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Jonathan Brent arrived in Moscow, in the winter of 1992, bearing gifts: salami, biscuits, chocolates in the shape of the Statue of Liberty, bottles of Jack Daniels, stacks of $1 bills, cartons of Winston cigarettes. His sole Moscow contact—a young American historian—had explained to him that the latter would help ensure the success of the meetings he had scheduled with directors of the former Soviet state archives. At his very first appointment—with the chairman of the Communist Party archive—Brent carried out the ritual as instructed:
I took out my pack of Winstons and lit a cigarette. My counterpart across the table did the same. I smiled and slid the pack across to him. He took it after a moment, withdrew a cigarette, and started to push the pack towards me. I held up my hand and shook my head. So he pushed his own cigarettes toward me instead. The transaction was complete. …
And thus, in a cloud of smoke, Brent and his new Russian colleagues launched one of the most ambitious archival publishing projects of all time.
Brent was, and still is, the editorial director of the Yale University Press, not a job, one would think, that requires qualities like adventurousness or an ability to tolerate heavy smoking and large quantities of drink. But in the immediate post-Soviet moment, Western ventures of any kind, with any Russian partners, required precisely those sorts of talents. In the same period—I'm guessing it was 1993—I also visited British historian Norman Stone, one of the first Western researchers allowed into the Moscow archives, in the ex-KGB officer's flat he shared with a young British businessman (one of his former students, if I remember correctly) and the businessman's ludicrously beautiful Russian girlfriend. Stone was sleeping on a kind of prehistoric pullout sofa, vodka bottles were in conspicuous evidence, and the KGB officer's hideous wooden furniture dominated the room—all of which was fairly typical at the time.
But unlike many of that first generation of Westerners in Russia, Brent wasn't primarily looking for sensational material—though, of course, when it fell into his hands, he didn't object. More important, for him, was the prospect of a long-term contract with one or more of the newly open Russian archives, one that would result in the publication of a series of books in both English and Russian. This was a scholarly project, he writes, not a commercial one: "What sustained it was the conviction shared by the heads of the archives and Yale that the value of publishing these documents was greater than the money it would take to publish them or the revenue we might realize by their sale. … They were somehow at the center of what gave us a shared life in the twentieth century and would take us further towards understanding that life than any other means in our possession."
Yale's convictions were not, alas, always shared, either by the archive directors or by the Russian public. The former often believed that their material held a good deal more commercial value—and more possibilities for personal enrichment—than did Yale; the latter were often convinced that these American researchers were trying to "steal" their national secrets.
This mistrust did not ease with time, either. Only a few years before, during the early period of Gorbachev's glasnost, newspapers with archival "revelations" had sold in the millions. But by the early 1990s, many Russians were already struggling to cope with the Soviet collapse. They faced a logistical crisis—how to get by in dramatically changed circumstances—and often a psychological crisis as well. Perhaps the old system was bad, they now felt, but at least back then we were powerful. And now that we are no longer powerful, we don't want to hear about how bad it really was, especially from foreigners.
Nevertheless, Yale, along with a very few others—most notably the Hoover Institution, which made microfilm copies of the entire Gulag administration archive and other important collections—persevered. The result was an extraordinary series, "The Annals of Communism," whose collective impact on Soviet historiography is something akin to that of the Rosetta Stone on the study of hieroglyphics. Among other things, Brent published edited collections of documents on the Spanish Civil War, the Great Terror, collectivization, the Katyn massacre, and the gulag; Stalin's correspondence with various henchmen, including Molotov and Kaganovich; the police files of Andrei Sakharov; even the final diary of the last Czarina.
A few did contain sensations: Yale's book on the American Communist Party, authored by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, exposed, among other things, the CPUSA's secret financial relationship with the Soviet Union and its covert obedience to Soviet causes. Brent's own book, Stalin's Last Crime, described the anti-Jewish purge carried out by Stalin at the end of his life—and hints, though doesn't quite prove, that Stalin was murdered.
All of this gave a new lease on life to the incestuous world of Soviet studies, which had been divided for decades into historians who preferred the triumphant version of Soviet history, accessible in official documents like newspapers, and those who listened to the very different story told by witnesses, refugees, and dissidents. This essentially ideological argument ended forever with the publication of archival information by Yale and others, replacing it, for the first time, with real history—and proving, among other things, that the witnesses, refugees, and dissidents had largely been right.
Although he discusses some of the academic issues that lay at the heart of the Yale project, the point of Inside the Stalin Archives is somewhat different: Brent is less interested in what his series meant for Western academics and more interested in explaining the strange atmosphere of post-Soviet Moscow, and in particular the ways in which Russia's twisted past continued to shape its present.*
Elsewhere—in East Germany, for example—the collapse of communism meant that the archive doors swung wide open, and researchers of all kinds flooded inside. But in Moscow, each archive (state, party, military) made its own decisions about which documents to release and to whom to release them. Some, among them the Russian state archive, where gulag documents are kept, were relatively open, though more out of negligence than any commitment to historical truth. I worked there in the 1990s and had the impression that nobody much cared if a bunch of foreigners were reading some old crumbling documents, let alone wasting their time writing books about them. By contrast, the military and ex-KGB archives were always kept under tight control. The image of the Red Army, the identities of informers—all of these things continued to matter to the Soviet authorities and still do.
In the past couple of years, this control has even expanded, with reclassification of documents and heavier restriction on foreign researchers. And in place of the official disregard of the past, there is now a new, state-promulgated version of history. The crimes of Stalinism are acknowledged but downplayed: "Mistakes were made." By contrast, the Second World War, and in particular the moment of Stalinist military triumph in 1945, is ever more loudly celebrated in books, films, and public anniversaries.
This change of attitude has a political purpose, of course. Ex-President and de facto Russian leader Vladimir Putin is well aware that the more people take pride the Soviet past, the less likely they are to want a system that is more genuinely democratic and genuinely capitalist. The more nostalgia there is for Soviet-era symbols, the more secure he and the ex-KGB clique around him are going to be. Putin has in effect made a promise to the Russians that goes something like this: Support me, and Russia will once again be stable; Russians will get rich; the media will sing in harmony with the politicians; the country will have an international presence, just like it was when you or your parents were young. And nobody will talk about how bad we used to be.
What Brent's book provides is some sense of that strange moment of transition, the few years between the crumbling Soviet Union of Gorbachev and glasnost and the resurgent Russian nationalism of the present. He evokes the odd smell of Moscow streets, some combination of poor plumbing, boiled cabbage, and exhaust fumes; the conversations with Russians who constantly wanted to know what things cost in America and were taken aback to realize that we were far richer than they were; the furtive assignations with ex-KGB officers, always eager, even excited, to speak; the cheap plumbing fixtures; the tasteless cookies and too-strong black tea; the odd vacuum where everything—ideology, politics, nation—used to be. That anarchic, open, exciting, and frightening atmosphere is gone now: Moscow is a more rigid, more subdued, and more hierarchical place. The past is on its way to being reburied, or at least reassessed. If Brent arrived in Moscow with Winston cigarettes today, I'm afraid that nobody would pay any attention to him at all.
Correction, Dec. 8, 2008: This article originally referred to Jonathan Brent's new book as Inside the Soviet Archives. The correct title is Inside the Stalin Archives. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
In the Dec. 10 "Press Box," Jack Shafer mistakenly referred to an "indictment" in the Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich case when he should have referred to a "complaint."
In the Dec. 8 "Books," Anne Applebaum referred to Jonathan Brent's new book as Inside the Soviet Archives. The correct title is Inside the Stalin Archives.
In the Dec. 8 "Technology," Farhad Manjoo originally criticized SnapTell's iPhone application for failing to recognize products like a bag of Cheez-Its and a bottle of Arm & Hammer laundry detergent. The SnapTell application is designed to identify only books, CDs, DVDs, and video games.
In the Dec. 7 "Today's Papers," David Sessions mislabeled the name of the New York Times "Week in Review" section as the "Weekend" section. The column also incorrectly stated that Senate Republicans want lawmakers to cut costs and reduce debt at auto companies—it's the automakers themselves who Republicans want to do the cost-cutting—and misstated the cost of state road and school programs awaiting federal cash. Those projects total an estimated $136 billion, not $136 million.
In the Dec. 5 "Explainer," Christopher Beam incorrectly stated that the hippocampus is responsible for short-term memory. It is believed to help convert short-term memory to long-term memory.
In a Dec. 5 "XX Factor" post, Marjorie Valbrun wrote that only two black female nonmodels besides Michelle Obama had ever appeared on the cover of Vogue: Oprah Winfrey and Jennifer Hudson. The post neglected to mention Marion Jones, who appeared on the January 2001 Vogue cover.
If you believe you have found an inaccuracy in a Slate story, please send an e-mail to corrections@slate.com, and we will investigate. General comments should be posted in "The Fray," our reader discussion forum.
We're now exactly 10 years into cable's ownership of the phrase "quality TV." HBO grabbed the mantle from all those locationy network titles—Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, NYPD Blue—and hung it on The Sopranos on Sunday, Jan. 10, 1999, at 9 p.m. Before long, discerning viewers had developed a taste for compromised heroes—and a short attention span when it came to virtuous ones.
Showtime's Dexter, which finishes its third season on Sunday, inherits cable TV's complex-hero tradition and takes it a step further. If Sopranos-generation cable put us in moral check, Dexter pushes us to checkmate. The Sopranos got us to relate to a mobster, The Wire to enlightened drug-dealers and rogue cops; but Dexter somehow gets us rooting for a full-on serial killer—and hoping he never gets caught.
You can't help but recoil from Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall), a stone-cold killer who plastic-wraps his murder rooms with the mechanical precision of a die-cutter. But you can't help but love him, too. He may be a serial killer, but he's a rational serial killer, one with a strict code: He only goes after killers who've slipped through the justice system.
The show thus challenges our consciences in the biggest way possible. In the stunning rape episode of The Sopranos, we felt the temptation to have Tony Soprano kill Dr. Melfi's unfairly freed rapist, but only for a moment. Ultimately, we were relieved that Melfi didn't turn to Tony to enact vigilante justice. Dexter pushes us through such qualms every week. You cheer Dexter the murderer as he stalks his prey—and outwits anyone who gets in his way—as you might cheer Batman swooping into action. Except unlike Batman, Dexter never spares the villain or broods over the morality of vigilantism. No bleeding heart, he.
The basics: The boyishly handsome Dexter Morgan is a blood-spatter analyst at the Miami Police Department, which is where he catches the scent of his victims. To his sister, a high-strung cop named Debra (Jennifer Carpenter), and to his blandly sweet fiance, Rita (Julie Benz), he is an odd but lovable outsider. To his colleagues, he's the reserved Average Joe who brings them donuts in the morning.
Everyone would be shocked to discover that the Clark Kent-like Dexter seethes with murderous rage, that he controls his violent animal instincts just enough to direct them against his victims. He looks so normal. But the viewer gets to know Dexter better than anyone, through his intimate voice-overs, delivered in the wry but stiff monotone of a noir detective. ("I'm not in the business of giving life," he mumbles upon learning that Rita is pregnant.) Since the show's 2006 premiere, he has revealed his history to us, and it has accumulated the mythic qualities of a superhero's back story: An early-childhood parental trauma, the urge to combat evildoers, a secret identity. The 3-year-old Dexter saw his mother carved up with a chainsaw and was locked in a storage container for days with her body. His adoptive father, an astute cop named Harry Morgan, knew that Dexter would be compelled to kill his mother's murderer over and over again. So Harry taught Dexter to channel his blood lust into cleaning up the streets of Miami.
The key to the show's power is that Dexter is so curiously appealing—and a big part of that appeal is thanks to the superb work of Michael C. Hall. Hall's affectless, Mr. Spock-ish performance is the opposite of Ian McShane as Al Swearingen in Deadwood or Denis Leary as Tommy Gavin in Rescue Me, who deliver unedited rants with the volume turned up. Dexter is all interior self-scrutiny, but thanks to Hall, you never for a second feel like he's merely a construct built to upend our moral balance. There's something profoundly sympathetic about this guy as he works to seem "ordinary," like an awkward teen trying to fit in. He speaks to the nerd in all of us, that part of ourselves that is always wary of being seen as an outsider or a fraud.
Every season, the writers—including Jeff Lindsay, author of the books on which the show is based—emphasize Dexter's merits by throwing him in with someone who's far more dangerous than he is. Within the tightly plotted seasonlong arcs, the writers distort the spectrum of good and evil. In Season 1, the heavy was the Ice Truck Killer, who turned out to be someone very close to Dexter. In Season 2, it was Dexter's lover, Lila (the dynamic Jaime Murray), a borderline with a fire fixation. And this season, it has been blood-thirsty D.A. Miguel Prado, played with unexpected angst by the usually more heroic Jimmy Smits. None of these people operates with a code like Dexter's, and, inevitably, he contrasts favorably to them.
Also casting Dexter in a positive light is Deb, played by Carpenter with winning foul-mouthed emotionality. (For Deb, "dildo" is a term of endearment.) She has been ridiculously sloppy in her romantic adventures: With the Ice Truck Killer, with her boss, and, this season, with an informant. She's a dear mess. Sure, Dexter is terribly bottled up, but, well, Debra. She makes Dexter's robotically deliberate approach to life seem rather creditable.
Does all this make Dexter sound like a one-note morality play? Oh no, it's not. It's one of TV's very best times. I've pushed it on many a friend looking for the next chapter in smart TV, and few have complained. There's always the initial balk—a show about a vigilante killer?—but the reality of watching Dexter is much more dimensional, suspenseful, and comic than its premise might suggest. On top of everything, Dexter is a black comedy. "I'm sorry," Dexter said to the relative of a dead man earlier this season. "That I killed him," he adds in a voice-over. Dexter is also secretly a ham.
Then there is the visual wit of Dexter, beginning with the amusing title sequence, a chronicle of Dexter's morning that's a small masterpiece of sociopathic insinuation set to a warped merry-go-round song. As Dexter mundanely shaves, wraps dental floss around his fingers, grinds coffee beans, and carves some meat, you can't help but see in his actions the meticulousness of his killing techniques. The show generally has an alluring Miami-noir haze over it, but when Dexter gets his victim on a gurney in some vacant room in the middle of nowhere and pulls out his knife, the motif becomes Abstract Expressionist—except Dexter spatters with blood. Dexter's set designers are among TV's most audacious.
And so the DVDs of two seasons of Dexter, and On Demand access to a third, await you. Dexter Morgan may be lying to everyone he knows, and he may be breaking the laws of humankind, but still: There will be a special jail in heaven for him and, in the meantime, a special place in the TV canon for his show.
Wednesday, Dec. 10, 2008
Politics: What Exactly Did Blagojevich Do?
Chief political correspondent John Dickerson discusses the various people involved the Illinois governor's pay-for-play scheme. We also explore President-elect Barack Obama's relationship with Blagojevich. (Listen to the segment.)
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Get "Dear Prudence" delivered to your inbox each week; click here to sign up. Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com. (Questions may be edited.)
Dear Prudence,
I have been happily married for several years, and we are expecting our first child. The only problem is that my husband is a cross-dresser. This is a fetish that I know he could never give up. We keep this behind closed doors so as not to alienate friends and family and to keep his work associates from finding out (if they did, he could lose his job). Our question is how do we incorporate this facet of our life with a new child? If we keep it hidden, our child will most likely find out someday—when mom is doing the wash for two dress sizes—and then feel betrayed and hurt. If we keep on as we are, then our child will likely tell someone that daddy wears dresses, and it wouldn't be fair to burden anyone with that secret. What is the best thing for us to do?
—Daddy in Dresses
Dear Daddy in Dresses,
I know that when you're expecting, you feel a need to get everything perfect for your new addition, but you're getting way ahead of yourself if you think you should dress a teddy bear in a peignoir so you can start explaining to the baby that, just like Teddy, Daddy likes to wear pretty ladies' clothes. Let's say you two were into bondage and had a closetful of whips and chains. I would advise you to keep the closet secured and get a heavy-duty lock for the bedroom door, rather than try to "incorporate this facet" of your life with your child by teaching your toddler how to snap Daddy into handcuffs for Mommy. If your husband lounges around at home every night in a bustier, palazzo pants, and a wig, then I'm voting for repression. It's time for your husband to limit his dressing up to times when he's not with the baby. As your child gets older and mobile, your husband will have to take more steps to separate his fetish from your family life. Perhaps he will need to check into a motel occasionally when he just can't stifle the need to dress up as Madonna. Your husband has to live with this compulsion, but surely you both want to do your best to keep your child from growing up amid such sexual confusion. You feel this aspect of your private lives is none of your family's business, or your husband's colleagues', and that is an excellent attitude to maintain with your child.
—Prudie
Dear Prudence Video: Difficult Dinner Guest
Dear Prudence,
My dear, highly educated husband has written a book. While he has many talents, writing isn't among them. He paid someone to edit the book, which helped it somewhat, but it's still awful. I've gone through it as well and cleaned it up the best I could without completely rewriting it. The problem is my attitude—I don't feel it's my place to crush my husband's dream but find it hard to just sit there with a smile on my face while he goes on and on about how life will change when he's a best-selling author. It's not going to happen. I realize that at one point a publisher (or a stack of rejection letters) will make the point without me doing so, but I'm not quite sure how to act now. I love him and want to be supportive of him following his dreams, but I don't want him to waste his time. Do I stand by and lie, or break the news to him somehow?
—Vanity Press
Dear Vanity,
Watch out, Malcolm Gladwell, you're about to be knocked off the top of the best-seller list by Tales of an Actuarial: Stochastic Models and Distribution Parameters. You say you don't want your husband to waste his time, but he's already written the thing, and if it's as bad as you say, the time's already been wasted. But consider that while almost everyone thinks they can write a book (if you go to a bookstore you will think everyone has written a book), most people never actually do it, so give your guy credit for sitting down and putting his dream—his dreary, eye-glazing dream—on paper. I can't tell if your husband's fantasies are sweetly pathetic or disturbingly delusional. But it says something odd about the state of your marriage that you could go so far as to edit this manuscript without your husband noticing you shared Ambrose Bierce's sentiment: "The covers of this book are too far apart." You don't need to crush your husband—you're right, the marketplace will take care of that task—but you should be honest. The next time he starts talking about what he's going to say to Meredith Vieira when she's interviewing him on the Today show, you need to convey that the chances of anyone's book becoming a best-seller are vanishingly small, and his are less than that.
—Prudie
Dear Prudie,
I come from a small, close-knit family. About two months ago, my sister's brother-in-law did something very freakish. I was stopping by to pick up some CDs to install on my new computer, and when I arrived, I saw him peek out the window before he opened the door. To my surprise, disgust, and embarrassment, he was standing there in his underwear. He went to get the CDs and handed them to me while still in his underwear. After I left, he called and asked if I wanted to go for a ride with him on his motorcycle. I refused and have not spoken to or seen him since. We are now planning Christmas dinner at my sister's house, and the in-laws are joining us. This would be very awkward for me and my fiance, who knows about the events. I would rather not attend and then visit my sister's house after they leave. But my sister's husband says that I should just get over it and attend. He feels that what happened wasn't all that bad. But I do and would rather not see this fellow in the near future. Am I overreacting?
—Avoiding the In-laws
Dear Avoiding,
Maybe your sister's brother-in-law was auditioning for a spot in the Guitar Hero commercial. OK, probably not. But don't let this jerk's appearance in his skivvies keep you and your fiance from enjoying your Christmas. (I love the touch of him calling and asking you to ride his "motorcycle.") You can be appropriately icy to him, and if he doesn't get the message, tell him something to the effect that if he ever tries to make a pass at you again, you and your fiance will see that he stars in a version of the "Nutcracker Suite."
—Prudie
Dear Prudence,
We spend every Thanksgiving with my in-laws and my husband's extended family. I genuinely enjoy these people, but there is something about the enforced three-day visits that drives me nuts. This year, after a very long day where I didn't get enough sleep, I lost it and blew up in front of the group. Most of the grown-ups have told me not to worry. My problem is the niece who apparently thinks I'm mad at her or don't like her. I can't quite bring myself to apologize to her because she's right—I'm not crazy about her. Over the years she's been rude to my daughter, who adores her, and awful to everyone else, including her parents. I know I should be the grown-up and apologize, but I can't quite bring myself to do this. Should I write to her and let her know I was in the wrong and was acting childishly?
—Lost It
Dear Lost It,
Sending a note of apology will be a great moral lesson for your niece and a psychological relief for you. She surely has picked up that you don't like her. Unless she has a deep-set personality disorder, in some part of that fevered teenage brain she knows she is unpleasant to be around. It's understandable that you don't want to apologize to this brat, but that's part of why you should. Many an intolerable teen has become a lovely adult. (Just as many have gone on to become intolerable adults.) Your niece may get the note and say, "Why should I accept this lame apology?" But maybe there will be a small glimmer of realization in her that when you behave badly you can repair it by owning up and trying to make things right. Your gracious gesture will speak more powerfully than any of the dozens of lectures on how to conduct herself she's surely heard from the exasperated adults in her life.
—Prudie
Photograph of Prudie by Teresa Castracane.
The wiretapped conversations recounted in the criminal complaint (PDF) filed against Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich on Tuesday include several references to Barack Obama, but prosecutors have apparently taken the measure of replacing his name with the phrase "[President-Elect]." (The complaint similarly referred to Sam Zell as "Tribune Owner.") Since everyone knows that Obama is the president-elect, what's the point?
For the sake of consistency. Randall Samborn, an assistant U.S. attorney who serves as spokesman for U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald's office, declined to discuss the logic behind the specific language in the affidavit. But prosecutors are usually hesitant to name people who are not defendants within charging documents, except when absolutely necessary. (As a result, the cast of characters in the charging document includes not only "President-Elect" and "Tribune Owner," but also "Sports Consultant," "Highway Contractor 1," and "Deputy Governor A.") In a press conference on Tuesday, Fitzgerald—who, by the Explainer's count, referenced Obama by name twice at the podium—tried to emphasize that the complaint against Blagojevich and his chief of staff should not be used to "cast aspersions" on the unnamed people it made reference to. "We make no charges about any of the other people who are referenced in the complaint, most not by name," Fitzgerald explained.
The U.S. Attorney's Manual—which lays out the standards prosecutors should follow—does not clearly specify how people should be described in criminal complaints when they haven't been accused of wrongdoing. But many prosecutors follow the same rules spelled out for people who may have done something wrong but aren't being charged—think Client 9 in the case against the Emperor's Club. (These are known as "unindicted co-conspirators" or "uncharged third-party wrongdoers.") The manual says that in all public filings, prosecutors should "remain sensitive to the privacy and reputation interests of uncharged third-parties" and avoid naming names whenever possible. (Those rules stem in part from a case in which unindicted co-conspirators in a case following demonstrations at the 1972 Republican National Convention "complain[ed] of injury to their good names and reputations and impairment of their ability to obtain employment.") Even if the law at hand stipulates that the crime involves someone with a specific position—for example, bribing a congressman—the manual says, "[T]he third-party can usually be referred to generically ('a Member of Congress'), rather than identified specifically ('Senator Jones')."
The basic logic behind these standards is that while a criminal defendant can redeem his or her name in court, someone who is never charged doesn't have the same opportunity—yet their name will remain forever in publicly available (and sometimes Google-searchable) court documents. Still, as in the case of Tribune Owner or President-Elect, prosecutors often can't help but include enough information in a charging document to allow anyone reading it to easily figure out whom it is referencing.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Randall Eliason of the George Washington University Law School and Daniel Richman of Columbia Law School.
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A military jet crashed into a residential street in San Diego on Monday, killing at least three people and destroying three houses and four vehicles. The pilot, who had ejected himself from the cockpit, landed safely in a tree. An eyewitness wondered whether the Marine could instead have "turned [the plane] around and put it in the ocean." What's the protocol for using an ejection seat?
It depends on the condition of the aircraft. If the pilot is in control of the plane but determines that a crash is inevitable, he should head to the closest unpopulated area, reduce speed, and then eject. If, however, the pilot has lost control of the plane's basic functioning and can no longer alter its path (in military parlance, the aircraft is "not flying, but falling"), then he should prioritize escaping before impact. From news reports, it seems the incident in San Diego falls into the latter category, which would absolve the pilot of blame. While the Marine Corps provided some information on standard procedure, the Navy refused to comment, since there may be an investigation.
All Marine and Naval pilots receive training on in-flight emergency protocol as well as instructions on how actually to launch themselves out of a plane at the moment of crisis.
The pilot involved in this week's crash was flying an F/A-18 D, which uses a Navy Air Crew Common Ejection Seat. Before pulling the ejection handle on this device, the pilot should have his chin elevated 10 degrees, the back of his head pressed against the headrest, his elbows to his sides, shoulders and back pressed against the seat, and his heels on the floor. Once the chair activates, a motor located beneath the seat fires and launches the pilot vertically, about 400 feet. His parachute opens, and then his seat falls to the ground. From the time the pilot grips the handle to when the parachute unfurls takes about two seconds.
The first ejection seats, powered by compressed air, were developed by the Germans during World War II. In January 1942, a man named Helmut Schenck escaped from his iced-up plane using an ejection seat, marking the first known emergency ejection. Prior to the 1940s, the only way to escape a plane was to jump out the door with a parachute, an especially difficult process in the case of injury.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks 2nd Lt. Joshua Diddams of the Marine Corps, Steven Levin of Levin and Perconti, and Andrew J. Martin of Martin-Baker.
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Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was arrested Tuesday morning after an investigation revealed that he had attempted to sell off the Illinois Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama. Blagojevich remains the governor despite his arrest—and that means he still gets to choose the next senator, right?
Not necessarily. Illinois state code doesn't require its legislature to approve the governor's pick to fill a vacant Senate seat, nor does it specify a deadline for the appointment. The law merely states that a new senator can't be named until the outgoing one steps down. (Obama took that formal step on Nov. 16.) That means that if Blagojevich acts quickly enough, he could, in theory, make an unfettered appointment of any of the candidates he was caught discussing (PDF)—or anyone else who is constitutionally qualified for the office.
But there are several ways in which the governor could be thwarted. The Illinois General Assembly could pass a bill that overturns the existing law and calls for a special election to fill the Senate seat. (The state Senate has already been reconvened for that purpose.) Even if the bill cleared both state Assemblies, however, it would still need a signature from Blagojevich, who would have 60 days to make his decision. A decision to veto could be overturned by a three-fifths majority in both the upper and lower houses. (Blagojevich is a Democrat, and Democrats have a majority in the state assembly. But this vote probably wouldn't split neatly along party lines.)
State Assembly leaders are already discussing another way to stop Blagojevich—impeachment. If the governor were formally convicted after the impeachment process, he'd lose the right to appoint the senator. That would take a simple majority in the state Assembly's lower chamber (the House), followed by a trial in the upper chamber (the Senate), presided over by the chief justice of the Illinois Supreme Court and requiring a two-thirds majority vote.
Blagojevich would also lose the right to make the appointment if he were convicted in federal court, but this isn't likely to happen anytime soon. His gubernatorial predecessor, for example, is currently serving a six-year sentence for corruption, but the trial and appeals dragged on for two years.
Even if Blagojevich makes his pick before any state-level action can be taken, the buck stops with the U.S. Constitution, which states: "Each House shall be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own members." That leaves the final say up to the discretion of the U.S. Senate in Washington. There have been five cases in which the Senate has refused to recognize an appointee (although all but one occurred before the 17th Amendment and the direct election of senators). In 1912, the Senate concluded that a 33-year-old businessman named William Lorimer had obtained his seat (three years earlier) through bribery and corruption. The would-be lawmaker hailed from the great state of Illinois.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Betty Koed of the U.S Senate Historical Office and Ken Menzel of the Illinois Board of Elections.
The CEOs of the Big Three automakers promised last week to limit themselves to $1 personal salaries in return for federal bailout money for their cash-strapped companies. If that happens, they would join a number of top executives—like Whole Foods' John Mackey, Apple's Steve Jobs, Yahoo's Jerry Yang, and Google's Eric Schmidt—who get paid a single dollar. Does a salary like that get paid out all at once, or do you get a check for 4 cents twice a month?
It's paid in a lump sum. Richard Kinder, the CEO of Kinder Morgan Energy Partners, gets his $1 dollar salary by check every January—that's 93 cents, after deducting for state and federal taxes. Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York also gets an annual check for 93 cents—with 6 cents going to Social Security and one penny to Medicare. (Bloomberg habitually leaves his check uncashed, however.)
A dollar a year—or about 1.9 cents a week—is way less than the federal minimum wage of $6.55 an hour. Does that mean these symbolic salaries are illegal? Technically, yes. According to the Fair Labor Standards act, executives can be exempted from hourly minimum wage laws (and the requirement that they be paid for working overtime) only if they get paid a salary valued at $455 or more a week. Being paid on a "salary basis" means you get compensated a predetermined amount, regardless of how many hours you work or how good your work is. So even though dollar-a-year CEOs tend to get other kinds of benefits—options, shares, Gulfstreams—those probably wouldn't count as compensation because their values aren't fixed.
To qualify as a minimum-wage-exempt executive, the person must also manage two or more full-time employees and have the power to make hiring and firing decisions. Executives who own at least 20 percent equity interest in the company are exempt as well. (For more information on white-collar exemptions to minimum wage law, see this PowerPoint presentation from the Department of Labor.)
Last week in The Big Money, Karim Bardeesy explained why the first crop of "dollar-a-year men"—company execs who joined the nation's war effort during World War I—were paid a nominal fee: At the time, it was illegal to work for the government for free. It still is—U.S. Code Title 31, Section 1342 prohibits any officer of the United States government from accepting voluntary services, and Comptroller General decision 201528 (PDF) forbids federal agencies from doing the same. The only exception is in the case of emergencies.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Alexander Cwirko-Godycki of Equilar, Farrell Sklerov of the New York City Mayor's Office, Loren Smith of the U.S. Department of Labor, and Emily Thompson of Kinder Morgan Energy Partners.
The obvious is sometimes the most difficult thing to discern, and few things are more amusing than the efforts of our journals of record to keep "open" minds about the self-evident, and thus to create mysteries when the real task of reportage is to dispel them. An all-time achiever in this category is Fernanda Santos of the New York Times, who managed to write from Bombay on Nov. 27 that the Chabad Jewish center in that city was "an unlikely target of the terrorist gunmen who unleashed a series of bloody coordinated attacks at locations in and around Mumbai's commercial center." Continuing to keep her brow heavily furrowed with the wrinkles of doubt and uncertainty, Santos went on to say that "[i]t is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene."
This same puzzled expression is currently being widely worn on the faces of all those who wonder if Pakistan is implicated in the "bloody coordinated" assault on the heart of Bombay. To get an additional if oblique perspective on this riddle that is an enigma wrapped inside a mystery, take a look at Joshua Hammer's excellent essay in the current Atlantic. The question in its title—"[Is Syria] Getting Away With Murder?"—is at least asked only at the beginning of the article and not at the end of it.
Here are the known facts: If you are a Lebanese politician or journalist or public figure, and you criticize the role played by the government of Syria in your country's internal affairs, your car will explode when you turn the ignition key, or you will be ambushed and shot or blown up by a bomb or land mine as you drive through the streets of Beirut or along the roads that lead to the mountains. The explosives and weapons used, and the skilled tactics employed, will often be reminiscent of the sort of resources available only to the secret police and army of a state machine. But I think in fairness I must stress that this is all that is known for sure. You criticize the Assad dictatorship, and either your vehicle detonates or your head is blown off. Over time, this has happened to a large and varied number of people, ranging from Sunni statesman Rafik Hariri to Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt to Communist spokesman George Hawi. One would not wish to be a "conspiracy theorist" and allege that there was any necessary connection between the criticisms in the first place and the deplorably terminal experiences in the second.
Hammer's article is good for a laugh in that it shows just how much trouble the international community will go to precisely in order not to implicate the Assad family in this string of unfortunate events. After all, does Damascus not hold the keys to peace in the region? Might not young Bashar Assad, who managed to become president after the peaceful death by natural causes of his father, become annoyed and petulant and even uncooperative if he were found to have been commissioning assassinations? Could the fabled "process" suffer if a finger of indictment were pointed at him? At the offices of the long-established and by now almost historic United Nations inquiry into the Hariri murder, feet are evidently being dragged because of considerations like these, and Hammer describes the resulting atmosphere very well.
In rather the same way, the international community is deciding to be, shall we say, nonjudgmental in the matter of Pakistani involvement in the Bombay unpleasantness. Everything from the cell phones to the training appears to be traceable to the aboveground surrogates of an ostensibly banned group known as Lashkar-i-Taiba, which practices what it preaches and preaches holy war against Hindus, as well as Jews, Christians, atheists, and other elements of the "impure." Lashkar is well-known to be a bastard child—and by no means a disowned one, either—of the Pakistani security services. But how inconvenient if this self-evident and obvious fact should have to be faced.
How inconvenient, for one thing, for the government of Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, a new and untried politician who may not exactly be in charge of his own country or of its armed forces but who nonetheless knows how to jingle those same keys of peace. How inconvenient, too, for all those who assume that the Afghan war is the "good" war when they see Pakistani army units being withdrawn from the Afghan frontier and deployed against democratic India (which has always been Pakistan's "real" enemy).
The Syrian and Pakistani situations are a great deal more similar than most people have any interest in pointing out. In both cases, there is a state within the state that exerts the real parallel power and possesses the reserve strength. In both cases, official "secularism" is a mask (as it also was with the Iraqi Baathists) for the state sponsorship of theocratic and cross-border gangster groups like Lashkar and Hezbollah. In both cases, an unknown quantity of nuclear assets are at the disposal of the official and banana republic state and also very probably of elements within the unofficial and criminal and terrorist one. (It is of huge and unremarked significance that Syria did not take the recent Israeli bombing of its hidden reactor to the United Nations or make any other public complaint.) Given these grim and worsening states of affairs, perhaps it is only small wonder that we take consolation in our illusions and in comforting doubts—such as the childlike wonder about whether Jews are deliberately targeted or just unlucky with time and place. This would all be vaguely funny if it wasn't headed straight toward our own streets.
Dear Dorie and David,
Thank you both for joining me—I'm really looking forward to mulling over the state of the cookie with such inspiring bakers and writers. It is, of course, cookie season. Most of the food glossies have an elaborate cookie section in their December issues, and with this year's economic news, I suspect many people will make their holiday gifts rather than buying them. Also, Anita Chu's sweet little Field Guide to Cookies just came out. Organized by cookie taxonomy, it's a bit like a bird-identification book. Because the guide is so catholic, including such borderline species as gougères (cheese puffs), baklava, and Algerian almond tarts, it opens up a rather critical question (critical, at least, for those of us devoted to making life sweeter): Just what is a cookie, anyway?
It's actually quite hard to define a cookie when you get down to it. The adjective "sweet" usually comes to mind, but I was eating a Dutch windmill cookie the other day and was surprised at how savory it was—it could easily have been served with cheese. Chu has a great recipe for TV snacks, which are buttery little almond haystacks livened up with sea salt. Butter is a fairly universal cookie ingredient but not an essential one, either. Macarons and macaroons and meringues and the like are made with little or none of it. In the end, I suppose my definition of a cookie has something to do with portability and with guilty pleasure (although this diet doctor asserts that his high-protein cookies can help you get slim). Dorie and David—what makes a cookie a cookie for you?
A related question: What is it that makes a cookie American? You both spend a lot of time in Paris, so I'm hoping you'll share your expatriate perspective. When I think of an American cookie, I think chunky—in terms of heft and girth but also chunky with sedimentary matter like chocolate chips, raisins, M&M's, brickle bits, etc. Our penchant for chunk likely has something to do with the fact that we like to customize—we want our cookies to be ours in some fundamental way. Even people who aren't all that inventive in the kitchen feel as if they can hot-rod a basic cookie recipe with mix-ins like dried cherries and butterscotch chips. These tweaks often work quite well—my mother-in-law's chocolate-chip cookies, for example, have Rice Krispies mixed in for a clandestine crunch factor. But sometimes cookies have so many added ingredients that they get a little frenetic. As a rule, I'd say two textured add-ins—plus an optional flavor tweak like orange zest or almond extract—is about all a cookie-eating brain can process.
The size issue is a complicated one. I grew up when "monster cookies" were all the rage—those 9-inch cookies that you could decorate with frosting for someone's birthday. They were really bar cookies, because they ended up quite cakey. Today's bakery cookies tend to be 4 or 5 inches across, which is great, in some ways, because they allow a distinct chewy texture to develop at the center of the cookie while the edges stay crisp. On the other hand, many bakery cookies are too big for a single snack. (This problem has become more acute since I became a mother: I hear a lot of "just one cookie" entreaties.) Of course the size issue cuts across industries—here in the states we like big cars, big muscles, big lattes—you name it.
While we're defining things, I feel I should declare my cookie allegiances, just so you know where I stand. I do love a good chocolate chip cookie—one with a little too much chocolate and preferably no walnuts. I am also fiendish about very spicy hermits and chocolate-truffle cookies—the ones with a cocoa-rich dough and big chunks of dark chocolate inside. I am entirely indifferent to most shortbreads and to ordinary sugar cookies (the crisp kind). I prefer my cookies to have a certain chew to them, unless they are very, very thin. On that note, I am always drawn to recipes for thin nut cookies made with brown sugar, which are almost impossible to find at bakeries. Maida Heatter, one of the great cookie gurus and a Floridian, is an advocate, and so I associate them in my mind with a certain shade of coral lipstick and the click of mahjongg tiles. And, finally, I rarely make very fussy cookies. I frequently resolve to bake sandwiched French macarons or homemade fig newtons, but ultimately I'm too impatient for cookies that have multiple steps. David and Dorie, you've probably baked every cookie there is, but which ones do you keep returning to? Are there cookies from your childhood that stir your nostalgia like you-know-who's madeleines? (Sorry, sorry. I swore I could make it through a cookie discussion without mentioning Proust, but I couldn't.)
Yours,
Sara
Dear Sara and Dorie,
Thanks, Sara, for getting us started. Well, here's my attempt to define the cookie: I'd say that it's handheld (although I've seen a few that tip the scales in the other direction); it's something meant to be consumed in a few bites; and it absolutely, positively has to be round. OK, I just made that last one up. Of course, you're right to point out that there are plenty of minisized treats and bars out there, like Anita Chu's Viennese almond crescents, which put my theory in question. Still, I would say that, for me, a good cookie should be big enough for at least three bites. Maybe Dorie can be the brain on that, and I'll be the brawn?
I agree with your explanation of why the American cookie is a chunky one. We Americans are "customizers." If you go to any restaurant in America, it's practically de rigueur to ask whether the chef can change everything on the menu. And we also take a "more is better" approach. Most folks feel a restaurant is a good value if there's a lot of food on the plate.
As for those thin, nutty cookies you mentioned, you probably won't find them at bakeries, since they're a lot of work to roll, cut, and bake. And they're fragile, meaning there's going to be a certain amount of breakage. (When I worked in a restaurant kitchen, I never had trouble getting rid of broken cookies, due to the steady swarm of hungry chefs milling around the pastry department at all hours.) Cookies take a lot of time, and anything fancy or small is going to be more costly and time-consuming to produce. That's probably the appeal of larger cookies in bakeries and with home cooks. On that note, I couldn't eat a 9-inch cookie, but if a cookie is good, I want more than one tiny bite of it. So a happy medium is appreciated.
Here in Paris, if I buy cookies, I prefer the kind that are difficult to make at home (especially if your kitchen is postage-stamp-sized, as is mine). I often go for macarons, which, like baguettes and croissants, are readily available and inexpensive. When I'm back in the States, if I'm in the supermarket, I can't resist Mallomars: big puffs of marshmallow sitting on a graham-cracker-like base, covered with the thinnest layer of dark chocolate. Those, and sugar wafers, remind me a lot of my childhood. But of all the store-bought cookies, HeyDays were the best—long wafers covered with caramel and dark chocolate, completely blanketed with toasted nuts. Perhaps they disappeared from the marketplace since they fell in that dubious area between cookie and candy bar: You're entitled to eat a bag of cookies, but few folks feel comfortable plowing through a bag of candy bars!
Hi, Sara and David,
Thanks for giving me so much to think about. It's funny: I've never considered the definition of a cookie; I always figured I'd know one when I saw one. And since I love cookies immoderately, I say three cheers for Anita Chu for casting the net wide and including treats like profiteroles (little cream puffs filled with ice cream) and those Algerian almond tarts in her wonderful new Field Guide to Cookies. Of course, she couldn't get away with that in France, where a pastry chef's taxonomy of sweets is so precise: Profiteroles are classified as dessert, tarts are pastries, and bunches more of her sweets wouldn't qualify as cookies (which the French call gateaux secs), either.
Fun probably wouldn't be part of a scholarly definition of the cookie in any country, but I think one reason cookies are such a beloved part of the American culinary tradition is that you eat them with your fingers. They are, as both of you said, handheld or portable—when you've got to grab a fork to munch on a sweet, I think you've left cookiedom—and what's better than playing with your food?
David mentioned that you should be able to polish off a cookie in three bites. I'd add that cookies shouldn't be more than a bite larger. I really dislike what Sara calls "monster cookies." And don't get me started about those cookies that tip the scales at about 6 ounces and are almost raw in the center. In a perfect cookie world, cookies would be 3 inches around, crisp close to the edges, and just a little chewy in the center (just the way you like them, Sara). And they'd be fully baked. Again, not really a defining characteristic, but one I think makes a huge difference in the taste department—when you bake a cookie until it's truly golden, you get great caramel flavor from both the sugar and the butter. Cookies in this baker's paradise would not, however, have to be round! Sorry, David (even if you did only just make the point up). Limit cookies to roundness, and you miss out on bar cookies, like brownies—and my guess is that none of us would want to miss out on those!
Finally, I'm with you both on chunkiness and "sedimentary matter"—as Sara so adorably called mix-ins like chips and nuts—being a big part of what makes a cookie all-American. Maybe it's because, as you said, we Americans like to customize everything (David, I giggled when you wrote about how everyone wants to make changes in restaurant dishes), but I think it comes back to fun and, for me, surprise. When you've got lots of stuff in a cookie, it means that no two bites will be the same—some will have more chips, some more nuts, some a raisin, some a bit of brickle—and that you'll be surprised from first taste to last. I think it's part of what keeps us coming back for more.
Of course, coming back for more has never been an issue for me, and while my favorite cookies are crisp and crunchy and chockablock with mix-ins, I've got soft spots in my heart for lots of different kinds of cookies. I'd be happy to have Sara's spurned shortbreads and sugar crisps, which I love for their simplicity and luxurious butteriness. I could go through a box of Mallomars, one of David's favorites, any day and would eat them just the way I did as a child: First, I'd poke a hole in the chocolate covering the marshmallow, then I'd nibble away at the chocolate until the marshmallow sat naked on the graham cracker and I'd be able to pop the marshmallow into my mouth, whole, and chase it with the cracker. I'm always content when there are madeleines (really cookie-size cakes), Linzer cookies (spice cookies sandwiched with jam), rugelach (cream-cheese dough crescents rolled around jam, nuts, and currants), any kind of gingerbread or molasses cookie, and just about any kind of chocolate cookie in reach. And I'd never refuse a beautiful Parisian macaron. (Among my favorites are Pierre Herme's rose, raspberry, and litchi macarons, known as Ispahan.) But, pushed up against the cookie jar to name my desert-island fave, I'd reach for the chocolate-chippers and hope they'd be 3 inches in diameter, thin, crisp, well-browned, and overloaded with very dark chocolate.
Hi Dorie, hi David—
Yum! This discussion makes me realize what a huge role nostalgia plays in shaping our appetites. David, you've made me nostalgic for something I never actually tasted—those near-candy bar HeyDays. Isn't it upsetting when a childhood taste disappears from the markets? I was sad to see that a whole cookie line, Mother's, recently went under—their peanut butter Gauchos knocked the pants off Nutter Butters.
As Dorie points out, there's something "fun" about cookies. And nostalgia is a critical part of that fun—we allow ourselves to relate to cookies as if we were still children, including ritualistic ways of consuming these treats. Dorie, for example, mentioned she has a particular way of munching a Mallomar. Currently, I'm doing my best to pass my cookie ticks onto my 4-year-old son. I've taught him to disassemble Oreos (or, in our house, Newman O's) before eating them, to decapitate animal crackers, and to go at the petit beurres corners first. (OK—now there's a plain butter cookie I do like—give me a couple glasses of wine, and I will confess to delighting in crumbly sables as well.)
The actual baking process is an important aspect of cookie joy, too. It's rarely acknowledged that cookies take a while to prepare. (In general, individual treats like dropped or rolled cookies, cupcakes, and tartlets take longer to bake than cakes or pies.) Bar cookies are quicker, of course. And I'm always a fan of keeping frozen dough in the freezer, ready to slice and bake should the need for warm cookies strike with some urgency. But there's no reason baking should always be fast and easy. Indeed, there is much virtue in a certain kind of inconvenience. I love all the observation and anticipation that comes with baking: watching for the moment when the butter is creamed or the whites are whipped; tasting and analyzing the dough, and reanalyzing it again and again; the careful rotation of pans in the oven and waiting for that golden moment when you can finally pull them out of the heat.
On that note, Dorie, you are so right about underbaked cookies. There's something about a pallid cookie that just seems so wasteful—you can't stop thinking about how good it could have been with a few more minutes in the oven. Another key cookie sin, and a common one in this country full of chunky cookies, is untoasted nuts. There's nothing like the bitter bite of raw walnut skin to knock you out of your cookie reverie, while a golden-brown one adds divine toastiness.
But let's set aside these eternal baking issues. What's out there in groceries or bakeries or cookbooks that's exciting you today? Recently, my home cooking has taken on a more healthful bent, and I have been intrigued by cookie recipes that use whole grains and alternative sweeteners. Heidi Swanson has some especially neat ideas, though I still wonder if a healthy cookie is an untenable paradox. More specifically, I'm glad to find that some recipes are once again calling for instant espresso powder. I'd never use the stuff to make a cup of coffee, but I've found that it adds a bizarrely compelling coffee-salt tang to cookies. Dorie, you've written previously about how much salt we use in baked goods these days—a trend that's made sweets a whole lot more interesting, I think. On that note, I was just reading about saltine panna cotta at momofuku ssam bar, which got me thinking about how I might use crushed saltines in a cookie recipe, perhaps as a crumb crust or even as a sort of macaroon base. (I am totally American in my affection for tinkering.) What is it that sends you both scampering off to test a recipe? And what does the cookie jar of tomorrow hold? Certainly, there will always be room for chocolate chippers, but are there any overlooked cookie traditions due for a revival, any gizmo developments that could compete with the Silpat in cutting-edge cookie technology?
Yours,
Sara
GDANSK, Poland—The president of the European Commission was there; so was Iranian activist Shirin Ebadi and former South African President F.W. de Klerk, both recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize. A whole gaggle of prime ministers showed up, keen to discuss peace, the financial crisis, and, above all, a new pact on climate change; some Cuban dissidents even sent a letter that was read aloud onstage.
A lot of people, in other words, traveled to cold, rainy Gdansk this weekend, eager to attend a conference marking the 25th anniversary of the day Lech Walesa—Solidarity activist, anti-Communist trade union leader, and former Polish president—won the Nobel Peace Prize. And yet—though presidents, prime ministers, and Nobel laureates were in attendance, though vital negotiations went on in the corridors, three names led all the news stories: the Dalai Lama, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and Walesa himself.
Nor, for once, was this news coverage slanted. Despite the plethora of distinguished guests, those were indeed the three stars everyone came to see. I happened to be present when Sarkozy made his one public appearance, giving what sounded like a campaign speech, hugely flattering to Poles in general and Walesa in particular. ("Democracy exists thanks to you and to people like you!") I was thus able to observe that, when the French president left the room, a large crowd of people got up and followed him out the door. As a result, the next speakers—yet another Nobel laureate and a famous economic reformer among them—found themselves talking to a half-empty conference hall, where the previously electric atmosphere had somehow fallen flat.
