Slate.com

Table of Contents

The Book of Psalms presents two daunting challenges to the Bible blog. First, because it's just a series of poems, in no particular order, there is no compelling reason to start at Psalm 1 and read on to Psalm 150. You might as well start at Psalm 47 and then read 112 and then 6 and then 65 and then so on. But since the aim of the blog is to read straight through the Bible, I will dutifully begin with Psalm 1 and trudge forward. Second, because there is no story, it's a very demanding read. As I quickly learned when I began my Psalmistry last night, reading one psalm is a joy, reading two is a pleasure, reading three is a chore, and reading a dozen or more is like sitting next to a desperate Amway salesman on a trans-Atlantic flight.

Psalm 1

A righteous man studies the Lord's teaching "day and night." It's 11:30 p.m., so that's me!

Psalm 2

One of several psalms addressed to kings and princes, all of which strike a similar theme. Don't plot against God or try to supplant Him. Remember, you serve at His pleasure, and if you get too big for your britches, you will regret it. "O kings, be prudent; accept discipline, you rulers of the earth … lest He be angered, and your way be doomed."

Psalm 3

The first of many psalms "of David"—that is, psalms that King David supposedly wrote. Since David is the Bible's most fascinating character, I'm looking forward to reading these. Given David's not-inconsiderable ego, it's hardly surprising that the main theme of David's psalms is: Poor me, I have so many enemies, even though I'm such a righteous man. Thanks for killing all my enemies, God!

I love this wonderfully modern line at the end of Psalm 3, where he praises the Lord: "For You slap all my enemies in the face."

Psalm 6

Another psalm of David. It opens: "O Lord, do not punish me in anger, do not chastise me in fury. Have mercy on me, O Lord." This is an interesting appeal to the Lord. God often reacts too quickly in the Bible, immediately flying into a rage at human sin and frailty. What's so appealing about this verse is that David is not denying his wrongdoing—he knows he's a sinner—but he wants God to count to 10 before smiting. He's asking God to grant him a few moments so that he can plead for forgiveness and prove his faith, hoping that the Lord's fury will subside. As always, David is a superb psychologist, daring to understand, and manipulate, the Lord.

Also, a literary point: Note that the first line—"do not punish me in anger"—is followed by a line that means exactly the same thing: "do not chastise me in fury." I haven't mentioned it before, but this similar-but-not-identical repetition is a common device in Bible poetry. (Psalm 3, for example, begins: "O Lord, my foes are so many! Many are those who attack me.") If I remember correctly from my college class in oral literature—lo, these 17 years ago—such repetition is common in song-poems all over the world. "Oral formulaic" poems contain repetitions so that the bards who had to perform them would have an easier time remembering them. (The oral formulas particularly apply to epic poems, but there are elements even in small poems like the psalms.) When the song-poems were eventually written down, the repetitions came along. (I assume—and correct me if I'm wrong, scholars—that the psalms were sung and performed long before they were written down.)

Psalm 8

Psalms, like Hamlet or Casablanca or Genesis, has what I would call a cliché problem, or maybe a Bartlett's problem. It is salted with so many famous phrases that it sometimes sounds trite. In this psalm, for example, appears the question: "What is man that thou are mindful of him?" As a reader, this tripped me up and distracted me from the rest of the very lovely poem, because it's a phrase I have heard many times before, without ever being able to place it.

In any case, the psalm thanks God for bothering to pay attention to us. It's a winning poem because it's humble without being self-loathing. (Most Bible verses about human failings tend to the histrionically negative.) It's realistic about our smallness—we're just human beings, little nothings compared to the sun and moon and stars—but it doesn't weep with over-the-top self-hatred. It also occurs to me that I like it because it reflects my own gratitude about being alive: Isn't it nice, that of all the gin joints, on all the planets, in all the galaxies in the universe, I walked into this one! Why am I so lucky to be born on Earth, and a human being too? If that's not a reason to thank God, I don't know what is.

Psalm 10

At the beginning of the psalm, the poet, like Habakkuk, asks God why He "stand[s] aloof" during bad times and allows the wicked to crush the good. But by the middle of the poem, the author recognizes that God is paying attention to all this evil and keeping score: "You do look! You take note of mischief and vexation!" And by the end, the psalmist knows that God redeems the downtrodden and crushes the tyrants. The entire cycle of belief, from doubt, to revelation, to vindication, in just 18 verses.

Psalm 11

God will rain down "blazing coals and sulfur" upon the wicked. Question: Why is sulfur a frequent Bible punishment? It's God's favorite chemical weapon, the mustard gas of the ancient Near East. Was sulfur in fact an Israelite weapon? Or, even if it was not a weapon, was it a common natural threat? Was there a Judean volcano or hot spring that spewed dangerous sulfur? I've been to Israel a few times and never seen (or smelled) any sulfur. But I can't imagine the Bible's authors would have written about sulfur with such alarm unless they had reason to fear it.

Psalm 13

This psalm displays David at his most Davidian. We hear his incredible whininess: "How long, O Lord; Will You ignore me forever? … How long will my enemy have the upper hand?" But he also shows off his seductive powers. Listen to this fabulous line, exactly the approach to God you'd expect from a pickup artist as skilled as David: "Look at me, answer me, O Lord, my God!" Can't you just see that devilishly handsome king, lyre in hand, tears welling up in his deep brown eyes, knowing that no one alive—not even God—could resist him? What mortal dares to command God, "Look at me"? Only His most beloved king, David.

Psalm 16

Among many other nice metaphors about the Lord, David says, "He is at my right hand." This right-hand phrase appears several times in the Bible: Is it the source of "right-hand man"?

Psalm 18

The longest and most spectacular psalm yet, it's actually an almost word-for-word copy of 2 Samuel, Chapter 22. It opens with David rattling off an amazing series of nouns to praise God: "my crag, my fortress, my rescuer, my God, my rock in whom I seek refuge, my shield, my mighty champion, my haven."

It then turns into a story of how God "bent the sky and came down" to rescue David. Egomaniac David, naturally, thinks he deserves nothing less because he is a "blameless" man. "The Lord rewarded me according to my merit."

Psalm 20

This one is sweet because it gives us David at his least self-absorbed. Usually his psalms are all about, well, David—how great he is, how the Lord had better stop ignoring him, how his enemies will suffer, etc. In this poem, David finally spares a thought for everyone else: "May the Lord answer you in time of trouble. … May He grant your desire, and fulfill your every plan." Its selflessness gives it a power and a heart that are lacking in many of his first-person psalms.

Psalm 22

This psalm surely has special meaning for Christians. David, complaining again, opens the psalm by crying: "My God, my God, why have You abandoned me?" Even I know these are Jesus' last (or nearly last) words.

It is not the only line in this psalm that relates to the death of Jesus. David imagines his killers "casting lots for my garments"—which is what the Roman soldiers did over Jesus' clothes.

The climax of this psalm is curious. David bargains with God, promising to proclaim His glory—as long as God saves him from death. This is characteristic of David. His love of God is conditional—dependent on God doing good for him (making him king, saving his life, etc.). Yet the overriding message of the Bible is always that our love for God mustn't be conditional. When your faith is conditional, it's self-interested and utilitarian. Love for God must be absolute. But David is always the Bible exception. Because he is God's favorite, he can get away with gamesmanship that the rest of us don't dare try.

Psalm 23

Probably the most famous poem ever written: "The Lord is my shepherd." It's just as good as I remember. Read it! I have only two small points to make about it. First, the King James version famously and majestically refers to "the valley of the shadow of death." But my Tanakh translation replaces that with "a valley of deepest darkness." I assume my translation is more accurate, but it's so … blah!

Second: Why is this psalm world famous and the other 149 are not? One reason must be that Psalm 23 is a most pacific and gentle poem. One of the revelations I've had reading the Bible is that its most famous passages are almost always its gentlest and most loving parts. While there are certainly famous Bible stories that are disturbing—Noah, Ten Plagues, etc.—the celebrated bits are far milder than the book as a whole. Psalm 23 is a perfect example of this whitewashing, presenting a God who is loving, mild, forgiving, openhearted—even though the God of the psalms, and of the Hebrew Bible generally, is usually quick to anger, furious, and unforgiving. The Psalm 23 God is certainly better for marketing.

Psalm 24

I pause here only for family reasons. This psalm begins, "The earth is the Lord's and all it holds." My late grandmother Helen Plotz edited anthologies of poetry, including a 1965 collection of spiritual poetry, The Earth Is the Lord's.

Thoughts on Blogging the Bible? Please e-mail David Plotz at plotzd@slate.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)

I can't do justice to the fascinating, learned, and provocative e-mails you sent me about Jonah and the whale. Everyone—and I mean everyone—loves that story. Let me touch briefly on the question that interested you (and me) most: How could Jonah have survived three days inside a whale/fish?

Nonbelievers answered: He couldn't, and of course it never happened.

Some believers said: It didn't happen, but it's still a wonderful allegory.

Those who said it did happen made one of these three points:

1) Maybe, just maybe, he could have survived in a sperm whale or whale shark; or

2) It's a miracle. If God wanted to do it, He could do it. Heck, he could have made a big fish just for the occasion and made it vanish as soon as Jonah was spewed on the beach. He could do anything, because He's God. For a fascinating version of the miracle position, listen to William Jennings Bryan squaring off with Clarence Darrow during the 1925 Scopes trial; or

3) Jonah didn't survive his fishy journey. He died, spent three days in the darkness, and then was resurrected—like a certain other holy man popular with Christians. Several Baptist readers told me that they were taught very explicitly that Jonah was a precursor to Christ.

On to the last five of the minor prophets. I'm going to race through them because, well, they're not very interesting.

The Book of Habakkuk

Chapter 1 and Chapter 2

A bit of a whiner, Habby keeps wondering how long he will have to cry to the Lord for relief. Eventually, he decides to stand in a watchtower until God answers his complaint. This gloomy fellow is evidently not the inspiration for the Coca-Cola slogan, "Habakkuk and a smile."

Give Habakkuk credit for posing one of the most important theological questions of the Bible: If you're so good, God, why are you "silent when the wicked swallow those more righteous than they?" This is probably the biggest question there is about God, one that still puzzles all of us today. (Since the Holocaust, Jews have been particularly troubled by it.) As far as I can remember—and please correct me if I am wrong—Habakkuk is the first person in the Bible to ask the question directly.

If I am understanding the Lord—the language is a little muddy—He answers by saying that the wicked will eventually be punished and the righteous rewarded. God checks off a list of malfeasants—"the treacherous and arrogant," "you who build a town by bloodshed," "you who make your neighbors drink"—and promises that they will pay dearly for their sins. I find God's response a little unsatisfying, though I don't know what else He could say. As far as I can tell, the only way, theologically, to justify evil's success today is the promise of a next world where the wicked will suffer and the good will be rewarded. If there is no future redemption or punishment, then God would be a sadist, allowing the good to suffer with no hope. (Not to belabor a favorite point of mine, but one of the things I have always loved about Judaism is that it doesn't rely so much on "you'll get yours in the next world." Rather, it demands we work for good on earth today.)

Chapter 3

The last chapter of Habakkuk is an emphatic prayer to the Lord. I mention it only to note two eye-catching phrases. The prophet describes the Lord "crack[ing] skulls" of villains. And when God arrives to judge and redeem, Habakkuk is so nervous that his "bowels quaked."

The Book of Zephaniah

Chapter 1 through Chapter 3

They call these 12 the "minor prophets," but that name doesn't do justice to the dinkiness, the negligibility, the puniness of Zephaniah. He's not minor league, he's rookie league. His three, mercifully short, chapters are third-rate Isaiah, a completely familiar prophetic poem: God's going to destroy mankind to punish Baal worshippers. He will trash the Israelites, the Moabites, the Ninevites, etc. Then He'll redeem Zion. Nothing you haven't heard 47 times, and better, before.

In Zephaniah, as in so many other books, the Lord describes razing a city—often Jerusalem, but Nineveh in this case—and leaving it such a wasteland that everyone who passes by "hisses and gestures with his hand." I am curious about the hissing and hand gesturing. Why would people hiss at a devastated city? What kind of hand gesture would they make? Are hissing and gesturing customs that persist in the Middle East?

The Book of Haggai

Chapter 1 and Chapter 2

A confusing but lively story. After the Persians reconquer Israel from the Babylonians and allow the Jews to return, the Temple remains in ruins. The Jews say, "The time has not yet come" to rebuild. Haggai, channeling God, rebukes them for their lack of faith. Why are their crops failing? Why do they never have enough warm clothes? Because they're not serving God, that's why! God instructs them to rebuild the Temple and promises glory and prosperity if they do. But the book ends ambiguously, with the Temple still in ruins.

The Book of Zechariah

This is the longest book in the minor prophets, and while it's not a thrill ride, it's weird and psychedelic.

Chapter 1 through Chapter 3

Chapter 3 brings a landmark moment: the debut of Satan! In a dream, Zechariah sees the high priest of Israel facing off against "the Accuser," who, as a footnote in my Bible observes, is also known as Satan. It's clear that this is no horn-bedecked, pitchfork-wielding, perfumed-with-brimstone, red-satin devil. The Accuser appears to be more like God's opposing counsel—a not very nice, but skilled, corporate defense attorney. The Accuser doesn't say a word in the chapter. In fact, his only role is to stand there and be chewed out by one of God's angels. Still, it's momentous to witness Satan's first appearance. Question: How does this abashed, impotent Accuser turn into His Satanic Majesty? (Christian readers may wonder why I've skipped over the appearance of Satan in the book of Job. As Jews read the Bible, Job comes well after the minor prophets, almost at the end of the book.)

Chapter 4 through Chapter 6

Z. has a weird vision of seven lamps, symbolizing God's eyes on the world. Then he has weirder visions of a giant flying scroll and a woman in a lead-sheathed tub, who represents wickedness. The prophet also declares that a man called "the Branch"—an ancestor of the Edge, perhaps?—shall rebuild the Temple and rule Zion.

Chapter 7 and Chapter 8

Like most New Yorkers, God can't bear to be away from His beloved city, even for a day. He is so fixated on Zion that he vows to restore it and move back to Jerusalem, despite its sins. When this joyful day comes, the people of the world will follow the Jews back to Zion. The description of this is hilarious: "In those days, ten men from nations of every tongue will take hold—they will take hold of every Jew by a corner of his cloak and say, 'Let us go with you, for we have heard God is with you.' " I love the idea of each Jew being besieged by a 10-pack of gentiles! (I wonder if my kids will get 10 gentiles each, too? Hmmm.)

Chapter 9

The new king of Israel shall ride into Jerusalem on a donkey!

The more I read of the prophets, the more it becomes clear that the Christian tradition intentionally borrows from them. (I know, I know—this is a blindingly obvious observation.) Why does Christianity tell stories about Christ riding a donkey, or coming from Bethlehem, or suffering for our sins? Perhaps because those stories are all true. Or perhaps because the early Christian writers wanted to place Christ emphatically in the prophetic tradition. They could do this by matching up his biography to the Jewish prophecies.

Chapter 10 through Chapter 13

Honestly, I was very tired when I read these chapters, and there was absolutely nothing in them to wake me up.

Chapter 14

Judgment Day will begin on the Mount of Olives. The Lord will step there and rip a gorge in the earth. Good to know for planning your next Israel vacation.

God will smite his enemies with a plague, and "their flesh shall rot away while they stand on their feet; their eyes shall rot away in their sockets; and their tongues shall rot away in their mouths."

Malachi

Chapter 1 and Chapter 2

The final prophet! Hallelujah!

God is sick of our heresy and backsliding, our feeble sacrifices and worthless professions of faith. "You have wearied the Lord with your talk," Malachi chides. I never sympathize with the Lord so much as when He gets peeved at His people.

Chapter 3

The Lord's going to wipe the floor with adulterers, liars, and mistreaters of the poor. And when the Lord's redemption comes, the good will finally take their revenge, too: "You shall trample the wicked to a pulp."

When Elijah was whooshed up to heaven several books ago, many of you disputed my contention that he had died. I guess you were right. In the last verses of Malachi, God promises to send Elijah as an advance man before Judgment. Elijah will show up shortly before the big day and "reconcile parents with children and children with their parents." This family unification project will moderate God's anger, and make the final judgment go easier for all of us.

Coming up next time … Psalms!

Thoughts on Blogging the Bible? Please e-mail David Plotz at plotzd@slate.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)

I read them all—every one of Tristram Stuart's 446 voraciously researched, densely detailed, beautifully written pages about European vegetarianism since 1600—and at the end I still wasn't convinced. Here's the story as he tells it in The Bloodless Revolution: In the 17^th century, a fundamental question about the relationship between ourselves and the other creatures of the earth broke out into passionate debate, a debate that swooped over and around and through the culture, rattling long-held European assumptions about the very nature of life. There was no single word adequate to capture the ideas that were bursting forth, until the term vegetarian emerged in the middle of the 19^th century. And with that, the battle was over—not because meat-eating came to an end but because European culture made a home for this challenge to dietary norms, giving it a local habitation and a name. Whether or not this constituted a victory for animal-lovers is hard to say. As Stuart points out early on, when the concept of vegetarianism became domesticated, it turned into "a distinct movement that could easily be pigeon-holed, and ignored." But people did start thinking differently about animals, human responsibilities, and the rights of living creatures, albeit rarely to the extreme sought by such groups as PETA. Stuart sums it up well: Nowadays, he says, "negotiating compassion with the desire to eat is customary."

So, that was the bloodless revolution: a war of ideas that brought about genuine change. But bloodless? Yes, in the sense that philosophy was the chief battlefield. But consider another terrain—the dinner table. Eating animals never lost its central role in human appetite. A lot of intellectual shaking and shimmying was going on during the centuries Stuart discusses here, but at the most basic level—what's for lunch?—the transformation not only wasn't bloodless, it wasn't a revolution.

If vegetarianism has settled comfortably into Western culture by now, it's because the term vegetarian has become so vast and shapeless that it describes just about everybody who isn't on the Atkins diet. To be sure, there are vegetarians who avoid all animal food. But most are willing to eat eggs, and many eat fish. Chicken is fine with some because hey, it isn't beef. Hamburgers? Absolutely not—or maybe just once in a while. And turkey because it's Thanksgiving, ham because it's Easter, pepperoni because it's pizza—what on earth is a vegetarian, anyway? No wonder Stuart never tries to define the term. A huge, wonderfully entertaining cast of dietary rebels parades through his chapters, but all we really know about the eating habits of these pagans, scientists, doctors, scholars, theologians, writers, philosophers, and crackpots is that most of them ate meat.

Pierre Gassendi, for instance, whose "Syntagma Philosophicum" Stuart calls "one of the most influential philosophical works of the seventeenth century," believed to the very core of his being that we were never meant to eat animals. They had senses comparable to our own, he argued, and even possessed a mode of reasoning. "They emit their own peculiar cries," he wrote to Descartes, "and employ them just as we do our vocal sounds." Human teeth and digestion, plainly designed for a vegetable diet, seemed living proof that we were not born to feed our bodies by spilling animal blood. Nevertheless, Gassendi ate meat and had no intention of quitting. "I admit that if I were wise, I would abandon this food bit by bit, and nourish myself solely on the gifts on the earth," he wrote. "I do not doubt that I would be happier for longer and more constantly in better health." Translation: I'm wrong and I'm not about to change—a sentiment that adequately sums up the fate of most dietary advice throughout history.

To be sure, this is a book about ideas, not about what people had for dinner. It would be hard to come up with a volume this size if the subject were dinner, since cooking, unlike philosophy, was women's work and tended to pass without notice. In this instance, however, there is an unusually good written record, for the leading proponents of vegetarianism were so notorious that their eating habits were of great interest, and people took careful note. Hence the fascinating leitmotif running through this narrative, as Stuart acknowledges over and over the disparity between the preaching and the practice: "Bohme may not have been vegetarian himself," "Evelyn relished good dishes of flesh," "Rousseau was not vegetarian," "At the time of his death Newton owed L10 16s 4d to a butcher." None of this distracts Stuart from his main theme, which is the powerful rise of vegetarianism. In the realm of pure thought, he certainly proves his case. But if the most ardent advocates of bloodless eating shrank back in dismay when the bean loaf came around, it seems doubtful that ordinary folk greeted it any more enthusiastically.

Perhaps the history of European vegetarianism is a history of wishful thinking. Stuart, of course, doesn't see it that way. But he does focus on India as the inspiration for a great deal of Western philosophizing (the book's original subtitle, jettisoned for the American edition, was "Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India"), and wishful thinking has long been a popular souvenir to bring home from the subcontinent. Early travelers to India returned with amazing tales of a population that lived entirely on vegetables and enjoyed perfect health. Nicolo Conti, a Venetian merchant, saw Brahmins who lived to the age of 300; travel writer Jean Baptiste Tavernier saw a man "whipped to death for shooting a peacock"; John Ovington, a cleric, saw Hindus living in a state of grace like Adam and Eve, practicing "Justice and Tenderness to Brutes, and all living Creatures." True or not, says Stuart, these reports were influential, for they offered a vivid and dramatic challenge to a way of life that Westerners took for granted.

But what did those travelers really see? Stuart doesn't go down that path; he's interested in the long cultural reach of these travelogues, not their veracity. Still, it's surprising how little attention he gives to the fact that vegetarianism in India was anything but monolithic. Contrary to what Stuart asserts, Buddha did not teach "that it was wrong for people to eat animals." (His own last meal, famously, was a dish of pork.) Stuart quotes Europeans who described Syrian Christians in Kerala "abstaining from animal food," just as the Hindus around them did; but he ignores a long tradition of beef-eating in that same Syrian Christian community. In truth, historians and archaeologists have traced meat-eating in the subcontinent back thousands of years; European travelers would have seen Indians consuming fish, fowl, mutton, and beef, as well as all-vegetable diets. But the West was most fascinated by tales of Indians who swore off all meat in the name of religion and nonviolence. That was the image of India that sold books, and that was the image that took root in Europe.

The travelers were right about one thing: In India, it was considered perfectly natural to live without meat. Vegetarianism wasn't a novelty, a hardship, a form of rebellion or a sign that a screw was loose. It was simply a way of life, in a region where many ways of life coexisted. In Europe, by contrast, vegetarianism grew up as an aberration swathed in asceticism and self-denial. Nobody was supposed to live sumptuously on a vegetarian diet; the point was precisely the opposite. Radical preacher Roger Crab, who became a hermit in 1652, renounced meat with a fervor typical of the early vegetarians and decided to eat only "broth thickned with bran, and pudding made with bran, & Turnep leaves chop't together, and grass." Had he been lucky enough to be a devout Hindu instead of a heretical Christian, he might have been eating the glorious vegetarian cuisine developed in the South Indian temple town of Udipi, notably those big, airy crepes called dosas, filled with spicy potatoes and accompanied by a few spoonfuls of coconut chutney and a little cup of hot, soupy sambhar, laced with vegetables and tamarind. When vegetarianism is about what to eat, instead of what not to eat, life picks up considerably.

In recent decades, the West has finally started to catch on. Anna Thomas, Deborah Madison, and all the other gurus of contemporary vegetarian cooking have dismantled the bleak, defiant approach to food that for so long characterized meatless menus in Britain and America. Nut patties and boiled carrots have given way to a new culinary tradition that draws on nearly everything in the edible kingdom—vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts, grains, herbs, and spices—and evokes flavors from cuisines around the world. The absence of meat is unremarkable, just as it should be.

And who chooses to eat this way? People who like food, whether or not they call themselves vegetarians. There was a bloodless revolution, all right, but it happened in the kitchen. The rest is commentary.

In two previous articles about Wikipedia ("Evicted From Wikipedia" and "Rescued By Wikipedia"), I argued that the open-source online reference work ought to abandon its "notability guideline," which says that an encyclopedia entry on a particular topic is ineligible for inclusion, and (at least theoretically) will be removed, if Wikipedia's gatekeepers conclude that the topic lacks sufficient importance. In the case of a paper encyclopedia, a notability standard makes perfect sense because of limitations of space, staff, and reader navigability. But in the case of Wikipedia, notability shouldn't be an issue, since Wikipedia has access to more or less infinite space, and (since its writers and editors are all volunteers) manpower, plus a method of navigability (the search engine) that's blissfully indifferent to volume. The only explanation I could find for Wikipedia's seemingly pointless notability guideline derived from Thorstein Veblen's 1899 classic, The Theory of the Leisure Class. Veblen argued that society sorts and discriminates among people and things long past the point where such actions have practical value, and that these "invidious distinctions" serve to uphold ancient status hierarchies. Wikipedia lets some topics in and keeps other topics out not because doing so is necessary, but because doing so is pleasurable.

Many "Chatterbox" readers disagreed with me, and I thought their arguments merited consideration. Here they are.

Wikipedia does not command infinite Web space. Servers cost money. Wikipedia is owned, along with some lesser-known Wiki projects (Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikinews, etc.) by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikimedia's 2006 financial statement says its largest single expense is "Internet hosting," which cost $189,631 in 2006. That's more than a fourfold increase over 2005. Without a doubt, Wikipedia's rapid expansion is running up the bills. But that expansion is simultaneously increasing—at the same pace—the volume of contributions. These totaled $1.3 million last year—again, a fourfold increase over 2005 and easily enough to cover Wikimedia's total expenses ($791,907). Granted, there's no guarantee that Wikipedia's future income from contributions (or other sources) will continue to track Wikipedia's growth. But for now, at least, new encyclopedia entries seem to pay for themselves. So, it would at best be premature to worry that abolishing Wikipedia's notability guideline would put it in the red.

Banning the notability guideline is an invitation to sock puppetry. A "sock puppet" is an e-mail identity intended to disguise a user who's already known by a different e-mail identity. An example would be a book author who, under an assumed name, posts favorable reviews of his book on Amazon. Without a notability guideline, it would in theory be easier for someone to post a Wikipedia article about himself, a practice Wikipedia strongly discourages even when the author doesn't hide his identity because such entries tend to be self-serving. But if an article is self-serving, that should be evident either from its tone or from its use of unverifiable facts, and therefore subject to correction or elimination by other Wikipedia users. If someone uses a sock puppet to post an article attacking a personal enemy, its hostility and/or unverifiability ought to be similarly self-evident. You don't need a notability guideline to rein in such misbehavior.

Facts about nonfamous people are difficult to verify. In my earlier columns, I suggested that I ought to be able to post a Wikipedia entry about my cleaning lady or my mailman, provided they didn't object. Such entries, readers note, would be hard to verify from print sources. Agreed. But in the event I were able to rustle up reliable citation sources for the facts about my cleaning lady or my mailman—possibly provided by them—I would no doubt find it especially irritating, after all that effort, to see these bios removed on "notability" grounds. If I didn't rustle up reliable citation sources, their bios could get tagged for removal because of unverifiability. So, where's the problem?

Wikipedia articles about non-notables get policed less. Because fewer people will see these entries, they'll be more likely to contain errors or diverge from legitimate Wikipedia standards. True. But this is a Zen riddle. If nobody sees a Wikipedia entry, it won't matter. If very few people see a Wikipedia entry, it won't matter very much.

How many George Bushes? There are two people in the world named George Bush who are of great interest to many readers—three if you count Jeb Bush's son, George Prescott Bush, who wowed 'em at the 1988 Republican National Convention—and who knows how many more people named George Bush who are of little interest to most readers. How to prevent the wrong George Bush coming up on a Wikipedia search? This is a nonproblem. The "real" George Bushes will come up first, and if you want to save a little time you can enter "George Bush" and "president" as search terms. Judging from this search page, a much more serious problem is the more than 10,000 separate Wikipedia entries for the 41^st and 43^rd presidents that really ought to be consolidated into two. A notability standard does nothing to fix that.

Wikipedia would turn into MySpace. No, it wouldn't. Entries would still have to conform to Wikipedia format and standards.

I once was lost but now am found. Wikipedia, which previously tagged my bio for removal because I failed to meet the online encyclopedia's rather stringent "notability" guideline, has now reinstated me. What brought about this miraculous intervention? My publication (in Slate and in the Washington Post) of an article that described my misfortune and then went on to argue that—given the seeming infinity of cyberspace and volunteer expertise available to Wikipedia—the only plausible reason Wikipedia's gatekeepers would exclude anyone or anything as insufficiently notable would have to be the secret thrill of exclusion itself, as described in Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class.

I don't mean to suggest that the sheer brilliance of my argument suddenly caused the scales to fall from the eyes of Wikipedia's content guardians. At best, I seem to have stimulated further discussion among the Wiki faithful about whether to eliminate the notability standard (click here and scroll to the bottom), a source of controversy long before I arrived on the scene. (Harvard Business School, for instance, dedicates a case study to Wikipedia's notability-based removal of its article on the term "Enterprise 2.0," coined by one of its professors; the article was merged into a separate article on "enterprise social software.") The notability standard itself still stands, fortresslike, and (as of this writing) continues to threaten elimination of two other Wikipedia entries that I mentioned in my earlier piece: for a Japanese anime series called Final Approach and for a Finnish security consulting company called Secproof. A third topic that I cited earlier as being endangered due to insufficient notability—Jungian analyst Anthony Stevens—has since been rated sufficiently notable, apparently on the merits.

My rescue, by contrast, seems to be a case of jury nullification. Let's review the sequence of events.

As I reported yesterday, my Wikipedia bio was bumping along, minding its own business, when a Wikipedia user (identified on the site as REtwW) tagged it for removal on notability grounds. A Wikipedia "sysop," or administrator, named Benjamin Lowe (one of about 1,500 volunteers chosen to enforce Wikipedia's standards; his day job is homeland-security consulting) has since explained to me that REtwW didn't enjoy any special gatekeeping privileges and that the tagging was very preliminary. At this stage, Lowe said, the expectation was that some other user would come along and add material clarifying the subject's notability, and that would be that. If such clarification proved impossible—as it would in my case, because (as I explained in my earlier column) the language of the notability guideline pretty clearly excluded me—then another user would, at least in theory, initiate the process of removal.

Slate published my Wikipedia column. In the blink of an eye, one user removed my scarlet letter of non-notability. Then another user, one Kendrick7, not only restored the scarlet letter but initiated my removal process, which consists of five days of debate followed by a sysop's ruling on the matter. If no one chooses to debate, the Wikipedia entry automatically comes down. That was not a worry here; the appearance of my piece in Slate (and, the next day, in the Post) brought hordes of Wikipedia users to the site. They added and subtracted biographical details to my entry; added citations (my entry had also been tagged for its lack of citations, an easy problem to fix); argued passionately about whether the bio should mention the "Chatterbox" column about Wikipedia that had caused this ruckus in the first place; and, of course, debated whether Wikipedia should keep my entry at all. (I stayed out of the editing and debating processes because I didn't want to pollute the outcome, about which I was very curious.)

The pro-Tims tended to agree with me that the notability standard ought to be eliminated outright. The anti-Tims argued that the notability standard was a necessary bulwark against anarchy and noted that I myself had asserted that it rendered me ineligible. Eventually an administrator (handle: JDoorjam) cut the process short, which is allowed under a Wikipedia rule that says you can ignore all other rules when the site's basic health is at stake. JDoorjam decreed that I would be "speedy kept" (i.e., reinstated immediately), and he explained he had short-circuited discussion because it was inviting "troll magnetry" (i.e., lots of uncouth people logging on and saying rude things) and "edit warring" (i.e., people repeatedly doing and undoing the same edits). As I write this, the final entered comment reads as follows:

Wow. That's just shameful. A run of the mill columnist intimidated you into keeping his article by bitching in a public forum. If that's all it takes, Wiki has a long way to go before it can be considered at all legitimate.

Not my intent, but also not my concern. I continue to believe that Wikipedia should stop putting on airs about legitimacy and repeal its notability standard. In a future column, I'll consider the arguments against my open-the-floodgates position as readers have presented them to me over the last few days.

Pass me that whiskey bottle. My Wikipedia bio is about to disappear because I fail to satisfy the "notability guideline."

Wikipedia, as you probably know, is an online, multilingual encyclopedia whose entries are written and edited by readers around the world. What you may not know is that this ongoing experiment in Web-based collaboration maintains volunteer gatekeepers, and one of them has whisked me (or, rather, the entry describing me) under the insulting rubric, "Wikipedia articles with topics of unclear importance." I share this digital limbo with Anthony Stevens ("internationally respected Jungian analyst, psychiatrist, and author"), Final Approach ("romantic comedy anime series"), Secproof ("well known security consulting company in Finland"), and about 400 other topics tagged during the past calendar month. There we languish, awaiting "deletion review," which I will surely flunk.

Wikipedia's notability policy resembles U.S. immigration policy before 9/11: stringent rules, spotty enforcement. To be notable, a Wikipedia topic must be "the subject of multiple, non-trivial published works from sources that are reliable and independent of the subject and of each other." Although I have written or been quoted in such works, I can't say I've ever been the subject of any. And wouldn't you know, some notability cop cruised past my bio and pulled me over. Unless I get notable in a hurry—win the Nobel Peace Prize? Prove I sired Anna Nicole Smith's baby daughter?—a "sysop" (volunteer techie) will wipe my Wikipedia page clean. It's straight out of Philip K. Dick.

My career as an encyclopedia entry began on Sept. 6, 2005, when (according to Wikipedia's "history" tab) an anonymous user posted a three-sentence bio noting that I wrote the Chatterbox column in Slate; that previously I'd been a Washington-based reporter for the Wall Street Journal; and that my wife, "fellow journalist Marjorie Williams," had died the previous January. I've since discovered through some Web sleuthing that my Boswell was a student at Reed College named Ethan Epstein. Subsequent reader edits added to Epstein's original a few more professional and personal items from my résumé that, like the earlier details, were readily available online.

I can't say that I'd ever harbored an ambition to be listed in Wikipedia, but when I tripped over my bio three months after it appeared, I felt mildly flattered. Exercising my Wiki rights, I corrected my city of residence, which was off by a few blocks, and added that I'd published a posthumous anthology of Marjorie's writing under the title The Woman at the Washington Zoo. Various items got added to and subtracted from my bio over the next year and a half, and every now and then I myself would check for errors (there were surprisingly few). It was on one such foray that I discovered I'd been designated for Wiki oblivion, like a dead tree marked with orange spray paint for the city arborist to uproot.

Talk about humiliating! Wikipedia does not, it assures readers, measure notability "by Wikipedia editors' own subjective judgments." In other words, it was nothing personal. But to be told one has been found objectively unworthy hardly softens the blow. "Think of all your friends and colleagues who've never been listed," a pal consoled. Cold comfort. If you've never been listed in Wikipedia, you can always argue that your omission is an oversight. Not me. I've been placed under a microscope and, on the basis of careful and dispassionate analysis, excluded from the most comprehensive encyclopedia ever devised. Ouch!

But the terms of eviction from Wikipedia raise a larger issue than the bruised ego of one scribbler (or Jungian analyst or anime artist or Finnish security consultant). Why does Wikipedia have a "notability" standard at all?

We know why other encyclopedias need to limit the topics they cover. If they're on paper, they're confined by space. If they're on the Web, they're confined by staff size. But Wikipedia commands what is, for all practical purposes, infinite space and infinite manpower. The drawback to Wikipedia's ongoing collaboration with readers is that entries are vulnerable to error, clumsy writing, and sabotage. The advantage is that Wikipedia can draw on the collective interests and knowledge of its hundreds of thousands of daily visitors to cover, well, anything. To limit that scope based on notions of importance and notability seems self-defeating. If Wikipedia publishes a bio of my cleaning lady, that won't make it any harder to field experts to write and edit Wikipedia's bio of Albert Einstein. So, why not let her in?

Granted, there are a few practical limits to covering any and all topics, "important" or not. One is privacy. Assuming that my cleaning lady were neither a public figure nor part of any larger story, it would be difficult to justify posting her bio against her will. Another limit is accuracy. The bio's assertions about my cleaning lady would have to be independently verifiable from trustworthy sources made available to readers. Otherwise, Wikipedia's vast army of volunteer fact-checkers would be unable to find out whether the bio was truthful.

But Wikipedia already maintains rules concerning verifiability and privacy. Why does it need separate rules governing "notability"? Wikipedia's attempt to define who or what is notable is so rococo that it even has elaborate notability criteria for porn stars. (A former Playboy Playmate of the Month is notable; a hot girlfriend to a famous rock star is not.) Inside the permanent town meeting that is Wikipedia's governing structure—a New Yorker article about Wikipedia last year reported that fully 25 percent of Wikipedia is now devoted to governance of the site itself—the notability standard is a topic of constant dispute.

When people go to this much trouble to maintain a distinction rendered irrelevant by technological change, the search for an explanation usually leads to Thorstein Veblen's 1899 book, The Theory of the Leisure Class. (Click here to read it.) This extended sociological essay argues that the pursuit of status based on outmoded social codes takes precedence over, and frequently undermines, the rational pursuit of wealth and, more broadly, common sense. Hierarchical distinctions among people and things remain in force not because they retain practical value, but because they have become pleasurable in themselves. Wikipedia's stubborn enforcement of its notability standard suggests Veblen was right. We limit entry to the club not because we need to, but because we want to.

[Update, Feb. 24, 2007, 11:40 a.m.: I didn't bargain on Wikipedia being such a highly sensitive instrument. Immediately after this article was posted (and therefore well before most people had a chance to read it), a Wikipedia sysop granted my entry a stay of execution with respect to "notability." Delighted as I am to be elevated once again to the company of Nicolaus Copernicus, Igor Stravinsky, and Melvin "Slappy" White, can the dividing line between eminence and obscurity really be the authorship of a single magazine article about Wikipedia? I note with interest that Stacy Schiff, author of the excellent New Yorker article cited above, failed to impress Wikipedia's arbiters of notability by winning the Pulitzer Prize in biography, writing several other well-regarded books, and receiving fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. It wasn't until she wrote her Wikipedia piece that she became sufficiently notable to be written up in Wikipedia.

I presume the Wikipedia sysops will debate this point and others with respect to my entry, and that I can expect to be re-tagged for removal and un-tagged ad infinitum over the coming days as they hash it out. I'll follow future developments (click here to keep track of them) with interest. In the meantime, I hope it isn't lost on readers that my aim was not to reinstate myself but rather to argue against Wikipedia's "notability" standard itself and to use it as a newfangled illustration of our society's love affair with invidious distinction.]

A version of this article also appears in the Outlook section of the Sunday Washington Post.

The following essay is adapted from Clive James' Cultural Amnesia, a re-examination of intellectuals, artists, and thinkers who helped shape the 20^th century. Over the coming weeks, Slate will run an exclusive selection of these essays, going roughly from A to Z, abbreviated for these pages. (Note: There is no "I" in the Clive's Lives series.)

The masses do not believe in the Opposition. They greet its every statement with laughter. Does the Opposition think that the masses have such a short memory? If there are shortcomings in the Party and its political line, who else besides these prominent members of the Opposition were responsible for them?

—Alexandra Kollontai, "The Opposition and the Party Rank and File," Selected Writings

Alexandra Mikhaylovna Kollontai (1872–1952) was born and raised in comfortable circumstances in old St. Petersburg; rebelled against her privileges on behalf of women and the poor; and was exiled to Germany in 1908. During World War I she traveled in the United States, preaching socialism rather in the manner that an American feminist like Naomi Klein would nowadays preach against globalization when traveling in Europe. Upon the outbreak of revolution in Russia in 1917, Kollontai returned home, where she served the Soviet government first as a commissar for public welfare, then in a succession of foreign ministerial and ambassadorial posts. She was the regime's recognized expert on women's rights: special rights, that is, in a state where there were no general ones. She was thus the 20^th century's clearest early case of the fundamental incompatibility between feminism and ideology. Feminism is a claim for impartial justice, and all ideologies deny that such a term has meaning.

Kollontai managed to live with the contradiction, but only because she was unusually adroit when it came to aligning herself with the prevailing power. Her dogged service to a regime that condemned large numbers of innocent women to grim death has rarely resulted in her being criticized by ­left-­wing feminists in the West. The pattern, alas, continues today, especially when it comes to the spurious alliance between feminism and multiculturalism, an ideology which necessarily contains within itself a claimed right to confine women to their traditional subservience. Against the mountain of historical evidence that ­left-­wing ideology has been no friend of feminism, there is some comfort to be drawn from the fact that fascism was even less friendly: Hitlerite Germany, in particular, did little to release women from their traditional typecasting. But it remains sad that women who seek a release for their sisters from the crushing definition of a biological role have always found so many bad friends among those theoretically wedded to the betterment of the working class. The yellowing pages of Cuba's Bohemia magazine in 1959 are full of stories about the heroic women who fought and suffered beside all those famous beards for the liberation of their island from tyranny and backwardness. How many of those women ever became part of the government? At least Kollontai got a job, and perhaps she and the Soviet Union she so loyally served merit a small salute for that.

A famous figure among the Old Bolsheviks, Kollontai was a sad case, and sadder still because it is so hard to weep for her. Her career is a harsh reminder that feminism is, or should be, a demand for justice, not an ideology. It should not consider itself an ideology and it should be very slow to ally itself with any other ideology, no matter how progressive that other ideology might claim to be. Kollontai was an acute and lastingly valuable analyst of the restrictions and frustrations imposed on women by the conventional morality of bourgeois society. Fifty years later, Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer did not say much that Kollontai had not said first, even if they said it better—as they were bound to do, because they were proposing feasible modifications to a society already developed, whereas she was trying to make herself heard over the roar of chaos.

Armed with her ­hard-­won awareness of how injustice for women had been institutionalized in the bourgeois civil order, she thought that the Russian Revolution, the universal solvent of all institutions, would give feminism its chance. She spent the next 35 years finding out just how wrong she was. From the viewpoint of the slain, the best that can be said for her is that she backed the regime for a good reason. Unfortunately, she backed the regime no matter how murderous it became. The outburst quoted above, from 1927, is really a declaration of faith in Stalin, making an appearance under his other name, "the masses." "The Opposition" were those brave few among the Old Bolsheviks who still dared to question him, starting with Trotsky. As always, it is advisable to note that Trotsky, the butcher of the sailors at Kronstadt, was no humanitarian. Only a few years further up the line, he actually thought that Stalin's treatment of the peasants sinned through leniency. But it was obvious at the time that any conflict among the leaders had nothing to do with principle: It was a power struggle, with absolute power as the prize. Kollontai was weighing in unequivocally on the side of an infallible party with an unchallengeable leader. The terrible truth was that the only real equality made available to women in the Soviet Union of her time was the equal opportunity to be a slave laborer.

A textual scholar might say that she was taking a conscious risk when she wrote: "If there are shortcomings in the Party and its political line … " It is quite easy to imagine a Lubyanka interrogator asking her: "Oh yes, and what shortcomings are those?" But the interrogation never came. Kollontai managed to stay alive, partly by spending as much time as possible on diplomatic duties in Norway, Sweden, and Finland. (Talleyrand said, "He who is absent is wrong." In the Soviet Union, however, being absent was often the key to survival.) Her ­dreamed-­of principle was "winged Eros," love set free. The Soviet actuality of love set free was a ­one-­size-­fits-­all contraceptive diaphragm, with the overspill taken care of by serial abortions. In her early writings—just as charmless as the later ones but a touch more personal—she was already exploiting the standard langue de bois technique of speaking as if she herself were the incarnation of the proletariat. She probably hoped that if she sounded like the party line, the party line might be persuaded to incorporate her views. A sample:

The proletariat is not filled with horror and moral indignation at the many forms and facets of "winged Eros" in the way that the hypocritical bourgeoisie is. ... The complexity of love is not in conflict with the interest of the proletariat.

In the event, she found winged Eros a hard taskmaster. In a touching forecast of the policy declared by Germaine Greer 40 years later, Kollontai favored the notion that a nonacademic but suitably vigorous proletarian might be a fitting partner for a female high­brow. But either the muscular young lovers she chose for herself did not understand that in offering them freedom she required their respect, or else she found parting from them hurt more than it was supposed to. It would be cruel not to sympathize, and patronizing too: Even while she was earning her decorations she was in fear for her life, and during the Yezhov terror in the late 1930s she thought every trip back to Moscow might be her last. She died in 1952, shortly before her 80^th birthday, with two Orders of the Red Banner to her credit, if credit that was.

Our real sympathy, however, we should reserve for those who were not spared. An impressive proportion of them were women, even within the party itself, where they were seldom given high office, but certainly had unhampered access to the status of victim. If Kollontai had been sent to the Gulag and somehow survived it, she might conceivably have written a book along the lines of Evgenia Ginzburg's Into the Whirlwind, although it is hard to believe that any amount of deprivation and disillusionment would have given her Ginzburg's gift for narrative. Kollontai wrote boilerplate even on the few occasions when she felt free to speak. Besides, she already had the disillusion: She ­didn't have to be locked up to have that. A single week in the company of the regime's ­high-­ranking thugs and boors would have been enough to tell her that there was no hope. We should not go so far as to greet her every statement with laughter, but we should try to rein in our pity. Pity belongs to the countless thousands of her sisters who were sent to the unisex hell that lay beyond Vorkuta, where they aged 30 years in the first three months unless they were granted the release of a quicker death. Did she know about all that? Of course she did. Women always know.

In the March 1 "History Lesson," David Greenberg originally and incorrectly described Patrice Lumuba as being a leader from Ghana. He was the prime minister of the Congo.

In the March 1 "Press Box," Jack Shafer erred in recounting when and how RM "Auros" Harman became a Slate fanatic. He first encountered it in 1999, during a Microsoft internship. He started reading it regularly in 2000. The piece also misspelled "Quds." And it mistated the origin of his nickname: It evolved from the name of his computer, not his sign-on name.

In the Feb. 28 "Architecture," Witold Rybczynski misspelled the name of architect Deborah Berke.

In the Feb. 25 "Today's Papers," Avi Zenilman misstated the Los Angeles Times' lead story. It concerned citizenship applications from green-card holders, not regular moviegoers' taste in films.

In the Feb. 22 "Summary Judgment," Doree Shafrir misidentified Letters From Iwo Jima as an Oscar nominee for best foreign language film. It was nominated for best picture.

In the Feb. 20 "Jurisprudence," Emily Bazelon mistakenly called the Guttmacher Institute the research arm of Planned Parenthood. The institute has been an independent nonprofit organization since 1977. Planned Parenthood contributes 4 percent of its budget and appoints four of 42 board members.

