Pentagon, Mr. Rumsfeld has been famous for his "snowflakes"—memos that drift down to the bureaucracy from on high and that are used to ask questions, stimulate debate and shape policy.
Fortunately, his successor appears to understand that secretary of defense is not a snow job. If you can't help the Decider decide, a blizzard of memos only leads to drift. ... 1:55 P.M. (link)
Friday, Dec. 1, 2006
Belly of the Beast: Last year, the big rage was sudoku. These days, the most popular Japanese craze in Republican circles is seppuku—the "belly-cutting" ritualistic suicide better known as hari-kiri.
Republicans have been practicing all week long. On Iraq, James Baker has generously offered to hold the sword; all President Bush has to do is fall on it. Bill Frist changed his mind about doctor-assisted suicide, pulling the plug on his presidential bid rather than pretend a miracle would revive his chances. Yesterday, it was RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman's turn, in a speech to GOP governors about how Republicans had offed themselves in the midterm elections.
Mehlman is a master of apologies. Last year, he told the NAACP how sorry he was for Republicans' divisive, racist Southern strategy of the last three decades: "Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong." In yesterday's speech, he was so busy atoning for Republican losses, he forgot to apologize for the divisive, racist Southern ad that helped Republican Bob Corker hold the Senate seat in Tennessee.
As Bush's former campaign manager, Mehlman was careful to honor his role as presidential apologist. He praised the Republican ground game for winning 13 of the 22 closest races, even though the dismal performance of the president and Congress deserve most of the credit for making what should have been cakewalks so close.
Mehlman also repeated the White House line that they'd beaten the historical spread: "Since the 1860s, the party of the incumbent President has lost an average of 45 House seats and five Senate seats during the second midterm." Don't despair, Mr. President: Ulysses S. Grant lost 96 seats in his sixth year, but he still got to be buried in Grant's Tomb.
But after running through the customary excuses, Mehlman made a damning admission: "If 2006 taught us anything, it is that a good ground game alone cannot be depended upon to push us over the top. We need to remember … all of us … that it is good policy that makes good politics." From a longtime disciple of Bush and Rove, that is the ultimate denunciation of the Bush administration and Rovism: Bush and the Republicans lost because their policies didn't work.
Mehlman claimed that Democrats, not Republicans, are supposed to be the ones who think government is the answer to every problem: "We Republicans don't believe that … but sometimes, over the last few years, we've behaved as if we do. What does that lead to? It leads to defeat, and it leads to temptation, and it leads to a government that is bigger and more intrusive than any of us would like."
The saddest part of Mehlman's speech, in fact, was his struggle to name a single Bush accomplishment worthy of Republicans' own mythical tradition. Reagan, he says, made Republicans "the party that would change government, not sustain it." Gingrich offered "a detailed list of congressional and governmental reforms that took power away from the smoke-filled rooms and returned it to the people."
And what has Bush done to make Republicans the party of reform? Mehlman's answer:
"President George W. Bush reorganized our entire security system, creating the Department of Homeland Security."
No wonder Republicans feel like killing themselves. The only hope their own chairman can give them that they're not the party of government is that Bush created the largest, costliest new federal bureaucracy in American history.
When the GOP's cheerleader thinks a bloated bureaucratic nightmare with 170,000 employees is a shining example of "limited government" and "our Party at its best," even Republicans seem to be saying sayonara to conservatism. Stick a sword in it—it's done. ... 1:48 P.M. (link)
Tuesday, Nov. 28, 2006
Traitor to His Class: As they survey the ruins of the conservative movement, Republicans ponder what might have been, if only Bush hadn't blundered so often and Congress plundered so much. A study in today's New York Times provides shocking evidence of the latest conservative betrayal. According to the latest available IRS data, the richest Americans have fared worse under Bush than any other income group.
If the Republican revolution promised anything, it was that after years of oppression and neglect, rich people would finally have the chance to get ahead. But the Times reports that life is tough on Easy Street:
"Incomes after 2000 fell the most among those at the top of the income ladder. The top one-tenth of 1 percent, about 130,500 taxpayers, reported their average income fell almost 17 percent, to just under $4.9 million each in 2004."
Even Bush's harshest critics would have to concede that the president has done everything in his power to help the rich. He cut tax rates for the upper brackets. He cut the capital gains rate from 20 percent to 15 percent. He gutted the estate tax and virtually eliminated the tax on dividends.
From 2001 to 2004, Bush gave the rich a new tax cut every single year. Yet as the Times points out, even with all those trillion-dollar tax cuts, the richest Americans saw their after-tax incomes plunge by 12.1 percent.
In his 2004 campaign, John Edwards called Bush's economic theory "the most radical and dangerous economic theory to hit our shores since socialism a century ago." It's now clear that for the very rich, even socialism might have been a better deal.
This is shattering news for Democrats and Republicans alike. What is the point of supply-side conservatism if it can't even make the rich richer? For that matter, where is the joy in railing against it? Supply-side economics never made any sense to begin with, but now its logic isn't worth the napkin it was written on. Trickle-down theory turned out to be no trickle, just down.
President Bush is famous for setting big goals and failing to meet them. Now we know he can't meet the easiest of goals, either. The rich have been getting richer for centuries. Moreover, in contrast to its other pursuits, the Bush administration's efforts to help the rich were a model of persistence and consistency. No pesky resistance tried to stop them; no clumsy Rumsfeld botched the execution. They did their best, yet still they failed.
In response, the rich are voting with their feet—or perhaps their footmen. In 2004, Bush carried voters with incomes above $200,000 by 63 percent to 35 percent. This year, the Republican margin shrunk 20 points, to 53 percent to 45 percent. That was the sharpest Democratic gain of any income category. More and more rich people are coming around to Bill Clinton's view that "if you want to live like a Republican, you have to vote like a Democrat."
While the very rich keep seeing their incomes go down, the cost of being rich keeps going up. The PNC Christmas Price Index, which tracks the price of everything from 12 drummers drumming to a partridge in a pear tree, reported this week that the cost of the 12 days of Christmas has jumped to an all-time high of $18,920. PNC says that a tight labor market means wages for piping pipers and other skilled workers are up, while the burst in the housing bubble "has dampened demand for luxury goods, such as gold rings."
Ronald Reagan used to say that in the 1960s, Democrats fought a war on poverty, and poverty won. In this decade, Republicans fought a war on rich people's poverty, and poverty won again.
Once upon a time, the United States was the world leader in making people rich. Not anymore. The annual World Wealth Report keeps track of High Net Worth Individuals (HNWIs), otherwise known as millionaires. According to the 2006 report, South Korea, India, and Russia are producing new millionaires three times faster than we are. Last year, the United States even fell behind Canada.
By examining "how much it costs HNWIs to live extremely well," the World Wealth Report shows just how hard it can be to keep up with the Gateses:
"HNWIs around the world have two things in common: a deep concern about preserving their wealth and an abiding desire to ensure growth of their wealth for the benefit of future generations and benefactors. … The 'admission and maintenance charges' to a life of privilege cannot be overlooked when discussing impacts to HNWI wealth."
While the gap has shrunk in the past two years, the report says that in 2003, the inflation rate for luxury goods was 5.5 percent higher than the Consumer Price Index. The report monitors an annual basket of luxury goods—including "5-star hotels, spa visits, and boarding school tuitions." As a percentage of wealth, rich Americans pay 60 percent more to live like Paris Hilton than Asian-Pacific millionaires do.
As they look toward 2008, that gives Republicans a new mantra: Stop the class warfare! Let Democrats whine about the middle-class squeeze. The upper-class squeeze—now that's an issue that Bill Frist and Mitt Romney can run on. ... 4:33 P.M. (link)
Thursday, Nov. 23, 2006
Crystal Ball: Move over, Mort Kondracke. You heard it here first: as predicted, Flyer and Fryer held on to defeat Plymouth and Rock, 27 percent to 22 percent, in this year's White House turkey naming contest. Corn and Copia, the other food item on voters' menu, finished third with 21 percent, ahead of deserving founder Ben and Franklin at 18 percent. Washington and Lincoln ended up first in war, first in peace, and last in the turkey standings, with 12 percent.
In what may be an early glimpse of a kinder, gentler Bush, the president dispensed with his annual neck-and-neck joke. He has given up pretending the election was close. Instead, Bush joked that it was probably better to be called Flyer than Fryer. He said the turkeys' owners "did a fine job raising these birds," then petted Fryer's neck and called it "a fine-looking bird."
Bush also revealed that although Barney had enjoyed chasing Flyer around the Rose Garden, his favorite toy is a soccer ball. That makes the president an honorary soccer dad, too late to win back any suburban swing voters.
Bates Motel: Flyer and Fryer have flown off to greener, Barney-free pastures in Disneyland. They don't know how lucky they are. With no help from Washington, some states are finding their own ways to reduce the turkey retiree burden. The Montgomery Advertiser reports on Alabama's solution: coyotes.
Every November, Bill Bates, a leading Republican who runs the largest turkey farm in the state, brings the best bird from his flock of 20,000+ to Montgomery for the governor to pardon. Bates, who has been doing this since segregationist days, doesn't need an online naming contest. He gives his best bird the same name every year: Clyde.
While a pardon may be the dream of every turkey worth his salt, the Advertiser's account suggests it's not easy being Clyde. The paper reports that many of Bates's prized turkeys "ate so much and got so fat that they had a hard time even waddling around the farm." Others apparently "have been known to drown during storms when they lift their beaks to the open sky."
But the pardon of Clyde '05 proved to be the cruelest hoax of all. After being honored by the governor, Clyde '05 went on display at a farmers' market in Montgomery. PETA complained about his shabby treatment, so Bates brought him back to the farm. A few months ago, a coyote got into his pen and had an early Thanksgiving dinner. "Poor Clyde never had a chance," Bates told the paper. "There wasn't much left but feathers and bones."
Since then, Bates has installed a new security system—barbed wire. But if more coyotes had time to read blogs, they might have left Clyde alone and followed this hot tip from Huffington Post: Tofurky. Made with "organic, non-genetically engineered soybeans," Tofurky has been "America's Leading Turkey Alternative Since 1995."
The 2007 "Gobble the Vote" naming contest is 364 days away, but we already have a frontrunner: Tofurky and Clyde. You heard it here first. … 1:27 A.M. (link)
We may know pornography when we see it, but the same can't be said of plagiarism. Ever since it was revealed last month that several passages in Ian McEwan's Atonement closely resemble sections of Lucilla Andrews' World War II memoir, No Time For Romance, critics have debated whether the similarities constitute wholesale "plagiarism" or mere literary "discourtesy." The one thing everyone does agree on, apparently, is the necessity of policing plagiarism, whatever it may be. A partial list of authors recently accused (rightly or wrongly) includes Dan Brown, Yann Martel, Kaavya Viswanathan, J.K. Rowling, playwright Bryony Lavery, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Stephen Ambrose, and Alan Dershowitz. In an op-ed in early 2003, Condoleezza Rice even cited Saddam Hussein's habitual plagiarism as evidence of the leader's fundamental treachery.
Our distaste for plagiarism is usually framed in terms of our affection for originality. "We prize originality above everything and place a high value on novelty of expression," Robert McCrum wrote in the Observer, examining the outcry over McEwan. In The Little Book of Plagiarism, an engaging new study of the concept, law professor and Judge Richard A. Posner attributes today's "increasing attention" to plagiarism largely to a "cult of originality" first shaped by the Romantics—who venerated individual genius—and further intensified by a 21st-century modern market economy that values novelty in its "expressive works." Obviously, originality does have something to do with all the fuss: Most of us expect writers—especially novelists and poets—to have a distinctive voice and literary style. We carve out exceptions for writers like Shakespeare—a plagiarist by modern-day standards—because they are creative in their use of borrowed material; such copying isn't "slavish" but inventive, or, as Posner puts it, "The imitation is producing value." Those who don't recontextualize borrowed work—like Kaavya Viswanathan—we censure.
But the rhetoric of creative originality doesn't fully explain our preoccupation with footnoting and credit—or the recent accusations against Dershowitz, Goodwin, and Ambrose. The historians were attacked for using language from other historians—in Ambrose's case, from a writer he cited in the book's notes—without quotation marks. Dershowitz was accused in 2003 by Norman Finkelstein of "fraud, falsification, plagiarism" for having borrowed many of the citations in The Case For Israel directly from another contemporary book—in other words, for using them without having checked the primary sources himself. (As evidence, Finkelstein pointed to Dershowitz's verbatim reproduction of errors in citation made by the original author, Joan Peters.) Judging by the "originality" standard, what Dershowitz did hardly seems like plagiarism. He did not copy Peters' actual words or pass the quoted authors' works off as his own; he just took a shortcut. In the case of Kearns, adding quotation marks to the passages she had borrowed wouldn't have made her work more original. It just would have given credit where credit was due.