Part of the explanation for this phenomenon lies in the causes and institutions that the three stars represent. Though Walesa is a rather controversial figure in Poland—his years as president aren't recalled with much nostalgia, for example, and it's been a while since he has made a stirring speech—outside Poland, none of that matters. Following the death of Pope John Paul II, he is, simply, the greatest living symbol of the collapse of communism, the embodiment of the idea that ordinary people—electricians, shipyard workers—can bring down dictatorships. In the contemporary world, the Dalai Lama plays a similar role. He, too, symbolizes defiance—of the Chinese occupation and cultural destruction of Tibet—and he, too, embodies the idea that authoritarianism and violence can be fought with faith and pacifism.
People come to hear the Dalai Lama, like Walesa, not merely because of what he will say, but because of what he represents. By the same token, people come to hear Sarkozy not necessarily because of what he will say but because of who he is: the president of France, the leader of what remains one of the most influential nations in Europe, itself the inheritor of a long tradition of revolutionary democracy.
And yet—there are other factors at play here, too. I have met North Korean refugees who are at least as brave as the Dalai Lama, and there were anti-Communist dissidents at least as effective as Walesa, yet TV cameras do not follow them from place to place. Equally, there are other European leaders—Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain comes to mind—who represent rich democratic traditions, and yet I don't think photographers would have been quite as powerfully drawn to them.
The fact is that, aside from what they represent, these three men share something else rather important: an indefinable form of charisma, a gift for publicity, and an intuitive understanding of what will look good in a photograph. Sarkozy wanted his picture taken with the Dalai Lama partly because he wanted to defy the Chinese regime's occupation of Tibet and partly because the Dalai Lama, with his monk's robes, has an almost mystical appeal. The Dalai Lama wanted his picture taken with Sarkozy partly because meetings with any foreign leaders help him put pressure on the Chinese government but also because a photograph with the glamorous Sarkozy—because he wears shoes with heels, because he is married to Carla Bruni—is worth more than most.
And both of them wanted to meet Walesa, because a picture with Walesa is worth more than a picture with most other Nobel laureates, too. Why? Because Walesa is an electrician, because he wears a trademark mustache, because he is given to earthy sayings and mixed metaphors. And because when he leaves the room—as when the Dalai Lama leaves the room or when Sarkozy leaves the room—something in the atmosphere, something indefinable, goes flat. "Moral authority," or any authority, is something people earn, thanks to their achievements and the quality of their ideas—and it is something they can sustain only if they know how to advertise themselves.
Dear N'Gai, Seth, and Stephen,
I'm honored to welcome you—three of the smartest video game writers in the country and in Blogistan—back for Slate's second Gaming Club, the magazine's now-annual look at the year in games. As someone who spent 2008 on hiatus from formal game criticism, I'm especially grateful to be invited back inside the sacristy. I hope to act as an engaged moderator of this year's discussion, but I'm probably too much of a blowhard to pull that off and will instead end up posing as the Anton Ego of the Xbox.
Let me start off by picking a fight. Over at MTV's Multiplayer, Stephen has already asserted that 2008 is the best year in gaming history, even better than 2007 (my pick for Best Year Evuh!!!) and 2001 (his other contender).
Really? I guess by the standard you establish—"a 12 month period that was more well-balanced with good games than any January to December stretch that had come before"—you might be right, but I think that's the wrong standard. Were there any games this year that rank with Bioshock and Portal, my two favorite games from 2007? Both of those instantly ascended to the canon, the list of games that all gamers must at least be familiar with, even if they haven't played them all—like Space Invaders and Zork and Super Mario Bros. and SimCity and Myst and Doom and Deus Ex and Halo and whatever else. Everyone knew this in December. There are no games like that this year. Something like Grand Theft Auto IV is an astonishing accomplishment, but I think it's in a lower, if still very esteemed, tier. (Though I'm ready to be persuaded otherwise. And I'm not saying, yet, that GTA IV was the best game of 2008. I still haven't rendered that judgment.) The greatest year in gaming history should have one or two revelatory titles, not an abundance (a welcome abundance, mind you) of Assassin's Creeds—games that are very good but also flawed and unlikely to be added to the medium's canon.
Put me down instead, then, with Sean Sands of Gamers With Jobs, who summed up the year a couple weeks ago as a disappointment: "I appreciate a fun game as much as the next guy, and this year has been positively choked with safe bets and easy playtime. I walk away from 2008 with some nice memories of time spent happily indulging my pastime, but few moments of gaming that challenged me on anything but a functional and mechanical level."
While I agree wholeheartedly with that, I should add the caveat that I'm rendering an incomplete judgment. I've only nibbled Fallout 3 ("Mad Max: Beyond Oblivion"). I'm still playing Fable 2. I probably gave up on No More Heroes too quickly. I pretty much sampled Spore. I've only played the demos of Mirror's Edge and Left 4 Dead. (Oh Valve, I promise to make that pilgrimage soon.) I haven't touched LittleBigPlanet or World of Goo. (I'll get there, I'll get there.) Et cetera.
But I think I've tasted enough of these and other games to feel comfortable in my verdict. There were four games this year that grabbed me by the thumbs and never let go: Grand Theft Auto IV, Gears of War 2, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, and Far Cry 2 (still grabbing me, at least). One of them is a failed masterpiece. One is exactly what it aims to be. One would merely be a pretty good PlayStation 2 game, but it's also the fourth-best (maybe better!) Star Wars movie ever made. And one—and this is admittedly a midgame judgment—is an "open-world shooter" set in postcolonial Africa that has me crossing my fingers that it's as good as it seems to be so far.
This is not necessarily my list of the year's four best games, though it might be by the time this week is over. But all four of them created places that I enjoyed living in for long periods of time. As a gamer, I can take months to plow through a title that I would have completed in a week if I were reviewing it for publication. I need games that are more than a nice spot to spend a long weekend. I want to be able to move there.
Now, go ahead, berate me for liking The Force Unleashed. I can take it.
One thing I've been wondering: Is it a good sign or a bad sign for the medium that this year's crop of games has produced such a wide divergence of opinion? Michael "the Brainy Gamer" Abbott thinks Fable 2 is perhaps "the most seductive game world ever created." Chris Dahlen thinks Fallout 3 "balances—and sometimes betters—the approaches of other videogame masterpieces: the retro immersion of 'BioShock,' the paranoia of 'Portal,' the exploration of 'Oblivion' and the seamless storytelling of 'Half-Life 2.' " The pseudonymous "Iroquois Pliskin" says GTA IV is "a classic, and stands head and shoulders above its previous iterations and nearly every other game released this year."
Those are three more of the smartest people writing about games. They each think their Game of the Year is a new addition to the canon. Maybe they're right. Or, more likely, this was a year of just-misses, which is why there's an absence of consensus.
Some more questions:
Is the PlayStation 3 now a system that a serious gamer really should own? Put economic considerations aside, as I mean this not as a financial question but as a gaming one. With Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots and LittleBigPlanet being released this year, am I missing crucial developments for the gaming connoisseur by abstaining from buying a third console?
Is the Wii a commercial success but a critical flop?
Should I have played Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist?
And what did we think of Braid?
Chris
Click here to read the next entry.
Dear N'Gai, Seth, and Chris,
Let's start with a correction.
I did not write that 2008 was the best year in gaming history. I wrote that it was the most well-balanced year in games.
You've got a fine balance when you get:
I didn't hear much grumbling from gamers of any kind in 2008, except for hardcore Nintendo fans, who felt abandoned for about the past three months. (Yes, gamers are the kind of people who want satisfaction now!)
This was the year that Sony released interactive art for the PlayStation 3. Microsoft promoted a season of new small downloadable Xbox 360 games that were some of the best games of the year. And Nintendo put out a fantastic Scuba-diving simulator that let me virtually swim with sea turtles and whales.
So I cannot complain about gaming in 2008.
Chris, the four games you cited were all quite good. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is a little bit of the weak link there, but it's quite a good-looking weak link. And don't feel bad about liking it. Time's Lev Grossman thought it was better than Metal Gear Solid 4, Fable II, and Fallout 3, those three games you say other people have cited as their Game of the Year.
Grand Theft Auto IV as Game of the Year? Maybe. If you don't mind that Rockstar made my home state of New Jersey the setting for the game's bland final third. I thought the game lost its zip after its first 20 hours. It stopped developing the morally compromised immigrant protagonist Niko Bellic, turning him into just another avatar for virtual homicide and costing the game its potential as a "classic."
Fallout 3 as Game of the Year? Possibly. I've still played only four hours of this game, which puts me about 46 hours behind my MTV colleague Patrick Klepek, who likes it quite a lot.
Fable II as Game of the Year? Getting warmer. In the reverse order of what happens in GTA IV, this game begins with a poorly defined character in an uninteresting medieval European fantasy world but winds up with you controlling a man or woman who is literally the shape of the choices you've made in the game. All that celery he ate made my guy skinny; his ample scars came because he was a clumsy swordsman; his youthful visage remained, because I chose not to sacrifice his looks when given the alternate option to sacrifice a maiden to the gods instead. Ten years from now, the world will remember Nov. 4, 2008, as the day America elected its first black president. I'll also remember that day, I'm sure, as the day when I was first emotionally affected by a video game. Pausing my DVR just after California was called for Obama, I had to go back to Fable II to make the game's final moral decision, a triple-optioned Sophie's choice involving money, loved ones, and community that would affect characters I'd interacted with for weeks. I'm still haunted by the pick I made. Obama's victory speech later that night distracted me from the unease that my final actions had put in my heart, but as I went to bed, with cheers still echoing down the Brooklyn streets near my apartment, I was haunted by the wonderful emotional pain I finally felt from a video game.
Yeah, that's my frontrunner for Game of the Year.
Chris, to answer your questions:
1) A serious gamer should own every console. Costs notwithstanding, to miss the PS3 is to miss not just LittleBigPlanet and Metal Gear Solid 4 but the burst of creativity that's on the PlayStation Network, small- and medium-sized games that are more unusual than most of what you can buy at the average game shop.
2) The Wii is a critical flop only to the critics who don't like having fun with a group of people gathered around their TV. What's more fun at parties than the Wii or arguing whether the auto companies should be bailed out? Rock Band and Guitar Hero? But they're on Wii, too.
3) I haven't played Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist, but I did play Braid. How can you not love a game that has a level in which time moves forward when you walk to the right, time moves backward when you walk to the left, and time stands still when you idle?
Hey, can we all agree about one thing that was a bit of a downer this year—what happened to handheld gaming? The burst of iPhone games notwithstanding, the creative excitement around the Nintendo DS and PlayStation Portable seemed to diminish significantly in 2008.
—Stephen
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Seth, Chris, and Stephen,
I'd say that it feels good to be back, but like last year, I'm feeling awkward and uncomfortable about having to sum up what this arbitrary unit of time means for video games. I'm in no rush to compile a top 10 list, to reduce the experiences I've had over the previous 12 months to A-is-better-than-B-but-not-as-good-as-C. Chris, you seem pretty comfortable in your assessment that 2007 was a better year for games than 2008. Stephen, you're insisting that 2008 was better balanced than 2007. But so much of this is by accident rather than by design.
Last year would have been more awesome and less balanced if the Brothers Four—Grand Theft Auto IV and Metal Gear Solid 4—hadn't missed their original holiday 2007 release dates. So? Did 2008 become less awesome but more balanced when those lazybones at Rockstar North failed to complete their planned expansion pack, The Lost and Damned, for this holiday? Maybe. But I don't know how meaningful those standards are beyond this brief moment in time, the week in December when we gather around our computers and fire off e-mails to one another about the year that just went by.
Last year, I said that one of my most important criteria for judging games was obsession. And on a game-by-game basis, 2008 scratched that itch just as much as 2007 did. Chris, I'd argue that the role-playing game Fallout 3 is easily as good as BioShock … but maybe that's because I'm an avowed RPG-hater who naturally skipped Bethesda Softworks' previously acclaimed hit, Oblivion. So even as I surprised myself by falling so hard for the bleak immersiveness of Fallout 3's stuck-in-the-'50s post-apocalyptic world, I had no way of telling whether it was just Oblivion in Mad Max fetish gear or something more. (Then again, I've never played BioShock's spiritual predecessors System Shock or System Shock 2; if I had, would BioShock have seemed quite as impressive?)
Even though I grew up playing Dungeons & Dragons and other pen-and-paper role-playing games, I don't like playing their computer and video-game counterparts. I hate the presentation of dialogue trees. I don't like assigning points to my character's attributes. I prefer action to behind-the-scenes d20 dice rolls. I dislike managing a party. Fallout 3 doesn't overcome all of my RPG pet peeves, though the focus on solo play (i.e., sans A.I. buddies) and the credible first-person-shooter mechanics helped tremendously. Still, I think it was the seamless unity of its presentation—character creation at the moment of childbirth; stat management first via a children's book, then a wrist-worn computer; combat using the green screen, data-terminal-like overlay of the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System—that subconsciously allowed me to settle into Fallout 3. All of this meant that I was finally able to appreciate the best virtues of the RPG: how narrative, character, and location can blend to create a series of interlocking stories, stacking choice upon choice until you feel that even though the world is bigger than you, you're still having a meaningful impact upon it.
Chris, I'll also see your Portal and raise you Braid. For a game whose mechanics could have been extremely confusing, Braid somehow taught me to play each of its time-twisting levels without instructions as explicit as Portal's own. One reviewer—I think it was Chris Dahlen—suggested that the best way to play Braid is like a crossword puzzle: Solve the parts you can, skip the parts you can't, then go back and slowly pick your way through the unsolved parts until you're done. That's what I did with Braid over four play sessions, and it worked like a charm. One hard-to-get puzzle piece required me to take advantage of my character's brief death animation, and I was floored when I finally figured it out. Most games teach us to either dismiss player death or be entertained by it. Braid let me ignore it for a long time, then, um, upbraided me for doing so. A nice touch in an exceedingly clever and, in its final act, unexpectedly moving game.
These aren't the only two games I'm considering for whatever top 10 list I assemble whenever I assemble it; others include Patapon, Grand Theft Auto IV, Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2, The Last Guy, PixelJunk Eden, Gears of War 2, LittleBigPlanet, Left 4 Dead, and Play Auditorium. But I'll end here by asking each of you to name and discuss the game you've had the hardest time expressing your opinion of. For me, it's Resistance 2, a staggering work of heartbreaking mediocrity from one of the industry's most accomplished studios. Staggering in its we-put-every-dollar-up-on-the-screen production values, in its scope, in its careful borrowing from all the right touchstones of the shooter genre. Heartbreaking in that its overblown scale may have helped do it in, in that it has created a fictional world that over two games has never truly connected with me, in enemy encounters that hit all the notes without ever quite playing the tune. It's not mediocre in the way that most games are mediocre. It's just off, and for the life of me I still can't figure out a succinct way to explain why.
Any games from 2008 make you feel that way?
Cheers,
N'Gai
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Hi guys,
N'Gai's question may provide a better frame for my year in gaming than my kickoff e-mail did. For me, 2008 was more about confusion than disappointment.
What to think of Grand Theft Auto IV, a game whose setting is a more complicated, fully realized, and living creature than its protagonist? Niko Bellic is supposed to resent the killing work that is increasingly forced onto him as the game progresses. But the game is wholly unconvincing on that level—the conflict between your actions as a player and Bellic's words and behavior in cut scenes is too jarring. I never finished the game, and I quit right around the time Stephen says the game loses its way, not too long after Niko reaches Liberty City's equivalent of New Jersey.
So Rockstar failed in its grandest ambition, to create a Mean Streets or Dog Day Afternoon for gaming. But it succeeded in creating one of the most compelling game environments ever made. Liberty City is a real place. Just ask anyone who's been there. Writing about it makes me want to overlook the game's flaws and start wandering its streets again.
Or, what to think of Gears of War 2? The game is even more shamelessly derivative than the first one. I picked up allusions to, off the top of my head, Independence Day, Battlestar Galactica (the Ron Moore re-imagining), The Empire Strikes Back, and the speeder-bike chase scene in Return of the Jedi. Mitch Krpata of the Boston Phoenix pointed out on his Insult Swordfighting blog that one of the game's levels is a tribute to, or a rip-off of, the final level of Contra.
The story in Gears, which Seth complained about vociferously in his Times review, is a combination of big explosions and sentimental revenge fantasy that will be deeply familiar to anyone who sat through the early works of the governor of California. And even the game's level design—while generally up to its predecessor's high standard—holds an occasional disappointment. There's a little too much running forward and not enough crouching in terror. A couple of times—which is a couple of times more than ever happened in the first Gears—I got a little lost and couldn't figure out where the game wanted me to go next.
I think Gears of War 2 was the most fun game I played all year, and the game that most achieved the goals it set for itself. If you want to see what an interactive Sylvester Stallone movie looks like, play Gears. It's everything a big summer blockbuster should be. But this is awards season, right?
And in the fall, I've been confused for some time now by a triple-F dilemma—should I be playing Fable II, Fallout 3, or Far Cry 2? Stephen, N'Gai, and I seem to come down on different sides of this triangle, at least for now. I started with Fable II and was enchanted for a while, only to become bored, not long after finding the quest's first hero, with a game that encourages me to sit in the middle of a town square farting for applause. (And trust me, I'm not too good for fart jokes.) But Stephen has persuaded me to give it a second shot.
But how can I do that now, when N'Gai makes a fine case for Fallout 3? I adored the Vault, the setting for the opening scenes during the protagonist's childhood. When I left the Vault, I was so mesmerized that I sat and listened to the post-apocalyptic president's entire radio message. (I am prone to this—I did something similar at the beginning of Half-Life 2.) I explored Megaton, the game's first village. All of this is just the game's amuse-bouche, but I can tell it's a spectacular meal. Except, the first time I left Megaton to carry out a mission, I kept getting killed during an encounter with raiders on a stretch of broken bridge on my way out of town. After five or so deaths in a row, I decided to take Far Cry 2 for a spin instead.
A friend tells me there's a lot of boring leveling and grinding in Fallout 3 before the game really gets going, and I always planned to give it some serious attention. A little more handholding in the game wouldn't hurt. I had to pull out the manual—yes, the manual!— to figure out the combat system. GTA IV did a better job of mixing some linearity into its open world.
And for me, at least so far, Far Cry 2 is less frustrating and more obsession-inducing than the Fable and Fallout sequels. I like the mysteriousness surrounding the Jackal, the arms dealer supplying both sides of the civil war you find yourself embroiled in. I like how the game lets you make moral choices without beating you over the head with them. I love the game's setting so much that I enjoy just driving around in it. Last night, I saw a gorgeous storm and a zebra.
Finally, what to think of Braid? Loved the ending. Liked the puzzles. Loathed the writing. I second Steve Gaynor, who thinks that the game, for all its pleasures, has a reach that exceeds its grasp. But at the same time: more, please!
The short answer to your question, though, N'Gai, is that the game that most confuses me about how I should think of it is The Force Unleashed. But I've gone on so long that I'm going to have to save that for Round 3 of this exchange.
One question for the three of you, though. We all think—or so I presume—that too many games (see the aforementioned triple-F dilemma) come out in the fall and too few in the spring and summer. But are we demonstrating an end-of-the-year bias by not lavishing more praise on GTA IV? Wouldn't we think more of it if, like Fallout 3 or Fable II or Far Cry 2, it came out in late October?
Chris
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Why the long faces gentlemen?
You seem let down by gaming in 2008. Did games let you down?
Or did you let down gaming in 2008?
Where were you, Chris, when Fallout 3 needed you to play more than one-tenth of it? N'Gai, did you really do your part to give Resistance 2 a try? Meaning, did you play its eight-man cooperative mode, soldiering through some randomized battles with a specially trained squad of fellow players? Or did you just play the single-player mode and declare the game's mediocrity then and there? And Chris, maybe I was wrong and GTA IV is a classic. You could have defended it if you'd played it through.
To nongamers, it may seem like I'm being unkind to Chris and N'Gai. But nongamers should recognize that Chris and N'Gai are typical gamers. I judge them no more harshly than I do the guy at Wal-Mart who just bought an Xbox for Gears of War 2 or the mom who finally tracked down Wii Fit.
Gamers abandon games—even games that they like—before finishing them. Gamers get angry at games—even games they like—for being repetitious or derivative or for falling short of being as good as it seems like they could be. That's what you get when you, the gamer, indulge in a creative form that was created to convey satisfying-but-repeatable, controllable bits of action for a quarter per minute. This is the creative form that has somehow evolved into a medium of 25-hour, $60 collections of satisfying-but-repeatable, controllable bits of action without inventing many successful strategies for telling stories, figuring out how to develop characters, or turning into a more interesting way to spend an hour than listening to Beethoven or watching The Wire.
And you thought the people voting for the Grammys, the Oscars, and the Booker prize might have missed some of the glorious works in their fields?
Gaming people often lack the time, the money, and the patience to really get into a year's worth of games. Playing lots of games can be pretty unpleasant, not unlike going to the gym a lot. You like what you get out of it, but you've got to put in a lot of work, much of it tedious.
There was, however, plenty of good gaming in 2008, for those of us who have structured our lives in a way that allows games to dominate our entertainment-consumption food pyramid. You just had to dedicate lots of time to get to it. You needed to get more than five hours into Fable II. You needed to reach the zero-gravity space combat parts of Dead Space. You needed to play all of Metal Gear Solid 1, 2, and 3 to appreciate the farewell those games were given by 2008's Metal Gear Solid 4. You needed to reach the last hour of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed's dozen to play the level most worth talking about. You needed to dig deep enough into No More Heroes to find out how Goichi Suda, the self-styled leader of the Punk games movement, crafted the greatest fight scene in gaming this year—not the one in which you fight an old lady, but the one in which someone else does the fighting for you. To enjoy the first-person parkour game Mirror's Edge you needed not to mind that the game might last "only" six hours (a complaint among many critics) and actually play it. You needed to put in the work to enjoy this stuff. Fun, right?
I didn't find the year in gaming any more confusing or any more full of flawed gems than previous years, including 2007. Chris, might I remind you that 2007's BioShock suffered a mood-killing shift from intellectual art-deco shooter to action movie in its final playable scene? Or that MTV's own Rock Band had a few flaws that needed patches (and 2008's Rock Band 2) to fix? Or that Portal's … nah, Portal was just about perfect. Most other games in 2007, however, had their faults.
Taking up N'Gai's request to name a game I had trouble articulating my reaction to, I choose Too Human. It's a game I may have dismissed had I not known its back story. Yet is that a fair reason to care about it? Here's a game that mixes The Matrix and Norse mythology and was gestating at development studio Silicon Knights in various stages for about a decade. Its lead creator, Denis Dyack, is a passionate spokesman for games as the "eighth artform" (the seventh was film, in case you didn't know). Dyack's personal and intellectual response to my question about why he hadn't abandoned the game after all this time was among the most heartfelt, ambitious, and reasonable statements about improving the gaming medium that I heard all year.
But Too Human isn't a great game. It has some good design, fun controls, and a whole lot of the previously mentioned tedium special to video games. It struggles to flesh out its characters even though it ends its story well.
Does context forgive execution? Does ambition justify imperfection? Had I not known Dyack or read a bunch of his interviews, I may have forgotten his game shortly after playing it in August, as I do so many other games. That wasn't possible, though. That's not how I consume my entertainment anymore. In this age, I know the creative back story of many of the games I play. The more revealing the game's creators are—and Dyack is among the most revealing of his peers—the more I care about the games they make.
I just don't know if all of that makes Too Human a game I can recommend, or if I simply would recommend that gamers learn more about the people who make their games.
So, did none of you play handheld games this year or what? No one's talking about them.
Stephen
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Hi, everybody. Sorry for coming late to the party. I wish I could tell you that keeping late hours had nothing to do with my sniffle this week, but that wouldn't be entirely accurate.
I come to our conversation from a bit of a different place than I was in last year. And in order to understand how I feel about video games these days, you need to understand how my relationship with games and the game industry has changed.
It has been an exhilarating, daunting, rewarding, and at times frightening journey in 2008 as I have become what amounts to the New York Times's first staff video-game critic. Since joining the culture department in 2005, I have always written some reviews and columns, but until this year I had mostly focused on news and features about games, gamers, and game makers.
Over the course of this year, starting in earnest with my review of Grand Theft Auto IV, I've been asked to shift toward building a critical voice through reviewing as many of the top games as I can get to. As a practical matter, that means spending a lot less time talking to and hanging out with people in the game industry and a lot more time sitting at home actually playing games (and writing about them).
The hardest part is that I have had to begin to distance myself from people in the game business. (I removed all my industry contacts from my Facebook!) As a reporter, you want to get close to people. You want them to like you and to want to give you information, especially in a scoop-crazed industry like video games. And a news reporter is able to maintain those relationships because he is not absolutely compelled to write for publication that his personal opinion was that a particular game had significant problems.
The critic does suffer that compulsion. And it can't matter whether or not the lead designer is a good guy or how bad you feel about how many millions of other people's dollars he has interminably wasted bringing his vision to the small screen. And it can't matter how much you have enjoyed socializing with the (often quite sociable) people whose job it is to get you to write nice things about their employers.
I had to confront this most squarely in my review of Fallout 3. I love the Fallout franchise. The first two installments are among my favorite role-playing games. And I really like the team at Bethesda Softworks. But I felt the game fell down in places and I had to say that.
One of the things I have really embraced about becoming a critic has been the process of learning to become a critic. Thankfully, at the Times I'm surrounded by some of the best in the world, whose work I now study much more closely than I used to. But as I struggled to come to terms with my ambivalence about Fallout 3, I finally discovered the touchstone of insight I needed from outside my paper, by way of both Roger Ebert and Robert Warshow. In a delightful item about his unorthodox review of Tru Loved, Ebert writes:
As the critic Robert Warshow wrote, "A man goes to the movies. The critic must be honest enough to admit that he is that man." In other words, whatever you saw, whatever you felt, whatever you did, you must say so. For example, two things that cannot be convincingly faked are laughter and orgasms. If a movie made you laugh, as a critic you have to be honest and report that. Maybe not so much with orgasms.
For a variety of reasons that we will leave aside for the moment, there still aren't any decent pornographic video games, so game critics don't face all of Ebert's dilemmas. (And it is not a coincidence that the flap over Ebert's Tru Loved review revolved around the fact that he did not finish the movie: exactly the same issue Stephen is slagging Chris and N'Gai for here.)
Yet the point still stands. For those of us who have, as Stephen so baldly put it, "structured our lives in a way that allows games to dominate our entertainment-consumption food pyramid," we have to be honest about that to the public. For example, Blizzard was probably not entirely thrilled that my write-up about the new World of Warcraft expansion was in many ways an exploration of my concern about playing the game so much in the past. But I had to cop to it.
Over the course of this year, plowing through game after game, what surprised me most was simply how good most of them were. Though the crop of 2008 has demonstrated its talent in different ways, it seems clear that the overall level of production quality and creative talent is higher now in video games than it has ever been. This is the real golden age of gaming because only now is the audience large enough, variegated enough, and mature enough to support high levels of investment in such a broad portfolio of genres on such a wide range of devices and screens.
The major publishers have finally figured out that schlock is not a business strategy that can compete in the long term with producing a high-quality product. I have played through and reviewed most of the biggest games of the year, with a few formal reviews still to come, and the one word that keeps coming back to me is professionalism.
Of course, some people don't want their games to be professional—or polished, for that matter. They want their games to be art. They want to be inspired to grand heights of emotion and struck with epic depths of profundity. I understand that. I even succumb to it once in a while. (OK, a little more often than that.)
What made Portal and BioShock stand out last year was that they were different, in tone and narrative technique and, of course, in some basic play rules. And I agree that with the exception of Braid, we have not seen a ton of "wow, I never thought of that really working" new game concepts in 2008.
But what if I don't find time manipulation fun? Or what if I don't enjoy teleporting balls around in Portal or exploring a creepy underwater warren in BioShock? These are all very particular, perhaps even peculiar, games. And the strength of a creative form is not judged solely by its ability to deliver a few quirky new art projects every year. That strength is judged by the overall depth of output and in the ability to provide a suitably high-quality entertainment experience for everyone.
I don't think there is a single genre or demographic of gamer that hasn't benefited from a number of excellent games this year. As Stephen rightly said, only the hard-core Nintendo fan has had something to complain about. But across the board, if you are a gamer and you haven't been able to find anything you really like this year, maybe it is time for a new hobby, because the bounty of 2008 has been rich.
P.S. Hey, Stephen: For mobile, my DS is locked on Sid Meier's Civilization Revolution. I can beat Deity level maybe half the time these days.
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Stephen, it's just like old times. Our old dialogue feature, Vs. Mode, is on extended hiatus, but there you go again, taking shots at me for failing to play Resistance 2 all the way through. Pity you didn't select a better target, as there are oh so many games and game modes that I never touched, but the co-op mode in Resistance 2 was not one of them. I played it for quite some time when it was previewed in NYC; you were there, but the open bar was open, so I'll forgive you if you can't remember too much from that event. But you're a loyal subscriber to Edge magazine. Didn't you read the column in which I cited, among other things, Resistance 2's cooperative mode as one of the biggest breakthroughs of 2008? An excerpt:
Insomniac built a separate co-op campaign for up to eight players, modeled after raids in massively multiplayer online games. ... [Its] approach is at once the most intriguing and the least fully fleshed out, mainly because it appears to have been designed with just a single strategy for success: soldiers out front, spec ops in the middle, and medics bringing up the rear. Whether the enemy AI or the encounter design is to blame I can't be sure, but if Insomniac can find a way to mix things up more it has the template for something both unique and special in the world of consoles.
So, yes, when I referred to Resistance 2 as a "staggering work of heartbreaking mediocrity" that I'm still struggling to explain, it wasn't based solely on the campaign. Still, you're my gaming sensei, so I won't take issue with your assertion that anyone who's disappointed with 2008 (hello, Mitch Krpata, author of the year's most essential blog series, "A New Taxonomy of Gamers") may not have played as many games as they should have nor as deeply as they should have. Your analogy to working out at the gym is nearly perfect; it's not just that games are work, it's that they also require you to learn. Every game, no matter how bad, is teaching you how to play it from beginning to end. And a lot of the time, I simply don't want to work at learning something new. (Is this the point where our more fanboyish readers say, cry me a river and give me your job?) Perhaps that's why a game's ability to quickly tap into my obsessive side is one of my key criteria for determining greatness: Without obsession, how many fewer games would I play, complete, or replay?
If it weren't for my trainer, I'd never go to the gym, and without you, sensei, I might not have finished the campaign modes in Halo 3 last year or Gears of War 2 this year. From this, I've learned that one of the best things about cooperative play is that it encourages me to finish what I start. I loved and was obsessed by Fallout 3, playing it night after night. But once I got into Gears 2 (particularly the Horde multiplayer mode) and Left 4 Dead, my obsession cooled, no doubt helped along by the fact that, at Level 8, I'd finally hit a stretch of the game where I'd have to grind in order to progress. Had Fallout 3 been co-op, with you and I walking through the bombed-out streets of our nation's capital, I'd probably have completed the game weeks ago. Thankfully, Gears 2 was co-op, and I could add it to The Handful of Games I Completed in 2008.
Seth, thanks for explaining to the readers and us why you actually have the best job in the world. Stephen and I still have to do reporting, while you play games all day and write about them. For the New York Times, no less! In an age when there's all but a dead pool for movie critics, not to mention those who write about books, theater, dance, and television, it's great that the Old Gray Lady has staked out this fertile critical terrain. I'm not sure any other outlets will follow, given our current Great Depression, but it's a good sign nonetheless.
Still, I'm somewhat surprised that either the Times required you to give up reporting and industry contacts or you chose to do so, simply because you became the paper's chief game critic. You cited Ebert as an inspiration; he writes profiles and features and Q&A's in addition to reviewing as many movies as he can. Do you really believe that you have to keep developers and executives at arm's length in order to be a good critic, or were you permitted to shed your reporting obligations because playing games takes a lot more time than watching a movie or reading a book?
Your point about professionalism also intrigues me. You're correct that, by and large, the level of craft in the video game industry continues to grow each year, and 2008 was no exception. I wonder if, however, by settling for the professionalism inherent in the acknowledgment that "we are those men, and we had fun with these games," we let games off too easily when they take the easy way out, interactively speaking.
Here's where I get my Totilo on and start taking shots. In your review of Gears of War 2, you rightly criticized the story by writing, "With its unintentionally mawkish story line—there's no winking here—and sophomoric dialogue, Epic Games, developer of the series, is clearly trying to mix some emotional depth into the franchise's established recipe of explosions and hot lead. It doesn't work." And you rightly praised the gameplay, saying, "[W]hat makes Gears 2 such a consummately enjoyable popcorn game, is pitch-perfect pacing melded with some of the most carefully calibrated challenges and consistently enjoyable game design you will come across." Then you conclude by writing: "Just ignore what tries to pass here for story and character. And please, don't think too hard."
[SPOILER ALERT]
The thing is, there's a moment in this all-about-shooting game where the folks at Epic decide to do the shooting for you, and in doing so, rob the game of a potentially compelling intersection of gameplay and character. I'm referring to the moment when Dom, wingman to series protagonist Marcus Fenix, is finally reunited with his wife deep in enemy territory, only to discover that her mind has been completely destroyed by her Locust torturers. (This time, it seems, it's personal.) The ensuing cutscene and its dialogue were mawkish, as you observed, though I'd argue that one line ("Marcus, I … I don't know what to do") and its anguished delivery managed the requisite poignancy. But Dom's subsequent decision to kill his wife, no matter how much Epic tried to set it up in a previous cutscene, struck me as implausible.
Actually, I take that back. Dom didn't decide to kill his wife. Epic design director Cliff Bleszinski decided to kill his wife, and they wouldn't even let Stephen, who was playing as Dom, pull the trigger. Compare that with the sequence in the first God of War, in which our hero Kratos, trapped in Hell with the wife and child he inadvertently slaughtered, must now protect them by alternately holding them to him (using the game's grab mechanic to share his health bar with them) and fighting off an army of Kratos doppelgängers. It's gameplay, not a cutscene, and nearly four years after God of War's release, it still stands as one of the best examples of how narrative and interactivity can be synthesized to create, well, art.
Was Epic's handling of Maria's fate a failure of craft or art? I say it's worth thinking hard about, especially when writing for a mainstream audience like yours in the Times and mine at Newsweek. Because when we avoid such questions, we're gulling our readers into believing that story and gameplay are mutually exclusive—or that games are just like other media. Seth, that's something I accused you of before, here. And, in fairness, I fell prey to the same temptation here.
That's my last shot. Reloading!
Cheers,
N'Gai
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Seth, good call on Civilization for the DS. That game hooked me for a time as well. And, N'Gai, good call on co-operative game-play having a heyday (heyyear?) in 2008.
I'd like to wrap up my contribution to our club by citing some other notable releases this year.
• You Have To Burn the Rope: Here we had a free game you could play from beginning to end in about three minutes. Not only that, but it had something to say about the challenges developers make us face in games. It may be the perfect accompaniment to my games-as-gym-equipment metaphor from my previous letter. And while I could say more, I think people should really just open a new window in their browser for a moment and play it. As an added bonus, its ending-credits theme is the best song released in a video game—and made about video games—in 2008. Play the game. Listen. And think about it.
• Wii Fit: To save us the embarrassment of not having deeply discussed 2008's biggest gaming newsmaker, I must add that this game served a number of interesting roles. It presented to average people the idea that playing a game could be good for you, it convinced some gaming executives that fitness gaming is the next trend that must be followed, and it expanded the currently unlabeled category of Self-Help Video Games that Nintendo's brain-workout Brain Age software opened up in 2006 (and which may someday force gaming-sales charters to give self-help games their own list, the way the New York Times had to in 1983).
• The Korean release of FIFA Online 2: I knew nothing of this game until last month, when it was the first thing on EA Sports chief Peter Moore's mind when I asked him what the biggest success of 2008 was for the Madden-making sports division. But I do know of games like it, and they excite American gaming executives quite a lot—they look like your standard American-released sports and racing games, but their economic model is predicated on a free-base product that you can buy items in. Some items improve the look of your character. Some improve his/her/its abilities. These micro-transaction games aren't new, but they've yet to make it big in the United States. Still, what we saw plenty of in 2008 was game publishers trying to find ways to sell small add-ons long after people purchased the original disc. It seems more likely than ever that the future of many people's gaming lives will involve not just paying for a game once but continuing to pay for it, or pay to add more to it, month after month. This change could prove similar to the way people went from not paying to watch TV programming in the middle of the 20th century to now paying for multiple services to see their favorite programs.
• Any iPhone/iPod Touch game: Apple, the company that typically projects an image that it knows what we want better than we do, never made an impressive step into the gaming world until 2008. And the company did it not by being a leader but by standing (somewhat) back and letting everyone from amateur developers to professional studios create hundreds of applications and games. The result? An Apple that once used to advertise how much cooler its machines were than Windows computers—even though Windows computers were the only computers worth playing video games on—now makes commercials showing off iPhone games. Now that Apple finally thinks video games are cool, cell-phone gaming has suddenly become a lot more interesting, and Nintendo has a reason to sweat for the first time in a couple of years.
Guys, it's been fun to talk about the year in games with all of you. May you all have more time to play in 2009.
—Stephen
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Dear N'Gai, Seth, and Stephen,
Stephen wonders if we should be embarrassed for not discussing Wii Fit, and then he answers his own question by noting that it's a self-help game and therefore isn't really the kind of game that the four of us are talking about. Which reminds me: As games grow, and as they are played by more and more people, I think game critics will increasingly have to grapple with Stephen's mantra from last year's club: "Video games are not a genre; they're a medium."
I think this statement was more radical than Stephen intended it to be. I think I'm persuaded by it, but I have trouble wrapping my head around it sometimes. The boldness of the claim makes me want to resist it. Put the Internet aside for a moment—in time, we may see it as less a new medium and more a technology for the transmission of all media (including games!) under the sun—and you'll see that every other medium, at least that I can think of, qualifies under one of the big three rubrics: Print, Audio, Video. (Under this taxonomy, TV and movies, for example, aren't distinct media—they're just distinct ways of transmission for a particular medium, video.)
Stephen is saying that video games are a Fourth Medium, then, something truly new under the sun. (Maybe this is just a different way of saying that games are an Eighth Art Form, as Dennis Dyack says.) I often think that's right. But it also helps explain my long face, as Stephen puts it. Don't I have the right to expect something more from this marvelous new medium? Something more wondrous than beautifully and impeccably crafted worlds filled with enemies for me to kill?
What I want is a game with the elegant gameplay and level design of Gears of War 2 but with the story of The Force Unleashed. But I want it told in a manner like Braid—or even You Have To Burn the Rope—meaning, a telling of the tale that is consistent with the promise and the mechanics of this Fourth Medium (or Eighth Art Form).
I haven't played this game yet. Have any of you?
Stephen and Seth are right that if you put a space alien in front of this year's batch of games, the interstellar visitor—assuming his slippery, tentaclelike thumbs could handle the controller—would conclude that the games that are coming out right now are some of the finest examples of the promise of this new medium. But they are also captivating largely because they possess exactly that: promise. The best games are packed with the prospect of something more, something on the tip of everyone's tongue that no one has yet been able to put into words—or rather, games.
I don't feel guilty about dreaming of the day when a game designer puts it all together and I can finally, at long last, scratch the itch that all of us feel but none of us can find.
Until next year,
Chris
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OK, a lot to get to here.
In terms of N'Gai's questions about how my job at the paper has evolved, a few clarifications. I have not given up any contacts, just held them at a bit of arm's length while in this period of heavy reviewing. I just didn't feel it was appropriate to be taking one-on-one meetings with game executives and PR people while I was reviewing the products they would be trying to spin me about. N'Gai, I think I saw you at one group dinner with a game company, and I made very clear to them that I was there only because it was a group event. It sounds obvious, but ultimately the products speak for themselves. The millions of people whom these companies want to buy their wares aren't getting special access to game-makers. In trying to come at the games from a perspective similar to that of a thoughtful consumer, I wanted to distance myself from the industry a bit. And as a practical matter, if I want to update my Facebook status with a transitory thought about a game I'm playing before I have published what I'm paid to publish, I don't think it is helpful if that's being seen by a few dozen game developers and publicists.
That all said, there is no doubt that even though big games like Super Smash Bros. Brawl, GTA IV, Metal Gear Solid 4, and Wii Fit were released in the first half of 2008 (which I applaud), gaming remains a very seasonal business. So in the early parts of next year, I'm sure I'll write some broader and more thematic features just because there won't be as many new games to review. What I will have to think hard about, though, is doing some big hype piece on a game in development that I know I will have to review later. We saw years of prerelease puffery on a game like Spore (none of it, thankfully, with my byline), a game that failed to maintain more than a few weeks of somewhat ambivalent buzz once we all actually got to play it.
Enough about journalism. N'Gai, I didn't think you were coming at me with what you said about Gears 2 and the wife scene. I think you raised a few of exactly the right questions. And this also plays into some of Chris' concerns about how stories are told in games. The goal of that scene is to move the player into the plot's next emotional arc—to attach meaning to gunning down the next wave of bad guys. I agree that the scene could have been a lot more interactive, but the real challenge would not have been in simply giving the player a choice but in allowing that choice to really matter in the overall plotline.
And that might have been a lot harder than it seems at first. Here is this soldier who has been searching for his long-lost wife, and he finally finds her in this horrible ghoulish state. If you give the player a choice there, his natural inclination most of the time is going to be to try to find a way to cure her. That's a whole different story, and Epic has the right to want her to die there to give the rest of the action a revenge vibe. So, what are you going to do, force the player to pull the trigger? Set up a fight where you try to save her but, no matter what you do, she dies anyway? Now that would piss people off, including me. Once you start giving people choices, the game has to allow those choices to matter. It is not always as easy as saying, "I should have had some choice there, and I didn't. Epic messed up." I obviously didn't think the story was the strongest element of Gears 2, anyway, but I didn't have a huge problem at that moment because I saw the rabbit hole the game could fall into otherwise.
More broadly, this line of thought plays into Chris' desire for more different kinds of storytelling in games. The thing is, in all of these mainline console games (even the Portals and such), the story is still being told to you, or even at you. In none of these games does the player really have any role in determining the overall story arc. In that sense, you are still acting out a role that has been written for you and have been given choices only within a fairly limited sphere of the fiction that has been spun around you. Meanwhile, your interaction with other actual human beings in most conventional console games is limited to shooting them, shooting with them, or competing with them for a spot on a high-score list.
That's why with every passing year I grow deeper in my conviction that the most interesting and meaningful games are massively multiplayer online games in which you have thousands of people in emergent, persistent communities with their own politics, their own tribes. In a massively multiplayer game, every day is different because people are always different. As I've played through dozens of games this year for my job, it has been so vital to maintain a gaming home base, a center of gravity with a group of people that I can just hang out and play with. I've found that most of this year in Eve Online, the hard-core science-fiction MMO that continues to grow. Eve is the kind of game in which the group of people you play with is the most important part of the experience. These are the people I'm on IRC with even when I'm playing something else, and it is that sense of community, of getting to know people from around the world just a little bit, that is the most valuable thing in gaming for me, and it is something that other media usually fail to provide. (Actually, music probably brings people together more than any other traditional media. I saw the Grateful Dead around 90 times, and I still know people I met out there on the road.)
As far as the year in MMOs, I have to give major respect to Electronic Arts and Mythic for making the first legitimate competitor to World of Warcraft with Warhammer Online. Warhammer isn't anywhere close to WOW's size and has only a fraction of WOW's depth, but Warhammer's focus on player-vs.-player combat as opposed to player-vs.-computer-controlled-monster combat gives it an important niche.
WOW, of course, remains the juggernaut, and the recent expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, is pure Blizzard: It oozes polish and is totally accessible to casual players. Thing is, WOW is definitely now being built and designed almost entirely for casual players. The WOW of today is probably less than a third as difficult, overall, as it was even a couple of years ago. This is why the game has around 11 million players. But it is a bit of a joke when even the most hard-core players can blow through all of the new expansion's top-end content in a matter of days. I'm not sure what the people who used to enjoy spending weeks and months working through epic content are supposed be doing in WOW now for their $15 a month. The beautiful thing for Blizzard, though, is that if those people are going to go anywhere during the next couple years, they will probably stay on the Blizzard reservation by moving to coming games like StarCraft II, Diablo 3, and the as-yet-unrevealed new MMO it is working on.
Stephen: I must confess, I have not burned the rope.
And finally, of course games are a medium, not a genre. There are all sorts of games for all sorts of players now. The idea of a canon in games means nothing when there are Bejeweled addicts out there who wouldn't know Miyamoto if he showed up in their living room. For that matter, there are probably millions of Wii players who have no idea who Miyamoto is. There are people who play Guitar Hero who could not care less about World of Warcraft, and there are Pokémon gurus who have never touched Halo. That's all as it should be. Video games are the most vibrant and exciting new entertainment medium in the world right now because of their diversity. When so many millions of people are having fun in so many millions of different ways, something is going right.
The annual U.N. climate negotiations, currently under way in Poznan, Poland, have stalled. Here's why: Rich countries want a commitment from poor countries to cut their greenhouse-gas emissions. Poor countries want a commitment from rich countries to pay for those cuts. Those competing claims have long posed a major obstacle for any kind of global climate deal. But the negotiators face another big handicap of their own making: The list of who's rich and who's poor that would be used for any final agreement is hopelessly out of date.
The United Nations first divvied up the developed and developing world for climate talks in 1992, with the goal of using that split to apportion responsibilities for cutting emissions. But distinctions that once made sense are no longer tenable. Ukraine, for example, is considered rich. In 1992, it was reflexively lumped together with the countries that once comprised the powerful Soviet Union; by 2007, its citizens had fallen to 97th richest in the world by GDP per person. (All wealth figures cited here are from The CIA World Factbook.) At the same time, Singapore (now the sixth-richest nation in the world) was designated as poor. Unless the climate regime overhauls its wealth labels, a country like Singapore could reap the benefits of financial aid, while Ukraine would be burdened with emissions caps. Needless to say, that kind of nonsensical setup won't get you very far in international talks.
The original climate negotiators had a simple way of defining wealth. First, they took the list of 24 countries that were part of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, a pre-eminent club of wealthy, democratic, free-market states that was formed in 1961; these included the United States, most of Western Europe, Japan, and a few others. Then they added several states of the former Soviet Union, like Russia and Belarus, as well as a handful from Eastern Europe, like Poland and Slovenia. This was basically Cold War logic on cruise control: First World and so-called Second World countries were rich; Third World countries were poor. The Kyoto Protocol, concluded six years later, maintained the same division. Rich countries agreed to institute caps on their greenhouse-gas emissions while poor countries agreed to do nothing.
The resulting deal had its flaws then. It makes absolutely no sense today. Belarus, for example, is lumped together with the rich countries, despite a GDP per person of about $10,000. As a result, it has an emissions cap like those in place for Europe and Japan. Kuwait, meanwhile, is considered poor. That means the oil-rich emirate is spared any obligations, despite the fact that its residents are about five times wealthier than the Belarussians.
And that's only the simplest distortion. Under the Kyoto protocol, developed (rich) countries have two ways of meeting their caps. They can, of course, cut their own emissions. But they can also pay for emissions-cutting projects in poorer countries, like China or Peru. Under that approach—called the Clean Development Mechanism—they earn credits for those projects. They can then use those credits to offset their emissions at home.
This leads to some extraordinarily odd—and unfair—outcomes. Any "poor" country can get in the game. Even Qatar, which has a higher per-person GDP than any other country on earth, is eligible. Not surprisingly, it has exploited the opportunity. Last year, Qatar teamed up with the U.K.-based firm EcoSecurities on a project to capture natural gas that was going to waste in operations at its Al-Shaheed oil field. According to estimates filed with the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, Qatar Petroleum expects sales of carbon credits from the project to generate $128 million. Meanwhile, according to a new EU analysis, "wealthy" Portugal (GDP per person: $22,000) looks like it won't be able to cut its emissions enough to satisfy its Kyoto target. Instead, it will have to spend about $500 million paying for the sorts of credits Qatar is generating.