In the Feb. 12 "Explainer," David Grosz made several misleading or inaccurate statements. He said that all fabrics (including cotton) have a "glass" phase and a "plastic" phase and that they wrinkle at high temperatures. Not all fabrics exhibit this behavior; the wrinkles in cellulose-based materials are caused by moisture, not heat. The original version also misused the word crosslink and misrepresented the role of formaldehyde in the wrinkle-free process.

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.

Tuesday, Feb. 27, 2007

Chatterbox: Wikipedia and "Notability"

Timothy Noah was pleasantly surprised to find his biography on Wikipedia. But recently, one of the site's volunteer editors flagged the article for not meeting Wikipedia's "notability" guidelines. Listen to the segment.

Medical Examiner: HPV Vaccine Policy Becomes Political Issue

Politicians in several states are debating whether to make the HPV vaccine free, or mandatory, for young girls. Human papillomavirus has been linked to cervical cancer. Dr. Sydney Spiesel talks with Alex Chadwick. Listen to the segment.

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

Dear Prudence,

I am 16, and my parents think that it's "cute" and "fun" to have sex in other places in the house besides their bedroom. I'm never home when this occurs, and am mature enough to realize that every couple needs to spice up their life a little now and then. Recently, I found out that my parents had sex on my bed. This was mortifying and horrific for me. Of all the places to do it, they thought it would be interesting to try it on my bed. I haven't even had sex on my bed! They don't see anything wrong with what they've done, but I find it completely disgusting and unnecessary. How can I explain to them that this has scarred me, possibly for the rest of my life?

—Need New Sheets

Dear Need,

Your parents sound as if they think they're starring in an X-rated version of Goldilocks. Since you weren't home when they discovered your bed was "just right," how did you find out? Do they discuss their conjugal adventures over dinner? Or do they make innuendos to each other that you're now old enough to understand? You're right to be disturbed (and it's awful that they've forced you to contemplate the need for sexual variety between middle-aged couples, in particular them). I can't tell from your letter if your parents are just a little bit screwy on this subject and don't realize you know more than they intend, or if they get their jollies from subjecting you to recitations of their intimacy. If it's the former, you must say, "I can't stand hearing references to your sex life, and I need you to stop. I also need you respect the privacy of my bedroom." If it's not the former, or if they don't get it after you talk to them, you have to seek help. Discuss this with a trustworthy relative, a member of your clergy, or a counselor at your school who can intervene on your behalf.

—Prudie

Dear Prudence,

Recently, my girlfriend of six months was using my computer. Later that evening, while looking through some work reports, I discovered that she had viewed some old pictures and letters on my computer that I totally forgot existed. The pictures and letters were from a previous serious romantic relationship, one that I have been very forthright and open about to my current girlfriend. I haven't talked to my ex in years; I forgot I still had these files and the letters and pictures contain nothing illegal or incriminating. However, I feel uncomfortable about my girlfriend finding and viewing them, as they were in a place not easily discoverable, and believe this was an invasion of privacy. I've read your responses to people who have discovered illegal pictures or salacious e-mails to co-workers on a mate's computer. But this is the opposite situation. I want to know if this a big deal, if I should feel uncomfortable about her reading this material, and if I should I discuss with my girlfriend the fact that I know she looked?

—Uncertain

Dear Un,

Yes, this is a big deal; yes, you should feel uncomfortable; and yes, you should tell her you know she snooped. I give a pass to people who innocently look up driving directions on their beloved's computer and their eyes fall upon child pornography or e-mails about co-workers' heaving bosoms. I also believe that probable cause—beloved comes home with lipstick on his collar, or blouses that smell of aftershave—justifies a lap around the laptop (I know, I know—such searches could raise potential legal issues). But your new girlfriend betrayed not only you but herself, revealing her own lack of trust in your relationship. Tell her that after she used your computer, you saw she had entered your long-forgotten file about your previous girlfriend and that she violated your privacy. Then see what she says. She can repair some of the damage by owning up to what she did, apologizing, and promising not to do it again. She might tell you that her previous boyfriend cheated on her, so she's tormented on the subject. That's an excuse but not a justification, and you two must come to an agreement about what's acceptable in this relationship.

—Prudie

Dear Prudie,

I have a dilemma. A guy I knew (but not well) asked me for my résumé, got me hired at the company he works for, and now is basically my supervisor. Along the way, we got to know one another, became close friends, and there is attraction on both sides. We spend every day at work together, and almost every evening. He has told others that he likes and wants to date me but that he's very worried about the work situation. What do I do?

—Wanting Something I Can't Have

Dear Wanting,

Yes, you are in a ticklish situation, but for goodness' sake, if single people can't fall in love with their colleagues, we are doomed as a species. Since he's the supervisor and clearly feels more constrained in making a move, you have to take action. The next evening you're together, tell him that things have become awkward for you at work because you have developed romantic feelings for him. Explain that you know that since he is your supervisor, this presents a problem but you need to know if he shares your feelings. If he says he does, cue the music and fade to a kiss (and when you come up for air, discuss if there is a way he can transfer you to another boss).

—Prudie

Dear Prudence,

How does one grow old gracefully? How does one accept (deal with?) the inevitable decline in abilities? I am grateful for every second of life, but those seconds seem to be passing much too quickly. I recently turned 58. I'm in excellent health and am doing volunteer work in a foreign country. But it seems time has taken its toll: I wear glasses and hearing aids; I'm a little slower than I used to be. I stay physically active, but it seems like I'm more easily winded. Frankly, other things don't function quite as well as they used to. I'm single and feel like I've lost my attractiveness, especially to women under 50. Don't get me wrong, I'm delighted with my life and I am very aware that there are many people my age who are in a much different situation. I only want to know how one adjusts (if there is adjustment to be made) as one gets closer to check-out time. How do I cope with all the changes? Intellectually, I know that it's all a natural part of living. Emotionally, I'm a little in the dark.

—Trying To Age in Style

Dear Trying,

Your check-out might be 30 years from now, so you don't want to spend all that time in the lobby waiting to settle your bill. There's a whole industry catering to bucking up aging boomers, so look into some of their findings. For example, an article in the New York Times last fall cited studies showing that viewing old age as a time of decline and frailty helps push you there. And a recent article in the Wall Street Journal discussed studies that found one's knowledge of a profession or hobby is retained into old age, that vocabulary grows with age, and so can emotional intelligence. Two books that deal with being vigorous and fulfilled in the last part of your life are Successful Aging and Aging Well. It also sounds as if you need a thorough check-up; there may be an organic reason why you're winded and, uh, not functioning so well in some areas. And since you're pushing 60, you'll surely feel more attractive if you pursue women closer to your own age. As for your circumstances, you were able to retire early, travel, and volunteer for something you love. That sounds like a good formula for enjoying the rest of your life.

—Prudie

Dear Troy and Kim,

Oscar-predicting is a movie critic's equivalent of paying taxes. It's dull, you have no idea what you're doing, and you're probably screwing it up royally, but once a year you have to grit your teeth and get through it. (Watching the ceremony, on the other hand, is always an unexpected kick, like getting your tax refund in the mail.) To get our conversation going, I'll stake my bet in a few of the major categories:

Best actress: Helen Mirren. This is not a prediction but a statement of simple orthodoxy, like "Credo in unum Deum …". For anyone else to win it would be one of the biggest Oscar upsets in memory and also, for what it's worth, unfair. Meryl Streep's monstrous fashion editor in The Devil Wears Prada is really more of a supporting role. Judi Dench does a great job with a poorly written character in Notes on a Scandal. Penélope Cruz, though she's divine in Volver, still has to convince American audiences she can act after a string of lousy English-language performances. Kate Winslet is an actress to whom I maintain a personal shrine, and she's been shut out five times already, but she has her whole career ahead of her to win an Oscar. Mirren has been earning hers for 25 years.

Best actor: I was at a press round table—one of those awkward celebrity junket sessions held in corporate boardrooms—with Samuel L. Jackson this week, and someone asked him for his Oscar predictions. He tossed out the two safest possible bets as he left the room: Helen Mirren and Forest Whitaker. Peter O'Toole is starting to emerge as a dark horse in this category—remember the academy's perennial pro-old-guy stance—but Sam Jackson is far too righteous to contradict, so I'm going with Whitaker.

Best director: If Martin Scorsese doesn't win this award at long bloody last, he might as well leave the Kodak Theatre in sackcloth and ashes, holding a sign that reads "The End Is Nigh." But it could happen. Academy voters do love their Clint Eastwood, and Letters From Iwo Jima has more substance and gravitas than The Departed, which, for all its graphic violence, plays in retrospect like a giddy genre romp.

Best picture: In a very split field—almost any of the five nominees could plausibly take the prize, though The Queen would be a long shot—I'd vote for The Departed or Little Miss Sunshine. (I love the image of these two slugging it out in some allegorical boxing ring: Jack Nicholson with his purple dildo vs. Abigail Breslin in her glasses and Walkman headphones.) Babel is starting to creep up as a favorite on the big Oscar blogs, but I think people are too starkly divided on that movie (cf. the brutal smackdown Wesley Morris gave me when I defended it in this year's "Movie Club.")

Best supporting actress: Either Jennifer Hudson for Dreamgirls or Abigail Breslin for Little Miss Sunshine. When you get right down to it, academy voters' hearts are made of gingerbread and moonbeams, and they'll want to see one of these two charming young women re-enact the Cinderella stories their characters got to live out on-screen.

Best supporting actor: Eddie Murphy for Dreamgirls. It would be really cool if it were Jackie Earle Haley for Little Children or Alan Arkin for Little Miss Sunshine, but child molesters and junkie grandpas aren't as dear to the academy's heart as martyred pop stars.

Best documentary: An Inconvenient Truth. This is a little unfortunate, given that it's the only doc in the category that doesn't need the word-of-mouth boost at the box office. But wouldn't it be a blast to see Al Gore step up and accept that award while the Hollywood establishment solemnly applauded the planet? Yay, globe! Sorry about that whole warming thing.

Kim, from inside the velvet rope in Los Angeles, do things look wildly different than this? And Troy, weren't you preparing a rant about Oscar-on-Oprah, and how the whole notion of awards season is becoming obsolete? Lay it on me.

Moonbeams, etc.,

Dana

Dana, Kim:

Let me start by asking Dana to hold on a second: You're saying that the Oscars aren't over yet? Does it not seem that Jennifer Hudson has already swanned into Morton's with the hardware in hand and a hug for Graydon? That E!'s leering "Glam Cam" has already checked out everything with a pulse and a purse—including, grossly, Abigail Breslin? Aren't you sick of seeing Helen Mirren? I think Helen Mirren is the best thing to happen to film acting since the projector, and yet I'm sick of seeing Helen Mirren. Does anyone else feel that they've been inoculated against Oscar fever? For your consideration: The Academy Awards have jumped the shark.

For starters, the awards season is loud, hectic, and numbing, something like a Brett Ratner film. Mirren, Whitaker, and Hudson have been the front-runners since critics starting doling out prizes in December, and each seems to have lapped the rest of the field. They're all deserving, but where's the suspense and the fun? There's no plausible underdog to root for. The buzz has turned into a drone.

Though this year's race for best picture seems to be more competitive, to follow it even at a distance is to catch a whiff of a rancid pool. Stephen Rodrick's Los Angeles magazine story about Oscar campaigning in the blog age—it's in the issue with Helen Mirren on the cover—was so fine it inspired mild nausea. Do you have a favorite passage? Mine's the one in which Rodrick calls up Jeffrey Wells, the proprietor of Hollywood-Elsewhere.com: "As the phone rang, I glanced at his Web site, which featured a 'for your consideration' ad for Little Miss Sunshine. We were both in New York. 'I'm in Williamsburg, staying at Michael Arndt's house,' Wells told me. 'You know, the screenwriter for Little Miss Sunshine.' "

I'm picking Little Miss Sunshine to walk away with the best picture prize. It won at the Producers Guild Awards, and it won the SAG Award for outstanding performance by a cast, and I loved how the Weinstein-caliber ferocity of its campaign came across in a January Entertainment Weekly piece. The essay laments how the new, compressed Oscar-season schedule has limited the opportunities for dark horses to emerge and generally made the whole affair a bit more horrible. "This year, Fox Searchlight has done everything but trademark the color yellow in its attempt to drive the Little Miss Sunshine bus all the way to the Kodak Theatre," Mark Harris, a former boss of mine, writes. "One of the season's ripest ironies may be the company's mammoth effort to secure prizes for a movie that makes such acute fun of the American obsession with winning." Did you read it? Do you agree? It's in the issue with Helen Mirren on the cover.

Meanwhile, with the audience for movies more fragmented than ever, the academy is promoting not the ceremony itself but the movie-love that the ceremony is itself supposed to promote. Last night on ABC, Oprah lent her name and her visage to an Oscars special featuring six actors, none of whom are in contention. And you can't have missed the slew of commercials, print ads, billboards, and such that quote lines from Oscar-nominated movies, as if people need to be reminded of the romance and community of filmgoing, which maybe they do.

Kim, you're in L.A.: Have you noticed that the bus shelter right in front of the academy's headquarters on Wilshire Boulevard bears one such ad? And that it features Norma Desmond's delusional declaration of readiness to Mr. DeMille? Is there an omen in that? Is Oscar a faded idol out of step with the times and off his rocker? If so, what does it mean for all those wonderful people out there in the dark?

Questioningly,

Troy

Dear Dana and Troy,

Troy: I agree with much of what you have to say, though I don't know that the Academy Awards have jumped the shark. Maybe movies have jumped the shark, for the most part, except for the foreign ones.

Yes, it is a dull year and you correctly recite all those choices that have seemed like sure things for much too long. (No, Dana, I don't believe that cute child from Little Miss Sunshine can win; she must settle for having been nominated, which isn't bad at her age. Winning hasn't done much for many child actors, far as I can tell. And Troy, there are a couple of plausible underdogs and their names are Peter O'Toole and Alan Arkin. Does this make for suspense or fun? Eh.)

Not all the movies are bad, of course. Some are good. Certainly I have my couple of favorites. But none rises to the level of "best picture."

If there's anything that Hollywood seems to be hoping for right now, it's that this unexciting Oscar event will distract from the unseemly Hillary vs. Obama war. "Thank God for the Academy Awards," sighed one political operative. Of course, the brouhaha will likely provide fodder for the awards writers. As Bruce Vilanch told me recently, Iwo Jima jokes are thin on the ground.

My hope is that Al Gore, after winning for An Inconvenient Truth, will get to his feet and declare that while global warming is a serious threat, the Democrats may be facing a more imminent meltdown unless certain petulant billionaires button their lips. "Can't we all just get along?" he might ask.

Just as an aside, I had a moment of confusion when Maureen Dowd riffed, "Who can pay attention to the Oscar battle between 'The Queen' and 'Dreamgirls' when you've got a political battle between a Queen and a Dreamboy?" Not to be politically incorrect, but you kind of have to read that one twice, don't you?

As for the Oscar show, it'll get better when the choices are more interesting. I believe these things are cyclical. I hope so.

Yours,

Kim

Dear Troy and Kim,

Last night's Oscars harked back to the ceremony's origins: It felt like an industry dinner, provincial and sedate. The product the guests spend the rest of the year selling is entertainment (or glamour, or catharsis, or whatever it is the movies are supposed to provide), but it could just as easily have been aluminum siding or fiberglass insulation. From the very mild ribbing of Ellen DeGeneres' opening monologue—she didn't roast celebrities so much as poach them gently in a white-wine sauce—to that final shower of gold confetti while the orchestra played "Hooray for Hollywood!", an atmosphere of cozy bonhomie and cautious politeness held sway. There was none of the uncomfortable East Coast edge introduced by Jon Stewart's presence as host last year, and DeGeneres hewed to the academy's rumored request to keep politics out of her patter.

The upsets were so rare and so minor—Alan Arkin rather than Eddie Murphy for best supporting actor, the cinematography award to Pan's Labyrinth rather than Children of Men—that they elicited "hmms" rather than gasps. And the whole affair unfolded with an unapologetic, magisterial slowness, like a three-day-long wedding in Rajasthan. Here are few moments plucked from the near four-hour blur:

• The "pity the clown" number performed by Will Ferrell, Jack Black, and John C. Reilly near the top of the show. It felt just the way a good industry-dinner skit should, hastily written and scantily rehearsed, but loose and funny (I loved when they rhymed "Ralph Nader" with "James Spader," and when Reilly suddenly stood up in the audience and burst into a credible musical-comedy tenor.)
• The periodic vignettes in which the dance troupe Pilobolus tumbled into view behind a white screen to form their bodies into silhouettes representing various nominated films (and some non-nominated ones: Snakes on a Plane?). To me, these were the best part of the ceremony, and I strenuously reject any comparison with the Debbie Allen-choreographed dance sequences of yore. Piling up on top of other people and twisting your bodies into the shape of a Volkswagen bus (Little Miss Sunshine) or a row of penguins (Happy Feet) is a perfectly legitimate artistic endeavor that should have an awards show of its own.
• The distracting ubiquity of the phrase, "Well, do ya, punk?" among the iconic movie quotes that drifted by in the graphic that ran underneath each clip from a nominated film. Those words, of course, were uttered by Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry as a follow-up question to his classic thug-menacing query, "Do you feel lucky?" Last night, it was hard not to imagine the question as being directed by Clint toward Martin Scorsese, his main competition for the best director Oscar. Marty did feel lucky last night; you could tell from his genial response to DeGeneres' goofing in the aisles, his tears when his lifelong collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker won the editing prize, and the bear hug he gave an inexplicably bald Jack Nicholson after finally landing his directing prize. I have no particular love for The Departed, but I'm not made of stone. It would have been too much to see those Groucho Marx eyebrows knitted together in chagrin as Clint strode past them to the podium once more.
• The choir of sound-effects artists delivering an astonishing medley of birdsong, chariot races, machine guns, steam trains—all reproduced using only the human voice. This idea had to have come from the same arty minimalist who booked Pilobolus for the silhouettes.
• Celine Dion, Our Lady of the Prominent Neck Tendons, performing the world premiere of a new Ennio Morricone song with her usual bizarre enunciation: " I knee-uw I lee-oved yee-ou/ Before I knee-uw yee-ou …" Every time I see Celine, I'm struck by how much, in appearance and behavior, she resembles a devotional image of a medieval saint, one of those early Christian martyrs bearing her own eyes on a platter.
• Jennifer Hudson going back and thanking God again a second time in the middle of her list of thank-ees: "I'd like to thank the Academy … definitely have to thank God, I guess, again. ... " You couldn't help but picture the Almighty as a disgruntled agent, watching the show from one of the B-seats in the back.
• Milena Canonero, costume designer for Marie Antoinette, admitting that she always wants to "get this doll" as she brandished her statuette. Sofia Coppola's next movie should be a spoof of awards season titled Get This Doll.
• Helen Mirren bringing her pocketbook up on stage with her, awkwardly clutched under her left arm as she wielded Old Goldy in her right. At first I thought, sweetie, let Taylor Hackford hold it for you—that's what less-talented-than-you director husbands are for! What are you going to need up there, your keys? A mint? And then I realized: She's keeping the bag as a tribute to Elizabeth II, who she thanked in her speech for never wavering from "her dignity, her sense of duty, and her hairstyle." Mirren has spent her career thinking about the details, perfecting the language of gestures and props—there's no way she carried that purse up there by mistake.

Troy, Kim: How did it look from your seats?

Dana

Dear Dana, dear Kim:

Provincial, check. Sedate, you got it. I'd be tempted to go so far as snoozy, but there were enough moments to get the blood flowing: Beyoncé was fierce, as was Seinfeld. Who couldn't love the plum-flavored relish Mirren brought to the "glorious" in … Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan? And the crowd I watched the Oscars with much enjoyed the Pilobolus act—especially the pet pug in attendance, which would reliably snort over to the TV and paw at the set.

Other innovations were less successful. Why show off the nominees for costume design in those corny tableaux vivants? Does the fault lie with the casting director or the cinematographer for making the people modeling the Dreamgirls togs look like drag queens? Why did we have to wait so long for the first acting prize? And why did Alan Arkin, accepting it, perform at a level scarcely satisfactory at a middle-school graduation ceremony? (One also recoiled a bit at the shot of Arkin's Oscar, which, like a Dreamgirls sound mixer before him, he set to rest on the floor. It provided a frisson of sacrilege while enduring his delivery.) The first half of the broadcast was unforgivably slow. Melissa Etheridge spoke for many of us when performing her Oscar-winning song in the very calm wake of James Taylor's number: "I need to wake up now."

I hope that no one holds it against DeGeneres, who, after her tentative first few lines, emerged as an ideal host. Aiming her barbs at the business of show rather than at any of the particular knights, maidens, and ogres in the woods of Holly, she was sly and relaxed and quietly unpredictable, with some underminer style and a resounding zing of Misanthropy Lite. Admire the polish on her line about sitting at home with "half a box of Chardonnay." Check out the cozy loathing in her introduction of Little Miss Breslin and Young Master Smith: "People say that children are our future, but this year we've seen that they're also our competition." Wonder all week long at the rich subtext of her joke that, with this year's many nominees from overseas, it was mostly the seat-fillers who represented the U.S.A. in the audience: "No one can fill a seat like an American, huh?" The academy ought to give her a five-year deal.

The pity-the-clown routine was very fine, agreed. Reilly, crooning about being involved with "Boogie and Talladega Nights," is an early contender for the Zeugma of the Year Award. The look on Peter O'Toole's face as Jack Black talked smack about him—a grin of genial obliviousness—was priceless. Indeed, the director did fine work capturing O'Toole last night—his avuncular smile for Jennifer Hudson, his low simmer when Reese Witherspoon did not read his name. He had wanted it bad, and you could see him summoning his composure.

We could have used more Clooney. Instead, we got Al Gore, who gave perhaps his loosest performance in a decade. A question about etiquette and craft: After the joke about the orchestra playing him off as he was about to announce his candidacy, could the orchestra have, in fact, played him off if his acceptance speech went on too long?

So, perhaps I jumped the gun in suggesting that the Academy Awards have gotten perilously desperate—but the Oscars are definitely shifting shape, no? The modern dance, the postmodern comedy, the way DeGeneres turned ceremony itself into something of a running joke—it felt contemporary, which is saying something. And there was philosophical Whitaker and bouncing Scorsese to put a lump in the throat and keep hope alive.

I'd say more, but as you know from Nancy Meyers' writers-on-film montage—which went heavy on Woody Allen tsuris, Stephen King misery, and N. Kidman-as-V. Woolf getting set to head down to the river—writing is awful.

Until next year,

Troy

Troy: You are nicer than I am, I think. While I quite liked Ellen—how can one not quite like Ellen?—the show was edge-free, bland. I realize it's meant to be a tribute to movies, but what about a little spicy sauce? The week in which David Geffen kicked off the Obama vs. Hillary war and not a murmur about it on the Oscar telecast. It was a topic that morning on Face the Nation and Meet the Press but on the Oscar show, nada. Can't imagine Billy Crystal, much less Jon Stewart, would let that gift go unwrapped. (Imagine the Al Gore reaction shots!)

Ellen's little bits about slipping a script to Scorsese and getting Spielberg to take her picture with Clint Eastwood were amusing but hardly water-cooler fodder. Nothing was. That's a problem—a really big problem.

I am nicer than you about Alan Arkin. There were more disappointing speeches (Scorsese), but great actors get to mutter for 45 seconds.

I may be nicer than you about Peter O'Toole. That look on his face smote me.

Those who said Norbit didn't hurt Eddie Murphy must rethink. Also, it would have helped if he had behaved in a more becoming manner at any time during the season. Yes, it's about the performances, but when it comes to campaigning, the academy definitely likes the sauce and they like it sweet.

Best presence overall: the kid from Little Miss Sunshine. She could give lessons in dignity.

The shadow-mimes were fun at first but as things dragged on, it seemed that having them do a sequence of the five nominees right at the top would have been wise.

On a Hollywood politics note, don't think I heard Graham King mention Brad Grey in that thank-you speech when he accepted for best picture. After Grey's quixotic campaign to be recognized as a producer, that omission must have hurt. Maybe King gave him a shout-out on the "thank-you cam."

Here are a few ideas about what needs to happen:

• Sound awards: out—into the technical presentation. Sorry, but they need to go.
• Film montages: out unless they are brilliant and serve a discernable purpose. What was that thing from Michael Mann? Any guesses?
• Put more creative energy into staging the songs, and drop almost all other gimmicks. Make it stop.
• Making Sid Ganis talk fast was a fine idea. This show desperately needs to be streamlined.

The idea of pushing back all acting awards until later in the show might have been a reasonable gamble, but it didn't pay off. The audience needs a little meat early in the proceedings to keep from dozing off.

So, you are much nicer than I am about the show overall. What it lacked most of all—and this is not its fault—was a movie that really excited audiences. People liked The Departed as entertainment, but who loved it? This year, the best picture prize seemed like a tribute vote, which made it about as thrilling as the bestowing of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.

Until next time,

Kim

Last fall, in the run-up to the midterm elections, Republicans and Democrats engaged in a heated debate about the politics and ethics of stem-cell research. In the midst of these momentous deliberations, America relied on CNN to ask the really important question: "What would Alex P. Keaton do?"

The question was prompted by a TV ad in which Michael J. Fox, who suffers from Parkinson's disease, swayed uncomfortably from side to side while speaking directly to the camera about the need for research. The ad became a national story after Rush Limbaugh declared that Fox was exaggerating his condition, either acting or off his meds. In the ensuing controversy, Fox became a hero to the left—ironically, many proclaimed, since he began his career as a pop-culture role model for the right. From 1982-89, he played Alex P. Keaton, a briefcase-wielding teenage Republican, on Family Ties, a popular NBC sitcom. As Alex, Fox was rakishly clean-cut—strange as that may sound—and he made conservatism seem at once upstanding and rebellious. Whatever edge the fairly conventional show had came from the conflict between Alex and his ex-hippie parents, Steven and Elyse, and their two (much less interesting) daughters: Mallory, ditzy and boy-crazed, and Jennifer, a tomboy.

The answer to CNN's question eventually showed up on YouTube, where one devoted fan posted nine minutes of a "very special epsiode" that first aired in 1987 (winning two Emmies, and helping Fox win one as well). About four minutes into the clip, an off-screen psychologist asks Alex—who is struggling with the death of a young friend (and is wearing, as always, a shirt and tie)—if he believes in God. "The analytical side of me says no," he replies. "On a straight cost-efficiency basis, you can't prove it. There's no annual report. There's no pictures of the board of directors. I mean recent ones." For Alex P. Keaton, being a Republican was not a theological proposition, but an economic one—if he objected to federal funding for stem-cell research, it would have been the federal funding he opposed, not the research.

In the episode that first nudged Fox toward stardom, Alex, a high-school senior, meets a college girl named Stephanie (played by Amy Steel) who is writing her thesis on Milton Friedman—Alex's favorite economist. She's surprised to learn that Alex has a favorite economist, but when he tells her that "high interest rates are primarily a psychological phenomenon" and that "the banks just don't have enough confidence in the economy to take the risk of lowering them," he wins her over with his earnest enthusiasm. Fox punctuates the exchange with his familiar, self-deprecating smirks, deflating any hint of pretension without seeming insincere. During the second commercial break, Alex loses his virginity. By the end of the episode, he's discovered that rushing into things was a mistake: Stephanie breaks his heart, and he learns a valuable life lesson.

That episode, "Summer of '82," was the fourth in the show's first season, now available on DVD as a bare-bones box set with no extras—not even so much as a booklet. (Its release date was finally announced, after two years of delays, just after the stem-cell brouhaha.) "Summer of '82" got a big response and convinced the show's producers to re-center the series around Alex. Ex-hippie and longtime TV writer and producer Gary David Goldberg had originally intended the show—drawn largely, he said, from his own life—as a showcase for Meredith Baxter-Birney and Michael Gross, who played the parents. The original opening credits feature a long montage of Gross and Baxter-Birney as young hippies, followed by just a few seconds of the kids.

That initial idea for the show, "hip parents, square kids," suggests the self-regard baby boomers are famous for—and, indeed, in the show's very first scene, Steven and Elyse Keaton literally regard themselves, subjecting the family to a slide show of their march on Washington, before the kids were born. The Keaton children mock their parents ("What were you protesting," Alex asks, "good grooming?"), but the show's attitude toward their hippie past still seems unquestionably reverent. In "No Nukes Is Good Nukes," Steven and Elyse participate in a rally improbably scheduled on Thanksgiving. They're arrested and then refuse to sign a pledge that, even more improbably, would free them from jail so long as they never again protest nuclear arms. The episode ends, of course, with the whole Keaton family lovingly enjoying a jailhouse Thanksgiving, all having learned a valuable life lesson.

Even after the show shifted its focus to Alex, it trapped him in scenarios seemingly contrived to refute his free-market-über alles worldview. When we meet Alex's hero—his uncle Ned, a rising young executive memorably played by Tom Hanks in a two-part episode—he is on the run for embezzling $4.5 million. (Hanks used Family Ties to come out as a dramatic actor, reprising the role the following season in another "very special episode": Uncle Ned had become an alcoholic.) And when Alex leaves his job at a mom-and-pop grocery for a big-box store offering higher pay and possible advancement, he finds himself in charge of cat toys and referred to only as "junior stockboy No. 28." Alex returns to his old job, having learned—well, you know.

And yet Alex P. Keaton became a hero to conservatives anyway. Ronald Reagan said Family Ties was his favorite show and reportedly offered to appear in an episode. Even today, young Republicans cite Fox's character as an early role model. When California Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman's 25-year-old opponent in the last election was asked why he joined the Republican Party, he explained: "It started with Michael J. Fox on Family Ties." And Tucker Carlson has built an entire career by channeling the character.

How did this happen? Partly, no doubt, it was the sheer absence, before Family Ties, of explicitly conservative young people on network television. And much of the credit must go to Fox himself, whose specialty as an actor was playing the smug, arrogant brat that you like in spite of yourself (see also Back to the Future, The Secret of My Success, The Hard Way, etc.). It seems unlikely that, say, Andrew McCarthy could have exuded such likable sincerity while explaining that "God wants me" to "make a lot of money … because if he didn't, he wouldn't have made me so smart," as Alex tells that off-screen psychologist after his friend has died. (Even Matthew Broderick, the producers' original choice for the role, might not have pulled this off.)

Still, it's tempting to conclude that Keaton's near-iconic status requires more explanation. Last summer in the New Republic, Rick Perlstein, the left-leaning author of a book on Barry Goldwater, argued that, even now, after years of Republican rule, the "culture of conservatives still insists that it is being hemmed in on every side." Having been "shaped in another era [the mid-1960s], one in which conservatives felt marginal and beleaguered," conservative culture—Perlstein had in mind everything from "Goldwater kitsch" to Fox News—still feeds on this antagonism, reflecting a sense that righteousness is always at odds with the decadent mainstream.

Alex P. Keaton fits this vision perfectly. Throughout the show's run, he was on his own: His parents were liberal, his sister was a ditz, and his one conservative ally, Uncle Ned, was a fugitive and then a drunk. Still, he persevered. If those 2006 midterms in which Fox memorably intervened were the harbinger of a major Democratic resurgence, then these long-delayed DVDs might be arriving at just the right time.

A female suicide bomber detonated a vest filled with explosives at a university in Baghdad Sunday, killing more than 40 people. If male martyrs can expect to find 72 virgin maidens in paradise when they die, what rewards can female suicide bombers expect?

Their husbands. The Quran itself describes little about the specifics of the afterlife, but it does note that believers will find huris, or maidens "of modest gaze, whom neither man nor jinni will have touched before them." (Every believer can end up in heaven; martyrs just get there faster.) Respected commentator Al-Tirmidhi said in a hadith that every man will have six dozen huris in heaven, but very few commentators enumerated the rewards for women. Ninth-century scholar Al-Tabarani did argue that women will be reunited with their husbands in the next world, and those who had multiple husbands can pick the best one to be their eternal spouse. (Other commentators added that a woman who never married can marry any man she wants in paradise.)

From the 9^th through the 12^th centuries, Muslim scholars described paradise as a place of sensual delights—for men. They debated whether men remained married to their wives in heaven, whether they could have sex with the virgins, and whether the heavenly virgins had anuses. (Some said there was no need for elimination in the afterlife.) There was even disagreement on the number of virgins assigned to each man. While Al-Tirmidhi said it was 72, Mulla Ali Qari, an 11^th_-century imam, counted 70 virgins and two human wives. Imam Al-Bayhaqi was more generous, granting men 500 wives, 4,000 virgins, and 8,000 previously married women. The meaning of the word hur is also open to interpretation, since it reads as "white raisins" when translated as a Syriac rather than Arabic word.

Women may not get these particular perks, but religious commentaries argue that paradise will make them beautiful, happy, and without jealousy. The fact that they fasted and worshipped Allah during their earthly lives will also make them superior to the virgins, who only exist in heaven. Some modern clerics argue that in heaven, husbands never grow bored of their wives, even with so many huris around. That may explain why some would-be female suicide bombers have spoken of becoming "chief of the 72 virgins, the fairest of the fair."

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

Explainer thanks Sherry Lowrance of the University of Georgia and Christoph Reuter of Stern magazine.

Tuesday's stock market crash drove the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 416 points in the steepest one-day decline since Sept. 11, 2001. At the end of the day, the New York Times reported, the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange "erupted with hearty boos." Wait, don't brokers make money whether or not the market does well?

Yes, but they certainly have a stake in its success. Brokers do earn money from commissions regardless of the market's performance. (Many traders, on the other hand, are just playing the market for themselves.) So while Tuesday's crash was bad news for anyone investing money in the market, the huge volume of transactions—more than 2.4 billion shares were traded Tuesday, compared with an average of about 1.8 billion—presumably meant brokers were making more money than usual just by executing trades.

Then why all the booing? Apparently it was the last day of one of the exchange's executive vice presidents, Anne Allen, and some of the people on the floor were giving her a ribbing. (We hear there was applause as well.) That said, traders might have booed because of a glitch in the Dow Jones computer system that created a minor panic in the middle of the day.

But some brokers may have had a good reason to boo, especially those working as "market makers." Instead of matching buyers with sellers immediately, market makers sometimes buy stocks with the intent of selling them back later, be it in a few minutes or a few weeks. If, at the end of the day, a broker is "net long"—or, has bought more stocks than he sold—then a 3 percent drop in the market would be painful. Not to mention, many brokers choose to invest in the markets, making the crash as agonizing for them as for anyone else.

Bonus Explainer: After the Dow Jones' initial drop Tuesday afternoon, the New York Stock Exchange implemented "trading curbs." What are those? Also called "circuit breakers," these are restrictions designed to keep people from trading large blocks of shares that might further destabilize the market. Curbs go into effect whenever the exchange's composite index rises or sinks 150 points beyond the previous day's closing price. During that time, "program trades"—defined by the NYSE as "the purchase or sale of 15 or more stocks having a total market value of $1 million or more"—are off limits. (You'll also see a little "Curbs In" icon at the bottom of the screen on CNBC.) The NYSE started imposing curbs after the "Black Monday" stock market crash of 1987, which many people blamed on program trading.

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

The shortest month of the year seems to have gone by in a flash. Why does February have only 28 days?

It's the Romans' fault. Our modern calendar is loosely based on their old, confusing one. Though records on the Roman calendar are sparse and sketchy, legend has it that Romulus, the first king of Rome, devised a 10-month lunar calendar that began at the spring equinox in March and ended with December. It is unclear whether there were any official months between December and March, but it's likely they were left off because the wintertime wasn't important for the harvest.

The second king of Rome, Numa Pompilius, decided to make the calendar more accurate by syncing it up with the actual lunar year—which is about 354 days long. Numa tacked on two months—January and February—after December to account for the new days.

The new months each had 28 days. But that didn't sit well with Numa because even numbers were considered bad luck at the time. So, he added a day on to January, giving the year an odd-numbered 355 days. No one knows why February was left with 28 and remained an unlucky month. It may be related to the fact that Romans honored the dead and performed rites of purification in February. (The word februare means "to purify" in the dialect of the ancient Sabine tribe.)

The 355-day calendar couldn't stay in sync with the seasons because it didn't account for the amount of time it took for the Earth to orbit the sun. So, an extra "intercalary" month of 27 days was inserted after February 23 every couple of years or so to even things out. The pontiffs who were in charge of calendar upkeep didn't always add the extra month on schedule. (Some officials took advantage of the system to extend their time in office, for example.)

In around 45 B.C., Julius Caesar commissioned an expert to put aside the lunar origins of the Roman calendar and make it sun-based, like the Egyptian one. Caesar added 10 days to the calendar year and an extra day in February every four years. (The leap-year day was inserted after the 23^rd, the same time as the old intercalary month.) Now, the year averaged out to 365.25 days, very close to the actual average length of a year: 365.2425 days (and even that varies).

Some have speculated that Caesar added a day to February when he reformed the calendar—making it 29 days long. The story goes that when the Senate renamed the month of Sextilis to honor the emperor Augustus, that day was subtracted from February and added to August in order to make it equal in number to July—the month named for Caesar. But this theory is now believed to be bunk; it's likely that Julius never even added a day to February.

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

Julia: Hello, Amanda. Thanks for letting me enlist you—Slate fashion writer and astute sartorial critic—to dissect the night's frocks. (And tuxes.) Award-fashion criticism is ubiquitous these days, but (as I noted in this piece) something seems to be amiss on the red carpet. Us Weekly's snippily dim Fashion Police, the certifiable Joan Rivers, the delightful Go Fug Yourself girls—all profess to be on the hunt for great style. But as celebrity dresses attract more scrutiny, stars' fashion choices seem increasingly blah.

Amanda: Hi, Julia. There is a sameness to Oscar dresses. It's the stylist problem—most of the actresses hire them. No one wants to end up on the worst-dressed list. Commentators (particularly the television sort) do not suffer risk-taking gladly.

Julia: Perhaps we should judge celebrity fashion the way they judge diving or gymnastics: with one score for execution, and another for degree of difficulty. Tonight Kate Winslet, for example, would have done well on the former scale, but not the latter.

Amanda: She looked beautiful, but after the Golden Globes I felt weary of all the Grecian-goddess dresses—the sashes, the draping, the bias cuts. I usually love the simplicity and elegance of dresses like these, but there was such a proliferation of them. Tom Ford supposedly once said that the goddess look for women is like the blue blazer for men. After this awards season, I agree with him.

Julia: What saves it is the color—that green is very unusual.

Amanda: Sea-foam? Mint-chocolate chip? In any case, daring.

Julia: Did you see Nicole Kidman's monstrosity?

Amanda: The bow! I didn't like it. And it's even worse that the dress was in red—she looked like a Christmas present. I also wasn't a fan of Anne Hathaway's bow; it was matronly.

Julia: What did you think of Penélope Cruz's dress?

Amanda: I like that she wore something that had some volume at the bottom. I liked the blush color on her olive skin. I like that she kept the jewelry simple. And I'm glad it wasn't Grecian.

Julia: But the texture of Cruz's skirt looked like Snuffleupagus' coat! Of course, perhaps it's hypocritical to complain about the sameness of Oscar dresses and then step on unexpected twists like Cruz's skirt or Nicole Kidman's bow.

Amanda: But I think it's possible to look different without choosing a bow that looks like it has its own heartbeat. Take Helen Mirren. What a gorgeous dress. She knows how to dress for her body. The ruched, nipped-in waist, the décolleté chest—she looked ravishing.

Julia: I loved the shape. Didn't love the color.

Amanda: I do like nude tones. For dresses, that is, not red-carpet makeup. Nude is certainly the color of the moment, no?

Julia: I think flesh-toned dresses have been around for a few years now. It's an interesting choice because they don't seem designed for the camera.

Amanda: They have been around: Naomi Watts wore one last year. Gwyneth Paltrow wore a pale Stella McCartney gown to the Golden Globes. And these dresses are not telegenic at all—they wash people out. But I think I'd like them in person. I suppose I'm making that allowance in my mind. What did you think of Maggie Gyllenhaal? I love blue and black together; it's an unexpected combo, and it almost always works.

Julia: What did she have in her hair? The Fug girls are always ragging on her for not having "done" hair, but I like that she usually looks as though she's done it herself. Was she wearing feathers, though?

Amanda: I couldn't tell. I don't mind undone hair at all. But there's a line. And I draw it at Cameron Diaz.

Julia: I love blue and black—that's what Portia de Rossi was wearing too, and Reese Witherspoon's purple-and-black gown had a similar feel. Like several women tonight—Kate Winslet, Cate Blanchett—Ms. Gyllenhaal was wearing a one-shouldered number.

Amanda: I think she wore it well. The bust fit, the sash wasn't gaping or bagging. Do you think asymmetrical dresses like these play well on television?

Julia: I have a theory about the asymmetrical dress: It's a way of playing it safe that doesn't seem too safe. It's shorthand for "interesting," "high-fashion," "offbeat." When in fact it's just as conservative as a strapless sheath.

Amanda: It's the fashion equivalent of bungee jumping, as opposed to sky diving? I think there's truth to your theory. Now, Cate Blanchett's asymmetry was an asymmetry that worked.

Julia: She looked smashing. That dress looked painted-on and yet still classy. She would look classy in a Hooters waitress uniform.

Amanda: Stunning. I loved all the visual interest—the beading—at the bottom. She could make those orange shorts look regal. What about Jessica Biel? The commentators seemed to think her great butt gives her sartorial carte blanche. But I didn't like the color of her dress. Nor the belt. What did you think?

Julia: I liked it. That color looks great on camera. It fit well, and I also liked how it played against type. Biel has the air of a floozy, and so it was appealing to see her channel Audrey Hepburn with that silhouette. What did you think of Rachel Weisz?

Amanda: Another bow! This time bejeweled. Was there a bow that worked?

Julia: I didn't see one.

Amanda: I think the jewelry was the biggest mistake there. What was that on her neck? A pineapple? A scorpion? A good rule of thumb: If your dress is bejeweled you shouldn't add more jewelry. She should have followed the Diana Vreeland theory of dressing and removed one thing before she left the house.

Julia: It must be so tempting to wear it all.

Amanda: I know! If someone offered me a 10-carat necklace I might just have to wear it, jeweled dress be damned. Let's talk about the men for a minute. When did we start seeing long-tied "tuxes"?

Julia: My mom just called and declared the bow-tie dead. She misses it.

Amanda: The bow-tie is already worn so infrequently. Why do away with it? The long black ties remind me of the ties junior high boys wore in the '80s, along with Girbaud pants and a big splash of Drakkar Noir.

Julia: I suppose men feel stuffy in bow ties. I'm not a fan of the shiny long black ties, but Gael Garcia Bernal had a very trim suit and skinny tie that looked mod and stylish.

Amanda: Still, why not be stuffy one night a year?

Julia: What did you think of Cameron Diaz's dress?

Amanda: Much better than the Valentino she wore to the Golden Globes—I thought she looked scary, like Miss Havisham. I liked the way this one was cut at the collar. But I do think the bottom needed a straighter hem.

Julia: Yes, exactly. The hem was very coquetteish and swannish and glam, and the neck was more severe.

Amanda: The neck was more edgy and '80s. It was like she sewed together the top and bottom halves of two different dresses.

Julia: Still, there was an experimental quality about it that I admire.

Amanda: Yes, the best-dressed to me generally means the wearer has taken some risk.

Julia: When I wrote that piece on how Oscar fashion got so boring, I discovered that there really was no red-carpet culture until the early '90s, when designers began vying for stars' attention. Then the critics and stylists piled on, and now there is hell to pay for a single misstep, so people don't take as many risks.

Amanda: You're right about the evolution of red-carpet culture. In the '60s, Julie Christie wore a gold-lame pantsuit. Can you remember anyone in the last 10 years wearing pants?

Julia: It is amazing how the Oscars have changed. It used to be that people would practice what they'd say; now they imagine what they'd wear.

Amanda: It's true that the dress has trumped the speech as the pièce de résistance of the evening. But don't you think—and I know it's hard to remember, because we were just kids—the speeches, too, used to seem less practiced? Both the clothes and the speeches seem much more conservative and formal. One might say that the artifice of the event has become more important. I read, for instance, that when Julie Andrews accepted the best director award for Robert Wise, Shirley MacLaine said to her, as she arrived at the podium, "Great dress—I love your dress!" No one would ever say that now. Even though we all know that's what's it all about.

Julia: I wish they would!

Amanda: What did you make of the award for best costume design?

Julia: Yet another period piece: Marie Antoinette. What a surprise. Were you rooting for The Devil Wears Prada? You defended its costumes in a piece for Slate.

Amanda: Not especially. I didn't much like the costumes, to tell you the truth. But, as I wrote, I thought that Patricia Field, the costume designer, got them right. She had to telegraph the fashion world to a nonfashion audience, and a lot of subtly and ingeniously cut Marni and Chloe wouldn't have conveyed that.

Julia: I was rooting for The Queen. I loved the way that movie used clothes: to make the sexy Helen Mirren look dowdy and prim; to convey the frugality and thrift the queen brought to the monarchy after the war (that ratty old bathrobe!); to contrast her with the sassy and modern Cherie Blair. But back to the clothes: Did you like Naomi Watts' dress?

Amanda: I don't think it worked to have that empire waist on the same level as the off-the-shoulder sleeves. You can't have too much going on in any one area of a dress—it's too much for the eyes and mind to take in. It's like having a centerpiece and flowers and placemats and napkin holders on a table.

Julia: Yes, the belt and sleeves seemed to be at war.

Amanda: OK, we have to talk Gwyneth. Her dress was very Art Deco, as were her earrings. She was the human Chrysler building on the one hand. And on the other she looked like she should be floating in on a seashell. But I liked that it was different. She is another actress who takes risks with her clothing. Remember the Goth outfit everyone pilloried? I actually liked that dress.

Julia: Yes! I loved the Goth dress. Well, I didn't think it worked entirely, but I loved that she was experimenting. I think that she, Cameron Diaz, and Cate Blanchett consistently look the least styled. I liked that this dress used traditional materials and methods (chiffon, accordion pleats) to produce an effect that wasn't totally retro.

Amanda: They're the Least-Styled Triumvirate: three women who consistently appear to be making their own choices about what they wear. They don't always succeed but they are always interesting. As was Catherine Deneuve. What did she have on her dress? Was that an aesthetic statement or a political one?