These examples help bring a crucial issue of plagiarism into focus. Behind the talk of originality lurks another preoccupation, less plainly voiced: a concern about the just distribution of labor. In plenty of instances of so-called plagiarism, what bothers us isn't so much a lack of originality as the fact that the plagiarizer has stolen someone else's work—the time it took to write the words or do the necessary research. The cribbed student essay—which Posner views as a particularly insidious form of plagiarism, committed by approximately one-third of high-school and college students—isn't an academic crime because a C student has tried to pass himself as a Matthew Arnold in the making. It's an academic crime because the student who buys his thesis from a paper mill has shirked the labor that his fellow students actually perform.
In fact, labor and plagiarism were entwined from the start. The word derives from the Latin plagiarius, referring to "kidnapper." Around the first century A.D., Roman satirist Martial gave us its modern sense when he wrote an epigram complaining that another man (whom he labeled a "plagiarius") had kidnapped his writings (which he metaphorically labeled his slaves) and was passing them off as his own. What had been a metaphor for a slave-stealer—someone who got labor for free—became a symbolic expression for the theft of words. As Glenn Reynolds and Peter Morgan observed in a 2002 essay, the ancients who gave us the notion of plagiarism didn't object to creative imitation. On the contrary, they encouraged it, knowing that there are only a limited number of good ideas in the world: "Imitation was bad only when it was disguised, or a symptom of laziness. It was not denounced simply on grounds of being 'unoriginal.' " And in his excellent book Stolen Words: Forays Into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism, Thomas Mallon notes that writers didn't care about plagiarism much "until they thought of writing as their trade."
It may be less obvious that issues of labor lurk behind our anxieties when it comes to fiction. But even the McEwan affair, when you think about it, boils down to a concern that he cut corners at someone else's expense. At this juncture, McEwan has published roughly a dozen works of fiction, most of them critically acclaimed, and is revered for his distinctive prose style. In the case of Atonement, it can hardly be said that the presence of two cribbed passages, comprising a few hundred words, profoundly alters our perception of McEwan's overall literary "originality." For one thing, Atonement is hundreds of pages long. For another, McEwan didn't exactly hide his borrowing: Andrews is acknowledged in the book. Why, exactly, do we care if a few sentences resemble a historical source? And what do we think would be gained from his having painstakingly substituted different words from those Andrews had used? The answer, clearly, has to do with work; it seems unfair that Andrews had to sit at her desk and painstakingly consider how to describe cleaning a soldier's wounds, while McEwan could merely sit down and effectively copy out her sentences, moving on to the rest of his story (while getting paid more than she did, presumably).
Posner may be right to connect our obsession with plagiarism to the rise of a market economy that values individualism in cultural works. But perhaps it also stems from a collision of contemporary ideas about what accomplishment really is: the result of effortless gifts, or the fruition of hard labor? Americans are fond of the myth of hard work. As preternaturally gifted distance runner Steve Prefontaine puts it in the 1998 biopic Without Limits, "Talent is a myth." And recent studies have shown that the old joke about how to get to Carnegie Hall is based in quantifiable fact: The top tier of 20-year-old violinists, it turns out, practiced on average 2,500 hours more than violinists the next rank down. Yet contemporary culture pays quite a lot of lip service to the myth of innate talent, wildly overestimating, for instance, the contributions of single employees to companies.
Clearly, our post-Romantic awe at individual talent still lives on. But it is also clear, as Posner points out, that we don't actually believe art must be sui generis to be great. Plenty of good Hollywood movies, to take just one example, are highly imitative. Martin Scorsese's acclaimed new film The Departed is a remake of the 2002 Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs.* But critics didn't hold that against Scorsese; after all, he did the work of translating the film to a contemporary Boston setting. (This makes the film different from its predecessor, but hardly "original.") What really bothers us about plagiarism isn't the notion of influence itself, but the notion that a piece of writing has been effortless for the thief in question. Instead of worrying whether writers who borrow from other artists are fakers, perhaps we should be asking if they're slackers. It might make it easier to decide which kinds of influence to condone and which to condemn.
Correction, Jan. 11, 2006: This sentence originally referred to the "2002 Taiwanese film Infernal Affairs." In fact, the film was made in Hong Kong.
Bloggers respond to Bush's "surge" speech and take a deep breath after Nancy Pelosi's smoking ban.
The Escalator: In a televised address Wednesday night, President Bush announced that he was committing 21,500 additional troops to Iraq. "Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me," he said. Democrats, meanwhile, said they would oppose Bush's escalation with a nonbinding resolution in the Senate and by attaching numerous conditions to funds in the House. Bloggers split mostly along partisan lines.
Daily Kos' liberal Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, who calls the address "the most important speech Bush has made in years," rails against the new plan's every aspect: "It's military insanity, foisted upon a reluctant Joint Chiefs of Staff and military brass. It's political insanity, as we'll see soon enough from those endangered Republican incumbents. And it's moral insanity, as yet more of our men and women in uniform sent to that hell in the desert in order to attempt to salvage George Bush's pride and bolster John McCain's primary chances."
Live-blogging what he calls the "train wreck" of a speech at AMERICAblog, liberal John Aravosis in D.C. criticizes it for being "too micro-managed": "We need a clear message, a clear strategy, clear evidence that this time will be the last time Bush comes and tells us his latest greatest idea for winning the war." Conservative Ed Morrissey at Captain's Quarters, who live-blogged as well, doesn't think much will change. But at the very least, "[h]is assumption of responsibility for the failure to quell the violence in Baghdad is the one element that had been missing until now, and it may help take the edge off of some of the criticism." Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly's Political Animal finds "nothing even remotely new here at all. Almost to the letter, it's the same stuff we've been trying for the past three years, except with about 10% more troops than before."
Conservative Andrew Sullivan, who is often critical of the Bush administration, argues that the entire premise of the speech—that there is a "national democratic government in Baghdad, defending itself against Jihadist attacks"—is dubious: "The government of which Bush speaks, to put it bluntly, does not exist. The reality … is that the Maliki government is a front for Shiite factions and dependent for its future on Shiite death squads. U.S. support for the government is not, therefore, a defense of democracy in a unified country, whatever our intentions. It is putting the lives of American soldiers in defense of the Shiite side in an increasingly brutal civil war."
Joe Gandelman at The Moderate Voice predicts Americans may come down with a case of "Bush fatigue": "Look for Bush to be under fire from right and left in the days to come. From the left (and center) for ignoring the vast array of institutional and public opinion forces opposed to his course. From the right: from those who feel the surge is really not enough to make a difference—because the kind of HUGE surge that could make a difference would be impossible politically."
After Bush's speech, Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., delivered the Democratic response, saying, "The escalation of this war is not the change the American people called for in the last election." According to "immoderate moderate" M. Takhallus of Sideways Mencken, Durbin "sounded much more convincing than the president. The Democrats now have their clear contrast with the president and I'd be willing to bet 70% of those watching will prefer Durbin's message which, boiled down is, 'Hey, we've done enough for those people, they're on their own.' "
Lapham's Quarterly and the Institute for the Future of the Book have posted an annotated version of the speech, including commentary by, among others, Howard Zinn: "The only thing I could think of as Bush spoke was the Vietnam era song by Pete Seeger referring to Johnson's insistence on escalating the war: 'We're waist deep in the big muddy, and the big fool says to keep on.' "
Read more about Bush's "surge" speech.
Butt out: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared a smoking ban in the Speaker's Lobby, a room outside the House floor traditionally reserved for politicians, reporters, and staffers jonesing for nicotine. Congress members can still smoke in their offices.
Bethany Sanders at health blog That's Fit raises an enthusiastic "Amen": "I guess since smoking is already banned in many federal buildings, and in all public areas in the District of Columbia, smoking in the Capitol shouldn't even be an issue."
Conservative Robert VerBruggen at Robert's Rationale accuses the "tobacco-, freedom- and tradition-hating Nancy Pelosi" of being dishonest about her motives. Plus, he adds, "secondhand smoke is primarily a danger to those who live or work around it constantly, not reporters who once in awhile might talk to lawmakers on cigarette breaks." Liberal John at Gordon's Notes agrees that "vengeance" is somehow involved: "Many Republicans smoke. Few Democrats smoke. Nancy Pelosi demonstrates both good governance and mastery of the twisted knife ... "
Read more about Pelosi's smoking ban.
Bloggers anticipate the president's speech tonight on a military "surge" in Iraq. They also think Hugo Chávez is up to his old socialist tricks, and can't quite see the point of Dolce & Gabbana's "knife" ad.
Surge, may I have another? Twenty-thousand additional troops will be sent to Iraq for "clear-and-hold" operations to secure the most dangerous areas of the country (especially Baghdad), according to advance reports concerning the speech the president will deliver tonight. De-escalationist Democrats in Congress who oppose this policy shift will do nothing to stop it. But bloggers are as skeptical as most Americans are about its chances for success in the war zone.
The Moderate Voice's Joe Gandelman adopts a wait-and-see attitude: "Basically, the Democrats have little to lose: polls show Americans lopsidedly against the 'surge' idea. Even if Bush delivers a boffo speech, it's unlikely his numbers and the idea for a troop escalation will surge. … Just stating 'this is a strategy that will bring us victory' or 'we can't afford to lose in Iraq' won't be enough anymore."
Conservative Andrew Sullivan thinks the anticipated figure of 20,000 additional troops is less than halfway there: "[A] real surge means a minimum of 50,000 more competent, professional soldiers deployed for the indefinite future. … Anything less than 50,000 means more of the same. We also need the best speech of the president's life, if he is to persuade the American people to send young troops to rescue Iraq from the grotesque incompetence of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, and the pathologies of Muslim sectarianism."
Liberal Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly's Political Animal tweaks Time's Joe Klein for writing on Swampland that while anti-surge Democrats are right on the tactics, they're hopelessly wrong on politics—it's the military commanders angling for a troop buildup. Drum responds: "The question at hand is whether a surge now would improve our counterinsurgency prospects, and there's been a ton of reporting in the past month that suggests that both the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military commanders on the ground in Iraq don't think so. Klein knows this perfectly well, just as he knows that the 'motivating force' behind the surge almost certainly … comes from George Bush and Dick Cheney, who are casting around for something—anything—to fend off calls for withdrawal …"
Lefty Matthew Yglesias addresses the report by Fred Kagan and Jack Keane of the American Enterprise Institute and notices a gap between their troop-addition estimate and the president's: "A Kagan-Keane sized escalation won't be mounted because the Joint Chiefs say it's logistically impossible. But according to Kagan and Keane success requires 'a surge of at least 30,000 combat troops lasting 18 months or so. Any other option is likely to fail.' … [D]oes Bush have some actual reason to believe that the number of additional troops required for the Iraq mission to succeed just so happens to be the exact number of troops who it's logistically possible to send? That's be a hell of a coincidence, wouldn't it?"
Read more about the surge option and Bush's speech. On Slate, Bruce Reed discusses the troop surge, which John Dickerson says Democrats won't oppose.
Can you hear me now, comrade? Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who was just sworn in to his third term, has vowed to nationalize the country's leading telephone and electricity companies. This comes on the heels of Chávez's threat to shut down a dissident TV network and to abolish legislative checks on his power.
"Scatbug" at Hugo Chavez Watch sees grim days ahead for Venezuela: "Legislating by decree. 'nothing and no one can prevent it.' All that's missing (for now) is a pledge to re-educate those who don't have their minds right."
Paila Master of The Devil's Excrement says the telecom market's changed, but "expropriating the expropriators" still looks the same: "CANTV is no longer the monopoly it was in 1990 and, if and when, it is run by the state it will become inefficient and badly managed and the two competitors it has will simply clobber the company in the market place, rendering CANTV worthless in the hands of the Government."
At Reading the World, free-marketeer Russell Redenbaugh points out other alarming facts about state seizure of communications: "[W]ith the prospect of Chavez owning the entire phone line system … Chavez will be able to listen in on any phone call he wants, especially with all the great electronic help he's getting from Cuba's communist electronic warfare experts who are now in Caracas. Worse yet, he'll be able to cut off electricity to any dissident or group, effectively ending any possible power to dissemimate news via electronic media. The only way to get any serious news out of Venezuela now will be to fly into Venezuela. If you can get a visa."
Read more about Venezuela's telecom nationalization.
Murder chic: Dolce & Gabbana is getting flak for these ads of rapier-wielding and wounded models, which the United Kingdom's Advertising Standards Authority has called irresponsible and distasteful. No rise in stab-happy pretty people as of yet, though.
"[P]erhaps it was bad luck that the first ad ran opposite an article on knife-related crime," speaketh Gawker. "Beyond the stagey stabs, it's typical D&G melodrama all the way, 'taking inspiration from the paintings of Delacroix and David.'"
In the comments section of Sweet Media, "leynafaye" writes: "We should be so lucky that images of knife-wielding women are the worst propaganda put out there by the fashion industry. While I agree they're a bit distasteful … I'm more concerned with images of skeletal-pre-adolescent-over-sexed women and the ridiculously priced clothes they gravitate to."
Read more about the Dolce & Gabbana knife ad.
Bloggers discuss Arnold Schwarzenegger's plan for universal health care. They also consider Russia's decision to cut off oil to Eastern Europe and ogle the newly unveiled iPhone.
Mr. Universal: California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed a system of universal health care that would extend coverage to the state's 6.5 million uninsured, including illegal immigrants. California would become the third state to offer such medical coverage. Bloggers are all over the place.
Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly's Political Animal offers conditional support, raising "two-and-a-half cheers." "Overall, I'm not a big fan of individual mandates," he writes. "On the other hand, I am a big fan of community rating, and the whole plan might be worth passing simply to get that enshrined into law. Once community rating becomes established, I suspect there's no going back, and that might eventually lead to a more rational system all by itself." But Terry Carter at The Liberal Progressive doesn't think the plan goes far enough: "The government should PROVIDE the health care of EVERY SINGLE AMERICAN PERIOD, not simply REQUIRE health care."
Michael van der Galien at The Moderate Voice cites the proposal as evidence Schwarzenegger "has now truly broken from the far right." He recognizes the need for universal coverage but fears the plan may overreach.
At Laura's Miscellaneous Musings, Orange County conservative Laura compares the plan to one California voters "decisively rejected" in 2004 and criticizes Schwarzenegger for straying from free-market principles: "[I]f you're a business, would you hire the tenth worker that would force you to comply with the insurance plan? And will businesses decide to pay the payroll tax instead of providing insurance, thereby forcing employees into state-run health plans?"
Libertarian blogger KipEsquire at A Stitch in Haste is appalled: "The economically inclined might also note that, if the demand for health care is inelastic, then physicians and hospitals can simply 'pass on' the tax to patients. Which would mean that Schwarzenegger's idea of helping his constituents is by imposing an indirect tax on them."
At Captain's Quarters, conservative Ed Morrissey calls the "healthinator's" idea "par for the course" in "a state that has made deficit spending an art form." He predicts the illegal immigrant issue will cause the most unrest: "I understand his economic reasoning—he figures that they're getting free emergency-room treatment and wants to reduce the cost of their treatment. … It will start a political firestorm and may re-energize the anti-illegal movement in California."
Read more about Schwarzenegger's health-care proposal.
Crude behavior: Russia cut off an oil pipeline to Europe over a dispute with Belarus, which Russia claims was illegally siphoning off crude oil. The immediate effects won't be too damaging, since Eastern European countries have plenty of reserves. But bloggers wonder about the long-term consequences.
Washington, D.C.-based Econo-girl imagines a Europe without Russian oil: "Would [Russia] honestly sit by and let thousands of people freeze to death? Perhaps. One thing that would definitely happen is that Europe would find an alternative to oil as fast as possible. Russia would become an international pariah. I doubt Putin really cares about that. He just misses seeing the fear in their eyes."
At energy blog The Oil Drum, "Heading Out" contends that these events "show the clear benefits of having some form of a strategic reserve of fuel. And in this case it appears that all the countries affected have got sufficient oil set aside that it will not be a serious problem for a while."
Libertarian law professor Daniel Drezner predicts that if the standoff lasts more than a week, Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko won't: "The big question here is whether Western Europe will force Russia to turn the oil tap back on before Lukashenka is ousted by someone not stupid enough to annoy Belarus' only ally. From a human rights perspective, it would seem hard to believe that anyone in Belarus could be worse than Lukashenko. On the other hand, it's not clear that a replacement would be much better, either—and there's the pesky problem of heating homes and such."
Read more about the oil cutoff.
Sell phone: Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the new iPhone, which combines video, music, communications, and a touch screen. The company's stock jumped 7 percent after the announcement. Bloggers are jumping as well.
Gadget blog Gizmodo's wall-to-wall iPhone coverage includes running updates on the Macworld convention, plus photos and a video of what they dub "the Jesus Phone." Engadget also provides running commentary and excerpts Jobs' keynote address: " 'There's an old Wayne Gretsky quote I love—"I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it's been." That's what we try to do at Apple. Thank you very, very much.' Huge, huge applause, standing ovation."
CaveMonkey50 wishes Jobs had talked less about the phone and more about the Mac: "Kind of hard to swallow when Vista is being released in three weeks. You usually use the time before your competitor's product release to talk about how good your product is."
Read more about the iPhone.
Bloggers are shocked that Israel may have plans to attack Iranian nuclear sites, debating the ethics of the treatment of one disabled child, and bidding farewell to the inventor of instant noodles.
Bunker busted: An article in the Sunday Times of London reveals that the Israel military has plans to use bunker busters against Iran's nuclear installations. The Israeli Foreign Ministry has since denied these accounts. "[I]f diplomacy succeeds, the problem can be solved peaceably," Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said. Reaction in the blogosphere is mixed.
Conservative heavyweight Ed Morrissey at Captain's Quarters is unconvinced the plan could be quickly put into effect. "This sounds more like the script to Star Wars IV & VI than a military plan being readied for imminent use. … Even more unlikely is the notion, floated by the Times, that the revelation of these plans will force the Iranians to give up their nuclear weapons. The difficulties in such a mission would be more likely to convince the Iranians that the US has completely given up on the military option for ourselves."
John Hawkins at Right Wing News also ponders the veracity of the report. "Maybe there's something to this or maybe there's not. It could even be a deliberate leak by the Israelis, designed to prod us into doing something or into scaring the Iranians into backing off."
"Is that our strategy on Iran? Just wait for Israel to take care of it?" wonders North Carolina government teacher Betsy at Betsy's Page.
At military news blog Murdoc Online, moderate Murdoc is unsurprised these plans exist. "Militaries train. Day and night. On every conceivable scenario. They train for hundreds of options on dozens of major plans pulled from files of tens of thousands of potential operations. … We have plans to use Special Forces to kill the president of France. We have plans to use Special Forces to save the president of France from assassins. Heck, the military probably has plans to blockade Grand Rapids, Michigan."
Conservative Robert Farrow at Flopping Aces believes the Israeli plans are justified. "Would you allow someone who daily threatens your existence to possess nuclear weapons?" Charleston Daily Mail columnist and conservative Don Surber thinks Israel is simply fulfilling its role: "Well, that's what Israel does: It protects the world from middle East idiocy. While the rest of the world is too timid (France, Germany) or too devious (China, Russia) or too otherwise occupied (United States) to do the right thing, Israel is ready to shut 'em down."
Read more about Israel's potential plans for Iran.
The pillow angel: Bloggers are fascinated and, in many cases, appalled by the case of the "pillow angel," an extremely brain-damaged little girl known as "Ashley" whose parents had her undergo controversial medical procedures to stunt her growth and keep her child-sized forever. They argue that this will make her easier to care for and improve her long-term quality of life.
Canadian Green Joe is horror-struck: "I don't know why the FBI hasn't gone in and arrested people yet, but doctors and a hospital's 'ethics board,' the people charged with protecting those who cannot make decisions for themselves, allowed doctors to mutilate a little girl. … The idea was that it would be difficult for her parents and grandparent to care for her otherwise. The bitch of it is, she'll outlive them anyway." Joshua Carter at Bioethics is of the same mind. "What kind of doctors would agree to intentionally shorten and sterilize a disabled six-year-old girl to make it easier for her parents to take care of her?"
Christina at Inside Motherhood sees long-reaching implications for medical ethics. "I think we should all be very frightened of the possibilities this opens before us, this gaping Pandora's box of alteration, this Brave New World," she writes.
But the Texan blogger at My View From the Center supports the parents' decision. "She will be cared for, loved and nurtured by two parents who have her best interests in mind. To my mind that is as happy an ending as is possible under the circumstances."
Ashley's parents (who remain anonymous) keep a blog as well, The Ashley Treatment, where they explain their choices: "A fundamental and universal misconception about the treatment is that it is intended to convenience the caregiver; rather, the central purpose is to improve Ashley's quality of life. Ashley's biggest challenges are discomfort and boredom; all other considerations in this discussion take a back seat to these central challenges."
Read more about the "pillow angel."
Instant noodles, lasting legacy: Momofuku Ando, the inventor of instant noodles, died in Japan over the weekend at age 96. His history of noodle production began in 1958, when he invented Chicken Ramen noodles. One Japanese businessman dubbed his instant noodle product "epoch-making." Surely bachelors and college students will agree.
At Zooomr Blog, Kristopher Tate fondly remembers his time eating Ando's fare. "[P]lease understand that you helped me (and many other young minds) through a difficult time in life where many things are uncertain outside of 'What am I going to eat tonight?'"
Writer Todd Lappin at Telstar Logistics critically evaluates Ando's legacy: "With all due respect, it's tragic that many non-Japanese know of ramen only as a salty freeze-dried noodle thing that is typically served in a styrofoam cup. A bowl of real ramen, however, is a delicious and subtle work of art which bears little resemblance to its instant counterpart."
Read more about Mr. Ando and instant noodles.
The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times lead, while the Wall Street Journal tops its worldwide newsbox, with Capitol Hill lawmakers expressing widespread skepticism toward President Bush's new plan for the Iraq war. USA Today mentions the congressional opposition in its lead story, but focuses on the way the White House is planning to sell its war plan to the nation this weekend. The president will appear on CBS' 60 Minutes on Sunday, and Cheney will sit for an interview on Fox News.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice faced tough questions from both sides of the aisle when she testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday. In the House of Representatives, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had a slightly easier time because they got a little more support from Republicans, but they still faced widespread skepticism from lawmakers.
As could be expected, much of the criticism centered on the additional 21,500 troops Bush wants to send into Iraq. Although administration officials were careful to emphasize they see this increase as a "temporary surge," they made sure not to give any hints that these troops would be coming back in the near future. Lawmakers also questioned whether the plan could really work at this late stage. Several were skeptical of whether Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki will truly want to confront and disband the militias. Gates said he saw a greater willingness in Maliki to go after everyone who breaks the law with "no exceptions." When asked about Maliki, Rice said she saw "his resolve" when they met. "I think he knows that his government is, in a sense, on borrowed time," she added.
Meanwhile, Democratic leaders in both the House and the Senate said they will move forward with their plans to express their disapproval of Bush's new plan through a nonbinding resolution. But they faced a new obstacle as Sen. Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, said he would filibuster any efforts to pass the resolution.
It isn't clear whether McConnell's efforts would be successful since several Republicans have joined Democrats in expressing doubts about Bush's plan. The Post's Dana Milbank writes on Page One that the tough questioning Rice faced on Capitol Hill made it clear the administration had "finally succeeded in uniting Congress on the war in Iraq. Unfortunately for Rice, the lawmakers were unified in opposition to President Bush's new policy." In effect, one of the most quoted statements from the hearings belongs to Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel who told Rice: "I think this speech given last night by this president represents the most dangerous policy blunder in this country since Vietnam, if it's carried out."
But whether this dissatisfaction with the plan will translate into Democratic leaders attempting to cut off funds for the war is still unclear. Some insisted they will go forward with the plans, but as the WSJ points out, the White House is betting that they won't. "There are a lot of divisions among the democrats, and you see them tiptoeing around it because they understand the consequences of such a vote," White House Counselor Dan Bartlett said. This sounds like a dare. Could the White House be attempting to goad Democrats into pushing the issue and thereby revealing the divisions within the party?
While Rice and Gates were being grilled on Capitol Hill, Bush went to Fort Benning in Georgia to pitch his plan. Everyone notes that although the crowd of soldiers and family members was friendly, the president didn't receive the roaring ovations he is used to when visiting military bases. The soldiers were not allowed to talk to the press.
The Iraqi government didn't express much support for Bush's plan either, says the NYT. Maliki did not show up for a news conference and did not comment on the new plan.
The LAT fronts a look at how part of the reasoning behind the extra troops is to make citizens feel safe and to secure Baghdad's neighborhoods. But the truth is, it may be too late for many of the neighborhoods that were once mixed but have now been taken over by sectarian communities and militias.
The NYT fronts, and everyone else mentions inside, news that U.S. troops detained six Iranian diplomats during a raid on an Iranian diplomatic office in the Kurdish city of Irbil. One was later released. Three weeks ago, U.S. troops detained Iranian diplomats during raids in Baghdad. All the papers remind readers that Bush warned Iran yesterday to not interfere in Iraq. The NYT says the raid happened after Bush's warning, while the LAT and WP say it was before. The Post goes high with a little context and gets word from U.S. officials that it is all part of "a new U.S. intelligence and military operation launched last month against Iran." The paper also mentions there were actually two raids yesterday, not one. The other raid took place at the Irbil airport, where U.S. troops tried to detain people but were stopped by Kurdish forces.
Everyone goes inside with John Negroponte, the departing director of national intelligence, also raising an alarm about Iran while giving his annual worldwide threat assessment before a Senate committee. Negroponte said the threat from Iran is growing, as the violence in Iraq is increasing and there is a resurgence of Shiite Islamic radicalism.
Most of the papers manage to catch late-breaking news that a rocket hit the U.S. Embassy in Athens early today. No one was injured. A police official characterized it as "an act of terrorism."
The WP fronts word that a small group of American military personnel went into southern Somalia to see who got killed by the airstrike carried out earlier this week. It seems none of the "high-value targets" were hit, although an official said eight to 10 people who are "suspected of terrorist links" were killed. The Post notes this is the first known case of U.S. military members going into Somalia since 1994.