These problems have not gone unnoticed by negotiators. In response, Australia recently proposed (PDF) that countries wrongly categorized as poor be reclassified and forced to assume the same responsibilities as the wealthy. (It helpfully includes a "Ukraine List" of 44 countries with higher per-person GDP than the "wealthy" Ukraine.) Japan has offered its own scheme, which would divide the world into three groups: a much larger set of wealthy countries than has been used in the past, an intermediate group of rapidly developing countries, and a third set of substantially poorer states.
Resistance has, predictably, been strong. Negotiators from the "poor" nations of China and Brazil have objected loudly (Word file). Perhaps most galling is the outspoken opposition of Singapore, which ranks ahead of the United States, Sweden, and Japan in per-person wealth. But even legitimately poor countries, worried about maintaining solidarity, have toed the line.
It's a dangerous situation. So long as negotiators insist on treating Singapore, China, and Togo as part of the same group of poor countries, they are not going to be able to find a set of rules that works for all of them. And if they continue to pretend that Ukraine and Switzerland are economically comparable and both wealthy, they're going to have a hard time coming up with a formula for rich countries' shared obligations, too.
If negotiators allow for new shades of gray, that might change. Acknowledging that there is a middle group of countries, including China and Brazil, would be a particularly important breakthrough. (The precise definition of this middle group would need to be negotiated—GDP per person would probably have to be supplemented by other measures of wealth and development.) Those countries are rich enough to have some capacity to cut their emissions on their own but poor enough that they need help doing more. They have no natural place in the current climate regime's taxonomy. If reforms freed negotiators to focus on the particular challenges those countries pose, though, progress might be more forthcoming.
To be certain, changing the way countries are classified would not be a panacea. Diplomats from big developing countries would still try to avoid making commitments, regardless of what category their countries were in. And some countries can't readily be classified under any scheme. In particular, India, whose citizens are the world's 136th wealthiest (behind Nicaragua and Iraq), is poor by most measures. But letting that justify an exemption from all emissions-cutting rules would be dangerous, since it is also the world's third- or fourth-largest greenhouse-gas emitter. It won't be sufficient to replace one rigid set of categories with another; negotiators will have to make difficult adjustments on the margin.
But that should not deter the United States and others from attempting to press forward on reform. The next year of negotiations will be challenging; failure is a significant possibility. If proposals for a new agreement don't reflect the many ways the world has changed since the 1990s, though, it's a guarantee.
On an island under military occupation at the edge of an empire, the armed forces of a global superpower detain hundreds and sometimes even thousands of allegedly unlawful combatants. The powerful nation consigns the detainees to a legal limbo, subjecting them to treatment that critics around the world decry as inhumane, unenlightened, and ultimately self-defeating. That may sound like a history of Guantanamo. Yet the year was 1776, the superpower was Great Britain, and the setting was New York City. The "unlawful" combatants were American revolutionaries.
Ever since President-elect Barack Obama suggested that he will close down Guantanamo, historians and journalists have been racing through the American past in search of evidence for our commitment to the rule of law in wartime. The Founding Fathers are the first stop. The days when New York was America's 18th-century Guantanamo, it seems, hold lessons for extricating ourselves from the Bush Administration's 21st-century mess. New York's notorious prison camps are the subject of a new book, Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners During the Revolutionary War, by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Edwin G. Burrows. Though he mentions current events only once, the American experience since 9/11 looms over his story.
After the Continental Congress issued the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, British forces under Gen. William Howe began warehousing thousands of Americans captured in and around New York in Britain's first major campaign of the war. For the next seven years, British forces occupied the city, turning it into a barracks and loyalist refugee center, but also a prison camp for Americans taken prisoner around the Eastern Seaboard and on the high seas.
Captured officers usually had little to complain about other than boredom. Most were released on what 18th-century armies called "parole" and spent months and even years in the relative comfort of Long Island, where they boarded with local families. The fate of American enlisted men, however, was far direr. The British crowded them into just about every available space. The city's churches and sugar warehouses became holding pens for captured Americans. Even King's College (now Columbia University) was thrown into service as an ersatz detention center.
Conditions in these unsuitable buildings and makeshift prisons were appalling. Smallpox and other infectious diseases raced through the ranks. Summers were unbearably hot in poorly ventilated and overcrowded buildings. Exceptionally cold winters in 1777 and 1778 combined with lack of fuel to produce freezing temperatures. Food was scarce under ordinary circumstances, and logistical problems often reduced the prisoners' food supplies to dangerously low levels. Burrows calculates that rations—set at about 2,400 calories a day, or two-thirds what a British soldier received—were so low as to cause a typical prisoner to lose one pound of body weight each week.
The notorious prison ships anchored in New York harbor were even worse than the ad hoc prisons on Manhattan island. The ships were far and away the worst place an American prisoner could end up. Enlisted men and privateers captured on the high seas were crowded into the noxious, waste-filled, and disease-ridden holds of aging vessels moored in Wallabout Bay along the Brooklyn waterfront (roughly between the Manhattan Bridge and the Williamsburg Bridge).
Death rates for those held in the ships, Burrows estimates, approached 50 to 70 percent. According to a few sketchy contemporary reports, some 11,000 Americans died on the ships. If death rates were the same in the Manhattan holding pens as on the ships in the harbor, then, Burrows reasons, as many as 19,000 American soldiers may have died in captivity, almost three times the number of Americans killed in battle during the entire Revolutionary War.
Parallels to recent American history are sometimes so close as to be eerie. In the months after 9/11, the United States hoped that putting detainees at Guantanamo would insulate its detention decisions from legal challenges in the courts. Lord North and the British Cabinet hoped that locating prisoners in New York would do the same. (North shipped American revolutionary hero Ethan Allen from London to New York in order to keep him out of reach of habeas corpus proceedings in the British courts at Westminster.) As in Iraq and Afghanistan, the ambiguous legal status of American prisoners tacitly licensed shocking abuses. The surviving diaries of American prisoners describe sadistic treatment by captors who were every bit the equal of Charles Graner and Lynndie England at Abu Ghraib.
What Burrows wants us to see is that the laws of war and its humanitarian protections were once rallying points for American patriotism, not obstacles to its realization. Virtually every one of the founding fathers—George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson most of all—cited the humanitarian imperatives of what was then known as the Law of Nations and excoriated the British for their treatment of American captives.
Burrows declines to draw the obvious comparisons to today's controversies, but in the Founding generation, he suggests, American values were clear. Our enemies were the global pariahs, while we were the champions of humanitarian ideals and the international rule of law. Journalists such as Jane Mayer and lawyers such as Philippe Sands and David Cole have drawn these conclusions more explicitly, though without Burrows' thorough historical research. Burrows' book is part of a quickly snowballing movement to redescribe the Bush administration's post-9/11 policies as an embarrassing aberration in an otherwise exceptional history of respect for the rule of law in times of national crisis.
This earnest attempt to recapture humanity for the flag is misleading; the legend of the "New York prison ships" has long been caught up in feel-good history and political mythmaking. Burrows avoids the worst mistakes of the genre, but he cedes too much to the patriotic fantasy of American exceptionalism in our commitment to the rule of law and humanitarian ideals.
Burrows' fatality estimates, for example, rely on the most extravagant available claims and then use them to extrapolate still further deaths. (Among other things, Burrows makes the implausible assumption that fatality rates were as high on land as they were in the prison ships.) Most historians believe that the number of prisoner fatalities among American soldiers was far lower than Burrows would have it, somewhere in the neighborhood of 8,500. The number is still startling. It is higher than the number of battle deaths in the war (estimated at upward of 6,000). But given that the British held few prisoners in New York (or anywhere else outside of Charleston, for that matter) after 1778, the lower estimate (less than half the size of Burrows' figure) is almost certainly much closer to the truth than Burrows' highball number.
Conditions in the British camps and ships in and around New York were what one would expect in the era before modern medicine and modern military logistics. Even if the official policy of King George III designated American prisoners as traitors and criminals, in practice the British treated them as de facto prisoners of war. French and Spanish prisoners of war—whose legal status was unambiguous—faced the same conditions as their American allies in the war with Great Britain. American prisoners regularly corresponded with family and friends outside New York. Wives and mothers were often permitted to come into British lines to visit their loved ones, and sometimes even successfully agitated for their release. Death rates were high, but so were death rates among British seamen aboard British ships. Rations were the same as those provided to British soldiers during their trans-Atlantic voyage. Even Burrows disclaims the view that the deaths resulted from the intentional infliction of cruel treatment. The main killer of prisoners (indeed, a main killer of soldiers on all sides, prisoners or not) was an epidemic of smallpox that swept through New York and then raced up and down the Eastern Seaboard in 1776 and 1777.
While British soldiers typically fared better in American hands than their American counterparts did, that was partly because American forces could send them into the interior to western towns where food and shelter were in good supply. Revolutionary Americans adopted the standards of civilized warfare. But they did so not just out of humanitarian selflessness but in pursuit of their strategic aims. To be recognized as a civilized state entitled to make war according to the Law of Nations was precisely what the Revolution was being fought for. The American commitment to the laws of war and to humanitarian ideals was supported by that ambition. For the revolutionaries, the claims of humanity ran together with American interests, not headlong into them.
From the nation's founding moment forward, humanitarian motives have mixed with strategic interests. The danger of an imagined American history of selfless humanitarianism is that it holds American leaders to an impossible standard. A standard that no nation has ever lived up to—such a history invites our leaders to abandon our ideals when crisis strikes.
Great Britain dismantled the prison camps of old New York in 1783 when it abandoned its war effort. But in our world of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, abandoning the fight is not possible. Obama will have to close Guantanamo while waging the battle Guantanamo was meant to help us win. To succeed, he will have to reunite the twin American traditions of interest and idealism. They are traditions his predecessor tore apart, but they are the true legacy of the Revolution.
Last month more than half a million American workers lost their jobs. How exactly do you tell an employee that his or her services are no longer needed? Institutional guidelines at two University of California campuses (see here and here) recommend "constant, open, and empathic communication." Somewhat less sentimentally, the Fairport, N.Y.-based H.R. Works Inc. advises: "Protect company assets," taking the precaution, for instance, to shut down the laid-off employee's computer and network access not after but "during the termination meeting." The state of Minnesota's instructions warn managers to be prepared for the worst: "If you are concerned that the employee may react to the news in a hostile or threatening manner, be sure to have a safety plan in place. This should include notice to Capitol Security." In the self-published Employee Termination Guidebook ($247.00 + shipping), "turnaround" consultant Kevin Muir urges managers to move quickly before the doomed employee starts "telling lies about you, turning others against you and destroying your reputation."
Inadvertently, the advertising company Carat provided a window on its termination process in September when the "Chief People Officer" of its New York office accidentally e-mailed companywide an 18-page draft PowerPoint presentation outlining the firm's "restructuring communications plan" (excerpts below and on the following three pages). Within days, AdAge had posted the document.
Please send ideas for Hot Document to documents@slate.com.
Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was arrested by FBI agents Tuesday morning and accused of trying "to sell the U.S. Senate seat" recently vacated by President-elect Barack Obama. The governor himself has joked about the difficulty of pronouncing his last name.
Name: Rod Blagojevich
Title: Governor of Illinois
Last Name Pronounced: "Bluh-GOY-uh-vich"
Tape: Click the arrow on the player below to hear Rod Blagojevich pronounce his own name while being sworn into office in 2007.
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Verily, your humble fervent did in the guise of the Humanae Cavia Porcellus fojourn to the paft, to the year of our Lord 1771. Prithee, allow me to declaim of my adventure in the colony of Virginia, and my difcoveries.
The reigning fantasy in many girlhoods is that of becoming a princess, presiding over a palace, dressing in satin, wielding a scepter. I always imagined myself as a settler, sitting by a cozy fireside, dressing in homespun, wielding knitting needles. So the tiny one-room, wood-beamed farmhouse at the Claude Moore Colonial Farm, a living history site set in 1771, with its dirt floor, hearth, table, spinning wheel, and sleeping loft, sent me back both to this country's beginnings and my own—it was the perfect manifestation of my childhood dreams.
For the Human Guinea Pig column I have been no stranger to costumes, from the nightmarish bathing suit competition at the Mrs. Washington, D.C., pageant, to my horrific "living doll" look for a stint as a street performer. As a historical interpreter at the farm, the foundation of my transformation into an 18th-century woman was the foundation garment called "stays—the fabric and bone device that tied around the upper body. This was not the wasp-waisted, heaving-bosom look of a Scarlett O'Hara corset. Instead the torso in stays becomes almost cylindrical, one's front flattened, one's back held straight. Good posture was a matter of propriety, and both Colonial boys and girls were put in stays. Males were released around age 7, but females spent their lives in them. I expected stays to be a sartorial prison. Instead, I enjoyed them. They made my movements deliberate, my posture impeccable. I felt as if the past was swaddling me.
Slate V: Emily Yoffe's experience as a historical re-enactor
The Claude Moore Colonial Farm is staffed by a handful of employees who do both the 21st-century work of the front office—arranging events, working on the computer—and also the 18th-century work of running a farm while portraying members of a tenant farm family. They are supplemented by an ardent group of volunteers. The most fanatic one I met was a young mother taking a hiatus from her Ph.D. in Colonial history who made authentic hemp diapers for her nursing infant. Incidentally, those of us playing roles on the farm were called "interpreters," not "re-enactors." Re-enactors is generally used to refer to more casual amateurs who like to dress up as a hobby.
Most farm staffers were women who had spent their childhoods playing olden days and had found a way as they grew up to keep going back in time. Elizabeth Rolando, 26, the program manager who portrays farm wife Lydia Bradley, volunteered as a girl at Plimoth Plantation and while a history major in college worked at Sturbridge Village. Katie Cannon, 26, the site supervisor and also a portrayer of Lydia, says, "I love spinning, sewing, gardening, cooking over an open fire, and I get paid to do it." Claude Moore is chronically short of men; men interested in living history often gravitate toward sites where they can pretend to do battle. Their absence at Claude Moore is explained to visitors by saying they are dead, or walking to Ohio to look for land.
I portrayed Chastity Crump, a middle-aged spinster from a neighboring farm who liked to visit Lydia and help with chores. For one of the farm's special events, a Colonial wedding, I acted as a kind of hostess, engaging our 21st-century guests in small talk, encouraging them to dance, and handing out cake. With my conelike bodice, billowing hips, ruffled cap, and no makeup (cosmetics are banned on the farm), I felt it would have been easy to live up to my virtuous name.
At home, I am a despiser of the domestic arts. But I loved the meal preparation at the farm. One morning, Cannon got the fire blazing in the hearth, and I assisted with making slapjacks (pancakes made from dried, hand-pounded corn) using fresh turkey eggs, pease porridge (a split pea soup, and, yes, "pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold" ran incessantly through my head as I stirred), and a salad from the dark greens in the garden. There was not a single modern convenience, yet it all didn't take much longer than a meal Rachael Ray would put together. All the women on the farm came down for the midday meal and we sat outside at a long wooden table, shooing the chickens away. I'm not sure why every simple meal I had there tasted so good. Maybe because it was all raised a few feet from where we ate. Maybe it was the witchy satisfaction of women together stirring their cauldrons.
One day while I was in the farmhouse assisting Rolando, a class of third-graders, notebooks open, came and peppered her with questions.
Q: Do you got a job?
A: I've got lots of jobs. I do the cooking for my family. We grow tobacco.
Q: How do you go to the bathroom?
A: Oh, we don't bathe very often. It's not good to wash the oils off your skin.
Q: I mean the toilet.
A: There's lots of woods around here. We have a chamber pot in the loft, but we don't use it very often.
The schoolchildren were followed by a couple from Ohio. Rolando asked them if they knew of any hardworking single farmers, as her husband had recently died, leaving her with four stepchildren.
"What did he die of?" the wife asked.
"He got injured in the arm with an ax," she said matter-of-factly. "That wasn't so bad, but he died from the putrefaction of the limb."
There have been living history museums for so long that there could be a living history museum with people re-enacting the founding of the living history museum. According to the Association for Living History, Farm and Agricultural Museums, the first successful open-air folk museum was established in 1891 in Sweden. In the United States, Colonial Williamsburg opened in 1932 and Old Sturbridge Village in 1946. They pioneered the idea of filling restored buildings with accurately costumed people who could show how those buildings and the tools in them were used. In the 1970s many more living history museums were created, probably inspired by bicentennial historical fever. Today the ALHFAM Web site has links to more than 100 such places around the country.
Claude Moore (named after a benefactor, not a historical figure) was founded in 1972 in McLean, Va., with the idea of showing that most Colonial Virginians didn't live at a Monticello but were poor farmers. It has a budget of about $430,000 and more than 60,000 visitors a year. One of the oddest things about the farm is its location: Across its property line is the headquarters of the CIA. I kept thinking about the essential similarity between the two places: They are both full of people who immerse themselves in false identities. The CIA's training site for people who go on to become spies is even called "The Farm," although that's actually near Colonial Williamsburg. Every time I would drive to Claude Moore, past the CIA guard house, I thought that our next breach of national security wouldn't come from an Aldrich Ames or Robert Hanssen, but from some Claude Moore volunteer wearing a listening device in his breeches. The proximity of these two federal entities (Claude Moore is the only privately operated national park) results in some strange encounters. Katherine Hughes, who recently left her job as a farmer to go back to graduate school, once got a distress call from the guard house saying they were surrounded by turkeys. Often CIA security will call asking to have the bull removed from their property.
After lunch one day Hughes put me to work making tobacco sticks. These are the humblest of objects—long sticks stripped of their bark and planed straight. They are placed across the rafters of the tobacco house where "hands" of tobacco—10 leaves tied together in bundles—are draped over them to dry. I sat on a "shaving horse," a wooden workbench in which I secured the stick so that it pointed toward me. I then took the drawknife—a blade with handles at each end—and drew it across the stick. As I began my jagged scraping, the 21st-century voice inside my head—a combination of my grandmother and a liability lawyer—started screaming admonitions: "Where are your goggles, a wood splinter could pierce your eye!" "You're aiming a knife toward your pulmonary artery!"
Yet I kept pulling the knife along the stick and it began to smooth and straighten. I fell into a rhythm and my movements started to become fluid. Making tobacco sticks required an action very similar to that used for the latissimus machine at the gym, a piece of equipment I hated. But as I sat on the shaving horse and pulled, my mind began to quiet. I finished my first stick, and as I stroked its silky finish I felt an inordinate sense of accomplishment. I put in another, and I found the scrape-scrape-scrape of the knife lobotomized the usual chattering in my head. A pair of middle-aged women approaching took me out of my reverie; I surreptitiously looked at the watch I had tucked into my pocket. Forty-five minutes had gone by; it had felt like 10.
During my time at Claude Moore I heard many interpreters say they were drawn to the 18th century because life was simpler then. I never bought that. It didn't seem so simple to watch your arm putrefy or lose your teeth in your 20s, or bury most of your children. But as I got up to get home in time for carpool, I did feel a deep longing to stay on my wooden horse and just scrape sticks. Once humans spent most of their days doing useful things with their hands, and I realized that we were designed to get a deep satisfaction from this. As Hughes put it, "You have the feeling people were supposed to do this kind of work, rather than data entry, which is amazingly horrible."
Almost as soon as the Industrial Revolution arrived, people began mourning its efficiency. As Thomas Carlyle wrote in Signs of the Times in 1829, "[T]he living artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one. The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver, and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster … nothing is left to be accomplished by old natural methods." The children who came to visit Claude Moore understood this loss. Several interpreters warned me that when I set children to various tasks they could do on the farm, from hoeing, to carding wool, to dipping candles, I would have a hard time getting them to stop. At a farm-skills training day, we all took turns learning how to crack dried corn on the hominy block, smashing a 3-foot-long wooden pestle against a hollowed-out log. One mother could not pull her 10-year-old son away and finally pleaded, "You have done a great job. So please stop pounding!" I had a vision of a new approach to our modern psychological problems. Psychiatrists would throw away children's Ritalin and their parents' Lexapro and prescribe a few hours a day of tobacco stick making or hominy cracking.
It was also a great pleasure to watch the animals. I was particularly entertained by the turkeys. These were not the tasteless, denatured modern grotesques bred to be so short-legged and heavy-breasted that they can no longer mate, but a heritage breed, Black Spanish. The turkeys are working birds; their job is to walk the rows of tobacco plants eating the horn worms. They were glorious to look at. The male, Brutus, was covered with glistening, iridescent feathers of emerald and russet which he often shimmied like a peacock. Brutus paraded with a harem of three hens—the group liked to come by the farmhouse at lunchtime looking for scraps. One day while I was sitting on a bench outside mending rags, I watched him get in a quarrel with a hen. They began pecking and squabbling until he lifted a foot, caught her wing, and pinned her to the ground. She eventually quieted, but when he removed his foot she got up, turned her back to him, straightened her feathers, and, head high, walked away without a glance.
The lives of the poultry are so intimate with that of the farm family that Rolando said she often finds chicken eggs in her sewing basket. Working at Claude Moore also means having to have a kind of Sarah Palin nonchalance about the need to turn farm animals into meat. But a trip to the past made it clear that however life has improved for humans since 1771, for our livestock, progress has meant misery.
If there ever is a rip in the time-space continuum, my Claude Moore colleagues probably could convincingly slip into Colonial America. But as much as I loved my sojourn to the past, I never was fluent enough in the language and the behavior of the 18th century to feel I was anything more than an imposter. When visitors came by I tried to remember to say 'tis, 'twill, and 'twas, but I often just motioned that I was unable to speak and deferred to my more expert companions. I was about as Colonial as Harrison Ford in Witness was Amish.
Still, I finished my time at Claude Moore feeling I had a glimpse of the satisfactions of life in 1771: the breadth of one's skills, the self-reliance, the flowing tasks, the working together for a common goal. I am happy my life in 2008 has medicine and modems—and that I don't have to sleep in a loft with my extended family. I do have occasional longings to set up a tobacco stick assembly at my house, but I realize it wouldn't be soothing, because there would be nothing useful about a tobacco stick in the anti-smoking county where I live. I need to find a substitute. As Elizabeth Rolando says, "There is a satisfaction in the accomplishment of the mundane."
I remember the day my first child was born. He lay sleeping, swaddled, in a plastic bin at the hospital. That's when I finally understood what it meant to be a parent. "If we leave this hospital without this baby," I told my wife, "we'll be arrested."
It was a joke, but it was also true. You arrive at the hospital as two people, and you leave as three. You can't just make a baby and walk away. It's yours forever.
Unless, that is, you make a baby through in vitro fertilization. In that case, you can put the embryo away in a freezer and decide what to do about it later. Or never.
In the United States alone, approximately 500,000 embryos now lie suspended in this frozen world. Thousands more accumulate every year. They go there because we make more embryos than are necessary for one child, and we set some aside in case we need them for a second child. They're our backup kids. In our heads, they aren't real yet. But in the freezer, they are.
President Bush, God bless him, wants to find homes for them. He wants the parents who made them to let others gestate, deliver, and raise them. It's a beautiful thought. But a survey published last week in Fertility and Sterility says it's not going to happen. The survey sampled more than 1,000 people who had embryos on ice. Only 7 percent said they were very likely to give their embryos to other parents. Twice as many were willing to consider donating embryos for research as for reproduction.
Why? Because we don't want other people raising our kids. In the survey, the authors found that "concern about or responsibility for the health or welfare of the embryo or the child it could become … was negatively associated with reproductive donation and positively associated with options not resulting in a child." For these people, the "sense of responsibility precludes their allowing their embryos to become children in any family except their own."
To pro-lifers, this preference for destruction is baffling. We're talking about an embryo in a freezer. Nobody's asking you, the genetic mother, to put it in your own body. We'll do all the work. Just let us have it. We'll give it life, love, and a good home.
But the mindset of possessive responsibility says: No. This embryo is mine. I can't let it grow into a child if I'm not there. I'd rather extinguish it. This is a cruel instinct, but it's pervasive. It's why Bush's father couldn't persuade women to choose adoption over abortion and why Bush can't persuade them to choose adoption even when no pregnancy on their part is required.
Imploring these people to embrace a baby-making "culture of life" is noble, but it isn't realistic. Nor is putting ads in church newsletters for 500,000 adoptive wombs. The realistic answer is to stop making and freezing so many extra embryos in the first place. That, too, requires moral strength. If you can't stand to become a parent to a batch of frozen embryos, why are you creating them? Sort out your ethics before you cross that line.
This, according to the survey, is exactly what's not being done. The authors find that "fertility patients are likely to face an unanticipated conundrum when they have completed treatment: a choice among unappealing disposition options." Unanticipated? Come on. IVF isn't a night of passion. It's an elaborate plan. How can you go into it without thinking through the eventualities?
The answer, the authors explain, is that "when embryos are initially cryopreserved, patients are focused on having a child and may not be prepared to consider fully their views about embryo destruction or donation." Furthermore, they report, "Our review of consent documents indicates that patients are often not asked their preference regarding disposition of excess embryos at the time of freezing. … Discussion of disposition options is not mandated by professional guidelines."
In other words, nobody focuses on the extra embryos. The patients and doctors are preoccupied with making a baby. If you get one, congratulations. Anything extra is an afterthought. We treat the leftovers as raw material, available to be used or thrown away. But they aren't raw material. Eggs and sperm are raw material. Embryos are what we make with that material. They're us.
So the leftovers sit in freezers, like souls in limbo. In this survey, nearly half the people with embryos on ice said they didn't want to have more kids. Yet among this group, the authors report that 40 percent "have yet to select a preferred disposition option, and nearly a fifth indicate they are likely to freeze their embryos indefinitely."
Compared with this, the abortion debate is almost quaint. There, the pro-choice slogan is: Who decides? And the scripted answer is: The woman does. But in the world of IVF, the answer, too often, is that nobody does.
What does it mean to be pro-choice in a world without time or fetal development? A world so frozen that no choice is required? Is it possible to respect each couple's choice but to demand that they choose one way or the other? Does the ethic of free choice require at least that much?
I'm a pro-choice moralist. I don't want the government telling people what to do with their pregnancies or their spare embryos. But that freedom doesn't eliminate moral obligation; it intensifies it. Each of us has to decide how to respect life in all its complexity. To me, embryos aren't people, but they're the beginnings of people. They aren't to be created, killed, or frozen lightly.
That means, among other things, that they should never be an afterthought. Don't have sex, at least not the procreative kind, without discussing what you'll do in the event of pregnancy. Don't make or freeze embryos without thinking through what you'll do with them. And if, after talking it over, you can't stomach the options ahead, maybe you should reconsider whether you're ready for this. That's a lot to ask, I know. But nobody said choosing would be easy.
(Now playing at the Human Nature blog: 1. The pro-life case for Planned Parenthood. 2. The recession-backed market for human eggs. 3. What are drones doing over North Dakota?)
It looks like we have a new record-holder in the ongoing "world's oldest mom" contest.
Patti Farrant, mother at 62—move over.
Adriana Iliescu, mother at 66—move over.
Carmela Bousada, mother at 67—move over.
Your new frontrunner is Rajo Devi of Alewa, India. She just gave birth at 70. Her husband is 72.
It's a heart-warming story of man—or, in this case, woman—overcoming nature's cruelty. Devi and her husband tried for years to have kids. Eventually, menopause claimed her. That was 20 years ago.
Then technology arrived to save the day. No eggs? No problem. We can get you donor eggs. Bad sperm? No problem. We'll fix that, too. "We used the usual intra cytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) technique," the couple's fertility doctor, Dr. Anurag Bishnoi, told the Times of India. "The ICSI method enables even poor quality sperms being used creating embryos." In Devi's case, the paper adds, the doctors used "blastocyst culture," transferring the egg after five days in vitro instead of the usual two or three.
The tinkering worked. "Childless for 50 yrs, mother at 70," says the headline in the Hindustan Times. Devi exults: "We longed for a child all these years and now we are very happy to have one."
To Bishnoi, it's a triumph over ignorant fatalism and prejudice. "The couple said they were facing social stigma for being childless for the last 55 years," the Times of India reports. Those bad old days of blaming women for infertility may soon come to an end. Bishnoi concludes: "IVF has revolutionized the way we looked at infertility. Infertility is no longer a social taboo or a divine curse. It can be treated scientifically."
Well, good riddance to infertility at 30. But Bishnoi hasn't broken Devi's curse at 30 or even 40. He has broken it at 70. "Rajo Devi has become the oldest woman to have given birth and the first woman in her seventies to do so," he proudly declares. As though the magnitude of her age makes the feat that much greater.
If you think Devi's record will stand, I'll take that bet. There will be mothers at 71 and 72. It will be done because it can be done, and because doctors such as Bishnoi see themselves as liberators. They're not just defeating society's strictures. They're defeating nature's. What once seemed an unalterable curse can now be "treated scientifically."
But as the march of motherhood continues into life's eighth decade, it may begin to dawn on the liberators that natural and cultural constraints are two different things. The former are less arbitrary. Nature tends to shut down a woman's ability to bear offspring shortly before it starts shutting down her ability to raise them. Science can defy the first shutdown, but how long can it defy the second? If 70 isn't too old to become a mom or dad, what is?
Maybe, as we extend our reach in this area, we'll learn to control it. We'll stop seeing infertility as a binary struggle between cultural fatalism and scientific treatment. We'll see an ecology of procreation and parenting, with some boundaries worth respecting, even when we know how to defeat them.
(Now playing at the Human Nature blog: 1. Drones patrolling the Canadian border. 2. Tobacco without smoke. 3. The recession and boob jobs.)
President-elect Barack Obama has made clear that he will close the Guantanamo Bay detention center. Notwithstanding the news this morning that Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four others want to confess their guilt in the 9/11 plots, closing the Cuban detention center is easier said than done. Closing the facility, which currently holds 250 or so alleged terrorists, involves a raft of hard decisions and trade-offs that won't get any easier simply because the new president's name is not Bush. The following is a checklist of the major questions President Obama will face, in rough sequential order, before he can shutter the camp:
Who must be released? Nobody contends that all of the current detainees at Guantanamo require continued incarceration. The Bush administration has already cleared approximately 60 of them for release or transfer to other countries. The Obama administration could assume some additional risk by letting others go. The first step in closing Guantanamo, then, will be to decide how many people truly must be held and how many must be held in American, rather than foreign, custody.
Where to release detainees? Where to send some of the releasable detainees poses an intractable problem. The Obama administration is legally barred from sending them to home countries that will torture or persecute them. The administration cannot easily set them free inside the United States, for some have terrorist backgrounds or connections, and the mere taint of having been called "enemy combatants" by the U.S. military will make them unwelcome. And the administration will have a tricky time convincing rights-protecting countries to resettle people deemed too dangerous to release here. The new president will thus need to figure out which detainees might be admitted to the United States and then leverage his substantial international prestige to persuade other countries to accept the rest. Ironically, the more willing he is to free detainees, the more difficult this problem will become.
Where should the remaining detainees be held? The new administration will presumably have to hold the remaining suspected terrorists in facilities in the United States. But where? They will likely end up in a prison on a military base, since it would be unsafe to hold them in normal prison populations. But few states will want to house Khalid Sheik Mohammed and his friends. And members of Congress will give NIMBY-ism a whole new meaning when it comes to keeping them out of their districts. If resettling nondangerous detainees will take careful diplomatic work abroad, resettling the dangerous ones in prisons domestically will require careful work with Congress at home.
How many of the remaining detainees can face trial? Continued detention over the long term for the remaining detainees will prove more palatable to domestic and international public opinion and the federal courts if detainees face criminal charges. But how many detainees have committed crimes provable in court using evidence judges will admit? It is critical both to identify publicly the group of detainees against whom prosecutors intend to bring charges and to bring those charges expeditiously.
What form of trial should be used? How many detainees can face trial will depend to some degree on which trial system the new administration ultimately deploys. There are three possibilities: ordinary civilian trials, military commission trials, and courts martial under revised rules of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Each system has pros and cons.
Civilian trials of terrorists are the most legitimate. But they also can endanger civilian juries and judges, they have demanding procedural and evidentiary rules that make convictions difficult, and the pro-government precedents likely to emerge from terrorist trials will hurt ordinary criminal defendants. Military commissions have more flexible rules that theoretically make acquittals less likely. But they are now politically damaged and have in any event doled out some short sentences. The UCMJ could be modified to operate like military commissions and likely would be more legitimate in practice. But the Constitution's double jeopardy clause may prevent detainees already tried in military commissions from being retried in a UCMJ trial.
A further complication in assessing these options is that the more demanding the trial system chosen (for example, civilian trials instead of military commissions), the harder it will be to convict, which means fewer detainees tried and more held indefinitely by other means.
Under what theory can detainees who are not tried remain incarcerated? Detainees convicted of crimes will be incarcerated for the term of their sentence. But detainees not yet charged or who can't be charged must be held in some form of extra-criminal detention. The United States has held in military detention "until the cessation of hostilities" hundreds of thousands of enemy soldiers in prior wars and currently holds the Guantanamo detentions under this theory. It has also long used administrative detention systems to hold without trial dangerous persons like child molesters and people with infectious diseases. The rules historically associated with these forms of detention need amplification to ensure that mistakes are minimized and to legitimize very long-term detention of terrorists not subject to trial.
Only Congress, working with the president, can establish such a system. The first and hardest issue Congress must address is the definition of the enemy to be detained. At a minimum, this definition should include everyone in the command structure of the Taliban, al-Qaida, and associated terrorist organizations who poses a clear threat to the United States. Beyond that, a precise definition becomes very hard. Congress will also need to specify rules concerning evidence, access to counsel, and government information; the length of detentions; the frequency and scope of administrative review, judicial review, publicity rules; and many other features of a detention system.
Create a national security court? Many (including the two of us) have proposed the creation of a national security court composed of Article III judges to supervise and legitimize the detention process and possibly to serve as the forum for civilian terrorist trials. In either role, the national security court would reduce the burdens on and dangers to ordinary civilian courts and employ nimbler evidentiary and classification rules. The objections to a national security court (beyond objections to military or administrative detention generally) are that they imply a permanent state of crisis and have a checkered reputation in other countries. If the new administration goes this route for either detention or for trial, the institution's design will require sustained work with Congress.
What about acquittals and short sentences? Any of the trial systems above might result in short sentences for or the acquittal of a dangerous terrorist. In ordinary criminal trials, guilty defendants often go free because of legal technicalities, government inability to introduce probative evidence, and other factors beyond the defendant's innocence. In terror trials, these factors are exacerbated by the difficulties of getting information from the place of capture, classified information restrictions, and stale and tainted evidence.
The possibility of acquittals or short sentences is a problem for terrorist trials. The Bush administration reserves the authority to continue holding acquitted terrorists or even those convicted in the military detention system after their sentences have run. But this authority undermines the whole purpose of trials, and the Bush administration has never exercised it. Putting a suspect on trial can thus undermine detentions the government regards as important. For example, the government would have had little trouble defending the indefinite detention of Salim Hamdan, Osama Bin Laden's driver, under a military detention rationale. Having put him on trial before a military commission, however, it would have been unseemly to sustain his detention beyond the light sentence he is now completing back home in Yemen.
This conundrum gives the government an overwhelming incentive to use trials only when it is certain to win convictions and long sentences, and to place the rest in whatever detention system it creates. Should the government loosen the rules for trial to make convictions easier, or should it rely more heavily on noncriminal detention? Hard call.
Wall off the system? The Obama administration will need to figure out the relationship between its domestic trial and detention system and the detainee system in the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The United States currently detains—without charge or trial and without access to lawyers or habeas rights—thousands of detainees in those two countries. These offshore detentions are perfectly legitimate under the Geneva Conventions, and in any event the resource-intensive system of trial and detention outlined above cannot feasibly be extended to thousands, much less tens of thousands.
But as the wars abroad drag on, many will ask why detainees abroad do not receive the same treatment as those at home. These questions will grow loud when the government stops bringing dangerous terrorists captured abroad to the United States, preferring instead to keep them outside our shores in the much less onerous and less scrutinized Geneva Conventions system. Closing Guantanamo will do the new president little credit if he is seen as having rebuilt it somewhere else.
What does it tell us about the state of the abortion wars today that battles once waged over the dignity and autonomy of pregnant women have morphed into disputes over the dignity and autonomy of their health care providers instead? Two of the most pitched battles over reproductive rights in America right now turn on whether health workers can be forced to provide medical services or information to which they ethically or professionally object. But as we learn from these fights, our solicitude for the beliefs of medical workers is selective: Abortion opponents will soon enjoy broader legal protections than ever. Those willing to provide abortions, on the other hand, seem to enjoy far fewer. And women seeking reproductive services? They will continue to be caught in the tangle between the two.
The first dispute concerns a new rule purporting to protect the "right of conscience" of American health care workers. Under a new midnight regulation crammed through by the Bush Department of Health and Human Services and poised to become law any day now, any health care worker may refuse to perform procedures, offer advice, or dispense prescriptions if doing so would offend his or her "religious beliefs or moral convictions." Congress has protected the right of physicians and nurses to opt out of providing abortions for decades. But this new rule, which President-elect Obama can overturn (although it may take months for him to do so), is far, far broader. It allows your access to birth control, emergency contraception, and even artificial insemination to turn on the moral preferences of your pharmacist, nurse, or ambulance driver.
The second dispute involves a South Dakota law that went into effect last summer after an appeals court lifted a preliminary injunction. The law requires physicians providing abortions to read from a state-mandated script advising the patient that she is about to "terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being" with whom she has an "existing relationship." The doctor must have her patient sign each page of a form indicating that she has been warned of the "statistically significant" risks of the procedure, including "increased risk of suicide ideation and suicide." These "risks" are almost completely unsupported by the scientific literature. A new comprehensive study released by Johns Hopkins found "no significant differences in long-term mental health between women in the United States who choose to terminate a pregnancy and those who do not." The disparity between the empirical data and the mandatory script thus forces physicians into a Hobson's choice between providing patients with accurate medical information and possible license suspension and misdemeanor charges.
Reading the new HHS regulations together with the mandatory South Dakota "script," one can conclude only that those same health providers who cannot legally be compelled to perform, assist in, or clean tools for an abortion may nevertheless be compelled by law to deliver misinformation about it. The freedom and autonomy of doctors who oppose abortion are to be protected. But those willing to provide abortions can be forced to deliver a state message with which they completely disagree. Something tells me that one's freedom and autonomy shouldn't generally depend upon one's moral or religious preferences.
Both the HHS's right-of-conscience rules and the South Dakota script purport to clarify the complex legal relationship between health provider and patient, but each instead confuses and obfuscates settled law. The HHS rule as written is so ambiguous that nobody can say for certain which health care workers or medical procedures are covered, beyond establishing that both categories are broadly expanded beyond anything protected by existing right-of-conscience laws. The new rule even fails to define abortion, leaving open the possibility that anyone who thinks birth control is abortion may decline to dispense it, turning every visit to the E.R. or the pharmacy into a spin of the constitutional roulette wheel.
A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine similarly blasts the South Dakota script for introducing novel and confusing legal language about "human beings," "constitutional rights," and "relationships" into an intimate medical conversation between doctor and patient, concluding that these words must be there only "to intimidate pregnant women with vaguely described and legal-sounding consequences." As Emily Bazelon has observed, doctors there must now make intolerable decisions about whether to explain that these warnings are not supported by science.
Of course, both the HHS's conscience law and the South Dakota script law claim to be rooted in law and science. Yet the HHS rule was pushed through over the objections of the American Medical Association, the National Association of Chain Drug Stores, and the American Hospital Association, as well as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. For its part, the South Dakota rule completely upends a 1992 Supreme Court determination that states may require women to receive "truthful, nonmisleading information" about abortion.
Almost completely missing from all of this fascinating legislative discussion about what health workers might be made to do and say with respect to reproductive rights are the reproductive rights themselves. Like it or not, the right to birth control, emergency contraception, and—under most circumstances—abortion is still constitutionally protected. But these are not services a woman can provide for herself, which leaves her with few rights at all when her physicians, nurses, and pharmacists are empowered by law to misinform her, withhold advice, or to deny services altogether.
Even beyond the problem of subordinating a woman's rights to those of her health care providers, however, there looms here a larger question for the health care workers themselves: If they are indeed seeing their rights and freedoms to speak and work either hugely expanded or severely restricted based solely on which team they've chosen in the culture wars, they should be wondering whether any of them are really free at all.
A version of this piece appeared in this week's issue of Newsweek.
This flu season, if your head starts aching, your nose gets clogged, and your body gets the chills, there's a decent chance you'll turn to the Internet before heading to the doctor. You won't be the only one. Last month, to harness the powers of our collective Web searching for a cure, Google announced a cool new system called Flu Trends that tracks outbreaks by monitoring when users type search terms such as "flu symptoms," "influenza," or "the flu." Google's team even published its findings in the prestigious scientific journal Nature. They reported that Flu Trends tracks almost perfectly with data on influenzalike illnesses that the CDC obtains from doctors' offices. And as an added bonus, Flu Trends detects outbreaks up to two weeks earlier, when people are still sitting at home sneezing into their keyboards.
"Syndromic surveillance," or using data that track trends in patient symptoms, has been a hot topic since the Sept. 11, 2001, and the anthrax attacks. The initial thought behind the now gazillions of dollars dumped into syndromic surveillance was to use sensitive monitoring systems to identify clusters of E.R. and doctor visits by patients exhibiting worrisome symptoms, like fevers and rashes, and to create an early-warning system for bioterrorist attacks. But as researchers from the Rand Corp. point out, syndromic surveillance is not all that when it comes to detecting bioterrorism. Anthrax symptoms like fever and cough mimic the flu, making it tricky to differentiate an attack from an influenza outbreak. But what syndromic surveillance is good at is detecting trends in the flu itself. And Flu Trends, which is really a new type of syndromic surveillance, reportedly has benefits over other types of surveillance.
Flu Trends is certainly better than Whoissick.org, where users report their symptoms. When sick, people are more worried about getting better (and using Google to figure out how) than reporting symptoms to a random Web site. Flu Trends is similar to a system in which doctors' offices report data on patients with flu symptoms to the CDC, which publishes the results each week. But we don't how Flu Trends compares with other types of surveillance systems, such as data from drugstores (to track purchases of cold medicine), telephone medical hot lines (to monitor patients who call in with flulike symptoms before a doctors' visit), school absences (to know when kids are not showing up at school), E.R.s (to identify diagnoses of actual flulike illnesses), laboratory data (to confirm the infection and know the viral strain), and hospital discharge data (for information on severity of illness and intensive-care use). But Flu Trends has one clear benefit over these systems: They are costly to maintain, while Flu Trends can get similar data on the cheap.
But sometimes you have to spend a little to get a little. The problem with Flu Trends is that it doesn't give detailed info on who is sick. Apart from knowing where their Internet connections are located, Flu Trends tells us nothing about the users. Other systems come with additional information, such as demographics (age, gender, etc.) and give more detailed information on where the sick people actually live. This "situational awareness" helps epidemiologists know how the disease is spreading in particular populations and regions.
But if officials monitored only Flu Trends, it would be difficult to sort the signal from the noise—in addition to losing critical details on who is sick. Things besides an actual flu outbreak can cause people to search the Internet for flu information. We would imagine that Flu Trends would spike on the release date for a flu-related movie—maybe Outbreak 2: Electric Booga-Flu. And what happens if a pandemic flu scare hits the nightly news? Flu Trends' ability to detect when the real pandemic hits will be obliterated when people, including those without symptoms, start to search the Internet. Monitoring drugstore sales has the same issue: A jump in cold-medicine sales may mean a flu outbreak, but it could also mean that CVS is running a sale or that flu fear is causing people to stock their medicine cabinets.
The real question here is: So what? Why is so important to predict a couple of days ahead of time which states have lots of people with flu symptoms? Some say this information may spark health officials or doctors to produce special news bulletins, intensify hand-washing campaigns and flu vaccination efforts, let hospitals know to up their staffing levels, or even prescribe preventive antiviral meds, like Tamiflu, to high-risk people. Those sorts of prevention efforts do actually reduce the flu spread. But it is unclear what good a one-week heads-up can do when it is already clear that the flu is coming, anyway.
If Flu Trends is not the perfect surveillance system, then what is? The ideal system would let health officials know where influenza hits, how serious it is, and what the viral strain is. It would give us advanced warning to help prevent spread. Problem is, no data source has all this info—each has limitations. The flu has a predictable pattern: You get infected, you spread it to your family and friends, you start feeling awful: fever, cough, aches, headache. Then you complain to your wife or mother (whom you have already probably infected), telephone a nurse hot line, or buy some cold medicine. Ideally, you call in sick to work or avoid school, and, finally, you type "flu symptoms" into your Google browser. There is surveillance for all these activities—except for the whining, of course. Most folks ride it out at home and stay in bed for a couple of days, but some go to doctors' offices or to the E.R, and some of those doctors will order influenza tests. But by the time we have the hospital data, the flu has not just arrived, but has infected lots of people, and interventions to reduce its spread are less effective.
Probably the best answer is for officials to use multiple data sources for syndromic surveillance simultaneously and perform graded interventions with each new bit of information. When the earliest warning system goes off (like Flu Trends or drugstore purchases), health officials might announce "Flu is here" and urge people to get more rigorous with hand-washing and get vaccinated if they haven't already. Then, when the hospital data warn that the flu has landed in a particular location and is having an extreme effect on a population (like children or the elderly), targeted interventions can be implemented at the regional level, as with Tamiflu prophylaxis, or even considered for more drastic measures, such as temporarily shutting day care centers.
Another future trend in syndromic surveillance is sharing information between jurisdictions that now adhere to political boundaries such as states, counties, and cities. Diseases often spread across state lines without asking permission from health officials. So regionalization or nationalization (like Biosense) of surveillance may help us identify outbreaks that are not confined to one particular area.
But despite all this, it is important to keep a grounded perspective. The way to prevent yourself from getting the flu is to get your shot, wash your hands, and stay away from coughing people. When you do get it, stay at home, for goodness' sake. And along with your daily searches for Britney Spears and government bailouts, keep on Googling for flu remedies. By doing so, you're not just informing yourself, you're also helping the health department. But no matter how accurate Flu Trends is, we can be certain about three things this winter: 1) Flu will come; 2) many people will get sick, and some will die from the infection; and 3) Google Flu Trends will prevent neither 1) nor 2).
Much to the delight of harried young doctors everywhere, an expert panel recently agreed that medical residents aren't getting enough sleep. Citing evidence that fatigue leads to more medical errors, the Institute of Medicine said last week that doctors in training should not work more than 16 hours without taking a five-hour nap. Though it carries no binding authority, the recommendation of the IOM's report supplements an earlier rule, passed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education in 2003, that limited residents to 30-hour shifts and no more than 80 hours of work each week. Surgical residents may someday soon have to prepare themselves to halt an operation and announce that it's nap time.
The American medical establishment has been slow to give up a hazing ritual that assigns grueling schedules to trainees, with supporters of the schedule arguing that the long hours prime young doctors for the rigors of medicine, expose them to many disease scenarios, and promote continuity of care for patients. Other nations have been quicker to jettison that system. New Zealand limits residents to 72 hours of work each week, while France caps the workweek at 52.5 hours. Danish residents work no more than 37 hours a week. (What a breeze!) Elsewhere in Europe, countries are slowly lowering the work hours of "junior doctors" to comply with the European Working Time Directive, which limits hours for all shift workers. By 2009, junior doctors will work no more than 48 hours a week.
Unfortunately, working less comes with a big price tag. Countries that have imposed shorter work hours for residents have faced steep staffing shortages as well as questions about the quality of their medical training.