Julia: I assume aesthetic. That appliqué looked very flea-market and unusual—and not just asymmetrical-shoulder unusual. There was an insouciance to her look—high neckline, muted material, an item of visual interest that's meant not for the cameras, but to be seen up close—that felt very French. Or perhaps just very Catherine Deneuve. What does she have to prove to any of us about beauty or style?

Amanda: Rien! As the French would say. I think of those style manuals that suggest using some consistent element—a brooch, a scarf, a color—to develop a "signature" look. In fact, I think there is one called How To Dress Like a Frenchwoman that makes this very suggestion. Deneuve probably thinks all these Americans look way too disco. What did you think of J. Lo?

Julia: Think those were real?

Amanda: The jewels or the boobs? Her dress took the Grecian goddess look to its extreme.

Julia: It was so showy and over-the-top that I thought it worked. It's an example of a dress that was designed for TV, and for cameras.

Amanda: It was very her. But it fell just short of costume-y. She's walking a thin line. It's like showy writing that is just shy of being purple. You're right that it's camera-ready. More stars need to be aware of that. Isn't it surprising that they aren't? Wouldn't you think that would be the first rule of Oscar dressing?

Julia: In that sense it is much more like costume design than clothing design.

Amanda: Excellent point! Perhaps the stars should think of the event as theatrical and hire costume designers instead of stylists. Cate Blanchett understands the Costume Design Theory of Oscar dressing.

Julia: Gwyneth and Cameron, not so much. They're not as unerring as Blanchett, who I thought had the best look of the night.

Amanda: My favorite dress of the evening was Helen Mirren's. With Cate Blanchett as a close second. But Blanchett and Paltrow and Diaz do understand that we want them to look interesting. They follow designers and trends. They want to express their sensibilities—not a stylist's—through fashion.

Julia: Here's to that.

Britain's obituary pages are almost designed to bring back memories of a lost or forgotten world, but the news on Monday about the death of Earl Jellicoe was remarkable, at least to me, for recalling an utterly vanished time that elapsed a very short while ago. The late earl was one of those men who used to make the Tory Party formidable: a solid member of the ruling class with a strong sense of his family's obligations. His father had commanded the British Grand Fleet at the Battle of Jutland in 1916 (being described by Winston Churchill, then at the Admiralty, as "the only man on either side who could have lost the war in an afternoon"). That's where the original earldom had come from. George, the first earl's eldest son, had succeeded to the title as he was about to go to university and had gone on to earn several military decorations in the Mediterranean theater in World War II. Before entering politics, he had served as a diplomat in many capitals, including Baghdad, where he'd been secretary to the short-lived "Baghdad Pact," under which Britain and the United States had attempted to shore up a version of constitutional monarchy in Iraq.

In government, he had kept up his interest in defense and foreign affairs and been a strong upholder of the two pillars of British Conservative orthodoxy: the military "special relationship" with the United States and the attempt to win Britain a larger place in the councils of Europe. He had opposed those in his party who, nostalgic for a lost dominion, were sympathetic to the white-settler rebellion in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Even his temporary departure from office in the early 1970s was the result of what you might call a classically Tory scandal. Tory scandals are about sex, as the saying goes, and Labor ones are about money. The noble earl went the whole hog by getting his name into the personal address book of a Soho procuress who also furnished call girls to another minister with a hereditary peerage, Lord Lambton. Jellicoe confessed all, resigned his post at the defense ministry, but continued to pop up as a member of useful blue-ribbon commissions and on the boards of various companies.

O Tempora, O Mores! During the week I recently spent in London, almost all the political gossip was about whether or not the latest leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron, had made recreational use of marijuana—and perhaps other drugs—while at Oxford. There were also photographs of him in his undergraduate days, garbed in the uniform of an upper-crust student dining club that could have been captioned "Brideshead Regurgitated." Thus, if only in a slightly frivolous way, the association of the Tories with the nobs and the toffs and the privileged was still preserved in tabloid form. But there was a time when no serious Conservative would have been caught dead with a joint—the very symbol of '60s fatuity. And the interesting thing was to notice not how incongruous the story was with the style of today's Tory leadership, but rather how perfectly it seemed to fit it.

David Cameron has become the green challenger. His party's events feature tie-less informality and earth tones and much grave talk about the need for "organic" attitudes. Confronted with things like youthful crime, which used to bring out the authoritarian beast in his party's traditionalist ranks, Cameron speaks soothingly of root causes and compassion. He has publicly regretted the way in which his party was too late in seeing the virtues of Nelson Mandela. Most astonishingly of all, he is running against Tony Blair (or rather, against Blair's heir-presumptive, Gordon Brown) as the candidate who wants to refashion Britain's relationship with Washington in such a way as to take distance from the American alliance. The press conference at which Cameron announced this new initiative was held on Sept. 11 last, as if to emphasize that the American Embassy could no longer take Tory sympathy for granted. And Cameron has appointed William Hague, a former leader of the party, as his spokesman on foreign affairs. Hague takes every opportunity to criticize the Blair administration for its slavish endorsement of George Bush and to promise that a Conservative government cannot be counted upon for Republican military expeditions.

Twenty or even 10 years ago, it would have been inconceivable that the historic left-right divide in British politics could have taken this form. Old leftist friends of mine from the 1960s are now on Labor's front bench and staunchly defend the overthrow of Saddam Hussein as a part of the noble anti-fascist tradition, while dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries are warning against American hubris. I keep having to pinch myself.

Some of this is dictated by public opinion, which generally regards the Iraq operation as an exercise in hysterical egomania by a prime minister too eager to please his master in Washington. At the moment, British politics are still too dominated by the figure of Blair for opinion polls to be very useful as a guide, but there is a lot of intuitive evidence that Gordon Brown would have a very tough time fending off a challenge from the younger and fresher Cameron—especially a younger and fresher Cameron who chose to appear in so many of the borrowed plumes of environmentalism and multiculturalism.

If you look at it in this light, it can even seem like a plus that the latest leader of Margaret Thatcher's no-nonsense party is now inescapably linked to certain dreamy voyages of the imagination. But I can't easily adjust to the fact that for the first time in memory, there is nothing intimidating about the British Conservative Party. For all I know, its current leader might regard that as a compliment.

Clearly, there is something about Ayaan Hirsi Ali that annoys, rankles, and irritates. I am speaking here not as one who knows Hirsi Ali—the outspoken Dutch-Somali critic of Islam—but as one who, while living in Europe, cannot seem to avoid meeting her detractors. Most recently, I met a Dutch diplomat who positively glowered when her name was mentioned. As a member of the Dutch parliament, Hirsi Ali had, he complained, switched parties, talked out of turn, and refused to toe whatever was the proper political line. Above all, it irritated him that she did not share his Dutch faith in political consensus.

For those who haven't encountered her name yet, suffice to say that Hirsi Ali is a European of African descent with an almost American rags-to-riches life story. As a young woman, she escaped from her Somali family while en route to an arranged marriage in Canada, made her way to Holland, learned Dutch, attended university, and eventually won a seat in the Dutch parliament. Along the way, she also made an intellectual journey—beautifully described in her new book, Infidel—from tribal Somalia, through fundamentalism, and into Western liberalism. After Sept. 11, 2001, horrified by some of the things Osama Bin Laden was saying, she reached for the Quran to confirm a hunch: "I hated to do it," she wrote, "because I knew that I would find bin Laden's quotations in there."

Partly as a result, she lost her faith, concluding that the Quran spreads a culture that is "brutal, bigoted, fixated on controlling women, and harsh in war," and that should not be tolerated by European liberals. That conclusion led her into a series of controversies—and to the murder of a Dutch filmmaker with whom she had co-produced a film about the mistreatment of Islamic women. The murderer was born in Holland, the son of Moroccan immigrants; he pinned a letter threatening Hirsi Ali onto his victim's chest. Ultimately, she left Holland for Washington, where she remains, ensconced at the American Enterprise Institute.

Yet even from that distance, she continues to provoke Europeans, sometimes without saying anything at all. Following a somewhat patronizing review of her first book—in which British writer Timothy Garton Ash called her a "brave, outspoken, slightly simplistic Enlightenment fundamentalist"—French philosopher Pascal Bruckner came galloping to the defense of Hirsi Ali and the Enlightenment. Garton Ash counterattacked, and others joined what turned quickly into a wide-ranging debate (read the whole thing here) about reason, faith, multiculturalism, and the integration of millions of Muslim immigrants into European culture.

Curiously, what seems to rankle Europeans most is the enthusiasm with which Hirsi Ali has adopted their own secularism, and the fervor with which she has embraced their own Western values. Though this is a continent whose intellectuals routinely disparage the pope as an irrelevant dinosaur, Hirsi Ali's rejection of religion in favor of reason, intellect, and emancipation seems to make everyone nervous. Typical is the British feminist who complained that not only does Hirsi Ali paint "the whole of the Islamic world with one black brush," she also "paints the whole of the western world with rosy tints," which is of course far more objectionable. Others have compared her unfavorably to Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan, who argues that religious Islam can be made compatible with modern European democracy. He, it is said, offers a way forward for millions of pious European Muslims. By contrast, her rejection of religion in favor of Western secularism is said to be a form of integration that works for no one but herself.

I suppose this latter charge might be true. On the other hand, it might not be: Maybe Infidel will inspire a generation of Muslim teenagers to study, work hard, join the mainstream—and then say what they think and spoil the political consensus. Either way, I'm not sure that the impulse to dismiss Hirsi Ali for her lack of utilitarian value reflects very well on those who do it. Nor does the underlying assumption—namely, that religious faith must be respected and defended on behalf of the dark-skinned immigrants who live among us, even though we natives no longer seem to require it.

But perhaps it is just a question of time. In America, the phenomenon of the flag-waving first-generation immigrant is a familiar one. In Europe, such a thing is unknown. Maybe once Europe gets used to the idea—a Muslim immigrant who embraces Western culture with the excitement of the convert—they'll like Hirsi Ali better. And, if they're lucky, others will follow in her footsteps.

Friday, March 2, 2007

To listen to the March 2 Gabfest, click the arrow on the player below:

You can also click here to download the MP3 file, or you can subscribe to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.

Welcome to our new Gabfest page, where we'll be posting links and other items mentioned in each week's show. There's also a new Gabfest Fray thread, where you can discuss the program with other listeners.

On this week's episode, regular panelists Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz tackle these topics: Should we talk to Iran? Is any GOP candidate conservative enough for the base? And should Al Gore turn Oscar gold into another White House run?

And for those who wanted to read Bill McKibben's article about happiness in Mother Jones, which David Plotz mentioned last week, you'll find it here. Posted by Andy Bowers, 12:08 a.m. (link)

My Xbox 360 disclosed something unexpected to me recently: Earlier this week, I played my 1,000^th hand of Texas Hold 'Em. When I bought a muscular, $400 gaming machine, I wouldn't have predicted that I would use it to play an unseemly amount of $5 video poker. That's not $5 a hand, mind you. It's $5 to download the game. And I'm not the only gamer using next-generation hardware for last-generation fun. After a fellow thirtysomething picked up a 360, he sent me this ecstatic note over the console's text messaging system: "Have you played UNO yet? Not for the faint of heart."

After more than two months with a "Wii60"—gamer slang for owning both a Nintendo Wii and an Xbox 360—I've been surprised to discover that the 360 is the console I turn to when I want a quick gaming fix. The Wii is a "party console"—a go-to system to impress guests, and a guaranteed good time when more than one (physically present) person wants to play. But the allegedly hard-core 360, and not the family-friendly Wii, appeals to the casual gamer in me—the guy who loves to play addictive and familiar mini-games.

Most casual gamers don't even realize they're gamers. The demographic includes the secretary who plays computer mahjong during her lunch break, the lawyer who zones out with Minesweeper at the end of her long day, and the grandfather who bought a $20 Pac-Man joystick to plug into his TV. These gamers probably don't know it, but the high-horsepower Xbox 360 is filled with mesmerizing, low-fi delights. The Xbox Live Arcade, a branch of the console's superlative online service, includes card games like UNO and Hold 'Em as well as a host of arcade classics like Ms. Pac-Man, Galaga, Joust, Dig Dug, and—an idiosyncratic personal favorite—Root Beer Tapper. (Minesweeper and mahjong are not included.)

In junior high, I was insanely jealous of my classmate Scott Mayer's Defender arcade cabinet. Well, guess what, Scott? Now I've got Defender, too, plus the lineup of pretty much the entire Fun Factory (that was the arcade at the local mall) stored in a box in my entertainment center. Trial versions of every game in the Xbox Live Arcade are free, allowing you to sample a level before committing to a $5 purchase (or $10, in the case of some larger games, such as the 1993 PC classic Doom). Annoyingly, Microsoft makes you buy the games with "points" that are purchasable only in multiples of 500, when 400 points equals $5. But that's a small headache to put up with for a system that will bring Yie Ar Kung Fu, my favorite game of the arcade age, to the 360 sometime this spring.

It may not be clear at first glance, but card games, mahjong, and arcade classics scratch the same gaming itch. They are all, in the lingo of Danish game theorist Jesper Juul, "emergence" games, not so different in their underlying structure from every game humans have played for 5,000 years. The addictive play of Pac-Man, and that of checkers and solitaire, emerges from a simple set of rules that compels players to engage with level after repetitive level. What Juul calls the "progression" game, the newer video-game variant that combines narrative with game-play, has won the hearts of hard-core gamers. But the 20 million downloads from the Xbox Live Arcade indicate that the emergence video game still has life, even on expensive next-generation consoles. (Which isn't to say that every game on the system is a delight. Gauntlet, for example, is much lamer than I recall.)

The 360 does add a next-generation element that makes the Xbox Live Arcade experience superior to the original games: online play. This is an arcade in the true sense, a commons where gamers meet and challenge each other for supremacy. Each game has a "leaderboard," modeled after the coveted high-score list atop every arcade classic, and most titles also allow individual players to face off over the Net. The fun of the card games in the Xbox Live Arcade is almost entirely dependent on the ease of finding human opponents. Hold 'Em fanatics like me can quickly find a table of eight human players, and four-person UNO really is—as its status as the second-most popular game in the arcade indicates—a shockingly easy way to lose an afternoon.

The Xbox Live Arcade is not the only place for gamers to go retro. The Wii's Virtual Console boasts its own cornucopia of downloadable classics. But the Wii's selection of old Nintendo and Sega games (such as Super Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong Country) appeal to the hard-core gamer in me. I'm eager to download The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time, for example, a just-released Nintendo 64 title that I never got to play in its original incarnation. But that release strokes the erogenous zone of someone who wants a long, involved single-player experience, not the short attention span delights of a casual game.

The Virtual Console and the Xbox Live Arcade both exploit nostalgia. Nintendo's Virtual Console games, however, have more in common with the games that dominate today's marketplace: They come from the era when consoles abandoned emergence games like Pac-Man and Tetris and groped toward the progression style that today's gamers know and love. The Xbox Live Arcade games—the retro classics, the conventional card games, and the original titles such as the free game Hexic HD—reach back to an earlier time, one that appeals both to people who find today's games too complex and time-consuming and to those who just want to steal a few minutes of gaming time in between sessions of Oblivion and Gears of War.

The Nintendo Wii will transform the way we play games at home. But the Xbox 360, through its Xbox Live service, is building something equally compelling: a celestial arcade, where casual and hard-core gamers alike can connect over the Internet and find like-minded souls. For an old-timer like me, the celestial arcade also lets me feel like I still have some of my old gaming mojo. A few weeks ago, as I stumbled my way through an online Gears of War match, one of the other players scoffed, "I don't think this kid has ever played video games before." Oh yeah? Check out the Root Beer Tapper leaderboard, where my high score marks me as the 688^th best player on the entire system. At last, a place where a fogey like me gets to say, "N00b. You've been pwned."

Lilac bushes in New England have pretty steadily been blooming earlier every year for the past 30 years. One way some gardeners have begun to think about shorter winters is to say, "Hey, great, I live in Ohio [or wherever, north of the Mason-Dixon Line] and now I can grow some camellias, maybe a fig tree." This is, frankly, nuts. Be careful what you wish for. Kudzu is creeping north, poison ivy is growing more toxic on its diet of extra carbon dioxide, and allergy season lasts longer.

Another reaction is to say, "I will make the world greener by planting a tree in my front yard that will inhale carbon dioxide and slow global warming." This is not nuts, and it's better than nothing, especially if you are planting a shade tree on the south side of your house and thus cutting your air conditioning use. But in the face of the enormity of global temperature change, it's only a little bit better than nothing.

There are two very specific and more sensible ways to prepare than by cheerily planting the flora of Charleston, S.C., in Cleveland. First, insulate the green things you have from the shock of drought to come by making the soil they live in better at holding on to moisture. Next, choose new plants that can tolerate drought and a wide range of temperatures.

The institutions that guide gardeners have themselves started to adjust. The Arbor Day Foundation recently released a hardiness zone map. Their members complained that the widely used official government source—the U.S. Department of Agriculture map—didn't reflect how much the country was warming up.

The Arbor Day Foundation map, using the USDA Hardiness Zone Map of 1990 as a starting point, tracked some dramatic changes from then to 2006. Our heartland—Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and even Michigan's mitten—has shifted from Zone 5 to a warmer Zone 6. (Higher temperatures mean that most U.S. gardeners will be facing longer summer stretches without water.)

The USDA, slower off the mark, will release its own update of the 1990 map sometime this year. When asked if the forthcoming new map was a response to global warming, USDA spokesperson Kim Kaplan said, "Not specifically." She gave as more compelling reasons the fact that the Government Printing Office is out of copies of the last version and that the old version wasn't Internet-friendly.

Both maps divide the United States into zones by shared average low temperatures. Bands of different colors run from a very cold Zone 1 (Fairbanks, Alaska) to a tropical Zone 11 (Honolulu). The maps are a general guide; you may have something like a sunny wall where cold-averse plants can grow. Or your garden may be in a valley that's colder than the surrounding hillsides.

For those who acknowledge that warming is definitely here, the highest priority is to protect trees, which shelter other plants from drying wind and sun, as well as absorb carbon dioxide. The single best drought-survival help you can give those beneficial trees and your other plants is to cover any bare earth, from which water evaporates quickly, with mulch. Spread shredded bark or bark chips or compost about 3 inches deep on top of the soil (take care not to push mulch right up against plant stems or tree trunks where it can cause rot).

When you're planting new things or moving old plants, improve the moisture-holding capacity of your soil even more by digging in organic matter—the same bits of bark or well-rotted cow manure, or compost.

Compost—dark, earthy, decomposed organic matter—has the immediate and obvious effect of making your soil moister, and it's also a welcoming home for the earthworms and microorganisms that make nutrients available to your plants.

A less obvious effect of making and using compost is to keep the atmosphere healthier. When the stuff rots in a municipal landfill, instead of decomposing in a nicely aerated compost heap, it exudes methane—a greenhouse gas that traps heat on Earth at a greater rate than carbon dioxide does.

Selecting plants for drought tolerance doesn't mean that your yard will be all yucca and cactus. Lots of favorite annuals bloom well with low water—cosmos, petunias, verbena, marigolds, and zinnias. (Remember that even drought-tolerant plants need to be watered thoroughly when they're first planted.)

Perennials from Mediterranean climates have evolved to thrive without summer rain. Pinch the leaf of a plant native to Provence or Greece (and similar climates in coastal California, South Africa, and Chile), and you'll see these plants are resinous and fragrant. These include useful and beautiful plants like lavender, rosemary, sage, catmint, oregano, and thyme. A less familiar herb—agastache, also known as hyssop—is a real garden star; it flowers nonstop through the summer, beloved by bees. The red agastaches attract hummingbirds.

The Denver Botanic Garden, which has long been landscaping with natives adapted to Colorado's semi-arid climate, has clear advice and useful plant lists. The catalog of High Country Gardens in Santa Fe, N.M., has particularly interesting water-smart planting designs including "The Inferno Strip Garden"—for hot, narrow spaces.

Any botanical garden will have good advice on the native plants that can stand up to hot summers; planting natives will make life easier for your local birds and beneficial insects.

Like everything involved with interacting with the natural world, water-wise gardening gets a little complicated. Climate watchers who are warning us of longer droughts also are predicting heavier rains in winter, coming in fewer events—downpours, buckets. The plants from the Mediterranean or the Colorado high plains do not do well if their roots are drowned. Happily, and also paradoxically, a good cure for waterlogged soil is to add organic material. It's an apparent paradox because that's the stuff that holds on to water, but the organic stuff also keeps the soil aerated and keeps water from collecting in fatal puddles.

You can hedge your bets in this chancy new world by choosing trees and shrubs that do well across many temperature zones. Among the most adaptable: oakleaf hydrangeas, amelanchiers, many of the deciduous magnolias, and a lot of the pines. It may not be precisely right, I suddenly realize, to use the word adaptable. People are adaptable; we can change our behavior. (Not long ago no one used car seatbelts, and everybody smoked.)

It's more accurate to say that some plants and trees have evolved to tolerate or survive or withstand a range of conditions. There are some clever little weeds that can shift strategies quickly, but for the most part it takes generations for trees to adapt to new conditions, which makes them terribly vulnerable.

The tree losers in the coming warming, sadly, are sugar maples and white birches, which thrive in a niche and are unwilling to adapt. Their populations are dwindling in the warming Northeast, land of the precocious lilacs.

Gardeners tend to be the most adaptable of human beings. In fact, working in a garden is an experience that trains you to be flexible and to find consolations where you can. So the poppies never came up and deer ate the roses? Well, the irises looked great, and the lilacs were fabulous.

Hear this: It seems that director Alejandro González Iñárritu has teamed up with his Babel collaborators, including actors Gael García Bernal and Adriana Barraza and composer Gustavo Santaolalla, to denounce screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga as a credit hog.



Arriaga and González Iñárritu have collaborated for some years—their films include 21 Grams and Amores Perros—but the issue of who deserves credit for Babel blew them apart. When the media reported on this in October, the producers of the film confirmed that the story was true but denounced it as "salacious gossip." Babel, indeed.

Apparently, the Babel team felt compelled to gossip some more in the pages of Mexico's Chilanga magazine. They wrote a letter addressing Arriaga: "It's a shame that in your unjustified obsession to claim sole responsibility for the film, you seem not to recognize that movies are an art of deep collaboration." Among all these stories about how Mexican filmmakers can't make their movies in Mexico, we find that they can conduct their feuds there.

We were a little confused about the meaning of Babel. In a recent interview with Variety, Arriaga explained that it was all about miscommunication, sort of. Because it's also about the last day of something in a person's life—a day that is a turning point.

For the story of the Moroccan boys who shoot at a bus, he said: "That … was the last day of innocence." (And for one of them, just about the last day of being alive. But let's move on.)

For the Mexican nanny who gets deported: "I can call it the last day of substitution. She substituted her family with this other family. Now she realizes that's not her country, that's not her family, that's not her identity." For the Japanese girl played by Rinko Kikuchi, it's "the last day of a sense of loss." And for the couple played by Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, it's "the last day of resentment between them."

Each story line, Arriaga explained, ends with the characters finding refuge in family, because only family provides relief from a world full of miscommunication.

That's not exactly our experience, but good for Arriaga if it's his. Because he seems to be in a world full of miscommunication right now.

On a more practical note, how strange that this fight continues just after Babel almost whiffed at the Oscar ceremony. (González Iñárritu lost; Barraza lost; Arriaga lost; if it weren't for Santaolalla, it would have been a total wipeout.) The film has gotten quite a lot of critical acclaim, but it's grossed less than $35 million. So, here's an idea: Maybe this should be the last day of bitching about the movie. (link)

Thursday, Feb. 22, 2007

Indecision: Oscar ballots are in, and we still have no clue about the best picture winner. In previous years we have taken great pride in our predictions, at least when it comes to best picture, so we felt a little bad about this at first. Then we realized—no prediction is the way to go this year! So, we were right again.

"Whatever wins, it won't be by much," says a veteran awards strategist and fearless prognosticator, calling this "the closest year in history." Of course, vote counts are never revealed so—he's right, too!

The field seems to have left a number of academy voters feeling dispirited. One director said he stared at the ballot and considered leaving the best picture category blank. Then he gave Clint a tribute vote. A publicist told us he did not check favorites in a couple of major categories for the first time in his years of voting. "I just said, 'Fuck it, I don't like any of 'em,' " he explained.

Everyone seems to suspect that the movie he or she dislikes most will win. The most passionate feelings in this respect are reserved for The Departed (certain voters say Scorsese would be rewarded for his weakest film in years) and Babel (certain voters say this movie is a wank).

You can find tea leaves to support arguments against all the contenders. The Departed had an amazing cast, but only Mark Wahlberg was nominated for acting—a bad sign, given the clout of actors in the voting. Little Miss Sunshine had no nominations for director or editor. Bad sign. Letters From Iwo Jima was snubbed in all the earlier awards, and it has grossed about $11 million so far. We're not sure if that would make it the lowest-grossing winner ever, but it's got to be competitive. And so on.

When it comes to best picture, the publicist says, "These are five movies that will be largely forgotten. Other than maybe The Departed, as a cable staple."

Surely there will be surprises in other categories, though the top contenders have appeared to be locks for so long that voters might have gotten lock fatigue. If you care at all, you know who they are: Scorsese, Whitaker, Mirren, Hudson, Murphy. Best shot at an upset probably belongs to Peter O'Toole for best actor.

If only the uncertainty made for real excitement. (link)

Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2007

Oscar night will present you with the opportunity to see Mr. Tom Cruise present the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award to former Paramount chief Sherry Lansing (who certainly was a lot more humane to him than the current studio management).

Cruise has been out and about quite a lot. In December, he showed up at a press-packed cocktail party to fete nominee Meryl Streep at the home of Fox studio co-chairman Tom Rothman—lovely but not the sort of event that Cruise normally attends. In January, he presented an award at the Producers Guild celebration, and he also gave one to Will Smith at the Santa Barbara Film Festival.

This willingness to celebrate other people's successes suggests that Cruise is committed to rebuilding his damaged career, brick by brick. His bride, Katie Holmes, has also let it be known that she wants to work. So, here's a quick look at their prospects.

Cruise's next movie sounds pretty smart. Lions for Lambs will be directed by Robert Redford. The movie, featuring the increasingly popular interconnected-stories format, casts Cruise as a congressman, Streep as a journalist, and Redford as an idealistic professor whose former student is wounded while fighting in Afghanistan. So, Cruise is sharing the screen with Oscar-associated royalty, which adds a nice touch of class.

The movie probably won't do diddly for the teenage audience that crowns box-office kings. But Cruise's reps have hastily aired the idea that he might team up with Ben Stiller in The Hardy Men, a comedy based on the Hardy Boys mystery books. You can almost see this one in your head, can't you? Well, sort of. Doing a broad comedy would be a gamble for Cruise, says a leading agent, who muses, "If it misses, it's going to be bad." But Stiller is one of Hollywood's hottest talents, not just as a comedian but as a producer. Note the telling line in the Variety story, though: "Fox is hunting for a scribe to do a rewrite." That means this story is what is called "an announcement" and the project is one that may or may not emerge from development hell (where, for the record, it has languished for eight years).

Based on all this, the leading agent also says that Cruise can regain some lost stature. But he doesn't think the actor will be satisfied with that. "Tom cares most about big popcorn movies," he says. "He couldn't find it before Mission: Impossible 3, so he had to go to his franchise to get it." The agent observes that Cruise won't have such a movie this summer or next summer, either. And he doesn't blame it all on the behavior. "It's evolution," he says. "The fact that he stayed on top as long as he did is spectacular." But now, when it comes to big, hot projects, he says, "I hear Tom Cruise's name nowhere."

As an example, he cites Fox's Shadow Divers, a drama to be directed by Peter Weir. The picture has two male leads, and the studio is talking about Tom Hanks, Brad Pitt, Russell Crowe, Leo DiCaprio, Johnny Depp ... maybe even your brother, but not Cruise. "In the old days," says the agent, "he would have been first on the list." A film executive involved in discussions with Cruise agrees that he may no longer be the top pick for such projects but adds, "I don't think that prevents him from being a summer asset. He probably has to be a little more thoughtful and a little less arrogant or disconnected. But I think he's paying closer attention." This executive finds Cruise so interested and engaged that working with him is "delightful," adding, "He's one good role away from being back."

And what of Katie Holmes? She appears to have blown a major opportunity by refusing a part in the Batman Begins sequel. Director Chris Nolan had a big part for her written into the script. But Warner is still seething over the way her romance with Cruise sucked media attention away from the original film and toward Tom's movie, War of the Worlds. (The suits were said to be livid when Cruise caused a frenzy by zipping up to the Batman Begins premiere on his motorcycle. Holmes' appearance on Letterman, ostensibly to promote the film, was a fiasco. Most of the conversation was about her boyfriend, and when Dave asked her whether she'd see Batman Begins or War of the Worlds if she had to choose one, she hesitated so long that he finally prompted her, "The Batman movie. Don't you think?" Even then, Holmes didn't take the cue. "I support my man," she muttered.)

So, when Warner approached Holmes about Batman Begins the sequel, we're told the studio played hardball. "They said no [big increase in] money, no entourage, no Tom tent," our source says (that last item is an allusion to the Scientology helpers that have appeared on previous Cruise films). "She said no to the project and that was stupid. It's going to play that Tom wouldn't let you or you're a diva now."

The official explanation, for the record, was that Holmes couldn't take the role because of "scheduling conflicts." Look her up on IMDB and figure out what those conflicts might be. (link)

Fight Club: As usual, there's some heavy jousting among Democratic hopefuls for bragging rights and access to Hollywood dough. The fact that the powerful triumvirate of Steven Spielberg, David Geffen, and Jeffrey Katzenberg are hosting an upcoming fund-raiser for Barack Obama has generated a ton of ink for the candidate. Much of it was in the vein of, "Is Hollywood turning its liberal back on Hillary?"



It was and is well-known in Hollywood that while Geffen and Katzenberg have committed to Obama, Spielberg has not yet promised himself to anyone. It was and is also well-known that Spielberg will host a fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton this spring, in addition to the Obama event this month.



So, it seemed odd to read in a Robert Novak column over the weekend that Spielberg, "previously listed as a probable supporter" of Obama, would now host a Clinton fund-raiser. This was presented as news, though Novak didn't make it clear who had "listed" Spielberg as an Obama supporter. Without quite saying so, Novak conveyed the idea that now only Geffen and Katzenberg are hosting the Obama fund-raiser, and that Bill Clinton had prevailed upon Spielberg to back away from Obama and toward Hillary.



The Novak column is too silly to merit discussion—except, perhaps, about how it illuminates the real state of affairs in deep-pocketed Hollywood.



If Spielberg had abandoned the upcoming Obama event, that would be news. But he hasn't. Many expect him to commit to Hillary in the future. But one veteran Hollywood Democratic operative said skeptically, "There is no one on earth that would know that from Steven who would talk to Bob Novak."



The suspicion among some in the Obama faction is that this story came from the Clinton camp, eager to put a stop to the "Hillary Hemorrhages Hollywood Support" stories. In a recent visit to town, Clinton campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe conveyed the notion that folks should pick sides now. Most aren't. In fact, McAuliffe's admonishment prompted Norman Lear, who, like many, is contributing to multiple candidates, to ask a Los Angeles Times reporter, "What's Hillary going to do? Jail me?"



We'll never know if McAuliffe was behind the column; we know that Novak is loath to reveal sources. But he really needs some better ones. He offered a couple of ludicrous explanations for liberal Hollywood's supposed defection from Hillary. One: that "the gay community"—read: David Geffen—"is seeking revenge against President Clinton's 'don't ask, don't tell' policy restricting open homosexuality in military service." That's funny, considering Geffen's continued support for Clinton long after that policy was adopted a few minutes after his inauguration.



The gossip passed around by those who follow Hollywood and politics holds that Geffen fell out with Bill Clinton much later over the then-president's refusal to pardon Leonard Peltier and over Clinton's subsequent allusion to Geffen's thwarted lobbying effort to demonstrate that he didn't dole out pardons as favors to certain friends.



Novak mentions another theory behind Hillary's supposed weakness with liberals—and bear in mind that she's so weak that Ron Burkle, Haim Saban, Steve Bing, and, of course, Spielberg are backing her. The entertainment industry, he wrote, "still harbors resentment about Clinton-Gore administration criticism of the material that is presented to children." In a community that is concerned first and foremost about the Iraq war, that is too laughable to address.



Having raised these ideas, Novak dismisses them and reveals the real reason for Hillary's faltering popularity: She's too conservative. To coin a phrase: Duh. "The whispered worry is that Clinton as the presidential nominee would be a loser in a year when all the stars seem aligned for a Republican defeat," says Novak.



That was whispered by David Geffen a couple of years ago in New York. Here's what he said about Hillary in a room full of people: "She can't win, and she's an incredibly polarizing figure." Subtle, huh? With code-cracking skills like that, it's no wonder Novak was the very first one to identify Valerie Plame in print. (link)

A top-secret 77-slide PowerPoint briefing prepared by Mitt Romney's presidential campaign staff has leaked to the Boston Globe. The document outlines Romney's perceived vulnerabilities, specifically citing Romney's Mormonism and his Ken-doll haircut, and maps out Romney's message strategy against Republican nomination rivals John McCain ("uncertain, erratic, unreliable") and Rudy Giuliani (saddled with "personal political liabilities," an apparent reference to Giuliani's messy divorce from Donna Hanover). A loathing of France looms large as a campaign theme, and at one point the PowerPoint presentation bravely declares, "Hillary = France." Zut alors! Another designated bogeyman is the commonwealth of Massachusetts, a breathtaking act of ingratitude given that a mere five years ago Bay state voters elected this Michigan-bred phony to be their governor. Today's Hot Document is one particularly choice slide from the Romney campaign's PowerPoint briefing, obtained via the Globe. To view it, scroll down.

Romney's isn't the first piece of Maoist self-criticism to leak to the press in the current presidential election cycle. In January, the Daily News ran a story about a 140-page document it obtained that outlined Giuliani's battle plan and spelled out his perceived vulnerabilities (Giuliani's liberal positions on social issues, the aforementioned messy divorce, his chumminess with withdrawn Homeland Security nominee Bernard Kerik). One month later, Wayne Barrett of the Village Voice obtained yet another internal Giuliani document, this one a so-called "vulnerability study" from his 1993 campaign for New York City mayor, which cited, among other things, Giuliani's "weirdness factor." For choice excerpts from that self-laceration, click here.

Needless to say, Slate would welcome similar leaks from other presidential campaigns. Send them (or other choice documents) to documents@slate.com. Please indicate whether you wish to remain anonymous.

Here are those tickets you requested to attend the Academy Awards at Hollywood's Kodak Theatre. A few days late, but better late than never!

Below and on the following six pages, an Oscar ticket envelope and the information contained therein, some of it surprisingly unglamorous. Bring your driver's license, leave your cell-phone camera at home, and ladies, prepare to be frisked through those expensive designer gowns. On the plus side, Wolfgang Puck has prepared some lovely hors d'oeuvres. Memo to self: Do not forget limo pass!

Got a Hot Document? Send it to documents@slate.com. Please indicate whether you wish to remain anonymous.

(For the latest columns on pain weapons, gay sheep, and shrinking people, click here.)

Virginia will mandate HPV vaccinations for all sixth-grade girls. It'll be the second state to mandate the vaccine and the first to do so through legislation. Opponents' concerns: parental rights and side effects. Supporters' answers: 1) The Virginia bill says parents who want to opt out must sign a form. The governor questioned whether the measure was too onerous but now says it's fine, so he'll sign the bill. 2) The mandate won't begin till late next year, allowing time to study side effects beforehand. (For previous updates on HPV, see item below or click here and here.)

The U.S. tentatively approved "the first commercial production of a food crop engineered to contain human genes." The crop is rice. The genes make immunity-boosting proteins normally found in blood, saliva, and breast milk. Rationales: 1) The rice will yield seeds that make medicine. 2) Using nature to do this is more efficient and cheaper than making the medicine ourselves. 3) This will save kids from fatal illness in poor countries. Objections: 1) Genetically modified plants have a habit of spreading and altering nearby crops. 2) The government has a sorry record of trying to police this. 3) So get ready for high doses of medicine in whatever you're eating. (For mice genetically engineered to make a human antioxidant, click here. For pigs engineered with worm genes to grow heart-healthy meat, click here.)

A major auto insurer is offering parents a car-mounted camera to record their kids' driving. Conditions: 1) It's free. 2) It won't be used to set rates—for now. 3) The video can be subpoenaed. 4) It'll be stored on a passport-protected Web site. The company calls it a "proactive behavior-modification tool." Rationales: 1) It'll help parents monitor and teach their kids. 2) It'll deter kids from bad driving, since they quickly learn that the camera starts recording when they brake or accelerate suddenly. 3) We already monitor driving through black boxes and GPS. Critique: Targeting kids and saying it's not new are the usual techniques for acclimating us to surveillance. (For a previous update on car surveillance cameras, click here. For Human Nature's take on GPS and crime, click here.)

Doctors and governments are pushing the boundaries of taking organs from live donors. 1) California police are investigating a case in which a transplant surgeon allegedly took command of a patient's treatment and urged nurses to "give him some more candy," i.e., potent pain drugs, to kill him faster and get his organs. 2) Police at a hospital in Singapore restrained a brain-dead patient's family so doctors could haul him away to get his organs before they became damaged. This happened because the government says you're an organ donor unless 1) you register to opt out or 2) you're Muslim. A leading doctor whose father was Singapore's first prime minister advocates organ sales to relieve the shortage: "If monetary incentive makes a potential living donor more willing to save another life, what is wrong in allowing that?" (For another alternative—growing organs in embryos—click here.)

Nearly half of all American women aged 20 to 24 have HPV, the human papillomavirus. More than a quarter of women aged 14 to 59 have it, making it the country's most prevalent sexually transmitted infection. Many states are proposing to vaccinate adolescent girls against HPV because it can cause cervical cancer. Gloomy spin: It's way more common than we thought. Rosy spin: The strains that cause most cancers are less common than we thought. Activist spin: But let's vaccinate against them anyway—and while we're at it, the vaccine might protect men against anal and penile cancers. (For previous updates on HPV and anal cancer, click here and here.)

Scientists at a Chinese robotic engineering institute remotely controlled a flying pigeon. First they implanted tiny electrodes in its brain. By activating the electrodes from a computer, they "forced the bird to comply with their commands," flying right, left, up, or down. According to Chinese government-controlled media, they're refining the technology in the hope that it "can be put into practical use." Scientists' fantasy: remote-controlled animals. Government fantasy: remote-controlled scientists. (For Human Nature's take on remote-controlled aerial drones in espionage and warfare, click here. For remote control of rats, click here and here.)

British officials threatened to take a fat boy from his family. He's 8 years old and weighs 218 pounds, three times the average for his age. He has trouble bathing and dressing and regularly misses school due to illness. A health official says the family has skipped appointments with nutritionists, nurses, and social workers. Officials' argument: "Child abuse is not just about hitting your children or sexually abusing them, it is also about neglect." Doctor's argument: "The way they are … feeding him, they are slowly killing him." Mother's plea: "If I didn't give him enough at teatime then he would just go on at us all night for snacks and stuff." Grandmother's plea: "He takes food out of the fridge the minute you turn your back." Human Nature's view: If you can lose custody of your kid for malnourishing him or failing to control his suicidal behavior, this case may qualify on either count. Update: The boy will stay with his family for now. (For a previous column on child obesity as malnutrition, click here.)

A driver died in a car crash while apparently using a laptop. His car veered into oncoming traffic and hit a Hummer. Officers found the laptop plugged into his cigarette lighter. The laptop was still running; the driver was not. Question: How many of the laws presently being enacted against driving while using a cell phone also cover laptops? How many of you have tried this? (Human Nature shamefully raises a hand.) (For previous updates on cell phones and driving, click here and here. For bans on cell-phone use while crossing the street, click here.)

Latest Human Nature columns: 1) The future of pain-beaming weapons. 2) Gay sheep and human destiny. 3) More on gay sheep. 4) The power to shrink human beings. 5) The first human embryo factory. 6) The bum rap on cloned food. 7) Lesbians of mass destruction. 8) The Best of Human Nature 2006. 9) Food and sex without consequences.

New York Times Magazine, March 4

The cover piece examines religion as a product of evolution. Some scientists see religion as an adaptation, like an opposable thumb. For example, "agent detection"—the survivalist assumption that if a leaf rustles, it's because an agent caused it to—may have evolved into a belief in God. But not all evolutionary theorists are religious skeptics: "Suppose science produces a convincing account for why I think my wife loves me — should I then stop believing that she does?" argues Christian psychologist Justin Barrett. … A piece looks at the recent spate of college erotica, in which students riff on sexual themes and, sometimes, pose nude. What was once a career-ending decision is now routine for some students: ''A body is a body is a body, and I'm proud of my body, and why not show my body? It's not going to keep me from having a job," says the founder of one Boston University publication.—C.B.

New York, March 5

A cover piece assesses Rudy Giuliani's presidential potential. His reputation as a "pro-choice, pro-gun-control, pro-gay-rights, thrice-married Catholic northeastern Republican" with only mayoral experience could crush his nomination chances. But his near-legendary status as one of the heroes of 9/11 gives him an emotional advantage over fellow Republicans John McCain and Mitt Romney. And "if there's another terrorist attack in the summer of 2008, a lot of suburban moms who may lean toward Hillary or Obama or Edwards" will vote for Rudy. Still, his lack of campaigning know-how gives McCain an edge. … A piece explores Barbara Walters' role in the contentious, much-publicized Rosie O'Donnell-Donald Trump spat. Walters, with "the exterior of a debutante … but the heart of an assassin," was a master of "the ins and outs of power, fame, and high society," often using duplicity to maintain her social position. But those tactics became widely known when Trump claimed on television that Walters was admittedly "not a fan of Rosie," her on-screen compatriot on The View.—P.G.

The New Yorker, March 5

A piece by Seymour Hersh scrutinizes the Bush administration's emerging policy of curtailing Iranian influence in Iraq by clandestinely supporting other governments—a tactic that could dismantle Shiite offensives throughout the Middle East. One U.S.-Israel-Saudi Arabia deal is meant to ensure Israel's safety while "counteract[ing] Shiite ascendance in the region." In Lebanon, U.S. aid to radical Sunni groups counterbalances the Iran-backed Hezbollah. Such tactics, though, could backfire. Much of the aid bolsters "Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda." … A piece explores Guillermo Arriaga and Alejandro González Iñárritu's introduction of fragmented and out-of-sequence narrative to mainstream cinema with the Oscar-nominated Babel. Disrupted chains of events in movies began with cinema itself, but Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction ushered in a renewal in temporal scrambling that "could not only enlarge your notion of art and entertainment but change your life." But as other Arriaga-González Iñárritu films demonstrate, disorder does not necessarily spawn great art.—P.G.

Weekly Standard, March 5

A cover piece challenges the House Democrats' proposal to "[d]ouble the size of our Special Forces." According to the author, this would ultimately require lower training standards for Special Operations Forces, "making special ops no longer special." But only airborne-trained soldiers may enter SOF programs, so even "[i]f somehow you were to get every conventional airborne soldier to become SOF you'd still fall dramatically short of the doubling goal." As an alternate plan, the author suggests upping defense spending to remedy armor shortages. … A piece examines the decreased influence of Wahhabism, which the author definese as "a radical system of social control" in Saudi Arabia. King Abdullah announced a review of the mutawwa religious militia, which no longer has as much authority over enforcing face-covering for women and other practices. Scuffles over Valentine's Day illustrate the shift in governance: While a newspaper declared that the mutawwa would disrupt Valentine exchanges among Muslims, "[m]any ordinary Saudi Muslims favored their beloved with Valentine gifts, which were more popular than ever."—P.G.

Newsweek, March 5

The cover story exposes cracks in the health-care system for the injured returning from Iraq. Problems include long waits for mental-health care, delayed disability payments, and a difficult-to-navigate bureaucracy. Part of the problem is the sheer number of wounded. "In Iraq, 16 soldiers are wounded or get sick for every one who dies." During the Vietnam and Korean wars, that ratio was 3 to 1. "In a broad sense, the situation at the VA seems to mirror the overall lack of planning for the war," the article says. … A piece warns that the Taliban is preparing for "what may be their bloodiest drive yet." Behind the coming attack is Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader who has been in hiding since 2001. "His recent communiqués assert that Afghans have a duty under Islam to fight the foreigner 'invaders' and their 'puppets' in Kabul because they will not leave Afghanistan 'peacefully.' " But coalition forces think that the Taliban has " little to no chance of ever regaining power through force of arms."—T.B.

New Republic, March 5

Jeffrey Rosen visits Guantanamo Bay, where he witnesses nothing but courtesy and professionalism: "Each cell had a Koran, a green exercise mat, and a black arrow pointing toward Mecca." He had heard rumors that he would see a white-washed version of things: "They'll show you the accused in a La-Z-Boy sharing fries with the investigator," one colonel predicted. On reflection, "it's hard to say whether it was a Potemkin tour," Rosen writes. But the visit convinced him that Guantanamo's most pressing problems involve how prisoners get there in the first place and, potentially, negotiate their own release. … A piece by Slate contributor David Greenberg argues that Scooter Libby should go free. Greenberg acknowledges that "on a cosmic level," the White House deserves punishment for revealing a CIA officer's identity. But liberals are "supposed to be champions of the First Amendment and foes of overzealous prosecutors. … [W]e should have protested this overwrought case from the start."—C.B.

Time, March 5

A cover piece probes the year-old resurgence of Sunni-Shiite enmity in Iraq. Traditionally, "Shi'ites see themselves as the oppressed, and they see Sunnis as the oppressors," but adherents of the different sects managed to forge friendly bonds during Saddam Hussein's rule. Now, the hatred "permeates not only the rancorous political discourse of Baghdad's Green Zone but also ordinary conversations in homes and marketplaces." The author identifies some flashpoints: The January 2005 elections forced Sunnis and Shiites to take sides for control of the government, and Saddam's execution on a Sunni holy day angered "[e]ven Sunnis who had little sympathy for Saddam." … A piece highlights the efforts of wealthy entrepreneurs leading a "renaissance period of space exploration." Virgin head Richard Branson, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, and Budget Suites of America's Robert Bigelow are nudging spaceflight to the private sector, undermining outer space's status as "untouchable, a museum open only to select government employees." Ventures include Branson's plan to offer two-hour space excursions for $200,000. The first hundred tickets for it have already been sold.—P.G.