The NYT and LAT front, and everyone else mentions, news that soccer star (and all-around famous person) David Beckham is moving to Los Angeles with his wife, Victoria "Posh Spice" Beckham. The couple will be "injecting a fresh shot of celebrity into a city where it is a practiced art," says the LAT. Beckham has agreed to a five-year deal with the Los Angeles Galaxy, which is reportedly worth around $250 million. Officials clearly hope Beckham's star power can make Americans interested in soccer. But this tactic has been used before, to little long-term benefit. In the 1970s, the New York Cosmos hired three star players, including Pelé. It worked for a little while, and attendance at the games increased but the league went bankrupt and soccer never really gained massive appeal.
All the papers lead with President Bush's nationally televised address where he announced that troop levels in Iraq will increase by 21,500. "The situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people, and it is unacceptable to me," Bush said. Everyone notes up high that, for the first time, the president acknowledged he did not send enough troops to Iraq. Bush issued several warnings to members of the Iraqi government saying they must take firm steps to bring peace and unity to their country. "America's commitment is not open-ended," he declared.
The Los Angeles Times says Bush's speech "was short on specifics" while the New York Times emphasizes that the president "gave no indication that the troop increase would be short-lived." The president did warn that Americans should expect more casualties in the coming months. The Washington Post declares, "Bush's new plan acknowledges that security must be the priority of the mission—not political reform, as many in the U.S. military have argued." Democrats and some Republicans started criticizing the plan before the president's address. USA Today quotes Republican Sen. Sam Brownback saying he opposes the increase in troops because "Iraq requires a political rather than a military solution." The Wall Street Journal points out it is not clear whether the new plan has any chance of success because "the administration's ability to control events on the ground in Iraq is rapidly diminishing."
Most of the additional troops will be sent to Baghdad, while a smaller number will go to Anbar province. The president said Iraqi forces will be taking the lead, and U.S. troops will provide support. The LAT gets word that the military plans to create "gated communities" in Baghdad. The idea is to seal off areas of the city, remove the insurgents, and then have troops present to ensure no fighting breaks out. The paper notes the tactic was tried in Vietnam (at the time they were called "strategic hamlets") but it ended up being a "spectacular failure."
Several of the papers draw up parallels to Vietnam, especially when they mention how President Bush is increasing America's involvement in an unpopular war. In a particularly blunt Page One analysis, the NYT declares: "perhaps no president since Richard M. Nixon has so boldly expanded an unpopular war." The paper quotes Nixon's explanation for invading Cambodia in 1970 when he acknowledged most Americans were in favor of withdrawing forces, and the similarities are striking. "The action I have taken tonight is indispensable for the continuing success of that withdrawal program," Nixon said. The Post talks to some who were in the government during the Vietnam war and who say Bush is making the same mistakes.
Everyone notes Bush made it clear that economic assistance to Iraq would also increase. "A successful strategy for Iraq goes beyond military operations," the president said. This means diplomatic efforts will also increase, and to that end, he announced Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will travel to the region on Friday.
In an analysis in its inside pages, USAT is direct: "except for the troop increase, none of the ideas is new. All are familiar parts of the administration's strategy in Iraq and Bush's prior speeches defending it."
The WP fronts current and former military officials warning that this new phase of the war will probably be more dangerous as soldiers in Baghdad can expect more fighting in the streets. When planning the invasion, the military wanted to avoid exactly this sort of "urban fight" but it now seems unavoidable. None of the officials the Post talks to is very optimistic the plan will work.
The Post fronts word from senior House Democrats that there seems to be increasing support for trying to block funding for any type of troop increase. If it goes through, the ensuing fight "could become the most significant confrontation between the White House and Congress over military policy since the Vietnam War." The idea currently under discussion by Democrats is to attach many conditions to the funds for new troops. This would, in effect, make it almost impossible for the administration to spend the money without going against Congress. But so far, no decision has been made on how far they will go in opposing the president's plan beyond passing a nonbinding resolution.
The LAT goes inside with a look at how the administration is not going along with the Iraq Study Group's proposal to open up a dialogue with Iran and Syria. In fact, Bush decided to go the opposite route. "We will interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria," Bush said. He added that U.S. troops "will seek out and destroy" the networks that are providing weapons to insurgents in Iraq. The NYT notes the president was vague about whether this fighting would only take place within Iraq's borders.
The Post's Glenn Kessler notes that even though word from the White House was that Bush's plan came together after weeks of internal debate, much of what was announced yesterday had been in a memo by national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley. When the memo was leaked and published in the NYT, most media attention focused on its criticism of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. But, in reality, the memo was filled with recommendations on how to proceed in Iraq.
Much of the plan's success depends directly on Maliki, and his government, who, everyone reminds us, has failed many times in the past to fulfill its promises. The LAT says that if the Iraqi prime minister fails to bring stability to Iraq, the United States "may look for a different leader as its partner in Iraq." (Slate's John Dickerson says Bush is "asking the country to embrace Iraqi leadership that, in the same speech, the president portrayed as so fragile that it would collapse if U.S. troops pulled back.")
The NYT says Bush's aides hinted the administration has already come up with a "Plan B" in case this one fails, but they wouldn't give specifics. (Slate's Fred Kaplan says the fact that Bush did not mention a backup plan was "this speech's most dreadful shortcoming.")
Meanwhile, in Iraq, the U.S. military announced three more service members were killed. At least 99 Iraqi civilians were killed across the country yesterday, according to the LAT
The NYT fronts, and everyone else mentions, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved the first increase in the federal minimum wage since Sept. 1997. The measure would increase the federal minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour over the next two years. Senate Democratic leaders vowed to push for the increase, although they are likely to include tax breaks for small businesses in order to improve its chances of passing.
The WP and NYT go inside with the latest from Somalia, where fighting broke out in Mogadishu when insurgents attacked a transitional government barracks. It was unclear who exactly these attackers were, but there are suspicions that they are part of the recently ousted Islamist movement. U.S. officials said they couldn't confirm whether the U.S. airstrike had killed the alleged planner of the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
Everyone points out House Speaker Nancy Pelosi banned smoking in the Speaker's Lobby, which is outside the entrance to the House floor. It was a haven for smokers who gathered and chatted between votes, but now lawmakers must either go outside or smoke in their offices.
The LAT fronts the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announcing it will be reviewing its investments to make sure they're socially responsible. The announcement comes a few days after the paper published an extensive two-part investigation into the foundation's investments. This will probably lead other foundations to revise their investment strategies.
The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times lead, while the Wall Street Journal tops its worldwide newsbox, with a heavy day of fighting in downtown Baghdad, where more than 1,000 U.S. and Iraqi troops were involved in a daylong battle against Sunni insurgents. The NYT calls the fighting "one of the most dramatic operations in the capital since the invasion nearly four years ago." Everyone mentions this could be seen as a preview of what awaits the additional troops President Bush wants to send to Iraq. USA Today leads, and the LAT and WP front, word from federal climate officials who announced 2006 was the hottest year ever recorded.
The fighting in Baghdad's Haifa Street has particular significance because U.S. troops managed to take control of the area in 2005 after much fighting, and Bush declared it a success story. The WP says this time around the fighting broke out four days ago when Iraqi soldiers killed 30 insurgents who had allegedly set up an unauthorized checkpoint. The Iraqi army then asked for U.S. help when several of its soldiers were killed two days ago. The Americans went in yesterday supported by fighter jets and Apache helicopters. The strong resistance the troops faced came as a surprise because they're more accustomed to insurgents hitting quickly and then disappearing. There are no reports of casualties among the Iraqi and U.S. forces, although there were injuries. The Iraqi military said they killed at least 50 insurgents, and captured 21, including several foreign fighters. Sunni officials said those killed were civilians and criticized the operation as a way to "clean Baghdad of the remaining Sunni elements."
The Post has the best quotes from U.S. troops on the ground. A U.S. officer who is on his third tour of Iraq called it "the most intense combat I have ever seen … we were in a fight for 11 straight hours." Another sees this fight as a sign of how "all sides are getting more desperate to enforce their will and increasingly they are capable of doing that." The Post quotes a U.S. service member saying that some of the captured insurgents had equipment that belonged to the Iraqi soldiers they had killed two days ago, which was "a big moral victory, and huge for their morale."
The average national temperature in 2006 was 55 degrees. Officials blamed El Niño climate patterns as well as climate change due partly to "greenhouse gases." Rather than seeing this as an isolated event, climate experts say the temperatures in 2006 were part of a trend toward hotter weather. On the bright side, the warmer weather meant there was a 13.5 percent decrease in residential energy demand.
The Post says on Page 1 that when President Bush gives his prime-time address tonight he will be ordering top military leaders to do something they, at least initially, opposed. Bush has frequently said commanders on the ground know what is best. Just last month he told the Post that "it's important to trust the judgment of the military when they're making military plans."
Meanwhile, Democrats have to decide how they will answer to Bush's plans. The NYT fronts word from Democratic leaders that they will hold symbolic votes in both the House and the Senate to try to force Republicans to take a side. This tactic would really have no effect on policy, but Democrats emphasized they are still open to introducing other measures that could, at least in theory, have a bigger impact. For now, Democrats appear to want to isolate the president. "If you really want to change the situation on the ground, demonstrate to the president he's on his own," said Sen. Joseph R. Biden of Delaware.
While trying not to seem like they're pulling the rug from underneath the troops in Iraq, Democrats also have to worry about angering their party's liberal base, says the LAT in its inside pages. This conflict has led several party leaders to criticize the president's plan while at the same time not giving any answers on what should be the alternative. Slate's John Dickerson says it's unlikely Democrats will do more than pass a nonbinding resolution. "It is clear Democratic leaders are more worried about being tagged as anti-G.I. than being penalized by liberals for not doing all they can to end the war," writes Dickerson.
But, as USAT says on Page 1, "neither party is united on how to proceed." Republicans are also finding themselves in the unenviable position of having to balance several interests, and many are struggling to figure out the correct position to take. The Post's Dana Milbank said Senate Republicans were "displaying more dance steps than the Joffrey Ballet" yesterday. Several senators insisted they wanted to hear the president's entire plan before expressing an opinion.
USAT and LAT publish an Associated Press story revealing that Pfc. Steven Green, an Army private who was charged with killing a family in Iraq, had been found to have "homicidal ideations" three months before the slaughter. Green told a military mental-health team that he was angry about the war and wanted to avenge the death of American service members. He was given small doses of a mood regulator and told to get some sleep, but he was back on duty the next day.
All the papers go inside with the latest from Somalia, where U.S. officials still say they do not know whether the airstrike designed to hit al-Qaida targets was successful. The WP says officials think at least one of the targets was hit. Early-morning wire reports quote a Somali official saying he has received confirmation that the airstrike killed Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, the al-Qaida militant who allegedly planned the bombings on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Meanwhile, in Somalia, word on the street is that 50 people were killed in the attack, although no official sources could confirm the figure. The LAT reports that the United States vowed to continue the manhunt against al-Qaida members in Somalia. The NYT says the attack "immediately set off new waves of anti-American anger" in Somalia's capital. For those interested in a general overview of what has been going on in Somalia, USAT's story includes a good summary.
The NYT, WP, and LAT all carry stories on vocabulary relating to the troop increase, a subject that has been a regular part of blog discussions in the last few weeks. President Bush has often talked about a "surge" in troops, and some media organizations followed. But opponents of the war prefer to talk about an "escalation." The LAT takes a hard look at the complaints against the news media for using the president's language (something most of the papers have been moving away from recently). Tony Snow said the president won't be using the term surge in his speech tonight.
The Los Angeles Times and New York Times lead with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposing a plan to extend health insurance to all of California's residents. "Everyone in California must have insurance. If you can't afford it, the state will help you buy it, but you must be insured," Schwarzenegger said yesterday. If approved, California wouldn't be the first state to guarantee coverage for all its residents, but, as the NYT notes, the state's sheer size coupled with its current 6.5 million uninsured, means the move "is likely to set the stage for a national conversation about health care this year."
The Washington Post leads with White House efforts to promote President Bush's plan to send more troops to Iraq. In preparation for the official announcement on Wednesday night, Bush spoke with 30 Republican senators in the White House to try to sell them on his plan. The lawmakers won't be the only ones who need convincing. USA Today leads with a new poll that reveals 61 percent oppose sending more troops to Iraq, and almost half said the United States will not be able to achieve its goals no matter how many troops it decides to send. Approval of President Bush's Iraq policies has dropped to 26 percent, a record low. The Wall Street Journal tops its worldwide newsbox with the fight that might be awaiting Bush's proposal in Congress. Democrats are currently divided on how to channel their opposition to the president's plan.
California's legislature still has to approve the measure, which would carry a price tag of approximately $12 billion. Schwarzenegger is likely to meet stiff resistance from members of his own party. Under the plan, all employers with 10 or more workers would be required to provide insurance or else pay 4 percent of their wages to a state fund. Critics of the plan are everywhere. Some say the 4 percent requirement is too low and might persuade employers to drop coverage. Doctors and hospitals aren't too happy that they would also have to pay up to fund the program. Under the plan, health insurance providers would also be prohibited from denying coverage to individuals because of prior conditions. "The plan has a substantial chunk of devil before you even reach the details," says an LAT editorial.