New Zealand and Australia were two early adopters of shorter hours for residents, and their experiences should have warned other countries against the idea. In 1985, when New Zealand restricted residents to 72 hours of work per week, hospitals faced a sudden shortage and ended up hiring more senior doctors to fill the gap. Australia experienced a similar problem after physicians adopted a 1999 "National Code of Practice" designed to minimize the risks facing all shift workers who work extended hours. By 2004, physician shortages were common in Australia, and the state of New South Wales had 900 vacancies for residents and other doctors in training.
Other countries have seen similar snags. In Europe, where thousands of physicians were needed to fill vacancies created after residents scaled back their hours, hiring additional personnel cost an estimated 1.75 billion Euros. Exceeding the 48-hour-a-week allotment "is the rule rather than the exception" in Portugal, noted researchers in a 2004 British Medical Journal article. The United Kingdom needed an estimated 15,000 additional doctors to staff the National Health Service to comply with the Working Time Directive, which applied to junior doctors for the first time in 2000. In 2004, the BBC reported that the NHS was facing a "staffing crisis" brought on by shorter hours for residents.
But too few doctors isn't the worst of the consequences. Proficiency in the operating room notoriously demands long hours, and one-third of orthopedic surgical residents were deprived of training in the operating theater because of shorter work hours, according to a 2002 survey by the British Orthopedic Association. "To become a competent surgeon in one fifth of the time once needed either requires genius, intensive practice, or lower standards. We are not geniuses," wrote the authors of an article published in the British Medical Journal in 2004. "That many senior house officers arrive at posts halfway through their rotations without any real competence in operative skills as basic as suturing and tying knots is therefore unsurprising," they noted.
As European countries approach a 2009 deadline for fully implementing a 48-hour workweek for doctors, critics have renewed their arguments. In November, a study published jointly by the Royal College of Anaesthetists and the Royal College of Surgeons suggested that medical education in the United Kingdom would need an overhaul in order to maintain certain training standards while complying with reduced-hour rules. Testifying before the U.S. Institute of Medicine's committee on residents' work hours, Dr. Bernard Ribeiro, former president of the Royal College of Surgeons of England and an outspoken critic of shorter work hours, urged members to consider the implications of reducing residents' hours: British residents today perform 25 percent fewer procedures than they did before the regulations began to take effect, he said.
Despite such a warning, lessons gleaned from other countries played a modest role in the committee's deliberations. An appendix, "International Experiences Limiting Resident Duty Hours," took up 19 pages in the IOM's 480-page report, Resident Duty Hours: Enhancing Sleep, Supervision, and Safety. "Each system is different—it's hard to generalize," said one committee member, Dr. Kenneth Ludmerer, a professor of medicine and history at Washington University in St. Louis. "Ultimately, we're concerned about our own country."
But here, too, shorter working hours for residents have a spotty record.
In 2003, when the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education ruled that residents could work no more than 80 hours a week, hospitals were forced to hire additional nurses, technicians, and senior doctors to pick up the residents' slack. Last week, the IOM committee said its recommendations could cost $1.7 billion a year. The committee justified the expense by saying medication errors and the cost of treating drug-related injuries in hospitals add up to more than $3.5 billion a year.
But if the mistakes of drowsy doctors are merely replaced by the mistakes of ill-trained doctors, there won't be as much benefit as the IOM predicts. Dr. Elias Traboulsi, chairman of graduate education at the Cleveland Clinic, points out that a quality medical education often hinges on how much time is spent treating patients and working in the hospital. Time restrictions also limit residents' exposure to the longitudinal nature of illness, said Dr. Joseph Loscalzo, chairman of the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. "It really fragments the learning experience we wish our residents could have," said Dr. Loscalzo. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education allows hospitals to apply for small extensions of up to eight hours a week for some residents on the grounds that certain medical specialties, like surgery, benefit from more training, but those extra few hours might not be enough.
We all want our doctors to be well-rested, but the IOM's effort to ease the burden on overworked residents saddles some doctors with recommendations that could hinder their education. Across-the-board guidelines lump together doctors with vastly different skills, sleep needs, and career goals. More flexibility would keep the United States from facing the doctor shortages and training deficiencies seen by other countries. By allowing individual programs to tailor work hours to meet the needs of their residents, the rules could accommodate aspiring physicians for whom shorter shifts are sufficient as well as those surgery residents who may benefit from logging extra hours in the operating room. Then surgeons won't have to worry about fitting in nap time.
Since the economic-stimulus package in February, the federal government has offered more than a dozen multibillion-dollar rescue packages for a variety of industries and people endangered by the financial chaos and the recession. The magnitude of even one of these mega-bailouts is hard enough to grasp—see the "Explainer's" take on the meaning of $700 billion—and combined they represent trillions of dollars in federal commitments. The following Slate visualization attempts to put the magnitude of these rescue packages in perspective.
How to read this graphic
Think of the rings above as an onion; each ring is an added layer of federal money, such that the combined picture represents the total financial commitment of the U.S. government.
Mouse over the rings or labels to get a description of each bailout. (The ring in question will turn red when you mouse over it or the corresponding label. Pardon the acronyms—it's the only way to squeeze their ungainly names on the page.) In its default setting, the chart displays federal money committed (but not necessarily spent). To see how much of this money is already out the door, just click on "Spent" and watch the rings shrink to the size of expenditures to date.
When the graphic first loads, you see each bailout add on to the previous one in chronological order. To see the whole picture, just click "View All." Hit "Play" to see the animation again.
Methodology
The data for this graphic were gathered from a variety of sources, including the Federal Reserve, The Big Money, and CNBC. Some editorial judgment went into deciding which lending programs and federal guarantees to include in the chart; for example, we don't include total FDIC backing of financial institutions, which the very highest estimates typically do. As these loans are repaid (and new short-term loans are offered), some dollar amounts will fluctuate. Please e-mail Slate with any suggestions for programs to add or figures to update.
Update, Dec. 12, 8:35 a.m.: The Term Auction Facility is now up to $448 billion in dollars spent, while the Commercial Paper Funding Facility rose to $312.4 billion, according to the Federal Reserve.
What's the difference between Smart Money and Dumb Money? Twelve months, the popping of a credit bubble, and about $800 million.
In the run-up of asset prices, which ended about a year ago, everyone was a genius. Hedge-fund managers felt wise for borrowing large sums of money and buying stocks, commodities, or pretty much anything that went up. Private equity barons bought companies, issued debt to pay themselves dividends, and were hailed as master investors. Heck, even millions of homeowners felt like Einsteins for refinancing at lower rates. And hardly anyone was deemed smarter than Sam Zell.
The Chicago-based real estate investor, nicknamed the Grave Dancer for his delight in picking up dead businesses and reviving them, built Equity Office Properties, a collection of high-end office buildings. In February 2007, Zell was lauded as a genius for unloading the company in an all-cash transaction valued at about $38 billion (Blackstone put in $6.4 billion in cash and borrowed the rest), after a frenzied bidding process. But Zell wasn't content to take his winnings and stow them under the mattress. Having benefited from the dumb-money culture—people willing to pay high prices for leveraged assets in the hope and expectation that they'd be able to sell them to other debt-fueled buyers at even higher prices—Zell loudly plunged right back into it. (Regular readers of this column should expect to hear more about the culture of dumb money—I've got an electronic book about it in the works with the Free Press.) In December 2007, Zell closed on the $8.2 billion acquisition of the Tribune Co., putting in $315 million of his own money and borrowing much of the rest. Make no mistake about it, the Tribune Co. was a classic dumb-money play, and not just because its main assets were declining newspapers.
A big part of the dumb-money culture was the rising sense that hedge-fund managers, asset flippers, and financial engineers—because they had made a lot of money from cheap credit—could apply their genius to industries in which they had little expertise. Frequently, however, that strategy didn't go much beyond financial engineering or selling assets—which depended, in other words, on the plentiful availability of cheap credit and credulous buyers. If hedge-fund maestro Eddie Lampert couldn't remake Sears into an effective retailer, investors thought, he could at least bolster shareholder value by buying back shares or by selling the real estate underlying the stores. That hasn't quite worked out. Hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman set up a vehicle to amass a huge stake in retailer Target. His bright idea: Target should sell its stores and lease them back.
It was plain from the beginning that Zell didn't have much of a strategy for reversing the revenue decline at the newspapers. And the failure to realize that a slowdown in real estate and autos—the credit crunch had started a half year before the deal closed—would reduce revenues sharply was an act of colossal stupidity on Zell's part and on the part of the bankers who made the era of dumb money possible. (Andrew Ross Sorkin has a good rundown of the fees earned by Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley for their roles in this debacle.) Zell loaded up the company with nearly $13 billion in debt, which required interest payments of nearly $500 million in the first half of 2008. The plan, such as it was, was to pay down debt not with operating cash but with asset sales. One problem: Most of the assets were themselves dumb-money assets—trophy properties such as the Chicago Cubs, office buildings, and big-city newspapers that couldn't support a lot of debt on their own and whose purchase would require easy credit. In May 2008, Zell managed to sell Newsday to Cablevision for $650 million. In September, it sold a chunk of CareerBuilder.com for $135 million. In June, Tribune put the company's headquarters buildings in Chicago and Los Angeles on the market. So far, no takers. The hope to stay current on debt payments rested on selling the Chicago Cubs, perhaps the greatest Midwestern trophy property of all. But the credit crunch decimated the net worth of many of the potential buyers, and lenders fell by the wayside. Having failed to find any greater fools, Tribune filed for bankruptcy Tuesday.
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This is shaping up to be a dismal Christmas. The International Council of Shopping Centers, which is supposed to help promote the industry, last Thursday trumpeted an "awful beginning to the holiday season." Excluding Wal-Mart, retailers reported that same-store sales last month fell 7.7 percent, the worst November in recent history. The big crowds that stampeded (literally, sometimes) through the doors of big-box retailers on Black Friday have dispersed. Shoppers seem inured to the relentless Christmas spirit. The Boston Consulting Group says that half the households it surveyed are planning to reduce their Christmas spending, while only 10 percent plan to boost it. ICSC projects that holiday sales could actually decline in 2008, "which would be the weakest holiday-sales performance on record," says Michael Niemira, chief economist and director of research at ICSC.
But no indicator was quite so telling as the plaintive message left on my home answering machine over Thanksgiving weekend. A kindly Bergdorf Goodman salesperson invited members of our humble household to stop by and check out the bargains. Now, if you're not a habitué of the his-and-hers luxury department stores on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, there are a few things you should know about Bergdorf Goodman. This place puts the haute in haute couture. It's about as welcoming to the public as North Korea. It's the kind of store where the salespeople take one look at your shoes and judge whether you're a big spender. Bergdorf Goodman cold-calling suburban shoppers? It's like college kids canvassing for Obama votes at a National Review conference.
But these are desperate times. During the late economic expansion, the well-off—and, in particular, the really well-off—thrived while the middle and working classes struggled. But in 2008, the stalwart customers of New York's luxury retailers have been falling along with the hedge funds. The investment bankers and their significant others? See ya. Rich tourists from points south and west? Not this year, y'all. Europeans and Brits fueled by their powerful domestic currencies? Adios, au revoir, cheers! Russian oligarchs? Da svedanya. In November, according to ICSC, luxury stores saw sales fall 10.5 percent. Neiman Marcus, which owns Bergdorf, reported sales were off 11.8 percent.
Strolling the half-mile of Fifth Avenue from Rockefeller Center to Central Park—the white-hot heart of the high-end American Christmas experience—you encounter the businesses that manage to separate more people from their hard-earned money more than any others. But crowds in these thrift-killing fields were relatively sparse last week (aside from the clutch of Citigroup bankers trying to present toxic mortgage-backed securities as collateral for loans from Salvation Army kettles). The Rockefeller Center tree, like everything else in New York this year, has been downsized. The 2008 Norway spruce is 72 feet, down from 84 in 2007. In Bottega Veneta, not a creature was stirring, not even a Vogue assistant editor. The Apple Store earlier this fall was so mobbed that hipsters had to take a number to enter the Shrine of Jobs. This time, I swept right in and didn't have to wait to pay. Across the plaza from Apple stands FAO Schwarz. In normal times, it's an anxiety-inducing miasma of kids, tourists, and flying plastic toys. Last Tuesday, it was an oasis of calm. I could have done yoga safely in the Lego section.
Why should we care where and how the well-off are spending? Well, the top 20 percent of households account for about 40 percent of discretionary spending, and the top 40 percent account for 74 percent of all discretionary spending, according to BCG. As go the rich and wannabe rich, so goes the nation. And while the residents of Richistan aren't moving to Pooristan just yet, they are cutting back. "Consumers who have money have decided they want to hold it in their pocket," says BCG partner Michael Silverstein. Luxury retailers have responded by acting like discounters. "In a better economy, customer service, quality, selection are the key selling points," says Ellen Davis, vice president at the National Retail Federation. "But this year it's really all about price." Saks, which specializes in imported finery, is taking a cue from domestic automakers and offering zero percent financing. A/X is advertising all sorts of merchandise as half-off.
But not all luxury retailers seem to have gotten into the 2008 Christmas-shopping spirit. At Bergdorf Goodman's men's store, tasteful signs advertised 40 percent off marked prices. Which meant, for example, that a lovely Brunello Cucinelli gray wool sweater was marked down from an astronomical $1,075 to a merely absurd $649. As I looked at a rack of dark blazers, I was flattered that a salesman actually spoke to me. "How much?" I asked. "Fortysomething hundred dollars," came the reply. I laughed. "That's Brioni," he said, "if it means anything to you." Why, yes it does, I thought. It means an insanely expensive product that probably won't sell much this year and, as a result, will fail to deliver fat commissions to nasty salespeople.
It's been fun. But next time, Bergdorf, don't call me. I'll call you.
A version of this article also appears in this week's issue of Newsweek.
The Reader (the Weinstein Co.) is slow-acting poison. For the first third of the movie, you'll experience a not-unpleasant tingling in the extremities, giving way to an encroaching torpor. An hour in, your pupils will have shrunk to pinholes, and by the time the closing credits roll, you'll be capable only of a dim longing for the defibrillation paddles. Who would have thought a movie about a beautiful, frequently naked female Nazi could be so dull?
If anyone could pull off the feat of making nude Nazis boring, it would be Stephen Daldry, whose The Hours (2002) was a genteel, portentous literary adaptation of exactly this sort. The Reader is based on a German best-seller by Bernhard Schlink, a former Oprah selection that is, by all accounts, a harrowing look into Germany's troubled postwar conscience. The movie is something else: a titillating romance that suddenly morphs into a suspense-free courtroom drama, then trickles off in a wan coda of hand-wringing.
Middle-aged law professor Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes) is a lonely shell of a man, incapable of real connection; as we first meet him, he's politely dismissing a one-night stand. Glancing at a passing streetcar, he's reminded of a certain summer long ago. Unfortunately, instead of hearing the theme from Summer of '42, we then flash back to 1958, when the teenage Michael (played by the gawky, endearing David Kross) had a furtive love affair with the much older Hanna Schmitz (Winslet), a ticket-taker on the Berlin trolley.
Hanna is an odd sort of girlfriend, fiercely sexual but briskly unromantic, given to sudden bouts of cruelty and sorrow. The sheltered, middle-class Michael is thoroughly entranced by this passionate enigma. He cuts school to spend days at her apartment, reading the classics aloud to her in bed. (These early scenes, in which literature and lust converge, are the movie's best.) Then, one day, he finds Hanna's apartment empty.
Years later Michael, still waiting to turn into Ralph Fiennes, enters law school. His professor (Bruno Ganz) takes the class to observe a war-crimes trial in which a group of former SS guards are accused of letting Jewish prisoners burn to death in a locked church. The principal defendant: Hanna Schmitz. Devastated, Michael returns to his class, Adolescent Grandstanding 101, to debate the morality of trying war criminals 20 years after the fact. Was Hanna, as she insists, a terrified subordinate carrying out orders, or was she a sadistic ringleader enjoying her power?
Maybe I'm lacking in moral complexity (or maybe this is a uniquely German story that translates poorly to an American context), but The Reader's central problem (which seems reducible to "I shagged a Nazi") strikes me as a bogus one. If Michael can say, truthfully, that he knew nothing about his lover's past, doesn't that effectively absolve him of guilt? A lifetime of Fiennes-ian brooding seems a steep price to pay for one summer of unwitting fascistic congress. And even if Michael can't help but feel haunted by his fling, shouldn't others (like the Holocaust survivor he confronts near the end of the film, played by Lena Olin) let him off the hook? Why on earth should a horny teenage boy have to abstain from sex with a willing blond goddess on the off chance she might be SS?
For Kate Winslet is indeed a goddess, one whose special power is to descend among us in manifold human forms. Even in this hopelessly silly role—half dominatrix, half victim, devoid of legible motivation—she finds moments of truth. (On a bike excursion with Michael, you can see Hanna trying, and failing, to rediscover her carefree prewar self.) Yes, Kate is grubbing for an Oscar this year with the near-simultaneous release of two Important Dramas (this and Revolutionary Road). But she may be the finest actress of her generation, and (unlike her only real competitor, the other Cate) she's also a five-time nominee who's never won. I say give her the gold guy already, Academy, if it means so much to her. Maybe it will free her up to stop acting in movies like this.
In 1779, a composer, writer, teacher, and dreamer named Christian Neefe arrived in Bonn, Germany, to work for the Electoral Court. Neefe (pronounced nay-fuh) was the definition of what Germans call a Schwärmer, a person swarming with rapturous enthusiasms. In particular, he was inflamed with visions of endless human potentials that the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment promised to unleash. Like many progressives of the time, Neefe believed that humanity was finally coming of age. So he had picked the right place to get a job. Bonn was one of the most cultured and enlightened cities in Germany; the court supported a splendid musical and theatrical establishment. Before long in his new post, Neefe found himself mentoring a genius. Meanwhile, in his spare time, he signed on with a plan to, as it were, rule the world.
One of Neefe's first students was a sullen, grubby, taciturn 10-year-old keyboard player named Ludwig van Beethoven. He was the son of an alcoholic singer who had more or less beat music into him. The kid seemed more like a charity case than a budding musician, but Neefe soon discovered that his talent could put him in the league of the musical phenomenon of the age, a child of freakish gifts named Mozart.
Ludwig was named for his grandfather, who had been Kapellmeister, head of the court musical establishment. Old Ludwig's son, Johann van Beethoven, was a tenor in the choir; when his father died, he had made a bid to become Kapellmeister. Everybody but Johann understood that was ludicrous: He was a competent singer and music teacher, otherwise hopelessly mediocre and a devotee of the bottle. As often happens, the full ferocity of the father's blighted ambition landed on the son. Johann van Beethoven intended to make his oldest child into another Mozart, or else.
Neighbors used to see tiny Ludwig standing on a bench to reach the keyboard, his father standing over him shouting and threatening, the boy weeping as he played. When Ludwig was 7, his father put him on display in a concert and for good measure advertised him as age 6, the same as Mozart when he became famous. Johann was hoping for a sensation, but nothing came of it (except that Beethoven was confused about his age for the rest of his life). At 7 he had been a terrifically precocious keyboard player, but he wasn't another Mozart, at least not yet.
By the time Christian Neefe arrived in Bonn and started teaching Beethoven organ and composition, the 10-year-old was as good a keyboard player as anybody in town. Soon Neefe got into print some variations Ludwig had written, one of his first pieces—slight and conventional, still not Mozart but impressive for his age. In a newspaper article, Neefe cited the variations and said the magic words: With proper nurturing, this boy will "surely become a second Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart."
By his midteens, Beethoven was a court musician in various capacities and making huge strides as a composer. His father had pulled him out of school after a few years so he could concentrate on music. (Beethoven learned to add and subtract but never learned to multiply. If he had to multiply 65 by 59, he wrote 65 in a column 59 times and added it up.) Meanwhile his father was promoting him relentlessly, mounting concerts in the house and taking him on tours around the Rhineland. By that point, there was little question in Ludwig's or anybody else's mind that he was headed for big things. One day when his landlord's daughter accosted him with, "How dirty you're looking again! You ought to keep yourself properly clean," he told her, "What's the difference? When I become a gentleman, nobody will care."
Which is to say that Beethoven was a prodigy and had the classic prodigy's trouble: He knew all about music, but he didn't know how to live. He had only a hazy sense of the reality of other people. Throughout Beethoven's youth, a row of mentors would attempt to civilize and socialize him, with mixed results.
In those years, his first serious mentor, Neefe the Schwärmer, was in an especially perfervid phase of his spiritual life. For some time he had been a Freemason, a group then in its first century as a progressive, international, secular, semisecret order open to men of all faiths. (As such, the Masons were loathed by churches and regimes alike.) But Neefe was tired of the Masons' endless chatter of liberty and morality. He wanted a more ambitious and active kind of brotherhood—say, a new world order. That took him to one of the more bizarre sideshows of the Enlightenment: the Bavarian Illuminati. A Bonn lodge of the Illuminati formed, and Beethoven's teacher became head of it.
Founded in 1776 by a Bavarian professor named Adam Weishaupt, the Illuminati joined radical politics and Jesuit-style hierarchy to fanatical secrecy. The aims of the order were ambitious, all right: They intended to change the world and had a plan to do it. The means were not to be by violent revolutions. The idea was to form a cadre of enlightened men who would steathlily infiltrate governments everywhere and slowly bring them to a kind of secular-humanist Elysium under the guidance of a secret ruling body. Said Adam Weishaupt: "Princes and nations shall disappear from the face of the earth peacefully, mankind shall become one family, and the world shall become a haven of reasonable people. Morality shall achieve this transformation, alone and imperceptibly."
For every Illuminatus, the perfection of society started with the perfection of one's own moral character. Aspiring members were given piles of text to read, required to write a rigorous self-examination and to undergo ritualized interrogations:
Where have you come from?/ From the world of the first chosen.
Whither do you want to go?/ To the inmost sanctum.
What do you seek there?/ He who is, who was, and who shall always be.
What inspires you?/ The light, which lives in me and is now ablaze in me.
For all the moony mysticism, the Illuminati had a high-Enlightenment agenda, rational, humanistic, and universal. They published a monthly magazine, Contributions to the Spread of Useful Knowledge, which was partly Enlightenment cheerleading, partly practical items relating to husbandry, housekeeping, and the like. Duty was the essence of Illuminati teaching, but it was an Enlightenment kind of duty: duty not to God or to princes but to the order and to humanity.
In practice, the Illuminati amounted to a kind of activist left wing of the Freemasons, from whom they drew most of their members. The numbers were never large, but they included people like Goethe (briefly) and Christian Koerner, a close friend and confidant of Friedrich Schiller. Koerner's influence seems to be why some Illuminati-tinged ideas—universal brotherhood and the triumph of happiness bringing humanity to Elysium—turned up in Schiller's famous poem Ode to Joy, which was often set to music and sung in Masonic and Illuminati circles. The poem would later enter history via the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
As an Illuminatus, an important part of Christian Neefe's duty was to covertly inculcate promising young people in the ideals of the order, then to recruit them when they came of age. Beethoven was as promising as young people get. So did Neefe inculcate this student? Surely he did. Was Beethoven recruited to the order? No—the Illuminati dissolved in 1785, when he was 14. There is also a question as to how inculcatable Beethoven was by anybody. Even in his teens, he was so fixed on his own tack that he only intermittently took notice of the rest of the world.
Not only Neefe, but then and later most of Beethoven's other friends and mentors and patrons were ex-Illuminati or Freemasons. Did those influences have an impact on his life and art? Among many other things, certainly. By the time Beethoven left Bonn, he was already planning to set Schiller's Ode to music, and he had a good idea what that poem was about, from its humanistic surface to its Masonic and Illuminati depths. By then Bonn had helped give him ideas and ideals about being a composer that no one ever had before. He wanted to be something more than an entertainer. He wanted to be part of history.
If Beethoven had come from anywhere but Bonn he still might have been a genius, but he would not have been the same man and composer. True, he was more self-made than anything else, could see the world only through his own lens. He was a legendarily recalcitrant student and claimed to have learned nothing from any of his teachers. His most celebrated teacher, Joseph Haydn, sardonically dubbed Beethoven die grosse Mogul—in today's terms, the big shot. Yet at the same time, Beethoven was by no means aloof. He soaked up every idea around him, read voluminously in classical and modern literature, studied the music of older masters and modeled what he did on them. His art drew from myriad sources, among them the extravagant humanistic ideals floating around Bonn in his youth. One of the things it all added up to was something like this: music as an esoteric language wielded by a few enlightened men for the benefit of the world. Beethoven was all about duty to the abstraction called humanity. That was what he was taught and what he lived and wrote for, through all the miseries of going deaf and a great deal of physical pain. It was people he didn't much care about. But in taking up Schiller's Ode for the Ninth Symphony, he proposed not just to preach a sermon about the brotherhood of humanity and the dream of Elysium. He wanted the Ninth to help bring those things to pass.
As for the Illuminati, call them one more example of the Enlightenment's excesses of hope for human perfectibility. Since Beethoven's day, the secrecy and world-ordering agenda of the Illuminati have made them a natural magnet for conspiracy freaks. The Illuminati actually existed only some nine years, but there are still lots of folks, including many on the American religious right and the John Birch Society, who believe the Illuminati are the mother of all conspiracies, a Jewish-dominated international cabal that has more or less run the world since they incited the French Revolution. My saying they were a short-lived and a bit pathetic phenomenon makes me, of course, part of the conspiracy—along with Beethoven. I'd like finally to meet some of my fellow conspirators. They seem like interesting people.
Newsweek, Dec. 15
The cover story looks to the Bible for arguments against gay marriage and instead finds that the good book advocates inclusion for all. In biblical times, marriage was a polygamist institution, and "no sensible modern person wants marriage—theirs or anyone else's—to look in its particulars anything like what the Bible describes." … A story examines the custody battle between two moms over their daughter Isabella. After marrying in Vermont and divorcing eight years later, Isabella's biological mother, Lisa Miller, has since found God and renounced her former lifestyle, which she now calls "fundamentally wrong." Despite a ruling by the Virginia Supreme Court, Miller continues to deny the nonbiological mother, Janet Jenkins, visiting rights. "For gay-rights advocates, it's further evidence that the uneven patchwork of laws concerning same-sex civil unions and marriage may promise them equality in one locale, but leave them vulnerable in another."
The New Yorker, Dec. 15
A piece profiles eccentric Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili in the aftermath of the summer's short war that brought Russian tanks within 20 miles of Tbilisi. Saakashvili, almost 10 inches taller than Vladimir Putin, has nicknamed the Russian president "Lilli-Putin," and whenever the pair meets, the room feels "electric with hatred," according to an observer. Many politicians have faulted Saakashvili for overestimating the amount of support the small Caucasian nation has in the West. "I don't want to live in the new Caucasian Israel. I'd rather live in the new Caucasian Ireland," one former ally said. … Malcolm Gladwell tries to figure out what makes a good teacher. One researcher concludes that it is "withitness"—"a teacher's communicating to the children … that she knows what the children are doing, or has the proverbial 'eyes in the back of her head' "—that separates the competent from the lackluster. Gladwell proposes opening up teaching "to anyone with a pulse and a college degree" and starting an apprenticeship program to weed out those who do not succeed.
The New Republic, Dec. 24
Coveting positions in "Camelot Redux," eager young Democratic job-seekers are flocking to key people in the new Obama administration like so many ravenous birds, a piece finds. Networking, already a professional sport inside the Beltway, has kicked into hyperdrive. The manager of Obama's 2000 state Senate run has dealt with more than 600 job inquiries since the election. … Washington's social climbers are also jostling for ties with the first family. "Establishment Washington is an insecure culture, peopled by frantic overachievers whose professional and social standing depends heavily and uneasily on the ballot box." The author also predicts that the locus of young Washington will shift from preppy Georgetown watering holes to hipster-packed dives in Adams Morgan and around U Street. … Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff does not have an office, and that's just one of the problems plaguing the newest federal agency, Jeffrey Rosen finds.
New York, Dec. 15
From Mad Men to Rachel Getting Married, the magazine weighs in on 2008's best offerings in its annual year-in-culture issue. … A profile of hedge-fund manager Jim Chanos chronicles how the prescient short-seller has managed to turn a profit on Wall Street's woes. To find hidden instability inside of companies, Chanos and his analysts pore over their financial statements to ferret out their weaknesses. "Chanos is a financial undertaker. He makes a profit when companies die. And when there's an epidemic, he gets richer still." … Women are drinking almost as much as men these days, an article finds. Part of the reason is savvy marketing; part is third-wave feminism. College and the binge drinking that often accompanies it can set the tone for lifelong habits, and "the more educated a woman is, the more likely she will be to drink throughout her life."
Weekly Standard, Dec. 15
Fred Barnes wonders if Jeb Bush's stated intent to run for Senate in 2010 means he wants to follow his father and brother to the White House someday. The stigma attached to Jeb's last name "should begin to fade" after his older brother leaves office in January. After two years out of politics, "Bush can't afford to stay on the sidelines if he has any hope of being president," Barnes writes. … An article follows Sarah Palin—"the second biggest phenomenon of the 2008 election cycle"—to Georgia, where she stumped for Senate hopeful Saxby Chambliss. Chambliss, who won in a runoff, commended Palin for her help getting out the vote. Her success in Georgia proves that "grassroots America does not want her to go away, and she has no intention of doing so." … The cover story evaluates recent changes at the National Museum of American History, the least popular of the big Washington, D.C., museums that "has been disappointing tourists for 44 years."
Click the arrow on the audio player to hear Rachel Hadas read this poem. You can also download the recording or subscribe to Slate's Poetry Podcast on iTunes.
If rings exchanged do signify a wedding,
or a couple standing face to face
making a promise, then it was a wedding
I dreamed, all draped with garlands of green meaning.
August meanwhile was reeking with black smoke.
Day's broadcast or night's scenario:
which message was—was either message—true?
Confusedly through sleep I recognized
my bridal pair. But at the same time, something
pressed against the haven of the night.
Sheet lightning? The air trembled
as if, hooves thundering, a nightmare galloped
past the house along the empty road.
Summer was waning. I was getting old.
The vision of the wedding fell away
and launched me, weary, into a red morning.
The world was warring, drowning, catching fire.
Last month's election was historic and may even have been transformative, as many commentators said. But in one important respect, it changed nothing. The divide between Republicans and Democrats in America continues to grow.
And it isn't just about politics. The division is also between rich and poor, between those with college educations and those without. On average, Republican communities have lower incomes and less education than Democratic communities. And those differences are growing as people migrate.
Just more than 600 counties (of more than 3,100 nationally) voted Republican more heavily in this year's presidential contest than in 2004. The average per capita yearly income in those counties was about $18,800, according to county income tallies issued each year by the Internal Revenue Service. (Income in this article is determined by the amount of adjusted gross taxable income listed on individual tax returns from 2004-07. Per capita income equals gross income divided by the number of personal exemptions.) By contrast, those living in the 500-plus counties that voted more heavily Democratic this year than in 2004 had average personal incomes of $28,000—nearly 50 percent higher than the communities trending Republican. The most Democratic counties (those where Barack Obama won by more than 20 percentage points) had average per capita incomes of $28,207. Those counties where John McCain won by similar margins had average personal incomes of just $21,308.
Places divided by income are also separated by education. In landslide Democratic counties, 32.7 percent of the adult population had a bachelor's degree or better. In Republican counties where McCain won by 20 points or better, 20.4 percent of adults had finished college or graduate school.
More than 30 years ago, pollster Everett Carll Ladd Jr. wrote about the "inversion of the New Deal Order." Ladd was one of the first to notice that white workers without a college degree were voting Republican in larger numbers and that educated white workers were turning Democratic.
The debate over whether working-class white voters have abandoned the Democratic Party rages on. (See this recent paper on the "shifting and diverging white working class in U.S. presidential elections.") In the meantime, the results from this year's election show that there is certainly a geographic division in America based on class and status. Democrats won in the richest and most educated communities in the country.
As people migrate, these divisions (political, educational, and economic) among American communities are increasing. Again using IRS records, we tracked the average income of people who moved between counties since the 2004 election. Those who trekked across state lines from 2003-07 and settled in counties that grew more Republican this year had average incomes of $18,300. The people who moved into counties that became more Democratic in 2008 averaged $28,100 in yearly income. So those who moved to blue counties had incomes more than 50 percent higher than those migrating to the reddest of counties.
And in the "flip" counties, the contrast is even starker. In all of the United States, there were only 44 counties that voted for John Kerry in 2004 but for John McCain in 2008. The average annual per capita income of the people who moved into these counties between the two elections was $16,500. That's 34 percent less than those who migrated into the 331 counties that went for George Bush in '04 but Obama in '08.
People with fewer money-making skills are moving into counties that are voting increasingly Republican. Those with higher incomes (and more education) are moving into counties that are voting more Democratic. The more lopsided the local political victory, the greater the differences in income and education.
This phenomenon held true in cities and rural communities alike. In those urban centers that voted overwhelmingly for John McCain, 23.6 percent of the adult population had at least a bachelor's degree. In urban counties that voted in a landslide for Obama, 33.3 percent had at least a college degree. In rural counties that voted in a landslide for McCain, 15.2 percent of adults had a college degree or better. In rural Obama landslide counties, it was 19.2 percent.
We don't pretend to understand the full meaning of how this country is dividing. We can see, however, that America is becoming more polarized not only politically but also educationally and economically—and that a country Balkanized by skills and by income has more troubles than one that is simply divided by votes.
The first rule of political crisis management: Tell everything. Every megascandal, from Watergate to Monica, was exacerbated by the slow trickle of embarrassing information. Better to put it all out there at once, take the heat, and move on.
On Day 3 of the Blagojevich affair—which needs a name: send nominations here—Barack Obama obeyed that rule, but with a twist: He promised to tell everything soon.
At a morning press conference in Chicago, Obama assured reporters that he had never spoken with Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich about filling his empty Senate seat, despite a previous statement to the contrary (since retracted) by his own senior adviser. Obama said he was "certain" there was no deal-making between his office and the governor's. And he promised to "gather the facts of any contacts with the governor's office about this vacancy so that we can share them with you over the next several days." (In other words, "I'll find some and I'll bring them to ya!") Obama thus disavowed any connection to Blagojevich's crimes while leaving open the door for future revelations.
On the one hand, this response doesn't satisfy: How hard is it to figure out who was the Obama team's liaison to Blagojevich? (Some think Rahm Emanuel, who replaced Blagojevich in his House seat, would be the obvious tie.) It's only natural that Obama would share his views about his replacement with Blagojevich—did they really have no contact regarding the seat? (We know they met as recently as last week.)
On the other hand, Obama is a delegator, not a micromanager: He can't possibly know every last interaction between his office and the governor's. Plus, caution behooves Obama right now. The scandal isn't about to disappear—U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald still needs to decide whether to hold a preliminary hearing or bring an indictment. And it's best to make sure you've got the facts straight before issuing a blanket denial. Creating a fact-finding committee is often a way of deflecting questions. But this time, at least, the questions aren't going away.
Meanwhile, Obama honed a few other approaches that are forming the foundations of the Obama school of crisis management:
Feed the sharks. Navigating a crisis is a fine balance. If you say too much, you might give the story oxygen. If you don't say enough, people will think you're evading tough questions. Obama knows that reporters need a story for the next day's papers, and that if they don't get one, the story will be: "Obama Stonewalls." He therefore called for Blagojevich to resign, cranked up the Emote-a-Tron from 3 to 6 (saying he was "appalled and disappointed" by the revelations), and said definitively that his aides did not bargain for the Senate seat.
Dangle a shiny object. Maybe you missed it, but the actual purpose of today's presser was to introduce the leaders of Obama's health care team: Tom Daschle as secretary of health and human services and head of a new White House Office of Health Reform, and Jeanne Lambrew as its deputy director. That gives Obama cover to answer questions about Blagojevich without appearing to make it his focus. It also guarantees that at least some column inches will be devoted to something other than the Blago-sphere.
Express outrage only when pressed. Obama raised eyebrows when his first statement after the arrest of Blagojevich left out the whole disapproval part (especially compared with Fitzgerald's impassioned presser). He made up for that today. Outrage does not come easily to Obama. He denounced the Rev. Jeremiah Wright only after a series of middling statements. His equanimity serves him well when it comes to decision-making, as well as in campaign contexts like debates, where coolness reigns. When it comes to denouncing disgraced politicians, though, the crowd wants blood.
Answer questions at length. Obama took only four questions today, but the answers went on forever. He turned a question about corruption in Illinois into a disquisition on the nature of public service. He went on about all the different ways in which he knew nothing about Blagojevich's dealings. The long answers are a relief for veterans of President Bush's press room, but they also obscure the occasional dodge. Today, Obama was asked how Blago got the impression he was being uncooperative if he had no contact with the governor's office—the key question in the whole mess. We're still waiting on an answer.
Obama's still in a good spot: The Blagojevich complaint leaves him pretty much untainted. And the questions raised—did he want Valerie Jarrett to replace him?—don't necessarily have embarrassing answers. But if he's going to keep invoking a new kind of politics, one that is honest and transparent, Obama will have to put all his cards on the table.
When a president-to-be does anything for the first time, it's interesting. Today we saw Barack Obama give his first denial related to a scandal. It's good practice, because sooner or later, a scandal (real or manufactured) will confront him while he's in office. As New York Sun reporter Josh Gerstein (I think it was he) used to joke: On any given day, you could ask President Clinton, "Mr. President what about the allegations?"
How did Obama do when asked about Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich's effort to hawk his Senate post? It was a bit of a muddle.
Obama was asked: "Were you aware at all about what was happening with your Senate seat?" He responded: "I had no contact with the governor or his office and so we were not, I was not aware of what was happening." He didn't want to go any further, citing the ongoing investigation.
It's hard to know what to make of this. As I wrote initially, Obama and his team come off quite well in the indictment. They didn't want to pay-or-play in any of the governor's games. In fact, this is what seems to have propelled Blagoevich into several bouts of plenteous profanity.
But Obama's answer wasn't terribly nourishing. First, as Jake Tapper notes, this seemed to contradict a statement last month by David Axelrod, Obama's top strategist. "I know he's talked to the governor," Axelrod said about the Senate seat, "and there are a whole range of names, many of which have surfaced, and I think he has a fondness for a lot of them."
The second part of Obama's answer was so vague as to be nearly meaningless. "I was not aware of what was happening" can mean anything you want it to. It can mean you weren't aware of anything relating to the Senate seat, or that you weren't aware the governor was trying to sell the Senate seat, or that you weren't aware the governor was under federal investigation for trying to sell the Senate seat. Or it could mean you were not aware that Blagojevich was using hairspray (or not, as the case may be).
The answer has the whiff of imprecision we're familiar with from politicians. They want to sound definitive without being definitive. But it's also true that officials can also run into trouble by acting in good faith. They try to give a short, simple, digestible denial, and by going for brevity, they unwittingly leave a door open. Was Obama purposefully trying to be unclear? It's hard to say. It's a little hard to believe that he didn't know anything that was happening relating to his old seat. Maybe he's just really, really focused—though he did say on Meet the Press, when ducking a question about Caroline Kennedy being appointed senator from New York, "The last thing I want to do is get involved in New York politics. I've got enough trouble in terms of Illinois politics."
Obama refused to elaborate on the Blagojevich business, citing the ongoing investigation. But an Obama aide responded to my questions by telling me that Axelrod was mistaken.
So much for the first part of the president-elect's answer. We now know, according to transition officials, that Obama did not speak with the governor or anyone else from his office about who would replace him.
What we don't know, and what the aide would not address, is what Obama meant by the second part of his statement. Did he really know nothing at all about what Blagojevich was doing with his Senate seat? If so, that would seem to be as easy to clear up as the Axelrod mix-up. But the aide wouldn't go any further. This could just be a function of an aide not wanting to speak for the next president. That's a healthy instinct—for the aide's survival and for all of us.
So we're left with vagueness. Why does it matter? It always matters when a politician won't say the simple thing. Maybe it matters a little more with Obama, who can answer the dickens out of a question when he wants to. There's evidence that Obama wanted Valerie Jarrett to take his seat—the governor sure seemed to think the president-elect wanted that. Suddenly, in the middle of the process, Obama stopped wanting that. Why?
The list of federal charges against Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich is a many-splendored thing. Each act it describes is more outrageous than the last. For the moment, my favorite quote is the governor's maxim that a Senate seat "is a fucking valuable thing, you just don't give it away for nothing." So true. Michael Huffington spent $30 million, John Corzine $60 million. Perhaps the devaluation of a Senate seat, like that of a governorship, only happens once you're in office.
U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said in a statement this morning that the breadth of corruption "would make (Abraham) Lincoln roll over in his grave." Blagojevich's phones were bugged for more than a month, which captured a lot of rich material and dark psychological terrain. While Blagojevich contemplated the string of difficulties and liabilities stemming from a three-year investigation into his administration, he was still confident enough to muse about a 2016 presidential campaign. He tried to leverage the power to appoint the next senator to replace President-elect Barack Obama into a job as Obama's secretary of health and human services. If that didn't work, he wanted Obama to name him an ambassador or help his wife get on some corporate boards in exchange for naming his preferred candidate to the post. (I called Obama's office to see what it makes of all of this but haven't heard back.)
After trying so hard to price the Senate seat at top dollar, Blagojevich may now have made it almost worthless. The 78-page rap against the sitting governor throws the question of the Illinois Senate seat into turmoil. If Blagojevich takes the Eliot Spitzer route and resigns, the lieutenant governor gets to name the pick, and the race is back on. But what if he's as delusional as the wiretaps make him seem? That would suggest he'll take the Ted Stevens route and stay in office while he fights the charges.
If he goes with the Ted Stevens model, one way to show that he's innocent of nothing more than playing backroom hardball would be to proceed as planned and name Obama's successor. But what senator would want to have "D-Blago" after his name, to be forever tainted by having been appointed by a man whose corruption appears to have been so splendid?
The charges also raise some tricky questions for all of those vying for Obama's Senate seat. What did they or didn't they say on the phone to the governor (or his chief of staff, John Harris, who was also indicted)? What might those working on behalf of a prospective candidate have done? There are allegations that the governor took money from at least one individual in connection with naming a successor to Obama, which means that one of the candidates for the job is having a very difficult conversation with aides right now.
If you're a candidate for that office, how do you play it? Do you immediately denounce Blagojevich? That would ruin your chances if he stays in the job. On the other hand, if you are the first to throw him under the bus, it might put you in the best position to be appointed as a clean candidate by Democratic Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn, who would take over if Blagojevich leaves office. Denouncing Blago might also put you in a good position to run in 2010. (I called the office of Jesse Jackson Jr., one of the leading candidates to replace Obama, but haven't heard back.)
The person who looks great in this sordid affair, in fact, is Barack Obama, whom Blagojevich refers to by another name. According to the charges:
ROD BLAGOJEVICH said that the consultants ... are telling him that he has to "suck it up" for two years and do nothing and give this "motherfucker [the President-elect] his senator. Fuck him. For nothing? Fuck him."
According to the charges, "Blagojevich said he knew that the President-elect wanted Senate Candidate 1 for the open seat but 'they're not willing to give me anything except appreciation. Fuck them.' " (Senate Candidate No. 1 seems to be Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Obama.) In another passage, Blagojevich fumes that if Obama doesn't show him some love, he'll appoint a person Obama doesn't want. Obama comes off as good as he could possibly have hoped for: He's behaving well even when you don't think anyone is watching.
Still, there are questions for Obama and his team. Jarrett is one of his top advisers, and, in keeping with Obama's public comments about transparency, she should tell the story from her side. Aides have suggested that Obama didn't want her in the Senate but thought she would be more valuable in the White House. The indictment suggests he was pushing for her to get it. Which is it? On Nov. 9, Obama seemed to want her for the Senate seat. On the 10th, he didn't seem to. What happened in between? Jarrett pulled herself out of the running for the Senate seat rather abruptly—did she know something funny was going on? Did Obama know something funny was going on? There are loose threads that should be taken care of.
As the old bulls retire from the Senate and Change with a capital C comes to Washington, it's quaint to see a throwback to 19th- (or 20th-) century money-grubbing. It's a little incredible that prostitutes weren't involved (or aren't yet, at least). Perhaps even more staggering is that the man at the center was so reckless while simultaneously aware of the advances in modern surveillance. As Blagojevich says at one point: "You gotta be careful how you express that and assume everybody's listening, the whole world is listening. You hear me?" Right you are, governor.
For the lawyers, radio hosts, and denizens of the Internet who want Barack Obama to be disqualified from the presidency, it was Black Monday. The Supreme Court had finally read Donofrio v. Wells, the lawsuit that accuses both Obama and John McCain of lacking "natural born citizenship." The court dismissed it. Its denial of cert was so curt—"The application for stay addressed to Justice Thomas and referred to court is denied"—that you might have thought the case had blown across a receptionist's desk and been filed by accident.
"Yes, they didn't take it to the next level of full briefs and oral argument," Donofrio wrote on his blog after the news came in. "But they certainly heard the case and read the issues. … Getting the case to the full Court for such consideration was my goal."
That was not what Donofrio's supporters had wanted. On Friday, about two dozen of them gathered outside the Supreme Court to talk to reporters, wave flags, and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Some of them questioned whether they could prosecute Obama for spending "foreign money" they alleged had been donated to his campaign. One questioned whether Barack Hussein Obama Sr. was the president-elect's real father or whether his real filial relationship to Frank Marshall Davis or Malcolm X had been covered up.
"There aren't a lot of people out here today," admitted Steve Brindle, a Pennsylvanian huddling in the cold. "There are a lot of people talking about this back home. Really, everyone's asking questions."
Robert Schulz, whose We the People Foundation had bought full-page newspaper ads questioning Obama's citizenship, was ready for the high court outcome. On Monday afternoon he asked Donofrio and two other lawyers with outstanding suits about Obama to come to the National Press Club to discuss their next steps. Donofrio didn't show, but Pennsylvania attorney (and occasional 9/11 skeptic) Philip J. Berg joined California attorney Orly Taitz at the podium of the club's Murrow room.
The room filled up early: About half of the small room's overflow crowd consisted of worried Obama skeptics who gasped and nodded at the testimonies of the attorneys and their litanies of facts that the press had covered up. Most members of the media were, themselves, part of the Obama Truth squad. Shelli Baker, the host of AM radio's Morning Song, spent five minutes unspooling a theory that tied Obama to Arab sheiks and world government. "I would be willing to testify," said Baker, "that, indeed, the media has been corrupted by foreign oil money."
Thus corrupted, reporters spent two full hours listening to Schultz, Berg, and Taitz describe their allegations accusing Obama of document forgery, arrogance, radical ties, and "foreign allegiance" to Kenya. "This is the largest hoax in 200 years," said Berg. "Obama knows where he was born. He knows he was adopted in Indonesia. Obama places our Constitution in a crisis situation, and Obama is in a situation where he can be blackmailed by leaders around the world who know he is not qualified."
Taitz, one of the lawyers representing Alan Keyes in his suit to stop California electors from voting for Obama next week, argued that her client had been injured by Obama's hoax—he was on the ballot in California and had to compete against a fake candidate. (Keyes won 0.4 percent of the vote there.)
"I was born in the former Soviet Union," Taitz said. "I have to tell you, one of the reasons I am so up in arms about this case is that during this election, the media in the United States was worse than Communist Russia."
"You guys have been traveling with him for two years!" Berg said, white knuckles gripping his podium. "You guys have access. Someone could stand up and say where's your birth certificate? What's your status in Indonesia?"
After the lawyers had their say, Schultz recognized Rev. James David Manning, the Harlem preacher who has called Obama a "long-legged mack daddy," and a member (alongside Jeremiah Wright and Oprah Winfrey) of the "Trinity of Hell." For some reason, Shultz gave Manning a microphone to talk about Obama's parents.
"It is common knowledge," explained Manning, "that African men, coming from the continent of Africa—especially for the first time—do diligently seek out white women to have sexual intercourse with. Generally the most noble of white society choose not to intercourse sexually with these men. So it's usually the trashier ones who make their determinations that they're going to have sex."