Economist, Feb. 24

An editorial argues that the Bush presidency is still salvageable. Although many Democrats would rather see nothing accomplished in the next two years, the editors urge cooperation between the White House and Congress. A compromise on funding No Child Left Behind, for example, would be a major step forward. Plus, growing support for climate change has made new legislation inevitable. Rather than veto it, Bush should "help draft a milder version now, improve his party's reputation on green issues and just possibly lure India and China into a global arrangement. How that would change the Toxic Texan's legacy." … A piece encourages India and Pakistan to speed up their peace process in light of the recent train bombing. Both governments reacted maturely to the tragedy, but they should go further by sharing intelligence. "[I]t is difficult to change the habits of a lifetime and each country's spies have spent theirs guarding and conspiring against the other's. Now, however, is the time to try."—C.B.

Radar, March/April 2007

A piece considers the moral and political implications of gay babies. Fetal screening technology may soon let parents detect homosexuality, and scientists predict that within a decade parents will have the option of applying a hormone patch to set a gay fetus straight. But until such a "remedy" exists, pro-life conservatives and gay rights opponents "will have to ask themselves whether the public shame of having a gay child outweighs the private sin of terminating a pregnancy." … A piece probes Jim Carrey's reputation as an on-set nightmare. One director, who collaborated with him on 2005's Fun With Dick and Jane, started calling it "Fun With Jane." … A piece examines how Wesley Snipes fell in with a group of anti-tax activists. Snipes turned himself in to the IRS in December and now faces up to 16 years in prison for tax evasion. "His attitude was: I'm a star and I can't be touched," a friend remembers.—C.B.

The Nation, March 5

In the cover essay, Patricia J. Williams rails against the notion that presidential contender and Sen. Barack Obama somehow "transcends" race: " 'Transcendence' implies rising above something, cutting through, being liberated from. What would it reveal about the hidden valuations of race if one were to invert the equation by positing that Barack Obama 'transcended' whiteness because his father was black?" For many people, his appeal seems to be what he is not: "He's not a whiner; he's not angry. … He is not the whole list of negatives that people like Chris Matthews or Joe Biden or a whole generation of fucked-up middle-class college students identify as 'blackness.' " … A piece explores the mounting discontent among conservatives in John McCain's Arizona home district. Says one state committeeman: "The guy has no core, his only principle is winning the presidency. He likes to call his campaign the 'straight talk express.' Well, down here we call it the 'forked tongue express.' "—C.B.

This week, the International Court of Justice released a disappointingly wishy-washy ruling on whether Serbia bears responsibility, as a state, for genocide in Bosnia during the Bosnian war. Hannah Arendt famously complained 45 years ago, at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, that international law had yet to come to grips with the notion of a criminal state. This week's ICJ decision raises the question anew. Can the government as a whole—rather than individual officials—be brought to account for monumental crimes? The ICJ ruling offers a far from coherent answer.

To be sure, the ICJ found that in principle states can be held responsible for violating the 1951 Convention Against Genocide. But it cleared Serbia of genocide or complicity in genocide, despite the country's notorious backing of a proxy army, the Bosnian Serb militia known as the VRS. The VRS committed numerous atrocities in its 1992 campaign of ethnic cleansing against Bosnian Serbs and Croats—atrocities that included the massacre of 7,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica, and the establishment of Nazi-style concentration camps and "rape motels." All of this has been exhaustively documented and adjudicated by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. The ICJ had the ICTY materials at its disposal. The court's exoneration of the Serbian government nonetheless—and after the case dragged on for 14 years—undercuts the principle of state responsibility that it endorsed. If Serbia's actions don't amount to state complicity in genocide, it is hard to envision what would.

The court's reluctance to hold a state accountable for crimes goes to the very heart of international law, which is itself a creature of states. States don't like to be accused of criminal wrongdoing. It offends their sovereign dignity and majesty. Nuremberg experimented with declaring organizations, like the SS, to be criminal. But that experiment was a failure: The judges were skeptical of the idea of collective guilt and trimmed the law back substantially. All the subsequent international criminal tribunals (Yugoslavia, Rwanda, the International Criminal Court, Sierra Leone, Cambodia) have prosecuted only individuals.

The law against genocide is also partly to blame. It defines the crime narrowly and in a way that makes it difficult to prove. The Genocide Convention says that genocide requires a specific intent to destroy a protected group, in whole or in part, as such. (Protected groups are national, ethnical, racial, or religious groups.) As such means "destroy them because they are who they are, not for any other reason." To prove genocide, prosecutors thus have to show that a massacre was specifically intended to destroy the victims as a group—not to grab their land, or as part of a military strategy, or to teach rebels a lesson. If prosecutors can't make this showing, a large-scale ethnic massacre can still be a "war crime" or a "crime against humanity." But it's not a genocide. The legal definition has thus come loose from what the word means to everyone other than a handful of international lawyers, as I've argued in a recent article. Prosecutors in the Yugoslav Tribunal have seldom prosecuted for genocide, because the other crimes are invariably easier to prove. And the narrow definition has other bad effects. A couple of years ago, a U.N. commission concluded that Darfur wasn't a "genocide" because there was no evidence of specific intent to destroy the non-Arab "black" tribes in Darfur "as such." The result was reduced political pressure to do something about Darfur.

In its ruling this week in Bosnia v. Serbia, the ICJ found that there wasn't enough evidence of specific intent to commit genocide for anything that occurred in the Bosnian war other than the Srebrenica massacre. That made it easy to find that the Serbian government lacked responsibility for genocide, because it hasn't been tied to the Srebrenica massacre. Instead, the court found that Serbia violated a lesser section of the Genocide Convention—Article 1, which requires that states "undertake to prevent and to punish" the crime of genocide—in part because the government failed to capture Gen. Ratko Mladic, the architect of Srebrenica, and turn him over to the Yugoslav Tribunal for trial.

For this, the court chose the least invasive possible remedy. The Serbian government must catch the Srebrenica bad guys (meaning Mladic) and turn them over. Serbia need not pay compensation, nor even give "a direction to provide assurances and guarantees of non-repetition." The key to the court's decision is the narrow choice to find genocide only at Srebrenica, rather than in the entire gruesome VRS campaign against the Bosnian Muslims.

Judge Awn Shawkat Al-Khasawneh of Jordan dissented and got it right. He criticized the ICJ for treating the evidence in a piecemeal, disconnected, myopic way, so that overwhelming evidence of Serbian support for ethnic cleansing accomplished through ethnic killings didn't constitute specific intent to commit genocide or even complicity in genocide. This is like an American court exonerating a financial backer of the Ku Klux Klan from a charge of complicity in a hate crime, even though he bought the guns, ropes, gasoline, and bed sheets. Doesn't it seem pretty clear that those purchases are evidence of complicity in a hate crime the Klan then commits?

The same anti-Muslim atrocities happened over and over again in the camps. Intent can be inferred from the pattern, and given Serbian government support for the VRS, the pattern should suffice to support a charge of state complicity in genocide. That was what Bosnia argued. Without a smoking-gun document or its equivalent, consistent patterns of action are the best evidence we have of official plans and intentions. In a prosecution of an individual, it might be impossible to infer specific intent to commit genocide from the fact that an atrocity was committed. But when we look at what many actors did and note the consistency with which they did it, the evidence of a genocidal plan becomes stronger and stronger. This is Judge Al-Khasawneh's argument.

There is a silver lining in the majority opinion. But for the most part, the ICJ's decision is evidence of its timidity. Casting a shadow is Nicaragua v. United States, the 1986 case in which Nicaragua sued the United States over responsibility for the Contras. The United States objected to the ICJ's jurisdiction, and when it lost that battle—and then lost the case on the merits—it stopped participating and pulled out of the ICJ altogether. The lesson is clear: Bold ICJ decisions can have awkward repercussions. The New York Times reports that this week's ruling "hews close to the political wishes of Western countries that want to pull Serbia into a wider Western European community." ICJ President Rosalyn Higgins denies "that the court has been seeking a political compromise." But it's hard not to suspect that the ICJ did its utmost to avoid pinning the world's most inflammatory label on Serbia. It is still a place, after all, where powerful nationalists insist that the Srebrenica massacre never happened and that international prosecutions are a Western plot.

A version of this argument is also posted on the blog Balkinization.

Return to article

Like Dickens' legendary case Jarndyce v. Jarndyce in Bleak House, this one dragged on largely because Serbia challenged the court's jurisdiction. The claim was that between the time Yugoslavia dissolved and the time Serbia reconstituted, the country wasn't a party to the relevant treaties. But in 1996, the court ruled that it had jurisdiction. And this week it said, 11 years later, that this previous decision was, indeed, binding. ("Congratulations, Mr. Jarndyce! You were right all along! Too bad about those lost years, but the wheels of justice run slowly and all that. Stiff upper lip.") In his dissenting opinion, Jordanian Judge Awn Shawkat Al-Khasawneh (who is also the ICJ's vice president) argues with some heat that the court's own blunders allowed Serbia to launch interminable Dickensian squabbles.

Return to article

The ICJ stated that the Genocide Convention obligations to prevent and punish genocide "apply to a State wherever it may be acting or may be able to act in ways appropriate to meeting the obligations in question." That is an important repudiation of the U.S. government's position: that the obligation to prevent and punish genocide applies only within a state's own territory. When Colin Powell and President Bush finally labeled Darfur a genocide, they did so believing that the label wouldn't actually obligate the United States to do anything about it. Now the ICJ says differently.

Of course, it remains utterly unclear what "ways appropriate to meeting the obligation" to prevent genocide are or what it means in concrete terms that a state "may be able to act." Physically able to act? Politically able to act? And at what cost? The court doesn't offer a clue. Nor does this opinion bind anyone but Bosnia and Serbia. But at least the court puts its considerable authority behind the idea that states have obligations of some sort to prevent genocide beyond their own territory—that is, that they should not stand idly by while a genocide is going on.

Of all the terrifically bad ideas implemented by the Bush administration since 9/11, probably the worst have involved torture. The decision to sideline criminal prosecutions and instead focus on "alternative interrogation" methods was wrongheaded from the get-go. It was wrongheaded as a tactical matter, wrongheaded as a legal matter, wrongheaded as an ethical matter, and wrongheaded as a matter of undermining world opinion. In fact the only thing the Bush administration has actually gotten right about torture is this one tiny truth: If you want to destroy someone—if that is your sole objective—torture works. So, why won't the government even take credit for that?

That's why it's worth keeping an eye on the proceedings this week in Miami as federal Judge Marcia Cooke tries to determine whether the alleged "dirty bomber"—scratch that—alleged "apartment bomber"—um, scratch that—alleged terror conspirator Jose Padilla is mentally fit to stand trial. What the prosecution now claims almost defies credulity. They contend that Padilla is wholly unharmed—after spending 1,307 days in a 9-foot-by-7-foot cell in a Navy brig in South Carolina, where he says he was, among other things, deprived of sleep, light, sight, sound, shackled in stress positions, injected with "truth serum," and isolated for extended stretches of time. It's better than that. According to the government, Padilla is faking his craziness.

Anyone who's hoping that this competency hearing will turn into a referendum on the Bush administration's abusive interrogation practices is probably dreaming. Judge Cooke is in a tough position. The government is not on trial here. And the legal threshold for a finding of legal competency is low: Padilla will be presumed competent to stand trial unless his mental condition prevents him from understanding the nature and purpose of the proceedings against him or unless he is unable to assist in his defense. Even whack-job Zacarias Moussaoui was deemed competent to stand trial.

So, what happened to Padilla in those many months of quasi-abusive solitary confinement is legally relevant only if the court determines that he is, right now, too damaged to understand the charges against him or aid in his defense. And not surprisingly, it has come down to a battle of the experts. As of today, two defense experts have testified that Padilla suffers from shattering post-traumatic stress disorder, facial tics, and Stockholm syndrome, which has him protecting the government and fearing his own attorneys. (He has been described by some prison staff as behaving like "a piece of furniture.")

The prosecution's expert, on the other hand, vows that Padilla's mental health problems are relatively minor and in no way impede his ability to stand trial. (So far my very favorite line from the various psychological evaluations of Padilla is this unironic note: "He does believe that he is being persecuted by the government, and he does demonstrate some paranoia about the government, but this does not appear to be delusional.") The prosecution's other claims range from laughable to horrifying: Padilla is alternately "malingering," faking so he doesn't have to stand trial; or his mental illness is a result of his own history of drug abuse; or he is clearly capable of assisting his lawyers, because he managed to tell them he'd been abused in confinement. Most unnervingly, they assert that the abuse he suffered—which they can't quite bring themselves to deny—is "irrelevant to the criminal case against him."

Judge Cooke is well aware that the defense claims of abuse are relevant only in the very narrowest sense: She must probe whether the incarceration has made him nuts as of today, but no more. On the one hand, as she's noted, "[i]t's not like Mr. Padilla was living in a box. He was at a place. Things happened to him at that place." And yet at the same time she has carefully limited the evidence about his conditions in the brig to testimony about Padilla's "present state of mind."

Even if Padilla is found competent to stand trial, Judge Cooke must rule on a pending motion to dismiss the case based on Padilla's abuse. So, if the trial goes forward we will still hear a lot more about what happened to him in that Navy brig. But at the end of the day, whether Padilla is tried, convicted, hospitalized, or set free, his whole sordid story stands for the single proposition that abuse begets more abuse.

Padilla was tied to the al-Qaida leadership after abusive interrogations of others—including Binyam Mohamed, rendered to Morocco where his information came with a razor held to his genitals, and Zayn Abu Zubaydah, whom as even President Bush concedes was treated to "an alternative set of procedures." Even if those tortured assertions were true, the information would have been too tainted for use at a trial. And Padilla's own isolation and sensory deprivation, which lasted for months on end, yielded what information precisely?

This abuse has been futile—aimed at the wrong man and carried out for years. It has tainted the entire Padilla trial and degraded those who did the abusing. It has alienated our former allies and undermined basic principles of humane conduct. And yet the government now claims it is "irrelevant."

But that's not quite right. The sustained abuse and isolation and disorientation of Jose Padilla is quite relevant because it's ruined his life, just as it has ruined the lives of countless Guantanamo detainees and other prisoners around the world. You would think that after more than five years of endlessly asserting, demanding, and scrapping for the power to treat enemy detainees in any way it sees fit, this government would take a bit of pride in its workmanship. Instead, it now takes the amazing position that the net effect of all these new and improved interrogation techniques is absolutely nothing at all.

Get-up-and-get-a-beer line of the day: According to the NY Post, Newt Gingrich "doesn't think Obama can win."

"If the country wants therapy, they're going to elect Obama," he said.

You mean the country doesn't want therapy? 6:09 P.M.

OK, New Orleans. You're on your own. It looks like NBC Nightly News' obsessive Katrina coverage hasn't been paying off in the ratings. ... 4:28 P.M.

"Democrats Will Do For America What the UAW Has Done for Chrysler, GM and Ford": Here's a legislative triumph Pelosi's party doesn't want to publicize too much. Do Democrats really want to campaign in 2008 on eliminating the secret ballot in union elections? Luckily, they'll probably be saved by Mitch McConnell. ... P.S.: Only 7% of private sector workers are now unionized. Is that a) because of all that employer foul play (what Dems tell each other inside the cocoon) or b) because the ponderous legalistic and adversarial structure of the Wagner Act--advancement by seniority, due process, work rules, labor-management negotiation--is especially unsuited to competing in a tumultuous, innovating economy that prizes flexibility and adaptability over predictability and job security? ... 3:36 P.M.

Iowa, Now More Than Ever: "Emailer X" sends a majestically symmetrical analysis with a grim corn-fed conclusion. [Boldface added]:

There are a couple of anomalies regarding 2008. First, it's the first genuinely open seat race in a very long time. There is no incumbent president or designated incumbent (Nixon, HHH, GFord, GHWB, Gore) running for either party's nomination. Thus the networks (which always overspend their primary coverage budgets in single party presidential nomination fights) are going to be financially strapped to cover two party presidential nomination fights at the same time.

Media coverage is the oxygen of politics; candidates who get media coverage can continue to raise money and candidates who don't get coverage can't. ... [snip]

Because the news divisions are less and less profitable (and "news gathering" is increasingly expensive), the bias of the television media in 2008 will be to shut off as much oxygen to as many candidates as possible as soon as possible. To save money. Which is one reason we have the current coverage configuration, which implicitly states that (1) Clinton and Obama are the front-runners on the Democratic side, with Edwards as the wild-card position player (in Iowa) and (2) McCain and Giuliani are the front-runners on the Republican side, with Romney as the wild-card position player (he's presumed to have a "base" in NH because of its proximity to MA, and he's raised a ton of dough). Everyone else gets the multi-candidate forum coverage package and that's it. If they want day-to-day coverage, they can go generate local coverage. They're not in the national coverage budget.

Given this configuration, the name of the game for the front-runners is "shut off all the oxygen to everyone else early." Which, translated, means: win Iowa and New Hampshire, and the game is over.

It seems to me that the only person who truly understands this is John Edwards. The others act like Iowa is a bother and that New Hampshire, while important, is not nearly as important as it used to be. California may move to early March! It's all about the Super Tuesdays! But here's the thing: If McCain or Clinton come into a Super Tuesday having lost Iowa and New Hampshire, then they're basically cooked. They've lost the "I & E;" inevitability and electability. And neither party's base much likes them anyway. It hardly follows that they will like them more after they've run losing campaigns in Iowa and New Hampshire.

I don't have the schedules handy, but I think Hillary has been to Iowa twice in the last four years. That's just stupid. I don't think Obama has traveled to Iowa and New Hampshire more than 3 times each. That's dumb. McCain (whom Iowa GOPers still distrust because he blew them off in 2000) hasn't spent much time in Iowa, nor has Giuliani. That's dumb. Romney seems to think that Michigan is every bit as important as Iowa. That's dumb. Only Edwards has basically moved to Iowa and declared a second residence in New Hampshire.

As you know, the entire media infrastructure basically moves to Des Moines for the last 10 days of the Iowa caucuses (which are usually on a Monday night). This year, they'll send a B-team to cover the Las Vegas primary, but that will be a drive-by deal. The machine will move to Manchester New Hampshire and megaphone from there. After that, it's off to South Carolina for that Saturday primary. Then it's imperative that one nomination fight be declared over and that the other be brought to a quick conclusion.

The other anomaly is that neither party's base (really) has a candidate. Hillary has the Clinton wing of the party, but the influence of the Clintons has diminished with the rise of Internet-based fund-raising on the left. The Netroots can match any money machine dollar for dollar. And unlike the Fat Cat Network, the Netroots bring hundreds of thousands of voters to the table as well. But the Netroots don't have a candidate (their candidate is Gore, but he's not running, apparently). Likewise on the GOP side, the base's candidate (Jeb Bush) is not running.

Because Republicans are concerned about losing both control of the legislative branch (2006) and the executive (2008?), the base has decided to be pragmatic. Find me a winner and we'll back him. Because Democrats need to retain control of the legislative branch and believe that they have their best shot since 1992 at picking up the executive, the Netroots are being as pragmatic as the GOP base. So the "aura" if inevitability and electability keeps everyone in their places. Lose that aura and you're done. The front-runners (all of them) can lose that aura completely in Iowa and New Hampshire. And if they do, there's nothing to fall back on, the base will cut them loose in a heartbeat.

This is why the Geffen thing was so injurious to Clinton's campaign. It fractured the aura a bit (confirmed by the Clinton campaign's over-wrought response). ...

It's a weird thing to watch all this unfold. And a weird thing to find yourself viewing John Edwards as the only one who gets the game.

Reaction: OK, there are two big trends here--1) The addition of more early primary states (Nevada, maybe California) and 2) the Decline of the MSM (and their budgets). "X" argues both have 100% perverse consequences: 1) Iowa and New Hampshire are now more crucial than ever and 2) the MSM news budget will completely drive the campaign, starving laggards of oxygen to force a swift conclusion. ... I can see Perverse Consequence #1--if Iowa and New Hampshire were in January but all the other states moved their primaries back to May, then (as X emails) "You could actually skip IA and NH and still win the nomination!" But I don't see Perverse Consequence #2--how does the decline of the MSM, and the rise of New Media, mean that the MSM's "coverage budget" drives the campaign more than ever, starving those candidates it ignores of oxygen? Surely it should be easier now for a non-frontrunning candidate denied MSM "oxygen"--Richardson, say--to get some "oxygen" outside the MSM (through a vigorous Web campaign that raises money for paid media, or a reverse-macaca YouTube moment) in a way that attracts voters in one of the primaries and gets the candidate back on the MSM's menu? ... 3:16 P.M. link

Is the "conversation" on Hillary's website as sanitized, repressed and otherwise controlled as ....well, as you'd expect Hillary's website to be? This blogger claims his non-vituperative critical comment about energy policy was censored. He's a "neophyte" blogger, which raises suspicions that he's a plant from some other campaign--but if he is he does a good job of faking the geniuine bloggers' solipsistic drone. You make the call. ... 1:26 P.M. link

Bob Wright tells me what I want to hear about my biological clock. ... 12:57 P.M.

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Outmaneuvered Again: Adam 'Spin Me' Nagourney's pro-Hillary take on the recent Geffen business has been vindicated. Hillary Clinton has gained in the latest WaPo poll, while Obama has lost ground. Looks like he really was "outmaneuvered"! I take it all back. A man with Nagourney's sound instincts should certainly be the central political reporter for the N.Y. Times. ... O...h ..., ...w ...a ...i ...t . ... Update: [In that poll Obama gained mainly among blacks. Could the Hillary Geffen reaction have turned off blacks?--ed Yes] ... More: RealClearPolitics has a broader poll analysis reaching the same conclusion--

The pro-Clinton spin that Hillary wins this round because it dragged Mr. Obama down in the mud with her and tarnished his image of being above the political fray is just silly.

2:48 A.M. link

Rosie Scenario: Smart Tony Blankley piece on how the Faster (and Earlier) election process actually hurts challengers, eroding their traditional advantages. (They get stale quickly, for example. And if they show the beef--policy proposals--there's lots and lots of time to pick those policies apart, or for them to be overtaken by events.) ... The obvious solution, Blankley notes--echoing Emailer X--is to jump into the race late. Advantage, Gingrich and Gore. ... Actually, maybe Blankley's logic suggests a solution for McCain: He could let his campaign collapse, drop out, lay low for a few months ... and then jump back in at the end. The Rosie Ruiz Strategy. There's plenty of time for it. ... (True, it didn't work for Gary Hart in 1988. But McCain wouldn't be withdrawing because of a character-questioning scandal. He'd be withdrawing because Giuliani seemed fresher and more appealing--at the moment. By December, if Blankley's right, it would be McCain who seems fresh.) ... 1:38 A.M. link

The Secret Neocon/Peacenik Convergence of Wishful Thinking: Do you get an eerie sensation reading arguments on the left about why there won't be a sectarian bloodbath in Iraq if the U.S. leaves--like this one from Robert Dreyfuss:

Contrary to the conventional wisdom in Washington, Iraq is not a make-believe state cobbled together after World War I, but a nation united by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, just as the Nile unites Egypt. Historically, the vast majority of Iraqis have not primarily identified themselves according to their sect, as Sunnis or Shiites. Of course, as the civil war escalates, more Iraqis are identifying by sect, and tensions are worsening. But it is not too late to resurrect some of the comity that once existed. The current war is not a conflict between all Sunnis and all Shiites, but a violent clash of extremist paramilitary armies. Most Iraqis do not support the extremists on either side. According to a poll conducted in June 2006 by the International Republican Institute, "seventy-eight per cent of Iraqis, including a majority of Shiites, opposed the division of Iraq along ethnic and sectarian lines." ... [snip]

This shared desire could be another crucial force in helping maintain the integrity of Iraq. The catch-22 of Iraqi politics is that any Iraqi government created or supported by the United States is instantly suspect in Iraqi eyes. By the same token, a nationalist government that succeeds in ushering U.S. forces out of Iraq would have overwhelming support from most Iraqis on most sides of the conflict. With that support, such a government might be able to make the difficult compromises—like amending the constitution to give minority protections to Sunnis—that the Maliki government has been unable or unwilling to make but that most observers believe are crucial to any political settlement that might end the fighting.

Or it might not be able to do it and hundreds of thousands will die! ... Dreyfuss' argument shares the wishful-thinking quality of the pro-war, welcome-us-with-flowers thinking of the Bush administration neocons. True, Dreyfuss hangs a lantern on his problem by asserting, in an aside, that

"the neoconservatives and the Bush administration weren't entirely wrong in 2003. ..."

But that doesn't make the argument more plausible. Sure a majority of Iraqis may be non-sectarian nationalists. But they aren't the people with the guns. The people with the guns seem to be sectarian extremists. If we leave, will they give up their guns? I doubt it. ...

P.S.: Paul Glastris (who published Dreyfuss' article in the Washington Monthly) defends it here. ...

Psst--To My Antiwar Friends: If we pull out, and comity is resurrected, and the difficult comprormises are made, and a political settlement is reached that ends the fighting while the integrity of Iraq is maintained, that would mean Bush's war was a success, no? ... 1:13 A.M. link

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Keep Hope Alive! Conservative opponents of "comprehensive immigration reform" who've been using it as a club with which to attack the presidential candidacy of its sponsor, Sen. John McCain, should maybe rethink. If Dick Morris and Eileen McGann are right, the McCain for President campaign is in big trouble. But what does that mean for those who care mainly about stopping "comprehensive" reform? ('Is it good for the yahoos?' Bill Kristol would ask.) McCain's need to suck up to conservative primary voters who hate his immigration bill is a big reason its prospects are less than secure, after all. The last thing anti-amnesty types should want is for McCain to sink so low that he drops out of the Presidential race and dedicates his year to passing his immigration reform. Or abandons the Republican primaries and seeks the presidency as an independent on a platform that includes his immigration plan. No, "comprehensive" opponents need McCain to at least think he's got a shot at the GOP nomination if only he just stops pushing his unpopular bill. Maintining the vital incentive to pander is crucial in cases like this--welfare was another one--where the voters are right and the respectable elites are wrong. .... 11:56 P.M. link

I'd forgotten a perverse set of facts that suddenly seems relevant: Hillary Clinton was almost certainly in favor of the 1996 welfare reform law while Rudolph Giuliani opposed it. ... That could mean Giuliani is more liberal than people realize, and less likely to undergo the program of "learning/repositioning" that conservatives like John Derbyshire look forward to. Or it could mean that Giuliani is more opportunistic than people realize and therefore more likely to reposition himself. ... My guess: Both, but definitely the latter. Giuliani was a genuine welfare reformer, after all. His opposition to the key reform bill, in retrospect, looks like a stunt to cultivate stature in the national press.** ... [Triggered by Ramesh Ponnuru at The Corner]

**--It should be said that bill did contain some gratuitously nasty provisions denying benefits to existing elderly legal immigrants. President Clinton had pledged to remedy these provisions, which were in fact softened. In retrospect--and in prospect--they didn't constitute a sound reason for opposing the bill, the core of which instituted large, once-in-a-generation changes in the basic cash welfare programs for poor Americans (allowing states to condition benefits on work, even for single mothers). ... 12:27 AM. link

Monday, February 26, 2007

"Viewer Discretion Advised: This diavlog contains grotesque images." 10:38 P.M.

Staples--'Yeah, We Don't Got That' (Update): My email is running 8-1 against the idea that Hewlett-Packard may have run afoul of the antitrust laws by getting Staples to take its competing store-brand refilled ink-jet cartridges off its shelves. I'm not convinced but don't have the motivation to figure out why beyond that a) it seems clear to me HP is already getting monopolistic prices for its cartridges, once consumers like me have been "locked in" through the purchase of a printer; and b) this action was taken to remove a rising competitor and protect this HP semi-monopoly (perhaps by bribing them with a share of the monopoly profits). One counterargument, made by emailer D.L., is that Staples could in theory use its bribe to lower prices for consumers of HP cartridges. Those prices were not in evidence on my recent visit, however. ... P.S.: If the U.S. Department of Justice isn't interested, there's always that wacky Jerry Brown, now California's Attorney General. In the meantime I'll take several emailers' advice and shop at Office Depot. ... Supplemental Reading: Here's a relevant case. ... 9:40 P.M. link

What song? I hope they're not exposing the Libby jurors to "Tennessee Plates." ... Report from the field: "Your Dad Did" ... 1:50 P.M.

John Derbyshire, an opponent of the McCain-Kennedy "comprehensive" immigration reform, explains why he's for Giuliani even though Giuliani's position on immigration looks an awful lot like McCain's. It's semi-convincing. (Derbyshire anticipates a Giuliani "learning/repositioning" experience.) 1:41 P.M.

How low can you go? A flyer compares Hillary to John Kerry. It's a smear campaign! ... 10:31 A.M.

Hillary's Doomed Taboo: Anne Kornblut describes a more plausible, but depressing, rationale for Hillary Clinton's seeming anti-Geffen overreaction than some of the takes offered last week. Kornblut argues the Clinton camp was trying to

[declare] her husband's impeachment in 1998 -- or, more accurately, the embarrassing personal behavior that led to it -- taboo, putting her rivals on notice and all but daring other Democrats to mention the ordeal again.

Questions: 1) Does Hillary realize that this taboo-enforcement strategy plays into the worst aspect of her public image--the dogmatic PC enforcer whose loyal aides seem, at least in public, to live in zombie-like fear that too much candor could incur her wrath? I don't think it's too much to draw a line from Hillary's attempt to suppress the speech of her fellow candidates to a general, instinctive distaste for the tumult and self-expression inherent in democracy itself. One thinks of Clintonite Roberta Achtenberg's seeming tolerance, as a HUD official, of her agency's intimidating investigations of local opponents of group homes for the handicapped. (Defending the investigations, Achtenberg told the NYT, "These are very difficult judgments that have to be made." No they're not, at least if you have any feel for democracy.)

2) Has the Clinton campaign ever heard of, you know, the Internet? Enforcing taboos doesn't work like it used to, back when all you had to do was muzzle a few gatekeepers.** Today, if people have things to say they're going to say them. If the candidates don't say them, and the MSM doesn't say them, that doesn't mean they won't get said.** Note to Hillary: Your husband cheated on you and was fined $90,000 for lying about it to a federal judge. Everybody thinks he's still cheating on you. Your fellow Democrats are tolerant, but they wonder what the deal is. That isn't the "politics of personal destruction." It's due diligence. Attempting to repress this discussion only assures that it will quickly come to the surface.

The more modern and effective alternative to suppressing nasty questions, of course, is to air them out--let the voters talk about them, "process" them and "move on," something that happens awfully fast now. Maybe Hillary's seemingly clumsy strategy of last week was perversely brilliant: By heavy-handedly trying to enforce a taboo on discussing Bill's misbehavior, she guaranteed that it would become the topic of widespread public conversation immediately--early in the campaign when voters have plenty of time to process it and move on before the Iowa caucuses.

She only seems like a speech scold. She was really outmaneuvering everyone!Take it away, Nagourney.

**--When the Clintons weathered the Lewinsky scandal, remember, blogging was in its infancy.

***--Even if they don't get said, of course, voters would still think them--but they might be more likely to act on them if a public discussion in effect gives them permission.

Update: If Nixon came back and ran again, could his opponents bring up Watergate? Or would that be "under the belt"? ... 2:15 A.M. link

Sunday, February 25, 2007

In a crowded theater: The performance of Arcade Fire's "Keep the Car Running" on SNL last night--available here--was better than the version on the CD (which is hurt by excess echo). [Adjectives, please. Is it: plangent? shimmering? twangy? chiming? Kinksy?--ed . Hectic and cathartic!] 11:49 P.M.

Saturday, February 24, 2007

Attention, Thomas O. Barnett: I went to Staples to buy a replacement cartridge for my HP printer. Usually I buy a "Staples" brand replacement--they're a little cheaper. But they were no longer on display. Only the pricier HP cartridges were for sale. I asked the store manager if this was because HP had sued Staples. No, she said--HP "paid us more" to carry only their brand. ... If true, isn't this a pretty clear antitrust violation? HP would seem to be trying to enforce a (presumably lucrative) semi-monopoly position in HP replacement cartridges. I don't think semi-monopolists can do that. Or am I misremembering antitrust law? ... Backfill: Business Week has covered this, and finds a prof who says there's no antitrust violation because "there are alternatives being sold at other office superstores, and other printer brands are being sold at Staples." Second opinion, please. ... Update: The opinions are in. ... 10:46 P.M. link

Keep your clothes on: Anyone want to bet that the mysterious new BMW sports car with black "camouflage" cladding--designed to fool spy photographers--is better looking with the cladding attached than the actual sports car we'll see when the cladding comes off? ... [via Autoblog]10:36 P.M.

Friday, February 23, 2007

What would Deborah Orin say? Here's a useful analysis from kf "Emailer X" arguing that the recent pro-Hillary, Nagourneyesque (and Dickersonian) spin is wrong:

The truth is Hillary's campaign has been a series of ill-considered moves. Obama panicked her into a way-too-early-announcement. The cause of the panic was fund-raising (poaching of presumed supporters), which is the least vulnerable aspect of her campaign. Basically, if she wins in Iowa and New Hampshire, she wins the nomination. The most she can spend in Iowa and New Hampshire is $20 million, every last dollar counted, including the surrounding states primary television advertising that will be seen in Iowa. So money is not her problem. Imagining that it was and therefore entering the race six-to-eight months before she needed to was a MAJOR mistake. Had she entered in August or September, the surge would have run its course successfully or not. The Iran issue would be that much further along. Pandemic flu would have hit or not hit. Etc. By announcing early, she brought into play a hundred unnecessary variables.

In a nutshell, her challenge is (a) herself, (b) her vote on the War (and her bizarre accounting for same), (c) her husband (never very popular with the party's left wing and a wild card every day), (d) the whole Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton can-we-ever-get-out-of-this-movie thing, (e) Hillaryland (consultants turning everything to hectoring mush), (f) deep-seated fear among Democrats that she is, in truth, the least electable candidate they have.

Geffen, a long-time ally, addressed a, b, c, d, e and f. The Clinton campaign, by responding the way it did, amplified his remarks at least twofold. If that's a win, I'm for the Breck Girl.

11:26 P.M. link

Do we really have to go through another presidential campaign watching the NYT's Adam Nagourney get spun? And without Deborah Orin around to bring everyone back to reality? Grim! Nagourney's Friday piece--"reporting" that "even Mr. Obama ... seemed to acknowledge that he may have been outmaneuvered" by Hillary in the Geffen flap is a case in point.

1) Nagourney didn't report anything to back up the claim that Obama acknowledged being outmaneuvered. He quoted Obama saying he wanted to avoid such "distractions." But Obama could have regretted it for sincere, highminded reasons, even if the controversy helped him. Why be cynical and assume that if a pol regrets something it can only be because it cost him votes? Or Obama could have been more deeply cynical than Nagourney--seeming to admit error as a tactical ploy (to placate the famously wussy Iowa caucusers, who hate Dem fratricide) while quietly pocketing his winnings.

2) Nagourney's conclusion, and that of most other MSM pundits, assumes you can analyze which campaign won and which lost without assessing the truth value or appeal of what Geffen said about Hillary. In this "neutral," strategic analysis, Obama lost because he was the positive candidate lured into going "negative." Doesn't it matter whether Geffen's charges were true--or at least rang true--or were baloney? "Objective" reporters are uncomfortable making such judgments, but those are the judgments voters will be making. If Geffen was giving voice to what lots of Democrats were actually thinking about Hillary, and if by doing so he in effect gave Dems permission to stop suppressing these objections, and if those objections are powerful, he could have done Hillary damage even if her brilliant staff lured an Obama press aide into putting out a snarky press release.

3) No Nagourney "I've Been Spun" piece would be complete without a quote from notorious Dem counterproductive overspinner Chris Lehane, whose tendentious 24-7 BS sniping as Al Gore's 2000 press secretary helped elect Bush in the first place (and constitutes the very "game as it customarily is played" that Obama condemns). The Obama camp's response "fundamentally undermined their long-term message," Lehane concluded. To ward off charges of bias, Nagourney claims Lehane "has not endorsed a candidate," but it's inconceivable that Lehane is without an agenda or agendas here--at the very least, the agenda of sucking up to Nagourney by telling him what he wants to hear. Also, Lehane is almost always wrong. I remember, after the California recall debate, he declared that Schwarzenegger had lost ground because he was mean to Arianna Huffington, thereby offending women voters. In fact, Schwarzenegger's put-downs almost certainly helped elect him. Lehane's spin is most useful as a Lawrence O'Donnellish contrary indicator. Maybe he isn't allied with a candidate because nobody wants him.

Update: Melinda Henneberger reports that Geffen's criticism "Is Nothing I Haven't Heard from Women Voters Across America." She didn't hear it from men voters? There's your lede! ... Oh, I see. She only talked to women. ... So we have a First Woman who doesn't appeal that much to women running against a First Black who doesn't appeal that much to blacks. Cool. Maybe Identity Politics is dead. ... 11:13 P.M. link

First Warner, Now Vilsack: Another seemingly inexplicable drop-out from the Democratic presidential race. Just when the two national frontrunners are busy destroying each other, why would a credible fallback choice like Iowa ex-Gov.Tom Vilsack bail? The fundraising troubles that are allegedly the "only" reason he quit a) don't seem that bad and b) were all quite foreseeable when he declared his candidacy in November. ... Baseless speculation (but why not): Did someone (e.g. Hillary) realize she desperately needed Vilsack's Iowa supporters and make him an offer he couldn't refuse? ... 1:36 P.M. link

Won't They Comp Posh? And here I thought Scientology was on the defensive: I didn't know there was a whole new batch of possible celeb recruits/hangers-around--Lachlan Murdoch (that from Radar), Will and Jada, J-Lo, Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy, even maybe Forest Whitaker. But the religion might be too expensive for David Beckham's fashionable wife. ("Victoria is too cheap to convert.") Elizabeth Snead says: "Maybe she can get Scientology wholesale." ... 1:06 P.M. link

Matthew Yglesias displays the strenuous casuistry loyal Democrats will employ to avoid the need for any confrontation with teachers' unions on the question Steve Jobs recently raised--firing lousy teachers. According to Yglesias the issue isn't firing bad teacher but attracting good ones:

... the reason politicians rarely push for it is that the actual payoff is very, very low. The issue is that there isn't this vast pool of highly effective potential hires out there. The schools with serious teacher-quality problems tend to have them because the better teachers, by and large, don't want to work there and schools have problems filling all the slots with minimally qualified people. The real action (also disliked by teacher unions, if pissing off unions is your goal) is in the certification process, who counts as a qualified teacher, and what counts as an effective teacher (here's where the accountability comes in). If in the future that created a situation where there were tons of people looking to break into the teaching field then it might make sense to expend political capital on making it easier to fire people. [E.A.]

Response:

a) It's easier to hire good teachers if you can fire bad ones. Competent people want to work for competent organizations. Which offer would you be more likely to take: "Come work for our school district. We weed out the deadwood and we're doing a great job preparing our kids," Or "Come work for our district and spend your life beating your head against a bureaucratic wall." Yes, teachers should be paid more--but it's weird that an idealistic liberal would think good candidates are only motivated by money. (And if you could fire bad and mediocre teachers then school districts wouldn't have to spend a big chunk of any pay raise boosting the salaries of ... bad and mediocre teachers).

b) You obviously want to do both-- weed out bad old teachers and expand the pool of potential good new teachers by allowing certification of people who haven't met the mindless credential requirements fiercely defended by the unions.** Yglesias conveniently pretends you can only do the former after the latter--"if" in the "future," after a couple of more generations have sloughed through mediocre or criminally lousy schools, we've managed to amass a huge pool of "tons" of people trying to break into teaching, then it "might" make sense to take on the union protection of incompetents. "Might." That's good of him!

c) Of course, if Yglesias shies from a confrontation now--by kicking the can off to some distant "future," and then only maybe--he'll shy from the confrontation ten years from now. Paul Glastris, in a recent bloggingheads debate on Yglesias' post, unexpectedly blurted out the real reason Dems like him don't want to confront the unions, no matter how sound and obvious the policy reasons for doing so.

**--as a means of protecting their members from uncredentialed hires who would do a better job! 1:53 A.M. link

Thursday, February 22, 2007

DownHill Racing: My impression is that David Geffen isn't furious at Bill Clinton for not pardoning Leonard Peltier. He's furious at Bill Clinton for lying about whether he was going to pardon Leonard Peltier--at least that's what I think Geffen would say. ... P.S.: The pros think Hillary won the Geffen fight. I'm not so sure. By striking back so quickly when a non-candidate makes an obvious anti-Clinton point, does she discourage further attacks or encourage them? I'd say the latter. Everyone loves a target who cries in pain every time it's hit. Anyway, the clear winner in the incident was TimesSelect. [Update: Or not!] ... P.P.S.: Larry Johnson has a good question for Obama, though--just to see how he'd handle it. ...3:57 P.M. link

Don't look now: The much-derided right-wing comedy show 1/2 Hour News Hour was a ratings hit for FOX. ... 1:21 A.M.

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

It's dangerous to spot trends in Rasmussen robo-polls that Rasmussen himself doesn't even highlight--but hasn't Obama cut Hillary's lead from 16 points to 4 points in about two weeks? The Hillary Announcement Bump would seem to have dissipated. ... P.S.: I forgot. She's inevitable. Sorry. ... 2:08 A.M.

Didn't Mike Kinsley get in big trouble at the L.A. Times for trying this? ... Seems kind of innocuous now. ...[via Corner] 1:43 A.M.

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Explainer Please! Rudy Giuliani "is happy to participate in a receiving-line style photo opportunity as compared to a snake line." [E.A.] What's the difference? What if the receiving line starts, you know, snaking a bit? ... P.S.: Maybe I'm a jaded Hollywood type, but Giuliani's demands don't seem that diva-ish. He only requires one (1) SUV. He apparently allows eye contact! He doesn't even ask for a fruit basket. ... 2:21 P.M.

Monday, February 19, 2007

Hillary--Batting .001: Mohammed at Iraq the Model--writing after the recent Baghdad car bombings-- reports that:

Although attacks happen here and there, the general feeling is still closer to hope and appreciation of the plan than pessimism. More families are returning to the homes they were once forced to leave, and we're talking about some of the most dangerous districts such as Ghazaliya and Haifa Street.

I'm not saying things won't change, I'm not saying long term prospects look positive. I'm saying they are positive enough to warrant giving the plan a chance to do some good instead of blocking it or strangling it Murtha style. Or Hillary style--now that she's called for starting a pullout in 90 days. How do you surge and "redeploy" at the same time?...

P.S.: It's not too early to say that Hillary's performance in the opening weeks has been impressively unimpressive. It's pretty clear in retrospect, that the war with Iraq, however it comes out, was a bad gamble. A mistake, in other words. But now that we've made the mistaken gamble, it also seems clear--to Mohammed at least--that the surge might do some good. The correct position, by these lights, was War No, Surge Yes. It would be selfishly callous, in a stereotypically American way, for us to invade Iraq, make a mess, and then not be willing to pay any extra price to help fix the mess we've made. (Murtha's demand that the troops be given "a year at home"--and the heck with what happens to Iraqis like Mohammed--only emphasizes this self-interested perspective.)

Yet through a conscientiously applied mixture of high-minded comity, Machiavellian calculation, stubbornness and bad expert advice, Hillary has managed to arrive at a position that's precisely wrong on both counts: War Yes, Surge No.

Didn't most political observers sour on Hillary in 1994, when she stubbornly clung to her grand, high-minded health care plan long after it was clear to everyone that it was a lost cause? Wasn't she supposed to have learned her lesson from that episode? Isn't she making exactly the same error again--stubbornly clinging to her refusal to say her Iraq vote was the mistake it was? ("She wants to maintain a firmness," an unnamed advisor told the NYT.)** And then, in this case, trying to compensate for her stubbornness by indulging the left's pullout impulses?

She should maybe take a breather to watch The Queen, which is all about how a strong woman (Queen Elizabeth II) is talked by Tony Blair into climbing down from a stubborn position (refusal to ostentatiously grieve over Diana) that, even though it makes sense to her, is out of touch with reality. ...

But if Hillary's judgment is that bad ... well, we get to choose our queens and kings. Do Americans need all the drama?

P.P.S.: Who is Hillary's Tony Blair? It was supposed to be Bill. Where is he? Off zipping around with Ron Burkle?...

Update: See also Iraqpundit, whose relatives in Baghdad have been able to move back to their home, at least temporarily. He acknowledges that the sectarian "thugs" might "eventuallly" return. [via Insta] Note that Mohammed is hearing firefights, which suggest to him that the targets of the "surge" are not just lying low:

It looks like some militants consider that sitting back and waiting is not an option and so they are trying to break the siege.

**--Backfill: Dick Morris offers several other examples of Hillary's counterproductive stubbornness:

Counseled by most of her staff to release the Whitewater documents when The Washington Post first requested them, she said no and triggered the designation of a special prosecutor. When Whitewater co-conspirator Jim MacDougal suggested that he buy her out of the investment to avoid political embarrassment, she refused, saying that she planned to use the proceeds for Chelsea's college tuition. When Bill Clinton had the opportunity to settle the Paula Jones lawsuit, Hillary vetoed that possibility, paving the way for her husband's impeachment.

Morris blames her dependence on "gurus." But at some point it doesn't matter. Bad judgment is bad judgment. ... 5:00 P.M. link

Coping with the Nevada cost of living: 16% of public employees in Southern Nevada make more than $100,000 a year, reports the Las Vegas Sun. ... Paying workers overtime for overtime seems only fair, but at some point it becomes a racket. (The national average for all workers is 5%, says the Sun). ... [Via NewsAlert] 11:57 A.M.

Saturday, February 17, 2007

Do all those Democratic Senators running for President really want to vote to disapprove the surge even as it seems to be showing some initial, tentative, possibly illusory positive effects? Or, as Instapundit suggests, would a "no surge" vote put them in the position where a military success would be "politically ... dangerous?" I've previously argued that the wording of an anti-surge resolution would leave the Dems some escape routes--but what if the public doesn't pay attention to the wording? What if they just pay attention to the vote? What if it comes up in a debate: "And you opposed the increase in troops which is what finally brought relative peace to Baghdad..." How much better for these Democrats if a)they can placate the left by telling primary voters they support some sort of anti-surge resolution but b) they don't have to actually vote on a resolution because it never gets enough votes for cloture, so there's no actual vote that can be hung around their necks. That's win-win! And gee, that's what actually seems to have happened in the Senate. Funny thing. I smell Kabuki. If there's one thing United States Senators are good at it's engineering a stalemate that lets everyone posture in whatever way they think will help them. ... 6:55 P.M. link

Apple CEO Steve Jobs unloads on teachers' unions:

AUSTIN — Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs lambasted teacher unions today, claiming no amount of technology in the classroom would improve public schools until principals could fire bad teachers. ...