In other California news with possible national impact, the LAT fronts word that Gov. Schwarzenegger is expected to announce today a new requirement that motor vehicle emissions be cut by 10 percent. Petroleum refiners and gasoline sellers would have 13 years to decrease the carbon content of their fuels.
Senators who met with President Bush said that, yes, he's planning to send up to 20,000 more troops to Iraq. The president insisted this strategy has a better chance of succeeding because Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has promised to commit more of his country's forces to fight against all sources of violence. President Bush is also emphasizing that increasing the number of troops is only one part of his plan, which will also include benchmarks for the Iraqi government and economic incentives. Illustrating the uphill battle Bush is likely to face in Congress, many of the Republican senators were not immediately supportive and said they would wait until the full plan is released before passing judgment.
USAT and the NYT report that meeting senators is only the beginning of what will be a full-on campaign by the White House to convince Congress and the public that President Bush's plan is the best chance for success in Iraq. After his televised address, Bush will travel to Fort Benning, Ga., and his secretaries of state and defense will testify before Congress.
The WSJ mentions in the top spot of its worldwide newsbox that Tony Snow said the president knows the public is anxious about the situation in Iraq, but emphasized Americans "don't want another Sept. 11."
The WP and NYT front House Democrats announcing they will pass the remaining reforms suggested by the Sept. 11 commission that failed to gather support in the previous Congress. The NYT goes high with criticism of the legislation. Notably, the Homeland Security Department said a requirement that all cargo be screened is not only prohibitively expensive but also inefficient.
The NYT fronts, and everyone else mentions, news that President Bush has picked Fred F. Fielding to be his White House counsel. Fielding is considered a Republican "wise man," according to the Post, because of his experience as a deputy counsel for Richard Nixon and as counsel for Ronald Reagan. All the papers mention this is part of the administration's efforts to build up its legal team in anticipation of investigations by the new Democratic Congress.
The WP and LAT front, and the rest of the papers go inside with word that a U.S. Air Force gunship carried out a strike against suspected al-Qaida members in southern Somalia. The attack by special forces is the first time the U.S. military has acknowledged taking action in Somalia since 1994. The LAT says the efforts are intended to "capture or kill" three suspects in the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The WP says sources in the U.S. government believe the attack was successful, but they claim not to have any definite answers quite yet. The attack apparently resulted in many casualties, but no one is sure of exact numbers. Everyone notes CBS News was the first to report the story.
The NYT fronts a look at audio recordings played during the continuing genocide trial in Iraq in which Saddam Hussein is heard justifying the use of chemical weapons against Iraqi Kurds and predicting that they could kill "thousands." During his trial, Hussein tried to assert that the chemical attacks were carried out by Iran. The recordings did come at a convenient time, and as the paper notes, they "may go a long way to answering criticism of the government for executing him before he was judged for the worst of his crimes."
The NYT fronts word on a sort of natural gas smell that was pervasive in several areas of Manhattan and northeastern New Jersey yesterday. Some schools and offices were evacuated and a subway station was even shut down as many feared the worst. Officials have been unable to pinpoint the cause, although Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg assured the city's residents the smell posed no danger. In 2005, New Yorkers were faced with a much more pleasant smell that was reminiscent of maple syrup.
The New York Times leads with word that, once again, the White House is talking "benchmarks" when it comes to Iraq. The new strategy that President Bush will propose will allegedly include "a series of goals" the Iraqi government will have to meet by a specified time. The Washington Post leads with Iraqi Health Ministry data that reveals 22,950 Iraqi civilians and police officers died violently last year. The Post emphasizes the huge difference between the first half of the year, when 5,640 Iraqi civilians and police officers were killed, and the second, which saw 17,310 violent deaths. The Wall Street Journal tops its worldwide newsbox with the Democratic lawmakers who went to the Sunday talk shows to discuss their views on Iraq and President Bush's expected plan to ask for more troops. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi characterized Iraq as "complete chaos" and warned that if the president wants to add troops to the mission "he's going to have to justify it."
USA Today leads with a look into how states are expanding their health-care coverage in order to try to reduce the number of uninsured. The federal government is now preoccupied with other matters, so states are starting to take the issue into their own hands. This all amounts to the biggest experiment with health policy since the 1980s, according to one expert. The Los Angeles Times leads locally with news that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will propose a $465 million cut in California's welfare budget. Democrats vowed to fight the plan, which risks eliminating aid to "tens of thousands" of children.
It should come as no surprise if talk of "benchmarks" and a "timetable" feels like déjà vu. After all, as the NYT is quick to point out, the Bush administration and the Iraqi government have agreed on timelines before, but nothing has come of them. The paper points out toward the end of the story that several of the benchmarks in the current plan were merely copied and pasted from an October list. Regardless, these benchmarks might be necessary to satisfy lawmakers from both parties who have made clear they want any escalation in troops to include specific goals for the Iraqi government. But what happens if the Iraqi government doesn't meet the benchmarks? Administration officials wouldn't discuss specific penalties. More to the point, if the United States really wanted to impose some sort of punishment (a big if), what kind of penalties are even possible? Short of threatening to abandon Iraq (something everyone would treat as a mere bluff at this point), what else is there?
The Post got the data through an anonymous Health Ministry official, who was not authorized to release the information. The official also emphasized the figures are incomplete, which means the final toll could be higher. A spokesman for the Health Ministry denied the existence of these numbers, and some officials said the number is too big. At the beginning of the year, a figure released by the ministries of defense, health, and interior said the total number of violent deaths last year was 13,896. A U.N. report released in November said 28,000 civilians died violently in the first 10 months of 2006.
Everybody mentions five more U.S. service members were killed in Iraq in recent days.
Pelosi said Congress would not cut off funding for troops, but she did emphasize the White House will no longer have a "blank check." Meanwhile, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, who confirmed he will be seeking the Democratic nomination for president in 2008, put a damper on hopes that Democrats could affect Iraq policy. Biden said it would be unconstitutional for Congress to "micromanage the war" after it had authorized the use of force. "As a practical matter, there's no way to say, 'Mr. President, stop.' " So, wait, according to the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, there's nothing Congress can do about Iraq? If true, it definitely makes Pelosi's threats sound emptier than they normally would. But is he right? Some views from experts might have helped to figure out the validity of his statements.
Regardless of Biden's feelings on constitutionality, he is planning on going forward with his extraordinarily original plan to solve the Iraq problem. Apparently, starting Tuesday, his committee will ask "experts from every perspective" what options remain in Iraq.
All the papers mention a meeting reporters had with Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, who is the new American operational commander in Iraq and is in charge of day-to-day activities. Odierno didn't reveal much information about Bush's new plan, but he did emphasize that any new strategy that is designed to take control of Baghdad must involve coalition troops targeting both Shiite and Sunni neighborhoods. Odierno said up until now efforts have been too concentrated on Sunni areas. As the NYT emphasizes, Odierno also said it might take another "two or three years" before American and Iraqi troops gain control.
The Post fronts a look at how most immigrants fighting deportation orders often do so without a lawyer. Although they have to present themselves to an immigration court, the government provides no legal counsel for the poor. In a related article, the Post goes inside with complaints that new anti-terrorism laws are being used to reject asylum applicants. Those who give "material support" to terrorist groups are being barred from seeking asylum, even if the "support" was given at gunpoint.
If the story sounds familiar, that's because on Dec. 22 the LAT fronted a very similar story. Besides having the same topic, both stories mention how "advocates for refugees" gave as examples a Colombian nurse who was forced to treat a guerrilla fighter and a woman in Liberia was forced to cook for rebels who killed her father, raped her, and occupied her home. If it's such a widespread problem, there should be more compelling stories, no? The Post does have two other examples the LAT didn't mention, but it does quote two of the same experts mentioned in the Times last month.
The LAT and WP front results of a new study that seems to show some stem cells in human amniotic fluid have many of the same qualities as embryonic stem cells. These cells can be easily retrieved from a pregnant woman during routine checkups and would not involve using destroyed human embryos, which is a factor that has led some to oppose stem-cell research.
Wesley K. Clark writes an op-ed in the Post in which he criticizes the plan to increase troop levels by 20,000 in Iraq. Clark emphasizes "we've never had enough troops in Iraq" and says that in Kosovo the United States had 40,000 troops for a population of 2 million. Using the same ratio, it would mean at least 500,000 troops should be in Iraq. Regardless, Clark insists the United States should focus on diplomacy in order to find a solution to the crisis. "The underlying problems are political, not military," writes Clark.
Shocking! … According to a new study by the Congressional Budget Office mentioned in the NYT, the ones who benefited most from Bush's tax cuts were, wait for it, the very rich.
The New York Times and the Washington Post lead with previews of the Bush administration's forthcoming plan to increase the breadth and depth of America's commitment to the Iraq war. The plan, provisionally titled "A New Way Forward," will send 20,000 additional troops to Iraq over the next several months in an attempt to stabilize Baghdad. The Los Angeles Times off-leads the Iraq surge and leads a report on American efforts to stop outside investors from financing the development of new Iranian oil fields. Over time, the United States hopes, these back-door sanctions will drastically curtail Iran's oil exports and ultimately destabilize the regime.
In addition to adding five brigades' worth of troops, the new Bush plan, to be presented sometime this week, will involve an increased commitment to reconstruction efforts and the creation of job programs for Iraqis. The troop increase would largely mean extending the tours of soldiers already in Iraq and cutting the stateside time of those who have rotated out. The plan will rely heavily on the cooperation and participation of the Nouri al-Maliki Iraqi government—a prospect that does not inspire confidence in those who have worked with the government before, as both the NYT and the Post note.
As magic bullets go, this one seems rather spent. "There is a lot of concern this won't work," was one military official's understatement. Others, discerning little substantive difference between "A New Way Forward" and the numerous old ways forward, are much more blunt. "I think the American people's patience is wearing thin with vagueness," said Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La.
Still, the White House is realistically optimistic. "Americans are willing to [sacrifice] as long as we have a clear strategy that offers a chance of success," one administration official notes in a LAT piece that reports on the White House's efforts at selling the plan. Count Joe Lieberman in: At an American Enterprise Institute event on Friday, the indiecrat senator called for a substantial and sustained troop increase in Iraq, the Post reports. "Joe Lieberman said that?" said a bemused Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., in what promises to become a familiar refrain during the next six years.
But what of Iraq's festering eastern neighbor? As the LAT reports, despite its vast crude oil reserves, Iran's dated oil-field infrastructure and generous domestic subsidies have the nation facing an impending energy crisis. It could be solved with outside investment into the exploration of new fields—but thanks to the United States, Iran can't get a loan. Without new oil fields, the thinking goes, Iran will have to cut its oil exports and reduce the subsidies that keep the domestic price of gasoline at around 35 cents per gallon. "[I]f you were to cut the subsidies, I think there would be riots in the streets," said one regional expert.
The NYT reports that America's first new nuclear warhead in over 20 years will likely end up a sort of Frankenbomb hybrid of two competing designs. Instead of choosing between designs submitted by teams at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Reliable Replacement Warhead (TP loves the name) will fuse elements of both designs, an approach that some believe is as likely to result in a dud as a functional weapon. "It's one thing to have all the components working and another to have them all working together," said one Berkeley scientist.
The LAT goes above the fold with the first part of an extensive investigation into the Gates Foundation's financial activities. The foundation, known for its investment into impoverished regions of Africa and other areas, has partially maintained its endowment by investing hundreds of millions of dollars into oil companies that pollute the areas where they're located—causing many of the health crises that the Gates charities hope to fix. This cognitive dissonance can be attributed to a rigid division between the foundation's philanthropic arm and its investment arm. "Foundations donate to groups trying to heal the future, but with their investments, they steal from the future," said one expert.
The Post reports on the ins and outs of polonium-210, the radioactive isotope that killed former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko. Highly fatal—one gram's worth could kill tens of millions of people—and easily transported, some fear that the isotope could be added to municipal water supplies as part of future terror attacks. Could polonium-210 become to this decade what germ warfare was to the 1990s? America's radiation-shield manufacturers are hoping the answer is yes.
The NYT reefers a long report on the back-door maneuvering between the American government and the Iraqi government in the days leading to the execution of Saddam Hussein. The United States, looking to conform to international protocols, wanted to delay Hussein's execution, while the Iraqis, motivated at least in part by revenge, wanted to hasten it—a conflict that led to several heated exchanges between the two parties before the United States decided to bow to Iraqi sovereignty and hand Hussein over.
The Post fronts a profile of Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, Bush's nominee as Iraq's new top military official. Petraeus, a counterinsurgency expert and an intensely competitive fitness nut, has a doctorate from Princeton and, more impressively, survived a midair parachute failure while skydiving in 2000. More than a man, less than a god … sounds about right, all things considered.
Hundreds of rock-wielding Somali citizens marched on Mogadishu yesterday to protest their transitional government's week-old demand that citizens give up their weapons or face house-to-house searches, everyone reports. Although the program was scrapped at the last minute, many Somalis, scorning a government they feel is the puppet of Ethiopian interlopers, were not mollified. "Unless we do this, the Ethiopians will never leave," said one woman.