Manning grew more intense as he went on. Berg and Taitz seemed to squirm in their chairs; Berg started taking quiet cell phone calls before Manning evoked the memories of Africans who lost their lives "packed like sardines" onto slave ships, now in "a watery grave." "Do you think we want to wake those people up and tell them that the womb of a 16-year-old white girl has produced your redeemer? Has produced your savior? I don't think they want to wake up to that. I think they want to keep sleeping in that grave until true justice might be given."
Every possible reason for disqualifying Obama was laid out, laboriously, if not exactly backed up with facts. After it was pointed out that the "forensic experts" who have accused Obama of forging the birth certification reproduced on FightTheSmears.com have not even revealed their names, Berg pointed out that the certification denoted the race of Obama's father as "African." "In 1961, no one talked 'African.' It was 'Negro.' I mean, that's what shows how phony this document is."
"How about that?" murmured Shelli Baker.
Still, none of the lawyers, nor Manning, could agree on a path forward for Obama birth certificate skeptics. Schulz proposed a citizens' convention—"continental congress, We the People congress, call it what you like"—that could hash out the issues around Obama's eligibility. Taitz was still working her cases and claimed that Obama could be held liable for an Illinois bar form on which he didn't list any other names he'd gone by. Berg hinted at a secret lawsuit that he was participating in and couldn't discuss, as well as information from an unnamed "barrister from England, who spoke to me on his nickel," that the FBI and CIA had information proving Obama's Kenyan birth.
The press conference wrapped up with the lawyers meeting well-wishers and handing out documents, as the few reporters still in the room headed for the door. Ruth Mizell, the widow of former Rep. Wilmer Mizell and a volunteer for two of George H.W. Bush's campaigns, idled in her chair for a little while longer. She was frustrated that the people she'd told about this story kept blowing her off.
"I can't stand to watch Obama," Mizell said. "He looks so deceitful. I feel like it's witchcraft going all over everybody, that he's witchcrafting everybody. He doesn't say anything. He uses a lot of good words."
Can we sue him for that?
I can't imagine Caroline Kennedy campaigning for the job of U.S. senator through traditional methods: shaking hands outside factory gates on a cold winter morning, granting interviews to reporters other than sycophantic morning-show hosts, explaining and defending her positions on the issues of the day. Just as she's never shown any enthusiasm for public office, so Kennedy has never shown much interest in the things candidates have to do to get elected.
Which is why Hillary Clinton's Senate seat may be perfect for Kennedy. Under the most widely discussed scenario, New York Gov. David Paterson would name Kennedy to replace Clinton, who is resigning to become secretary of state. Kennedy would become senator simply by doing something at which she has long excelled: working the phones with powerful people who take her calls because of her last name. And though such talents aren't irrelevant to a senator's job—and though Kennedy has long experience fulfilling ceremonial obligations, another senatorial duty—they are far from sufficient. Sometimes a senator has to get her hands dirty.
Disclosure: My view of Kennedy is shaped by personal experience. Before my book American Son, about working with John Kennedy Jr. at George magazine, was published in 2002, surrogates of Caroline tried to prevent its publication. They failed, but it was ugly stuff. If Caroline Kennedy didn't know the specifics of their efforts—which ranged from threatening my original publisher to planting negative stories about me in the media—she certainly knew of their existence. How do I know? Because I told her, in letters to which she never responded. (By contrast, I corresponded with Sen. Ted Kennedy's office several times, with his aides informing him of the book's progress, and before it was published they asked for advance copies.)
Still, my lack of enthusiasm at the prospect of Sen. Caroline Kennedy is more than personal. (In fact, the toughness I encountered would probably serve her well on Capitol Hill.) In several important ways, she's also considerably less suited for public office than the two senators who currently represent New York, Clinton and Charles Schumer.
Unlike Clinton and Schumer, Kennedy has always seemed more interested in avoiding public issues than engaging them. As an adult, she has tended to work at jobs that didn't require her to work all that hard and didn't require her to mingle with ordinary people. She has a law degree but does not practice law, instead co-writing two books about important Supreme Court cases. The books were typical of Kennedy: high-minded, earnest, but distant, as if she never really wanted to take a position on something relevant to the events and debates of the day. More recently she has published books on more domestic matters, such as A Family of Poems: My Favorite Poetry for Children and The Best-Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
In a recent column, Michael Wolff tells a story about Kennedy catching wind of a New York Post inquiry about the alleged misbehavior of one of her children. So, Wolff writes, Kennedy called an aide to Rupert Murdoch, and the Post's owner had the story killed. In turn, Kennedy wrote a letter of recommendation for Murdoch's daughter to Brearley, an exclusive private school in Manhattan. Of course, Kennedy is the caretaker of the family legacy and a mother. So in that sense her actions are understandable. But would she ever risk damaging her image on behalf of the public?
She received lavish praise when, in 2002, she joined New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein in his efforts to improve the city's public schools. Yet her work with the city's schools was limited to part-time fundraising. No one has said anything bad about her participation—there's not much upside to criticizing Caroline Kennedy—but then, if you work at a hedge fund and Kennedy calls you in the middle of a bull market to ask for money, are you really going to say no?
As a Kennedy, Caroline can hardly shirk public service. But her commitment to it has always seemed essentially ceremonial. When she was 9, she broke a bottle to help christen the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy. As an adult, she was the honorary chair of the American Ballet Theater and founder of the Profiles in Courage Award, given out by Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. She balanced New York society parties with a devotion to preserving the family memory. Otherwise, she has largely hid herself from public life.
You can't blame her for her reticence—it's her life, after all. But the truth is that Kennedy has ventured into the public arena as little as possible, and when she has, she has endeavored to dictate the terms. Perhaps now, with her brother dead and her Uncle Ted extremely ill—and her children of college age—Kennedy is changing her mind. But can she change her patterns of behavior?
Again I should disclose a personal bias. Of the two children of John F. Kennedy, John Jr. always struck me as the one destined to run for office. He had an affinity for it. John enjoyed meeting regular people far more than he liked palling around with the rich and famous. Caroline is a Democrat, but not a democrat. John lived in Tribeca when Tribeca was still counterculture; Caroline lives on Park Avenue. John rode the subway frequently and happily. Caroline, not so much. John started a magazine whose intention was to popularize politics. Caroline was about the only one of John's relatives who didn't at some point appear in its pages. I could see John having a beer with those factory workers. Caroline would look for some hand sanitizer.
She'll probably have the same response to this column—which is one reason that, despite all the buzz, I find it hard to believe that Caroline Kennedy actually wants to become a senator. (I'm not exactly Walter Winchell.) Maybe Uncle Ted is pressuring her to continue the family place in the Senate. Maybe she's convinced herself that she does want the job. Regardless, she wouldn't be good at it, and she shouldn't get it.
Teenagers and bombs go together like peanut butter and chocolate.
When I was a kid, my brother Jon and I would collect the empty aerosol cans from the trash and toss them into the 55-gallon drum that functioned as the family incinerator. We'd wait until the parental units went shopping or golfing and then cover the Right Guard and Aqua Net containers with a pile of combustible trash and put a match to the whole thing.
Sometimes we were rewarded with the rocket's red glare as the burning cans would spiral toward the heavens. On other occasions, the cans would blast flame posies of burning newspaper in the air that would float to the ground and start tiny brush fires. Disappointment arrived when the cans merely made whooshing sounds without exploding at all.
Such is the bond between teens—especially of the male variety—and the story about the teenager blowing off a hand in his basement bomb factory has become a staple of American newspapers. Blind to this long love affair is the CBS Evening News With Katie Couric, which on Dec. 9 aired a ridiculous piece it titled "Made in the U.S.A.: Teen Bombers" on its Web site.
In her very scary intro, Couric reports that:
A government report out tonight may surprise you. It says there were more than 2,700 incidents involving bombs and explosive devices last year, right here in the United States. What's truly shocking is who was behind most of them.
The shocking, shocking, shocking news according to CBS reporter Armen Keteyian is that:
The latest figures, gathered by the [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives] and obtained exclusively by CBS News reveal that between 2004 and 2007 juveniles accounted for well more than half of all reported traceable explosive incidents—far exceeding gangs and hate groups combined.
When you follow the CBSNews.com link to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives' U.S. Bomb Data Center Web site and look at the statistics, you discover that explosives incidents are demonstrably down in recent years. The CBS News broadcast (and the transcript offered on its Web adjunct) doesn't mention this fact. In 2004, the ATF recorded 3,790 explosives incidents. In 2005, the bureau noted 3,722 incidents. In 2006, it collected data on 3,445. (See this ATF PDF.)
(What exactly is an "explosives incident"? Glad you asked. According to the Bomb Data Center, incidents include bombings, attempted bombings, attempted incendiary bombings, premature explosion, stolen explosives, recovered explosives, hoax devices, and accidental explosions. In 2007, 2,061 of the 2,772 explosives incidents were recovered explosives.)
A graphic that appears at about the 44-second mark in the CBS News segment posted to the Web states by year the percentage of cases in which juveniles were involved: In 2004, 57 percent; in 2005, 63 percent; in 2006, 76 percent; in 2007, 59 percent.
That the number of explosives incidents fell to just 2,772 in 2007 (PDF) should have suggested to CBS News a segment titled "Hey, Where the Hell Have All the Explosives Incidents Gone?"
Instead, CBS News hangs its story on the hook that teens "accounted for well more than half" of all explosives incidents between 2004 and 2007. If it's true that teens are behind more than half of all incidents—and, given my past, I don't doubt it for a moment—shouldn't the network have done the arithmetic to produce the raw number of incidents involving juveniles?
Had the network gone that route, here's what it could have reported, year by year:
What to make of CBS's assertion that it's an "alarming trend" that more than half of all incidents involve kids "under the age of 18," even though the raw number—that was once fairly steady—has plummeted? That the network is desperate to inflate a nontrend into a real one.
Jon and I never graduated from aerosol cans to pipe bombs. He discovered the greater incendiary potential contained in girls, and I discovered firearms.
******
Later we both discovered alcohol. Send your bomb memories to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum; in a future article; or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)
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If Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich is immediately guilty of anything, it's of making overt what other politicians make covert, and doing so while the wiretaps roll.
Despite the sensational treatment given the arrest of Blagojevich and aide John Harris in today's New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune, the governor has yet to be charged with attempting to sell Barack Obama's vacated Senate seat. All those juicy details about Blagojevich making plans to trade the Senate seat for a position in the Obama Cabinet, another job, financial support, or jobs for his wife appear in the complaint brought yesterday.* But U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald has yet to file charges over the alleged attempt to sell the seat.
It could be that Fitzgerald will eventually file expansive charges against Blagojevich for discussing the sale of the Senate seat and the other allegations he detailed in a press briefing yesterday. As Fitzgerald put it, he'd arrested the governor "in the middle of what we can only describe as a political corruption crime spree" and that "we're not going to predict that other charges will or will not be filed." (Scott Turow speculates in today's New York Times that Fitzgerald accelerated the investigation to block Blagojevich from peddling the Senate seat.)
So far, the actual charges against Blagojevich and Harris are very narrow. The complaint says they "corruptly solicited and demanded a thing of value"—the firing of Chicago Tribune editorial writers by the paper's owners—in exchange for "millions of dollars in financial assistance by the State of Illinois" for Wrigley Field, which is owned by the newspaper's corporate father, the Tribune Co.
Blagojevich's first mistake was asking the Tribune Co. for way too little in return for the state's financial favors. What allegedly angered him was a Sept. 29 editorial calling on the Illinois House to explore his impeachment and an Oct. 25 endorsement of a state representative—a dentist—for re-election. The editorial observed that the representative was the "only dentist in the legislature. Can he extract a governor?"
I can't believe that the governor wanted to extract absolute revenge for these minor offenses. Besides, there is no way that the scalps of a bunch of meddlesome editorial writers are worth the $100 million in financial assistance mentioned in the complaint. For purposes of comparison, I could have Arthur Sulzberger Jr. vanquish the entire New York Times editorial board tomorrow for $11,524, and if I really wanted to rub Sulzberger's nose in it, I could make him extend William Kristol's op-ed page contract for another year. If Blagojevich is as corrupt as the headlines make him out to be, wouldn't he hold the Tribune Co. up for something a little more tangible than a few firings? Or is he really that dumb?
Blagojevich's second mistake was to air his demands in a phone call to Harris. Crime bosses and corrupt politicians never say anything of substance in meetings or phone calls. When engineering a transaction, they know enough to insulate themselves beneath layers of underlings—or to encourage their trading partner to figure out which quid pro quo is desired.
Unremarked upon in today's coverage is the question of why the state of Illinois is in the business of dispensing $100 million in financial favors to billion-dollar corporations like the Tribune Co. in the first place. To paraphrase Michael Kinsley, the scandal isn't what's illegal. It's what's legal. (Over at Cato, Jim Harper writes of how politicians fawned over by lobbyists and staff "tend to collapse together the public interest and their personal interests.")
As for the accusation that Blagojevich was prepared to sell Illinois' open Senate seat, the only concrete information I can find about that in the complaint is intercepted conversations between the governor and his associates, a fundraiser, and a union official speculating about what he could expect to get in return for the appointment.
Before we turn down the sheets on Blagojevich's prison cot, let's see transcripts of him actually making a money deal or power deal with somebody for the Senate seat. Even U.S. Attorney Fitzgerald says his office isn't "trying to criminalize people making political horse trades on policies or that sort of thing."
As for other possibly criminal conduct by Blagojevich—such as attempting to shake down corporations for campaign contributions in return for state funding—he appears oblivious to how easy it is to legally swap political favors for position, power, and money. And for that ignorance the governor has my complete sympathy.
******
"The subject of criminal rehabilitation was debated recently in City Hall. It's an appropriate place for this kind of discussion because the city has always employed so many ex-cons and future cons," Mike Royko wrote in the Chicago Tribune on March 6, 1985. Send appropriate Roykoisms to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum; in a future article; or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)
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Correction, Dec. 10, 2008: The original version of this article mistakenly referred to an "indictment" in the Blagojevich case when it should have referred to a "complaint." The article has been changed. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
Instead of dissipating, the cult of Tim Russert has only swollen in the six months since his death. One measure of the cult's staying power has been the media's incessant speculation on who would replace him as host of Meet the Press. Would it be NBC News' political director, Chuck Todd? An "ensemble of hosts" led by Todd and correspondent/MSNBC anchor David Gregory? NBC had approached Gwen Ifill about the job, the network was said to pine for the return of Katie Couric, and even Ted Koppel was being considered as a long shot. And though nobody asked him, USA Today founding editor Al Neuharth nominated Bob Costas for the slot.
The media fuss wasn't so much about the importance of who was good enough to sit in Russert's chair but—like the over-coverage of Russert's death, funeral, and memorial service—another demonstration of the Washington press corps's extraordinary high regard for itself. All the conjecture reinforced the notion that the people who ask politicians questions are so very, very important. But Meet the Press draws an average of only 3.7 million viewers, making it a TV flyspeck compared with ABC's Dancing With the Stars, which recently drew an audience of 21 million.
Having finally settled on David Gregory this week as the new moderator, NBC News brings much-needed relief to a harassed nation of news consumers. Yet the cult lives on in the utterances of Gregory, who genuflected toward his predecessor, telling the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz that "[s]ucceeding Tim Russert is humbling" and the Los Angeles Times how "daunting and humbling" the new assignment is.
Note to Gregory: It's only a gig. Please get on with it.
Gregory seems to be a fine choice as moderator: Although a pathetic dancer, he has a reputation for being a tough, fair reporter. If you have a reputation for being tough, it makes it a lot easier to be tough, which I reckon he will exploit on Meet the Press.
But what kind of tough? The most difficult aspect of a Sunday-morning show is source maintenance. Until Sunday show moderators obtain subpoena power, they've got to keep politicians feeling good about themselves or else they won't come on. Russert was a master of source maintenance, which made his show a destination for politicians. For all his legendary hardness as an interviewer, most of Russert's pitches were hittable. For example, throwing up on a screen those trademark graphics that proved that his interview subject had flip-flopped was completely overrated. A politician had contradicted himself? Is a hypocrite? Double wow. As Tom Carson wrote for Esquire in 2004, "Russert rarely shows much interest in which position is wrong." This shtick was completely beatable.
Gregory comes to his post at an opportune moment. After an engaging presidential campaign, the whole nation remains fired up about politics. An activist Congress stands ready to change all the rules, and the economy has gone MIA. All we need is a new war some place in the world and the table would be completely set.
Gregory won't shake up the show right away. He'll both avoid impersonating St. Russert, lest anyone make unfavorable comparisons, and lull the loyal Meet the Press audience back into its comfort zone. After getting them there, he should begin remaking the show. First step:
Get rid of the Russert regulars. Who hasn't heard enough from James Carville and Mary Matalin by now? Hasn't plagiarist Doris Kearns Goodwin run out of gas? Doesn't William Safire phone it in? Can't NBC do the right thing and give Andrea Mitchell her own show? And why does the mere sight of David Broder, Bob Shrum, E.J. Dionne, or Peggy Noonan on television make me want to kill myself?
Blacklisting these usual guests from the Meet the Press round table and recruiting a younger band of participants would mark the passing of an era and acknowledge the arrival of a young president. It's not even a very radical step. Russert was known to experiment with formula, adding Matt Drudge and Rush Limbaugh to the mix. So it's not too much to ask some new voices to suit up for play. The office politics of such a move will be tricky. Betsy Fischer, Russert's executive producer, is Gregory's executive producer. It would be a pity if she insisted on turning the show into a permanent memorial service for her old boss.
For starters, I'd have the Gregorized Meet the Press Rolodex add Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times, who had a great run covering the Obama campaign. Nobody knows more about the next president and is more resistant to his charms than Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times. Helene Cooper, who just moved over to the New York Times' White House beat, is a fine reporter. As resident progressive egghead, sign up Thomas Frank, who now writes a weekly column for the Wall Street Journal. Add George Mason University economic professor Tyler Cowen, a regular New York Times contributor, as counterweight. Also allow me to put in a good word for two of my Washington Post Co. colleagues: Washington Post editorial writer and columnist Ruth A. Marcus files consistently excellent op-eds these days, and Terence Samuel, deputy editor of The Root, who also writes for the American Prospect. Samuel commands an original, wicked mind. Next step:
Invent a great gimmick. Russert had a dozen gimmicks. He had the flip-flop graphic. He had Buffalo. The Bills. His blue collar. The whiteboard. His dad. Gregory needs a similar signature, and I've got just the thing. Good politicians are evasion artists, able to field a difficult question without answering it and making it sound as though they did. When confronted with such maneuvers, Gregory could pursue his prey with three follow-up questions. If the politician didn't answer satisfactorily, Gregory could give his best grin and say, "Senator, that's three and you're out" and move on to the next question. If deployed artfully, "That's three and you're out" could become the most feared phrase in political reporting and just maybe it could get politicians to respond truthfully. After that:
Add a reported segment. Every Sunday talk show tries to generate news for the Monday newspapers by prodding a politician to say something interesting. The politicians know this, so the smarter ones know well enough to drop a bomb or bomblet and frag for the moderator. Instead of relying on guests for news, a Sunday show could break the mold by filing a reported story that makes news. (The lack of reported news stories on the Sunday show is one of economics. Reported stories are about 10 times more expensive to produce than studio chatter.) Lacking the budget or gumption to break news, Gregory's show could at least broadcast a reported segment that put into context the top story that everybody was about to discuss. It's not a revolutionary idea: Jack Smith used to file Sunday stories for This Week With David Brinkley. Finally:
Get out of the office and stay out of the office. As Washington bureau chief for NBC News, Russert could sponge up details and tips from his reporters. I'd have Gregory, who isn't bureau chief (and shouldn't be), walk the political beat all week in preparation for his show and not let his Today assignments get in the way of his real work. If he runs the show more like a reporter and less like a Washington institution, he'll already have a leg up on Russert.
******
Perhaps I overdosed on the political talk shows when watching them was part of my job description. Send diagnoses to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum; in a future article; or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)
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In a bad economy, office holiday parties usually get scaled down or canceled. But George W. and Laura Bush are still expected to throw a number of parties at the White House this holiday season. In 2005, John Dickerson described the arduous social obligations imposed on the president and first lady during the month of December. His original article is reprinted below.
No matter how much you may enjoy your office holiday party, there's always someone you'd like to avoid running into at the punch bowl: Bob from the seventh floor who won't shut up about his Big Bertha Fusion golf club, or Felicia in accounting who wants to know where your expense reports are.
Imagine hosting a party for only the people you've always wanted to avoid. The president and the first lady will hold two such events next Thursday as they welcome the press corps into their home. They are less the hosts of these parties than their victims. The first couple will not sip at eggnog or nibble on tiny lamb chops in the state dining room. They will stand in one spot in the Blue Room, next to a Christmas tree, as hundreds of correspondents, sound people, and photographers line up to have individual photographs taken with the first couple.
During the holidays, the president is a virtual prisoner in the White House. He and his wife will perform this grueling act of cheer at 26 holiday parties between Dec. 4 and Dec. 20. There's one for the diplomatic corps, members of Congress, the Secret Service, and top military brass. Invites also go out to political donors and allies across the country. The last evening is reserved for the White House staff—the plumbers, electricians, cooks, and butlers who hang the president's towels when he leaves them on the bed and polish his floor. For most of that period, the Bushes will have "two-a-days," hosting one party from 4 to 6 p.m. and a second from 7 to 9.
This year's theme (because Jackie Kennedy insisted there must be one) sounds secular—"All Things Bright and Beautiful"—but it comes from a religious hymn. The Bush White House isn't hiding the baby Jesus. There He is among the wise men and barnyard creatures in the 18th-century Italian crèche. Mrs. Bush calls the 18-and-a-half-foot Fraser fir from Laurel Springs, N.C., a Christmas, not a "holiday," tree.
It takes three days to fill the public rooms with decorations. The White House florist directs a team of volunteers to drape the fireplaces with boxwood garlands, stand topiaries of lemon leaves and tangerines in the state dining room, and arrange dozens of paperwhite narcissus, amaryllis, and wreaths of pears. Few tabletops are left alone. On one sits a gingerbread White House, a tradition started by Richard Nixon, and on another squat topiaries of the White House pets, a tradition that one hopes will begin and end with Bush. The press release promoting the decor reads like Southern Living: "The color schemes of tangerine, lime green and hot pink boldly accent the traditional touches of the holiday decorations."
The 9,500 guests will consume roughly the same menu of ham, turkey, lamb, cheeses, and gnocchi from an enormous candlelit table in the State Dining Room. The first lady's office reports that when the last guest collects his coat, 30,000 Christmas cookies, 10,000 petit fours, 1,100 truffles, and 2,100 pounds of sweet potatoes will have disappeared. At the Hanukkah party tonight for Jewish religious and community leaders and Jewish members of the staff, there were also the traditional latkes, or potato pancakes, and a kosher buffet. The spiked eggnog is the only thing available for anyone who needs a bracer before standing in line.
The parties run with the precision and efficiency of a military parade, while making an effort to have you feel like you're the only guest invited for the night. Smiling, uniformed military personnel appear at every turn, directing you to the coat check or staircase or bend in the hallway. They're glowing and you almost forget that they'd pin you like a bug if you tried to scramble upstairs to the residence.
White House staffers moan about having to attend so many of these events every year, but both Republicans and Democrats start to sound like children when they look back on the party season. Bruce Reed, who served as Bill Clinton's domestic policy adviser before rising to become a blogger on Slate, describes it this way: "With the giant, over-decorated tree in the Blue Room, the pastry chef's marzipan model of the White House in the dining room, the boughs and lights twinkling in the East Room, and a Marine band playing Christmas songs on the grand piano in the foyer, visiting the White House is as magical as climbing aboard the Polar Express."
Reagan's speechwriter Peggy Noonan describes her first impression with the same misty nostalgia: "I was new at the White House. I walked over from the EOB, entered the White House and thought it was like walking into Santa's playhouse—trees, garlands, sparkling stars. Everything shined and there were red velvet bows. It was a wonderland. It had everything but elves and then I saw the NSC staff in their little beards."
The Christmas parties have grown considerably in scale and number since President Benjamin Harrison dressed as Santa in 1893 and handed out gifts beside the White House Christmas tree in the oval library. Now Mrs. Bush and the White House staff start planning Christmas events in April.
Karl Rove starts checking his list even earlier. The president's top political aide keeps an extensive record of the donors and allies across the country who have worked to help Bush and who might help Bush (and Rove) in the future. The president of a small college in a swing district who let Bush speak at his school during a key moment in the campaign might get an invitation. So might the local pol in Tampa, Fla., who hustled to get voters to the polls on Election Day. Donors known as Rangers who raised $200,000 or more for the last campaign will certainly be asked to attend. Rove's office had better make sure Tom Donahue, the president of the Chamber of Commerce, is on the list this year. Two years ago, the important ally somehow fell off. Rove had to act quickly to keep from needlessly alienating a friend and crucial corporate ally.
If we could get a peek at Rove's list, we could probably divine from the people he wants to please what he has planned for Bush's second term. We could also get an early hint of how he sees the 2006 congressional elections playing out—in which races he thinks the party needs help and where he's building allies. The most tantalizing thing we might learn would be who he's courting that might be helpful to the GOP in 2008. Rove has said he will stay out of the next presidential election. Does his guest list say that?
The true Washington cave-dwellers who have received invitations over many administrations affect a weary air about these nights. Just one more social obligation, they sigh. They've been to so many of these parties. This year, they might not even go. Don't let them fool you. In Washington, eminences need to pretend that they're bored with such events, but for weeks after they've gone to the party they will be starting sentences this way: "When I was at the White House Christmas party …"
In fact, for guests anxious to trade on White House proximity, the photography line is an efficient machine for maximum distribution of glory by association. Guests can leave with two nuggets: a picture they can hang on their "glory wall" to impress visitors and a little anecdote about presidential face time.
Holiday pictures with the first couple can wind up anywhere. They show up in local newspaper profiles or Web pages of law offices and foundations, as proof of a person's Beltway credentials. Washington-establishment types who have intimate pictures with the president don't think the holiday snaps have much cachet, so they send the staged photos to their parents to sit on the breakfront. Rita Cosby* used her White House photo with President Bush in the ad promoting her talk show on MSNBC. Monica Lewinsky's Christmas party picture with Clinton is in the book about her affair with the president.
But all who stand in line can also legitimately claim they've had a chat with the president, even if the conversation is measured in tenths of a second. Lobbyists can boast to clients that they've taken their case to the highest levels. Lawmakers will be able to tell their constituents they talked Iraq by the fireplace with the leader of the free world.
In reality, a lightning exchange takes place. A marine reads your name and the clock starts. You walk a few paces from the line into place, the camera snaps, and you're expected to withdraw immediately.
In the two years my wife and I stood in line, we did not make good use of the moment. She told Bush she thought it was nice for him to invite in the street people. He understood that she was comparing the press to hobos and laughed knowingly. The next time, my wife was weeks away from delivering our daughter. The four of us exchanged a few distinct sentences about 1) children; 2) making it home for bath time during campaign season; and 3) children's names, before the next couple was in place behind us. (My in-laws have enjoyed their photos.)
The president and his wife have to produce such sheer tonnage of cheer in those 26 photography sessions that it must affect the cheek muscles. Yet they never seem to show fatigue. I imagine stewards prepare bowls of crushed ice so that afterward they can soak their weary faces. All invitees can bring one guest, so the president and first lady have to be emotionally nimble enough to react to many different kinds of characters. They must deliver a compliment to a staffer's mother without necessarily remembering what the staffer does. Smile for a same-sex couple the same way they would for any other pairing. They need to show ready grief if someone announces they're scheduled for surgery the next day or elation when presented with a happy couple newly engaged.
Some presidents can't stand the false bonhomie. Nixon stayed upstairs as the Watergate scandal heated up, unwilling to mingle for his last White House Christmas party with the press. The journalists waited and waited and finally Pat Nixon and daughter Tricia arrived for the unhappy chore. Clinton did just the opposite. The House voted to impeach him during the party season, and he not only went to his party but mingled with the members of Congress who had voted to remove him from office.
When it's time to go, doors start quietly closing. Velvet ropes appear. The crowd moves without realizing it's being herded and only occasionally must one of the ushers hustle people along. When they do, they use some kind of elfin Ninja technique. They smile and lift a hand. The latticework of cheer propels you outward, until you're back standing on the curb in the cold.
Correction, Dec. 14: The article originally and incorrectly spelled the MSNBC host's name Crosby. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
On Tuesday, Gov. Rod Blagojevich of Illinois was taken into federal custody on corruption charges, one of which entails attempting to sell President-elect Barack Obama's Senate seat to the highest bidder. In 2006, Daniel Engber explained why politicians in the Land of Lincoln are so corrupt. The article is reprinted below.
Former Illinois Gov. George Ryan received a sentence of six and a half years in prison on Wednesday, after being convicted on charges of racketeering, mail fraud, filing false tax returns, and lying to investigators. The Chicago Sun-Times reports that in the last three decades, at least 79 local elected officials have been convicted of a crime, including three governors, one mayor, and a whopping 27 aldermen from the Windy City. What makes Chicago so corrupt?
City government experts point to a political culture that's been in place for more than 100 years. This culture dates back to the late 19th century, when a gambling-house owner named Michael Cassius McDonald created the city's first political machine. Under machine-style rule, those in power would hand out contracts, jobs, and social services in exchange for political support.
Chicago's large immigrant population made it easier for political machines to grow in power. Poor ethnic communities could be played off against one another and manipulated with petty gifts. In exchange for political support, ethnicities would be given virtual fiefdoms within city government; the Irish, for example, were given police work, and the Italians jobs at the transit authority.
Of course, none of this was unique to Chicago. New York City had large immigrant populations and the notorious political machine at Tammany Hall. But machine politics faded away in New York, due in part to external pressure from former New Yorker Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was elected president in 1932.
In Chicago, corruption persisted, to some degree because the city never had the benefit of a reformist mayor like New York City's Fiorello LaGuardia, who had political ties to FDR. Instead, Chicago moved towards a one-party system that made it even more vulnerable to corruption: The city's last Republican mayor left office in 1931. Today, not even the Democratic primaries are competitive—for the most part, once you're in office, you stay there. The weak campaign finance laws in Illinois probably helped to stave off competition in recent years.
The star power of Chicago politicians may also contribute to the city's continuing problems with corruption. Incumbents tend to be big personalities who get celebrity coverage in the local papers—which sometimes translates into ethical leeway from voters. (In cities like Los Angeles and New York, local politicians take a back seat to the media celebs.)
Bonus Explainer: How do we know that Chicago's so corrupt? The most straightforward way to measure corruption is to check the number of convicted local officials. Between 1995 and 2004, 469 politicians from the federal district of Northern Illinois were found guilty of corruption. The only districts with higher tallies were central California (which includes L.A.), and southern Florida (which includes Miami). Eastern Louisiana (and New Orleans) rank somewhat further down the list.
But a high conviction count doesn't necessarily mean more corruption. It could mean that a district happens to have very strict transparency laws or a zealous and effective federal prosecutor—like Patrick Fitzgerald in Chicago. You might try to measure corruption by checking the number of city employees per 1,000 people. (Bigger governments suggest patronage-style politics.) Or you could check to see how long it takes to acquire a construction permit through legal means. (Long delays may reflect a system of rampant bribery.)
Public perception may be the most useful measure. If the inhabitants of a city view corruption as a given, they'll be more inclined to forgive politicians who have already been tainted by scandal, like Chicago's current mayor, Richard Daley.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Ester Fuchs of Columbia University, Michael Johnston of Colgate University, Mike Lawrence of Southern Illinois University, Dick Simpson of the University of Illinois, and Jay Stewart of the Better Government Association.
Many people greeted the recent news that several major retailers are going out of business by pondering what this means for the broader U.S. economy. Those people make more money than I do. Big bankruptcies mean big sales, and for me, the timing couldn't have been better. Armed with a few clippings from the Wall Street Journal and a sense of dignity as slender as my checking account, I set out to see whether I could find suitable presents for everyone on my list at liquidation sales—the cheaper, the better.
Steve and Barry's
The first stop on my bankruptcy bonanza tour was Steve and Barry's, known primarily for selling college T-shirts and downscale clothing lines by celebrities like Venus Williams, Amanda Bynes, and Stephon Marbury. Earlier this year, word that Sarah Jessica Parker would be creating a line for Steve and Barry's occasioned admiring coverage from the New York Times, which praised the company's ambitious but bare-bones business plan. By late November, the company had announced it was liquidating all of its stores.
The first sight that greeted me at a forlorn S&B's in midtown Manhattan was a shelf full of battered wooden hangers. Previously used proudly to display Michigan Wolverines sweatshirts and FDNY tees, these little pieces of retail history were now on sale, five for $1. They seemed positively overpriced, however, compared with some of the other stuff on offer. T-shirts were on sale at the cut rate of two for $13. The selection, however, wasn't fabulous. Determined to take advantage of the twofer deal with an Ohio State (I'm from Cleveland) and a Georgetown (my sister's a Hoya), I was left swimming in a sea of XXXL disappointment. Why couldn't anyone on my list have gone to Fordham?
I had better luck in the women's section, where I discovered a pair of red patent-leather heels for $12.98. Test-driving the surprisingly stable shoes, I sashayed over to the wantonly ransacked jewelry section, which was offering two pieces for $8. I settled on a bright geometric ring and delicate gold wire-hoop earrings that I could convince my sister I'd bought from a Soho vendor. There are no 12-year-old-girls on my shopping list, but I could have stuffed stockings for an entire sixth-grade clique with plastic bangles, sparkly hairclips, and "I Heart SATC" shirts. I also could have picked up some basics (cotton underwear for $2.98!) but decided it was too early in the game to give up on dazzle.
Whitehall Jewelers
With shiny things on my mind, I headed over to a Whitehall Jewelers in Jersey City, N.J.; the store is in the process of shuttering all of its 375 stores. I'm not in the market for fine jewelry myself, but I'm frequently consulted by my hapless father about my mother's taste in such things. As it turned out, a simple way of describing her taste to my dad would be to say "Nothing they sell at Whitehall Jewelers." Tennis bracelets and diamond cross pendants abound at Whitehall, the sort of generically gaudy pieces my mom would never wear. And yet, while no one on my list needs a diamond-encrusted Tiffany heart necklace knockoff, Whitehall was the most fun I'd had shopping in a long time. The sensation of having a salesclerk hold up a bauble, punch a large number into a calculator, and then reduce it by 60 percent or 75 percent is a thrilling one. Over and over, I made the clerk complete the ritual. The markdown was astonishing every time: Simple freshwater pearls, formerly $502, now $191! A killer onyx cocktail ring even my mom might like, formerly $326, now just $110! A large diamond ring, down from $8,000 to a mere $2,560, once the clerk threw in an extra 20 percent discount I hadn't angled for the tiniest bit. (Perhaps she mistook my careful note-taking for the work of a particularly diligent fiancee—or maybe just a sad, lonely case who deserved an extra break.)
In an otherwise emptyish mall, the Whitehall store was packed. The case displaying engagement rings was the most crowded of all, with cheerful men consulting sisters, mothers, and saleswomen about which reduced rock might win their lady's heart. I saw one man grab a pretty solitaire that, with the reduction, was less than just one of my paychecks (perhaps a new measurement to replace the punishing three months' salary that was standard when investment bankers roamed the land).
Linens 'n Things
While still in Jersey City, I headed over to Linens 'n Things, the bankrupt home-goods retailer that's been liquidating all its stores since early October. It looked a little the way I imagine Rome must have looked during the holiday season in A.D. 455. Displays had been destroyed, and bedding was strewn everywhere. There were lots of yellowed, dusty boxes that looked as if they'd been sitting in the back of a warehouse for decades. Yet none of this deterred the delighted nesters grabbing at $33 castle-shaped muffin tins or 17-piece stainless-steel Phillipe Richard (who?) cookware sets for $199.99. For a while, I looked for sensible gifts—measuring cups, serving spoons, fluffy bath towels—before realizing that these items were both the most shallowly discounted and the most picked over.
The linens, thus, were disappointing—oh, but the things! Pink Cuisinart soft-serve ice-cream maker? Still a little steep at $179.99, but can you really put a price on at-home, push-button fro-yo? A heated shiatsu massager for $59.99? Perfect for a soon-to-be-lonely significant other you're planning to dump once the holiday season has passed. A tropical green Margaritaville "Frozen Concoction" Maker for $172.42? Pair it with a shaker of salt, and scratch all the Jimmy Buffet fans right off your list.
Large sections of the Linens 'n Things store I visited were now nothing but empty shelving. But the beauty of a liquidation sale is that everything really must go. The Ikea-like shelving units were on offer for a mere 60 bucks, according to a bright orange sticker that could easily be replaced by a tidy red bow. For the rest of the fixtures and equipment in the store, prices were available upon request, as is the case with all truly fine goods.
Circuit City
Perhaps the most hyped liquidation sales have been the ones at Circuit City, which has filed for bankruptcy protection and is closing 155 of its stores. But if you're hoping to get a 46-inch LCD screen for a song, stop reading this right now and go shop, because when I visited a Manhattan location in late November, the only televisions left were the ones on the floor. (A man bought one from right out under me, as I was inspecting it.) You're probably equally out of luck if you were hoping for an iPod—all sold out, though there were plenty of off-brand MP3 players left. Same thing with virtually all digital-photo printers and all but the very cheapest of speakers. A robust selection of DVDs at 25 percent off remained, depending on your definition of robust. I counted at least four thick stacks each of Made of Honor and, for the John C. Reilly enthusiast lurking in every family, Walk Hard and Talladega Nights. There was plenty of merchandise still left in the gaming section, too, but the games were a mere 10 percent off. I pictured a future in which a dozen Guitar Hero Aerosmith Limited Edition bundles—stubbornly still at $89.99—stood between this poor Circuit City and a peaceful death.
These four retail biggies are just a few of the stores closing up before the holidays—there are plenty of others to explore. But before you venture into the growing retail graveyard, a few tips I gleaned from my adventures:
And if you don't feel like you've gotten your money's worth out of this pre-Christmas round, there's something to look forward to: Historically, the peak season for major retail store bankruptcy filings has been January. So start cross-checking catalogs with third-quarter sales numbers. Zales, for instance, isn't looking great. I'm predicting a rash of Valentine's engagements.
If you're a great Web designer or developer who loves Slate, we want to talk to you. We're looking to hire
Both will help design and develop new Web applications, editorial features, and production tools for Slate. We're (always!) in the midst of upgrading our technology, redesigning the site, and developing new features, so we're looking for people who are creative, flexible, and bold, and who have experience in the care and feeding of large Web sites. To apply for any of these positions, please send your résumé to Slate technology lead Jing Gu (jing.gu@wpni.com) and Slate art director Vivian Selbo (vivian.selbo@slate.com). Applicants from the Washington, D.C., and New York City areas are preferred, but we'll consider superb applicants who live elsewhere.
Read more about the Web designer position and the skills required for it.
Read more about the senior Web software engineer position and the skills required for it.
Read more about the mid-level Web developer position and the skills required for it.
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Web Designer
The Slate Group seeks a talented, hard-working designer to join our team. This person will be working on a wide range of creative projects for all our sites: Slate, Slate V, The Big Money, The Root, and Double X.
We're looking for someone who is self-directed, well-organized, flexible, inclined to ask the right questions at the right time, graceful under pressure—in short, a dedicated, collaborative player.
Responsibilities:
Requirements:
Education Required:
Send resume to Vivian Selbo vivian.selbo@Slate.com.
Please send URLs to show work, not attached image or PDF files.
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Web developer: This Web developer will support and develop our Web applications, editorial features, and other technology projects. This is a great position for someone entering the work force with a computer-science degree, or for anyone with an interest in the media and with significant Web-programming experience in CSS, DHTML, XSLT, and ASP.NET applications. You will work closely with the editorial and business staffs as well as the development team, so good communication skills are a must.
Your day-to-day responsibilities will include supporting our content-management system, modifying existing XSLT templates in line with stylistic updates, and developing new Web features and applications on both short- and long-term schedules.
We're looking for the following:
Experience with Flash action scripting is also a plus.
Please send your résumé to Slate technology lead Jing Gu (jing.gu@wpni.com) and Slate art director Vivian Selbo (vivian.selbo@slate.com).
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Senior Web engineer: This is an ideal position for someone with great ideas about and significant experience in Web-media architecture and development. It entails working closely with our editorial staff and business team to address recurring issues and build new functionality. You'll collaborate frequently with the editorial team on tech-heavy stories and features. You will be responsible for prototyping, designing, and coding major portions of Slate, and you'll function as the development group lead, performing reviews of infrastructure, code, release procedures, and other development and tech lead duties as required. You'll need the following skills:
The following skills are also desirable:
Please send your résumé to Slate technology lead Jing Gu (jing.gu@wpni.com) and Slate art director Vivian Selbo (vivian.selbo@slate.com).
Return to article
Web Designer
The Slate Group seeks a talented, hard-working designer to join our team. This person will be working on a wide range of creative projects for all our sites: Slate, Slate V, The Big Money, The Root, and Double X.
We're looking for someone who is self-directed, well-organized, flexible, inclined to ask the right questions at the right time, graceful under pressure—in short, a dedicated, collaborative player.
Responsibilities:
Requirements:
Education Required:
Send resume to Vivian Selbo vivian.selbo@Slate.com.
Please send URLs to show work, not attached image or PDF files.
Return to article
Senior Web engineer: This is an ideal position for someone with great ideas about and significant experience in Web-media architecture and development. It entails working closely with our editorial staff and business team to address recurring issues and build new functionality. You'll collaborate frequently with the editorial team on tech-heavy stories and features. You will be responsible for prototyping, designing, and coding major portions of Slate, and you'll function as the development group lead, performing reviews of infrastructure, code, release procedures, and other development and tech lead duties as required. You'll need the following skills:
The following skills are also desirable:
Please send your résumé to Slate technology lead Jing Gu (jing.gu@wpni.com) and Slate art director Vivian Selbo (vivian.selbo@slate.com).
Return to article
Web developer: This Web developer will support and develop our Web applications, editorial features, and other technology projects. This is a great position for someone entering the work force with a computer-science degree, or for anyone with an interest in the media and with significant Web-programming experience in CSS, DHTML, XSLT, and ASP.NET applications. You will work closely with the editorial and business staffs as well as the development team, so good communication skills are a must.
Your day-to-day responsibilities will include supporting our content-management system, modifying existing XSLT templates in line with stylistic updates, and developing new Web features and applications on both short- and long-term schedules.
We're looking for the following:
Experience with Flash action scripting is also a plus.
Please send your résumé to Slate technology lead Jing Gu (jing.gu@wpni.com) and Slate art director Vivian Selbo (vivian.selbo@slate.com).
Is the claim that former Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller were involved in post-9/11 detention policies more or less plausible than the assertion that the CEO of Coca-Cola has intentionally slipped a mouse into your soda bottle? How busy do you have to be in order to evade a civil lawsuit? What is the plural form of mouse? These are the big questions the Supreme Court grapples with this morning as it sticks a toe into the waters of a raging national debate about legal accountability for high-level government actors for wrongs committed in pursuit of the war on terrorism.
Javaid Iqbal is a former cable installer and Pakistani citizen who was swept up along with more than 700 Muslim and Arab men in the massive post-9/11 terrorism dragnet. Not one of them was ever charged with terrorism-related crimes. Some of those deemed, like Iqbal, to be of "high interest" were detained under a "hold until cleared" policy at a high-security facility in Brooklyn. Iqbal claims that during 150 days of detention based solely on his religion and national origin, he was subject to solitary confinement, repeated cavity searches, denied medical care, and brutally beaten. He pleaded guilty to immigration charges (unrelated to terrorism) and was sent back to Pakistan in 2003. He then sued 34 current and former government officials, right up the chain of command from the prison staff to John Ashcroft and Robert Mueller. Ashcroft and Mueller moved to get themselves out of the case, claiming, among other things, that any connections between themselves and the Brooklyn detention policies were based on mere "conclusory allegations." A federal district court and the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed, allowing the suit to go forward against the two men based on the "likelihood that these senior officials would have concerned themselves with the formulation and implementation" of these policies.
Solicitor General Gregory Garre opens his argument this morning with the claim that high-ranking officials are entitled to qualified immunity—the doctrine that shields government officials from personal liability for actions taken in their official capacities. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg stops him short, explaining that qualified immunity is a defense, yes, but not a mechanism for tossing the lawsuit altogether.
Justice David Souter pokes at the government claim that there is nothing connecting Ashcroft and Mueller to the detention policy, asking whether the complaint doesn't quite specifically allege that Ashcroft and Mueller "willfully and maliciously" designed it. Garre responds that the formal policy of "holding persons until cleared" was neutral and reasonable on its face. He says racial or religious classifications under the policy were made by FBI officials in the field. (You may remember this as the "bad apples" defense born at Abu Ghraib.)
The sticky wicket in this case is a 2007 Supreme Court decision called Bell Atlantic v. Twombly, which changed the test for how much evidence a plaintiff needs to show to keep from being tossed out of court. This may not sound all that consequential to you, but to America's civil-procedure professors, the effect of Twombly was akin to releasing a live ferret amid the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.
But Garre makes a big point of arguing that he's not seeking higher pleading standards for his clients. He just wants the court to take "context" into account. And the context here seems to be that some people are just too busy to be sued. This arises both insofar as Ashcroft and Mueller are evidently too busy to be subjected to the discovery-and-trial process but also because they were too busy, post-9/11, to bother with "microscopic" decision-making about "micromanaging" detention policy in Brooklyn.
Justice Steven Breyer then offers up the hypothetical that keeps on giving: Suppose, he asks Garre, "Jones sues the president of Coca-Cola for personally putting a mouse in his bottle. Where is the rule that says he can go to the judge and say, 'I have no time for this'?" Garre says the plaintiff needs to show some kind of plausible claim. Souter points out that "plausible" claims are not the same as claims that can "probably be proven true." Souter says an allegation that "the president of Coke is personally putting mouses [sic] in bottles" is simply bizarre. Whereas Iqbal's allegation that the FBI director was involved in its detention policies is not.
Breyer—claiming to be forgetting civil procedure ("it was probably taught on Day 4 ...")—repeats that he knows of no rule allowing people to evade the discovery rules because they are too busy. "Yes, the attorney general is very busy, and what he does is very important," Breyer says. "The president of Coca-Cola is very busy. The president of General Motors is also very busy. In fact, he's very busy at the moment. Lots of people are very important and very busy. ..."
Ginsburg asks about the findings of a report that came out of the Inspector General's Office in 2003 faulting government officials for a system that was at times chaotic and abusive. Garre replies again that whatever allegedly discriminatory actions were taken occurred "on an ad hoc basis."
Alexander Reinert represents Iqbal, and he rejects the idea that this is all about "ad hoc decisions at low levels." Justice Samuel Alito immediately starts to grill him about what specific allegations he has that Ashcroft or Mueller "approved of an illegal policy." Justice Antonin Scalia says there are "two possibilities here," one being that there was a perfectly "valid policy that was subject to distortions at the lower levels," the other being that "high-level officials themselves directed unconstitutional acts." In his view, the second is b-a-n-a-n-a-s. Reinert replies that both would be illegal.
Chief Justice John Roberts asks Reinert whether the president of Coca-Cola would be subject to the same pleading standards as the attorney general or the FBI director for decisions made "on the evening of Sept. 11." Reinert responds "certainly," and Roberts, aghast, therefore asks him the same question three more times, concluding: "You at least accept that because we're looking at litigation involving the attorney general and the director of FBI in connection with their national security responsibilities, that there ought to be greater rigor applied to our examination of the complaint." Reinert says no such special scrutiny is required under the federal rules. The rules are the rules no matter how busy or important the defendant might be or how terrible the national-security crisis.
Stevens will then ask a question about the insertion of rats into Coke bottles, leading Souter to redouble his efforts to introduce the word mouses into mainstream legal discourse. Scalia then points out that the ability of the attorney general and FBI director to do their jobs should not be dependent on the discretion of a district court judge. He pronounces district court judge the way you or I might say serial wife-beater. Not to be outdone, Alito will later wonder, in horror, "How many district judges are there in the country? Over 600? One of those district judges has a very aggressive idea about what discovery should be. What's the protection there?"