If Jobs is a Democrat,** he's a New Democrat! ...P.S.: In response, Dell CEO and founder Michael Dell--who sells mainly non-Apple Windows-based machines--defended the unions. ... Windows, kludgy Old Dem! Apple, New Dem! Just what you would have thought. ... P.P.S.: Jobs might have added "no amount of well-meaning educational donations from the Gates Foundation would improve public schools nearly as much as allowing principals to fire bad teachers." ...

**--which he seems to be. On the other hand Dell, who took the Old Dem position, is a Republican. ...

Update: Joe Klein (not swooning yet!) says Barack Obama, at an Iowa town meeting, "told a teachers' union member that he supported higher pay for teachers but also--the union's anathema--greater accountability." I'd be interested in the transcript: Praising "accountability" is one thing--a good thing, but vague. It could mean a lot of things. Talking about getting "rid of people," as Jobs did, puts the issue more clearly, no? ...

More: David Yepsen has an exact quote of what Obama actually said:

"If teachers are underperforming, we're going to get them the help they need. But we're not going to pretend they are not underperforming, and that is something we're going to have to make happen ..." [E.A.]

Hmmm. Maybe you get candor points for saying even that much in teacher-dominated Iowa, which only shows how pathetically pander-centric Democratic politics has become. (I think Eduwonk agrees.) Why couldn't Obama say something like this:

"If teachers are underperforming, we're going to get them the help they need. But in the meantime we will replace them with someone who can do the job. Our children's education has to come first. Yes, in order to attract good teachers, we must be fair to teachers. But the schools are there to teach our kids. They're not a jobs program. The best teachers are honored--and the best citizens will be attracted to the profession--when the public schools regain their reputation as institutions where good things happen to kids."

In the 1984 Democratic primary, Gary Hart and Walter Mondale actually got into a national debate over whether Mondale would dare to admit that bad teachers should actually be dismissed. Mondale finally said the words, if I remember, only after being backed into a highly-embarrasing special-interest corner by the press. Now the press gives out bravery awards for daring to say that teachers should "get the help they need." In this, and many other respects--read his announcement speech and try to find even a little bit of Souljah--Obama's campaign as less than a half Hart. ...I'd estimate about 23%. ...1:57 P.M. link

Friday, February 16, 2007

Low Hanging Fruit--The Gaia Hypothesis (as noted in Eat the Press): Hollywood fundraiser Daphne Ziman unveils Hillary Clinton pollster Mark Penn's carefully-crafted new campaign message in the Beverly Hills Hotel's Polo Lounge:

"The nation is in deep need for a mother figure who will lead the people out of a violent world and back into caring for the poor and the disabled, mostly caring for our children, our future." [E.A.]

Someone needs to be disciplined! ... Note to D.C.: You see what we have to deal with out here? ... 3:02 P.M. link

What's gotten into David Broder? He's written a piece that isn't CW. [Is it persuasive?--ed No. He says Bush is "poised for a political comeback," without offering much evidence. A bit of bipartisan comity is all it takes and he starts getting giddy. ... Blogger Don Surber actually does a bit more with the thesis.] ..[via Lucianne and Insta] 11:58 A.M.

N.Z. Bear: "Sorry kids: multi-hour response time just doesn't cut it here in the big leagues." 1:43 A.M.

America's Leading Contrary Indicator: If I were Lewis "Scooter" Libby, this is what I'd want to read right about now. ..

"Libby is guilty. And he's going to be found guilty. .."

from the Man Who Is Always Wrong, Lawrence O'Donnell. ... P.S.: O'Donnell's own commenters actually do a pretty good job of busting him for his earlier erroneous predictions. Excerpts:

Unfortunately you were wrong when you predicted, six or seven indictments-including Rove... [snip]

I hope you're right, Lawrence. But I must say your batting average is pretty dismal. Two examples: 1) You told Al Franken's audience that John Kerry had nothing to worry about (or words to that effect) in the 2004 election 2) You predicted that Joe Lieberman, after losing the primary, would be persuaded to drop out of the Senate race by September 2006. ... [snip]

I really like reading Lawrence O'Donnell, but isn't he the guy who also said that Rove was, beyond a doubt, going to be indicted? [E.A.]

They forgot O'Donnell's famous Labor Day, 2000 "It's Over" column in New York, giving the election to Gore. ... [Didn't you just make the same Libby prediction?--ed I did! But even I don't have O'Donnell's authoritative track record.] ... [Thanks to alert reader R.P.] 12:04 A.M.

Thursday, February 15, 2007

This is what he said, folks: "I don't want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes or make beds in Las Vegas." [snip]

This insults work. Period. It also insults the people who do work. It is the worst kind of class warfare.

Normally Democrats attack Rove if he has a pimple. Why go easy on him now? The answer is pretty obvious: Dem elites are tacitly allied with Rove in pushing "comprehensive immigration reform." They see him as the unwitting architect of Democratic realignment. [But that doesn't explain why non-elite bloggers would lay off him--ed. Good point. Beats me. a) It could just be that the PC/Wall Street Journal multiculturalist spin--that "comprehensive" opponents must be evil racist Nativists--at least initially wins out over the Dobbsian populist spin that too much immigration lowers working wages. Bloggers tend to be meritocratic successes, remember. They're typically "symbolic analysts"--globalization's winners! They are not typically unskilled workers. They don't want to pick tomatoes either. And Dem bloggers don't want to get into bed with The Corner. Or b) it could be that (especially with connected bloggers becoming employees of campaigns) the elites have more control over bloggers than it would seem. Remember Townhouse!].... 5:06 P.M.

Bloggingheads discuss the current #1 on my list of Contrarian Pieces Crying Out to be Written. ... 4:00 A.M.

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Lyndon Johnson losing Cronkite is like Tim Russert losing ... Imus! [Actually, isn't it more like Johnson losing Jack Valenti?--ed Or Lady Bird.] ... P.S.: Whatever you think of Russert, Seth Stevenson pithily puts the basic perjury case against Libby:

But even if Russert is forgetting, the jury still has this to contend with: Libby claimed he was "taken aback" when Russert mentioned that Joe Wilson's wife worked at the CIA. Libby said this information was "something he was telling me that I was first learning."

To believe that, you'd have to believe that 1) Libby forgot that Cheney had already told him about Plame (Libby says he did forget their conversation, and only remembered it when he saw it in his notes), and 2) that Ari Fleischer, Cathie Martin, and multiple other prosecution witnesses were all lying or misremembering when they described conversations with Libby (about Plame) that happened before the Russert phone call.

For the same reason that it's plausible that lots of reporters learned about Joe Wilson's wife's CIA job, and silly to expect that it would stay secret once Wilson started his dramatic public dissent, it's implausible that Libby would ever forget it. The reason: It was great gossip! ... 1:51 A.M.

More on Ditchdiggergate: A Krikorian emailer reports people in the room were shocked when Karl Rove said "I don't want my kid digging ditches" at a conference in June, 2006:

The small business folks were to polite to boo, but you could hear the disappointment and snickers of dissatisfaction rumble through audience immediately after those remarks.

John Podhoretz asks if I--or, rather, those who object to Rove's remarks--would be willing "to receive poorer service at still-high prices" when "restaurants and hotels" actually have to pay enough to attract legal, non-"temporary" workers. The answer is yes. ... P.S.: I always thought the GOP, pro-market position was that the rising tide of the economy was going to lift all boats. I didn't realize it had to lift all the boats in Latin America before it started lifting the boats of unskilled Americans. ... 1:07 A.M.

How Obama May Have Saved Hillary: An obvious point about Hillary: She's in trouble now because of her pro-war vote, and her unimpressive attempts to explain it without repudiating it. But the 2008 campaign has started so early that there's plenty of time for her to reverse field and recover. She should thank Barack Obama for forcing her to move up the start of her campaign. If it were December or even October, things might be different and she'd be in real trouble. ... 12:40 A.M.

David Sirota has been denied a U.S. Capitol press pass because he's an "activist," reports Mary Ann Akers. That seems foolish--isn't an "activist" just a "citizen" exercising his or her rights? But then, it's become hard to think of a principled (and constitutional) basis on which "press" access to the limited real estate in the Capitol can be doled out. If everyone has a blog (as Sirota does) then everyone's at least a part-time journalist and everyone who passes the security check and can give a plausible reason for being there--Sirota's writing a book--should have access. If that would make the galleries too crowded, then maybe the House and Senate themselves should explicitly vote on who gets access instead of pawning the job off onto a committee of journalists. Congressmen are elected, journalists aren't. And if Congressmen decide that at the margin that they want WaPo hanging around but not HuffPo--well, that's what their constituents voted for, indirectly. They should take the heat for it. ... That seems less unconstitutional than letting self-proclaimed private sector reporters exclude their citizen-competitors. ... Got a better idea? 12:11 A.M.

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Edginess Begone: According to Autoblog, a "Bulgarian economist" has designed a futuristic Audi, and it's not only fresher and better looking than any Audi Audi itself is designing these days, it's better looking than everything everybody else is designing too. See if you agree. ... Caution: It has curves, not edges! ... 12:14 A.M.

Yesterday's bloggingheads today: Al Gore makes a symbolic appearance to tout the carbon tax--something he advocated as far back as 1993 and the subject of a highly persuasive Anne Applebaum op-ed piece last week. Bob Wright argues that free-rider problems remain--why would any one nation take painful measures (like imposing a carbon tax) unless other nations have to do that too? But isn't Applebaum's point that some self-imposed burdens are easier to bear than others. Nations have to tax something--taxing carbon instead of wages and income seems like less of a sacrifice than actually capping emissions. And, like wearing your underwear on the outside, it's easy to check! 12:04 A.M.

Monday, February 12, 2007

New Model Edsall: The authoritative Tom Edsall's immigration piece in the unaffordable, subscriber-only National Journal--

a) notes that, while the 2006 elections weren't a victory for anti-comprehensive forces, some swing-district Democrats like Tammy Duckworth were badly hurt by (Edsall says false) charges that they were soft on illegals. That's why Dem caucus chair Rahm Emanuel is insisting on 85 or 90 Republican votes in the House--to give Dems bipartisan cover;

b) "If Democrats saw this as a political winner, why aren't they talking more about it?"--anti-comprehensive Steven Camarota;

c) "Analysts in both parties" are trying to reassure paranoid swing-district Dems that

[m]ost voters who adamantly oppose illegal immigrants are Republicans. ... Faced with a choice between a pro-immigration Republican and a similar Democrat, these voters might well sit out the election.

That means, Edsall theorizes, that "newly elected House Democrats from Republican-leaning districts have less to fear from a pro-immigration vote than do most House and Senate Republicans." But doesn't this logic require the Republicans to cooperate, suicidally, by nominating "pro-immigration" (i.e. pro-comprehensive) candidates in these swing districts? ...

d) Edsall nut graf:

To get a citizenship bill through Congress, President Bush and the Democrats probably need to convert a large bloc of anti-immigration Republican members, perhaps 40 in the House and 20 in the Senate ...

.. even though Democrats are themselves counting on the legislation to create a Democratic electorate, not a grateful pro-GOP Hispanic bloc.

Unless Republicans are easily conned, that sounds encouragingly hard to do. ... [Emphasis added] 11:25 P.M.

Desperate Measures: The host of NBC'S Meet the Press must really be worried about his image this week. He's hauling out "Big Russ:"

Tuesday on "NBC Nightly News": Tim Russert's efforts to make sure his Dad, 'Big Russ,' has everything he needs.

10:30 P.M.

To See What Is In Front of One's Nose ... Andrew Sullivan: "He seems to believe that merely taking a stand in warfare, even if it is a wrong one, is some kind of virtue in itself." Amazingly, Sullivan is not writing about himself--although maybe he really is, on a, you know, deeper level! ... It seems like only yesterday that Sullivan was preeningly defending those "who ever had the balls to take a stand"-- and thus avoided "irrelevance"--even though they were wrong. But it was really last Tuesday. ...[Tks to reader M.G.] 10:09 P.M.

Is Hillary Clinton's campaign really trying to pretend, through vigorous Webbery, that she didn't support the war? That's what Matt Yglesias claims.** If true, that's a bit different than simply stubbornly refusing to apologize for your support; it's trying to deny that you have anything to refuse to apologize for! And it's kind of pathetic. Hillary's had a long time to think about what she'd say in this situation. Not even her husband could get away with that much slickness. He managed to position himself for-and-against Iraq War I, but only because he didn't have to vote on it (and because the war was over and old news by the time he had to stand before the voters). ... P.S.: Yglesias regards Clinton's stance as "an insult to the intelligence of liberals everywhere." Note to Matt: True. But what if her target audience isn't "liberals everywhere" but ... Iowa caucusers? Those people bought the "Kerry, electable" pitch, remember. Who knows what else they'll buy! It's about time someone insulted their intelligence.

**--What makes him so sure? He's got proof! 8:32 P.M.

Gaffe of the year? Karl Rove defends "comprehensive immigration reform":

I don’t want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes or make beds in Las Vegas.”

Has Rove accidentally ripped the mask off the vicious social inegalitarianism of Bush's immigration plan, as Mark Krikorian argues, or does a more benign interpretation of his comments save him? It's not like he hasn't said this sort of thing before, apparently. Indeed, his June, 2006 version makes the probable context of last week's remark quite clear--and Rove's not simply "saying that every parent wants their child to have a high-skilled, high-wage job," as the White House's damage control suggests. Here's the 2006 pitch:

"Now frankly," Rove said during a riff on the temporary worker part of President Bush's immigration reform plan, "I don't want my kid digging ditches. I don't want my kid slinging tar. But I know somebody's got to do it. And we ought to have a system that allows people who want to come here to work to do jobs for which Americans are not lining up."

OK, let's concede there are some unpleasant, unskilled jobs that need doing. How to get them done? 1) One solution is to raise the pay until enough Americans--including teens and college-age kids--and legal immigrants are willing to take the jobs. If the wage gets so high that machines can do the job more efficiently, then unskilled workers will gradually be replaced by robots. (Maybe Rove could tolerate having his son run a computerized robotic tomato picker.) 2) We could in effect draft Americans to do these lousy jobs. It would be a duty of citizenship, like serving on juries. I have a vague memory of Michael Walzer suggesting something along these lines in Spheres of Justice; 3) A third solution would be to import foreigners to work the lousy jobs, but offer them a deal in which, if they work for x number of years, they could gain equal citizenship. This would be a sort of modern, socialized version of indentured servitude.

The most socially inegalitarian solution, of course, is Bush's Solution #4) Import foreign workers who do these second-class jobs as second-class non-citizens. ...

Ah, but wouldn't Bush be happy to settle for #3--a temporary worker program with a path to citizenship? He might. And that's the proposed solution of many Democrats. If I was sure a McCain-Kennedy-Bush program could actually achieve #3, I might support it too. What I fear, of course--what I expect--is that what seems to be #3 will instead become #5: A huge new wave of illegal immigration, drawn by the reward of Bush's semi-amnesty, that overwhelms the fancy new employer and border enforcement mechanisms and temporary-guest-worker safety valves Bush talks about. Lousy jobs will continue to be done by foreigners who have no "path to citizenship" and no legal authorization--it's just that there will be many, many more of them and they will be more poorly paid.

Would Rove care if a 'guest worker program with a path to citizenship' (#3) breaks down, Iraq-style, into a 'new wave of illegals' (#5)--as the 1986 reform did? We now have a clue! That's the significance of Rove's gaffe, I think: Whether or not Bush's guest worker plan is amended to include eventual citizenship, Rove's already revealed himself as a social inegalitarian at heart who doesn't much care. He's fine with #4. Likewise, Rove's unlikely to object much--at least on egalitarian grounds--if we wind up with 20 or 40 million more illegal immigrants slinging tar and making beds. Hey, at least no American's children will have to do the work.

This is not the man you want comprehensively reforming immigration. Dividing work into skilled jobs fit for Americans and unskilled jobs unfit for Americans is certainly one logical reaction to the increasing returns to smarts and skills in our economy. But, as Krikorian notes, it's a reaction that would alter America's essential self-conception. Democrats complain about the inegalitarian effect of various Republican tax cuts, but that's a minor and superficial inequality compared to formalizing the snobbery of the skilled. ... [via Sullivan and Rising Hegemon] 1:43 A.M. link

Why Lie? The estimable Tom Maguire suggests that if Cheney aide Scooter Libby lied about Tim Russert telling him about Valerie Plame, it wasn't a lie that Libby "needed" to tell "in order to paint a useful deception."

Libby's story was that Russert reminded him on July 10; he then talked to Rove, who told him that Novak had the story of Wilson's wife armed with these two reminders, Libby then leaked to Miller and Cooper, sourcing it as reporter gossip.

That "reporter gossip" story works just as well if Libby simply sources it to Novak; the Russert detail added nothing to the legal fog bank he was allegedly trying to create.

I hesitate to venture into Plameland at this late date, but it seems to me that Libby's interests are indeed served by the Russert story: it takes the onus (and the spotlight) off of Rove. That's useful! Rove is more important to Bush than Libby is, Rove was a bigger potential campaign liability, and I don't think too many Bush administration aides like Libby win points with the boss by pissing Rove off. But I defer to more experienced Plamers on this issue. ... 1:37 A.M. link

Now here's a real conflict of interest: WaPo/CNN reporter Howie Kurtz defends Tim Russert on Kurtz's show, "Reliable Sources." WaPo/CNN reporter Howie Kurtz gets invited on Meet the Press by Tim Russert.** ... Howie Kurtz could make something out of that! ... P.S.: As far as I can see Kurtz hadn't been on Russert's show since May*** of 2002. ...

**--For conflict of interest purposes, it doesn't matter much which came first, the defense or the payoff--sorry, I mean the invitation. ...

***--Corrected. Originally said "March." 12:06 A.M. link

Sunday, February 11, 2007

Surge Report: It's undoubtedly not the last word, but for the moment Omar of Iraq the Model is filing positive reports on the surge. Sample:

Baghdad is still enjoying some days of relative calm interrupted only with minor sporadic incidents. In general there's a feeling that these days are better than almost any other time in months. This is more evident in the eastern side of Baghdad than the western part, because the former part has received more US and Iraqi military reinforcements than the latter. [E.A.]

Also, there seems to be an effort to return some Sunni mosques in Shiite areas to the Sunnis, including at least one in Sadr City**:

The mosque was reopened with a celebration where Sunnis and Shia prayed together behind a Sunni cleric. Before the ceremony Shia volunteers cleaned up the area around the mosque from garbage and fixed the sign that carried the name of the mosque.

I tend to trust Omar more than noted Iraq expert Robert Reich, who was confidently assuring everyone on Stephanopoulos's show today that the surge would fail. ... I'm not saying Reich won't turn out to be right. But I'll believe it when Omar sees it. He's not seeing it yet. ... [via Insta]

**--This was unfortunately an operation led by Ahmed Chalabi, of whom Omar is appropriately skeptical. ..10:49 P.M. link

Hillary is so not inevitable! Jon Chait and Jim Geraghty make the point. Chait's argument is especially relentless. Sample:

The question is: Which candidate is more likely to benefit from endless hours of speechifying, hand-shaking, and town hall meetings? There's no reason to think the answer will be Clinton. While she may be just as smart as--and more experienced than--Edwards and Obama, she is an average orator, while Edwards is a very good one and Obama is a brilliant one. Having seen all three give speeches, it's hard for me to imagine how a prolonged side-by-side comparison will move voters into Clinton's camp. And, as the best-known of the leading candidates, she'll have the hardest time making a strong new impression anyway.

Post-Chait data point: In Iowa, "among those saying they have attended at least one caucus," Hillary leads Edwards by only 29-25%. A year out. ... Evitable! ...

Update: Reader K.S.Z. emails:

The obvious counter-example to your post on Hillary and Iowa: John Kerry. "Endless hours of speechifying, hand-shaking, and town hall meetings" should have sunk him, if they sank anyone. They didn't.

Good point. True, the tryout period promises to be much longer this time--but Chait does seem to have forgotten one crucial factor: the Iowa Dem caucusers are fools! Who knows whom they'll decide is "electable" this time? Still, that only makes their choice seem more random and less inevitable, no? ... P.S.: The larger issue is that we--the Dems, the press--are on the verge of making Iowa seem all-important again, even though the kind, earnest, liberal Iowans have not picked a winning non-incumbent Democratic candidate in the thirty years since Jimmy Carter and David Broder put the caucuses on the map. ... 1:57 A.M. link

Radar Magazine comes out on Tuesday, with "Toxic Bachelors" advertised on the cover. A Ron Burkle story in the very first issue! That should put to rest those persistent, unproven rumors that Burkle is funding Radar. I apologize for even worrying that editor Maer Roshan would pull his punches for someone who's at least a "good friend" of Yusef Jackson, chairman of Radar's parent company.. ...P.S.: What's that? Really? Must be some sort of printer's error. ...

P.P.S.--Free advice to Roshan: You boast in the Daily News that Radar plans to rely on

"actual reporters and photographers to cover stories ... not pajama-clad post-collegiates snarkily blogging on content produced by others." [E.A.]

a) Snarky! b) Cliched; c) Strategically foolish: Why begin your second relaunch by pissing off bloggers? Everyone admires your touchingly quaint attachment to actual, you know, journalism--but bloggers could be your friends. For one thing, as you note, they need your content to snark off of. For another, they may need real jobs one day (and if you're still around, you will hire them--don't pretend you won't). In the meantime they can give you publicity for your forthcoming investigative achievements. And it's not as if you're debuting your magazine without an obvious, Faustian-bargainish, gaping journalistic sore spot--i.e., conflicts of interest created by your mysterious ownership structure that bloggers could harp on obsessively if sufficiently goaded, conflicts of interest that are just the sort of thing the plodders of the mainstream press might pick up on to tar your name. You only get one chance to make a third impression! ...

P.P.P.S.--I'd say zero. How does zero sound? What are the chances that Radar will cover the most enjoyable likely scandal on the horizon--the gripping story of how Bill Clinton somehow avoided temptation to remain faithful to Hillary over the past 8 years--with Jackson & Co. funding the venture? Burkle is Bill Clinton's business partner, remember.

P.P.P.P.S.: When Mike Kinsley started Slate under Microsoft's ownership he (misguidedly, in my opinion) conceded, "There will be no major investigations of Microsoft in Slate." But Kinsley argued that by creating a new journalistic institution--even one with a blind spot--Slate was still "adding to the total amount of skeptical scrutiny going on." Couldn't Roshan make a similar argument for Radar? Sure. The differences are 1) We knew who owned Slate. We don't really know who's bankrolling Radar--i.e. where the blind spots are; 2) Melinda Gates wasn't running for president. ...12:49 A.M. link

Friday, February 9, 2007

The Dog-Catcher Meme: Tom Bevan debunks what has always seemed an Upper West Side/NYT myth about Giuliani--that "on September 10 Rudy couldn't have been elected dog catcher in New York City." True, he wasn't as popular as he had been, and the anti-Giuliani elites smelled victory (just as they smelled victory over Bush in 2004). But that's a distorted view--and not only for the usual liberal-cocooning reasons. There's also an idiosyncratic factor: cab drivers. Cab drivers hated Giuliani, for various reasons, including tough safety and cleanliness clampdowns. Most pre-9/11 visitors to New York--and native New Yorkers--who had money to take cabs were routinely entertained by anti-Rudy rants. But the cabdrivers in this case were not the voice of the people. They were the voice of an aggrieved interest group. ... 1:02 P.M. link

If ever there was a car I'd expect to be a piece of junk, it's the Jeep Compass. But USA Today's seemingly reliable James Healey likes it. 12:51 P.M.

RCP's John McIntyre thinks that, given Giuliani's likely entry, John McCain "would be well advised to position himself as the pro-growth, supply-side conservative in the Republican field." And sure enough Robert Novak just happens to have written a column touting McCain's supply-side credentials, claiming he "sounds more like Jack Kemp as a 2008 candidate." Novak says, of McCain:

He supports radically scaling down the estate tax and does not now favor upper income increases in the Social Security tax.

Wow. He does not now favor upper income Social Security tax increases! That'll reassure the anti-tax crowd. And McCain supports radically scaling down the estate tax! Isn't that the, um, Democrats' estate tax plan? I think it is! Anti-tax Republicans want to repeal the estate tax, as Novak knows. ... Oh, yes: McCain also talks to Arthur Laffer! ... It's hard to believe Republican economic conservatives are such cheap dates that they'll fall for McCain based on the thin evidence offered by Novak of his "transformation." .... P.S.: Bob Wright and I discuss some serious Giuliani weaknesses McCain might play on, including a big 9/11 mistake. ... 1:27 A.M. link

Only a decade or so too late (and more than three years after Chrysler) General Motors finally coming out with what should be an affordable rear-drive sedan. ... 1:09 A.M.

Attention, Thomas O. Barnett: I went to Staples to buy a replacement cartridge for my HP printer. Usually I buy a "Staples" brand replacement--they're a little cheaper. But they were no longer on display. Only the pricier HP cartridges were for sale. I asked the store manager if this was because HP had sued Staples. No, she said--HP "paid us more" to carry only their brand. ... If true, isn't this a pretty clear antitrust violation? HP would seem to be trying to enforce a (presumably lucrative) semi-monopoly position in HP replacement cartridges. I don't think semi-monopolists can do that. Or am I misremembering antitrust law? ... Backfill: Business Week has covered this, and finds a prof who says there's no antitrust violation because "there are alternatives being sold at other office superstores, and other printer brands are being sold at Staples." Second opinion, please. ... 10:46 P.M.

Keep your clothes on: Anyone want to bet that the mysterious new BMW sports car with black "camouflage" cladding--designed to fool spy photographers--is better looking with the cladding attached than the actual sports car we'll see when the cladding comes off? ... [via Autoblog]10:36 P.M.

Friday, February 23, 2007

What would Deborah Orin say? Here's a useful analysis from kf "Emailer X" arguing that the recent pro-Hillary, Nagourneyesque (and Dickersonian) spin is wrong:

The truth is Hillary's campaign has been a series of ill-considered moves. Obama panicked her into a way-too-early-announcement. The cause of the panic was fund-raising (poaching of presumed supporters), which is the least vulnerable aspect of her campaign. Basically, if she wins in Iowa and New Hampshire, she wins the nomination. The most she can spend in Iowa and New Hampshire is $20 million, every last dollar counted, including the surrounding states primary television advertising that will be seen in Iowa. So money is not her problem. Imagining that it was and therefore entering the race six-to-eight months before she needed to was a MAJOR mistake. Had she entered in August or September, the surge would have run its course successfully or not. The Iran issue would be that much further along. Pandemic flu would have hit or not hit. Etc. By announcing early, she brought into play a hundred unnecessary variables.

In a nutshell, her challenge is (a) herself, (b) her vote on the War (and her bizarre accounting for same), (c) her husband (never very popular with the party's left wing and a wild card every day), (d) the whole Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton can-we-ever-get-out-of-this-movie thing, (e) Hillaryland (consultants turning everything to hectoring mush), (f) deep-seated fear among Democrats that she is, in truth, the least electable candidate they have.

Geffen, a long-time ally, addressed a, b, c, d, e and f. The Clinton campaign, by responding the way it did, amplified his remarks at least twofold. If that's a win, I'm for the Breck Girl.

11:26 P.M. link

Do we really have to go through another presidential campaign watching the NYT's Adam Nagourney get spun? And without Deborah Orin around to bring everyone back to reality? Grim! Nagourney's Friday piece--"reporting" that "even Mr. Obama ... seemed to acknowledge that he may have been outmaneuvered" by Hillary in the Geffen flap is a case in point.

1) Nagourney didn't report anything to back up the claim that Obama acknowledged being outmaneuvered. He quoted Obama saying he wanted to avoid such "distractions." But Obama could have regretted it for sincere, highminded reasons, even if the controversy helped him. Why be cynical and assume that if a pol regrets something it can only be because it cost him votes? Or Obama could have been more deeply cynical than Nagourney--seeming to admit error as a tactical ploy (to placate the famously wussy Iowa caucusers, who hate Dem fratricide) while quietly pocketing his winnings.

2) Nagourney's conclusion, and that of most other MSM pundits, assumes you can analyze which campaign won and which lost without assessing the truth value or appeal of what Geffen said about Hillary. In this "neutral," strategic analysis, Obama lost because he was the positive candidate lured into going "negative." Doesn't it matter whether Geffen's charges were true--or at least rang true--or were baloney? "Objective" reporters are uncomfortable making such judgments, but those are the judgments voters will be making. If Geffen was giving voice to what lots of Democrats were actually thinking about Hillary, and if by doing so he in effect gave Dems permission to stop suppressing these objections, and if those objections are powerful, he could have done Hillary damage even if her brilliant staff lured an Obama press aide into putting out a snarky press release.

3) No Nagourney "I've Been Spun" piece would be complete without a quote from notorious Dem counterproductive overspinner Chris Lehane, whose tendentious 24-7 BS sniping as Al Gore's 2000 press secretary helped elect Bush in the first place (and constitutes the very "game as it customarily is played" that Obama condemns). The Obama camp's response "fundamentally undermined their long-term message," Lehane concluded. To ward off charges of bias, Nagourney claims Lehane "has not endorsed a candidate," but it's inconceivable that Lehane is without an agenda or agendas here--at the very least, the agenda of sucking up to Nagourney by telling him what he wants to hear. Also, Lehane is almost always wrong. I remember, after the California recall debate, he declared that Schwarzenegger had lost ground because he was mean to Arianna Huffington, thereby offending women voters. In fact, Schwarzenegger's put-downs almost certainly helped elect him. Lehane's spin is most useful as a Lawrence O'Donnellish contrary indicator. Maybe he isn't allied with a candidate because nobody wants him.

Update: Melinda Henneberger reports that Geffen's criticism "Is Nothing I Haven't Heard from Women Voters Across America." She didn't hear it from men voters? There's your lede! ... Oh, I see. She only talked to women. ... So we have a First Woman who doesn't appeal that much to women running against a First Black who doesn't appeal that much to blacks. Cool. Maybe Identity Politics is dead. ... 11:13 P.M link

First Warner, Now Vilsack: Another seemingly inexplicable drop-out from the Democratic presidential race. Just when the two national frontrunners are busy destroying each other, why would a credible fallback choice like Iowa ex-Gov.Tom Vilsack bail? The fundraising troubles that are allegedly the "only" reason he quit a) don't seem that bad and b) were all quite foreseeable when he declared his candidacy in November. ... Baseless speculation (but why not): Did someone (e.g. Hillary) realize she desperately needed Vilsack's Iowa supporters and make him an offer he couldn't refuse? ... 1:36 P.M. link

And here I thought Scientology was on the defensive: I didn't know there was a whole new batch of possible celeb recruits/hangers-around--Lachlan Murdoch (that from Radar), Will and Jada, J-Lo, Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy, even maybe Forest Whitaker. But the religion might be too expensive for David Beckham's fashionable wife. ("Victoria is too cheap to convert.") Elizabeth Snead says: "Maybe she can get Scientology wholesale." ... 1:06 P.M. link

Matthew Yglesias displays the strenuous casuistry loyal Democrats will employ to avoid the need for any confrontation with teachers' unions on the question Steve Jobs recently raised--firing lousy teachers. According to Yglesias the issue isn't firing bad teacher but attracting good ones:

... the reason politicians rarely push for it is that the actual payoff is very, very low. The issue is that there isn't this vast pool of highly effective potential hires out there. The schools with serious teacher-quality problems tend to have them because the better teachers, by and large, don't want to work there and schools have problems filling all the slots with minimally qualified people. The real action (also disliked by teacher unions, if pissing off unions is your goal) is in the certification process, who counts as a qualified teacher, and what counts as an effective teacher (here's where the accountability comes in). If in the future that created a situation where there were tons of people looking to break into the teaching field then it might make sense to expend political capital on making it easier to fire people. [E.A.]

Response:

a) It's easier to hire good teachers if you can fire bad ones. Competent people want to work for competent organizations. Which offer would you be more likely to take: "Come work for our school district. We weed out the deadwood and we're doing a great job preparing our kids," Or "Come work for our district and spend your life beating your head against a bureaucratic wall." Yes, teachers should be paid more--but it's weird that an idealistic liberal would think good candidates are only motivated by money. (And if you could fire bad and mediocre teachers then school districts wouldn't have to spend a big chunk of any pay raise boosting the salaries of ... bad and mediocre teachers).

b) You obviously want to do both-- weed out bad old teachers and expand the pool of potential good new teachers by allowing certification of people who haven't met the mindless credential requirements fiercely defended by the unions.** Yglesias conveniently pretends you can only do the former after the latter--"if" in the "future," after a couple of more generations have sloughed through mediocre or criminally lousy schools, we've managed to amass a huge pool of "tons" of people trying to break into teaching, then it "might" make sense to take on the union protection of incompetents. "Might." That's good of him!

c) Of course, if Yglesias shies from a confrontation now--by kicking the can off to some distant "future," and then only maybe--he'll shy from the confrontation ten years from now. Paul Glastris, in a recent bloggingheads debate on Yglesias' post, unexpectedly blurted out the real reason Dems like him don't want to confront the unions, no matter how sound and obvious the policy reasons for doing so.

**--as a means of protecting their members from uncredentialed hires who would do a better job! 1:53 A.M. link

Thursday, February 22, 2007

DownHill Racing: My impression is that David Geffen isn't furious at Bill Clinton for not pardoning Leonard Peltier. He's furious at Bill Clinton for lying about whether he was going to pardon Leonard Peltier--at least that's what I think Geffen would say. ... P.S.: The pros think Hillary won the Geffen fight. I'm not so sure. By striking back so quickly when a non-candidate makes an obvious anti-Clinton point, does she discourage further attacks or encourage them? I'd say the latter. Everyone loves a target who cries in pain every time it's hit. Anyway, the clear winner in the incident was TimesSelect. [Update: Or not!] ... P.P.S.: Larry Johnson has a good question for Obama, though--just to see how he'd handle it. ...3:57 P.M. link

Don't look now: The much-derided right-wing comedy show 1/2 Hour News Hour was a ratings hit for FOX. ... 1:21 A.M.

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

It's dangerous to spot trends in Rasmussen robo-polls that Rasmussen himself doesn't even highlight--but hasn't Obama cut Hillary's lead from 16 points to 4 points in about two weeks? The Hillary Announcement Bump would seem to have dissipated. ... P.S.: I forgot. She's inevitable. Sorry. ... 2:08 A.M.

Didn't Mike Kinsley get in big trouble at the L.A. Times for trying this? ... Seems kind of innocuous now. ...[via Corner] 1:43 A.M.

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Explainer Please! Rudy Giuliani "is happy to participate in a receiving-line style photo opportunity as compared to a snake line." [E.A.] What's the difference? What if the receiving line starts, you know, snaking a bit? ... P.S.: Maybe I'm a jaded Hollywood type, but Giuliani's demands don't seem that diva-ish. He only requires one (1) SUV. He apparently allows eye contact! He doesn't even ask for a fruit basket. ... 2:21 P.M.

Monday, February 19, 2007

Hillary--Batting .001: Mohammed at Iraq the Model--writing after the recent Baghdad car bombings-- reports that:

Although attacks happen here and there, the general feeling is still closer to hope and appreciation of the plan than pessimism. More families are returning to the homes they were once forced to leave, and we're talking about some of the most dangerous districts such as Ghazaliya and Haifa Street.

I'm not saying things won't change, I'm not saying long term prospects look positive. I'm saying they are positive enough to warrant giving the plan a chance to do some good instead of blocking it or strangling it Murtha style. Or Hillary style--now that she's called for starting a pullout in 90 days. How do you surge and "redeploy" at the same time?...

P.S.: It's not too early to say that Hillary's performance in the opening weeks has been impressively unimpressive. It's pretty clear in retrospect, that the war with Iraq, however it comes out, was a bad gamble. A mistake, in other words. But now that we've made the mistaken gamble, it also seems clear--to Mohammed at least--that the surge might do some good. The correct position, by these lights, was War No, Surge Yes. It would be selfishly callous, in a stereotypically American way, for us to invade Iraq, make a mess, and then not be willing to pay any extra price to help fix the mess we've made. (Murtha's demand that the troops be given "a year at home"--and the heck with what happens to Iraqis like Mohammed--only emphasizes this self-interested perspective.)

Yet through a conscientiously applied mixture of high-minded comity, Machiavellian calculation, stubbornness and bad expert advice, Hillary has managed to arrive at a position that's precisely wrong on both counts: War Yes, Surge No.

Didn't most political observers sour on Hillary in 1994, when she stubbornly clung to her grand, high-minded health care plan long after it was clear to everyone that it was a lost cause? Wasn't she supposed to have learned her lesson from that episode? Isn't she making exactly the same error again--stubbornly clinging to her refusal to say her Iraq vote was the mistake it was? ("She wants to maintain a firmness," an unnamed advisor told the NYT.)** And then, in this case, trying to compensate for her stubbornness by indulging the left's pullout impulses?

She should maybe take a breather to watch The Queen, which is all about how a strong woman (Queen Elizabeth II) is talked by Tony Blair into climbing down from a stubborn position (refusal to ostentatiously grieve over Diana) that, even though it makes sense to her, is out of touch with reality. ...

But if Hillary's judgment is that bad ... well, we get to choose our queens and kings. Do Americans need all the drama?

P.P.S.: Who is Hillary's Tony Blair? It was supposed to be Bill. Where is he? Off zipping around with Ron Burkle?...

Update: See also Iraqpundit, whose relatives in Baghdad have been able to move back to their home, at least temporarily. He acknowledges that the sectarian "thugs" might "eventuallly" return. [via Insta] Note that Mohammed is hearing firefights, which suggest to him that the targets of the "surge" are not just lying low:

It looks like some militants consider that sitting back and waiting is not an option and so they are trying to break the siege.

**--Backfill: Dick Morris offers several other examples of Hillary's counterproductive stubbornness:

Counseled by most of her staff to release the Whitewater documents when The Washington Post first requested them, she said no and triggered the designation of a special prosecutor. When Whitewater co-conspirator Jim MacDougal suggested that he buy her out of the investment to avoid political embarrassment, she refused, saying that she planned to use the proceeds for Chelsea's college tuition. When Bill Clinton had the opportunity to settle the Paula Jones lawsuit, Hillary vetoed that possibility, paving the way for her husband's impeachment.

Morris blames her dependence on "gurus." But at some point it doesn't matter. Bad judgment is bad judgment. ... 5:00 P.M. link

Coping with the Nevada cost of living: 16% of public employees in Southern Nevada make more than $100,000 a year, reports the Las Vegas Sun. ... Paying workers overtime for overtime seems only fair, but at some point it becomes a racket. (The national average for all workers is 5%, says the Sun). ... [Via NewsAlert] 11:57 A.M.

Saturday, February 17, 2007

Do all those Democratic Senators running for President really want to vote to disapprove the surge even as it seems to be showing some initial, tentative, possibly illusory positive effects? Or, as Instapundit suggests, would a "no surge" vote put them in the position where a military success would be "politically ... dangerous?" I've previously argued that the wording of an anti-surge resolution would leave the Dems some escape routes--but what if the public doesn't pay attention to the wording? What if they just pay attention to the vote? What if it comes up in a debate: "And you opposed the increase in troops which is what finally brought relative peace to Baghdad..." How much better for these Democrats if a)they can placate the left by telling primary voters they support some sort of anti-surge resolution but b) they don't have to actually vote on a resolution because it never gets enough votes for cloture, so there's no actual vote that can be hung around their necks. That's win-win! And gee, that's what actually seems to have happened in the Senate. Funny thing. I smell Kabuki. If there's one thing United States Senators are good at it's engineering a stalemate that lets everyone posture in whatever way they think will help them. ... 6:55 P.M. link

Apple CEO Steve Jobs unloads on teachers' unions:

AUSTIN — Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs lambasted teacher unions today, claiming no amount of technology in the classroom would improve public schools until principals could fire bad teachers. ...

If Jobs is a Democrat,** he's a New Democrat! ...P.S.: In response, Dell CEO and founder Michael Dell--who sells mainly non-Apple Windows-based machines--defended the unions. ... Windows, kludgy Old Dem! Apple, New Dem! Just what you would have thought. ... P.P.S.: Jobs might have added "no amount of well-meaning educational donations from the Gates Foundation would improve public schools nearly as much as allowing principals to fire bad teachers." ...

**--which he seems to be. On the other hand Dell, who took the Old Dem position, is a Republican. ...

Update: Joe Klein (not swooning yet!) says Barack Obama, at an Iowa town meeting, "told a teachers' union member that he supported higher pay for teachers but also--the union's anathema--greater accountability." I'd be interested in the transcript: Praising "accountability" is one thing--a good thing, but vague. It could mean a lot of things. Talking about getting "rid of people," as Jobs did, puts the issue more clearly, no? ...

More: David Yepsen has an exact quote of what Obama actually said:

"If teachers are underperforming, we're going to get them the help they need. But we're not going to pretend they are not underperforming, and that is something we're going to have to make happen ..." [E.A.]

Hmmm. Maybe you get candor points for saying even that much in teacher-dominated Iowa, which only shows how pathetically pander-centric Democratic politics has become. (I think Eduwonk agrees.) Why couldn't Obama say something like this:

"If teachers are underperforming, we're going to get them the help they need. But in the meantime we will replace them with someone who can do the job. Our children's education has to come first. Yes, in order to attract good teachers, we must be fair to teachers. But the schools are there to teach our kids. They're not a jobs program. The best teachers are honored--and the best citizens will be attracted to the profession--when the public schools regain their reputation as institutions where good things happen to kids."

In the 1984 Democratic primary, Gary Hart and Walter Mondale actually got into a national debate over whether Mondale would dare to admit that bad teachers should actually be dismissed. Mondale finally said the words, if I remember, only after being backed into a highly-embarrasing special-interest corner by the press. Now the press gives out bravery awards for daring to say that teachers should "get the help they need." In this, and many other respects--read his announcement speech and try to find even a little bit of Souljah--Obama's campaign as less than a half Hart. ...I'd estimate about 23%. ...1:57 P.M. link

Friday, February 16, 2007

Low Hanging Fruit--The Gaia Hypothesis (as noted in Eat the Press): Hollywood fundraiser Daphne Ziman unveils Hillary Clinton pollster Mark Penn's carefully-crafted new campaign message in the Beverly Hills Hotel's Polo Lounge:

"The nation is in deep need for a mother figure who will lead the people out of a violent world and back into caring for the poor and the disabled, mostly caring for our children, our future." [E.A.]

Someone needs to be disciplined! ... Note to D.C.: You see what we have to deal with out here? ... 3:02 P.M. link

What's gotten into David Broder? He's written a piece that isn't CW. [Is it persuasive?--ed No. He says Bush is "poised for a political comeback," without offering much evidence. A bit of bipartisan comity is all it takes and he starts getting giddy. ... Blogger Don Surber actually does a bit more with the thesis.] ..[via Lucianne and Insta] 11:58 A.M.

N.Z. Bear: "Sorry kids: multi-hour response time just doesn't cut it here in the big leagues." 1:43 A.M.

America's Leading Contrary Indicator: If I were Lewis "Scooter" Libby, this is what I'd want to read right about now. ..

"Libby is guilty. And he's going to be found guilty. .."

from the Man Who Is Always Wrong, Lawrence O'Donnell. ... P.S.: O'Donnell's own commenters actually do a pretty good job of busting him for his earlier erroneous predictions. Excerpts:

Unfortunately you were wrong when you predicted, six or seven indictments-including Rove... [snip]

I hope you're right, Lawrence. But I must say your batting average is pretty dismal. Two examples: 1) You told Al Franken's audience that John Kerry had nothing to worry about (or words to that effect) in the 2004 election 2) You predicted that Joe Lieberman, after losing the primary, would be persuaded to drop out of the Senate race by September 2006. ... [snip]

I really like reading Lawrence O'Donnell, but isn't he the guy who also said that Rove was, beyond a doubt, going to be indicted? [E.A.]

They forgot O'Donnell's famous Labor Day, 2000 "It's Over" column in New York, giving the election to Gore. ... [Didn't you just make the same Libby prediction?--ed I did! But even I don't have O'Donnell's authoritative track record.] ... [Thanks to alert reader R.P.] 12:04 A.M.

Thursday, February 15, 2007

This is what he said, folks: "I don't want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes or make beds in Las Vegas." [snip]

This insults work. Period. It also insults the people who do work. It is the worst kind of class warfare.

Normally Democrats attack Rove if he has a pimple. Why go easy on him now? The answer is pretty obvious: Dem elites are tacitly allied with Rove in pushing "comprehensive immigration reform." They see him as the unwitting architect of Democratic realignment. [But that doesn't explain why non-elite bloggers would lay off him--ed. Good point. Beats me. a) It could just be that the PC/Wall Street Journal multiculturalist spin--that "comprehensive" opponents must be evil racist Nativists--at least initially wins out over the Dobbsian populist spin that too much immigration lowers working wages. Bloggers tend to be meritocratic successes, remember. They're typically "symbolic analysts"--globalization's winners! They are not typically unskilled workers. They don't want to pick tomatoes either. And Dem bloggers don't want to get into bed with The Corner. Or b) it could be that (especially with connected bloggers becoming employees of campaigns) the elites have more control over bloggers than it would seem. Remember Townhouse!].... 5:06 P.M.

Bloggingheads discuss the current #1 on my list of Contrarian Pieces Crying Out to be Written. ... 4:00 A.M.

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Lyndon Johnson losing Cronkite is like Tim Russert losing ... Imus! [Actually, isn't it more like Johnson losing Jack Valenti?--ed Or Lady Bird.] ... P.S.: Whatever you think of Russert, Seth Stevenson pithily puts the basic perjury case against Libby:

But even if Russert is forgetting, the jury still has this to contend with: Libby claimed he was "taken aback" when Russert mentioned that Joe Wilson's wife worked at the CIA. Libby said this information was "something he was telling me that I was first learning."