The NYT goes inside with a piece on how Congress' delay in passing a budget is adversely impacting the pace of scientific research at laboratories that rely on government funding. In some cases, already-established projects are shuttering until funding is secured. "The message to young scientists and industry leaders, alike, will be, 'Look outside the U.S. if you want to succeed,' " said one scientist.
It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel warm: Is global warming to blame for the unseasonably warm weather that's sweeping much of the country? According to the uninformed opinions of D.C.-area passersby (recorded by the Post), the answer is a resounding yes. "It makes me think we might not be here too much longer, because of global warming," said one jogger. Others expressed similar opinions. The National Weather Service, sounding slightly aggravated, explains that El Niño is the real culprit. "It's very dangerous to blame climate for weather," said a Penn State weather scientist, who should know. Talk about an inconvenient truth!
The Washington Post leads with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid's letter to the president declaring "it's time to bring the war to a close." The new leaders urged Bush to begin a phased withdrawal of troops in four to six months. The Los Angeles Times leads with the advice Bush is receiving from escalation advocates, specifically their warnings that any buildup lasting less than 18 months will fail. The New York Times leads—and the LAT off-leads—with Friday's House vote to tighten disclosure rules on earmarking. The measure requires lawmakers to attach their names to any project they add to tax and spending bills and certify they do not stand to gain financially from it. Unclaimed earmarks played a major role in recent Congressional scandals. The Wall Street Journal tops its worldwide newsbox with continued reorganization of the White House's Iraq team.
"Surging forces is a strategy that you have already tried and that has already failed. … Adding more combat troops will only endanger more Americans and stretch our military to the breaking point for no strategic gain," the new speaker of the House and Senate majority leader wrote in their letter to the president. But the Post notes that though Pelosi and Reid's words are strong, they are not accompanied by a cutoff of funding for the war.
Meanwhile, according to the LAT, Sen. John McCain and retired Army Gen. Jack Keane are telling Bush he should send 30,000 additional troops to remain in Iraq from 18 months to two years. The president and his national security advisers met Friday with 15 senators (or perhaps only 13, which is the number the NYT gives) to talk Iraq policy, several of whom later told the papers that there was widespread skepticism among the senators about troop increase. The Post notes that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is expected to give a speech today in which he welcomes more U.S. forces.
The Post fronts an in-depth look at the Haditha massacre in November 2005 that left 24 Iraqi civilians dead. One shocking finding: According to a lengthy report by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service the paper obtained, U.S. Marines gunned down five unarmed Iraqis one by one who were at the scene. The report, which is thousands of pages long, includes hundreds of interviews with Marines, Iraqi soldiers, and civilians, and paints a terrifying portrait of the events of that day. Four Marines were charged with murder last month and the Marine Corps has charged four officers with failing to investigate and report the killings. The Marines charged with the murders make some startling admissions in the report: One says he instructed others to "shoot first, ask questions later"; another says he urinated on the corpse of a civilian he had just shot.
The NYT fronts a story on Saddam Hussein's public image makeover: In death, the convicted dictator is being cast as a hero. Demonstrators throughout the Middle East have been praising him in recent days, and the Libyan government has plans to erect a statue of Hussein in the gallows. In an interview with an Israeli newspaper Friday, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said, "No one will ever forget the way in which Saddam was executed. … They turned him into a martyr."
On Friday, Bush confirmed earlier news that Army Lt. Gen. David Petraeus—a supporter of increased troops in Iraq—will be the new top American general there. Petraeus will succeed Gen. George W. Casey Jr., who Bush said he will nominate as the Army's new chief of staff. Bush also formally nominated retired Navy Vice Adm. J. Michael McConnell as the new director of national intelligence, and confirmed he will nominate Navy Adm. William Fallon as the new chief of U.S. Central Command.
African and Western diplomats met yesterday in Nairobi and called for a swift deployment of an African peacekeeping force in Somalia. Also Friday, the United States pledged $40 million for humanitarian aid and other efforts there. The European Union has said they'll give $47 million.
Ismail Haniya, the Palestinian prime minister, urged an end to violence in the Gaza Strip Friday. The day before, Hamas gunmen surrounded a Fatah leader's house and killed him.
At least seven people have been murdered in New Orleans in 2007, reports the Post. Five of the shootings, all unrelated, occurred within a 14-hour span on Wednesday night and Thursday morning. The killings are in stark contrast to comments from the city's police chief on Monday indicating that New Orleans had become less violent.
The NYT reports on the national first-baby sweepstakes that is quickly widening into a debate over immigration. Toys "R" Us pledged to award a $25,000 savings bond to the first baby born in 2007, and Yuki Lin, a baby born in New York City, was pronounced the winner after she was born at midnight and selected from a tie-breaking drawing. But like six out of 10 babies born in NYC, and at least two others in Brooklyn born at about the same time, Yuki has immigrant parents, so the corporation decided to disqualify her, citing fine print—although Yuki is, of course, a legal citizen herself.
Paging Akeelah … The NYT runs two corrections in today's paper illustrating the imperfection of the modern spell check. Last Saturday, the paper misspelled the Ford family's home city (it's Palm Desert, lest readers thought they lived in delicious Palm Dessert), and yesterday they botched the former Soviet premier's name (it's Nikita Khrushchev, not Kruschev).
If George W. Bush had delivered Wednesday night's speech two years ago, he would have deserved praise for candor, equanimity, and breadth of vision. But given its actual timing, one can only wonder about his grip on reality.
His new plan for victory—which he laid out after admitting that the old plan has been bankrupt for nearly a year—is a declaration of great faith or cruel cynicism. Congress won't stop him, so we can all hope the new plan works somehow (President Bush is right that defeat would be disastrous), but let's at least wade into the big muddy with our eyes open.
First, the "surge" turns out to be even paltrier than press leaks have suggested. Its dimensions are as reported—about 20,000 additional U.S. troops sent to Iraq, more than three-quarters of them to Baghdad, the rest of Anbar province—but, it turns out, they are to be mobilized gradually, a brigade or two at a time, over the next few months.
The Army's recently published field manual on counterinsurgency—co-authored by Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, soon to be the new commander of U.S. forces in Iraq—emphasizes that these sorts of campaigns need early successes to inspire confidence in the local populace, who will be watching carefully and taking sides accordingly. The manual also notes that successes, in general, require a massive superiority in manpower. To escalate, er, surge gradually (which may be all that's physically possible), works against our prospects from the get-go.
Second, the president said that Iraqi security forces will take the lead in this operation, while the Americans will play a supporting role, mainly as embedded advisers within Iraqi units. In fact, he suggested at one point that Iraqi troops will outnumber American troops by 3-to-1. (The United States will embed a "brigade with every Iraqi Army division," Bush said; a division is roughly equal to three brigades.) In principle, this is a good idea—it's the Iraqis' country, after all—but is it plausible? Where are these 60,000 additional Iraqi troops coming from? Are they any good? Do they represent a national army, or are they—as suggested by several real-life operations lately—merely militias disguised in national uniform? When the United States threw several thousand troops into Baghdad this past fall, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki promised to contribute six Iraqi battalions (fewer than 10,000 troops); only two battalions showed up. What has happened in the past couple months to suggest next month's call-up will prove much more fruitful? According to some reports, Maliki will send in the peshmerga, the Kurdish militia. But the peshmerga tend not to regard themselves as part of the Iraqi army, and the people of Baghdad aren't inclined to put their trust in Kurds, either. (And trust is the issue. As Bush said, these Iraqi forces will be "conducting patrols, setting up checkpoints, and going door-to-door to gain the trust of Baghdad residents.")
Third, it is not clear where this surge, such as it is, is going. President Bush declared tonight that America's commitment is "not open-ended" and that "America will hold the Iraqi government to … benchmarks." However, he said nothing about what will happen if the Iraqis fail to meet those benchmarks. And without a warning (even a sternly intoned "or else!"), benchmarks mean nothing.
And let's look at those benchmarks. Bush said that the Iraqi government has promised "to take responsibility for security in all of Iraq's provinces by November." It "will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis." It will "spend $10 billion of its own money on reconstruction and infrastructure." It will "hold provincial elections later this year," to empower local leaders, especially Sunni leaders. And, in a further effort to co-opt Sunni insurgency, it "will reform de-Baathification laws and establish a fair process for considering amendments to Iraq's constitution."
When did all these promises get made? Where did Maliki suddenly get the political power, or even the political audacity, to make them? One obstacle to reconstruction has been pervasive corruption within the Iraqi ministries; how does he hope to clean that up? The call for provincial elections has been ignored for months. The Shiite-led government promised to amend the constitution—with special attention to altering the language on oil revenue sharing and de-Baathification—back when the constitution was ratified; it has refused to bring up the issues ever since.
What about Iraqi politics has changed that now permits Maliki to do all these things, most of which the factions of his fragile ruling coalition have thus far refused to do?
Speaking of his fragile coalition, how will Maliki get away with letting American troops raid the Baghdad enclaves of the Mahdi Army, Muqtada Sadr's radical Shiite militia? Without the support of Sadr's faction, Maliki's government will fall. It would be great if Maliki could assemble a coalition without Sadr; but unless something is going on deep behind the scenes, there's no indication that he can.
As Bush said, the whole point of this surge is to help assure the survival, durability, and legitimacy of a central Iraqi government. If the government founders on these sorts of issues, an influx of American troops—whether they number 20,000 or 200,000—won't matter.
This leads to the cynical interpretation of tonight's speech: The benchmarks place such an overwhelming burden on Maliki's government, he'll unavoidably fail to meet them; when this failure becomes clear, and the American surge does little to improve matters, Bush—or, better still, his successor—will pull out with a shrug and the patina of good conscience, absolving himself of blame for the deluge that follows. Whether or not the leaders of the White House devised the new plan with this scenario in mind (and I don't think they did), it offers a tempting way out if worse comes to dead worst.
But here we come to this speech's most dreadful shortcoming: Bush's failure to outline any backup plan at all if his plan comes to naught. Worse still, he strongly suggested that he will resist such a plan. A realistic backup plan would rely on region-wide diplomacy to keep the conflagration of all-out civil war from spreading across the Middle East.
Halfway into the speech, it seemed for a moment that Bush might address this issue. "Succeeding in Iraq also requires … stabilizing the region in the face of the extremist challenge," he said, a task that "begins with addressing Iran and Syria." But then, instead of calling for, say, talks with those countries, Bush said that their regimes have provided material support to the insurgents. "We will disrupt the attacks on our forces," the president warned. "We will interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq."
Really? All we can muster for Iraq is a paltry 20,000 extra troops; even they will accomplish little without massive infusions from a dubious Iraqi military and miraculous political breakthroughs from a faltering Iraqi government—and President Bush, at such a desperate moment, talks about expanding the war to Iran and Syria? It's shiveringly scary.
George W. Bush has named a new man to take charge in Iraq as a prelude to his announcement of (allegedly) a new strategy. Will either make any difference?
The new commander, Lt. Gen. (soon to be promoted to simply Gen.) David Petraeus, is probably the smartest active-duty general in the U.S. Army today. Late last year, he co-authored the Army's field manual on counterinsurgency—its first in over 20 years. During the early phase of the Iraq occupation, as commander of the 101st Airborne Division, he was one of the very few American officers who understood how to win over the populace, not just bash down their doors. In those halcyon days of the summer of '03, commanders had free access to Saddam Hussein's captured slush funds, and Petraeus used the money shrewdly to build local projects and to build trust with local leaders. It may be no coincidence that things started going to hell in northern Iraq, the 101st Airborne's area of operation, when the commanders' fund dried up—and no further funds poured in.
Alas, Petraeus is in much the same situation he found himself back then—loaded with enormous responsibility, the right skills, but not enough resources, either in money or, especially, in troops.
The big talk this past week, and probably the centerpiece of Bush's announcement (to take place Wednesday night), is the "surge"—20,000 additional U.S. combat troops to be deployed to Baghdad, as part of a classic strategy of "clear, hold, and build." This means swooping a lot of troops into a particular area (a town, a village, a neighborhood, whatever), clearing it of insurgents (i.e., killing or capturing them), and leaving behind enough troops or police to maintain order so that reconstruction can take place—while other troops move on to clear, hold, and build in the next troubled area on the list.
Petraeus and his co-authors discussed this strategy at great length in the Army's counterinsurgency field manual. One point they made is that it requires a lot of manpower—at minimum, 20 combat troops for every 1,000 people in the area's population. Baghdad has about 6 million people; so clearing, holding, and building it will require about 120,000 combat troops.
Right now, the United States has about 70,000 combat troops in all of Iraq (another 60,000 or so are support troops or headquarters personnel). Even an extra 20,000 would leave the force well short of the minimum required—and that's with every soldier and Marine in Iraq moved to Baghdad. Iraqi security forces would have to make up the deficit.
In the short term, then, say for a year or so, enough troops might be concentrated in Baghdad if troops now deployed in Iraq have their tours of duty extended, troops due for redeployment to Iraq are mobilized several months ahead of schedule, nearly all these troops are transferred to Baghdad, and enough Iraqi troops can be mobilized to make up the remaining slack.