That's right. This case is about the Supreme Court justices protecting Americans from out-of-control district court judges and their out-of-control discovery rules. And that is the case even when, as here, both the lower court and the appeals court crafted sensible, nuanced limits on discovery, protecting Ashcroft and Mueller from precisely the sort of burden the court is worried about. America has survived liberal pleading rules for a very long time, in part because judges are pretty good at identifying and discarding the lame cases. But the justices seem determined to shut down just a few more trials by spontaneously manufacturing a rigorous pleading standard for high government officials who are busy with national security emergencies.
And humility that ain't.
By the end of the morning, even Breyer and Stevens start to go wobbly at the prospect of busy important men caught up in civil litigation for a decade. Hey, let's reserve trials for just the mediocre and the lazy! The stunning thing here is that, without any apparent basis in case law, statute, or the Constitution, there are at least three votes to create different pleading standards for the high and low ranking, the busy and unbusy. It's the kind of magical legal thinking that got us into the war on terrorism and the kind of magical thinking that will never let us out.
Sometime this shopping season, you'll find yourself stuck in a big-box store agonizing over an attractively priced television, DVD player, high-end blender, or some other amazing thing. Can I get it somewhere else cheaper, you'll wonder—or should I snap it up now? And anyway, is this thing all it's cracked up to be? Do other people like it? Do I even really need it?
There was a time when you couldn't really ask such questions of products; every purchase was a gamble, a leap of blind faith that you wouldn't get too terribly ripped off. Then came the Internet: During the past decade, many of us have adopted a mode of shopping that smacks of private detective work—before we commit to buying anything of consequence, we embark on epic research missions to seek out the best prices and the most thorough reviews. You consult the experts at CNET before choosing a TV, then you stop by your local Best Buy to see how it looks, and you order it from a discount store on the Web, tax-free. This process has liberated us from the tyranny of shifty salesmen and gouging retailers; it's also changed the way businesses operate, prompting many to lower their prices and boost their customer service in an effort to compete with the Web.
And yet for all the ways that the Internet has transformed shopping, we still make most of our purchases in retail stores, just out of reach of the tide of consumer advice available online. Several new pieces of mobile phone software, however, are starting to transform the way we navigate through the aisles—and with a little improvement may revolutionize both how we shop and how we manage the many things we buy. If I sound a bit overheated, it's because I've been blown away by the best of these new apps: Amazon Mobile, the amazing program that Amazon.com put out for the iPhone last week. Just take a photo of any item you come across in a store—a book, a CD, a cereal box, an oven thermometer, tennis shoes, anything. The app sends the picture to Mechanical Turk, Amazon's freelance service, where anonymous hordes stand ready to identify the item. (Amazon pays people 10 cents for each ID; the service is free for you to use.) A few minutes later, your phone displays Amazon's listing for the product, including the site's invaluable user reviews. If you like what you see, you can buy the item straight from Amazon over your iPhone—even while you're still browsing the aisles of Best Buy or Target.
As a piece of technology, Amazon Mobile is a marvel. The company's Mechanical Turk service has always seemed like a lark—an interesting concept looking for a practical use. The system allows businesses to put up requests for small, repetitive tasks that only human beings can handle—writing up descriptions for photos, doing simple Web searches, etc.; anyone with an Amazon account can take a stab at doing these tasks, earning a few cents per fulfilled request. The presence of a large, anonymous workforce willing to do menial tasks has made Mechanical Turk a hideout for vaguely scammy businesses. One current request, for instance, offers you a nickel to write a five-star review of Golden Memories 1, an album of piano music; three people seem to have taken the bait, with one writing, "Note after note, key after key, the music keeps on flowing."
This store-browsing app, though, is perfect for Mechanical Turk. Other companies have tried to build automated iPhone shopping programs, but they've been hindered by a key limitation of the device—unlike the T-Mobile G1, Google's first phone, the iPhone camera's lens can't focus close enough to get a good read on product barcodes. (You can buy a lens attachment that improves its focus.) So how do you identify a product without its barcode? A company called SnapTell is trying to use computerized image recognition: With its iPhone app, you snap a photo of a product and, within a few seconds, the company's servers will analyze the picture and send back a product link. SnapTell is more limited than Amazon's app—it is only meant to identify books, CDs, DVDs, and video games—but it did identify most of the books and some of the CDs I threw at it nearly instantly.*
Amazon's service was slower—I had to wait between two and 10 minutes before I got a listing for my product—but because there were humans on the other end, I got much more accurate results. Amazon identified the Cheez-Its, the Arm & Hammer detergent, a copy of the Collins Gem English Dictionary, a Sylvania portable LED light, a Waterpik, a package of Oreos, a copy of my book, and a copy of A Briefer History of Time. It failed only when Amazon didn't carry the product I'd photographed—when I snapped a shot of Fre nonalcoholic red wine at the supermarket, a helpful Mechanical Turker directed me to an Amazon listing for sparkling grape juice.
Intrigued by the photo-identifying elves on the other end, I logged on to Mechanical Turk to offer my help in finding listings for people. My first test: a slightly blurry, dim photo of a black Bluetooth headset. It's a good thing I've got a job that requires me to try out a lot of Bluetooth headsets—I knew immediately that this was the Aliph Jawbone. Within 30 seconds, I found the Jawbone's Amazon listing and sent it in, hopefully surprising the fellow on the other end with my accuracy. (Alas, Mechanical Turk offers no way for searchers and searchees to talk.) The next photo would also have stumped a computer. It was an upside-down shot of one-thong sandal, slightly blurry and pretty small. You could just barely make out a logo on the insole—a red drawing of what looked to me like an ocean wave. For about 20 seconds I wracked my brain trying to identify it. I Googled "Billabong logo"—wrong. "Hang Ten logo"—nope. "Quiksilver logo"—yup, that was it! Next I searched Amazon for men's Quiksilver sandals and found a pair that seemed to be a pretty close match to the ones pictured. I'd done about a minute's work, which seemed a lot more than was merited for the dime Amazon was paying me. It was quitting time.
Because phone shopping apps give shoppers power in a place where they've long had none, they're bound to create some tensions with local retailers. One shopper in Michigan was recently admonished for using ShopSavvy, a barcode-scanning app for Google's Android mobile phones, at his local Target store. (Target later said that the employees acted in error and that the company has no policies on barcode scanning.) Last week, Nate Anderson of Ars Technica wrote a thoughtful piece worrying about the ethics of Amazon's app: "For Amazon to explicitly suggest that shoppers take advantage of bricks-and-mortar stores—an expensive investment that Amazon has purposefully not made—and then use the benefit derived from those stores to order the product cheaply online, well, that's a pretty straightforward declaration of war." Some consultants have even suggested that retailers fight back by installing cell phone jammers or banning iPhones from their stores.
But I'd caution the bricks-and-mortar crowd to hold their fire—it's possible that Amazon's app might even help them. I was at Wal-Mart this weekend when I saw that Sylvania portable LED light. I wondered if it would be bright enough to light up some dark areas in my closets. The packaging offered no help—so I took a photo and, after getting back a positive ID, consulted Amazon's listing. For one thing, I found that Wal-Mart was much cheaper than Amazon (no surprise). But Amazon's reviews also convinced me that the light worked pretty well—in other words, Amazon pushed me to buy the item from Wal-Mart.
The same thing could work elsewhere, of course. Next time you want a good book, try this: Go to Barnes & Noble, and find something that looks interesting. Not sure it's as good as the blurb says? Check Amazon for reviews. If you like what you see and the book's cheaper online, go to the store manager, show her your iPhone, and ask her to match Amazon's price. If she says yes, buy the book there—otherwise, click Buy right in front of her. Remember: He who has the phone makes the rules.
Correction: Dec. 10, 2008: This piece originally criticized SnapTell's iPhone application for failing to recognize products like a bag of Cheez-Its and a bottle of Arm & Hammer laundry detergent. The SnapTell application is only designed to identify books, CDs, DVDs, and video games. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
The septic new dating show A Double Shot at Love With the Ikki Twins (MTV, Tuesdays at 10 p.m. ET) follows on the fuck-me heels of A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila, a single-elimination tournament wherein skanks of both sexes vied for the heart of a moderately greasy bikini model. On Double Shot, the objects of affection are Erica and Victoria Mongeon, calendar girls known to a discerning elite as Rikki and Vikki, the "Ikki twins"—avowedly bisexual and, obviously, monozygotic. According to their online biography, Rikki came out of the womb a few moments earlier, and they came out of the closet almost simultaneously while waitressing at Hooters. It's no threat to their dignity or ours if we don't bother distinguishing between them.
In the introduction, the Ikki twins, who meet the minimum requirements of generic hotness, briefly reviewed their joint career. Photos slid past, demonstrating their talent for standing next to Corvettes and proudly clenching hockey sticks. They clarified that each is looking for the love of her life here on MTV, saying in stereo that they don't intend to share. They explained the evening's twist. In this initial episode, as in David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers, the protagonists would pretend to be one person. Then the thwomp of rotors ripped through the inky sky outside the Ikki manse. Here was a pair of helicopters, each dangling a cargo crate. One, lined in pink polyester, bore a dozen "sexy lesbians." The other, decorated in blue, held 12 "hot straight guys." Each crate featured a disco ball.
The ladies romped out of their holding pen, so crazed with thirst that they immediately began doing body shots. Nikki took the first turn mingling while Mikki hid herself away to watch the action on a monitor. The twins share a numbingly low idea about what is attractive or meaningful or halfway interesting. One contestant was praised as "super-superhot, like, stepped-out-of-a-magazine hot," which would only be true if we're talking Field & Stream. Later, Doohikki snuggled by a fire pit with a dude who worked his rap thusly: "I don't know if I'm hot because of you or because we're sitting by the fire, but I know you're hot." Her impression? "He's definitely smooth."
The twins insist on the cast's sex appeal relentlessly, pleading with the audience to disbelieve its libido. Still, the slatternly attire and attitudes of the women will suffice to captivate the core demographic—that is, semi-tumescent ninth-graders and the girls who seek their attention by making out with other girls at keg parties. On the other hand, there must be a few genuine lesbians among Double Shot's constituency; tackiness doesn't discriminate.
In the "Petting Zoo" segment, the female contestants don lingerie and tails and snouts to strut around a mock barnyard as kitties, piglets, ducklings, donkeys, and such. Watching it, I held depression at bay by hoping, as never before, that a reality show might inadvertently radicalize some militant feminists. At least the women on Double Shot boast stable jobs in the service sector (bartender, personal trainer, dominatrix, lifeguard). The men, mooks that they are, are a shadier lot. There's a party promoter, a club promoter, a "Wall Street sales rep" who lives in Massachusetts. "Boston accents are wicked sexy," Gimmikki said.
Double Shot offers cynicism without irony and nihilism without surcease. It gives trash TV a bad name. It's so patently deplorable that it's not even any fun to deplore. So let us appreciate its lone moment of self-consciousness, a line from the montage of highlights of the soul-corroding season ahead. One of the male bimbos smirks at the camera: "This house is full of surprises. And douche bags."
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Harold Louis Humes Jr.—H.L. Humes on the jackets of his two novels, Doc to peers and pals—is the man standing just left of center in Cornell Capa's famous Life photo of a swell party at George Plimpton's place. There's a calabash pipe in his lips as he leans forward into whatever scrumptious gossip or merry slander Truman Capote is squeaking. The photo was taken in 1963, 10 years after Humes had co-founded the Paris Review, a time when he was cutting an eccentric figure in the middle of many good parties. Two years later, he cracked up flamboyantly. By the end of decade, Humes was an acid casualty, a paranoid freak who'd inaugurated a habit of crashing with college students. In 1969, he commandeered the apartment of Columbia senior Paul Auster for a nonstop salon where, styling himself a philosopher king, he riffed on the true nature of the cosmos for hairy undergraduates. "I could no more ask him to turn them away than I could ask the sun to stop shining," Auster writes in the memoir Hand to Mouth. "Talk was what he lived for. It was his final barrier against oblivion."
Plimpton and Auster are among the authors and scenesters who laugh, frown, and goggle their eyes over Humes in the highly entertaining Doc (PBS, Tuesday; check your listings), an Independent Lens number shot by his daughter Immy Humes over many years. The documentary makes a persuasive case for Humes, who died in 1992 at age 66, as the first hipster of Quality Lit, as a proto-Yippie and avant-garde Zelig, and as the foremost burnout of his literary generation, a kind of Brian Wilson of the backlist.
Less persuasively, it states that Humes was the equal of Faulker and Hemingway, or would have been without the burning-out business. His reputation rests on two novels, The Underground City (1958, about the French underground and World War II) and Men Die (1959, about the destruction of a Navy munitions base). Of The Underground City, critic Alan Cheuse here says, "It's an authentic novel of ideas. Certainly in American literature, there are very few authentic novels of ideas." First, it must be said that there actually aren't few enough. Second: The Underground City, which runs 755 closely printed pages, is a ropy-muscled and fine-nerved thriller, and its principal pleasures are sensual. When you can describe the rush and dust of an airfield as well as Humes can, philosophy is only going to get in the way. For a novel of ideas, you'd do better with Men Die, which, being laced with ragged fake Beat poetry, is not entirely readable. In any event, Humes is the sort of literary figure whose work is peripheral to his glamour. For the purposes of mythmaking, it suffices that he put a rich voice—a wine-dark shade of prose—to use in one book of daunting scope.
Humes enrolled at MIT at age 16, left early to join the Navy, and by 1949 was continuing his education in Paris, where he discovered Bohemianism in flower and a lax attitude toward the public consumption of hashish. He founded a rag called the Paris News Post—"sort of a fourth-rate version of the New Yorker," he drolly croaks here. He got Plimpton very, very high on Easter Sunday in 1952, and it is worth tuning in to Doc just to hear Plimpton's voice rise when he imitates his own stoned giggle of that afternoon. Somewhere in there, the Paris Review started. Humes claims that the magazine evolved from "a conversation between Jimmy Baldwin and myself." George, Being George, the new oral history of Plimpton's life, suggests that Peter Matthiessen nudged Humes toward the idea partly because Matthiessen was working for the CIA and needed a good cover. Everyone agrees that Humes was too wild actually to manage a publication. Still, it was poor form for them to knock him down the masthead, where, for a time, he dwelled ridiculously as the advertising manager.
Doc, the film, might have slowed down a bit at this point to sort out some chronology and tell us more fully about its subject's cafe-society rambles, his labor-rights and free-speech agitations, and his Buckminster Fuller-lite scheme for utopian housing. It's a touch sloppy that way, and its production values can be downright homely—unforgivably bad lighting, weird framing choices, ill-chosen camera angles. (The audience is very interested in what William Styron has to say but somewhat less compelled by his wattle.) At points, however, the willful DIY quality and intimate home-movie vibe yields serendipitous results. When Immy Humes goes in search of a lost movie her father shot in the early '60s—Don Peyote, a psychedelic take on Cervantes meant to be scored by Ornette Coleman—she follows a false lead to filmmaker Jonas Mekas. This scene is, structurally speaking, pointless, but it's an utter delight to see the awesome stacks and shelves of film canisters in Mekas' endless basement archive. Immy, sharing this pleasure, turns the camera on herself and giggles like George Plimpton on hash.
The bad trip began in 1965, when Timothy Leary delivered a quantity of LSD to London, taking Humes' consciousness in the other direction. His paranoia acquired heaviosity, and his universe started making rather too much sense, as demonstrated by the notes and spiraling diagrams the documentary spookily shows us over a plaintive horn. He was beating his wife. When his family and friends had had enough of it, they told him that Queen Elizabeth wanted to see him, and his agent arranged a limousine to ferry him to a mental hospital. The wife and kids went back to the States. After Doc cooled out a bit, he did, too. His daughters found out that he was still alive after reading a New York Times story about a guy who was hanging around Morningside Heights, dispensing his inheritance to strangers $50 at a time.
Doc Humes spent the next long chapter of his life making mischief and holding forth, mostly in college towns, where there was always a fresh supply of young people eager to audit his freelance lectures—"his own floating university of Humesism" says one Oliver Trager, Bennington '79. None of them minded too much when he now and then accused them of being CIA agents. He seems to have met his second wife at a food co-op/massage academy/open classroom in Cambridge, Mass. Then he unraveled Howard Hughes-style for a while, and then got medicated and approachable, and then moved on.
In closing, Doc offers, a touch too triumphantly, the revelation that Humes was not entirely as crazy as everyone had thought. "It turned out that the U.S. government was keeping tabs on Doc for at least 30 years," goes the voice-over as snippets of his FBI file scroll past. (It's like an epitaph reading, "He was paranoid … but also important enough that they were after him!") Humes, in all his charm and madness, might have been served better by an anecdote relayed earlier by his friend Russell Hemenway. One day in Paris, Doc walked onto the terrace of the Brasserie Lipp and joined a group. "Somebody ask me a question," he said. "I feel like explaining something."
A crisis is a terrible thing to waste. This moment of decision about the auto bailout should be when we summon the courage to reject broken policies, not just to throw more capital at them; use market forces to drive restructuring, not just provide bridge loans; and put in place true market-based pressures, not a veneer of government oversight that will substitute poorly for tough decision-making.
The unfortunate reality is that we are straying further from market-driven principles and moving to an economy that relies on government as benefactor. We have nationalized the financial-services sector and are on the cusp of nationalizing the automotive sector, yet we have failed to demand anything nearly adequate in the form of genuine competition, rules changes, or transparency from the affected firms.
The current iteration of the auto bailout—car czar and all—is a move in the wrong direction. Despite the appropriately rough ride the auto CEOs were given on their first jet-ferried trip to Washington, the House, faced with mounting job losses economy-wide—caved on the auto leaders' second, carpooled road trip. Senate Republicans blocked a congressional bailout on Thursday, but it now seems likely that the White House will use financial rescue money to fund some version of the bailout plan. The Big Three will receive an initial payout of billions, and nobody believes that the first check is anything more than a down payment. As with the financial services bailout, once Washington is in the game, it is almost impossible to turn off the spigot. Yet the companies have proffered only paper-thin platitudes about possible actions to restructure, platitudes that are neither binding nor creative. And we still know precious little about the finances of the companies, especially Chrysler/Cerberus.
Even worse, the Big Three may be subject to the authority of a car czar with theoretically almost unfettered power. Yet this modern Wizard of Oz will have no more real power than did the original. I have yet to find a single person who believes that the czar would really be able to guide or force real change on the industry—or will have the wisdom to do so. Progress comes from competition, not from oligarchs or bureaucrats.
So here is a better—and tougher—way to proceed.
We all know that a significant downsizing of auto-industry capacity is necessary. Maintaining all three companies is probably not economically feasible. We also know that the incipiency of bankruptcy tends to focus the mind and produce real offers. Why don't we tell the current Big Three that $25 billion in capital is available—but only to two of them? The surviving two will be those that submit the best, and final, binding bids, supported by all the necessary constituencies: boards, managers, suppliers, vendors, creditors, and the UAW. The plans that are the best, as judged by a panel of private- and public-sector figures—Jack Welch, Warren Buffet, or Felix Rohatyn, plus OMB and CBO officials—are the plans that will get funded. The measures they will be judged by will be announced ahead of time and will be a combination of retained/gained market share, return on capital, jobs retained, and mileage and environmental efficiency gains. The company with the least impressive plan will be denied funding. To avoid letting the third parties—creditors, the UAW, or vendors—pick the winner by refusing to sign on with their least favorite of the Big Three, third parties will be required to offer the same deal to each of the three. This process will force the companies to bid against one another for aid, giving us the benefit of genuine competition. This is better than an "oversight board" of Cabinet members who have no real understanding of the industry.
This auction process should be accompanied by radical transparency. Before we fund the auto companies, we need to know whether they will live up to the promises they will be making, and that means discovering how truthful they have been in the past. We should demand immediate public release of the following information: projections, at each point over the past two decades, of what each company then believed it could produce in terms of fuel efficiency if we funded their ongoing research; all information pertaining to why they did not fund such research; all information about environmental measures that might have been taken and their consequences; and all contacts with energy companies and other auto companies about the impact of any of the steps above.
A simple reality should frame the bailout conversation: Taxpayer dollars are being used to cover the enormous legacy costs that resulted from the industry's failure to navigate through a changing business environment. In virtually any other context, the result would have been bankruptcy, creating the appropriate accountability for those whose capital was invested, those who benefited from unsustainable labor agreements in the short term, and those who extended credit to the company. Shifting this burden to the public makes sense only if we can begin the transformation of the industry. A car czar will not do so; competition among the companies might.
When Barack Obama becomes president in January and his chosen lawyers take over the top positions in the Justice Department and the other legal levers of the federal government, the sigh of relief will be loud and long. And then lawyers and commentators inside and outside the government will start asking, "Now what?" Indeed, they already have.
How exactly does the new Obama legal corps go about diverging from the Bush era? Which precedents do they repudiate, what do they simply ignore, and what do they keep? For every potential goal, there's a complicated set of underlying and interlocking questions about the nuts and bolts. How exactly do you go about closing Guantanamo? What should happen next in the long battle over access to the federal courts for inmates there? How should DoJ reinvigorate civil rights litigation? Protect voting rights? And what do the Obama lawyers do about investigating their Bush predecessors for potential crimes and ethical violations, about everything from torture to the suspicious firings of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006?
Dahlia, Stuart, Joe, and David—please do serve up your expertise on some of these questions, as well as anything else you come up with to ask and answer. I'm especially interested at the moment in how seriously you think the new administration is, and should be, taking the idea of a new detention law that could establish a national-security court for trying some terrorism charges. Should Obama go in this direction, or should he stick with the rules that provide for secrecy and security in the regular federal courts? I also want to hear from Joe and David about voting rights. Before the November election, David, you decried the Bush DoJ's investigation of the liberal group ACORN for potential voting fraud. If that probe was a partisan scare tactic, where should the new DoJ put its energy instead? And, Stuart and Dahlia, what's your current feeling about the new DoJ investigating the old one? Should the Obama folks stick to a truth commission-like function, and pardon the old guard, as Stuart has suggested? Or is it premature to give up on potential criminal indictments, as Dahlia has?
Grab your coffee mugs, thank you for joining us, and may the Breakfast Table be seated.
Thanks,
Emily
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Dear Emily, et al.—
Great questions. Here's the first part of some tentative answers, focusing especially on the questions that you directed to Dahlia and me. My answers are tentative in the sense that many turn on factual matters that the Obama team should explore before locking itself into prefabricated answers:
New detention law? I lean toward thinking that Obama should propose such a law. But to do so right at the start might be premature. Instead, I have advocated that he appoint a blue ribbon, bipartisan commission to study all available information about the 250 or so detainees who remain at Guantanamo and to issue detailed findings that would be, as much as possible, public.
It seems likely that, as the military claims, the facts will show that a great many of these men are both very dangerous and impossible to convict of any serious crime in ordinary civilian or military courts. Why impossible? In many cases because the strongest evidence would be inadmissible based on ordinary rules of evidence such as the hearsay rule and based on the requirement that even the most sensitive classified evidence that is shown to the jury also be shown to defense counsel and the defendant. Also, based on rules against use of statements made in coercive interrogations, without Miranda warnings, and the like. In addition, some prisoners who have committed no known or provable crimes have made it clear in statements at Guantanamo that they want to kill as many Americans as they can if and when released.
What to do with dangerous prisoners who cannot be prosecuted? Bush's system of military commissions has failed so badly for so long that it does not provide a credible solution. The best alternative—as ideologically diverse experts including Neal Katyal, Jack Goldsmith, Andy McCarthy, and Ben Wittes have argued—might be a new national-security court staffed by Article III federal judges, on the model of the FISA court. If properly designed by the administration and Congress, such a court could provide fair and credible opportunities for detainees to show that they should be released without compromising national-security secrets.
Would this be preventive detention? Yes, it would. Can we do it without violating the Constitution? Yes, we can.
More soon on your other questions.
Best,
Stuart
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Emily, you asked about the new DoJ investigating the old one. Obviously, the new DoJ needs to finish up all pending investigations, including the criminal investigation into destruction of the videos of CIA interrogations, the investigation of the Office of Professional Responsibility into the genesis of the deservedly criticized Yoo-Bybee "torture memo" and other Office of Legal Counsel memos. (Here's a link to Slate's interactive guide to these and other allegations.) And obviously the new DoJ should look into any specific, credible allegations of criminality that come to its attention.
But it would be a terrible mistake, in my view, to launch anything like the big, public criminal investigation that almost 60 House liberals, human rights groups, and others are seeking into allegations that John Yoo, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Condi Rice, President Bush, and other top officials reportedly approved harsh interrogation methods including water-boarding (subject to limitations that have not yet been publicly identified). I suspect, without benefit of inside information, that Obama attorney general pick Eric Holder and other top officials of the incoming administration would agree with me.
First, such investigations and prosecutions would tear apart the country and blow up Obama's hopes of lifting us out of our multiple crises. Note that Obama himself cited in April the need to distinguish between "really dumb policies and policies that rise to the level of criminal activity." He also said, "I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt, because I think we've got too many problems to solve."
Second, while I deplore profligate use of the brutal interrogation methods that were approved at high levels and the rhetorical encouragement of even worse low-level abuses, and while some detainees were certainly tortured in the usual meaning of that word, there is no credible evidence that any high-level official acted with criminal intent to violate either the narrowly drafted anti-torture law or the War Crimes Act. All of them were relying, in good faith, on advice of government lawyers, especially the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. It would be unconscionable and unlawful—under a specific provision of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 as well as general legal principles—for the same Justice Department that advised that water-boarding and other brutal methods were legal to turn around and prosecute people for acting on that advice.
It's true that reliance on advice of counsel is no defense if the client is acting in bad faith, with reason to know that the advice is bogus. But that is not the case here. Indeed, all of the methods approved at high levels have been found lawful not only by the gonzo executive-imperialist Yoo-Bybee "torture memo," but also by several respected mainstream lawyers who carefully analyzed the issues after the Yoo-Bybee memo had been repudiated.
As to water-boarding, while a strong case can be made that it violates the anti-torture statute, a strong case can also be made that if carefully controlled, it does not necessarily violate that statute. I will elaborate later, if anyone would like.
Water-boarding and other interrogation methods approved at high levels did violate the ban against "humiliating and degrading treatment" in Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which is enforced by the War Crimes Act. But those violations cannot be prosecuted in American courts unless the officials acted with criminal intent. They did not. Rather, they acted in reliance on another OLC memo, which advised that Common Article 3 did not protect stateless terrorists like those from such groups as al-Qaida. Although a bare majority of the Supreme Court held otherwise in the June 2006 Hamdan decision, there were very respectable legal arguments for the OLC position. I thought it was correct. In any event, Congress explicitly amended the War Crimes Act later in 2006 to effectively immunize from prosecution any officials who violated Common Article 3.
In short, as Talleyrand (or some other old French guy) once said: "It was worse than a crime. It was a blunder."
Best,
Stuart
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Greetings, everyone, and thanks for joining in on this discussion.
Emily and Stuart, under each of your posts lurk really interesting questions about how the Obama administration might move forward while still acknowledging what's happened before. Emily, you ask how the new DoJ should handle the sins of the old one. Stuart, you argue against a big criminal proceeding against the architects of the Bush administration's interrogation policy, in part because "such investigations and prosecutions would tear the country apart and blow up Obama's hopes of lifting us out of our multiple crises." David and Joe, I am sure, will have thoughts on the extent to which the solution to the myriad legal sins of the past eight years will be to hit "control + alt + delete" and just start up the Rule of Law over again. I do understand the appeal of rebooting the whole system, as Stuart suggests. There is a slightly crazed tone to some of the efforts to avenge the wrongs of the past eight years. (See, for instance, the Berkeley City Council's efforts to micromanage John Yoo's employers at the University of California-Berkeley.) Like Stuart, and probably Eric Holder, I see the benefits of just acknowledging that mistakes were made, but usually in good faith by people who believed themselves to be following the law.
I am less certain than Stuart, however, that the country will explode under the weight of a truth commission. And I am really quite certain that some Americans are going to find it awfully hard to just get over everything from warrantless wiretapping to Abu Ghraib to the U.S. attorney purge to partisan hiring at the Justice Department, all in the spirit of moving on. I am not sure anyone can ever move forward without accountability for the past. I guess the whole purpose of this conversation is to try to tease out some nuanced solution between these poles.
To that end, I'd be curious as to what David and Joe think about the morale problem at the DoJ. Sometimes I hear from readers that claims about a demoralized department are hugely overblown. Other folks tell me it's even worse there than we have heard. And I also wonder—do you all think the solution is to just bring in new leadership or whether fixing the department will require a scrub brush, a firehouse, more investigations, and even, if warranted, some sanctions?
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Should Bush pardon any or all top officials who might be in jeopardy of prosecution, to the extent that they acted in good-faith reliance on advice of government counsel? I so suggested in a Newsweek piece in April. I advocated instead that Obama appoint a truth commission of some sort, and I suggested that pardons might actually make it easier for a truth commission to get at the truth. I am less confident now that either pardons or a truth commission would be a good idea, although both should be considered.
My reasons for being less confident: First, if it becomes clear before Bush leaves office that Obama has no intention of throwing the book at Bush's team based on abusive interrogations, pardons might not be necessary. Second, it would be a tricky and arguably impossible business to issue pardons conditioned on proof of good-faith reliance on advice of government counsel. Third, an Obama campaign adviser told me that a truth-commission-type inquiry would stir up partisan animosities (though less than a criminal investigation would) in a way that could create problems for Obama's forward-looking agenda.
Jack Goldsmith recently laid out other compelling arguments against truth-commission-style investigations in a Washington Post op-ed. He points out that investigations have costs. In particular, he argues, "the greater danger now is that lawyers will become excessively cautious in giving advice and will substitute predictions of political palatability for careful legal judgment. This was a serious problem before Sept. 11, and many believe it led to governmental structures and attitudes that precluded detection of the Sept. 11 plot."
Goldsmith was, of course, a Bush appointee. But I have heard some very astute Obama supporters express similar views.
Best,
Stuart
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I was in the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice from 1968 to 2005, and from 1999 to 2005 I was chief of the Voting Section, and so I'll focus on that aspect of the DoJ.
How to reinvigorate the Department of Justice and, more specifically, the Civil Rights Division? Initially, it is important as soon as possible to finalize and release the fourth report concerning the Civil Rights Division, by the department's inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility. This report is about the politicization of the Civil Rights Division. The new leadership of the division needs the result of this review. If there are ongoing criminal investigations of former division leadership, then this may affect the timing of the release. But since formal complaints made about the Civil Rights Division's leadership and Voting Section management have been pending for more than three years, it is time to make the information public.
The new division leadership, when in place, needs to address the following:
The hiring process in the Civil Rights Division: It was badly politicized from 2002 through 2007. I recommend:
Morale: Dahlia, you asked how bad a morale problem the DoJ has. To find out, we need a careful review of each section of the Civil Rights Division, as soon as possible. The review should include the effect of section management on line attorneys and administrators. Any changes in section management that follow should be done section by section, with emphasis on management performance and impact on morale.
Resetting priorities. My partial list includes the following:
1. Cases attacking discrimination against racial minorities
2. Fair-lending enforcement, focusing on charges of discrimination in the subprime lending market
3. Increase cases that address a widespread pattern or practice of discrimination, especially in employment, voting, and housing
4. More amicus work at the trial and appellate levels
5. Police-misconduct cases in the criminal and special-litigation sections
6. Guidance to school districts to address the Supreme Court's 2007 ruling in the Seattle-Louisville schools cases
7. On the legislative front, voting legislation introduced last year to address deceptive voting practices. In addition, investigation and formulation of a universal voter-registration law should be a high priority.
8. Hate crimes legislation previously introduced in Congress
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Stuart, you cogently (and provisionally, I understand) lay out the case for a new national-security court. I confess the idea makes me feel more nervous than reassured. To begin with, Congress doesn't have a great record here. Its past efforts to muck around in the Guantanamo litigation—the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, the Military Commissions Act of 2006—have only made the muck deeper. In twisting traditional habeas protections, they left the Supreme Court a big mess to clean up. I know that now we're talking about a different, more Democratic Congress. But all I have to do to stay suspicious is think back for a moment to the overhaul of surveillance law last summer, with its expansive and permissive stance toward domestic-to-international wiretapping without a warrant. When Congress fools around with the courts and procedural protections, defendants almost always emerge worse off (Exhibit B: federal sentencing laws, with their ever-loving mandatory minimums and lengthier punishments).
The second reason I'm skeptical about the wisdom of a new detention law is that we haven't yet sufficiently tested the regular old federal court system. As Marty Lederman has persuasively argued on Balkinization, we should give the processes we already have in place a chance to work before we resort to special measures. Another Lederman point: There are salient provisions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice that we can employ, without any Gitmo-only legislation. We haven't really tried this route yet.
So far, when Guantanamo cases have actually come before federal judges, despite all the Bush administration's efforts, they have taken steps—like closing court and keeping documents sealed—to protect classified information and other national-security interests. If the judiciary has also dismissed the government's case against a particular set of detainees as impossibly thin, as Republican-appointed Judge Richard Leon did last month, well, that's what I'd like to think we call justice.
Best,
Emily
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Emily, yesterday you asked what the Obama lawyers should do about investigating their Bush predecessors for crimes and ethical violations, "about everything from torture to the suspect firings of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006?"
I'm sure there will be some on both sides of the aisle who will argue that the Obama administration should let bygones be bygones regarding the ongoing probe of special counsel Nora Dannehy into the firings of nine U.S. attorneys, myself included. If these were penny ante traffic-court offenses, I'd agree. But the numerous investigations and hearings have uncovered some modicum of evidence showing felony-level criminality on the part of former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and possibly other former Bush administration officials. Whether or not the evidence rises to the level of an indictment remains to be seen and rests solely in the considered judgment of Ms. Dannehy.
Should we tolerate possible criminal activity on the part of the former chief law enforcement officer of the United States? Should a former AG or other former high-level officials be given a pass on possible perjury and obstruction of justice charges just for the sake of moving on? In my view, clearly not. To do so would send an unmistakably clear signal to law enforcement officials throughout the world that the rule of law applies to all but the well-connected. It would also set a terrible precedent for future attorneys general. As a former state and federal prosecutor, I want to believe to the molten core of my being that when the attorney general of the United States says something, he is being 100 percent truthful, 100 percent of the time. Otherwise, he is just another pettifogging, parsing, and mendacious politico. If anything, prosecutors should be held to the same, if not a higher, standard, than the nonprosecutor "civilian." One practical way to begin to repair the damage done to the reputation of the Justice Department is to treat this particular investigation like any other high-level criminal case. The political appointees need to stand back and let the prosecutor do her job. Just as confidence is the key word in the stock market, integrity is the key word in the prosecutor's world. The public has the absolute right to believe that when someone is charged with a crime, whether they are a "coyote" on the southwest border or the former attorney general of the United States, the prosecution's bases are the law and evidence, nothing else.
Obama's team should allow special counsel to take her time to do it right, and if the evidence supports a grand jury indictment, then indict the case. If it doesn't, don't go forward. Justice is not measured by notches on the belt; it is assuredly not about winning a case. Sometimes, it's about reviewing the evidence and not proceeding with a nonprovable case. I know this dynamic from personal experience, as I felt pressured by Republican officials to indict cases I knew I could not prove and to rush a political corruption case that was not ready to indict for partisan gain in a midterm election cycle. To reduce the clamor that this would be merely a hypocritical "political prosecution" motivated by the same type of improper partisan reasons I just described, Dannehy needs to be fully independent and not have her ultimate decision approved or rejected by a political appointee. As I understand it, the AG has the final say in this probe. This is regrettable and does not take the political component out of the charging decision.
Finally, Dec. 7 marked the second anniversary of the infamous phone calls from Main Justice to the seven of us U.S. attorneys. When all the dust finally settles on this scandal, it will be seen as a frontal assault on the independence of the prosecutor. With no independent prosecutors, you cannot have a criminal justice system that is characterized by integrity and fairness.
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Some responses to the excellent posts by all of you:
Emily, you (and Marty Lederman) make a very good point in saying that we should give the post-Boumediene habeas litigation that is already under way a chance to work before we resort to special measures. I wish I had taken that into account before sending my post yesterday.
In fact, I spoke later on Monday with a person I cannot name who has deep insights into how the D.C. federal courts are handling—and are likely to handle—those cases. My source's view was that in principle, the handling of these detainees involves issues of high legislative policy that should be decided by Congress. But, the source added, given the mess that Bush has made and the Supreme Court's rulings, and given the healthy level of both talent and ideological balance on the D.C. Circuit and district courts, Obama should let the habeas litigation play out before making any big legislative proposals.
I suggested in my post yesterday that Obama should hold off for a different reason: to let a bipartisan, blue-ribbon commission sort out the evidence on who these detainees are before deciding what would be the best system for deciding their fates. Maybe the courts will do that well enough to obviate any need for a commission.
But maybe they won't, because maybe existing law won't let them. I have been told by well-informed sympathizers with the administration that the rules—and vast uncertainty about what the rules are—in the habeas litigation might make it impossible for the government to put before the courts its best evidence that particular detainees are terrorists or would-be terrorists.
The main problem may be treatment of highly sensitive classified evidence, including some that was provided by foreign intelligence services to the CIA only on the condition that the agency won't share them with anyone else.
The government's problem is that if it wants the judges to consider such classified evidence, it runs a risk that the judges will require disclosure not only to defense counsel (who have been known to leak, if not in this litigation) but also, perhaps, to the detainees. I have heard it suggested that the CIA is unwilling to identify some of its sources and methods even to the Justice Department, for fear that the habeas process will 1) violate the CIA's promises to its sources and 2) risk leaking the information to the public or to enemies.
Consider the Justice Department's decision to withdraw its claim in Judge Leon's court that the Boumediene group of Algerian-born Bosnian citizens were plotting to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Bosnia. Did Justice give up on that claim because it had no real evidence? Or because it was unwilling, for valid national-security reasons, to disclose that evidence to the defense? We don't know. Nor, I suspect, does Judge Leon, who had no choice under the circumstances but to rule for these detainees.
In my view, the best way to resolve these problems would be legislation that would specify that the Justice Department may show its classified evidence to the judges, with no risk that the judges will share the evidence with the defense over the government's objections. If the judges then choose to disregard the evidence because of lack of adversarial testing or related constitutional problems, so be it. At least the judges' decisions would be fully informed. And the habeas litigation may well end up pointing to the conclusion that the least-bad approach is to establish a new national-security court with clear rules on how to handle classified evidence and other knotty problems that are especially pressing in international terrorism cases.
As for Emily's concern that Congress would make a mess if it created such a court, remember that one model—the FISA court—was reviled when created in 1978, and for many years thereafter by civil libertarians, as a cover for sham proceedings that provided no protection for civil liberties and would open the floodgates to all manner of abuses. And remember that, as we have learned in recent years, the opposite turned out to be the case. I am aware of no evidence of any abuses under the aegis of the FISA court. And as documented by the 9/11 commission and others, the FISA rules for protecting civil liberties, and the understandable overabundance of caution that those rules inculcated in the DoJ, FBI, CIA, and NSA, are among the reasons that the 9/11 suicide hijackers escaped detection.
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Emily, in your very first post you asked me and Joe about possible fixes to the Voting Rights Division. I view the voting section of the Civil Rights Division to be the fulcrum of the office. The right to vote is, in my view, essentially sacred, and it needs to be guarded zealously. Any scheme or artifice deployed to deprive legitimate voters from their right is abhorrent.
It was deeply troubling to see that the discredited specter of voter fraud once again was resurrected this fall to try to get the DoJ involved in high-visibility investigations just before the elections. Joe wrote about the long-standing DoJ policy of maintaining a low profile on voter-fraud investigations before the election. I have heard that this policy was recently changed to allow for more visible, pre-election investigations. If that's true, this needs to be changed back to the historic policy. The DoJ should stick to its bread-and-butter cases, which have traditionally been immigration crimes, narcotics, and white-collar cases. The new administration will send its priorities out to the field, where new U.S. attorneys will come into line and enforce the law. The new DoJ should also affirm the historic practice of prosecutorial independence in its first meeting of U.S. attorneys.
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I respectfully disagree with Emily's criticism of the overhaul of surveillance law last summer. Unfortunately, the details are so complicated and intricate that I doubt any of us fully understands FISA or the 2008 amendments. Certainly, I don't. But after consulting people who do understand, I argued in my most recent National Journal column that, in fact, the government still has too little power to intercept communications and at the same time too few safeguards against misuse of the information.
As I argued in my column last week, FISA is badly outdated. It has always required judicial permission based on "probable cause" to target calls and e-mails between parties inside the United States but not calls from or to targets outside the United States. (The rules for e-mails have been different, for no very good reason.) But it is often impossible to tell where the parties to a cell call or an e-mail are. In addition, "the surveillance it authorizes is unusable to discover who is a terrorist, as distinct from eavesdropping on known terrorists—yet the former is the more urgent task," as Judge Richard Posner has written.
Obama, a harsh critic of Bush's secret, unilateral defiance of FISA's rules from 2001 through 2005, wisely broke with most liberals by voting in July to relax those rules. He should propose a complete overhaul and simplification of the almost incomprehensibly complicated law. It should be easier to use sophisticated computer data-mining programs to fish through millions of calls and e-mails for signs of possible terrorist activity. At the same time, privacy protections should be improved by tightening the rules to detect (through use of audit trails) and prevent unnecessary dissemination or retention of the intercepted information and to punish severely any misuse of it. An additional privacy protection, suggested by Posner, would be to forbid use of this information for any purpose (including, say, tax-fraud prosecutions) other than to protect national security.
In response to Dahlia and David, some clarifications: In opposing any big, public criminal investigation into the strong evidence that the entire top echelon of the Bush national-security team approved water-boarding and other allegedly torturous interrogation methods, I did not mean to rule out a truth commission. Rather, I qualified my previous advocacy of a truth commission by noting that some Obama people fear it would create partisan animosity that could hurt his forward-looking agenda.
Nor did I mean to suggest a pass for the people responsible for Abu Ghraib, the U.S. attorney purge, or partisan hiring at Justice. Indeed, all of these matters have been, or are being, investigated criminally and otherwise. They are thus covered by my earlier assertion that the DoJ needs to finish up all pending investigations.
At the same time, I believe that all plausible Abu Ghraib prosecutions played themselves out long ago. And although I know very little about the U.S. attorney purge or the partisan hiring, I have seen no evidence that the firings or hirings themselves involved criminality—as distinguished from sleazy and unethical conduct that may have violated civil laws—on the part of high officials. In this regard, David, I would be grateful if you could elaborate on your view that there is some modicum of evidence showing felony-level criminality on the part of former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and possibly other former Bush administration officials.
Whether there is substance to the related allegations of perjury and other cover-ups by former officials, including Gonzales, is a different question that can be answered by only the kind of close factual inquiry that is now under way. I certainly agree with David that the Justice Department should prosecute if there is strong evidence of criminality by these officials.
I respectfully disagree, however, with David's view that Dannehy needs to be fully independent rather than to have her ultimate decision approved or rejected by a political appointee. The now-defunct independent-counsel statute and its administrative analogues seemed like good ideas in the wake of Watergate. But more than 20 years of experience with it convinced many of us—including Democrats outraged by Ken Starr—that assigning a special independent prosecutor to go after a single (or a few) specific targets, with no competing demands on the prosecutor's resources and no admiring headlines if she decides not to prosecute, is a formula for overzealousness.
I plead ignorance on most of the matters that Joe discusses. But I have my doubts about whether racial discrimination in employment and voting are all that widespread these days—doubts that were reinforced by witnessing the supposedly impossible election of an African-American to the presidency with more support from white voters than John Kerry had in 2004.
What Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson said in 1991 has become truer and truer ever since: "America, while still flawed in its race relations … is now the least racist white-majority society in the world; has a better record of legal protection of minorities than any other society, white or black; [and] offers more opportunities to a greater number of black persons than any other society, including all those of Africa."
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First, in further response to Dahlia's question about morale, I want to emphasize that there is no question that morale in the Civil Rights Division was badly damaged during the Bush administration. When I testified before the House judiciary committee in March 2007, I noted that since April 2005, when I left the voting section, of the five career attorneys in section leadership (the chief and four deputy chiefs), only one deputy chief remained. In the same time period, 20 of the 35 attorneys in the section had either left DoJ, transferred to other sections (in some cases involuntarily), or gone on details. Similarly, since 2002 in the employment section, the section chief and three of the four deputy chiefs had been involuntarily reassigned or left, and 21 of the 32 attorneys had either left or transferred. The chiefs for the housing and criminal sections were involuntarily removed in 2003 and 2005. It is my understanding that the Civil Rights Division lost more than half of its career attorneys (nonpolitical hires) during the Bush administration.
Such loss of experienced staff tells only part of the story. From the outset, there was a conscious effort to wall off career managers and attorneys in the Civil Rights Division from participation in decision-making. Perhaps the most astounding example was instructions from political appointees to appellate section attorneys not to discuss their briefs with trial section staff about a case the trial lawyers were handling. The damage to effective law enforcement is obvious. Brian Landsberg, a former career attorney now at McGeorge Law School, explains the importance of close working relations between political and career staff in his book Enforcing Civil Rights. He writes that the design of the department "requires cooperation between the two groups to achieve the proper balance between carrying out administration policy and carrying out core law enforcement duties. Where one group shuts itself out from influence by the other, the department's effectiveness suffers."
During the Bush administration, such crucial communication was consciously discouraged. One of the first jobs of the incoming division management will be to address this.
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Stuart, you asked me to say more about the evidence of crimes related to the 2006 U.S. attorney firings. The best source document is the official report into the scandal by DoJ's Office of Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility. It carefully documents the "sleazy and unethical conduct" that you mention and specifically refers to a possible false statement that former Gonzales chief of staff Kyle Sampson made before Congress. It also says that "those seeking Iglesias' removal" may have obstructed justice. (See Page 198 for all of this.) The report further details possible wire fraud by those who "sought to pressure Iglesias to take partisan political considerations into account in his charging decision." (That's on Page 200.)
Who was seeking my "removal"? The term could refer to Republican activists in New Mexico, members of the New Mexico congressional delegation, or White House officials. The report laments the fact that Sen. Pete Domenici and his chief of staff, Steve Bell, did not cooperate with the investigation. Neither did former DoJ staffer Monica Goodling. The White House refused to produce some documents and e-mails related to our firings. This is precisely why Dannehy will likely, if she hasn't already, issue grand jury subpoenas to get the documents that the White House failed to voluntarily produce.
As I wrote this summer in Slate, I am waiting with great anticipation to see whether the vastly overused executive privilege will be trotted out again in this criminal investigation. Take a look at the Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Nixon. It is well-settled that executive privilege cannot be used to shield the president's staff members from criminal liability.
Regards,
David
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With respect to Dahlia's question as to whether there should be adverse action taken against people hired or promoted to management positions under the politicized hiring regime at Justice, my short answer is no. That kind of retribution is repeating the wrongs committed by the Bush administration. That said, I repeat what I said in my first post: The incoming division leadership must carefully examine the impact of existing career management on the morale of section staff and decide whether repair of that morale requires a change in section management. In addition, the expectation of vigorous enforcement of civil rights laws and of the priorities set by the new administration must be clear to all staff.