To believe that, you'd have to believe that 1) Libby forgot that Cheney had already told him about Plame (Libby says he did forget their conversation, and only remembered it when he saw it in his notes), and 2) that Ari Fleischer, Cathie Martin, and multiple other prosecution witnesses were all lying or misremembering when they described conversations with Libby (about Plame) that happened before the Russert phone call.

For the same reason that it's plausible that lots of reporters learned about Joe Wilson's wife's CIA job, and silly to expect that it would stay secret once Wilson started his dramatic public dissent, it's implausible that Libby would ever forget it. The reason: It was great gossip! ... 1:51 A.M.

More on Ditchdiggergate: A Krikorian emailer reports people in the room were shocked when Karl Rove said "I don't want my kid digging ditches" at a conference in June, 2006:

The small business folks were to polite to boo, but you could hear the disappointment and snickers of dissatisfaction rumble through audience immediately after those remarks.

John Podhoretz asks if I--or, rather, those who object to Rove's remarks--would be willing "to receive poorer service at still-high prices" when "restaurants and hotels" actually have to pay enough to attract legal, non-"temporary" workers. The answer is yes. ... P.S.: I always thought the GOP, pro-market position was that the rising tide of the economy was going to lift all boats. I didn't realize it had to lift all the boats in Latin America before it started lifting the boats of unskilled Americans. ... 1:07 A.M.

How Obama May Have Saved Hillary: An obvious point about Hillary: She's in trouble now because of her pro-war vote, and her unimpressive attempts to explain it without repudiating it. But the 2008 campaign has started so early that there's plenty of time for her to reverse field and recover. She should thank Barack Obama for forcing her to move up the start of her campaign. If it were December or even October, things might be different and she'd be in real trouble. ... 12:40 A.M.

David Sirota has been denied a U.S. Capitol press pass because he's an "activist," reports Mary Ann Akers. That seems foolish--isn't an "activist" just a "citizen" exercising his or her rights? But then, it's become hard to think of a principled (and constitutional) basis on which "press" access to the limited real estate in the Capitol can be doled out. If everyone has a blog (as Sirota does) then everyone's at least a part-time journalist and everyone who passes the security check and can give a plausible reason for being there--Sirota's writing a book--should have access. If that would make the galleries too crowded, then maybe the House and Senate themselves should explicitly vote on who gets access instead of pawning the job off onto a committee of journalists. Congressmen are elected, journalists aren't. And if Congressmen decide that at the margin that they want WaPo hanging around but not HuffPo--well, that's what their constituents voted for, indirectly. They should take the heat for it. ... That seems less unconstitutional than letting self-proclaimed private sector reporters exclude their citizen-competitors. ... Got a better idea? 12:11 A.M.

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Edginess Begone: According to Autoblog, a "Bulgarian economist" has designed a futuristic Audi, and it's not only fresher and better looking than any Audi Audi itself is designing these days, it's better looking than everything everybody else is designing too. See if you agree. ... Caution: It has curves, not edges! ... 12:14 A.M.

Yesterday's bloggingheads today: Al Gore makes a symbolic appearance to tout the carbon tax--something he advocated as far back as 1993 and the subject of a highly persuasive Anne Applebaum op-ed piece last week. Bob Wright argues that free-rider problems remain--why would any one nation take painful measures (like imposing a carbon tax) unless other nations have to do that too? But isn't Applebaum's point that some self-imposed burdens are easier to bear than others. Nations have to tax something--taxing carbon instead of wages and income seems like less of a sacrifice than actually capping emissions. And, like wearing your underwear on the outside, it's easy to check! 12:04 A.M.

Monday, February 12, 2007

New Model Edsall: The authoritative Tom Edsall's immigration piece in the unaffordable, subscriber-only National Journal--

a) notes that, while the 2006 elections weren't a victory for anti-comprehensive forces, some swing-district Democrats like Tammy Duckworth were badly hurt by (Edsall says false) charges that they were soft on illegals. That's why Dem caucus chair Rahm Emanuel is insisting on 85 or 90 Republican votes in the House--to give Dems bipartisan cover;

b) "If Democrats saw this as a political winner, why aren't they talking more about it?"--anti-comprehensive Steven Camarota;

c) "Analysts in both parties" are trying to reassure paranoid swing-district Dems that

[m]ost voters who adamantly oppose illegal immigrants are Republicans. ... Faced with a choice between a pro-immigration Republican and a similar Democrat, these voters might well sit out the election.

That means, Edsall theorizes, that "newly elected House Democrats from Republican-leaning districts have less to fear from a pro-immigration vote than do most House and Senate Republicans." But doesn't this logic require the Republicans to cooperate, suicidally, by nominating "pro-immigration" (i.e. pro-comprehensive) candidates in these swing districts? ...

d) Edsall nut graf:

To get a citizenship bill through Congress, President Bush and the Democrats probably need to convert a large bloc of anti-immigration Republican members, perhaps 40 in the House and 20 in the Senate ...

.. even though Democrats are themselves counting on the legislation to create a Democratic electorate, not a grateful pro-GOP Hispanic bloc.

Unless Republicans are easily conned, that sounds encouragingly hard to do. ... [Emphasis added] 11:25 P.M.

Desperate Measures: The host of NBC'S Meet the Press must really be worried about his image this week. He's hauling out "Big Russ:"

Tuesday on "NBC Nightly News": Tim Russert's efforts to make sure his Dad, 'Big Russ,' has everything he needs.

10:30 P.M.

To See What Is In Front of One's Nose ... Andrew Sullivan: "He seems to believe that merely taking a stand in warfare, even if it is a wrong one, is some kind of virtue in itself." Amazingly, Sullivan is not writing about himself--although maybe he really is, on a, you know, deeper level! ... It seems like only yesterday that Sullivan was preeningly defending those "who ever had the balls to take a stand"-- and thus avoided "irrelevance"--even though they were wrong. But it was really last Tuesday. ...[Tks to reader M.G.] 10:09 P.M.

Is Hillary Clinton's campaign really trying to pretend, through vigorous Webbery, that she didn't support the war? That's what Matt Yglesias claims.** If true, that's a bit different than simply stubbornly refusing to apologize for your support; it's trying to deny that you have anything to refuse to apologize for! And it's kind of pathetic. Hillary's had a long time to think about what she'd say in this situation. Not even her husband could get away with that much slickness. He managed to position himself for-and-against Iraq War I, but only because he didn't have to vote on it (and because the war was over and old news by the time he had to stand before the voters). ... P.S.: Yglesias regards Clinton's stance as "an insult to the intelligence of liberals everywhere." Note to Matt: True. But what if her target audience isn't "liberals everywhere" but ... Iowa caucusers? Those people bought the "Kerry, electable" pitch, remember. Who knows what else they'll buy! It's about time someone insulted their intelligence.

**--What makes him so sure? He's got proof! 8:32 P.M.

Gaffe of the year? Karl Rove defends "comprehensive immigration reform":

I don’t want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes or make beds in Las Vegas.”

Has Rove accidentally ripped the mask off the vicious social inegalitarianism of Bush's immigration plan, as Mark Krikorian argues, or does a more benign interpretation of his comments save him? It's not like he hasn't said this sort of thing before, apparently. Indeed, his June, 2006 version makes the probable context of last week's remark quite clear--and Rove's not simply "saying that every parent wants their child to have a high-skilled, high-wage job," as the White House's damage control suggests. Here's the 2006 pitch:

"Now frankly," Rove said during a riff on the temporary worker part of President Bush's immigration reform plan, "I don't want my kid digging ditches. I don't want my kid slinging tar. But I know somebody's got to do it. And we ought to have a system that allows people who want to come here to work to do jobs for which Americans are not lining up."

OK, let's concede there are some unpleasant, unskilled jobs that need doing. How to get them done? 1) One solution is to raise the pay until enough Americans--including teens and college-age kids--and legal immigrants are willing to take the jobs. If the wage gets so high that machines can do the job more efficiently, then unskilled workers will gradually be replaced by robots. (Maybe Rove could tolerate having his son run a computerized robotic tomato picker.) 2) We could in effect draft Americans to do these lousy jobs. It would be a duty of citizenship, like serving on juries. I have a vague memory of Michael Walzer suggesting something along these lines in Spheres of Justice; 3) A third solution would be to import foreigners to work the lousy jobs, but offer them a deal in which, if they work for x number of years, they could gain equal citizenship. This would be a sort of modern, socialized version of indentured servitude.

The most socially inegalitarian solution, of course, is Bush's Solution #4) Import foreign workers who do these second-class jobs as second-class non-citizens. ...

Ah, but wouldn't Bush be happy to settle for #3--a temporary worker program with a path to citizenship? He might. And that's the proposed solution of many Democrats. If I was sure a McCain-Kennedy-Bush program could actually achieve #3, I might support it too. What I fear, of course--what I expect--is that what seems to be #3 will instead become #5: A huge new wave of illegal immigration, drawn by the reward of Bush's semi-amnesty, that overwhelms the fancy new employer and border enforcement mechanisms and temporary-guest-worker safety valves Bush talks about. Lousy jobs will continue to be done by foreigners who have no "path to citizenship" and no legal authorization--it's just that there will be many, many more of them and they will be more poorly paid.

Would Rove care if a 'guest worker program with a path to citizenship' (#3) breaks down, Iraq-style, into a 'new wave of illegals' (#5)--as the 1986 reform did? We now have a clue! That's the significance of Rove's gaffe, I think: Whether or not Bush's guest worker plan is amended to include eventual citizenship, Rove's already revealed himself as a social inegalitarian at heart who doesn't much care. He's fine with #4. Likewise, Rove's unlikely to object much--at least on egalitarian grounds--if we wind up with 20 or 40 million more illegal immigrants slinging tar and making beds. Hey, at least no American's children will have to do the work.

This is not the man you want comprehensively reforming immigration. Dividing work into skilled jobs fit for Americans and unskilled jobs unfit for Americans is certainly one logical reaction to the increasing returns to smarts and skills in our economy. But, as Krikorian notes, it's a reaction that would alter America's essential self-conception. Democrats complain about the inegalitarian effect of various Republican tax cuts, but that's a minor and superficial inequality compared to formalizing the snobbery of the skilled. ... [via Sullivan and Rising Hegemon] 1:43 A.M. link

Why Lie? The estimable Tom Maguire suggests that if Cheney aide Scooter Libby lied about Tim Russert telling him about Valerie Plame, it wasn't a lie that Libby "needed" to tell "in order to paint a useful deception."

Libby's story was that Russert reminded him on July 10; he then talked to Rove, who told him that Novak had the story of Wilson's wife armed with these two reminders, Libby then leaked to Miller and Cooper, sourcing it as reporter gossip.

That "reporter gossip" story works just as well if Libby simply sources it to Novak; the Russert detail added nothing to the legal fog bank he was allegedly trying to create.

I hesitate to venture into Plameland at this late date, but it seems to me that Libby's interests are indeed served by the Russert story: it takes the onus (and the spotlight) off of Rove. That's useful! Rove is more important to Bush than Libby is, Rove was a bigger potential campaign liability, and I don't think too many Bush administration aides like Libby win points with the boss by pissing Rove off. But I defer to more experienced Plamers on this issue. ... 1:37 A.M. link

Now here's a real conflict of interest: WaPo/CNN reporter Howie Kurtz defends Tim Russert on Kurtz's show, "Reliable Sources." WaPo/CNN reporter Howie Kurtz gets invited on Meet the Press by Tim Russert.** ... Howie Kurtz could make something out of that! ... P.S.: As far as I can see Kurtz hadn't been on Russert's show since May*** of 2002. ...

**--For conflict of interest purposes, it doesn't matter much which came first, the defense or the payoff--sorry, I mean the invitation. ...

***--Corrected. Originally said "March." 12:06 A.M. link

Sunday, February 11, 2007

Surge Report: It's undoubtedly not the last word, but for the moment Omar of Iraq the Model is filing positive reports on the surge. Sample:

Baghdad is still enjoying some days of relative calm interrupted only with minor sporadic incidents. In general there's a feeling that these days are better than almost any other time in months. This is more evident in the eastern side of Baghdad than the western part, because the former part has received more US and Iraqi military reinforcements than the latter. [E.A.]

Also, there seems to be an effort to return some Sunni mosques in Shiite areas to the Sunnis, including at least one in Sadr City**:

The mosque was reopened with a celebration where Sunnis and Shia prayed together behind a Sunni cleric. Before the ceremony Shia volunteers cleaned up the area around the mosque from garbage and fixed the sign that carried the name of the mosque.

I tend to trust Omar more than noted Iraq expert Robert Reich, who was confidently assuring everyone on Stephanopoulos's show today that the surge would fail. ... I'm not saying Reich won't turn out to be right. But I'll believe it when Omar sees it. He's not seeing it yet. ... [via Insta]

**--This was unfortunately an operation led by Ahmed Chalabi, of whom Omar is appropriately skeptical. ..10:49 P.M. link

Hillary is so not inevitable! Jon Chait and Jim Geraghty make the point. Chait's argument is especially relentless. Sample:

The question is: Which candidate is more likely to benefit from endless hours of speechifying, hand-shaking, and town hall meetings? There's no reason to think the answer will be Clinton. While she may be just as smart as--and more experienced than--Edwards and Obama, she is an average orator, while Edwards is a very good one and Obama is a brilliant one. Having seen all three give speeches, it's hard for me to imagine how a prolonged side-by-side comparison will move voters into Clinton's camp. And, as the best-known of the leading candidates, she'll have the hardest time making a strong new impression anyway.

Post-Chait data point: In Iowa, "among those saying they have attended at least one caucus," Hillary leads Edwards by only 29-25%. A year out. ... Evitable! ...

Update: Reader K.S.Z. emails:

The obvious counter-example to your post on Hillary and Iowa: John Kerry. "Endless hours of speechifying, hand-shaking, and town hall meetings" should have sunk him, if they sank anyone. They didn't.

Good point. True, the tryout period promises to be much longer this time--but Chait does seem to have forgotten one crucial factor: the Iowa Dem caucusers are fools! Who knows whom they'll decide is "electable" this time? Still, that only makes their choice seem more random and less inevitable, no? ... P.S.: The larger issue is that we--the Dems, the press--are on the verge of making Iowa seem all-important again, even though the kind, earnest, liberal Iowans have not picked a winning non-incumbent Democratic candidate in the thirty years since Jimmy Carter and David Broder put the caucuses on the map. ... 1:57 A.M. link

Radar Magazine comes out on Tuesday, with "Toxic Bachelors" advertised on the cover. A Ron Burkle story in the very first issue! That should put to rest those persistent, unproven rumors that Burkle is funding Radar. I apologize for even worrying that editor Maer Roshan would pull his punches for someone who's at least a "good friend" of Yusef Jackson, chairman of Radar's parent company.. ...P.S.: What's that? Really? Must be some sort of printer's error. ...

P.P.S.--Free advice to Roshan: You boast in the Daily News that Radar plans to rely on

"actual reporters and photographers to cover stories ... not pajama-clad post-collegiates snarkily blogging on content produced by others." [E.A.]

a) Snarky! b) Cliched; c) Strategically foolish: Why begin your second relaunch by pissing off bloggers? Everyone admires your touchingly quaint attachment to actual, you know, journalism--but bloggers could be your friends. For one thing, as you note, they need your content to snark off of. For another, they may need real jobs one day (and if you're still around, you will hire them--don't pretend you won't). In the meantime they can give you publicity for your forthcoming investigative achievements. And it's not as if you're debuting your magazine without an obvious, Faustian-bargainish, gaping journalistic sore spot--i.e., conflicts of interest created by your mysterious ownership structure that bloggers could harp on obsessively if sufficiently goaded, conflicts of interest that are just the sort of thing the plodders of the mainstream press might pick up on to tar your name. You only get one chance to make a third impression! ...

P.P.P.S.--I'd say zero. How does zero sound? What are the chances that Radar will cover the most enjoyable likely scandal on the horizon--the gripping story of how Bill Clinton somehow avoided temptation to remain faithful to Hillary over the past 8 years--with Jackson & Co. funding the venture? Burkle is Bill Clinton's business partner, remember.

P.P.P.P.S.: When Mike Kinsley started Slate under Microsoft's ownership he (misguidedly, in my opinion) conceded, "There will be no major investigations of Microsoft in Slate." But Kinsley argued that by creating a new journalistic institution--even one with a blind spot--Slate was still "adding to the total amount of skeptical scrutiny going on." Couldn't Roshan make a similar argument for Radar? Sure. The differences are 1) We knew who owned Slate. We don't really know who's bankrolling Radar--i.e. where the blind spots are; 2) Melinda Gates wasn't running for president. ...12:49 A.M. link

Friday, February 9, 2007

The Dog-Catcher Meme: Tom Bevan debunks what has always seemed an Upper West Side/NYT myth about Giuliani--that "on September 10 Rudy couldn't have been elected dog catcher in New York City." True, he wasn't as popular as he had been, and the anti-Giuliani elites smelled victory (just as they smelled victory over Bush in 2004). But that's a distorted view--and not only for the usual liberal-cocooning reasons. There's also an idiosyncratic factor: cab drivers. Cab drivers hated Giuliani, for various reasons, including tough safety and cleanliness clampdowns. Most pre-9/11 visitors to New York--and native New Yorkers--who had money to take cabs were routinely entertained by anti-Rudy rants. But the cabdrivers in this case were not the voice of the people. They were the voice of an aggrieved interest group. ... 1:02 P.M. link

If ever there was a car I'd expect to be a piece of junk, it's the Jeep Compass. But USA Today's seemingly reliable James Healey likes it. 12:51 P.M.

RCP's John McIntyre thinks that, given Giuliani's likely entry, John McCain "would be well advised to position himself as the pro-growth, supply-side conservative in the Republican field." And sure enough Robert Novak just happens to have written a column touting McCain's supply-side credentials, claiming he "sounds more like Jack Kemp as a 2008 candidate." Novak says, of McCain:

He supports radically scaling down the estate tax and does not now favor upper income increases in the Social Security tax.

Wow. He does not now favor upper income Social Security tax increases! That'll reassure the anti-tax crowd. And McCain supports radically scaling down the estate tax! Isn't that the, um, Democrats' estate tax plan? I think it is! Anti-tax Republicans want to repeal the estate tax, as Novak knows. ... Oh, yes: McCain also talks to Arthur Laffer! ... It's hard to believe Republican economic conservatives are such cheap dates that they'll fall for McCain based on the thin evidence offered by Novak of his "transformation." .... P.S.: Bob Wright and I discuss some serious Giuliani weaknesses McCain might play on, including a big 9/11 mistake. ... 1:27 A.M. link

Only a decade or so too late (and more than three years after Chrysler) General Motors finally coming out with what should be an affordable rear-drive sedan. ... 1:09 A.M.

Thursday, February 8, 2007

I should be on Greg Gutfeld's Red Eye show, on Fox News, which starts in about ...oh ... 10 minutes. The show's not as amateurish as bloggingheads.tv--but it's close! Which is the point, I guess. On today's episode: Gutfeld's mom disses Bill O'Reilly. ... Update: ETP's Red Eye review. ... 10:47 P.M.

Surging to Bosnia? Is it possible that the "surge" is actually a fairly logical political precursor to a U.S.-aided Bosnia-like partition along the lines suggested by Michael O'Hanlon and Edward Joseph? If you listen to Anne Garrels' report from Baghdad, you'll hear U.S. soldiers attempting to reassure Sunnis threatened by Shiite militias (and by the Shiite-dominated Iraqi Army units with which we are supposedly cooperating in the surge). The Sunnis appear to regard the Americans as legitimate protectors. Today, the Americans tell them they will try to keep them from being chased out of the neighborhood. ("I will talk to the Iraqi Army tonight,"the American captain promises.) Tomorrow, if the surge fails, will the Americans tell the Sunnis "We're sorry. We tried. We made things a bit safer, but we can't really protect you. It's best if you moved"? It might be better than the alternatives. ... Possible problems with the O'Hanlon-Joseph plan are discussed here on bloggingheads. ... 1:29 P.M. link

Tom Maguire makes the case against Tim Russert, suggesting why yesterday's testimony may not have been the triumph Slate says it was. [Rated ANPF**]...

**--Accessible to Non-Plame Fanatics. ...11:41 A.M.

Another Man in the Arena: Andrew Sullivan, discussing Joe Klein, argues that "having it both ways on the Iraq war [is] better than having no coherent position on the war at all, except fathomless bitchiness toward anyone who ever had the balls to take a stand." Hmm. I'd say it's at least a close question! ... Is it also better than taking a firm position you later admit was an "error" that caused "tens of thousands of dead, innocent Iraqis and several thousand killed and injured American soldiers" and then boasting about how it showed you had "balls"? ... Klein and Sullivan are both prone to dragging out that T.R. chestnut about the "man in the arena". It always comes in handy when you've made a hideous misjudgment. A few less Men in the Arena might be a good thing. ... 1:52 A.M. link

Wednesday, February 7, 2007

The Surge: Anne Garrels' excellent NPR report seems to give a pretty good idea what is going on in one Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad where the U.S. has set up an outpost. Something is being accomplished, and the American commander inspires confidence, maybe awe. But ... 9:37 P.M.

Tuesday, February 6, 2007

Joe Klein's "Last Words": Joe Klein has issued a seven-point response to Arianna Huffington's post noting that he wasn't exactly the Iraq War opponent he now claims to be--his having gone on national TV and, er, supported the war and all. Klein says it was "a moment of stupid weakness." But in that same TV interview Klein said, "I go back and forth on this war from day to day," which seems to reflect more ongoing ambivalence than just a weak "moment" (or, as Klein puts it, "a position I had never taken before and never would again"). ... As Huffington points out in her counter-response, the issue isn't Klein's wisdom four years ago but his truthfulness today, when he poses (and not just this once) as a sturdy pre-invasion critic of the war. If he just said "I went back and forth on the war but quickly** came to see it was a mistake," there'd be no controversy. Having gone back and forth on the war doesn't remove you from the company of reasonable pundits--even exceptionally self-righteous, moralistic, pugnacious pundits! But instead Klein touched up his own history--and when he gets called on it he blames nothing less than "a structural problem the left has had ever since before the days when Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz were socialists." No, Joe, they're just calling you on it! ...

P.S.: Huffington also makes the point that if Klein expressed his strongest opposition to the war in private, but not in public--as he seems to claim--that makes him look rather less honest and courageous. Why not tell your readers what you actually think? ...

**--Klein did turn against the war quickly. I remember running into him at a party in 2004 and being shocked at the (again, private) vehemence with which he declared Bush's Iraq project to be a huge blunder. At the time, things didn't seem to me to be going that badly. Now it's looking like Klein was right. And, as I say, the run-up to the war wasn't my finest hour either. ... 2:11 P.M. link

Remember, We're Not All In This Together! I hadn't noticed this particularly grating example of the divisive quality of the Democrats' new populism, from Sen. Webb's State of the Union response:

We're working to get the right things done, for the right people and for the right reasons. [E.A.]

The "right people"--isn't that the phrase white-glove snobs use? 11:51 A.M.

The Charge is Gone: Toyota has started offering incentives on the hybrid Prius. 11:50 A.M.

Monday, February 5, 2007

"Mark Foley Scandal Brings MORE Pages to the Program"--Drudge ... Similarly, will Joe Biden's Obama gaffe make him go up in the polls? I suspect so. He was at 1% before. Now everyone knows that he's that loudmouthed guy. ...11:47 P.M.

Swampland! Joe Klein, having it both ways on the Iraq War? That's Arianna Huffington's claim, and she seems to have the goods, in the form of a pre-war February 22, 2003 interview with Tim Russert in which Klein declares:

This is a really tough decision. War may well be the right decision at this point. In fact, I think it--it's--it--it probably is."

I've read the entire interview, and in context the quote means what it seems to mean. ... But these days, Klein writes on Time magazine's blog that he "disagreed with [John McCain] about the war in 2003." ... P.S.: In the same 2003 interview, Klein admits, "I go back and forth on this war from day to day." That's probably the real truth. But then he shouldn't pretend now that he cleanly "disagreed" with the war. [You admit you "waffled"--ed I did! I had trouble making up my mind. Klein made up his mind, then made it up a different way, and now writes as if only one of those events occurred.]

Update: See above on Klein's response and Huffington's counter. ... 11:38 P.M. link

Winning the Nina Bernstein Primary: Here's one way to put the difference between John McCain and Rudolph Giuliani when it comes to getting the GOP nomination--McCain has the wrong friends (the press), while Giuliani has the "right enemies," as Amy Holmes just said on Anderson Cooper. She cites Al Sharpton as a good foe for a Republican primary candidate to have. I'd add the New York Times. Anyone who inspired such enmity from the Times, conservatives may conclude, can't be all that liberal. ... Backfill: JPod made the "enemies" point rather forcefully last November. He starts his list with the ACLU. ...11:05 P.M.

How "Comprehensive Immigration Reform" Is Like the Iraq War, Part II: In the disingenuous spin used to sell it! ... Here's Greg Anrig, Jr. at TPM Cafe, commenting on my earlier effort to draw parallels between Bush's grandiose, risky, Iraq idee fixe and his grandiose, risky immigration idee fixe:

9. Mickey notes that in both cases there are less grand, and less risky, alternatives. On immigration, he would prefer to put in place only new enforcement mechanisms, and make sure they work, before "rewarding those illegals who already made it across the border." The problem with that approach, which may seem logical, is that an important part of the new enforcement regime will relate to the system employers are required to use to verify the status of workers. If the undocumented workers now in the country would be more likely to get nailed under that new system, which ought to be the case if it actually works, then presumably millions will quickly become subject to deportation. Only the Tom Tancredos of the world want that. [E.A.]

This is like Bush saying we have to invade Iraq because the U.N. sanctions are eroding--the point being to rhetorically eliminate the notion that there might be a middle course falling short of the "comprehensive" solution. Here we're told that we can't try employer i.d. checks, etc., without also granting amnesty because otherwise millions of illegals who are already here will be fingered by their employers and "quickly become subject to deportation." This seems almost certainly bogus. Has Anrig never heard of "grandfathering"? Surely it's possible to apply the employer i.d. checks only to new hires and tacitly exempt ("grandfather") existing legal and illegal workers by not checking them. Most of the "undocumented workers now in the country" could keep working at their jobs, as they're doing now, "in the shadows," without amnesty or a "path" to legalization, while we discover whether the i.d. check mechanism would actually work to prevent employers from luring new immigrants (including the millions of new immigrants who'd be encouraged to come here by amnesty or legalization).

No doubt a middle, non-comprehensive, semi-grandfathering approach faces complications,** but they're the sort of complications politicians usually tackle effectively unless they're intentionally trying to exclude the middle in order to promote the extreme. (The Iraq analogue would be Bush trying to make sure the UN's WMD inspections weren't too successful.)

P.S.: Note how those who disagree with Anrig's plan quickly become "Tom Tancredos," just as those who disagreed with Bush's plan became Neville Chamberlains.

P.P.S.: In this vein, Anrig also sneers that "only right-wing ideologues like him supported the idea of invading Iraq." He must be thinking of John "Comprehensive" McCain. I waffled but ultimately opposed the invasion on proceduralist grounds--the lack of sufficient U.N. authorization (see, e.g. this page and this one). ...

**One obvious complication: If existing illegals tried to switch to a new employer they might get caught (though Congress could give them, say, a year to find a decent employer before an enforcement system took effect). Actually, if the new enforcement system worked, they would get caught. Which means they wouldn't try, no? They'd either stay with their existing employer, or try to work in the underground economy, or give up and "self-deport." I don't know how many would fall into thie latter group, but if it were tens of thousands or even "millions," it seems to me a) millions of people gradually and unofficially deporting themselves over a number of years is not the same thing as millions of people being forcibly deported by the U.S. government, which is the specter Anrig invokes; b) those most likely to leave would tend to be those for whom it is the easier course--e.g., they haven't put down "roots" here or they have family and the prospect of work in another country. And they could always come back if they could qualify for any guest-worker or other legal programs that became available. ... And of course some deportations--either official or unofficial--are necessary if any enforcement system, including Bush's or Anrig's, is going to have a deterrent effect on potential future illegals. ... 5:28 A.M. link

Sunday, February 4, 2007

Peretz on Gore: "He's got enough hair and enough hair in the right places not to use blow-dryer. Honest." 7:44 P.M.

Friday, February 2, 2007

Do "hate crime" laws lower racial tensions or raise them? I'm not sure it isn't the latter. In Long Beach, some black teenagers were convicted of beating three white women on Halloween "with a hate crime enhancement," according to the LAT. This would be an inflammatory case anyway (despite the initial let's-not-cover-the-news efforts of the Times) even if it were prosecuted as a simple assault. But adding the hate-crime inquiry makes the race issue central to the trial, and makes it more likely to degenerate into a divisive festival of competitive racial victimization, no? ... 1:19 P.M.

More on Sen. Hagel and the "surge" from an erstwhile antiwar fan of his:

I am a little disappointed in the way he's opposed it. Not just the level of emotionalism ... [snip] ... but what really disappoints me is, what I've hear, his failure to kind of articulate really solid logic for being sure this is going to fail ... [E.A.]

Don't look at me! I didn't say it. 2:50 A.M.

Hon. Loretta Sanchez has quit the House Hispanic Caucus, claiming its chairman called her a "whore." A shocking affront to Congressional dignity! ... Wait. ... Loretta Sanchez ... Loretta Sanchez ... wasn't she the distinguished lawmaker who sent out a Christmas card showing her ... er, cat on fire? I think she was! ... P.S.: Wonkette is on the case, sort of. But instead of the scandalous flaming "cat" card they chose one with a modest surfing theme! ... 2:32 A.M.

Cynic's Scorecard: 7 Outs and Counting: Are Senators who vote for the Warner anti-surge resolution taking any political risk, or are they just protecting themselves against anti-war sentiment? In other words, on the off chance that the surge works, would they be embarrassed? Bob Wright says yes. But Senators in this situation have been known to leave themselves escape hatches.

The fewer escape hatches, of course, the greater the political consequences of getting it wrong, and the more support for the anti-surge resolution should actually reflect a senator's judgment that the chances of an embarrassing surge success are small. The more escape hatches, the more the Warner resolution seems simply a convenient way for pols to hedge their bets against any outcome:

After reading Senator Warner's resolution, I'm reinforced in my suspicion that the bet-hedging scenario is a plausible description of what's really going on.

The resolution says, in the first of 12 clauses::

(1) the Senate disagrees with the "plan" to augment our forces by 21,500, and urges the President instead to consider all options and alternatives for achieving the strategic goals set forth below;

Now, I'm not very imaginative, but I can think of at least seven "outs" a Senator who votes for Warner's resolution could try to use if the surge is ultimately judged beneficial: 1) 'I wanted more troops than the 21,500!' I strongly believe we shouldn't risk troops unless we have an overwhelming force advantage;' 2) 'We were trying to get the attention of this president, to change course. I didn't agree with all the provisions in the resolution.' Oh wait. Hillary's already said that. 3) I just wanted the president to consider all options and alternatives;' 4) Under my alternative plan, we could have acheived the same result without putting that many extra American soldiers at risk (e.g., 'We could have done the job with 20,500 troops!'); 5) Gen. Petraeus is a genius; he took a flawed policy and somehow made it work; 6) 'The plan they actually implemented wasn't the plan we condemned--in the wake of the resolution, I think you'll see they modified the plan, which made it work much better; 7) 'The resolution itself was what scared the Iraqi government and made the plan work, so I actually take some credit for its success.' ...

I'm sure more experiences politicos can come up with other, better, 'outs,' ** The most important "out," of course, is this: Should Bush's surge happen to succeed, angry voters aren't very likely to run around punishing politicians who voiced doubts (especially since most voters harbored those same doubts). Voters just won't be riled up the way they'll be if the surge fails. They'll base their vote on other issues (e.g., health care, taxes). Isn't the rational course for a self-protective Senator, then, to err on the side of pessimism and vote as if the surge had a lower chance of success than you actually think it does (or than you would think it does if you actually analyzed it fully)? ...

**--Update: Anti-surgers could always "huff, snort, nit-pick" about the inevitable "messy details," suggests Victor Davis Hanson--though I imagine that would be easier for previously antiwar Dems than previously prowar GOPs. [Via Insta]... 2:12 A.M.

Thursday, February 1, 2007

You were supposed to clear the decks for me, dammit! Hillary Clinton hasn't gotten nearly enough grief for declaring, of the Iraq War:

"The President has said this is going to be left to his successor. I think it's the height of irresponsibility, and I really resent it. ... This was his decision to go to war; he went with an ill-conceived plan, an incompetently executed strategy, and we should expect him to extricate our country from this before he leaves office." [E.A.]

Imagine if Eisenhower had said that about Korea. This is the presidency, not a dream date! Presidents are supposed to deal with the problems the face. JPod riffs, Lee Harris ruminates ... P.S.: Hillary's "evil men" joke was funny, though. ... 11:21 A.M.

It's true. This cat is looking into the abyss, man. ... 11:08 A.M.

Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Sloppy Joe: Everybody's piling on Joe Biden's loose-cannon Observer interview. Biden is a loose cannon, and the praise lavished on Sen. Hagel for "letting it rip" in front of Biden at the recent Foreign Relations committee hearing might not have been the best influence on him. But Biden's sharp critiques of his Democratic rivals' Iraq plans--especially Hillary Clinton's--are not so easily dismissed.

"From the part of Hillary's proposal, the part that really baffles me is, 'We're going to teach the Iraqis a lesson.' We're not going to equip them? O.K. Cap our troops and withdraw support from the Iraqis? That's a real good idea."

The result of Mrs. Clinton's position on Iraq, Mr. Biden says, would be "nothing but disaster."

It would be highly informative to see her try to answer. Let's hope Biden makes it to the debates (and not only the ones in front of the proven fools in Iowa). ... 11:03 A.M.

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Hagel Bravery Update: A political reporter emails:

It seems to me, at least, that he didn't start making quite so much noise about the war until after Sam Brownback came out against the surge, putting Hagel's position as the only 2008 antiwar GOP candidate in jeopardy. I've been wondering, since the end of the November election, when Hagel would choose his moment to become the Antiwar Republican Presidential Candidate, because I thought he was risking the possibility that someone else would come out first if he kept waiting. And hey, somebody did (sort of).

He said it, not me! ... 9:09 P.M.

Here's CW foghorn Tim Russert--I was going to say he's the new Johnny Apple but that would be an insult to Apple's reporting skills--talking to Brian Williams on NBC Nightly News last week:

WILLIAMS: Now on the domestic side, Tim, was there a topic in that speech tonight that garnered more talk in Washington today than, say, some of the others?

RUSSERT: There was, Brian. Health care and energy are very complicated and difficult to do in one legislative session. However, immigration was debated thoroughly last year. People know where they stand on that issue, and the Democrats are much closer to President Bush. They have told him if he can deliver half of the Republicans in his party in both houses of Congress, they can put forward a comprehensive immigration bill, but they want to put--the Democrats want to put some pressure on the Bush White House to bring some Republicans along so it's simply not a Democratic immigration bill. [E.A.]

Hmm. ... First, do we really think immigration "garnered more talk in Washington" the day after the state of the union than Bush's new health care and energy proposals--or is it just the issue Russert wanted to bring up? Why the BS artifice? ... More important, why would the Democrats want to make sure the bill is "not a Democratic bill"? The obvious answer is that the bill is potentially unpopular--maybe even among Democratic voters--and Democratic legislators are scared of taking responsibility for it themselves. They want Republicans to share the blame. ... Doesn't this suggest that a "comprehensive immigration bill" might not be so easy to pass? ... Can you imgaine Dems being similarly skittish about passing, say, a minimum wage hike with only Democratic votes? No. Because voters actually want a minimum wage increase. ...

P.S.: If passing a "comprehensive" (i.e. semi-amnesty) immigration bill is the key to winning the burgeoning Latino vote of the future, as pro-"comprehensive" advocates in both parties claim, why wouldn't the Dems want sole credit? One answer: They are thinking short term, not long term. Another answer: They can think short term because they know millions of new Latino immigrant voters will tend to be Democrats no matter who gets credit for passing an immigration bill in 2007. ... 8:10 P.M. link

Half-defense: I don't quite understand why it's offensive to call Sen. Obama a "halfrican." It's a useful word! It efficiently describes a real phenomenon. It isn't, on its face, pejorative--and even if it were, it wouldn't be pejorative for long if it were simply used descriptively to mean people with one parent from Africa. ... Update: A reader emails to point out the word is distressingly close to "half-breed." That does seem like a hard connotation to shake. ... 5:38 P.M. link

Calame: From Laughingstock to Menace! It's bad enough that NYT ombudsman Byron Calame is so embarrassingly, life-sappingly pedantic that he may have convinced the paper to abolish his position. Now he's doing actual damage to the public dialogue, preventing knowledgeable Times reporters from expressing their views on issues within their areas of expertise. It seems Michael Gordon, author of the highly critical Iraq War history Cobra II, was asked on Charlie Rose his opinion of the "surge." Gordon responded:

"So I think, you know, as a purely personal view, I think it's worth it [sic] one last effort for sure to try to get this right, because my personal view is we've never really tried to win. We've simply been managing our way to defeat. And I think that if it's done right, I think that there is the chance to accomplish something."

Too hot for Charlie Rose! Calame "raised reader concerns about Mr. Gordon's voicing of personal opinions with top editors" of the Times, with the result that Gordon was dressed down by his bureau chief and forced into a ritual self-criticism, admitting "his comments on the show went too far." ... Three obvious points:

1) Would Gordon have been smacked down if he hadn't heretically supported the surge? Is the Times now like a leftish web site where Kos-like readers take down any discordant comments?

2) Does anyone think that just because Gordon is forbidden from voicing his views that he won't have those views? Isn't it better if they're out in the open, where readers can see and judge them? Calame and the Times censors are enforcing appearance over substance; and

3) Isn't it good for democracy if citizens hear the moral conclusions of highly experienced reporters like Gordon? It's one thing to report on what's happening in the surge. It's another to try to figure out its chances of success and whether the likely consequences are worth the likely cost. They're both important calculations. If Gordon's done both, don't you, as a citizen, want to hear both results of both before Congress votes on the issue? "Should we do the surge" is certainly about the first question you'd ask Gordon if you ran into him on the street. Do Times editors really think their readers can't handle an answer?

[Thanks to reader D.S.] 4:57 P.M. link

Don't Cook Tonight ... : In 1969, as a senior in high school, I worked briefly as a delivery boy at the Beverly Hills franchise of Chicken Delight. We wore white dress shirts and bow ties with the word "Chicken" down one tassel and "Delight" down the other. Most famous client: Burt Bacharach! The boss was a grouchy/lovable character who--according to possibly apocryphal legend--would occasionally pick up the phone and, instead of answering "Chicken Delight, may I help you," say "Chicken Delight, fuck you!"... Anyway, one of my coworkers was a high school classmate, Paul Diamond, who (this being Beverly Hills) made a movie of the experience--The Chicken Chronicles. This "lost classic" receives a rare screening on Showtime in the coveted time slot of 6:30 A.M. Eastern Time, Thursday morning, Feb. 1. Phil Silvers plays the boss. I remember brilliant social commentary during a chase scene through pretentious Beverly Hills back yards. The film also launched the career of Steve Guttenberg. ... 4:16 P.M.

Monday, January 29, 2007

How Is Chuck Hagel Brave? Why, exactly, is Sen. Chuck Hagel showing "courage" in conspicuously denouncing the Iraq War now that virtually the entire American establishment has reached that same conclusion--now that Hagel is virtually assured of getting hero treatment from Brian Williams and Tim Russert and long favorable profiles in the newsweeklies? .

OK, maybe Hagel's not so courageous. Maybe he's just right. Except that he chose, as the moment to make his flamboyant speech, not the vote on the imprudent war itself--he voted for it--but a vote to withdraw support for a last-ditch surge strategy that even the NYT's estimable, on-the-scene pessimist Sabrina Tavernese thinks "may have a chance to work." Was this the right time--it certainly wasn't the courageous time--for a speech like Hagel's? Was he serving the nation or himself?

Saying "the war was wrong but the surge is worth a try"--that would be courageous. There's no ready-made constituency eager to cheer a pol who says that.

Bucking your party to actively fight against the war when it would have made a difference--that would have been courageous.**

Hagel hasn't done either of those things. Instead, he let loose at the precise moment when letting loose was least brave and least timely. Lest the MSM miss the point, his eruption took the form, not of arguing that his Republican colleagues were wrong, but of denouncing them for, in effect, being cowards, unlike you-know-who:

If you wanted a safe job, go sell shoes. ... Don't hide anymore; none of us.

Never mind that the anti-surge resolution Hagel has cosponsored is all about hiding. It has no binding effect. But it does provide Senators who supported the war a convenient bit of late-inning skepticism they can point to when trying to save their skins.

Hagel also deployed the hoary I've-been-in combat-so-I-know-these-are-real-men-and-women-"fighting and dying" pitch--as if his fellow senators didn't realize they were real men and women. The I've-Been-There meme is to Hagel (and John Kerry) what the "mommy" meme is to Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer--a guilt-tripping, self-glorifying unique selling proposition that attempts to confer on the speaker a special capacity for insight that renders actual persuasive argument unnecessary.

And gee, after getting huge MSM play for lecturing the Senate on how courageous he is, and how he has special understanding as a combat veteran, Hagel is considering a run for the White House! Funny how that happens.

**--There's a tension here between two favorite MSM angles: 1) That Hagel is courageous, and 2) that Hagel's defection is a dramatic new blow to Bush's war effort. It wouldn't have been very courageous for Hagel to have supported the war in public while expressing grave doubts safely in private, of course--and pro-Hagel profiles tend to emphasize his early public skepticism (except, of course, when it came to actually voting for the thing). But if Hagel has been publicly criticizing the war since 2003, it's not much of a surprise that he's still against the war in 2007. ...

I'd say both MSM memes are wrong. Before the war, Hagel was already widely disdained within his party as a pol who reveled in the "strange new respect" the liberal press typically lavishes on GOP apostates. It's not like he threw away massive Republican backing. And if Hagel really thought the war was a disaster, sending those real men and women into a pointless "meat grinder," there were many things he could have done, aside from giving snippy quotes on Meet the Press, to oppose it. He could have given speeches like the one he gave last week, for example. He could have challenged Bush in 2004. But that might have ended his career! Instead, it looks to me as if he sniped and quipped up to the point where it could do him fatal damage if the war went well. At the same time, given the sniping and quipping, the MSM's surprise that 'even Republican Senator Hagel' opposes Bush is entirely inauthentic. ...

Update: Even a liberal HuffPo blogger thinks the MSM is overdoing the Hagel hype! ...

Backfill: At The Corner, Kate O'Beirne suggests a more ... courageous (and effective) way Hagel could register his opposition to Bush's war strategy--by campaigning against Gen. Petraeus' confirmation. ... 6:46 P.M. link

Deborah Orin-Eilbeck: I'm stunned by Deborah Orin-Eilbeck's death. I didn't know she was fighting cancer. She sent me an email only a couple of months ago cheerfully and sensibly disputing something I'd written arguing that Gov. Vilsack's candidacy would let Hillary skip the Iowa caucuses. (She wrote: "If Vilsack is running at the bottom of the Iowa Poll, as he was, he isn't a replay of Tom Harkin and doesn't give anyone a pass out of Iowa, methinks. ... And besides, Hillary being Hillary won't get a pass anywhere.") Orin was almost certainly right, as usual--where did Hillary spend last weekend, again? ...

I only met Orin-Eilbeck a few times--mainly through the hospitality of her friend Mary Louise Oates, in whose house she was surrounded by Democratic friends. I'd heard she had a rep as a driven, badger-her-sources reporter, but everytime I met her she was funny and warm and sharp. Also: beautiful dark eyes! Her New York Post writing was almost hygienically unaffected by whatever wishful, respectable (and typically liberal) CW was blowing around Washington. Her pieces were also typically short, pointed and (therefore) fun. Like most good political reporters, she pursued the latest political intelligence with a relentlessness hidden to the outside world, including to most bloggers. I was just thinking Orin would be the perfect person to ask a prickly question I've been avoiding--did the immigration issue really hurt the GOP in 2006? If she'd have said yes, the answer is yes.

None of us will know her thinking on that or any other issue in the coming two-year presidential fight. That's a narrow concern, I know. But it will be hard to make sense of it all without her.

Lucianne has a tribute thread. 1:34 A.M. link

Unionism Is Too the Problem: Labor costs--and specifically work rules--are part of what's killing all the unionized auto manufacturers while their non-unionized competitors thrive building cars in the U.S., according to CNN Money. The famous $1,400/car health care burden is only a piece of it:

Other labor costs add to the bill. Contract issues like work rules, line relief and holiday pay amount to $630 per vehicle - costs that the Japanese don't have. And paying UAW members for not working when plants are shut costs another $350 per vehicle.

Sorry, Comrade Kuttner! [via Autoblog] ... P.S.: I guess we need to abolish secret ballots--requiring only a card check--in order to help bring Detroit-style productivity and business success to America's other industries. It can't be that workers look at how the UAW--a relatively clean, democratic union--has poisoned its industry and decide they don't want to organize. It must be "employer coercion." ... 2:17 A.M.

Sunday, January 28, 2007

I didn't realize that Andrew Sullivan also broadcast his misinformation about that British video--i.e. that it showed Iraqi troops beating "civilians"--on the Chris Matthews Show, on national television. ... P.S.: The Matthews producers seem to think that gathering five journalists who all agree about Bush, the "surge," and pretty much every other topic makes for a lively dialogue. ... 7:05 P.M.

Saturday, January 27, 2007

Unreliable Narrator: Andrew Sullivan hosts a British video report that he says shows

U.S soldiers watching as their Iraqi Army colleagues - Shia - brutally beat Sunni civilians to near-death, as U.S. soldiers hoop and holler in support.

The video shows Iraqi troops beating three men who'd been caught with a bag full of mortars in their car. I don't defend the beatings, which at least one American tries fecklessly to stop, but calling people captured with mortars "civilians" is a bit of a distortion, no? Nor do they appear to be beaten "to near death"--that's just a Sullivanian embellishment.** Does he even watch the videos he hosts? ...

**--Nor can the Iraqi soldiers hear the Americans hooping and hollering in their vehicle many yards away--a non-trivial distinction, when you think about it. When I first read Sullivan's description I thought the American's were actually spurring the Iraqis on (as opposed to keeping their distance, doing nothing, and hooping amongst themselves, which may be bad enough). The one American who we're told actually has contact with the Iraqis appears to be the one who tries to get them to stop.