Meanwhile, how will Petraeus be able to keep Baghdad's insurgents from simply slipping out of town and wreaking havoc elsewhere? This is what happened in Fallujah when U.S. troops tried to destroy the insurgents' stronghold in that city.
In the one successful counterinsurgency campaign, in the northern town of Tal Afar, the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment surrounded the town with a 9-foot-high wall to isolate the city. This was in addition to other counterinsurgency techniques—maintaining a high troop-to-population ratio, dealing in a civilized manner with local authorities, and so forth. (Tal Afar slid back into chaos when the 3rd A.C.R. was redeployed to another hot spot—another indication that clear and hold, much less clear, hold, and build, requires a lot more troops than the United States has ever had in Iraq.)
Will Petraeus wall off neighborhoods in Baghdad? (The U.S. Army in Iraq does have a lot of concrete.) Is such a strategy feasible in a city of 6 million, as opposed to a town of 60,000 like Tal Afar? Moving in the bulldozers and the berms may be a dramatic first step. But then what?
Even on the level of troop deployments, the issue is as much quality as quantity. Petraeus' field manual notes that counterinsurgency is very different from normal combat and that successful operations "require soldiers and marines at every echelon" to possess a daunting set of traits, among them a "clear, nuanced, and empathetic appreciation of the essential nature of the conflict … an understanding of the motivation, strengths, and weaknesses of the insurgent," and a knowledge of local culture. [Italics added.] Are there enough such soldiers and Marines at every echelon who have these traits? If there were, this field manual would not have been necessary. Beyond this, the field manual notes that combat leaders, down to the company level, must be "adaptive, self-aware, and intelligent."
The purpose of an Army field manual is to lay down the requirements of combat—in the case of this field manual, a type of combat that the U.S. Army hasn't focused on for decades. It generally takes years, if not decades, for a new culture—which this field manual calls for and outlines—to take hold of any military. Petraeus is a brilliant officer, but it's questionable whether even he can force-feed a new culture in just a matter of months.
If he manages to succeed in Baghdad, how will he be able to "hold" it while proceeding on to Iraq's other troubled cities? (Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, who came up with the "surge" strategy, proposes expanding the Army's ranks by 30,000 combat soldiers over the next two years. The problem is, well-placed officers calculate that, even if enough recruits can be found, the Army could support an expansion of just 7,000 combatants per year.)
Then there are the more political considerations. Nothing will work, even under otherwise ideal circumstances, unless the Iraqi government supports the effort, orders Iraqi battalions to take part, and agrees to let the counterinsurgents go after all militias, including the Mahdi Army controlled by Muqtada Sadr, a key faction of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's power base. The Iraqi government would also have to devise some power-sharing arrangement—for instance, a formula to share oil revenues with Sunni regions—to deal with the causes of insurgency (or at least the causes of the insurgents' popular support or tolerance). While an area is being secured, the U.S. and other governments would also have to pour in massive funding for reconstruction projects, well beyond the $1 billion that President Bush is expected to request for urban job creation. In other words, a surge—even if it proves successful on its own terms—will mean nothing, in the medium to long term, unless it is part of a broader political and economic strategy. Does Bush have such a strategy in mind? We'll see on Wednesday. If he does, will the Iraqi government be willing or able to go along? We'll see in the next few months.
But security is the prerequisite, and to achieve enduring security, the hard arithmetic indicates that Bush needs to send in a lot more troops than 20,000. The problem is, he doesn't have them, and he won't be able to get them for many years, under the best of circumstances. (Even if he reimposed the draft—a sure way to convert popular disenchantment with the war to rioting-in-the-streets opposition—it would take a few years to get the Selective Service System running and to mobilize, train, and equip the draftees.)
One widespread, and plausible, theory is that the surge constitutes a last-ditch effort at success. The thinking goes like this: Maybe this will work; and if it doesn't work, the United States can cut its losses and pull back without making the retreat seem like too disastrous a debacle. "We gave it our all," the president could say; "don't blame us that it fell apart." And, since Kagan and other surge-advocates are saying the plan would take about two years to succeed or fail, the next president—not Bush—would be the one who orders, and takes all the heat for, the retreat.
I am not one who likens the Iraq war to Vietnam, but there is an eerie parallel to a memo that John McNaughton, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's closest aide, sent to him on March 24, 1965, after it seemed clear that the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign was producing scant results. "The situation in Vietnam is bad and deteriorating," McNaughton wrote. The important aim now is to "avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor)." Therefore, it is essential "that the U.S. emerge as a 'good doctor.' We must have kept promises, been tough, taken risks, gotten bloodied, and hurt the enemy very badly."
One month later, on April 21, McNamara and McNaughton met in Honolulu with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other top leaders. They concluded, as McNamara summed up in a memo, "that it will take more than six months, perhaps a year or two, to demonstrate VC [Viet Cong] failure in the South." (Both documents are reproduced in Volume 3 of The Pentagon Papers.)
It took another decade and 50,000 American lives to concede what McNaughton (who, soon after that meeting, died in an airplane crash) had realized just one year into the fighting. In the quite likely, lamentable event that Bush's surge doesn't work, let's hope that today's leaders accept the reality more quickly.
I realize I'm late to the party: Dubai is long past its media moment. The flurry of breathless write-ups—in Sunday travel sections and glossy lifestyle magazines—has come and gone. We're on to the next destination already. (Laos. Yemen. Low-altitude space orbit.)
Still, I remain determined to see Dubai for myself. It's too curious to ignore. What sort of mania drives this small, lonely desert outpost to begin construction on the tallest skyscraper in the world? To carve an indoor ski slope from the side of a shopping mall? To pour dirt into the ocean, forming man-made island chains into a Mercator projection of Earth?
There is profound wackiness afoot here. But I wonder: Is something more interesting happening, too? Because I can't help but find reason for hope in this crass spectacle. The cultures that produced Dubai and Las Vegas surely must have something in common. If the Arab world's starry-eyed dreams are just like ours—full of schlock, gluttony, and elaborate theme hotels—perhaps we can get along after all.
I'm not saying that out-of-control capitalism will defuse the clash of civilizations. But I'm eager to find out what it looks like when Islam gets mixed up with reckless expansion and tacky greed. These are the sorts of ambitions the West has no difficulty understanding.
The clichés begin springing to life the moment I arrive in Dubai's gleaming airport. Whirring along on the people-mover, I pass an endless stretch of ads for high-rise condos and high-tech office parks. Each promises greater swank than the last. None has been fully built yet. The ads are conceptual drawings: crosshatching sketches in the outlines of 70-story towers, newly dug harbors, bustling helipads …
At the end of this gantlet, I'm deposited in a cavernous immigration chamber. I fall in line behind a crowd of South Asian men, here to get jobs as construction workers. (Someone has to build all these shiny developments.) The men in front of me are Bangladeshi, I gather from the passports they clutch nervously in their hands. They all wear matching bright-yellow T-shirts and cheap baseball hats bearing the words "Mid-East Staffing." These impromptu uniforms were no doubt handed out by some wrangler from the employment agency—here to usher the newest subcontinental fodder through the bureaucracy.
International-arrivals halls offer interesting first impressions of a place. (I remember the last time I flew back to Washington, D.C., from a trip abroad. As I stood in the snaking line at Dulles, waiting to be admitted into America, I noticed the overhead televisions were all tuned to Fox News. The customs clerks behind the desks wore police-type uniforms, with badges and epaulets. A sniffer dog wandered among us, at the end of a leash.) Here in Dubai, the immigration clerks are all women in abayas—those long, loose black cloaks. They cover their hair with headscarves, of course, and some wear a face veil, too. While the tough guys in D.C. look you hard in the eye as they grill you on the purpose of your trip, these women make only fleeting eye contact (if any) as they quietly stamp our passports.
My hotel (after an air-conditioned cab ride through choking traffic) turns out to be a tad more Western-friendly than I'd have preferred. Across the street are a McDonald's and a KFC. The lobby bar is packed with drunken Brits watching soccer by satellite. (Though alcohol is technically a no-no in the United Arab Emirates, restaurants and bars attached to hotels are allowed to serve it.)
The only hint I'm somewhere unfamiliar is the gold-colored arrow affixed to the desk in my hotel room. It points to Mecca—unless perhaps a Hindu maid has unknowingly shuffled the room's furniture, in which case the arrow might well point toward some alternative holy shrine. (Jerusalem. Stonehenge. Jim Morrison's grave.)
Around dawn, I'm awakened from my fitful, jet-laggy sleep by the sound of prayer. It blasts from a loudspeaker mounted atop a nearby mosque. I love this sound—the calm, low voice intoning "Allahu akbar," or "God is great."
But while I strive for respectful tolerance in all things religious, I take issue with the final line of the morning prayer. It makes a controversial claim: "A-aalaatu khayrun mina-naum": "Prayer is better than sleep." I've no doubt Muslims truly believe this as they chant it each morning (still bleary eyed, not yet having enjoyed their first sumptuous gulp of Moroccan tea). But me, I could never pledge fealty to such a notion. I honor the infinite by yielding myself to the spirit realm of dreams. (Also, I'm really lazy.)
When I finally rouse myself, I stumble out into the 95-degree heat of a winter afternoon. I'm in the older Bur Dubai neighborhood, far from the glitz of the modern towers just down the coast. Here, the winding streets are lined with squat, humble buildings—cramped storefronts at ground level, apartment balconies with drying clothes flapping in the wind above.
The architecture and feel are not unlike what you'd find in some poor Third World cities. But there are no beggars here. No homeless families. If you're a local, you're taken care of by your fantastically rich government. If you're an immigrant … those construction sites are hiring.
Since it's my first day, I decide to visit the Dubai Museum for an overview of the city's history. As it turns out, there's not much history to speak of (though I'll have more on this tomorrow). It's certainly astonishing to look at pictures taken before oil was discovered in 1966. They show a tiny settlement on the banks of a twisting creek. Some of the houses are little more than tents. The creek is shallow and dotted with sandbars.
When I go back outside, I walk the lovely promenade of this same creek and marvel at the changes. Water taxis float a steady stream of workers from shore to shore. The creek has been dredged to improve shipping, and dhows loaded with commercial goods crowd the teeming docks. Beyond, glass office buildings and five-star hotels rise from the sand.
As the sun sets, I walk back to my hotel, the sound of evening prayers echoing out from the mosques. In my room, I flip on BBC World. They're showing footage of a massive blimp, circling the skies above London. On the side of the blimp is an advertisement. It's the logo of the Palm—a new island development here in Dubai. Luxury homes are available now … though, of course, construction has not yet been completed.
Before diving into the plate-glass heart of modern Dubai, I decided it might be wise to establish some context. I wanted to learn more about the Bedouin culture that once existed here before the construction cranes and money-chasing expats arrived. Thus I found myself, on a weekday afternoon, catching a taxi to the Falcon Center.
The guidebook says the Falcon Center is a complex devoted entirely to the noble sport of falconry. (Falconry was a staple of the ancient Bedouin desert lifestyle and remains a hobby for some Emiratis.) In my head, I'd pictured a giant aviary bustling with high-intensity falcon training. Falcon obstacle courses. Mid-air targets, with falcons violently attacking from every angle. A miasma of shrieking and clawing. As it turned out, the Falcon Center (located on the sandy outskirts of town) was just a large building with some retail stores inside. These stores sold falcons (and falcon accessories).
When I wandered into one, I found several live falcons perched on stands, their heads covered by tiny leather hoods. The birds were silent, occasionally grooming a loose feather with a talon. As I leaned in closer for a better look—emboldened because the falcons couldn't see me, and thus were unlikely to shred my face to ribbons—a shopkeeper quietly entered from a backroom.
"Would you like some tea?" he asked. I was not expecting this, but tea sounded lovely. So, he returned to the backroom and emerged with a teapot and some elegant little glasses, which he filled. I thanked him, took a sip or two, and then began to pepper him with questions. What were the specs on these falcons? What exactly were they capable of?
By way of response, he pulled out his cell phone, punched some buttons, and held the screen in front of my face. On the small display, I could make out a film of a falcon flying in the desert, its wings pumping up and down. A few seconds in, the bird swooped and totally blitzkrieged a helpless animal that appeared to be—I swear to God—some sort of small antelope.
At this point, I realized: I must have a falcon. I inquired as to the cost. The shopkeeper explained that this depends on the size of the falcon and its skill. But in general, they'll run you about five grand apiece.
Which is clearly worth it, when you think about it. I had my eye on the fierce-looking bird in the corner. I planned to name him Shrieky. I'd haul him out on my balcony in D.C., turn him loose, and wait for the freshly killed game to pile up. Perhaps a neighbor's Shih Tzu. Or infant.
Of course, I couldn't really justify purchasing a falcon. (Nor did I relish the thought of getting it through customs. Or keeping it fed—the shopkeeper had now begun to place raw chicken drumsticks in the falcons' talons, and they were munching away with wet, flesh-ripping sounds.) So, instead, I opted for perhaps the oddest souvenir I've ever bought: a falcon hood.
It's leather, with little rawhide straps to tighten it over the bird's eyes. I'm not sure what I'll use it for, though it might come in handy if I had a pet guinea pig that was really into bondage sex games. But I felt I had to buy something after this shopkeeper was so kind and hospitable.