Emily asked about the criminal investigation of alleged voting fraud by ACORN shortly before the election. Last month, I wrote a letter to Attorney General Mukasey, along with other alumni of the Civil Rights Division—Brian Landsberg, whom I mentioned earlier; Steve Pollak, assistant attorney general for civil rights from 1967-69; Jim Turner, who served as the career deputy assistant attorney general from 1969-94, and two longtime career civision managers, Paul Hancock and Sandra Coleman. We wrote:
As you are aware, activities by the Department before and on Election Day have been limited primarily to the important role of the Civil Rights Division in placing federal observers to monitor elections pursuant to provisions of the Voting Rights Act. The activity is designed to protect minority voters from racial discrimination or intimidation. On the other hand, the Department has long recognized that initiating federal criminal investigations into allegations of election fraud in the immediate pre-election period can have a serious chilling effect on voters, especially minority voters who have experienced a long history of discrimination and intimidation at elections. This is recognized by the Criminal Division in policies set forth in its manual addressing federal prosecutions of election offenses. …
Allegations of voter registration fraud should not be taken lightly. But, it is because of the long recognized sensitivity to the role of federal law enforcement officials in elections that we have concern about press reports, apparently leaked to the press by FBI officials, that the Department recently opened a nationwide criminal investigation into the allegations of fraud in the voter registration efforts of a national community organization that was engaged in registering low income voters who are predominantly minority. It would seem that this is the kind of investigation that longtime Department policy dictates should not be initiated until after an election. We understand there may be exceptions to this policy, but it is not clear that this particular investigation should be one of those exceptions.
We have not received a response to this letter. The only point I would add is that, in my mind, there is little or no evidence of systematic vote fraud in this country. Those concerned with voter fraud point only to anecdotal cases, most of them never prosecuted. The so-called Help America Vote Act, passed in 2002 in response to the 2000 election, includes several provisions designed to address the specter of voter fraud that do not help Americans vote but rather make it harder for them to do so. That's why many-voting rights specialists are advocating for new legislation to eliminate unnecessary barriers to voting and particularly voter registration.
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A few final thoughts here: Stuart, I'm glad you agree that there is wisdom in letting the habeas litigation play out in the courts. I understand your potential criticisms of dealing with highly sensitive information in the federal courts. But they are just that—potential. If there is confusion about the existing rules for habeas litigation, as you say, well that's because the Bush administration fought like hell to keep these cases walled off from regular judges. All those rounds of Supreme Court litigation weren't much about the actual standards for hearing evidence—they were primarily about the preliminary call about if and where the evidence would be heard. Now that we have a different administration that presumably won't keep fighting that already-lost battle, the courts will get to give developing appropriate detention standards a real go. That helps explain, I think, why Marty Lederman and others keep resisting calls to pass a preventive detention statute any time soon. The best way to find out which of these cases are the ones that will be hard for the courts to wrestle to the ground is to watch them try.
And while the lower courts hash out the Guantamo cases, the Supreme Court has finally decided to hear Al-Marri v. Pucciarelli, the case in which a guy captured inside the United States has been held in a military brig indefinitely—suspected of war crimes but never charged. What's the Obama DoJ going to do with this one (briefs aren't due until after the new president takes office)? I can't wait to find out. And I can't wait to see the Obama administration actually put on its new legal running shoes and take DoJ and the rest of the federal government out for a spin. In the meantime, many thanks for your excellent contributions to this discussion. You've been great, and we are grateful.
Best,
Emily
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This has been an incredibly useful discussion, and yet I suspect we have touched only the tip of the iceberg on some of these issues! Just a few quick notes and loose ends, if I may. Stuart, I am sure you have seen this report by Human Rights First suggesting that having prosecuted more than 100 terrorism-related cases, the government is actually pretty well-equipped to try terrorists in the conventional court system. I don't dispute that there are serious problems associated with the criminal courts. But after the circus at Guantanamo this week, I am more inclined than ever to go with the devil of a system we know.
Joe and David, your thoughts on vote fraud are very welcome, especially given that the hysteria about this issue seems to be on the rise, despite all the empirical evidence to the contrary. So I end echoing the observation that you made in your first post, Joe: The time to fix the voter-registration and voting laws is now. As Justice Stevens noted in his Crawford opinion, regardless of the actual data, voter confidence is ever-more shaky. This has happened for many reasons, and vote fraud is just a part of it. Still, here's hoping the new DoJ can rededicate itself to safeguarding the right to vote, as David suggests, and here's hoping that happens sooner rather than later. Thank you all so much for your thoughts and insights.
Dahlia
Slate's "Moneybox" columnist Daniel Gross was online on Washingtonpost.com to chat with readers about Sam Zell and the fall of the Tribune Co. An unedited transcript of the chat follows.
Tokyo, Japan: It's Bill Ackman, not Dan Ackman.
Daniel Gross: correct you are. We will fix.
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Brooklyn, N.Y.: Would this have been a less awful move had the credit crisis not hit? Or was it that dumb money was always gonna come back to show us just how dumb everyone was?
Daniel Gross: In theory, yes, it would have been less awful. A year ago, to think that he could get, say, $1 billion for the Chicago Cubs, which is a great franchise and would attract lots of bidders, was perhaps not entirely unrealistic. And he could have taken those proceeds a decent sized chunk of debt—not to make it in the long-term, but perhaps to get through this year.
I think, though, in the end, it was a question of "when" not "if" for Tribune, given the underlying businesses. It's one thing to have a company with relatively stable revenues and profits, like a manufacturer of soup, supporting big debt. It's quite another thing for a bunch of newspapers, whose revenues have been unstable and whose profits have been tough to come by, to support a massive amount of debt.
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Not anyone from The Post, honest: Do you think the future of newspapers are their online versions? How do you judge (at the risk of an appearance of conflict of interest) washingtonpost.com and its online newspaper? Personally, I find The Post far ahead of most other newspapers in developing an online site.
Daniel Gross: So, while I work for the Washington Post Company (my salary comes from Newsweek & Slate), I don't work directly for the Washington Post. So no big conflict of interest. And it's how I read the Post (it's not on the newsstand where I live). I think it's very good. The New York Times has been doing an excellent job, and so has the WSJ, except you have to pay for that.
That said, in answer to your question, I think it's likely that, say, 30 years from now, newspapers in their current form may not be with us. However, for the near future, I think the newspapers' future will be in a combination of print and online. When things are going well in the economy at large, newspapers have proven they can be profitable businesses, and the revenues from online only aren't enough to support the newsgathering and all the other resources that make the online publications great.
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New York, N.Y.: Who would you compare the situation with the Tribune to the situation with the New York Times? I know the Times has its troubles but—or am I wrong—there seems to be a family ownership that has kept the paper in check and is fighting to see that the Times survives.
Daniel Gross: The situation with the Times is very different than that with the Tribune. For one, the level of debt at the Times Co. is much more manageable—it's a challenge for the Times to manage, but nothing on the scale of what was piled on the Tribune.
Family ownership at publicly held companies (the washington post co. falls into this category) can be a double-edged sword at times. On the one hand, it encourages long-term thinking, preservation of capital, and guards against things like the Zell takeover. On the other hand, it sometimes means there are other interest at work. Take, for example, the New York Times and its dividend.
Right now, the Times' main operating businesses—the New York Times and the Boston Globe—don't seem to be making money. About.com seems to be generating some cash. And it has some valuable assets—its building, a chunk of the Boston Red Sox—but it can only monetize those by selling. In an environment where cash is king and access to credit is difficult, you would think a company in the Times' situation would be doing everything it can to preserve capital. Eliminating your dividend would seem to be a no-brainer.
And yet in recent years, the Times increased its dividend—only to cut it sharply (but not eliminate it). One of the reasons, of course, is that there are a few generations of Sulzbergers who depend on the Times Co.'s dividends to support themselves in comfort. So there are times when family control can influence corporate policies in ways that are not always optimal.
On the whole, however, in this climate, companies are frequently off under family control than under the control of highly indebted private equity types.
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Texas: How likely is it that the Cubs would be sold by the Tribune Company and for how much? Based on past interest, do you have any ideas as which parties would be interested buyers of the franchise?
Daniel Gross: Interesting questions. So, a year ago, it was common to hear people say that the Cubs could go for $1 billion, which is a lot of money. And of course, there's more to the Cubs (in terms of what Tribune owns) than the team. I believe they might have owned the stadium, as well as all or part of WGN, the tv station that carries the cubs' games.
Lots of names have been floated. Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, various Chicago-based financiers. But pretty much all the names floated have seen their net worths hacked significantly in the past year. I'd say it's likely to be a consortium rather than a single individual.
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Dunn Loring, Va.: You and others commenting on the Tribune's failure have focused on Sam Zell's incompetent management, but since most newspapers are slumping, aren't there other factors (such as the lack of objective reporting) that greatly contribute to the overall decline?
Daniel Gross: Newspapers' decline stems from two factors. One is secular (i.e. it's a long-term trend)—and that is that advertising dollars, resources, and eyeballs are moving away from printed newspapers to tv, online, mobile, etc. Also, classified ads, which were a big moneymaker for newspapers, have basically gone to Craigslist.
The second factor is more cyclical—namely the recession, and the fact that advertising always shrinks during recessions across the board. Virtually every form of media is finding reduced advertising spending.
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Philadelphia: There was a sense of some that a few years ago, a partisan political operator with little newspaper experience got a group of investors to buy the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News at an overvalued price. These company is declining in value, I am not sure how readership is (they proclaimed in an ad that it is up). So I wonder: Do you have any sense on what the future may hold for the Philadelphia dailies?
Daniel Gross: Hi Philly—I don't know much about the situation with the Inquirer and Daily News. But it's quite similar to that of the Tribune—a leveraged play by non newspaper people.
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Baltimore: So Sam Zell has ruined a huge media company, but he managed to put up only $315 million out of his many billions to do it. Yes, it was rapacious and unconscionable, but if you have to do something rapacious and unconscionable, at least he picked a smart way to do it.
Now I hope that maybe my hometown paper, the Baltimore Sun, can fall under local ownership and not be the piece of trash it's become.
Daniel Gross: "only $315 million"? Even for Zell, that's real money.
re: future ownership. That's the big question. Will the papers be sold off individually or in groups? Will someone come in and try to run the whole company. We don't have any answers yet.
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Reston, Va.: There is a Web site which lists Tribune's acquisitions from 1924 forward. You can look at the acquisitions year by year.
Eventually you get to 2007, and there it is: Zell buys Tribune. And whoosh, only one year passes and the whole enterprise files for bankruptcy.
It seems to me something is off-base. This company made acquisition decisions going back 80 plus years, then suddenly Zell appears, buys it, and they go bankrupt. Is it possible that this was orchestrated by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, or perhaps an investment group (hedge fund in particular) with very influential members?
Daniel Gross: i don't think the u.s. chamber of commerce had anything to do with this.
This deal was thought up by someone whom the world had dubbed to be an investing genius, it was backed and advised by all the blue-chip investment banks, and name-brand banks lent tons of money to the company. The net worth—and reputation—of all involved has taken a significant hit.
It was just a miracle of poor timing.
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Your blog: After reading your book, Pop!, I went to your Web site.
Do you not update that anymore?
Daniel Gross: First, thanks so much for reading. And, yes, when I joined the staff of Newsweek in the summer of '07 I stopped updating the blog. Basically, you can see all my work on Slate or on Newsweek.com
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Baltimore: What happens to all the people who took the Tribune buyout during the last year? Do they still get paid, or are they now unsecured creditors?
Seems pretty slimy if they get rid of workers with the promise of severance, even while knowing they're about to declare bankruptcy and not make good on those obligations.
Daniel Gross: That's a good question. To a degree, it depends where the buyout money came from. Sometimes, if companies' pension funds are overfunded, they can use those assets to fund buyouts and severance. And in that case, a bankruptcy wouldn't mean the workers were out of luck. I know one of the big creditors of Tribune Co. is Mark Willes, who was a former CEO and is owed several million in retirement money. oh well.
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Washington, D.C.: It's been my understanding that many (most?) newspapers are still profitable—there just isn't any growth, which isn't good enough for shareholders. Incorrect?
Daniel Gross: I think many newspapers are profitable, although this year—and this quarter in particularly—I would guess that not all that many are. Newspapers are really tied to the economic cycle—when a recession hits, people cut back on discretionary spending, like newspaper subscriptions, and advertisers pull back.
You could check out the quarterly results of Gannett Co.
Seems like they made a pretty decent profit on newspaper operations in the most recent quarter
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Hartford, Conn.: From where I sit the Zell strategy seems to be to cheapen the product so its inherent value to the consumer (news) is even less so, in the hopes that it can shrink its way back to profitability, then regain its lost luster in some way. The next industry to successfully pull off that business model will be the first.
Daniel Gross: that might be a simplification. I don't think he really had a strategy to deal with the newspapers per se. This was a guy who probably hadn't thought for more than a few minutes about how to run a newspaper before taking control of the companies. Basically, he saw a financial opportunity—acquire control of Tribune with very little down and lots of debt and hope to flip pieces of it.
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New York Times: I had to look with one eye closed when the New York Times company mortgaged their building to fund current operations.
If real estate has not hit a bottom, won't this endanger the company long term.
Didn't anyone read your book, Pop?
Daniel Gross: The Times basically took out a home equity line of credit on its new home in New York. It wants to borrow about $225 million, I believe, which is probably only about 1/3 of the value of the building. So it's a pretty conservative move. And they're not using the proceeds to fund current operations. They want to use it to pay down some debt and have cash on hand in case they have difficulty rolling over existing credit lines.
I know that some people did read my book, Pop.
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Evanston, Ill.: Hey Dan, you wrote a provocative book about why bubbles are good for the economy. Of course there are beneficial side effects but I think the questions is what is the net effect of a given bubble. Is it safe to conclude that the housing bubbles benefits are outweighed by fallout we are now living through?
Daniel Gross: Hi Evanston—I don't want to give away the whole book here. It's still available for sale, after all. But basically, the argument is that bubbles are good when they leave behind a new commercial infrastructure that others can use—like the telegraph, the railroad, or the Internet. In other words, without Web bubble 1.0, we don't get Google. Without the telegraph bubble of the 1840s and 1850s, we wouldn't have got the Associated Press and Western Union. When the bubble is in something like paper (credit, stocks) or in something that doesn't really create a new commercial infrastructure (housing), we don't get the same benefits.
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Toronto: How do the sellers of the Tribune Co. feel about their sale to Zell now?
Do they feel as though they erred in selling to a person who used other peoples money and saddled the company with large debts, as opposed to selling parts of the Co. piecemeal to people like David Geffen, or do you think they simply do not care, because they made a lot of money in the sale?
Daniel Gross: I think the people who sold the Tribune Co. actually feel pretty good. They got a good cash price for their stock at what turned out to be the top of the market. Had they said no, and held on, that stock would probably be cut in half, just like every other media stock.
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Miami, Fla.: Any idea why they took on additional $3B in debt? Seems they paid for business with $300 million from Zell and $9B from banks to pay off family, Wall St and Fitzsimmons. After this transaction Zell was able to add $3B additional debt—seems like straight forward corporate looting, especially when the business reported $100M-plus profits each quarter in 2007 and 1st 1/2 of '08.
Daniel Gross: I think—not sure, though—that the $3 b may have been existing debt. In other words, when you buy a company you assume all its assets and liabilities. That's why it's sometimes confusing when we report about the size of deals. If you put $1 billion cash down, and borrow $9 billion to pay $10 billion for a company that has $5 billion in debt, the price of the deal is $10 billion, but the value of it may be $15 billion, since the new entity is assuming that existing debt.
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Washington, D.C.: In the early '90s, when my cousin used to connive to me about terrorists hijacking jets with box knives, I used to tell him that Communism was coming to America through the federal bankruptcy courts, not through firebombs in the streets. Then his younger brother would chime in that the government was going to provide us all with the cure for anthrax after a bioweapon attack—in exchange for our guns.
How much power does the federal court's overseer have in deciding which Tribune creditors get paid and which do not? That would be the most powerful job in the company, wouldn't it?
Daniel Gross: Bankruptcy court isn't supposed to be a place where the judge decides who gets paid and who doesn't. It's supposed to be a place where the creditors and debtors get together and work out deals under the supervision. There's a lot of negotiations, threats, discussions, and sometimes litigation in bankruptcy court. But in a typical bankruptcy, the parties work out deals without massive intervention from the judge.
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Daniel Gross: Looks like the hour is coming to a close.
Thanks for all the great questions.
See you next time
Dan
Emily Yoffe, who dispenses advice as Slate's "Dear Prudence" columnist, was online at Washingtonpost.com to take readers' questions about holiday-related quandaries. An unedited transcript of the chat follows.
Emily Yoffe: Happy holidays everyone! Okay, let's try to get some of the bah humbug out of the season.
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Washington, D.C.: With the economy the way it is, my wife and I had to immediately cancel all gifts to each other (The kids' gifts were purchased mostly over the summer). I'm in the middle of home repairs/improvements which will be complete by the weekend in time for the holidays. Given that there's no time at all to come up with a thoughtful poem and my wife will not consider the home improvements as a sort of gift, what can I do that's both free and doesn't take up time I don't have?
Emily Yoffe: I'm not quite understanding your agreement—no presents for each other, except your wife expects a present? Since it sounds as if a poem will do, hit the anthologies, find a love poem that expresses what she means to you, especially during these tough times, hand copy it (but don't pretend you wrote it!) and attach a rose.
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Alexandria, Va.: I am a Muslim man who is dating a Christian lady. She has invited me to spend Christmas with her and her family this year. I have never celebrated Christmas and would feel uncomfortable celebrating it now. When I raise the issue of not going, she gets upset and her feelings are hurt, which makes me just want to give in so that she is happy. How can I handle this? Knowing that this will be an issue every year, and an even bigger issue if we ever get married and have kids. Help!!!
Emily Yoffe: If you're thinking about getting married, you need to work this out before you do—and certainly before you have kids. The question of what religion to observe is not just a Christmas issue, but it's particularly loaded then. But your attending your girlfriend's festivities does not mean you are abandoning your own religion, just that you acknowledge she has a different faith, and you are happy to share this happy occasion with her.
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Oak Creek, Wis.: Dear Prudence, how can I get my three bosses to stop buying me a holiday gift? It's not that I don't like the joint gift, it's just that then I have to buy something for the three of them. Their incomes greatly exceed mine, so buying three gifts of a quality I think they would appreciate really is a strain on my pocketbook. I would feel awkward receiving a gift but not giving. What do you suggest?
Emily Yoffe: Your bosses do not expect you to reciprocate on the same level—they know what you make and that you're their subordinate. Simply write them each a note expressing your thanks. You could attach it to a small box of fudge or a gingerbread cookie.
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Huntsville, Ala.: How do I get out of these stupid office holiday celebrations without looking anti-social? There is a holiday party for everything—the org, the dept., the workgroup, the team, the contractor group, and a December birthday party outing. To top it off, we have to pay for our meal ourselves or bring in a dish. Do they not realize I have a family I need to provide for? Bah humbug!
Emily Yoffe: A group of you have to get together right away and declare a holiday policy (although it may be too late for this year). One general party, and another for a group in a specific division is fine, but a month long series of celebrations, at which you're expected to supply the victuals, is ridiculous. Once you've made an appearance at one or two, you can politely decline the rest.
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Ellicott City, Md.: What is the real etiquette with attendance at holiday office parties? Newspaper and online articles seem to indicate that attendance is de riguer, but less than half of the company attended my office party this past weekend. Is my office atypical?
Emily Yoffe: See the letter above. I'm wondering if you may be the victim of office overkill with people feeling, "I just can't attend one more office event!" But if you are having THE office party, you're right, people should make every effort to attend.
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Washington, D.C.: Ugh—parents and in-laws and siblings are already fighting over the 72 hours I have "at home." I also want to make time to see friends with whom I get together every year. How do you deal with guilt tripping relatives, particularly the moms?
Emily Yoffe: There's nothing more festive then being forced to enjoy the company of relatives for 72 hours straight because IT'S THE HOLIDAYS! You do have an obligation to your family—Christmas does mean more than spring break. But families have to be flexible enough to understand that people grow up, create families of their own, and required attendance just increases the desire for a prison break. Before you go home tell your family (Mom) that you've scheduled a couple of visits with old friends and alert her when you'll be gone, then explain you'll be around the rest of the time. If she knows what to expect there may be less drama.
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Memphis, Tenn.: I finally got up the nerve to ask my boyfriend of almost two years if I could join him in visiting his small, close-knit, east-coast family for the annual Christmas pilgrimage. To my delight he said yes but is concerned about his mother, who just had a heart attack in the fall and is still not "herself" though is home and recovering. I know she'll try her best to be a hostess as is her nature, but I'm no ordinary house guest and she doesn't need to impress me. I'd like to make myself useful even though I've never celebrated Christmas myself. How to best show her that I'm game and incidentally that I'm daughter-in-law material? She and I have met and she does seem to like me.
Emily Yoffe: I'm a little worried about the relationship if after two years it took "getting up the nerve" to see about spending the holidays together. The best thing you can do is not try to impress your possibly future mother-in-law that you desperately want her to be your mother-in-law. Relax! Enjoy yourself. Ask how you can make yourself helpful, then do so. If you're not allowed to help, then play with the little kids or offer to take the dog for a walk. Don't make this into an audition for family membership—your tension is all anyone will notice.
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Washington, D.C.: What do I do when I receive a gift from someone I have no plans on getting a gift for? I have a very tight budget. I also do not want to start a trend of giving gifts to people that I don't feel close to. If they feel I am close to them, I appreciate that, but I am not going to fake that we are closer than I actually feel we are!
I will write a thank you note. That's as far as I will go; am I terrible?
Emily Yoffe: Write a gracious note and let it go.
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Suggestions for Washington D.C.: A handwritten gift certificate for a foot massage, complete with baby oil.
A handwritten gift certificate for a candelit bubble bath, either 1. solo, with you keeping the kids away from the bathroom for one whole hour. Or 2. bubble bath for two, if the kids are old enough to understand the bathroom restriction.
A promissory note for one month of the chore she dislikes the most.
I'm sure you can think of one or two other things along this line.
Emily Yoffe: See these good suggestions for the husband with no time and money and whose wife, after agreeing to no gift, wants a gift.
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Philly: Hello—last Christmas, I gave all of my husband's family members cute (but inexpensive) ornaments with some homemade cookies. I don't have a lot of money so I am planning on giving the same family members either a collage of family pictures, a frame, or other small items. Money is tight, as we all know. However, last Christmas my mother-in-law gave me a very expensive gift—I know it was ten times as much as I had spent on them because she left the price tag on! I feel like this big, nice, expensive gift has sort of upped the gift ante, so to speak. Should I get something a little nicer for the mother-/father-in-law? Money is an issue for me but is definitely not an issue for them. Help!
Emily Yoffe: Resist the temptation to enter into this potlach ceremony. This is the hospitality tradition of some Northwest tribes (I believe) where they bankrupt themselves by exchanging ever more elaborate gifts. Stick with your plans, and don't act defensive or embarrassed about the gift imbalance.
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Fairfax, Va.: Hi Ms. Yoffe. I am a student, so obviously on a budget, but I have noticed that gifts I give to my brother (usually DVDs or CDs since he never gives my family any idea what he wants) get thrown away by his wife. This has happened several years in a row and I'm frankly pretty tired of throwing money down the drain.
Emily Yoffe: Why not make an agreement that the adults will only get gifts for the children and not exchange gifts this year? Even if they don't agree, you can declare this is what you have to do this year, then stick with it.
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Washington, D.C.: To Alexandria, Va.:
As a Catholic woman who has dated non-Christian men (and who has non-Christian friends), I thought I would offer one perspective. When I invite others to holiday celebrations (Christmas, Easter, etc.), my goal is not to convert them or have them take part in any overtly religious activities. Rather, I want to spend time with them and share the holidays with them. I assume the same thing when others invite me to their religious events. If what you are concerned about is overt religious celebration, perhaps you can make a compromise—joining her family for the Christmas gathering but not going to church with them. She might be upset because she feels that, by not coming to the gathering, you are snubbing her family.
Emily Yoffe: This is in response to the writer who is Muslim and is uncomfortable about spending Christmas with his girlfriend's family. You are exactly right—don't look at sharing the holiday as a conversion event, but enjoying someone else's (someone you love, presumably) tradition.
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Capitol Hill, D.C.: Do you have any suggestions for how to dis-invite relatives who have declared their intent to crash chez moi for the Inauguration? I have told them that it will likely be cold, there will be a shortage of port-a-potties on the Mall, no large bags will be allowed on the Mall, if you live within two miles of the Capitol you have to walk (stay off public transportation), I have three cats and four litter boxes, bars will be open till 5 am, there will be no smoking in my condo, and other things that would dissuade any rational person. So far they are still coming. Help. Thank you.
Emily Yoffe: Normally I am in favor of just flat out telling friends you don't want to play host to that that while you'd love to see them, this simply isn't a good time. For many people this Inaugural is not a normal time, but an historic time. I think you should be flexible on this and open your home for a few days. So what if they get stuck freezing on the mall looking for a porta-potty—you will be home all cozy and curled up with the kitties.
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Washington, D.C.: My husband doesn't want us to spend money on gifts, which is fine, but he already bought me a purse. I was going to buy some tickets to his favorite team at a venue within driving distance and an inexpensive hotel room so we can stay overnight, but he says he doesn't want it. For my sports (and music) fanatic husband, what can I get him that isn't too expensive, but that still gives him SOME type of gift?
Emily Yoffe: If the sports fanatic has said no to this gift, he really wants no gift. So see a previous list of suggestions—you can delete bubble bath and give your husband a gift certificate for a massage (from you), or make his favorite meal, etc.
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Cincinnati, Ohio: My sister flies to my house every year for Christmas. Last year, we drove to my parents' house in the Detroit area for the actual holiday. My parents' house is a mess—crammed with stuff, nowhere to sit, and, now that their dog has cancer, it smells like urine. My sister wants to go to their house again this year, and my stomach is in knots at the thought. I've done everything I can to get their house cleaned up, but it never works. My parents could come to my house (they have many times in the past), so it's not a question of leaving them alone on Christmas. What can I do? She doesn't understand how awful it has become.
Emily Yoffe: It sounds as if your sister just can't let go of the idea that Christmas means coming home to your parents house, even if the dog is peeing on the Christmas tree. Since your parents have agreed to Christmas at your home previously, they sound as if they are more than happy to pass on the hosting responsibilities. So simply make an executive decision and tell sis and the parents it's Christmas at your house this year, and make the arrangement to get your parents there.
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Washington, D.C.: I'm dreading the holidays "back home" because many members of my family are very racist, and they know my politics and know I voted for Obama. I'll hear a lot of really awful things. My Mom (an Obama supporter) can't stand any kind of discord, and has asked me to just keep my mouth shut. I feel that my nieces and nephews should see and hear an adult who thinks differently from their parents. Am I right?
Emily Yoffe: Not getting into political squabbles for the sake of a placid holiday and letting openly racist remarks pass are two different things. On the other hand, are you possibly reading racism into remarks that are simply critical of Obama? If family members complain they wish McCain had won, just shrug it off—he didn't after all. But for racist remarks go ahead and say something like, "Uncle Stan, I find those kind of comments deeply disturbing. It's fine that you don't like the President-elect, but I wish you would keep your remarks about him civil."
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Chicago: What do I say to my mother-in-law when she comments on my real or supposed weight loss. I have lost a few pounds—somehow it isn't really noticeable to anyone but her. The problem is that she then tends to remark that she's never had weight problems. I usually lie and deny that I've lost any weight. Is there a better way to handle this?
Emily Yoffe: Ah, the annual passive-aggressive weigh-in. It doesn't sound as if your mother-in-law is really that interested in whether you've lost weight, she just wants everyone to register her marvelous shape. So disarm her. When she comments on your weight loss just smile and say, "Thanks for noticing!" When she adds how great she looks, keep smiling and say, "Louise, you have always had an enviable figure!"
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Phoenix, Ariz.: Hi Emily!
I'm a middle-aged lesbian. My parents have never liked my partner or taken our relationship seriously, even though we have been together for 25 wonderful years. The holidays are especially stressful and I tend to visit my parents alone for a few days before Christmas. Their health is failing, however, and I feel pressured to be with them on Christmas eve and day. I'd like my partner to attend (she is anxious to, by the way) and give family togetherness another shot before it's too late. Any suggestions?
Emily Yoffe: Just try being honest. Don't get into the past, but tell your parents you're looking forward to seeing them, but the holidays are meaningful to you and your partner as well. Say that the best way to make everyone happy is for all of you the spend the time together. If your parents don't outright refuse, then do it. If they make a fuss, then explain you won't be able to spend as much time with them as you would like because you're not going to leave your partner alone for the whole holiday.
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Maine: I have gotten a lot of negative responses from people who have asked about my family's Christmas plans. Because my husband's office is closed for much of the holidays we tack on some vacation days and take an extended trip to see his parents who live rather far away. The drive is no fun, but once we get there we are able to have a nice, long visit with my husband's family who we don't see as much a we'd like. It's a good place to visit, we all get our own rooms and the kids get to spend a lot time with their extended family. However, many people have been saying to me, "How can you do that to your kids, they should be home for Christmas." Sure, there is part of me that would like to just stay home, but family is important to us and these plans are working for our family for the time being. How do I respond to the negative comments without being overly defensive?
Emily Yoffe: There are people in your life who make you feel defensive for having a wonderful time with your in-laws? Who are these people? Why are you listening to them? If you find yourself discussing this issue with any of these people just say, "I am so blessed to have wonderful in-laws and lucky that we have enough time off so that the kids can really spend time with their grandparents." Then change the subject!
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Christmas Blues: My youngest (age 21) sister has a deep, deep anxiety regarding all things holiday-related. It has increased over the years to the extent that she will hide in her room during all family meals, movie watching and "let's go look at the lights" type activities. I would really like to make sure I spend time with her over Christmas, but in ways that respect her anxiety. Do you have any suggestions? Thanks.
Emily Yoffe: Your sister needs to see a doctor. If she hides in her room for family meals, she has crippling anxiety or possibly other disorders. Get the family member closest to her help her seek help (she may be unable to take these steps herself). There are wonderful medications and therapies that can help her conquer this and rejoin life.
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Re: Inauguration: I have to disagree with you heartily on the Inauguration question. It's historic, yes, but it's not ever permissible to just invite yourself to someone's house. Sounds like they decided they'd crash at his/her place, and that was that.
Emily Yoffe: I know what you mean, but usually when you don't want to host family members you can say, "There's a Motel 6 not to far from me that serves wonderful hard-boiled eggs at breakfast." There's no Motel 6 available in this case. I say let them crash. They'll be spending most of their time caught in a huge crush anyway and out of her hair.
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Reference: The Office Party: I straight up told my coworker that I wasn't going to an office holiday party with those who talk about me behind my back the rest of the year! She told me to get into the festive spirit and let her know of three occasions when she talked about me! Yes Virginia, there is a Bah Humbug!
Emily Yoffe: Hoo boy, if everyone refused to attend an office party with anyone who ever talked about them behind their back we finally, finally would end the tradition of the office party. Everybody talks about everybody at the office. Given the tone of your note, there may be a reason people talk about you. Your co-worker is right—lighten up, and not just at this time of year.
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Los Angeles: Dear Prudie,
Love your advice! Look forward to it each week. Here's my dilemma: Every Christmas for the past 12 years, I have sent out cards with a funny Christmas letter about our lives over the past year. I really enjoy writing it and many friends tell me they look forward to my letter every year. This year is different because my husband's mother is terminally ill. She may not even make it through Christmas. I'm at a loss as what to do. If I send the letter do I mention my mother-in-law, or just what our family has been doing? If I do not include a letter, how do I respond to those who want to know what happened to the letter? I don't want to gloss over this sad time in our family, but I don't want to dampen anyone's Christmas cheer with a sad letter. My husband says he can't even think about Christmas right now.
Yours faithfully,
Sad Writer
Emily Yoffe: I know we're all supposed to cackle at the Christmas letter, but I love them. But there is no obligation to try to write something worthy of David Sedaris every year. You can write some of the fun, happy things that happened to you, then in another paragraph you can say 2008 has had its painful parts as well because your beloved mother-in-law is gravely ill. Write a few words of tribute to her and say that you feel so blessed to have had her in your life for so long. You will not bring people down—they will be touched, and you will probably move them to appreciate their loved ones more.
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Mixed-Language Family: I am spending Christmas with my boyfriend's family for the first time. In addition to his parents, his two married brothers, their wives, his unmarried teenage brother, and the wives' mothers will be present, making for quite a tribe. My boyfriend and his brothers grew up in a Spanish-speaking country. Most of us (including myself) are bilingual, but some people only speak English, and some only speak Spanish. We are spending several days with them, so I expect to engage in lots of different activities with different combinations of people. When is it appropriate to speak English and when is it appropriate to speak Spanish?
Emily Yoffe: It sounds like you're in for a busy, fun holiday. It also sounds as if there are no hard rules in this Spanglish household. What people need to do is keep in mind the linguistic abilities of everyone. If the conversation is all in Spanish, or English but there are people in the room who are being left out, then recommend you switch. But it sounds as if in this group anyone can move on a find a conversation to join.
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Durham, N.C.: I have a group of friends who get together at Christmas and do a gift exchange—everyone brings one gift worth about $25 and then the fun ensues. Except that I'm a grad student and I only spend about $25 on family members (each, not total). I'd rather just give each of them a little homemade goodie. I've successfully avoided the party in the past, but I'm tired of coming up with excuses for not going. I don't want to end their fun, but I don't want to have to put out another $25 as the cost of playing. What to do?
Emily Yoffe: Just explain to the group that you'd love to come, but the entry tab would bust your budget, so you're going to give cookies. It may inspire everyone to lower the gift fee. Or if they are really fanatics on this $25 gift tab, say you'd love to join them, but when the gifts start being exchanged, you'll happily watch as a spectator.
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Washington, D.C.: My boss gave me a generous gift certificate to a high-end spa as a holiday gift. I truly appreciate his thoughtfulness and have already given him a thank-you note with a box of his favorite gourmet cookies. The problem is that even the least expensive services that the spa offers significantly exceed the value of the gift certificate. Money is very tight for me and I don't see being able to come up with the difference during the next few months, before the certificate expires. What should I do? He has already asked me when I plan to schedule my "spa day"! I also really hate to think that he has wasted his money. The certificate is addressed to me personally, so I can't even give it to someone else who has the means to pay the difference.
Emily Yoffe: You need to contact the spa and explain your problem. Surely if your boss gave you a "generous" gift certificate that would cover a pedicure at this place. Talk to the manager about how you can take advantage of this gift. And usually such gift certificates are good for a year—if yours has a short time-line tell them you need it extended. Sounds like you have a nice boss.
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Inauguration (again): Wow, I usually agree with you, but you got it way wrong this time.
You're telling the poster that she has no right to her own privacy, just because she happens to live near a place where an interesting event is occurring?
Let's leave alone the argument of "it's history"; that is irrelevant. Someone else's desire for free accommodations never trumps your right to say no. Period.
"I'm sorry, I just don't have room for guests." That's all you owe them. They can't get a room someplace? They can if they're willing to pay enough. They're not willing to pay enough? Then they can't come. The same holds true for my desire to go to Paris.
Emily Yoffe: Lots of people are mad that I said let the family crash for the Inaugural. Okay, tell the family, "Sorry if you care enough about this event, go to Craig's list and find someone else willing to have you. I hear rooms are starting at about $500 a night."
You're right, no one can invite themselves. And people who live in desirable cities have to be firm about not being taken advantage of year in and year out. But is saying no to a few days of family visiting for this specific occasion really worth all the years of resentment it will engender? I say make an exception. (But if Obama gets re-elected, no crashing in 2012.)
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Gaithersburg, Md.: Worst office party Christmas gift: used, empty pepper grinder. I kid you not.
Emily Yoffe: I'd love that gift! My pepper grinder just broke!
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Emily Yoffe: Thanks everyone for your fascinating holiday dilemmas. Best wishes for 2009!
Please help settle an argument that's threatening to tear my family apart this holiday season: What's worse for the environment, a real Christmas tree that lasts just a few weeks, or an artificial one that we can haul out every December for the next 15 years?
Crunching the numbers on this quandary is tough, if only because so much of the public information is skewed in favor of natural trees. America's Christmas tree growers have a fearsome lobby, one that's spent the past few years demonizing the artificial competition; check out this hilariously alarmist FAQ by the National Christmas Tree Association, which lambastes fake firs and pines as beetle-infested fire hazards descended from toilet brushes. (According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the NCTA started going on the attack in 2004 in response to declining sales.)
Despite its hyperbolic rhetoric, the real-trees industry makes at least one excellent point when denigrating the fakes: The needles on artificial trees are usually made from polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, which is anathema to Greenpeacers and their ilk. As the Lantern discussed two weeks back, PVC is widely reviled as a major source of dioxins. To make matters worse, cheap PVC is sometimes stabilized with lead, which can break free as harmful dust as a fake tree ages.
Growing concern over PVC has led fake-tree manufacturers to develop polyethylene needles; according to one prominent treemaker, 20 percent of artificial Christmas trees are now PE rather than PVC. But watch out for sleight of hand when it comes to "eco-friendly" fake trees; most of those 20 percent still contain PVC interior needles in order to create a fuller look.
As you note, the chief environmental selling point with fake trees is the fact they can be reused, which means that energy doesn't have to be expended year after year getting the product to market. But how much transportation fuel does an artificial tree really save? Let's make an estimate based on shipping each type of tree to a decidedly average American burg: Lebanon, Kan., claimant to the title of Geographic Center of the Lower 48.
The vast majority—at least 85 percent—of fake trees come from Asia, so we'll base our estimate on a Shanghai-to-Long-Beach, Calif., voyage aboard a container ship. A large ship capable of holding 2,125 40-foot containers will consume about 1,000 metric tons of fuel during its two-week journey across the Pacific Ocean. Let's say that there's only one container of fake trees on that ship, which means the trees' share of that fuel is roughly 1,037 pounds. On the last stretch of the journey, from Long Beach to Lebanon, the Yuletide cargo travels on a truck that gets six miles per gallon. On that 1,160-mile road trip, the truck will consume about 193 gallons of gas, which weighs around 1,158 pounds. Total for the trip from Shanghai to north-central Kansas: 2,195 pounds of fuel.
Now let's compare that fuel usage to 15 years' worth of real trees. (The Lantern is actually skeptical that most artificial trees last that long—especially the cheapest ones—but let's go with it.) In order to consume 2,195 pounds of fuel, your real trees would have to average a farm-to-retailer journey of 146.3 miles, assuming they are transported on the same six-mpg trucks mentioned above.* And even though the NCTA likes to point out that tree farms operate in all 50 states—yes, even in Florida—odds are the trees at your local lot traveled farther than that.
Yet the Lantern is still going to cast his vote for real trees: PVCs are just too worrisome, and so is the disposal issue. It's easy to track down a local program that will turn your real tree into mulch, but even the hardiest plastic tree is doomed to wind up in a landfill, where it will remain intact for ages. As for the fakes' advantage in terms of transportation energy, you can minimize this by being an informed consumer and trying to buy as locally as possible. (Also, don't worry about deforestation—98 percent of American trees are farm-raised, and they are usually replaced on a 3-to-1 basis after each harvest.)
The Lantern realizes, though, that raising Christmas trees may not be the most efficient use of land, and that pesticides are an integral part of the farming process. You may also blanch at the idea of killing a living thing solely so you and yours can enjoy a few weeks of pine-scented joy. In that case, lessen your guilt by buying a tree that you plan on planting after the holidays, complete with roots; just make sure you don't keep it indoors for more than a week, or it might become so acclimated to your living room that it won't survive outdoors.
There are also a few cities, like San Francisco, that offer rent-a-tree programs; they'll bring you a potted tree, then take it back after the holidays and plant it somewhere that needs a dash of green. A smart idea, but traditionalists beware: The trees on offer don't look like the ones you grew up with, but are rather very young Southern magnolias and small-leaf tristanias. They certainly don't appear capable of supporting that massive Three Wise Men ornament you inherited from Grandma.
Is there an environmental quandary that's been keeping you up at night? Send it to ask.the.lantern@gmail.com, and check this space every Tuesday.
Correction, Dec. 18, 2007: This piece originally stated that real trees would have to average a farm-to retailer journey of 4.1 miles in order to consume 2,195 pounds of fuel. That distance is actually 146.3 miles. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
Every Christmas, my grandmother puts a check for $100 into my stocking. This year, I want to spend that money on reducing my carbon footprint. How can I do the most good with that money?
What a good boy you are! The Lantern is glowing with pride. Unfortunately, this is a thorny question, and your most fundamental assumption may be wrong: It's possible that Grandma's check shouldn't be spent on reducing your own carbon footprint at all but instead on larger-scale efforts to help the environment. While the Lantern firmly believes individual choices can make a difference, efforts to combat global warming, protect biodiversity, and keep air and water clean will ultimately depend more on government action than consumer choices. So there's a strong case to be made that your dollars will go furthest in support of groups that lobby for environmental issues. If public advocacy is not your bag, you might donate that money to environmental charities that run their own green projects—like, say, rain forest adoption programs.
If these ideas don't excite you, the Lantern recommends putting the new cash toward insulating your family's home. Of course, whether this makes sense depends on your local climate and whether you buy or rent. (Likewise, the current state of your home will determine just how much insulation your $100 will buy.) For the rest of you, it might be wisest to replace any antiquated, energy-inefficient appliances you might have—along the lines spelled out here. (Let's put aside the complicated question of carbon offsets, which will be addressed in a future column. Suffice to say that they wouldn't be the Lantern's first choice.)
Insulation doesn't sound as sexy as, say, a solar-panel messenger bag. But to understand why it may be the best choice, the Lantern recommends a report from the McKinsey Climate Change Special Initiative, and a free online book by Cambridge professor David MacKay called Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air. Neither is framed as a how-to guide for personal conservation, but they both provide information on how we might make the biggest environmental impact for the least money.
The McKinsey report (PDF) tries to answer that question by constructing a "cost abatement curve," which describes how much money it would take to prevent 1 ton of greenhouse-gas emissions through different approaches, from improving lighting systems to carbon capture and storage. (Worth noting: The firm's work has been supported by utility companies, among others.) If you look at that graph—found here—you'll notice that many of these costs are actually negative, meaning that reducing carbon emissions actually saves money. For example, through 2030, every ton of carbon-equivalent emissions reduced by improving fuel efficiency will save about 50 euros. Globally, investing in insulation gives the largest financial return—earning more than 100 euros per ton of emissions. While your specific location may change the numbers some, McKinsey data suggest that insulation—along with energy-efficient appliances and compact fluorescent light bulbs—are usually good bets.
MacKay, for his part, is skeptical about how much consumers can do to reduce carbon emissions absent significant regulatory changes, pointing out that "if everyone does a little, we'll only achieve a little." But he does identify a few individual behaviors that can make a difference, taken together. He starts with the steps that won't even require cashing in Grandma's check: eating less meat, driving less, and, perhaps most crucially, flying less. His other top choices for action include double-glazing your windows and—you guessed it—improving your insulation.
For practical advice on how to go about insulating, the Lantern defers to the Department of Energy's compendium of information here, as well as this nifty program for determining how much money you might save. Keep in mind that all types of insulation can save energy, but some insulating materials are greener than others. The Lantern's recommendation? Thank Grandma for the check, and tell her you've got your eye on a nice bag of cellulose.
Is there an environmental quandary that's been keeping you up at night? Send it to ask.the.lantern@gmail.com, and check this space every Tuesday.
Hours after NBC announced that Jay Leno was taking over its prime-time lineup, Rod Blagojevich demonstrated why shows like Leno's are so cheap to produce: all the best material comes from people on the public payroll.
Tuesday's jaw-dropping, grave-roiling news from Illinois completely obscured another politician's more workmanlike efforts to humiliate himself. Like Leno, Larry Craig can't bear to walk away from the laughter. As a result, he lost yet another appeal Tuesday in a Minneapolis court. Craig promptly issued a statement maintaining his innocence and holding out the promise that he will launch one last embarrassing appeal before leaving public life next month.
In the league of bare ruined careers, Craig has actually had a better year than many. Never mind what his appellate briefs now contend: Craig's ridiculous strategy to cop a misdemeanor plea in August 2007 and appeal it ever since may have been the only plausible strategy to keep himself in office for the rest of his term. Confronted with more serious but less Leno-prone charges, Senate colleague Ted Stevens chose the road Craig didn't take—to fight in court and run for re-election. Stevens lost in the courtroom and at the ballot box and ended up with a felony conviction that would have forced him to step down even if he'd been re-elected.
Meanwhile, the once-considerable shock value of Craig's creepy, boneheaded antics in an airport bathroom has since been eclipsed by scandals that make his seem minor league. Eliot Spitzer threw away a shot at the presidency to become Client No. 9. And this week, Blagojevich trumped Spitzer with one of the most megalomaniacal implosions since Watergate—right down to the secret recordings and expletives deleted. The federalist in Craig can take consolation in knowing that, as much as Washington prides itself as the scandal capital, Blagojevich's Illinois is proof that every now and then the laboratories of democracy still produce a mad scientist.
Try as he might, Larry Craig simply can't compete on that stage. As schools for scandal go, an Idaho sleazeball just doesn't have the strength of schedule to top the BCS rankings—while the Big Ten and Big East champs get automatic berths.
Besides, Craig may be the most colorless figure to stumble into a modern political scandal. The man's harshest expletive is "Jiminy God!" Blagojevich and his wife curse more in one criminal complaint than Craig has cursed in his entire life.
So with no presidential aspirations to squander and no sordid traditions to uphold, Larry Craig soldiers on, sullying his reputation the way he knows best—through sheer determination and hard work. His latest appeal is a testament to perseverance. What he wanted the court to do—overturn his own guilty plea—was embarrassing and improbable enough the first time. Asking his lawyers to reprise the performance before the Minnesota Court of Appeals (and if he gets the chance, the Minnesota Supreme Court) takes a thick skin and a big line of credit. As a lame duck and lost cause, Craig isn't getting much help in his quixotic exercise: The Senate ethics committee told him to stop using campaign money, and his legal defense fund has collected less than $5,000.
Based on this week's appeals court decision, Craig's arguments might not be worth even that much. Craig's brief contended that he couldn't possibly be held to his written admission that he "engaged in conduct which I knew or should have known tended to arouse alarm or resentment [in] others." According to Craig's lawyers, the plea should be invalid because the public nuisance statute says "others," which is plural, while the creeped-out police detective in the neighboring stall was (no thanks to Craig) singular. With Whitmanesque sweep, however, the court ruled that "the singular includes the plural; and the plural, the singular"—and that in any event, everyone else in the men's room would have been creeped out, too.
Craig's lawyers also tried to argue that their client's conduct was free speech and therefore the nuisance statute was "unconstitutionally overbroad." The court disagreed, ruling in essence that even the First Amendment is not broad enough to cover so wide a stance: "Even if appellant's foot-tapping and the movement of his foot toward the undercover officer's stall are considered 'speech,' they would be intrusive speech directed at a captive audience, and the government may prohibit them."
Citing a Supreme Court precedent that would make Craig's constituents proud, the Minnesota court ruled that the senator picked the wrong place to intrude upon "the right to be let alone." The appellate opinion declared that "the 'privacy interest in avoiding unwanted communication' is very strong in a stall in a public restroom." Craig spent his entire career trying to stop courts from finding a right to privacy in the Constitution, only to end up helping a court find one in the bathroom.
Even in defeat, Craig can remind himself that he's no Rod Blagojevich. Craig never even rated a federal wiretap: The closest he came was when he tried to leave his lawyer a fishy voicemail but called the wrong number. In fact, the two men couldn't have charted more divergent paths to infamy. According to the government's complaint, Blagojevich said of the Senate seat, "I'm just not giving it up for [bleeping] nothing." In the end, that may be the best description ever given of just what Larry Craig did.
Let me offer a somewhat hyperbolic hypothetical. It's the winter of 2009, and a crisis has erupted between the United States and the former Soviet Union. Putin (surprise!) is acting arrogantly and aggressively, trying to push the new American president around. Do you want Barack Obama, the guy who has his finger on our nuclear trigger, notorious nicotine addict, to be dying for a smoke? All irritable, his nerves and famously smooth temper on edge? No outlet for his intolerable frustration but ... a butt. But no butts to be found.