Update 1/27: Sullivan's response--Civilians, insurgents. Unarmed, mortars. Minor details! ("The insurgents are civilians inasumuch as they are not in the Iraqi Army ..." Huh?) I've missed the point:

The whole point of the video and the posting, however, was that it illustrated how almost exclusively Shiite forces are ... clearing Sunni neighborhoods, with tacit U.S. support."

Except the video doesn't show that. It shows Shiite forces capturing and roughing up armed Sunnis, of the sort who are terrorizing civilians in other parts of town. It doesn't show soldiers chasing Sunni residents from their homes. ...

P.S.: Sullivan declares, of the beating victims, "they are residents of the neighborhood." But of course he doesn't know that. They were in a car, after all (with mortars!)--that's all the video shows. Sullivan also writes that one of them was thrown "into an airless car trunk." The "airless" is another little Sullivan enhancement. I don't know how much air gets into a HumVee trunk--but neither does Sullivan. The man can't help himself. ...

P.P.S.: Sullivan says that I'm not "much concerned with Iraq." This is not a charge that can be levelled at him, unfortunately. To see Sullivan abjectly apologize for his thoughtless, bullying cheerleading for the Iraq war, see this video. ...

P.P.P.S.: Actually, he doesn't apologize for the "bullying." I added that! ...

More: Is there a structural problem with the use of YouTube clips or rather a problem when you have an "excitable embedder." Leigh Hunt sees both. I see only one. ... 1:51 A.M. link

Friday, January 26, 2007

What Liberal Alterman? Neo-neoliberal Eric Alterman takes on a pro-teachers'-union blogger who accused him of opposing New York teachers' unions on a "lefter than thou" basis (i.e., because they sometimes endorse Republicans):

[M]y displeasure with the teachers union has nothing whatever to do with political policies. Rather, it is as the parent of a New York City public school child who finds the union's frequent inflexibility and resistance toward what looks to my admittedly non-expert eyes to be common-sense reforms self-defeating in the extreme, as well as a significant barrier to badly needed improvements. This explains why the author is so confused about the citation of my views by the DLC fellow.** I do agree more with the DLC than with the union. [E.A.]

Alterman opposes teachers' unions. ... He's agreeing with the DLC. .. He's turned against race-based affirmative action. ... Next he'll be for means-testing Social Security! ... Make him a contributing editor of The New Republic. ...

P.S.: Why does the pro-teachers' union blog read like something a General Motors executive might have written in, say, 1985? Our cars are as good as any in the world! The critics all have evil motives! ...

**--The "DLC fellow" would be Eduwonk, who mischievously provoked the dispute. ... 5:11 P.M. link

Will Blacks Vote for Obama, Part II: Bob Wright makes a good point about Obama and blacks in our most recent bloggingheads session: Black voters who are lukewarm on Obama may not be responding to his unconventional biography--Kenyan father, no slavery or Jim Crow or civil-rights fights in his background--but rather that he seems "culturally kind of white." After all, Wright argues, you wouldn't expect ordinary voters to be all that familiar with the details of Obama's life. ... To the extent Wright is right, Obama's black problem might be harder to overcome (when it's learned that his cultural affect is reinforced by his life story). Or it might be easier to overcome (if black voters only care about the affect, which can be modified, and not the life story, which can't). But I'm not sure Wright's right: Black voters who know about Obama might well know the basics of his story by now, and they also know if their local opinion leaders--who almost certainly know the details--are talking him up. ... And aren't there plenty of black leaders whose cultural affect is mainstream--Julian Bond, Andrew Young, Harold Ford--who have no problems obtaining black support? ...

Update: kausfiles Tuesday, WaPo Thursday!** The Post's Michael Fletcher suggests a) black voters get to issues of both heritage and cultural authenticity very quickly, and b) that Obama nevertheless succeeded in establishing a base of African-American support in his "mostly" black South Side Chicago constituency. ...

**-- OK, Salon Monday. ... 1:34 P.M. link

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Bold, Decisive Disasters: The conventional view of Tuesday's State of the Union speech is this: Bush's invasion of Iraq has turned nightmarish. He got beat in the midterms. He's reacted by changing his approach on the domestic front--reaching across the aisle to make bipartisan, centrist compromises on domestic issues like "comprehensive immigration reform."

But it seems to me the invasion of Iraq and "comprehensive immigration reform" actually have more in common than you might think. Far from being a sensible centrist departure from the sort of grandiose, wishful, rigid thinking that led Bush into Iraq, "comprehensive immigration reform" is of a piece with that thinking. And it's likely to lead to a similar outcome. Here are ten similarities:

1. They're both ideas Bush had when he came into office. Bush speechwriter David Frum has written of his first Oval Office meeting with Bush, a few weeks into his presidency, at which the president explained his "determination to dig Saddam Hussein out of power in Iraq." At about the same time, Bush was meeting with Mexican president Vicente Fox to try to hammer out an immigration deal that would combine a guest worker program with some legalization of existing illegal Mexican immigrants. (Plans for such a broad deal were put on hold only after 9/11 made immigration a national security issue--but Bush diligently resumed pursuit of the deal, just as he diligently resumed pursuit of his pre-election plans for Social Security.)

2. They both have an idealistic basis. Bush was sympathetic to the way Middle East democrats had been frustrated by "realist" foreign policies, and he's clearly sympathetic to the problems of poor immigrants who come to the U.S. to work and feed their families only to be forced to live "in the shadows."

3. They both seek, in one swoop, to achieve a grand solution to a persistent, difficult problem. No "smallball"! The Iraq Project would begin the transformation of the Middle East, an area that had frustrated president after president. "Comprehensive" immigration reform would, as the name suggests, resolve in one bold bill the centuries-old immigration issue--including a) devising a way to keep out illegal workers while b) providing business with legal immigrant workers, plus c) deciding what to do with illegals who are already here. It would, as Bush said Tuesday, be "conclusive."

4. In both cases, they envision a complicated, triple-bank shot chain of events happening just as Bush wishes it to happen. Iraqis were going to be grateful to their American liberators, come together in peace and give us a stable "ally in the war on terror." Hispanics, in the happy Rovian scenario behind Bush's immigration plan, would be grateful to Republicans for bringing them out of the shadows, etc., ensuring a large and growing GOP Latino vote for decades to come.

5. Both have an obvious weak spot, depending crucially on pulling off a very difficult administrative feat. In Iraq, we had to build a nation in the chaotic vacuum of sectarian post-Saddam Iraq--which came to mean training a national army and police force from scratch with recruits who were often sectarian loyalists or insurgent infiltrators. "Comprehensive" immigration reform requires the government to set up an enforcement mechanism that can prevent millions of impoverished foreigners from sneaking across thousands of miles of unprotected borders--and prevent America's millions of self-interested employers from hiring them.

6. In both cases, the solution has failed before. We had failed to "stand up" a democracy in Vietnam. We failed to establish a stable, trans-factional governing structures in Lebanon and Somalia. Similarly, the grand, bipartisan Simpson-Mazzoli immigration reform of 1986 had promised, and failed, to establish an effective immigration enforcement mechanism.

7. Both were promoted by Bill Kristol!

8. In both cases, some Bush plan enthusiasts may not really mind a chaotic end result. Iraq war foes argue that some important neocon supporters of the Iraq war weren't really bothered by the prospect of Sunni-vs.-Shiite warfare--even seeing divide-and-conquer advantages. (That might help explain the lack of attention paid to planning the post-war occupation.) Similarly, Kristol has said he isn't really bothered that the enforcement parts of the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli law failed:

I'm not cavalier about illegal immigrants. ...[snip]... What damage have they done that's so great in 20 years? The anti-immigration forces said 20 years ago, there was an amnesty, which there sort of was, the Simpson- Mazzoli bill, which was pushed by the anti-immigration people, that Ronald Reagan signed. What's happened that's so terrible in the last 20 years? Is the crime rate up in the United States in the last 20 years? Is unemployment up in the United States in the last 20 years?...[snip] ... I am pro-immigration, and I am even soft on illegal immigration.

9. In both cases, less grand--and less risky--alternatives are available. Bush could have kept "Saddam" boxed up while he planned regime change through other means, built alliances and pursued the more manageable war in Afghanistan. ("Smallball" in 2002. Sounds good now!) Similarly, Bush could put "enforcement" mechanisms in place, and make sure they work, before he potentially stimulates a huge new wave of illegal immigrants by rewarding those illegals who already made it across the border. As a stopgap measure, he could establish modest "guest worker" program and even enlarge the quota of legal immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries.

10. In both cases the consequences of losing Bush's big bet are severe. On Tuesday, Bush described the "nightmare scenario" his Iraq plan's failure (on point #5) has made plausible: The Iraqi government "overrun by extremists on all sides. ... an epic battle between Shia extremists backed by Iran, and Sunni extremists aided by al Qaida. ... A contagion of violence could spill out across the country. And in time the entire region could be drawn into the conflict." Plus Al Qaida would have a "safe haven" in Iraq that it hadn't had before.

The equivalent disaster scenario in immigration would go something like this: "Comprehensive" reform passes. The "earned legalization" provisions work as planned--millions of previously undocumented workers become legal Americans. But the untested "enforcement" provisions (point #5) prove no more effective than they've been in the past--or else they are crippled by ACLU-style lawsuits and lobbying (as in the past). Legal guest workers enter the country to work, but so do millions of new illegal workers, drawn by the prospect that they too, may some day be considered too numerous to deport and therefore candidates for the next amnesty. Hey, "stuff happens!" The current 12 million illegal immigrants become legal--and soon we have another 12 million illegals. Or 20 million. As a result, wages for unskilled, low-income legal American and immigrant workers are depressed. Visible contrasts of wealth and poverty reach near-Latin American proportions in parts of Los Angeles. And the majority of these illegal (and legal) immigrants, like the majority in many parts of the country, are from one nation: Mexico. America for the first time has a potential Quebec problem,** in which a neighboring country has a continuing claim on the loyalties of millions of residents and citizens.

In one sense, this second grand Bush plan failure wouldn't be nearly as disastrous as the first--tens of thousands of people wouldn't die. In another sense, it would be worse. We can retreat from Iraq. We won't be able to retreat from the failure of immigration reform--no "surge" will save us--because it will change who "we" are.

**--Worse than a Quebec problem, maybe. At least France isn't on Canada's border. 12:06 A.M. link

American medical education produces doctors whose superpower is a wondrous agility on standardized tests. We have crawled our way past the PSAT, the SAT, the MCATs, and the National Board of Medical Examiners Parts 1, 2, and 3, till finally we vanquish our specialty certification.

There is only one flaw: When we bump up against a real-life problem, we can be horribly dimwitted. So, when challenged by the biggest problem of all—death—we do what we know best: design yet another program of study and qualification. First 1) comes problem identification; 2) then a curriculum; 3) a course to attend; 4) national guidelines; and finally 5) a multiple-choice test to reach the promised land 6) of certification.

The medical world's optimistic belief in this kind of remediation is the premise underlying recent books by two big-hearted doctors, Final Exam by Pauline Chen, and The Lonely Patient by Michael Stein. For these physicians, there is no challenge that can't be solved by a medical-school curriculum that offers extra instruction in soul-searching.



Structured as half memoir, half self-help manifesto, the books discuss illness and dying from a doctor's perspective: the first time the authors saw a dead person (awful to witness); encountered a cadaver (strangely engrossing); faced the illness of a close friend or family member (extra awful); and broke the bad news to patients (don't ask). Chen in particular writes quiet, clear-eyed prose—plus she loves, really loves the innards of people (she waxes poetic about fascial planes and tenacious dermal layers).

But when she leaves the descriptive world for the soapbox, the charm and delicacy of her medical coming-of-age story turns sour. She becomes hellbent (as does Stein) on slapping around the medical profession because we don't deal with the nonscience side of medicine as well as we should. We don't listen; we don't sympathize; we don't see the real person behind the disease; we are too caught up in our own importance and lifelong hurry to stop and take in the big picture. Our fancy tests and fancier machines have distanced us from the core of professional responsibilities carried out so admirably by yesteryear's country doctor, the one who would hold your hand and look you in the eye and speak the truth. And worst of all, we are relieved to have taken ourselves off the hook as we zip around with our cool gadgets.

Chen's plan for a cure follows the six-step program above—a "final exam," indeed. Though less pointed, Stein too laments the dominance of the heartless, mechanical doctor who has abandoned his role as healer for the seductions of the high tech. Despite the term-paper thoroughness of the books—Stein quotes everyone from Milton to Harold Brodkey—both doctors overlook a crucial fact. Serious illness is awful, death unimaginably worse, and a doctor's performance can do almost nothing to change this.

In a central moment in Chen's book, a friend's father dies a horrible death. The friend breaks into tears, in Chen's view because the doctors did not talk about the father's imminent death with her or her family. I would quibble mightily with this interpretation. Isn't it more likely that Chen's friend cried because her father had died? Yes, the physician fell far short of one's hopes in such a situation. But Chen's certainty that this bungling significantly added to, rather than confused, her friend's grief hands doctors far too much power. In a way, both authors inadvertently return to the old-school doctor-as-god point of view. Only we are mighty enough to soften Shakespeare's 1,000 blows that flesh is heir to; only we can ease the pain of death.

In fact, doctors aren't bad at handling the details of dying. We know how to ease pain, promote comfort, and arrange the medical particulars. But we are disasters when it comes to death itself, just like the rest of the human species. (Morticians often have the same problem.) I admire Chen's and Stein's pep-club optimism, but they might have integrated Ernest Becker's seminal Denial of Death into their discussions. Becker's basic point is that all of human behavior can be traced to our inability to accept our own mortality. Cowards that we are, we not only refuse to consider our own inevitable death, but our patients', too: We duck the tough discussions, flinch and flutter and order another test, and finally leave it to a (usually much younger) colleague to sit down with the family. We don't slink away because we are bad people; we slink away because we are people.

Becker also is curiously absent from How We Die, Sherwin Nuland's examination of death—a work that has made him the godfather of death books. Yet despite the omission, Nuland succeeds where Chen and Stein fall short. Here's my explanation: Nuland was not young when he wrote How We Die, and unlike Chen and Stein, he was not trying to reform American health care. Rather, he wrote with the panic and urgency of someone who sensed his own upcoming deadline, giving us a kind of What To Expect When You're Expecting To Die. He admits to doctors' yellow streak, pointing out that medicine is "more likely to attract people with high personal anxieties about dying." We are the ones seduced by the irrational belief that knowing about a disease will prevent it. Instead of a quick fix for our weaknesses, Nuland envisions patients making the big decisions with their loved ones, informed and advised—not directed—by their doctors. In other words, he reduces doctors to their proper supporting role. (Nuland also has a new book out about aging.)

I agree with Nuland that doctors' failure to deal well with their patients' deaths is not a bad habit that can be corrected by medical-school remediation. Doctors and patients would be better served if we stopped sophomorically pursuing the "good death" reassuringly reducing the end of life to another commodity subject to adjustment and negotiation. Instead, we should do what we can to make the dying and those who survive a tiny bit more comfortable when the time comes. As doctors, we should ease pain; as humans interacting with other humans, we should console those who are anguished as best we can because it is the right thing to do, not the professionally optimal approach. This modest goal is all we can hope to accomplish—but still seldom do.

This week, Dr. Sydney Spiesel discusses a way to stop the progression of nearsightedness in kids, a better method of hormone replacement therapy for women after menopause, and new developments in the search for a cause for autism. His column will start appearing a couple of times a month.

Stopping the march of myopia

Condition: Nearsightedness, or myopia, is the most common eye problem. In the United States and Europe, about 25 percent of the adult population is nearsighted, and in much of Asia the condition is more common still. Significant myopia can have serious medical consequences. It has long been understood that the condition has a strong genetic component: Nearsighted parents are more likely to have nearsighted children. But recent research has shown that other factors contribute. For example, just as our mothers warned us, there is now evidence that doing close-up work, like reading, seems to promote the condition.

How it progresses: The eyeball of a nearsighted person is deeper than the eyeball of a person with normal vision and becomes deeper as nearsightedness progresses. Myopia often begins to develop between the ages of 6 and 8. As children grow, their nearsightedness worsens, continuing to do so long after they have stopped growing taller. Though we know a lot about factors associated with nearsightedness and its progression, we have no good ideas yet about the mechanism. But can we stop it?

New research: A recent study by Wei-Han Chua and colleagues at the Singapore National Eye Center elegantly built on older research and successfully used atropine eye drops to treat myopia in children. Atropine is a longer-lasting version of the pupil-dilating drops your doctor uses when you go for an eye exam. Available by prescription in the United States, the drops are mainly used to treat amblyopia (lazy eye) instead of the older treatment, patching, which children often hate.

Dr. Chua and his co-workers studied the progression of nearsightedness in 400 children between 6 and 12 years of age. Half the children were treated with atropine eye drops, and the other half were treated with placebo eye drops. Both kinds of drops were administered nightly to one eye, so the untreated eye could be compared with the treated one. The children were followed for two years. All used eyeglasses to correct their nearsightedness, and because atropine dilates the pupil, the lenses of the glasses self-darkened in bright light, to avoid discomfort for the children whose pupils were dilated.

Findings: The effects were extraordinary: After two years, on average, the children's nearsightedness had not progressed in the atropine-treated eyes but had dramatically worsened in the placebo-treated and untreated eyes. Similarly, atropine-treated eyes did not become deeper, while placebo-treated and untreated eyes did. No serious adverse effects were observed in the course of the research.

Conclusion: This is extremely promising. Further work needs to be done to determine the ideal concentration of atropine in the eye drops, to find out how long the treatment needs to last, and if the effects are permanent. Because atropine interferes with close focusing, children will probably need to wear bifocals while they're using the atropine drops. Much more research must be done to help us understand why nearsightedness develops and progresses. But in the meantime, we may have a way to head off this common problem.

Hormone replacement therapy—a safer way

Treatment: Hormone replacement therapy was introduced in 1941, when the FDA approved the use of estrogen for this purpose. Early on, HRT was prescribed with great enthusiasm. It relieved troublesome symptoms associated with menopause, including hot flashes, sleep problems, and, for some women, difficulty in concentration. And HRT (usually estrogen plus a progestin) was shown to improve the bone density of elderly women and decrease their risk for fractures.

Downside: Time and further research has shown that these gains come at a cost, however: increased risk for cardiovascular problems, stroke, and blood clots in the veins and lungs. Postmenopausal women on HRT also seem to be an increased risk for breast cancer and possibly dementia. This made many women feel they had to choose between improved quality of life and a risk of ill health and early death.

New study: Now research reported in the journal Circulation suggests a way around the blood clotting problem, at least. The researchers studied about 270 women who had developed blood clots in their veins, almost all of them postmenopausal. They were compared with more than 600 women who did not suffer from blood clots but similar in age, smoking status, and age at menopause. Among women in either group who used HRT, the study tracked whether the estrogen medication was taken orally or applied through the skin as a patch or a gel. The nature of the progestin component, if any, was also studied.

Findings: Estrogen HRT increased the risk for blood clots in the veins—but only if it was administered orally. This result is not as surprising as it might seem. A medication that's given orally collects in the blood supply of the intestines and passes through the liver before it is distributed to the rest of the body. This causes changes in the proteins synthesized by the liver, some of which are known to increase the clotting of blood. When the estrogen in HRT is administered through the skin, by contrast, it bypasses the liver. The study also established that some progestins (there are many kinds) increase the risk of blood clotting and that others do not.

Conclusion: If these findings are confirmed, HRT skin patches or gels and careful choice of the progestin component could normalize the risk of blood clots in the veins, and also blood clots that migrate to the lungs, causing pulmonary embolism, and to the brain, causing stroke. Unfortunately, other studies suggest that administering HRT through the skin won't affect the rate of heart disease or risk of breast cancer associated with it. HRT will still be a difficult choice. But this study at least lowers the risk and may well shift the balance for many women.

The genetics of autism

Search for a cause: It has long been clear that autism is primarily genetic in origin. The disorder is almost certainly the result not of a single abnormal gene, but rather the interaction of several. In the past, a few locations on human chromosomes have been suspected of playing a role for a scattering of patients. Now researchers have identified a genetic location on a specific chromosome that seems to be associated with the expression of autism in many patients.

New research: Described in a paper with 137 authors representing 67 worldwide institutions, this finding is the first result of an audacious project conducted by the Autism Genome Project Consortium. The project started with a set of almost 1,500 families with at least two people who fall on the autism spectrum. Of this group, DNA samples from about 1,200 families could be analyzed for chromosomal similarities.

Findings: This analysis points to a hitherto unsuspected "hot spot" on chromosome 11, which seems to be related to an increased risk for the expression of autism. (The genetic function of the hot-spot location is still unclear.) Besides identifying the chromosome 11 hot spot, the data also tantalizingly hint that flaws in the gene coding for a material called neurexin, which plays a role in the development of certain cell-to-cell transmission sites (synapses), can cause autism in some cases. This trigger for autism is probably quite rare. But it suggests that the disorder is somehow related to abnormalities in the connections between nerve cells that make use of glutamate for information transmission, and defects in those transmissions. How (or even if) these two observations—the hot spot and the neruexin flaws—fit together is as yet unknown.

Conclusion: This study doesn't tell us exactly which gene on chromosome 11 is important, but it does tell us just where to focus our attention. And the neurexin-related discovery hints at the mechanism of what might go wrong in neurodevelopment to lead to autism. These discoveries reinforce the value of collaborative work that puts together information about patients with a relatively rare disorder, from many locales, to create a pool large enough for serious research.

Return to article

If you are nearsighted, you can see nearby objects but distant objects are out of focus. People with normal vision can get a sense of what this is like by putting on a pair of reading glasses and looking around, or doing the same thing with a magnifying glass.

Return to article

For example, in Singapore and Taiwan it is estimated that about 80 percent of young adults are nearsighted, and this prevalence seems to be increasing.

Return to article

High degrees of myopia can lead to a variety of complications that can severely damage vision—for example, retinal detachment, glaucoma, and a form of macular degeneration, all of which may lead to blindness.

Return to article

People often imagine that newborns are nearsighted. In fact, they are quite farsighted because their eyeballs are too short, though they can still see nearby objects pretty clearly. (Photographers will understand why: If a camera lens has a short focal length, the depth of field—the range in which objects will be seen clearly—is very deep. This greater depth of field more than compensates for the poor focus for near objects.) As babies grow, their eyeballs deepen, and their range of clear vision moves toward them.

Return to article

Atropine is made from extracts of the "deadly nightshade" plant, also called belladonna ("beautiful woman"). Eye drops containing it have been used for centuries as a kind of cosmetic—atropine causes the pupils to dilate, and people tend to respond positively to faces in which the eyes appear large. High-born 18^th-century Italian or French women would not have considered making a major public appearance without putting a little belladonna extract in their eyes first, despite the temporary effect on vision.

The side effects of atropine include greater sensitivity to bright light (since the pupils don't close down in response to it) and some blurred vision. There are also systemic effects if it is absorbed from the eye or taken orally: flushing of the skin and decreased sweating, which means decreased tolerance to high temperatures. But these effects can be prevented. At high overdoses, atropine is poisonous, causing nausea, confusion, delirium, and heart problems. These harms are rarely, if ever, seen when atropine drops are properly used in the treatment of lazy eye.

Return to article

HRT that consists only of estrogen stimulates the lining of the uterus, increasing the risk of endometrial cancer. This can be prevented by combining estrogen with an additional hormone, a progestin.

Return to article

Autism is a neurological disorder in which abnormal development of the central nervous system results in poor ability to interact with other people, diminished ability to communicate, and often repetitive patterns of behavior (like hand-flapping or saying a word over and over again). In addition, autistic patients may have extremely narrow interests. We all know people with some of these characteristics, and there is no hard and fast line between "neurotypical" individuals and people who fall somewhere along the autism-disorder spectrum, though severely affected people are pretty easy to identify.

In previous decades, it was thought that full-blown autism occurs in about two out of every 1,000 people and that people elsewhere on the autistic disorder spectrum amount to about six in every 1,000. A recent publication suggests that the true numbers may be somewhat higher. Still, the prevalence data are iffy. The boundaries of the autism-disorder spectrum are not as well-defined as we would like, and there are no diagnostic laboratory tests. Scientists are beginning, however, to establish some unique behavioral patterns that place patients in the autism spectrum.

Wall Street and the media have mostly blamed yesterday's huge U.S. stock market drop on frenzied, irrational Chinese investors. After a parabolic run up, China's stock market fell nearly 9 percent on Tuesday, triggering drops across Asia and Europe, and ultimately, in the United States. According to the conventional wisdom, sophisticated U.S. investors were taken unawares by unpredictable, irrational overseas behavior. For globalists, the domino effect is yet more proof that the world is flat. For anti-globalists, it's another warning about what happens when we tie our established economy too closely to China's emerging one.

Or maybe not. Sure, the quick fall in China's market may have alerted American investors to global risks and caused them to dump U.S. shares. But in fact, U.S. investors were rationally processing (albeit in a somewhat frenzied manner) investing information that was almost purely domestic in nature. China's plummet may have set off the conflagration, but the kindling was entirely homegrown.

Consider what was floating around yesterday: (1) a precipitous drop in U.S. durable goods orders in January, not including defense, which bodes ill for the manufacturing sector; (2) perhaps the most esteemed economist of our era, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, publicly mused that the U.S. economy might—might—be headed for a recession later this year; (3) a slew of stories in the Wall Street Journal on the continuing problems with subprime lending, the possible failure of American banks to set aside reserves for bad debt, and a general pullback of the liberal extension of credit; (4) existing home-sales data that showed an increase in volume but a 5 percent drop in the prices of homes sold in the United States between December 2006 and January 2007; (5) the anticipation of this morning's sharply downward revision to Gross Domestic Product for the fourth quarter, from 3.5 percent to 2.2 percent.

While the durable goods number was unexpected and Greenspan's comments came out of the blue, the other data points were not surprises. The fact that the housing bubble has popped and that subprime lenders and borrowers are in trouble is one of the least well-kept secrets on Wall Street. Meanwhile, smart analysts have been punching holes in the preliminary fourth-quarter GDP data since it was first released in January.

U.S. stock markets have routinely shrugged off negative information during the recent bull run. What made yesterday different? This time, the signs of a slowdown—not a recession but a slowdown—are clearly evident. The plunge in durable goods orders indicated that the manufacturing sector may be in danger of recession. (Thankfully, the U.S. economy relies less and less on manufacturing for growth, which is why a manufacturing recession may not trigger an economy-wide one.)

And the twin turbines that have driven the U.S. economy in recent years are clearly sputtering. When housing is doing well, it stimulates a great deal of economic activity, creates jobs, and makes people feel wealthier—and hence more likely to spend. When housing is doing poorly, the opposite holds. And as today's new home-sales report confirms, housing is still struggling. Prices and home values are down marginally, but when assets are encumbered with huge amounts of debt—as houses are—it doesn't take much of a decline to make an impact. (If you put 10 percent down on a house, and it declines 10 percent in value, you've lost your entire investment.)

Second, and more important, there has been a precipitous decline in the business of housing-related credit. In recent years, cheap and abundant mortgages have allowed people to buy ever-more-expensive homes with little money down and to borrow against homes they already own to expand and renovate, thus fueling consumer spending. The huge volume of so-called mortgage-equity withdrawal, Alan Greenspan and his Federal Reserve colleague Mark Kennedy have argued, has been a significant contributor to the late consumer-spending binge.

Here, too, the trend may no longer be the economy's friend. Interest rates are still low. But with subprime-lending operations failing, and with big banks taking big hits to their mortgage portfolios, pressure is mounting among regulators and investors for lenders to become more parsimonious. Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored enterprise that is a huge force in the mortgage market, yesterday announced it would no longer buy certain types of subprime loans. In the economy, one overreaction—in this case, extending too much credit on easy terms—tends to inspire a counter overreaction. And so it's reasonable to assume that housing-related credit will become more difficult to obtain in the coming months.

Individually, each of the above items bodes poorly for the short-term performance of the U.S. economy. Taken together, they are the ingredients for one big slowdown sandwich. It's as if investors woke up yesterday and realized that the U.S. economy could really be slowing down, which is generally bad for stocks. Sell!

In addition to the hard data signaling the possibility of a hard landing, there were less tangible—but still meaningful—signs of the sort of widespread complacency that frequently cometh before the fall. Buyout maven Henry Kravis, whose 1988 biggest-ever deal to take RJR-Nabisco private signaled the top of that decade's credit cycle, on Monday announced the new biggest-ever deal to take energy company TXU private. The market had gone nearly four years without a day in which the S&P 500 fell more than 2 percent. And the cover of the issue of Forbes now available on the newsstand plugged an article titled, "Has the Bull Market Just Started?"

For Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, the transition from moderate, gay-friendly, abortion-tolerating Massachusetts governor to a certified social conservative isn't going smoothly. YouTube and Google have exposed Romney's shifting policy positions and relatively recent history of liberal behavior. In 1992, he voted for Democrat Paul Tsongas in the presidential primary. In a 1994 debate, he promised to be better on gay rights than Ted Kennedy and spoke movingly about why abortion should be safe and legal. Today? He's hyperpartisan, pro-life, and hostile to gay marriage. Last year, he worked with Democrats to enact universal health care in Massachusetts. Today, his campaign Web site's health-care page doesn't even mention it.

Romney's flip-flops have been aggravated by his clumsy responses. Disavowing his remarks in the 1994 Kennedy debate, he said: "Of course, I was wrong on some issues back then. I think most of us learn with experience." Yes, as an unformed man of 47, this CEO, father, and multimillionaire was in the thrall of foolish, immature ideas.

It's easy to conclude that Romney lacks core principles and will say or do anything to get elected. But I think there's something deeper at work. Romney's behavior—and the fact that he doesn't think his obvious flip-flopping should arouse suspicions—suggests that he may be the first real CEO/MBA candidate. Sure, President George W. Bush is the first president to have an MBA, and he made noises about running the country like a company. (Insert Enron joke here.) But in contrast to Bush, Romney was a real businessman before getting into politics. The Harvard MBA started at Bain & Company as a management consultant in 1978, founded BainCapital, a wildly successful venture-capital firm, and restructured the Salt Lake City Olympics effort. Romney would easily win a private poll among Republican-leaning executives—he's their kind of guy, socially and financially. Ebay CEO Meg Whitman is a big supporter. And smart establishment economists such as Greg Mankiw of Harvard, Columbia Business School Dean Glenn Hubbard, and John Cogan of Stanford, all of whom provided critical intellectual support for President Bush, have signed on.

So, how are Romney's flip-flops and business success connected? People suspect, perhaps correctly, that Romney really doesn't believe all the things he's saying. His wife, Anne, has multiple sclerosis, yet he's opposed to embryonic stem-cell research. If an MS treatment derived from embryonic stem cells were to be developed overseas, it's a pretty sure bet that Romney would use his influence and funds to get that treatment for his spouse.

But such hypocrisy, which turns off voters, is something like a job requirement for CEOs. In the executive suite, abandoning deeply held attitudes and reversing positions are job requirements. How often have you seen a CEO proclaim that a struggling unit is not for sale, only to put it on the block a few months later? A CEO will praise a product to the skies one day and then cancel it the next. He'll boast, sincerely, that his company is No. 1 in the industry and then, when he quits the next day to run a rival, claim that the new firm is tops. CEOs take their cues from Mike Damone of Fast Times at Ridgemont High: "Act like wherever you are, that's the place to be."

These business flips are fine, because in the corporate world, people don't confuse advocacy of a company's strategy or products and services with personal honor or integrity. Nobody expects Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott to wear suits made at Wal-Mart, or Sears Chairman Eddie Lampert to furnish his homes with appliances from Sears, or for the gazillionaires behind Triarc to eat lunch at Arby's.

Good CEOs don't simply stake out public positions and stick to them for 20 years. They devise new business strategies and business plans to cope with changing market conditions. Energy-company executives who are suddenly eager to do something about global warming aren't seen as hypocrites, they're seen as shrewd operators. If the world changes, you don't simply do and say the same thing. You bring in Bain & Company, commission a study, announce a restructuring, start manufacturing in China.

It is clear that Romney approaches politics not as a crusade but as a business case study. He doesn't run in elections, he competes in markets. In 1994, the former management consultant knew his market. Running against icon Ted Kennedy in an intensely Democratic state, Romney knew there was no percentage in running as a right-wing alternative. So, he tried to get to Kennedy's left on women's and gay issues, and asserted he wasn't even a Republican in the 1980s.

Like a good management consultant, Romney has also been a relentless bench-marker—taking proven tactics and adapting them to present-day circumstances. When he ran for governor in 2002, he followed the playbook of William Weld, who showed that the way to get elected as a Republican in a hyperpartisan, wealthy state like Massachusetts was to run as a likeable, moderate post-partisan.

Today, Romney correctly recognizes that what is appropriate for one market (Massachusetts voters) clearly is not appropriate for another market (Republican-primary voters). And so he has borrowed the tactics of President Bush, addressing the market much as Bush did in 2000, as a tax-cutting, pro-business, pro-life, anti-gay-marriage, gun-toting, compassionate conservative who can also hold hands with African-Americans.

It's not surprising that Romney has fled from his public record and is running to the right. What's surprising is that the man who has usually been so competent is proving to be rather poor at execution, and timing. He's moving hard right at a time when the national mood seems to be swinging in the opposite direction. Witness his graceless attacks on liberals, sudden interest in guns, James Inhofe-like soundings on global warming. They sound all wrong and unconvincing, like a consumer-products company reinventing itself as a dot-com—in the summer of 2000. Meanwhile, his focus on a narrow (and suspicious) conservative niche is likely to inhibit his ability to appeal to a mass market. After all, the latest poll from Quinnipiac College has him charting at 7 percent.

You only had to see the blaxploitation-style poster of Christina Ricci chained and kneeling at Samuel L. Jackson's feet to know that Black Snake Moan (Paramount Classics) was going to be a provocative rebel yell of a movie. A middle-aged black man in the South chains a young white woman to his radiator to cure her of nymphomania and succeeds: What a rich exploration of racial and sexual archetypes! What a daring challenge to viewers' expectations! Or maybe: What bullshit.

I guarantee that the words provocative, bold, and courageous will be bandied about in discussions of this movie, and they won't be entirely misplaced. Writer and director Craig Brewer, who made 2005's Hustle and Flow, has a fine sense of locale (here, the Tennessee countryside), a way of coaxing thrilling performances from actors, and terrific taste in music. But can we just start with something very basic here? Chaining someone to your radiator is wrong. Depriving a near-naked and recently assaulted stranger of the most basic physical liberty for days on end is a sick, perverse, and cruel thing to do. Black Snake Moan appears to be—or, worse, pretends to be—oblivious to that simple fact. And that obliviousness makes all of the movie's supposed risk-taking seem more like exploitation.

Before I get ahead of myself with analysis, let me go back and set up the movie. We open on a scene of Rae (Ricci) desperately banging her boyfriend (Justin Timberlake), who's Iraq-bound with the National Guard. Moments after seeing Ronnie off with a promise to be true, Rae is getting dirty with a burly black drug dealer. That same night, she gets high at a party, has semiconsensual sex on a football field, and is subsequently raped, beaten, and left for dead by Ronnie's best friend.

It's hard out there for a ho—until Rae meets Lazarus, the embittered farmer and former bluesman played by Samuel Jackson, who finds Rae by the side of the road and takes her in. Sprawled half-conscious on the couch inside Lazarus' country shack, Rae displays signs of "the sickness," a kind of erotic fever whose symptoms include writhing in panties and scratching at one's thighs. Lazarus, determined to drive out the demons from this suffering young woman, submerges her in an ice-cold bath (actually a terrible way to treat a fever, but let's hope no one is watching this movie for first-aid advice), reads to her from the Bible, and eventually padlocks her to the radiator with that large, clanking chain.

All this sounds like the setup for Saw or Hostel, a sadistic B-movie about sexual torture and humiliation. Instead, Black Snake Moan morphs into a wacky intergenerational bonding movie, something closer to Harold and Maude or The Karate Kid with a dusting of Southern grit. Lazarus and Rae, as it turns out, aren't a couple but twins: Stubborn, damaged, and lonely, they each need something from the other. She, I guess, needs to be chained, and he needs to chain someone, but just for a little while—until they both learn how to trust again. Bondage and captivity are this movie's meet-cute.

With the help of a folksy preacher (John Cothran Jr.) and a preternaturally nice pharmacist (S. Epatha Merkerson), Lazarus and Rae's relationship segues seamlessly from imprisonment into a cozy father-daughter bond. Toward the end, when a transformed Rae is seen wearing a gold belly chain, it's even suggested that the piece of jewelry represents the spiritual journey the two lost souls have taken together. But there's nothing symbolic about the large, heavy metal chain binding, and bruising, Ricci's impossibly tiny waist for the first part of this movie. I'm sorry, but in the age of Abu Ghraib and Alberto Gonzales torture memos, it seems important to say it again: Chaining people and holding them against their will is not the right thing to do. By that I don't mean, simplistically, that Jackson's character is "bad" and should be punished at the end of the film. I mean that the questions—ethical, sexual, racial, whatever—that are raised by this initial act of violence are never addressed.

Just as in Hustle and Flow, there's an unsubtle message here that race trumps gender. In that movie, Terrence Howard's character was meant to remain the focus of our attention and sympathy even after he threw one of his hookers out into the street with her baby as punishment for talking back. I never forgave the character for that act, and by the end of the movie, I couldn't have given a shit whether he achieved rap fame or not (with the "boo-hoo, I'm a pimp" song that he neither wrote nor sang by himself but ran around taking full credit for).

Black Snake Moan's misogyny is a little subtler than Hustle and Flow's, not least because of Christina Ricci's subtle and compassionate rendering of what could have been a one-note character. In interviews, Brewer makes it clear that "nymphomania" is a nonexistent condition, an invention of cultural fantasy. But you'd never know that from watching Black Snake Moan, which would rather indulge that fantasy than provide its own characters with credible motivations. Ricci's character spends days in nothing but a cut-off Confederate-flag T-shirt and white panties—the outfit in which Lazarus found her, raped and beaten, by the side of the road. If Lazarus is supposed to be so concerned with Rae's well-being, not to mention immune to her sexual appeal, wouldn't he insist she change into one of his clean shirts right away? Brewer stirs the pot with commendable bravado, but he seems curiously uninterested in thinking through the issues of race and gender that he himself raises. Rae and Lazarus—but particularly Rae—are archetypes one minute, characters the next, depending on the emotional reaction the movie needs from its audience in any given scene.

On a tangential note—or maybe not so tangential—it's sad to see Christina Ricci's barely covered skeleton offered up as an object of salacious contemplation. She's so thin her head looks like a lollipop on a stick. Ricci's lush physicality has always been of a piece with the offbeat roles she chooses to take on, a bodacious "fuck you" to Hollywood standards. I loved her curvy form in Buffalo 66, The Opposite of Sex, and Monster, those childlike bug-eyes contrasting with that voluptuous, womanly shape. But in Black Snake Moan (and in the ubiquitous press photos accompanying its rollout), Ricci has dieted herself into near-invisibility. Is this level of scrawniness even appropriate for the character? If the town slut in backwoods Tennessee can't have a little meat on her bones, who can?

The first meeting I ever attended of the American Historical Association included a session about Oliver Stone's 1995 film Nixon. The panel included Stone, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., and George McGovern—the only one, as it happened, with a history Ph.D. (Schlesinger did his graduate work as a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, which then forbade the pursuit of Ph.D.s.) The audience filled a ballroom at the Hilton in midtown New York. McGovern said nothing critical about the film, and it fell to Schlesinger to dissect its bizarre, psycho-conspiratorial reading of history. Given the roughing up that Stone's JFK had gotten, I expected the academics in the crowd to follow Schlesinger's lead. Instead, during the question time, they went after the historian himself, grilling him about Cold War intrigues from the assassination of the Congo's Patrice Lumumba to U.S. political meddling in British Guyana.* Though Schlesinger parried well, he seemed relieved when time expired, and, as he and McGovern huddled afterward, Stone exited, unbowed, past a gantlet of autograph-seeking Ph.D.s.

The scene at the AHA captured the unusual place in the world of historical scholarship occupied by Schlesinger, who died Wednesday at 89. The audience he commanded at the Hilton showed that he remained as much a luminary within the profession as he was outside it. And for those of us who have always believed that historians should write for lay readers and fellow scholars, Schlesinger will remain an incomparable model. Yet for all his renown, many academics viewed Schlesinger with disdain—only a portion of which could be attributed to the snarls of professional jealousy that greet any colleague who writes best sellers, let alone consorts with the Kennedys.

Like his peer Richard Hofstadter, Schlesinger wrote history that was popular, without writing "popular history." He once said he regretted writing so many articles on current events and not enough books. That claim seems plausible if you consider his journalistic output—opinion-journal think-pieces, New York Post and Wall Street Journal columns, book reviews by the ream, film criticism and celebrity profiles for the glossies—as well as the sad fact that he never published the long-anticipated fourth volume of his Age of Roosevelt (1957-1960) or the second part of his memoirs. But if you take the books themselves—at least eight of which, by my count, stand as classics or near-classics—the comment seems falsely modest. Surely, Schlesinger must have been tossing off his op-ed pieces during his downtime, when less industrious writers might watch TV or work overtime to hone the kinds of sterling sentences that came so easily from Schlesinger's dazzling mind.

The literary merit of these works was inseparable from their intellectual achievements. I once came across a statement by Schlesinger explaining his approach to writing history, and the passage is worth taping to the office wall:

It has always seemed to me that the trick of writing history is to fuse narrative and analysis in a consistent literary texture. The history which is purely narrative … I find … ultimately unsatisfactory. It's not enough to describe the events … without giving some indication why they were happening. … Purely analytical history … by leaving out the emotions and the color and the atmosphere … is dehydrated history …. . [I]t doesn't recreate the mood in which the choices were made. [What] one must try to do … is to write a combination of narrative and analytical history.

Schlesinger's genius, in part, was to find that precise combination as assuredly as any historian I've read.

This stylistic brilliance wouldn't earn him greatness, of course, if his ideas didn't still matter. But they do. The Age of Jackson (1945) is the starting point for understanding how American liberalism began to inch away from the anti-statism of Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson and toward the embrace of a strong government. A Thousand Days (1965) and Robert Kennedy and His Times (1978), while open to the charge of court history, nonetheless loom large before anyone who wants to write about the Kennedys. The Imperial Presidency (1973), though in some ways an artifact of the Nixon era, stands as the best history of the growth of presidential power since World War II. And The Vital Center (1949)—a political argument rather than a work of history proper—mines the past in search of insight for the present in the best way, finding strains to lament as well as to admire in the liberal tradition that Schlesinger loved. Today, the book is inspiring a new generation of tough-minded liberals.

Schlesinger's undisguised political commitments—not only his polemics but his role in founding Americans for Democratic Action, his speechwriting for Adlai Stevenson, his service in the Kennedy White House—invited the charge that he "writes as he votes." When I was in graduate school, I still heard the generations-old quip that The Age of Jackson is a wonderful work of history—about the New Deal. (The book credits Andrew Jackson with vitalizing the idea of using presidential power on behalf of ordinary folk.)

Interestingly, though, comparatively few of Schlesinger's peers denied his greatness. The challenge came, rather, from younger scholars in the 1960s who found him insufficiently radical, too scornful of left-wing utopianism (a chief target of in The Vital Center), too enamored of power, and too closely attached to the Kennedys and the Democratic Party. Christopher Lasch, one of Schlesinger's harsher critics, accused him—and other like-minded liberal intellectuals—of having been seduced by JFK's style. Others said that Schlesinger whitewashed the administration's actions in episodes from the Bay of Pigs to the Cuban Missile Crisis. As the New Left generation gained influence in the profession, Schlesinger's stock in academia fell.

The root of the academic left's unhappiness with Schlesinger, I think, was his steadfast realism—his willingness to accept (without fully endorsing) the limits on social change imposed by democratic politics. He likened critics such as Lasch to the sentimental progressives who had backed Henry Wallace's 1948 presidential campaign and other exemplars of what he called the "doughface" tradition of preferring ideological purity over concrete results. "The left-wing critique of the Kennedy administration," he wrote at the time, was "a new expression of the old complaint by those who find satisfaction in large gestures of rejection against those who find satisfaction in small measures of improvement."

Indeed, Schlesinger's own decision to join the Kennedy team and forsake his old hero Adlai Stevenson resulted from his recognition that Stevenson lacked the comfort with politics and power that would be necessary to govern well. Schlesinger concluded by mid-1960 that Stevenson was showing too much "frivolity, distractedness, over-interest in words and phrases," while Kennedy "gives a sense of cool, measured, intelligent concern with action and power. … [Though] less creative personally, he might be more so politically." Yet when asked which figure in his lifetime he would have liked to have seen in the White House, he invariably answered, "Adlai Stevenson." Hope and realism coexisted.

Schlesinger favored liberal realism over left-wing utopianism because the latter philosophy posited the existence of a future free from struggle, whereas Schlesinger, deeply influenced by Reinhold Niebuhr, subscribed to a secularized idea of original sin that considered human nature inherently flawed. (He joked that he and his fellow admirers of the midcentury theologian called themselves "Atheists for Niebuhr.") And from John Dewey he took the insight of democracy as a practice that won't ever coast to a halt in some well-functioning steady state but must continually be renewed through purposeful engagement and action.

It made sense, then, that Schlesinger found stories of dramatic struggle throughout the American past, from the Age of Jackson to the Age of Roosevelt, and he told them with insight, commitment, and panache. But it made sense, too, that he also found implacable conflict in his own age—in the indifference of the Eisenhower years, the dedication to reform of the Kennedys, the power lust of Nixon, and the unthinking willfulness of George W. Bush. If Arthur Schlesinger spent rather too much time, by his own lights, joining the battles of a given day, it was because he believed that the state of American democracy, not just in the future but in the present, was worth it.

Correction, March 1, 2007: The article originally and incorrectly described Patrice Lumuba as being a leader from Ghana. He was the prime minister of the Congo. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

To listen to Slate's Spoiler Special about Hour 11 of Season 6 of 24, click the arrow button on the player below:

You can also click here * to download the MP3 file, or you can subscribe to the Spoiler Special podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.