Hospitality—along with falconry—is one of the proud pillars of Bedouin society. (It's the Bedouin people who roamed these deserts for centuries and who are the root source of Gulf Arab traditions. I'm talking here about the countries of the Arabian Peninsula, such as the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Qatar. They have a history and mood distinct from other parts of the Arab world.) In fact, based on my reading and my visits to Dubai's museums, I'd argue that Bedouin culture boils down to the following elements: hospitality; falconry; camels (and camel racing); fancy, engraved daggers; deserts (and desert wandering); and covering up your women.
And that's about it. When you're a nomad on a constant hunt for water, there's not so much time for dabbling in the delicate, nonfunctional arts. It's all about weapons and animals.
As for the Bedouins' manner of dress, it's fascinating to me that Emirati men still wear their traditional long, white robes. (They're called dishdashas—and wow is that a fun word to say.) Nearly all U.A.E. nationals—even the ruling heads of state—continue to resist trousers and other Western clothes. It's a little bit bad-ass, and it speaks to serious cultural pride. I suppose if your people survive in the harsh desert for millenniums, you don't let some pansy foreigner tell you what to wear.
You do, however, tell your women what to wear. And I have a few raw chicken bones to pick on that score:
1) It seems horribly unfair that the men's dishdashas are white, while the women's long cloaks (called abayas) are black. I ask you: Which would you rather wear beneath a blazing desert sun? If Arab culture weren't otherwise so progressive on gender issues, I might say this was a clever means of discouraging women from leaving the house.
2) The unfairness becomes crystal clear when you go to the beach here. The Emirati women keep their abayas on. Meanwhile, their husbands strip down to tight, short bathing suits—exposing their flabby stomachs and hairy backs.
3) I'm fine with the headscarf that covers the hair. (This seems not unlike wearing a yarmulke.) But the face veil is fundamentally different and, in my view, not OK. One cannot happily contribute to society when one has no face. The veil transforms women into a pair of downcast eyes. And again, it seems, more than anything else, like an enticement to stay at home.
I realize some Muslim women will talk about the face veil as an empowering, female-driven choice. This seems like the same kind of empowering, female-driven choice that sorority sisters make when they choose to become bulimic together.
All of which brings me back to falconry. At one of the museums, I saw an old photo of a sheik with his prized falcon. The caption read, "The key to falconry is the relationship between the falcon and the falconer," which seems reasonable enough. The text also observed that the falcon was wearing one of those little leather hoods, and in parentheses it noted the Arabic word for these masks: burqa.
Suddenly, the thought of those birds, forcibly hooded, tied by the ankle to their master's wrists, gave me a small chill.
On a glaring, scorching afternoon in downtown Dubai, I wiped the sweat from my brow, turned to my friend, and said, "Wanna go skiing?"
We'd been considering this idea for a while. The enormous Mall of the Emirates features an indoor slope. And skiing inside a mall just seems like a very Dubai thing to do. Besides, I'm always up for a new sporting adventure: I've tried surfing in Baja, cricket in India, and skeet shooting in West Virginia, but I've never shooshed a graceful S-turn next door to an H&M.
The tricky thing about skiing in a desert is that no one owns the proper clothes. And indoor snow may be man-made, but it's still cold and melty when you fall. Luckily, Ski Dubai includes a rental parka and snow pants with your lift ticket. (They do not, however, include hats and gloves. That's how they getcha. Although I'm secretly pleased that I now own "Ski Dubai" mittens.) All told, the clothes, equipment, and ticket cost $45 for two hours on the slope. Which is not bad, given what it would cost to get to the nearest outdoor skiing.
Once we'd suited up, we walked through a revolving door into an enormous, chilly warehouse with fluorescent lighting. A four-person lift sped us to the top of the slope. And just like that, with a dig of my poles, I was on my way down—trying hard to avoid the three-story wall to my immediate left.
Ski Dubai offers two short runs side-by-side—a gently undulating beginners slope and a steeper hill for the more experienced. If you tuck, you'll reach the bottom of either one in about 20 seconds. Nothing here will rev your engines if you've skied for real before. But I will say this: Having grown up in New England, I've definitely seen worse snow and lamer trails.
Also, I've had a few "yard sales" before (wipeouts so disastrous that my hat, goggles, skis, and poles were strewn across the slope). But Ski Dubai, with its mid-mall setting, offers a unique opportunity for the reckless skier. Should you lose control wildly enough, it is possible to explode through the window of a T.G.I. Friday's.
On the slope with us were mostly expats. (Not surprising, as 80 percent of Dubai's population is foreign-born. At one point, we shared a lift with a pair of European teens who go to high school here. These kids told us they come to the mall nearly every weekend to snowboard. Which suggests that there's not a whole lot to do if you're a teenager in Dubai. By that point, I'd navigated the expert run three times, and already I was getting bored of it.
As for locals, I don't think I spotted any Emiratis on skis or snowboards. But there was an adorable scene going on in the little "snow park" at the bottom of the slopes. Emirati girls and boys—wearing loaner parkas over their dishdashas and abayas—were riding inner tubes down a tiny hill. Small children, some of them no doubt encountering not just snow but coldness for the very first time, were having a cheerful snowball fight. Also, there were Arab guys who work there adjusting bindings all day and operating the chairlift. Yeah, that's right: Dubaian ski bums. (And they've already got that aloof, barely tolerating the tourists thing down pat.)
Everyone I've met in Dubai tells the same basic story to explain why wacky ventures like an indoor ski slope have come to exist in this once-quiet corner of the world. As the tale goes, Dubai's royal family realized early on that their oil riches (not nearly as vast as those of neighboring emirate Abu Dhabi) would at some point run dry. So, with great foresight, these sheiks decided to broaden Dubai's economy with a two-pronged strategy: First, they would create a friendly business environment—where Westerners could feel comfy and secure as they grubbed after Arab wealth. Second, they'd transform Dubai into a world-class tourist destination.
With not much indigenous culture to promote (see yesterday's entry), it would take some modern sort of attraction to bring in foreign visitors. But how on earth do you lure rich tourists to a desert in the middle of nowhere? It seems like an impossible problem … until you remember that someone's already solved it. Viva Las Vegas!
Of course, the nominal draw in Vegas is the gambling. (Which isn't gonna happen in an Islamic country.) But is that what's really bringing people to the Strip—even folks who could make a short drive to an Indian casino back home in Connecticut or wherever?
I'd argue that it's more the sheer nuttiness of Las Vegas that packs 'em in. Its replica Eiffel Tower, and the indoor Venetian canals, and the scale model of the New York skyline. It's the over-the-top excess that truly fascinates us all.
This is the brand identity Dubai is cribbing from. The announcement of each new fantastical project (man-made islands in the shapes of continents; the tallest tower in the world; a theme park where the theme is to aggregate theme parks) keeps Dubai in the news. And it all sounds so very strange that we simply must see it for ourselves. Hey, that's what brought me here.
In another shrewd marketing move, Sheik Mohammed keeps the media abuzz with a lineup of international events. (Just during my 10-day visit, there were an automotive rally, the Special Olympics, and an exhibition tennis match between Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe.) Other than a 12-night run of shows from Barbra Streisand (which really isn't out of the question), how else might Dubai emulate Vegas? I suppose it could become a hub for prostitution—but, like gambling, that would never fly with an Islamic government in charge
Or would it? Before I left, I got this e-mail from an acquaintance—a guy who works on Wall Street and has done business in Dubai:
If you want to see the shady side of the city, go to Cyclone. The place looks like a typical club, but in actuality it's all hookers. I don't mean like the typical hookers-at-the-Oak-Room thing you see in NYC. I mean essentially a whorehouse in disguise. Hundreds of women of every flavor proactively pursuing their prey. Mostly businessmen traveling thru, but a share of the ex-pat community and Gulfy Saudis in town as well …
For research purposes, it seemed imperative that I check this out. So, late one night, after a couple of drinks, a friend and I asked a cabbie to drive us there. Naturally, the cabbie knew exactly where the place was. After paying a $20 cover each (and won't that be fun to expense to Slate), we bought a couple of $10 beers and took a lap around the club.
Our first sign that something was off was that there were dozens of attractive women—and each one was standing by herself. This simply does not happen in the real world. Also, the men here were generally older, pudgier, and balder than at other clubs we'd gone to. The scent of their desperation battled for prominence with the equally strong scent of a Hungarian hooker's perfume. Huge security goons roamed the room, keeping an eye out for anyone attempting to consummate transactions on the premises. The whole scene was disturbing—and not in a fun way—so we jetted after 15 minutes or so.
But, let it be said: I have witnessed sexual deviance being tolerated—or at least ignored—within the borders of a Muslim country. And I'm declaring it a promising sign. If there's one thing the West and the Middle East can come together on, it's a Hungarian hooker.
(Though that, of course, would cost extra.)
I was walking into the Fairmont Hotel on Sheikh Zayed Road—planning to view an art exhibition of Arabic calligraphy—when, a few steps into the lobby, I got flagged down by a woman in a business suit. "Are you here for the press conference?" she asked me.
Well, no, to be honest. But what self-respecting journalist turns down a press conference that falls in his lap? Moments later, the woman was ushering me into a function room filled with TV cameras and notebook-flipping journalists. I grabbed a pen and a pad of paper from the table by the entrance, found a seat near the front, and settled in to figure out what the hell I was reporting on.
Turns out it was the announcement of a major business deal. A deal involving a vitally important resource here in Dubai. No, not oil. Water.
According to the suits up on stage (they represented a private equity firm and a water-supply company—both based in the United Arab Emirates), there is a potential water crisis looming in this region. The scare stat: MENA (the Middle East and North Africa) contains 5 percent of the Earth's population, but only 1 percent of its accessible fresh water. The equation is particularly grim in Dubai, where the population is exploding in the middle of a desert. An estimated $117 billion will be invested in water supply over the next decade—mostly in desalinization projects. An executive from the water company explained that "it's the vision of Sheik Mohammed to make Dubai a world center for desalinization excellence."
When the Q&A session began, I made my exit and headed to the calligraphy exhibit. (Which was mind-blowing, by the way. If you have a moment, check out the work of Mouneer Al-Shaarani.) But given the dire forecasts I'd just been listening to, I couldn't stop thinking about Dubai's insane growth. Is there any way this pace is sustainable?
There's ongoing construction literally everywhere you go. Neighborhoods are being invented from thin air. New buildings sit eerily empty, with no inhabitants. By day, you can see which towers are missing plates of glass at random intervals. (They look like badly pixilating LCD screens.) One street has a row of skyscrapers without tops. (These look like deadheaded flowers in a window box.)
I am firmly convinced that a real-estate crash is due. The rate of expansion just doesn't make sense and seems driven more by the royal family's fantasies (they're the money behind much of the construction and harebrained theme-park-type ideas) than by a genuine level of demand. Besides, there's no price-boosting shortage of land here—there's just more empty sand waiting beyond the city's edge.
Meanwhile, the traffic grows unbearable. (As a Pakistani cab driver told me: "Traffic! Every people is headache!") The foreign labor force gets exploited. (Flyers taped to the side of phone booths advertise for "Filipina bed-spacers." I thought this sounded racy, until it was explained to me that it refers to women working coordinated shifts so they can use the same bed.) The expansion rolls on, with little indication of a prudent central plan or a grand design.
One day, I was walking with a friend when—glancing around at the honking traffic, the construction cranes, the rebar, and the miserable, hot dust—my usually upbeat pal suddenly spoke from a deep chasm of ennui. "I want to call in the airstrike," he said.
Of course, we instantly saw the inappropriateness of this, on all sorts of levels (and here I should admit I'd had similar thoughts). But we couldn't shake our basic disgust with Dubai. Which suggested it was time for a break.
So, we rented a car and hit the open road. After 20 minutes of driving, the city faded out and the desert began. After an hour, we pulled over at a rest stop. It was like we were in Lawrence of Arabia—if Lawrence had a rental car. There was nothing here but a lonely power line and a few brave outcroppings of scrub.
Eventually, we reached our destination: an ancient oasis in the town of Al-Ain, at the Oman border. As the guidebook notes, this trip once required a five-day camel trek. Now it's a 90-minute scurry in a Honda Civic. (Soon, no doubt, the relatively nearby Rub' Al Khali—the vast Saudi desert known as the "Empty Quarter," in my view perhaps the most romantically desolate place left on Earth—will be tamed by paved highway and power lines, too. Progress sort of sucks sometimes.)
We parked the car and took a walking path into the heart of the oasis. It was the precise opposite of downtown Dubai. A lush forest, thick with date palms. Leaves rustling in a gentle breeze. Precious shade now suddenly abundant. It's not difficult to imagine the joyous miracle this would have seemed to a thirsty Bedouin coming in from the desert. No desalinization machines necessary here.
Granted, there is a Pizza Hut a few hundred yards away, which does dampen the natural wonder of it all. But Al-Ain is a delightful little town. No skyscrapers. No cranes. No expats in pinstripe suits. Instead, there's an outdoor market where people sell goats from the backs of pickup trucks.
On the heels of a week in Dubai, it's a true oasis, in every sense.