The White House, of course, has been a butt-free zone since the Clinton administration. That pack of Marlboro Reds he's kept stashed under a bush in the Rose Garden, hoping it'll be camouflaged? Out of reach. The only thing that looks like a butt is, well, a button, and it's looking good. Why not reach for it? Then he won't have to put up any longer with the insane puritanical rules imposed by those who don't know, will never know, the knife-edge of nicotine desire.
Do you want to die because President Obama is dying for a smoke? It's true that smoking would be bad for our 44th president, who's been trying to kick the habit. Lung cancer caused by smoking is a major cause of death in America. Even secondhand smoke is deadly, we're told. But how about secondhand radioactive plutonium? Might that turn out to be a major cause of death (for those not already dead in a nuclear exchange)? Do I have to answer that?
OK, so Obama isn't going to start a nuclear war because of the well-meaning but counterproductive no-smoking rule. At least, I hope he isn't. I don't smoke, but I know smokers, and I know smokers trying to quit, and they scare me.
Which is why those who say a president who smokes in the White House would be a bad role model are all wrong. In fact, consider the possibility that he'd be a better, perhaps more effective, negative role model. He'd teach the nation's youth how scary an addiction smoking is: Even the most powerful man in the world is putty in its tobacco-stained hands.
The media don't seem to share my views on this, at least if their recent bout of hysterical scolding is any indication. (Perhaps they're using this issue to show they can be tough on the president they helped elect—about something, however trivial.)
First there was Barbara Walters, who came close to implying, in a face-to-face interview, that poor Obama's pledge to quit smoking was more important than any of his other presidential priorities. A collapsing economy? Mumbai terror heading this way? No worries. Will he live up to his no-smoking pledge? Now, there's an issue.
Walters had asked whether he still sneaked smokes, and Obama had said something vague about his pledge to observe the no-smoking rules in the White House.
Then eagle-eyed Tom Brokaw demonstrated the way a hard-nosed reporter goes after a cover-up. On Meet the Press last weekend, Brokaw picked up on what he thought was wiggle room in Obama's Barbara Walters response and treated the president-elect to a bit of journalistic inquiry that surely ranks with Woodward and Bernstein's challenges to Deep Throat (another smoker?).
Brokaw: "Finally, Mr. President-elect, the White House is a no-smoking zone, and when you were asked about this recently by Barbara Walters, I read it very carefully, you ducked. Have you stopped smoking?"
(He "read it very carefully"! Wow, are we impressed by his journalistic excellence, or what?)
Obama's answer was a classic recidivist's evasion:
"You know, I have, but what I said [to Walters] was that there were times where I have fallen off the wagon," Obama told Brokaw.
"That means you haven't stopped," the steely NBC interrogator asserted.
Obama's response: "Well, the—fair enough. What I would say is, is that I have done a terrific job, under the circumstances, of making myself much healthier, and I think that you will not see any violations of these rules in the White House."
Gotcha! Way to go T.B.! (Perhaps not the best initials here.) Savvy observers and addicts could spot Obama's evasiveness, which wouldn't survive a minute in a 12-step meeting.
Don't you love the ambiguity, the weasel-worded squirming? It's so human, it's endearing. All us sinners—of various habits and forms—loved Obama for it and loathed Brokaw, Walters, and the nation of scolds we have become in their collective attempt to shame the poor guy (yes, president-elect, I know, but here, just a poor, conniving backslider) into some self-scourging confession.
You have to admire Obama's good nature as he puts up with these narrow-minded nannies (addicted to tobacco in their own perverse, negative way) and offers up this masterpiece of obfuscation.
Let's parse the statement. I like his assertion of greater healthiness as an excuse for this minor failing. Not gonna work, but it shows his desperation. Still, the key evasion is "you will not see any violations of those rules in the White House." (The italics are mine.)
Note that he doesn't say "outside the White House," leaving himself room to sneak a smoke in the privacy of the Rose Garden. And then, of course, there's the fact that a president doesn't spend all of his time "in the White House." He goes to Camp David, Europe, South Dakota, Iraq. Surely, there's a spot in one of those locales to sneak a puff or two undisturbed? With that phrase, "in the White House," Obama has his own "depends on what the meaning of the word is is." He's left himself a hole big enough for Richard Nixon to fit all of Watergate through or Bill Clinton to maneuver a strip club's worth of babes. Don't a few sneaky puffs seem innocent by comparison?
Obama—who, according to a wide array of sources, has smoked for years, but promised his wife, Michelle, that he'd quit in exchange for her help with his presidential campaign—has never said that smoking is good or healthy or that quitting is easy. Quite the opposite. He's made clear that quitting is a struggle and, like others who struggle with their demons, he's fallen off the wagon.
So what? This is probably the most sinless president we're likely to get in the foreseeable millennium, and yet he's already got the health Nazis on his tail. He's human, he's not on Mount Rushmore yet. (Although I kind of like the idea of a giant, granite Obama next to the Rushmore four, a stone cigarette dangling from his lips.)
In fact, I'd argue that Obama's smoking habit gives us another reason to like him: He's not a perfect paragon of the Whole Foods boho sensibility, comments about arugula notwithstanding. I'm told there are people who were surprised to learn he smoked, as if it was somehow shocking he didn't fit all the virtuous liberal-elite stereotypes. It would be refreshing (and not in that cool-menthol way) if he's more a democrat, less a virtue-crat.
I also wonder—and this will seem wildly heretical to virtue-crats, so hide the children—whether some of Obama's finer qualities aren't bound up in his alleged nicotine sins. That contemplative self-possession that so many admire him for. It might come from Obama's ability to sit back, inhale a puff or two, slow down and think—meditate, cogitate—before acting. Sure it's a trade-off. Lung cancer later in life: the percentage grows grim. But isn't it possible that, without the mediating thoughtfulness of a nicotine break, Obama would still be a "community organizer"? Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Look, people, we have what looks to be an incredibly thoughtful, long-view-taker as president, and maybe we owe it to cancer sticks. That's the tragedy of life. You don't get somethin' for nothin'. Maybe you don't get the Obama we think will make a great president without the devil weed. Maybe we owe him some cancer sticks if that's what he chooses. Because—and here I take the libertarian view—you choose your poison. He knows the stats and the risks. Maybe he makes a choice to have a butt or two despite the stats and the risks. Bill Clinton knew the odds and chose his butt or two with consequences that were arguably graver for the country as a whole. (By the way, you know who made the White House into a smoke-free zone? Hillary Clinton. We'd all be better off if Bill had thought "smoking hot" meant he was hot for smoking.)
If Obama were still a senator, a largely do-nothing job (at least if you consider senators' achievements), fine, take time, enroll in an anti-smoking program, white-knuckle it, whatever you decide: You have the leisure. But he's going to be president, with the fate of the nation, of the Earth, in his hands. Did George W. Bush make great decisions as a president while abstaining from alcohol? Maybe a sip of sherry or a cold brewski might have calmed him down enough to think twice about invading Iraq or deregulating the markets.
Look at all the great presidents we had during Prohibition: Harding, Coolidge, Hoover … Wow, makes you wonder if abstemiousness is to blame for turning out mediocre-to-disastrous louts in the Oval Office.
Come Jan. 20, Obama will be the president of a nation whose entire economic infrastructure is collapsing and who faces renewed tensions with a nuclear superpower. Such tensions could easily lead us to the nuclear brink. Is this the precise time we want our president to undergo the ordeal that giving up smoking represents?
Give Obama a break ... a smoking break. No president has come into office facing the massive problems he does. And now he's got Chicago politics, like another monkey on his back, following him there. Let him enjoy a few contemplative moments as he works a problem. Let him have his down time. We'll probably be better off for it. So get off his case, all you holier-than-thou Puritans. I'm not advocating smoking for anyone else, and I think he should make a point of telling kids what a horror quitting is. But, meanwhile, cut the guy some slack. He's risking his health for you.
The Senate didn't reach a deal. After some brief bouts of optimism throughout the day, senators failed to reach a compromise on a $14 billion rescue package for Chrysler and General Motors last night. "It's over with," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said, suggesting that lawmakers won't take up the issue again until January. GM and Chrysler have both said they might not be able to survive beyond this month without help. "There is always a chance Congress will act sooner if one of the companies totters on the brink," notes the Wall Street Journal, "although that possibility appears remote." The Washington Post specifies that it's not clear "whether GM, in particular, could survive until January," when Democrats will have a larger majority in the Senate. USA Today points out that GM and Chrysler could save money "by shutting down operations between now and Jan. 20," but it would be a risky gamble that could end up devastating suppliers.
The New York Times characterizes the failure to get Senate Republicans to agree on a rescue for Detroit as "bruising defeat for President Bush in the waning weeks of his term, and also for President-elect Barack Obama," who had urged lawmakers to act quickly. The Los Angeles Times notes that Bush personally lobbied reluctant Republicans after Vice President Dick Cheney failed to change their minds at a meeting Wednesday at which he told them, "If we don't do this, we will be known as the party of Herbert Hoover forever." Last night, Reid warned that financial markets would feel the effects of their inaction. "I dread looking at Wall Street tomorrow," he said. "It's not going to be a pleasant sight." Indeed, Asian markets tumbled today, and European markets were also in negative territory this morning.
Negotiations in the Senate essentially broke down over one issue: the timing of wage cuts. The two sides had agreed on most other issues, including a controversial Republican proposal that would have required the automakers to cut their debt obligations by at least two-thirds by the end of March. There was even agreement that the automakers needed to bring down their wages and benefits to match those of U.S. employees of foreign automakers.
The problem was the date. Republicans insisted that these wage cuts had to come by a specific date in 2009, while Democrats and the United Auto Workers said the deadline should be 2011, when the UAW contract expires. After the talks broke down, union representatives said they were willing to do their part but asked only that they not be treated unfairly. "Unfortunately, Senate Republicans insisted that workers and retirees be singled out and treated differently from all other stakeholders," said the UAW's legislative director. Of course, Republicans quickly blamed the union for the failure to reach a deal.
At this point, it might be worth asking how much of a big deal this wage issue is in the grand scheme of things. The WP takes a stab at the question by pointing out that GM told Congress that in 2010 their labor costs would add up to around $14 per hour more than what Toyota pays at its plants inside the United States. But to really understand the meaning of all the numbers that get thrown around, TP recommends a piece by the NYT's David Leonhardt from earlier this week, where he specified that there really is a disparity between the Big Three and foreign automakers, but it's not as big as one might think. Bottom line? "[T]he main problem facing Detroit, overwhelmingly, is not the pay gap," Leonhardt wrote. "That's unfortunate because fixing the pay gap would be fairly straightforward." Detroit's unionized workers make about $10 an hour more than those at nonunionized plants, mostly because of benefits. In addition, the Big Three pay more in retiree benefits, but that's mainly due to the obvious fact that they're responsible for more retired workers. Ultimately, and perhaps most importantly, despite all the attention that is paid to the issue, labor costs add up to about 10 percent of the cost of making a vehicle.
So, what now? As soon as the rescue package failed in the Senate, Democrats urged the administration to act on its own to make sure that GM and Chrysler don't go under. The White House has so far been resistant to push the Treasury to provide the auto companies with emergency loans from the $700 billion bailout package, but now it may have no other choice. The problem is that there's only around $15 billion left of the initial $350 billion that was disbursed by Congress, and Treasury officials have been adamant that they need the money as a cushion in case any of their other rescue efforts run into trouble. There's also a possibility that the Federal Reserve might step in, but it has been reluctant to get involved so far.
The prospect of collapse is real enough that both GM and Chrysler have hired some of the top lawyers in the business to help them figure out whether they should file for bankruptcy. But they're hardly the only ones at risk. As the NYT details in a separate front-page piece, an increasing number of auto suppliers, which employ more than twice the number of workers as the Big Three, are getting worried they won't be able to survive much longer. "I don't think that suppliers will be able to get through the month without continued payments on their receivables," the head of a supplier trade group said. If suppliers start collapsing, it wouldn't affect just the Big Three but the entire auto industry, since they often sell their products to both American and foreign manufacturers. GM and Chrysler owe their suppliers around $10 billion, and while that may not have been a big deal in a normal economic environment, it could prove lethal at a time when credit markets are frozen.
In other news, Obama made his first lengthy comments about the scandal surrounding the Illinois governor and vowed to release a list of contacts between his transition team and Gov. Rod Blagojevich. "What I'm absolutely certain about is that our office had no involvement in any deal-making around my Senate seat," Obama said. "That would be a violation of everything that this campaign has been about." As the WSJ details, there are some key questions that remain unanswered, and one of the main ones is the identity of the Obama adviser whom, according to the federal affidavit, Blagojevich ordered his staff to contact. There are rumors that the person identified as "President-elect Advisor" referred to Rahm Emanuel, who will be Obama's chief of staff. Still, despite the unanswered questions, the LAT notes that Obama "struck an emotional chord that had been absent" by noting how "appalled" he was by the scandal. Many who had criticized Obama's early response to the scandal said he managed to hit the right tone yesterday.
The NYT talks to Obama's successor in the state Senate, Kwame Raoul, who said he was approached by Blagojevich about the president-elect's old seat, but he withdrew his name from consideration after he felt pressured to provide something in return for the position. "It was open knowledge among people in and around Springfield," Raoul said. "Legislators and lobbyists alike openly talked about the fact that the governor would want to appoint somebody who would benefit him." Of course, just because Blagojevich wanted someone who "would benefit him" doesn't mean he's guilty of criminal activity, and Raoul refused to get into details with the NYT.
The NYT is alone in fronting news out of Iraq, where a suicide bomber detonated explosives inside a packed restaurant north of Kirkuk and killed at least 48 people. (The WP says 57 people were killed.) It was the deadliest bombing in Iraq in six months. The apparent target was a meeting that was taking place in the restaurant between Kurdish officials and Sunni Arab members of the Awakening movement, which is mostly composed of former insurgents.
The Post fronts, and everyone mentions, a bipartisan report released yesterday by the Senate armed services committee that says decisions made by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top administration officials were directly responsible for widespread detainee abuse in Guantanamo and other detention facilities. The report says that the most severe cases of prisoner abuse, including Abu Ghraib, weren't simply due to "the actions of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own," as the Bush administration has always claimed. Rather, decisions made by high-level officials in the administration "conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees."
Bettie Page, the legendary pinup model, died last night. Her controversial, and extremely popular, photos that were seemingly everywhere in the 1950s helped set the stage for the sexual revolution of the '60s. At the height of her fame she decided to walk away from everything and had a rough life in seclusion that was marked by her fight against mental illness. In the late 1980s, "she was rediscovered and a Bettie Page renaissance began," notes the NYT. She would occasionally grant interviews but refused to allow her picture to be taken. "I want to be remembered," she told the LAT in 2006, "as I was when I was young and in my golden times. ... I want to be remembered as the woman who changed people's perspectives concerning nudity in its natural form."
USAT reports that your community's nativity scene may have gone high-tech. A number of churches, synagogues, and others that display holiday scenes are embedding Baby Jesus, menorahs, and other figures with satellite tracking devices to avoid theft. "Given the storied history of the nativity scene," the Rev. George Smith explained, "we were interested in seeing if having a GPS would deter people from 'borrowing' from it."
The Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal's online newsbox lead with the House approving a $14 billion bailout package for U.S. automakers last night. Now it's up to the Senate to decide whether General Motors and Chrysler will get the emergency loans, and things aren't looking good for Detroit. Many Republican senators continue to oppose the legislation, saying that it doesn't provide enough oversight of the ailing companies and could end up being a huge waste of taxpayer money. The New York Times leads with President-elect Barack Obama and the entire Senate Democratic caucus calling for Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich to resign after he was arrested in a corruption scandal. Illinois lawmakers are trying to figure out a way to fill Obama's old Senate seat without the governor, and Majority Leader Harry Reid warned Blagojevich that he should "under no circumstances make an appointment."
USA Today leads with a look at how the effort to ease the pain of the financial crisis and recession through government spending is increasing "the federal share of the nation's economic activity close to $1 out of every $4," which is the highest level since World War II. The previous record was set in 1983, when the federal share of the nation's economy was 23.5 percent. Many warn that all this spending could bring more troubles down the road as the government will eventually have to begin taming the growing budget deficit.
The rescue plan for U.S. automakers was approved largely along party lines, with 32 Republicans joining Democrats in voting for the measure. Republican support is much more important in the closely divided Senate and several lawmakers were openly pessimistic about the chances that Democratic leaders will be able to garner enough support to ensure that the legislation passes. "I don't think the votes are there on our side of the aisle," said Sen. George Voinovich, one of the few Republican senators who have openly expressed his support for the package. The White House sent a group of high-level administration officials, including Vice President Cheney, to Capitol Hill to try to convince lawmakers but Republicans refused to budge. "They probably left with less support than they came in with," Republican Sen. Bob Corker said.
Some Republicans are holding on to the opinion that the companies have a better chance of long-term survival if they're pushed toward filing for bankruptcy protection. But others said they'd be willing to consider voting in favor of the loans if the so-called car czar is given more power to force the auto companies to restructure. The problem now is that lawmakers may have run out of time to make changes to the legislation since lawmakers will be leaving Washington for the holidays. The WP points out that while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she might call lawmakers back, a "senior House aid" said that's unlikely. But the legislation that was introduced in the Senate is already slightly different from what the House passed because it makes it clear that automakers would only have to comply with federal fuel efficiency and emissions requirements rather than stricter standards in several states.
As Democrats tried to deal with the fallout from the Blagojevich scandal, Reid warned that the Senate leadership may not seat anyone the Illinois governor appoints. Members of the Senate Democratic caucus want Blagojevich to resign and allow his successor to make the appointment. Meanwhile, Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., a rising star in the Democratic Party, found himself embroiled in the scandal when federal authorities identified him as the man referred to as "Senate Candidate 5" in the criminal complaint. The 76-page affidavit filed in support of the charges against Blagojevich quotes the governor saying that he'd been offered $500,000 or more by a representative of Candidate 5 in exchange for the Senate seat. Jackson strongly denied he had sent anyone to offer the governor money and said he was unaware that the selection process had become tainted.
Even as more members of his own party are calling for his resignation, the WSJ points out that the case against Blagojevich might not be as open-and-shut as the headlines make it seem. The recorded conversations might be shocking but they're not necessarily criminal. One criminal defense attorney tells the WSJ that the portions of the governor's conversations that were released don't necessarily add up to crime. "Every politician keeps accounts," the lawyer said, "what is horse trading, and what is hyperbole?"
In a separate story inside, the NYT points out that the Blagojevich scandal "could be the first test of the Obama team's ability to manage a growing scandal" and whether it can avoid making mistakes that could raise even more questions about the president-elect's involvement. Obama's aides have avoided answering questions about any discussions they had with the Illinois governor about the Senate seat but the president-elect might finally discuss the issue today during a scheduled news conference on health care.
The WP and NYT front, and everyone mentions, that Obama appears to have settled on some key choices to run his energy and environmental initiatives. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, will be nominated as secretary of energy, while Lisa Jackson, a former environmental policy official in New Jersey, was picked to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Carol Browner, who led the EPA under President Clinton, will fill a new White House "energy czar" role. The WP says the team suggests Obama "plans to make a strong push for measures to combat global warming and programs to support energy innovation." The WSJ says that after the president-elect faced some criticism from supporters that his early Cabinet picks were too centrist, Obama "appears to be moving to the left with some of his new choices."
In what everyone says is a horrible sign for economies across the globe, China announced yesterday that its November exports plunged 2.2 percent from a year earlier, which marked the first decline in seven years. The decline marked a sharp change from even a month earlier when exports rose 19.2 percent. "The most striking real economic fact of the past several months is not continued U.S. economic weakness, but that China's economy has slowed much more quickly than anyone had forecast," Australia's central bank governor Glenn Stevens said this week. The WSJ fronts the news and points out that the slump raises questions about whether China "can help support growth and stave off deeper financial pain elsewhere around the world." In a front-page piece the WP points out the World Bank predicted that global trade will fall 2.1 percent next year, the first decline since 1982. "The slowdown illustrates how globalization, which fed rapid growth during times of plenty, can quickly turn against nations during times of bust," says the Post.
The LAT and NYT both front must-read dispatches from Africa. The NYT's Lydia Polgreen takes a look at how the recent killings in Kiwanja, Congo, not only displayed the brutality of rebel groups fighting for power in the troubled country but also provided "a textbook example" of how United Nations peacekeepers continue to fail in their efforts to protect the Congolese people. While the killings were taking place, 100 peacekeepers were less than a mile away but they didn't fully understand what was happening outside their base as they focused on rescuing aid workers and searching for a kidnapped journalist. They have almost no intelligence capabilities, and at the time didn't even have a translator on base. "Kiwanja was a disaster for everyone," a Human Rights Watch senior researcher said. "The people were betrayed not just by rebels who committed terrible war crimes against them but by the international community that failed to protect them."
In another of her strikingly vivid dispatches that chronicle the desperation of everyday life in Zimbabwe, the LAT's Robyn Dixon takes a look at how cholera is taking hold of the country and how relatives are often left with no choice but to watch their loved ones die of an easily treatable disease. There's a shortage of medicine so patients often have to bribe doctors for care and clinics are suffering from huge staff shortages as nurses are severely underpaid and overworked. Cholera is spreading quickly and many fear the problem will persist for a long time due to Zimbabwe's rapidly decaying infrastructure.
The LAT's Rosa Brooks says the Blagojevich scandal "should be a cautionary tale for Democrats" because it serves as a reminder that "powerful Democrats aren't immune to human weaknesses." Democrats shouldn't just be careful about the obviously illegal forms of corruption, they also need to watch out for the "far more subtle ways" that corruption can seep into a party in power. "For in the end, arrogance and groupthink can prove far more lethal than even the most scandalous financial shenanigans," writes Brooks. "Just ask the thousands dead in Iraq."
All the papers give top billing to news that Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was arrested yesterday on wide-ranging corruption charges, including an attempt to sell President-elect Barack Obama's recently vacated Senate seat to the highest bidder. Prairie State residents might be used to seeing their executives embroiled in criminal charges—the Los Angeles Times specifies that Blagojevich is the fifth Illinois governor to be charged with criminal conduct over the last 50 years—but the arrest yesterday revealed such brazen corruption schemes "that veteran investigators and prosecutors could barely contain their revulsion," notes USA Today. Prosecutors "portrayed Blagojevich as a brazen crook," says the LAT. "The conduct would make Lincoln roll over in his grave," said U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. The Washington Post points out that by filing charges in the form of a criminal complaint, U.S. officials were able "to share more details about their investigation and the conversations they captured than would normally appear in a federal grand jury indictment."
Federal authorities have been investigating Blagojevich for more than five years and have been listening on wiretaps for the past two months that leave little to the imagination. While the Illinois governor's alleged illegal activities are far-reaching, most of the papers naturally focus on the claims that he tried to profit from his authority to name a successor for Obama in the senate. "The allegations suggest a breathtaking degree of brazenness on the part of the Illinois governor," says the Wall Street Journal, which points out the governor continued to talk about his schemes by telephone even after the Chicago Tribune reported Friday that his phone lines had been tapped. And it seems his actions on Obama's Senate seat were par for the course. The conversations recorded by authorities "laid bare a 'pay for play' culture that, according to prosecutors, began shortly after he took office in 2002 and continued until before sunrise yesterday," when the governor and his chief of staff were arrested. The New York Times says that the charges "left many wondering who else might yet be implicated," particularly since it seems some were willing to go along with the governor's schemes to enrich himself.
The 76-page complaint details how Blagojevich and his chief of staff carried out a "political corruption crime spree," as Fitzgerald called it, in an effort to raise as much money as possible from people with state business before an ethics law that bars the practice takes effect in January. The governor allegedly discussed withholding state funds from a children's hospital until its chief executive would write a $50,000 check and tried to use his political clout to get some editorial writers at the Chicago Tribune fired. But by far the most eye-catching allegation is that Blagojevich "put a 'for sale' sign on the naming of a United States senator," Fitzgerald said.
Prosecutors allege that Blagojevich was quite flexible in what he could accept in return for the Senate seat, including a post in the administration, an ambassadorship, a leadership post in a pro-labor nonprofit, campaign funds, and a seat on a corporate board for his wife. In recorded conversations, Blagojevich appeared ready to appoint a candidate Obama wanted but was frustrated by the president-elect's team's unwillingness to play ball. In an apparent reference to Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Obama—none of the potential candidates are named— Blagojevich told an adviser he knew the president-elect wanted her as his successor but complained that "they're not willing to give me anything except appreciation. Fuck them."
If Blagojevich didn't receive an enticing enough offer from any of the potential candidates, he was apparently ready to appoint himself. "I've got this thing and it's fucking golden," Blagojevich told an adviser. "I'm just not giving it up for fuckin' nothing. I'm not gonna do it. And, and I can always use it. I can parachute me there." The NYT and WP both take front-page looks at how the people of Illinois and federal investigators, who have seen their fair share of corruption, were struggling to understand how the governor could have been so brazen in seeking personal gain from his office, even when he knew he was under investigation. "I almost fell over," a frequent critic of the governor tells the NYT. "I was speechless and sickened. In all of the millions of indictments I've read over the last years, I can't remember anything as vile as this."
Everyone seems to agree that the possibility that a senator might be picked through corrupt means is the main reason why prosecutors decided to act now after investigating the governor for more than five years. "We're talking about tainting the selection of a U.S. senator," which could have much more far-reaching repercussions than "a continuation of the let's-make-a-deal, where's-mine part of Illinois politics," a political science professor tells USAT.
Fitzgerald took pains to emphasize that the case "makes no allegations about the president-elect whatsoever." Obama also tried to distance himself yesterday. "I had no contact with the governor or his office, and so I was not aware of what was happening," Obama told reporters yesterday. In his first newspaper interview since the election, which the LAT fronts, the president-elect refused to elaborate on any conversations that members of his team had with the governor's office about the Senate appointment. Last month, David Axelrod, a senior adviser to Obama, said the president-elect had talked to the governor about the appointment, but he issued a statement yesterday saying he had misspoken.
Slate's John Dickerson notes that "[i]t's a little hard to believe that [Obama] didn't know anything that was happening relating to his old seat." There's evidence that Obama wanted Jarrett for the seat, but then all of a sudden "in the middle of the process, Obama stopped wanting that," writes Dickerson. "Why?"
As much as he tries to distance himself, it's clear the Blagojevich scandal will, at the very least, prove to be a distraction to Obama. Plus, as the LAT highlights, it also brings back memories of Obama's relationship with Antoin Rezko, since the governor's arrest was the result of the same investigation that led to the conviction of the real estate developer earlier this year.
The NYT points out that, in a way, Blagojevich, who will surely have the worst birthday of his life today, has Obama to thank for his fate. In a phone call three months ago, Obama urged the president of the Illinois Senate to urge passage of a state ethics bill that he was opposed to, as was Blagojevich. After the call, the Senate overrode Blagojevich's veto, which led the governor to pressure state contractors for campaign funds before the law took effect in 2009. Hearing word of these efforts is what pushed federal agents to obtain the wiretaps that recorded all the compromising conversations.
In the interview with the LAT, Obama avoided answering most of the questions about specific issues. But the piece does reveal that the president-elect intends to use his full name—Barack Hussein Obama—when he's sworn in, and he plans to give a major address in an Islamic capital as part of his push to "reboot America's image around the world."
The WP and WSJ front, and everyone mentions, that the White House and Democratic leaders have almost finalized a deal to rescue U.S. automakers. A vote in the House could come as early as today, but its passage is far from a done deal, particularly since many Republicans continue to be reluctant to pour money into the Big Three and might not be persuaded by a lame-duck administration. One of the main changes to come out of the negotiations is that Democrats agreed the new "car czar" would review any transactions by the automakers of $100 million or more, rather than the $25 million that lawmakers initially proposed. The new czar would also have the power to revoke the loans and push the companies toward seeking Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection if they fail to make progress on a plan to return to profitability. Still unclear is the fate of a Democratic-backed provision that would bar the carmakers from fighting state laws that impose higher limits on greenhouse-gas emissions, but there are hints that Democrats could give it up in exchange for Republican support.
In an op-ed piece, the NYT's Timothy Egan says that the complaint against Blagojevich "showed a man trolling the depths of darkness," where nothing was sacred and anything could be used for political and personal gain. "It would be somewhat comforting if there were a larger lesson here, or a map out of the banality of evil," writes Egan. "But there is no trend or modern twist, no evidence of a greater criminal web, no overarching moral. Like a kid who beats up old ladies just because he knows no other way, the allegations against Blagojevich amount to what Fitzgerald called a crime spree, of the political variety."
The New York Times leads, and the Washington Post off-leads, news that Congress and the White House are getting closer to agreeing on a plan to rescue the U.S. auto industry by providing $15 billion in emergency loans as long as the companies agree to grant the government broad oversight powers. Assuming a deal is reached, "the car industry would be the latest to submit to strict government scrutiny in return for a bailout," declares the Wall Street Journal, which gives top billing to the news on its front page. USA Today leads with a new report by the Pentagon's inspector general that says the military was well aware of the dangers posed by roadside bombs before the Iraq war but did little to develop vehicles that could have done a better job of protecting service members in the war zone. The Marine Corps leadership basically ignored a 2005 request for Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles and said that outfitting more armor in existing Humvees was the "best available" option. A study earlier this year claimed hundreds of Marines died unnecessarily because of delays in getting the appropriate vehicles to the war zone.
The WP leads with news that the five Guantanamo detainees accused of planning the Sept. 11 attacks said they were ready to confess and plead guilty. The offer to plead guilty was later withdrawn after the military judge raised a number of legal questions, but this latest development could complicate things for President-elect Barack Obama, who has vowed to close the detention camp. The Los Angeles Times devotes its top nonlocal spot to the unsealing of the Justice Department's case against five private security guards for their role in the shootings in Baghdad's Nisoor Square last year that killed 17 Iraqi civilians. A sixth Blackwater guard provided information to authorities as part of an agreement to plead guilty to lesser charges.
Under the plan currently in the works in Congress, President Bush would appoint an official who is being referred to as the "car czar" to oversee the rescue program. The WP specifies that the car czar would be at the head of a seven-member "auto board" that would not only make sure the government money is used properly but also that the industry is taking steps to return to profitability. The czar would have to approve any business transaction of $25 million or more. The NYT points out that Democratic officials hope the new car czar will be able to stay put when President-elect Barack Obama gets to the Oval Office, which suggests the White House will work with the incoming administration to select someone.
Ford announced yesterday that it would not seek short-term federal aid, but if the other companies agree to take the money, they'll have to accept some restrictions on executive compensation. They would also be barred from paying dividends to stockholders until the loans are paid back, and they'd be forbidden from leasing or owning private jets. The WSJ says that the government would receive stock warrants that would add up to at least 20 percent of the loans a company receives, which would mean taxpayers could benefit if the firms manage to turn around. The WP highlights that the government could demand that the auto companies get rid of their top executives and points out that Senate banking committee Chairman Chris Dodd said yesterday that General Motors' chairman "has to move on."
The LAT points out that the details of the rescue package "appear to match most of the terms Bush has been insisting on," but the WSJ says that the White House would prefer that the package "were even tougher on the car makers" and the administration "gave a chilly reception to the latest overture by Democrats." The WP details that the proposal drafted by the White House includes a "financial viability adviser" within the Commerce Department that could force the auto companies to declare bankruptcy while the Democratic plan would allow the oversight board to develop goals for the company but "could not compel them to act." Despite the disagreements, officials are optimistic they'll be able to reach a deal that will win passage by the end of the week.
In a front-page analysis, the NYT's David Sanger says that while the one word that no one in Obama's team "wants to be caught uttering" is nationalization, in many ways that is pretty much what the rescue plan proposes. The "car czar" would essentially be "a one-man board of directors" who would essentially have unfettered power to decide how the companies operate. The problem with this is not just that the government might make a bad corporate manager or that taxpayers could lose billions of dollars but also that the United States would officially be contradicting what it has been advocating to countries around the world for years. While Detroit's Big 3 are in talks with the government, there's no hint that foreign automakers who have factories in the United States would get anything. "If Japan was doing this, we'd be threatening billions of dollars in retaliation," one expert said.
The move by Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four co-defendants to plead guilty "seemed to challenge the government to put them to death" and suggested they intended to weaken the government's plan to hold a high-profile trial, notes the NYT. Some of the five men have declared their desire for martyrdom and seemed shocked that their guilty plea might prevent them from receiving the death penalty. "Are you saying if we plead guilty we will not be able to be sentenced to death?" Mohammed asked the judge. The judge also said that two of the co-defendants haven't been deemed competent to represent themselves, and the three others said they would hold off on their guilty plea until the five could act together. If their guilty plea is ultimately accepted, it could complicate Obama's efforts to close down the military tribunals, since it might be difficult to transfer the case to federal court. On the other hand, if they're allowed to continue, the new administration might have to "oversee an execution resulting from a process that many Obama supporters and legal advisers regard as deeply flawed," points out the WP.
The case against the Blackwater guards that was unsealed yesterday provides the most complete details of the shootings that severely strained relations between Iraq and the United States and raised questions about the use of contractors in a war. The five guards were charged with 14 counts of manslaughter, and 20 counts of attempting to commit manslaughter. Prosecutors claim that none of the Iraqis killed that day posed a threat to the guards but said manslaughter was a more appropriate charge than murder because of the difficulties of operating in a war zone. The five men surrendered to federal to authorities in Salt Lake City in a move to support efforts to get the case out of Washington, D.C. and into a more conservative part of the country. But a judge rejected the request and ordered the five men to appear at a hearing in Washington early next year.
The WP's Eugene Robinson writes that while the indictment of the Blackwater guards may appear to be a commendable effort to hold private guards accountable for what appears to be an indefensible massacre, it really represents "a whitewash that absolves the government and corporate officials who should bear ultimate responsibility." Just like in Abu Ghraib, the government is singling out a group of individuals for an atrocity and ignoring the larger corporate and governmental policies that allowed it to happen in the first place. "The five Blackwater guards may have fired the weapons," writes Robinson, "but they were locked and loaded in Washington."
The WSJ leads its worldwide newsbox with word that Pakistani officials raided a camp run by the terrorist group believed to be responsible for the Mumbai attacks and arrested two of its senior leaders along with 10 other people. It appeared to be the first concrete step by the Pakistani government to fulfill Indian and American demands for action against Lashkar-e-Taiba. The NYT also fronts the news but says the information is less than clear, as the paper couldn't even obtain definite confirmation that Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi, who is believed to be the group's operational commander and the mastermind behind the attacks, was arrested. The LAT seconds the confusion and says it got contradictory information from several Pakistani officials. But the WSJ affirms that Lakhvi was indeed captured, along with Zarar Shah, another top commander. Still, many experts say "the raid was a good first step but also a relatively easy one," notes the WSJ, because the real question is what Pakistan will do about the group's parent organization that has a high public profile.
In an op-ed piece in the NYT, Pakistan's president, Asif Ali Zardari, says that the "Mumbai attacks were directed not only at India but also at Pakistan's new democratic government and the peace process with India." Reminding readers that militants killed his wife, Benazir Bhutto, Zardari writes that Pakistan is also a victim of terrorism and warns against jumping to conclusions about his country's involvement in the attacks. "For India, Pakistan and the United States, the best response to the Mumbai carnage is to coordinate in counteracting the scourge of terrorism," he writes.
The NYT and LAT front, and everyone covers, news that NBC managed to keep Jay Leno and will announce today that he will host a show each weeknight at 10 p.m. that will follow a format similar to The Tonight Show, which he has hosted since 1993. The move will keep Leno in the network after Conan O'Brien takes over the show next year and will save the company lots of money in production costs since a talk/variety show is much cheaper to produce than a scripted show. But it also represents a huge gamble since a show of its kind hasn't flourished in prime time for several decades. The WP focuses most extensively on how the move will affect O'Brien and says many industry executives "bet Conan must be madder than a wet hen."
The two biggest stories in the papers continue to be the U.S.'s economic crisis and the fallout from the terror attacks in Mumbai, with attention increasingly focused on Pakistan. The Washington Post leads with progress made on an auto industry bailout: Democrats are advancing a new plan that would loan $15 billion to automakers while taking broad authority to manage the companies' operations. The Los Angeles Times leads with Barack Obama saying that the country's economic woes "are going to get worse before they get better" and supporting the Democrats' bailout plan.
The New York Times leads with U.S. counterterrorism officials taking a closer look at the group behind the Mumbai attacks, which has links both to Pakistan's intelligence service and to al-Qaida. The Wall Street Journal tops its world-wide newsbox with a catchall of Pakistan news, including an attack on a transportation depot in northwestern Pakistan that resulted in the destruction of "scores" of vehicles taking supplies to U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. USA Today leads with an interview with the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, who says he needs nearly double the number of troops over several years to stabilize the country.
The new Democratic auto bailout plan would create a seven-person government board, consisting mainly of Cabinet secretaries who would oversee the companies' restructuring. The proposal would also ban any dividend payments or executive bonuses as long as the loans were outstanding. All the papers quote President-elect Obama supporting the bailout but talking tough about the companies' executives: "If this management team that's currently in place doesn't understand the urgency of the situation and is not willing to make the tough choices and adapt to these new circumstances, then they should go," he said.
Some in the auto industry are looking to an authority higher than Congress for help, too: The NYT has a dispatch from a Detroit Pentecostal megachurch where the bishop, in a sermon titled "A Hybrid Hope," prayed for a bailout. The story includes priceless photos of gleaming white SUVs on the altar.
Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group implicated in Mumbai, has received support from Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI, which "has shared intelligence with Lashkar and provided protection for it, the officials said, and investigators are focusing on one Lashkar leader they believe is a main liaison with the spy service and a mastermind of the attacks," the Times writes. But that support was now more in the past, the Times notes. Lashkar "has outgrown ISI's support," one analyst says. In fact, Pakistan carried out a raid on a Lashkar camp on Sunday though, as the LAT points out, it's not yet clear whether or not the raid was serious or symbolic.
The LAT also features Lashkar on the front page, focusing on its recruitment of westerners, in particular Britons and Americans. Both the LAT and the Journal, in stories on how Lashkar indoctrinates young members, note that the group is a sort of minor-league terror group, being easier for foreign would-be jihadis to join than the better known al-Qaida. Famous alums include Richard Reid, the shoe bomber.
And it doesn't just happen to Sarah Palin: The Post stuffs a story about how someone pretending to be the Indian foreign minister prank-called the Pakistani president's office threatening Indian military action. Pakistan apparently took the threat seriously enough to put its air force on high alert. India says Pakistan's publicizing of the story is a ploy to deflect attention from its citizens' role in the Mumbai attacks.
The Journal apparently broke the news that the Tribune Co., publisher of newspapers including the Los Angeles Times, was exploring options for bankruptcy and had hired an investment bank known for its debt-restructuring prowess. But the LAT followed up and got an interview with a company executive: "Revenue declines have been dramatically worse, even over the last couple of weeks. It's just really rough … A number of advertisers just don't have the money to spend right now."
Also in the papers … the CEO of Merrill Lynch is arguing that he should get a bonus of $10 million, while those in charge of such things argue that despite his apparent skill in managing the mess the company is in (he's only been boss for a year) public mood is against huge executive bonuses. The Journal airs the dirty laundry on the front page. Russia is using the financial crisis to renationalize strategic industries, particularly in natural resources, the NYT reports on Page One. Writing music for video games is fast becoming a lucrative market for composers, paying up to $2,000 per minute of music, and music schools are offering classes in scoring games, the LAT reports. Unmanned aircraft will soon be patrolling the U.S.-Canada border, says the NYT.
The Washington Post leads with the first look into Barack Obama's "massive public works program," the most expansive and ambitious since Dwight Eisenhower instigated the federal interstate highway project in the 1950s. The plan will attempt to pump money into highway renovation, school repairs, and expansion of broadband Internet coverage. The New York Times leads with additional U.S. troops moving to Kabul, a move that signals the increasing delicacy of the situation near Afghanistan's capital. It also "underscores" the hard choices, regarding how to best divide troops between Iraq and Afghanistan, that U.S. military officials face. The Los Angeles Times leads with its occasional series on Mexican drug trafficking. Today's installment tells the story of four people gunned down in a jewelry store near Monterrey, where the drug war has infiltrated what was previously one of Mexico's safest large cities.
In an address delivered on radio and YouTube yesterday, Barack Obama divulged a few more details about the massive public works program he promised a few weeks ago. The president-elect responded to November's depressing unemployment numbers (we shed more jobs in the past month than we have since 1974) by reiterating the need to create 2.5 million new jobs, most of them to replace the 2 million we've lost since the recession began last year. Obama said explicitly that his plan would be massive and far-reaching, though the ultimate price tag remains among the classified details. The NYT calls it "government-directed industrial policy," which means the administration will pick among competing private contractors on which to "rain money."
Any talk of raining money is sure to make conservative economists unhappy—the NYT is the only paper with that angle—but the governors love it! Several state governors highlighted road and school programs just waiting for an injection of federal cash, projects that add up to an estimated $136 billion.* Obama gave them no promises, which the WP says is "in keeping with the secrecy that surrounds the development of his recovery plan."
Congress worked through the weekend to hammer out a bailout proposal for the "big three" U.S. automakers, and it's looking as if General Motors might have the most convincing case for a federal lifeline: the fact that nearly three-fourths of its employees work outside the United States. A GM failure at home could have global implications, meaning it would be best for us and the rest of the world if the company stays afloat. (Republicans still aren't convinced, arguing that the automakers must be forced to cut labor costs and reduce debt.* The WP editorial page agrees.) But some people are in deep trouble whether it survives or not, particularly those who run certainly doomed vehicle dealerships. GM wants to shed increasingly unpopular lines like Hummer, a family of vehicles that have become a national symbol of gas-guzzling inefficiency, which would leave tons of dealership owners stranded. (Though it may be necessary, it would also be extremely costly because of "stringent franchise laws across the country.")
Political stability in Iraq may have come at the cost of increased tribal suppression of women, a front-page WP story postulates. Many of the religious leaders the U.S. supported for the sake of stability have rejected Saddam's secularism, "imposed strict interpretations of Islam and enforced tribal codes that female activists say limit their freedom and encourage violence against them." Thirty percent more women were killed in the first six months of 2008 than the previous six months, most of them "honor crimes" involving fundamentalist Islam and more than half ending with the woman being burned to death. Some women are boldly and publicly decrying the violence, including one Kurdish journalist who rails against oppression and head scarves in her magazine columns.
In the NYT "Week in Review" section, Ross Douthat rebuffs the broadening consensus that the Republican Party should ditch its anti-abortion contingent.* Contrary to the notion that this interest group harbors the radicals who most hurts the right's image, pro-lifers have met their opponents halfway, accepting public opinion and stricter restrictions, and many have abandoned politics altogether for personal activism. But to give up on overturning Roe v. Wade is to abandon the heart of the cause, to leave "pro-choice absolutism" in place to dominate the abortion debate.
The NYT reports the survival of two cultural institutions, one good and one bad. The bad news first: a dogfighting subculture is now thriving in Texas. In addition to established rings, the cruel sport is attracting a younger generation from "hardscrabble neighborhoods," where "gangs, drug dealing and hip-hop culture make up the backdrop."
The good news is that college radio is still alive and well, despite the near-fatal hit music radio has taken from the likes of iPods and imeem. College DJs say they don't listen to much radio aside from their own—they have iPods, too, and many are also bloggers. But America's 700 college stations have kept the music spinning—"settling into a role as the slower but more loyal foil to the fickle blogosphere"—and deserve more credit than they get for breaking new acts.
Correction, Dec. 8, 2008: This article originally mislabeled the name of the New York Times "Week in Review" section as the "Weekend" section. (Return to the corrected sentence.) It also incorrectly stated that Senate Republicans want lawmakers to cut costs and reduce debt at auto companies—it's the automakers themselves who Republicans want to do the cost-cutting. (Return to the corrected sentence.) The article also misstated the cost of state road and school programs awaiting federal cash. Those project total an estimated $136 billion, not $136 million. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
Yesterday's monthly report from the U.S. Labor Department is the big news in today's papers: The nation's employers cut 533,000 jobs in November, the largest monthly job-shedding since 1974. Congressional Democrats are near a deal with the White House to help out the flagging auto industry with the goal of preventing even nastier unemployment numbers.
The New York Times notes high up in its lead story that the bad numbers do not include people who are underemployed or who have simply stopped looking for work. Counting those folks would nearly double the November unemployment tally, putting it at 12.5 percent instead of 6.7 percent. President-elect Barack Obama called for public spending to solve the crisis, but the Times says Obama's vague plan to create 2.5 million jobs would "barely recover the jobs that have disappeared over the last year," given the accelerating losses.
The Wall Street Journal points out that the 1.9 million jobs so far lost in 2008 makes the current recession the worst downturn since the years following World War II. The government revised down its data for the previous two months, and the WSJ says could do the same for November, which could leave us with a final figure even worse than the 602,000 jobs shed in December 1974 (though the paper provides perspective, noting that because the 2008 economy is 75 percent larger than its 1974 counterpart, today's bad numbers are less dramatic).
The Washington Post highlights the low price of oil and high number of homeowners behind on mortgage payments or in foreclosure—10 percent. Some predict unemployment will rise to 10 percent as well by the end of 2009. The situation is "unraveling so fast as to deny analysis by the usual statistical models," says the Post. The paper points out what colorful language economists are using to describe the situation, including such terms as "god-awful" and "indescribably terrible."
Even small businesses are firing people, which the Los Angeles Times says is a particularly bad sign because small businesses typically hang on to their trained workers in anticipation of better times. The Times finds husband-and-wife owners of two heating and air-conditioning firms who fired their own daughter two weeks before her wedding.
Congressional Democrats are nearing a compromise with the White House to provide loans to the flagging Big Three companies of the U.S. auto industry. The WP reports that in talks with the president's chief of staff, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi dropped her opposition to tapping an existing program for funding fuel-efficient car development to provide the loans. The NYT says congressional Republicans and concern about massive default risk could still sabotage the deal. The WSJ reports that Chrysler has hired a bankruptcy firm.
Enough gloom—let's turn our attention toward sunny North Dakota, where, according to a Page One NYT story, everything is just fine. In North Dakota, auto sales are up, unemployment is down, foreclosures are few, and the budget is in surplus. Why are things so great in North Dakota? Partly because of surging oil production and a good farming year, but also because of a "never-fancy culture that has nurtured fewer sudden booms of wealth." In other words, "Our banks don't do those goofy loans," as the co-owner of a local car dealership puts it.
The WP fronts a four-pager on the tricky question of what to do with the thousands of prisoners held in Iraq by the U.S. military. The recently-approved security pact between the Iraqi and U.S. governments calls for all 16,000 prisoners to be released or referred to courts. The story describes a tribunal of U.S. servicemen who decide not whether a detainee is guilty or innocent but whether the person would be dangerous if released. The Post reports that the military has at least made a significant effort to improve the conditions of its prisons.
Evil geeks are winning a global cyber war and malicious software is spreading faster than ever, according to a front-page piece in the NYT. Hackers thrive in foreign countries with little interest in prosecuting cyber misdeeds, and so cyber criminals raise an army of remotely-controlled zombie computers to send penis-enlargement e-mails and stealthily steal your money. Some fear an erosion of confidence in the foundation of 21st-century commerce.
Only the LAT fronts a story on the sentencing of O.J. Simpson to up to 33 years in prison for his attempt to rob a pair of memorabilia dealers. Simpson surprised even the judge by apologizing and getting misty-eyed in a pre-sentencing statement.
Greeting-card companies, their fingers ever on the pulse of the American psyche, are muting the tone of holiday cards this year. The WSJ reports that one company sensed waning consumer confidence and started toning down its cards months before the housing bubble burst. According to card salesmen, people want more sentimentality, fewer garish colors, and still fewer symbols of gross consumerism. The businesslike language industry insiders use to describe their calculations—"Santa is a true, traditional red, instead of the cherry red we've used in the past"—makes the story a must-read.