This week's episode covered the events of 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. Jack Bauer spent most of that time changing into a suit, Chloe O'Brian proved that she has no boundaries, and President Palmer saw stars.

As part of Slate's Spoiler Special podcast series—recently expanded to include TV shows—we'll be hosting regular "post-view" discussions of Season 6. (Click here to listen to a discussion of the first four hours, here for a discussion of Hour 5, here for Hour 6, here for Hour 7, here for Hours 8 and 9, and here for Hour 10.) In this podcast, Slate's Meghan O'Rourke and June Thomas ask if 24 is inevitably anti-climactic, wonder if someone on the show's writing staff is unnaturally obsessed with presidential assassinations, and ponder Morris O'Brian's chances of redemption.

Because we reveal plot twists in these chats, we recommend—but don't insist—that you watch the show before listening to the program.

Here are links to our previous Spoiler Specials:

24: Day 6, Hour 10

Music and Lyrics

24: Day 6, Hours 8 and 9

24: Day 6, Hour 7

24: Day 6, Hour 6

Factory Girl

24: Day 6, Hour 5

24: Day 6, Hours 1-4

Notes on a Scandal

Dreamgirls

Casino Royale

Sleeper Cell

The History Boys

Fur

Borat

30 Rock

The Prestige

Marie Antoinette

The Departed

The Black Dahlia

Snakes on a Plane

World Trade Center

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby

Miami Vice

Scoop

Lady in the Water

My Super Ex-Girlfriend

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

The Devil Wears Prada

* To download the MP3 file, right-click (Windows) or hold down the Control key while you click (Mac), and then use the "save" or "download" command to save the audio file to your hard drive.

Return to article

Slate Spoiler Special: A recorded "post-view" discussion of a movie in which the participants feel free to give away the ending, key plot points, and other details that should not be mentioned to someone who has yet to view the film. The recording resembles the discussion you might have with friends while leaving the theater.

Return to article

Slate Spoiler Special: A recorded "post-view" discussion of a movie in which the participants feel free to give away the ending, key plot points, and other details that should not be mentioned to someone who has yet to view the film. The recording resembles the discussion you might have with friends while leaving the theater.

Click to listen to Steve Kronen read this poem.





It will be exactly like this, this life, this room,

all of it the same. At sunrise, dull as a corpse,

the bird of time staring from the copse,

the hollow fountain ringing as servants resume

their chores in the cold. O, terrible youth! The heart, empty,

just as in this life. And the voices of winter,

voices of the poor, calling from their ragged city.

And singing to himself, the window-mender.

From under her dirty bonnet the old woman, fragile,

screaming her fishes, and beneath his blue apron,

a man will set down his wheelbarrow, spit upon

his calloused hands and bellow, an unforgiving angel—

just as it is here. This life, this table—

Goethe, inkstand, the stink of time,

paper, the woman who reads your mind,

O my child, the pen and portrait, Bible.

Exactly like this life. This same garden,

shadowed, overgrown, thick. And at noon

people gather, hungry, pleased to take part in

the communal life, though no one

knows another, but each knows this: one is dressed

as for a party and opening the door, enter

the night, alone, without love, without lantern.

Exactly as in this life. The same dim way through the forest,

midday in autumn, along the forest trail,

where it turns, downward, cautious as a woman

bending to gather flowers that might help heal—

listen, we will meet again as it once was when, when ...

And you will have forgotten the dress you wore, its color ...

But what happiness I've found has been brief and spare.

O, you will dress in pale lilac, my beautiful sorrow,

the flowers in your hat, tiny, steeped in dolor –

I will not recall their names, all of them foreign,

unnameable but one, the forget-me-not, asleep

in the weedy ravines of the hide-and-seek

world, just as now, left alone, an orphan.

And before you, a dark path will soak

up the splash of water falling in torrents.

And I'll speak to you then of the Rabbi of Bacharach,

of the city built on water, of nights in Florence.

And there, redolent of rain, where the wall's collapsed,

flowers on their hollow stems quiver

and the fat fallen weeds, drowsy, nap

by the silent river.

On Wednesday night, John McCain broke the news that he is running for president on the Late Show With David Letterman. The formal announcement won't come until April, but the "soft launch," as an adviser called it, was vintage McCain—candid and messy. The Arizona senator poked fun at the political charade of his drawn-out announcement and said soldiers' lives had been "wasted" in Iraq, a comment he was apologizing for the next day.

McCain's ambitions are no secret, but the venue was a surprise. There was a bit of risk in going on Letterman, if for no other reason than that Bob Dole did the same thing in 1995. No candidate running for any office on any planet should ever steal from the Dole playbook. McCain has particular reason to avoid the parallels. Dole's gambit was seen as an effort to come off as youthful, so as to head off questions about his not young age. McCain, who will be 72* on Inauguration Day, faces the same questions.

McCain probably chose the Late Show to bring a little mirth to a campaign that so far has been a lot less jolly than his last run. As the senator has told supporters privately, the press and his opponents are waiting for him to show his age or his temper. Having to be hyper-cautious all the time irritates him. In 2000, there were glowing stories about his swashbuckling maverick style. This time, the coverage is more often about how he's muffled his straight talk. McCain supports a troop increase in Iraq that nearly 70 percent of the country opposes. He gets criticized from the right for pandering to his moderate base and he gets criticized from the left for abandoning that moderate base to pander to conservatives.

McCain also trails Rudy Giuliani by almost 20 points in the latest Time and ABC/Washington Post polls. For now, the McCain team is taking a measured approach to the widening gap. Their principal strategy is to wait and let Giuliani fall of his own weight. Once conservatives learn about Giuliani's pro-choice, pro-gun control, and pro-gay-rights positions, McCain aides expect, their rival's support will diminish considerably. Giuliani's commitment to conservative judges took a knock Thursday, and Giuliani supporter and former solicitor general Ted Olson went right on the air to rebut the charges to conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. As Giuliani's own research suggests, the press is also likely to cover his three marriages, business dealings, and experience during the Vietnam War. The McCain campaign will make no Clintonlike efforts to draw their rival off-sides, at least for the moment. They will hope the press does their work for them (sometimes with their guidance).

McCain is also relying on front-runner-sized structure and organization to beat Rudy. The mayor may be popular, they argue, but he lacks the state-by-state organization required to actually win the nomination. McCain and his team have been building that groundwork for two years.

Their best weapon at this stage, they think, is the candidate himself. So, they're getting McCain on the road. He will increasingly be out in the country, away from the Senate and among voters in the kind of free-flowing town halls that were his signature in 2000. This serves several purposes. A frenetic schedule and McCain's energy on stage offer reassurance about his health and vigor. The format, if it stays genuine, allows McCain to connect with the audience even if some of them disagree with him. It also clearly energizes him.

The challenge is that McCain obviously has a lot more to answer for now than he did when he was an insurgent candidate. The big risk is that McCain's looser talk will lead to mistakes, like his remark to Letterman that "we've wasted a lot of our most precious treasure, which is American lives." (Barack Obama, who had to apologize for a similar remark, graciously and shrewdly came to McCain's defense).

Unless the GOP finds a fantasy candidate they're stuck with McCain, Giuliani, and Romney. Which means the conservative vote is up for grabs. McCain's advisers know their candidate has problems with conservatives but argue that of the three, he has the most conservative record. But policy positions may not make the difference. No matter how much pandering he does, McCain can't stop conservatives from flocking to Rudy regardless of his record, either because they're emotionally drawn to the former mayor or because they can't stand the competition. It won't be clear how far McCain can go until it's clear how far Rudy will fall.

Correction, March 2: The article originally said that Sen. McCain would be 73 on Inauguration Day. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

10:14 a.m.: The defense calls Walter Pincus, a Washington Post reporter.

We're expecting a parade of journalists through the witness box today. Three Posties, a Timesman, a Newsweeker, and Robert Novak. (I've sometimes imagined that Novak is in the employ of Satan, but it turns out he also works for the Chicago Sun-Times.)

Pincus testifies that he talked to Scooter Libby during the summer in question of 2003, and Libby never mentioned Valerie Plame. Who did spill the Plame beans to Pincus? Ari Fleischer. They were talking by phone on July 12 (two days before the publication of the infamous Novak column that outed Plame), when Ari—out of the blue—told Pincus that Joe Wilson's wife worked for the CIA.

Oddly, Fleischer didn't mention this when he was on the stand earlier in the trial. Ari said he leaked (after first learning about Plame from Scooter Libby) to two journalists: NBC's David Gregory, and my Slate colleague (and then-Time writer) John Dickerson. (John disputes Ari's recollection.) What's going on? Did Ari totally forget about his talk with Pincus? Is this yet another instance of a faulty recollection, in a trial that may hinge on conflicting memories?

11:18 a.m.: The defense calls Bob Woodward.

The courtroom is packed for Mr. Watergate. Woodward gets to tell us that he's shared in two Pulitzer Prizes and written 14 books. (He claims he writes about government agencies and politicians. What, no love for Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi?)

In summer 2003, Woodward was reporting for the book that would eventually become Plan of Attack. He talked to then-Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage on June 13. They discussed the ongoing kerfuffle over the "sixteen words" in Bush's State of the Union (about Saddam Hussein trying to get uranium from Africa) that came from dubious intelligence and should never have showed up in the speech.

The defense plays Woodward's audio recording of this interview. It turns out to be perhaps the most entertaining exhibit of the trial. While most of the voices we've heard are tamed by the cautious cadences of the law-schooled (not only the trial attorneys, but also Libby and even Tim Russert once worked as lawyers), Armitage is clearly a fun guy to shoot the shizzle with. He features a gruff voice and a whole lotta cussin'. (Which was sadly redacted in the courtroom. You can listen to the censored tape here.)

There was a big fight in 2003—among the White House, the CIA, the State Department, and lord knows who else—over who was to blame for letting in those 16. The CIA eventually took the hit, with Director George Tenet issuing a mea culpa that July. But a month earlier, Armitage had a different take: "The CIA is not going to be hurt by this one," he told Woodward. As for the State Department? "We've got our documents on it. We're clean as a [frackin'] whistle."

"How come it wasn't taken out of the State of the Union, then?" asks Woodward. "Because I think it was overruled by the types down at the White House," answers Armitage.

Moments like this are the fascinating flotsam of this trial. Here we get a peek at how the pre-Iraq war intelligence got so badly mangled. Is there any historical import to the fate of Scooter Libby? Not really. He deserves a fair trial, and justice. But realistically, Scooter's a footnote. It's the flotsam we'll remember.

Of course, while it's more interesting than the case itself, this passage isn't actually the relevant portion of the tape for the defense's purposes. After the 16-words exchange, Armitage, unsolicited, tells Bob Woodward about Valerie Plame. This is the first known leaking of Plame's identity. Armitage had learned about her CIA employment a few days before, from a memo issued by the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. (Click here for a transcript of what Armitage said to Woodward.)

11:32 a.m.: Woodward says he talked to Libby two weeks after he spoke to Armitage. And Libby never mentioned Valerie Plame.

The defense's strategy is becoming clear. Check it out, jury: Here are some big-shot reporters who talked to Scooter Libby during the time period in question, and Scooter didn't tell a single one of them about Plame. If he was so focused on leaking that information, why didn't he leak to Pincus or Woodward?

I understand the tactic. But I'm not sure how it will play with the jury. Libby may not have told Bob Woodward, but that doesn't mean he didn't tell Judy Miller.

11:53 a.m.: The defense calls New York Times reporter David Sanger. Guess what? Scooter didn't leak to him, either.

1:37 p.m.: The defense calls Robert Novak. Novak wears his signature three-piece suit, with peaked lapels. He answers questions while peering out from between the tops of his glasses and the awnings of his eyebrows.

Novak recounts his career, which began in 1954 when he covered the Nebraska and Indiana legislatures for the Associated Press. "He's older than dirt," whispers the journalist next to me. "Did you know he survived lung cancer? It's like he can't be killed."

Novak says that Armitage told him on July 8 (two days after Joe Wilson's appearance on Meet the Press) that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA and had suggested Wilson go to Niger. Armitage didn't say the wife's last name, but Novak says he found it in Who's Who in America. (Score one for old media. I would have tried Google.)

Novak then confirmed this with Karl Rove. (Rove was "a really good source" for Novak, and they talked "two or three times a week." When asked if Rove's job was to get the president re-elected, Novak answers, "I think he was trying to do a good job for the country, too.") Novak also talked to Libby that week, but says, "I'm absolutely positive that he did not confirm it for me. … He gave me no information about it."

Again the defense is suggesting: If Scooter's such a leaker, why not leak to Novak?

2:22 p.m.: Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald cross-examines Novak. Novak says he first met Wilson in the green room at Meet the Press, when both were appearing on the show. Fitzgerald asks if it's fair to say that they weren't "fast friends."

Most people in the green room are "circumspect," says Novak, by way of reply. But Wilson was "giving his opinion" on the Clinton administration vs. the Bush administration "at some length" and "in a very loud voice." (Guess which Wilson liked better.)

Imagine if Wilson had just reined it in a bit that day. Maybe Novak wouldn't have bothered to pursue a story on him. The Plame column might never have run. And instead of sitting on the hard wooden benches of this courtroom, I could be napping on my couch right now.

2:36 p.m.: Novak reveals another person whom he discussed Plame with before running his column. It was lobbyist Rick Hohlt. Novak told him he had some good scoop. Hohlt is a "lobbyist about town" and "a gossip," in the words of one defense attorney.

Hohlt seems to have little bearing on the case, but as he's the first new name to crop up in the trial for quite a while, the journalists are buzzing. Who's Rick Hohlt? Who's Rick Hohlt?? Last I hear, Newsweek's Michael Isikoff has scurried off at the break to start tracking Hohlt down. (Update: Nancy Pelosi said in 2001, "I don't know Rick Hohlt, but I do think he is acting like a caveman." The plot thickens!)

2:54 p.m.: The defense calls Washington Post reporter Glenn Kessler. He is yet another reporter whom Libby did not leak to. The most interesting tidbit in his testimony: When Libby called Kessler on a Saturday afternoon to answer some questions, Kessler was at the zoo with his children. Where in the zoo was he? "I was in the elephant house," says Kessler. Why does he remember this? "I haven't taken many calls in the elephant house."

10:30 a.m.: I am in a dentist's chair, getting my teeth examined. (Oh, thanks for asking, that's very sweet of you—turns out they're fine but I could floss better.)

In my stead, we sent my Slate colleague Christopher Beam to observe the trial's morning action: Witnesses Jill Abramson (a New York Times editor) and John Hannah (national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney).

Abramson was here to cast doubt on earlier testimony from Judy Miller (the New York Times reporter who claimed Scooter Libby leaked to her). Miller testified that she suggested a story about Valerie Plame at a meeting with Abramson. Today in court, Abramson says she can't remember Miller ever raising the issue. Under cross-examination, Abramson admits that "it's possible that I sometimes tuned her out." (In retrospect—given how wrong much of Miller's reporting about WMD turned out to be—tuning her out was perhaps the wisest course of action.)

John Hannah, who worked with Libby in the vice president's office (and took over some of Libby's duties after he resigned), was called to bolster the defense's portrayal of Libby as a busy, forgetful guy—too busy and forgetful to accurately testify before a grand jury. On the busy front, Hannah says that Libby was effectively working two jobs (as Dick Cheney's chief of staff and national security adviser) while dealing with mini-crises all over the globe. On the memory front, Hannah testifies that he'd sometimes tell Libby something in the morning, only to have Libby repeat it back to him later that day—forgetting that Hannah was the source.

Slate's Chris Beam notes that this sounds like a scene from the movie Memento. (Bailiff, please check if Scooter has "Remember Joe Wilson" tattooed on his hand.) Chris also points out the extraordinarily high moustache ratio among Libby's defense team. Libby attorneys Ted Wells, William Jeffress, and John D. Cline all sport upper-lip whiskers. Must be something the jury consultants were pushing.

2:39 p.m.: I make it back to the courtroom in time for the afternoon session. And right off the bat, I'm rewarded with a major announcement. Wells tells us that, after consultation over lunch, the Libby team has decided they "do not intend to call the vice president" and have "released him as a potential witness."

Apparently, Cheney was scheduled to testify Thursday. But no more. This is a crushing blow. I couldn't wait to see Cheney in the witness box, facing cross-examination from prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. I was fully expecting a charged and confrontational, "You can't handle the truth!" moment. (Did you order the leak? Did you order the leak!? "You're goddamn right I did!") And now I'll never see it. On the other hand, I also won't be forced to restrain myself from shouting, "Go frack yourself, Mr. Cheney!" as he takes the stand.

2:42 p.m.: But wait, there's more! Wells now says that "after consulting with us and his wife," Scooter Libby will not testify, either. The judge has Libby stand up and acknowledge that he understands what he's doing. Libby says he does, but in a voice so quiet that I couldn't hear exactly how he put it. (Neither could the reporter next to me. We'll have to check the transcript later.)

So, that's pretty much the trial. The defense could rest as soon as tomorrow. Who have they called on Libby's behalf? Several reporters who say Libby never told them about Valerie Plame (though the government never claimed otherwise). An editor who says she doesn't think Judy Miller asked her to do a story on Plame. And a Libby co-worker who says that Libby was preoccupied and absent-minded.

It's possible they'll call someone else Wednesday. But as things stand, I can't see how they've done enough to dent the government's case. Scooter's decision not to testify seems like it could be damaging. Here's his chance to go before the jury and clear his good name, and he's not going to take it? The jurors, fairly or not, will no doubt ask themselves what he's afraid of. (As for the decision not to make Cheney take the stand: Perhaps Scooter's betting that loyalty will buy him a pardon? Or perhaps, given Cheney's approval numbers—now hovering dangerously near the tweens—it was thought that he'd do more harm than good.)

Frankly, if I were deciding Scooter Libby's fate, I think I'd have a hard time letting him off. There's a slew of witnesses contradicting him. The tapes of his grand jury testimony were awfully damning, especially when Libby's voice got many decibels quieter at the moment it seemed he'd been caught in a lie by Fitzgerald. The prosecution has brought forth both a motive and a lot of evidence.

Can I imagine a scenario in which Scooter is innocent, and is getting a rotten deal? Let's see:

First, there's the clear dispute between Scooter and Tim Russert. Libby says that Russert mentioned Valerie Plame (and said "all the reporters" knew about her), while Russert says they never talked about Plame (and that Libby just called him to complain about something on Hardball). If Scooter's correct, then Russert is either misremembering or lying.

I can't buy that Russert is lying under oath—and possibly sending Scooter Libby to jail—when Russert has no obvious motive to do so. (Others imagine a vast NBC conspiracy, but I find this far-fetched. Anyway, the jury has been given almost zero evidence to support the conspiracy theory.)

What if Russert's misrecollecting? It would be tragic. Russert's testimony was by far the most dramatic, easy-to-understand courtroom evidence against Libby. But even if Russert is forgetting, the jury still has this to contend with: Libby claimed he was "taken aback" when Russert mentioned that Joe Wilson's wife worked at the CIA. Libby said this information was "something he was telling me that I was first learning."

To believe that, you'd have to believe that 1) Libby forgot that Cheney had already told him about Plame (Libby says he did forget their conversation, and remembered it only when he saw it in his notes), and 2) that Ari Fleischer, Cathie Martin, and multiple other prosecution witnesses were all lying or misremembering when they described conversations with Libby (about Plame) that happened before the Russert phone call.

That's a lot of people all lying or misremembering in the same way—a way that hurts Scooter Libby's case. And it strains credulity, to borrow a term from the lawyers, to imagine that Libby accidentally forgot all of these many conversations. If there's one thing that's clear to me, it's that Libby knew full well who Valerie Plame was—long before Tim Russert did or did not utter anything about her.

Of course, juries are notoriously impossible to predict. And remember, Michael Jackson and O.J. Simpson never took the stand, yet it didn't seem to hurt them one bit. Also, Scooter's lead representative, Ted Wells, is a superb defense attorney, with a flair for righteous outrage. (Though he's no Tom Mesereau—the brilliant, white-maned litigator who helped Michael Jackson beat a molestation rap. And I think I'd take an in-prime Johnnie Cochran over Wells, too.) Perhaps today's announcement that Cheney and Libby won't testify is a bold strategic move, made out of confidence that the defense is winning. Or maybe it's a realization about sunk costs.

After hours of lawyer wrangling Wednesday, the judge called the jury into the courtroom. All but one of them entered wearing a bright red T-shirt with a white heart over the left breast. Seated in their rows, they looked like a box of maraschino cherries. The juror who is a folksy North Carolina school teacher stood. Looking at the defense table, he said the 12 jurors took their duty seriously. "That being said," he concluded, "Valentine's wishes to you all."

There was applause, like the tentative clapping at the end of a wedding. What to make of this? I think it's good news for Scooter Libby. This has been a tedious case, with lots of little irritating details, and yet the jury is still upbeat. And uncynical. Valentine's Day is the most contrived holiday in the calendar, and the jury seemed ready to press sugared hearts into the palms of strangers. People with this kind of cheeriness could be open to the human side of Scooter Libby—the dedicated if fabulously forgetful fellow portrayed by the defense. The one questionable juror is the art curator who in the backward style of old newsmagazines speaks. She wore no red shirt.

The main legal question of the day was whether the defense would be allowed to haul in NBC's Tim Russert for a third day of testimony. Russert had already suffered through five hours of cross-examination, but Libby's team wanted another chance to shred his credibility. Theodore Wells, Libby's attorney, returned to Russert's discussion with an FBI agent regarding his phone conversation with Libby, and then his later public stand against testifying. "He went around the whole country saying that he was this great protector of the First Amendment," said Wells, previewing the assault he would make. Whether the jury would have been persuaded is not clear. But another day of trial coverage about whether Russert is a hypocrite definitely would have bruised his reputation. Fortunately for the Meet the Press host, the judge ruled against the defense. No Russert.

Instead, the defense was allowed to read into the record an affidavit from the FBI agent who first interviewed Russert. The agent's account of his conversation with Russert contradicted Russert's two days of testimony. Talking to the agent, Russert could not rule out the possibility that he had an exchange with Libby about Wilson's wife (In court, Russert testified firmly that he hadn't.) The agent also reported that "Russert acknowledged that he speaks to many people," and that it was "difficult to reconstruct conversations several months later."

You are not crazy to think that what you've just read sounds like it was written by the defense; it nicely mirrors Libby's testimony about his own fuzzy recollections. On Tuesday, Fitzgerald even suggested that Russert had a lot on his plate and couldn't be expected to remember everything. This caused members of the defense team to almost bark out loud, since that is the exact argument they are making about Libby.

The lawyers also fought over just how much of Libby's busy schedule could be entered into the record. Much of it already had been, but his team wanted to call three of the officials who briefed Libby each day on national security threats. The point was to show how easily Libby could have have forgotten what he knew about Joe Wilson's wife amid all the other more important matters. But since Libby is not testifying, Fitzgerald objected. The judge issued a compromise ruling and left it to the lawyers to work out the details.

Then the judge left the room. I should have, too. The discussions took forever. At one point a member of the Libby team flicked at her BlackBerry so intensely it looked like she was trying to defuse a bomb (or like she was totally killing on BrickBreaker). While lesser lawyers hashed out an agreement, prosecutor Fitzgerald wheeled his leather chair over to the defense table for a light chat. Eventually the whole controversy washed away. Both sides agreed that there would be no witnesses. Instead, Libby's defense attorney would read into the record the list of items he was briefed on. The list was extraordinary: al-Qaida, Hezbollah, foiled attacks in Nairobi, Ethiopian terrorists, suspicious canvassing of U.S. buildings in Beruit.

As the list was read, Libby looked the saddest I've seen him. For most of the trial, he has been pretty peppy. He writes the occasional Post-it note to his counsel but otherwise seems at ease, listening, smiling at his wife, and laughing at the rare amusing moments. The list must have been a downer, though. All that top secret information he'll never get to hear again, regardless of the trial's outcome.

Just after 4 p.m., the defense rested and the day dribbled to a close. The air has come out of this case so completely I wouldn't be surprised if the court reporter finished the day's entry by typing: pffffft.

Before excusing the jurors for the long weekend, the judge reminded them once again to stay away from the newspapers and television before Tuesday's closing arguments. In doing so, he offered Libby one more possible valentine. The papers should be ignored, the judge noted, because sometimes journalists get it wrong.

Last week, Scooter Libby and his defense team decided not to call Vice President Dick Cheney to the witness stand. Today, prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald brought him in anyway. "Let's talk straight," he said, sounding like John McCain. "There is a cloud over the vice president." One of the unanswered questions of the Libby trial is whether, as Cheney's aide, Scooter lied and obstructed justice to protect his boss from political embarrassment or legal jeopardy. In his closing argument, Fitzgerald said that it's Libby's fault those questions linger: "That cloud remains because the defendant lied about evidence and obstructed justice."

The government built its case and Tuesday's closing argument around what Fizgerald referred to as "the big slide," a graphic displayed on courtroom screens with a picture of Libby at the center. Surrounding the defendant was a halo (or the opposite) of yellow arrows, pointing to eight boxes representing the people with whom Libby talked about undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame. A picture of Cheney in the upper left-hand corner stood for the first time Libby heard about Valerie Plame. (Libby disclosed that disclosure to the grand jury.) The other boxes represented the journalists and government officials who have contradicted Libby's testimony about what happened during June and July 2003, the period of time that's the focus of the trial.

Top and center in the graphic was a picture of Tim Russert (with a red border around it, in case anyone missed that he was a key witness). Libby testified to the grand jury that Russert told him Wilson's wife worked at the CIA on July 10 and that the news struck him as if he were learning it for the first time. Russert says they had no such conversation.

For an hour and a half, prosecutor Peter Zeidenberg walked through each of the accounts that contradict Libby's, arguing that together they proved that at Cheney's behest, Libby was working intensely to learn about Plame and spill her CIA status to journalists to undermine her husband Joe Wilson's criticism of the Bush administration and its justification for the Iraq war. Zeidenberg called Libby's claim that he did not remember those conversations "ludicrous," and charged that Libby "absolutely fabricates two conversations that never happened." He argued that the former chief of staff had to concoct a story to protect himself and Cheney from the legal fallout for leaking Plame's identity. Libby also wanted to avoid political fallout, in the event he was found to have been involved after the White House publicly said he wasn't.

The prosecution also used Libby's own words against him, playing snippets of his grand jury testimony to the packed courtroom. To show just how good Libby's memory could be, the prosecution played grand jury testimony of his description of his phone call with Karl Rove, the one in which Rove talked about his conversation with columnist Robert Novak. Libby's description had more detail than the one Novak gave on the stand last week.

As he listened to the government's case, Libby often had the middle-distance stare of a man listing to a concerto. His lead lawyer Ted Wells emoted for him. Wells punched his fist when he took the floor just before lunchtime, claiming that Libby's misstatements had been badgered out of him. "They were beating on him," said Wells of Libby's grand jury testimony. "Time after time after time," he said, again hitting palm with fist. Wells also pantomimed a rodent's crawl at one point (to illustrate that he didn't "crawl into the White House" to create evidence favorable to Libby). And to wipe away a prosecution assertion, he moved his arms back and forth quickly below the elbow, as if he was trying to make tiny snow angels.

When he settled down, Wells tried to match the clarity of the prosecution case with his own narrative. "It's a case about different recollections between Mr. Libby and some reporters," he said. In other words, a classic "he said/she said." That gambit shaved away five of the prosecution witnesses who had contradicted Libby—the nonjournalists. "There's a craziness to this case," Wells also asserted, contending it was "madness" to try to convict Libby of a crime based on his foggy memory about fragments of conversations three and four months after they took place. Slim evidence, and potentially dire consequences. "My client's life would be destroyed" if he were convicted, Wells said.

After the break, Fitzgerald did his best Wells impression. Just because the defense was "saying it loudly and pounding on the table," didn't mean its story was true. It wasn't a he-said/she-said case," he argued, "it is a he-said, he-said, she-said, he-said, he-said, she-said, he-said, he-said, he-said." With each reiteration, he pointed to the pictures on his big slide. Could all of these people be mistaken in their recollections about Libby? "Is this the world's greatest coincidence?" he asked.

Fitzgerald concluded by asking something of the jury, too. Libby "stole the truth from the political system," the prosecutor said. "Give truth back, please do."

There was a moment of near drama in the Scooter Libby trial Wednesday. At 9:45 a.m. the lawyers, court sketch artists, and journalists (including Chris Matthews, who has a side role in this drama) packed the courtroom waiting to hear about a note from the jury six days into deliberations. But after we took our seats, Judge Walton said he wasn't going to read the note because he wasn't sure he understood what the jury was asking. "I am going to send a note back to the jury saying, can you please clarify your answer," he said. Everyone slouched back and waited for the rewrite.

After a half-hour, Judge Walton returned with a new note. Now we'd get to see what they wanted to know. "After further discussion we now are clear on what we need to do," the note said. "No further clarification. We apologize."

Never mind.

Once the first note was released to the press, it was easy to see why the judge was confused. The jurors were asking about the third count of the five-count indictment, the one concerning false statements Libby made to the FBI about his conversation with Matt Cooper. Libby said he only told Cooper he'd heard from other reporters that Joe Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, worked at the CIA and that he didn't know if this was true. Cooper contradicted this, testifying that Libby confirmed Plame's status without qualification. The jury asked, "Is the charge that the statement was made or about the content of the statement itself?"

What exactly were they asking? Were they talking about Libby's statement to the FBI or his statement to Cooper? This was the first news to come out of the court since a juror was dismissed Monday, so in the press room there was a brief frenzy. We were like squirrels fighting over a nut. Was this a ceramic garden-ornament nut and therefore of no nutritional value? Yes, but darn if it didn't look like a real one. The jury seemed to want to know whether Libby was accused of lying to the FBI or lying to Cooper. The former is a lie for which he has been indicted; the latter, lying to a reporter, is, sadly, not a criminal offense. The jury apparently worked this out on its own between notes.

RM "Auros" Harman claims to have read practically everything published in Slate since 2000, after first encountering it during a 1999 Microsoft internship.* He says he ignores our fashion coverage and that he consumes few "Sports Nuts" columns. But the remainder of Slate passes through the 29-year-old Palo Alto, Calif., computer scientist's eyes and into his brain on a daily basis.

Auros calls Slate his "basic news source" and "a great digest." But he's not a fool for it. A walking, talking, error-correction algorithm, Auros spots goofs in everything from Slate's science stories to its politics copy to its movie reviews to its "Today's Papers" column, and he routinely sends his findings to the magazine's corrections alias, corrections@slate.com.

Like most newspapers—but unlike most magazines—Slate does not fact-check articles. Slate writers are responsible for the accuracy of their pieces, editors do their best to backstop them, and more often than anybody will admit, copy editors save all of us from embarrassment with their last-second interventions.

In the interests of accountability, Slate instituted a "Corrections" column about four years ago, and it collects and corrects between one and a dozen blunders a week for all the world to read. Auros is easily one of the most prolific "gotcha" artists currently submitting corrections to the magazine. He says he started using the Corrections e-mail alias soon after it appeared and continued expunging errors from Slate copy because he got a good response from the editors.

"My sense of the magazine is that you have a more collegial relationship with your readers than, say, does the New York Times," Auros said in a phone conversation.

An active blogger, a California Democratic Party activist, a Slate "Fray" participant ("Auros-4"), and a member of the "Predictive Input Product Team" at Motorola, Auros reckons that he's e-mailed Slate at least 17 requests for corrections. I met him for the first time two days ago when he e-mailed my "Press Box" alias complaining about innumeracy in a Slate piece. When I brought Auros' name up with Slate staffers June Thomas and David Plotz, both immediately recognized him—Thomas because she's the Corrections editor and Plotz because Auros e-mails him frequently to comment on his Bible blogging. After quick consultation with them, I realized that Slate does have a fact-check department, it works for nothing, and its name is Auros.

OK, I exaggerate. But only slightly. On Jan. 3, he bagged two Slate errors: The "Today's Blogs" column mistakenly referred to the blog "Balloon Juice" as "Balloon Justice," and the "Moneybox" column called the Transportation Security Administration the Transportation Safety Administration. Auros questioned—but earned no correction—for Slate's description of the Quds* Force as an "overseas branch of Iran's army" in the Feb. 17 "Today's Papers" column. No sea separates Iran from any of the nations in which the force is active, he argued. He pesters us—quite rightly—whenever we write "Democrat Party" or "Democrat candidates" (it's Democratic). In October 2006, he caught a Slate writer confusing his x-axis with his y-, and in December 2006, busted another writer for booting the name of a video game based on the "Left Behind" books (it's Left Behind: Eternal Forces, not Left Behind: Eternal Focus). Last month he pounced on a typo (plant for planet).

He's even scrubbed Slate podcasts for mistakes, forcing the magazine's editors to consider how best to correct errors in podcasts. ("Chatty" podcasts in which speakers are clearly shooting the breeze aren't held up to traditional fact standards. Regular podcasts, such as Slate's Political Gabfest and the 24 series, often run responses to listener criticisms, including alleged errors of fact.)

Auros calls Slate editors collegial, but I'd give him most of the credit for the magazine's graciousness: His polymathic challenges are direct and respectful. What more could a publication want?

Before we rang off, Auros jokingly offered to vet this article for errors prior to publication. I declined, as I can't wait for him to give it the vigorous and public beating it deserves so we can post the results in the Corrections column.

******

You're wondering about his nickname? If you must know, it evolved from the name of one of his computers.* To write about errors is to doom yourself to making one. Or two. Don't let Auros beat you! Identify mine and send the bad news to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)

Corrections, March 1, 2007: The original version of this article misstated when RM "Auros" Harman first encountered Slate. It was in 1999 during a Microsoft internship. He become a regular reader in 2000. (Return to the corrected sentence.) The article originally misspelled Quds as Qud. (Return to the corrected sentence.) The article misstated that Harman's nickname evolved from his sign-on name. (Return return to the corrected sentence.)

In New Orleans, the powers that be will resort to anything that works to hold the waters back—dams, voodoo chants, and bribes. At the Washington Post, editors have traditionally filibustered the staff with memos and, when need be, tough edits to reduce story length. But like rivers, Post reporters—and the editors who abet them—flow where they want to flow, which means all victories are temporary.

Today, Feb. 28, Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. and Managing Editor Philip Bennett memoed the staff about a topic that has been on the duo's forward agenda since late last year: A reduced news hole requires editors to keep stories tight and to the point.

The memo and e-mail introduction, reproduced in this sidebar, expresses Downie and Bennett's philosophy that "every story must earn every inch" that it occupies in the newspaper. While that equation has always been the rule at the Post, given the subjective nature of distributing a newspaper's news hole, it isn't always followed.

The memo, like all memos, is easy to ridicule. But unlike yesterday's memos, it was written with full knowledge that it would be leaked and analyzed by others in the press. So, it isn't as easy to ridicule as would be convenient for me.

It sets up a taxonomy of news stories that should give protesting reporters the "case law" they need to demand additional column inches for their long pieces.

Small events or incremental developments can run as digest items. Day stories "significant enough to write for our readers but based on one event or development" are worthy of 6 to 15 inches of copy (at the Post, a page with headlines and photos takes 65 column inches of text). Single events with "multiple layers or levels of information" deserve 18 to 24 inches. More complex, ambitious news features equal 25 to 35 inches. Major enterprise "involving in-depth reporting or narrative story telling" will get 40 to 50 inches. All extraordinary long-form narrative or investigation will first appear as best-selling books by Bob Woodward.

Just kidding. Such magazinelike work will get 60 to 80 inches and, on rare occasions, more.

One bit of the memo's advice—"Watch out for artificial transitions. They burn up space needlessly. In many newspaper stories you don't need a transition from one idea to the next."—begs for lampooning. I don't know how to get from one idea to the next without transitions of some sort.

An underlying assumption of the memo is that readers desire more concise and succinct copy. "We are often saddling readers with too much recapitulation and background. In writing both news and features, reporters should strive to eliminate stale material," the memo states. This is true, except when it isn't. What one reader rejects as needless recapitulation, another reader celebrates as the drinks and appetizers that whet his appetite for the main serving to come.

If followed to the letter, much of the memo's advice would produce a newspaper I wouldn't want to buy. I don't read newspapers to save time. If I did, USA Today would be my primary newspaper. I read newspapers to take up time. Unless trapped on an Amtrak car or an airplane, I rarely read from every story. Like other hunter-gatherers, I graze on the fattest fruits and nibble on the tart and tannic pieces. What I enjoy about a newspaper is the breadth of variety—and length.

The Post memo endorses variety in length, too, so I suspect my view isn't that far removed from Messrs. Downie and Bennett's. The proof will be in what sort of newspaper this memo directs into being. I don't envy the editors the task of holding back the word torrents. Reporters overflow the banks more reliably than do rivers.

******

Oh, I like USA Today. I just have a relationship with it that allows me to see other newspapers. Short? Long? More? Less? Send you views to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co., which also publishes the Washington Post.)

Return to article

Feb. 28, 2007, Memo from Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. and Managing Editor Philip Bennett to the Paper's Staff

To: The Staff

From: Len and Phil





Our outstanding journalism comes in all sizes, including long pieces that deserve every inch. But for too long we've confused length with importance. Often the result has been stories that readers don't want to finish and displays in the newspaper that don't do our journalism justice.



We have decided to take a more disciplined approach to story lengths, with guidelines that are consistent with giving our readers quality journalism in a variety of appropriate lengths.



Here are guidelines for writers and editors. Please study and follow them. We are asking AMEs to enforce them.

Story Lengths—A Newsroom Strategy

Goals

• The newspaper should be filled with stories of different sizes.
• We need to show discipline in writing and story-telling. We especially need to pay attention to mid-range stories that are too long, given the underlying material.
• We want to give reporters and editors the tools to edit better for length, and we want to give page designers a wider selection of story lengths to help them showcase all our journalism better.
• A philosophy to live by: Every story must earn every inch.

Methods

1. A Rough Guide

The physical size of the newspaper imposes real constraints on story lengths. With headlines and photos, a page takes 65 inches of text. The only stories that run that long are projects. Otherwise, we must get several stories on most pages. To keep the paper lively and interesting, we must strive for variety—including some stories that are short. Through long experience with layout and design, and taking into consideration the news holes typically available on inside pages, we've come up with some guidelines for story lengths:

• A small event, or an incremental development worth noting can be a digest item. The digests are important for readers.
• A day story, significant enough to write for our readers but based on one event or development—6 to 15 inches. We frequently end up with 12-inch holes in the paper. Let's use them to the best advantage.
• A single event with multiple layers or levels of information, 18 to 24 inches.
• A more complex news feature of ambition and altitude—25-35 inches.
• Major enterprise, involving in-depth reporting or narrative story telling—40 to 50 inches.
• Extraordinary long-form narrative or investigation, magazine-type stories—60 to 80 inches or, rarely, more.

2. For Writers

Writers need to take responsibility for earning every inch of their stories. Every writer should consider:

In structure, does the story move cleanly from one sub-theme or topic to the next? If it wanders and circles back, look for ways to deal with sub-themes one at a time. Good chronology makes for good storytelling.

Watch out for artificial transitions. They burn up space needlessly. In many newspaper stories you don't need a transition from one idea to the next.

To build effective, memorable mental images, pay attention to characters. Can you describe who we are hearing from, what they look and sound like, and where they are coming from?

Is there a high, clear and powerful nut graf? Even the most extraordinary narrative needs to get to the point. For stories on the front page and section fronts, we must get to the nut graf before the jump.

We must avoid repetition. Don't use two or three quotes when one will do. The same goes for anecdotes. Resist the urge to quote someone just because you interviewed them.

We are often saddling readers with too much recapitulation and background. In writing both news and features, reporters should strive to eliminate stale material. If you must revisit events to make the current material work, be sparing. Cast a cold eye on B-matter. Every story about a complex running issue does not need to recap everything that's happened. Write for readers, not your sources.

Show, don't tell. Can you animate your characters and recount events in a way that will let the scenes and voices speak for themselves, rather than using the reporters' voice to tell it all? Watch out for excessive adjectives that tell us what to think, rather than summoning real experiences and events that show us what happened.

3. For Editors

An editor on each desk will be deputized to ensure that we stay true to the principles we're enunciating here: compliance with guidelines, accurate budgeting, coordination with page designers and layout.

This editor will scrutinize lengths based on our common editing criteria and will have power to hold a story and ask that it be redone based on length.

He or she will make sure that stories on the budget have passed through this process. All stories will be put on the budget with their actual lengths as approved and edited by that desk.

The editor in charge of story lengths—and the person running the day on each desk—must actively engage page designers. They should visit the News Desk and look at the pages and available news holes before determining the day's cutback. The goal is to establish story lengths that will work both for the words and for the design.

If a longer story is offered for A1 and does not make it, and it is to be published inside the A section or another section, it should be scrutinized for length, consistent with the design needs of the section.

Forth & Towne, the new store from Gap Inc., was born of a statistic. The company—which also owns the Gap, Old Navy, and Banana Republic—sells clothes to about 8 percent of women under 35. But it reaches only 3 percent of "older" women: that is, women 35 and over. And so it has created Forth & Towne with the intent of luring in this demographic.

Women age 35 and over are, in the words of Forth & Towne president Gary Muto, "underserved." They have more income than younger women but fewer places to shop. For most middle-aged women, the mall is a wasteland: Apart from Eileen Fisher, which peddles roomy clothes in natural fibers, and Chico's, which sells ethnic print sweater-coats and the like, it's just tumbleweeds rolling through the food court. As a result, many women in this demographic are forced to comb through the racks at department stores or pore over catalogs like Coldwater Creek and J. Jill. For women in this age group, shopping can be a time-consuming (and, at times, frustrating) cobbling together of bits and pieces from various sources.

As a business idea, then, Forth & Towne makes sense. As a fashion concept, though, it raises a few questions. For starters: Who are these "women 35 and over"? It's a group both enormous and diverse. It includes Sarah Jessica Parker and Madeleine Albright, Anna Wintour and Oprah Winfrey, Mrs. Robinson and Miss Havisham. It includes both my elegant 59-year-old mother, who scours department stores and discount chains like Loehmann's for classic suits, and her chic 44-year-old sister, who recently devised a way to wear an Hermès scarf as a shirt.

How does Forth & Towne intend to appeal to all these women? To find out, I drove to West Nyack, N.Y., where one of the first outposts opened in August, to take a look at the clothes.

Click to see a slide show on Forth & Towne.

I've had a small crew of chickens for a few years now. My wife says they're the only truly useful creatures on the farm. They're industrious, pecking all day at grubs and bugs, purposefully marching around the pasture. Aside from water and a handful of feed and corn each morning, they require little from me. At dusk, they hop up onto their roosts in the barn. In return, they supply all the eggs we need.

But Henrietta is different. Henrietta's father is my speckled rooster Winston, a dignified, conscientious, even heroic creature whose leg got mangled when he staved off a hawk attack on his hens. Her mother is one of my tawny, unnamed Buff Orphingtons. Henrietta arrived unexpectedly last fall. The mother hen had disappeared, which sometimes means bad news. But my helper Annie soon spotted her in the garden, sheltered by a bunch of tall zinnias and warming half a dozen eggs. I tried to move the mom someplace more secure, but when she nearly pecked off my right hand, I decided to let her be.

We left her there for weeks, bringing feed and water as close as she would let us come. Only one egg hatched: Henrietta. The first chicken born on Bedlam Farm, she was gray and speckled, like her dad. She and her mother spent a few weeks in a snug little milk house, abandoned for decades and slightly decrepit, but perfect for a nursery. Annie and I visited daily, bringing water and assorted goodies—corn, birdseed, Cheerios.

Annie wanted to keep mom and chick in the milk house for a few months. She worried particularly about Mother the barn cat, who was hovering around the milk house with chilling enthusiasm. But I, playing the father who wants his offspring out in the world, freed Henrietta after six weeks. "She seems quite able to take care of herself," I said.

Henrietta is the most recent subject of the unofficial study I've been conducting to see if how we treat farm animals can affect their personalities. Animals of the same species can behave very differently, yet there's little research that explains why. Genetics is a factor, so are health and environment. And I'm coming to believe that humans can also shape the natures of domesticated animals, even creatures that seem to lack individuality.

My animals have space to roam and graze, shelter from the weather, first aid, and veterinary care when they need it. They have plentiful food and water and strong fences that keep them in and nasty critters out. Unlike many farm animals, they've also been continuously, even relentlessly socialized by humans. My farm is a highly unmechanized operation: People give the animals their food, bring extra treats, touch them, and talk to them, treat them gently. My cows, donkeys, and sheep meet visitors of all sorts, who invariably arrive with carrots and apples and want to scratch ears and pat backs.

Maybe that's why some of these animals behave contrary to expectations. Elvis, my enormous Brown Swiss steer, is trainable, affectionate, and intelligent. To my surprise, and contrary to certain bovine stereotypes, he doesn't simply eat, eliminate, and sleep. He has what I would call a life. He has relationships, pleasures, attachments.

So does my feisty little hen.

From the start, Henrietta was unusual, a hen of entitlement. None of the larger animals intimidated her one whit. She seemed to have some of her dad's better traits: She looked people right in the eye, reacted to them, seemed curious and adventurous. She wandered off from the other chickens from time to time, and occasionally stopped by to visit me.

Our perceptions of animal personalities are shaped by our own cultural conceptions, too. We like animals that are "cute" or good-looking and that respond to us. I admired this assertive chicken, so I talked to her and tossed her more grain. But that doesn't fully explain why, on a warm fall day when I was brushing hay and flecks of manure from the donkeys' fuzzy coats, Henrietta hopped right up on Jeannette's back and began pecking. Jeannette, my senior donkey, can be territorial and argumentative, but she seemed not to notice or care as Henrietta tidied up her back a bit, then settled down in that comfy spot for an hour or so, riding along when Jeannette ambled over to the feeder.

None of the farmers hereabouts, wise to the ways of poultry, had seen anything like it. One neighbor came by, watched, spat on the ground and said, "You've got yourself an interesting chicken there."

The barnyard residents seem quite unruffled by Henrietta, though. She bounds onto the donkeys' and sheep's backs, pecks a bit at their coats and fleece, then rides along imperturbably. Except for the humans, everyone seems quite blasé about it.

Most striking is the … let's call it a relationship that's developed between Henrietta and the barn cat. Every evening, I bring out a can of cat food, and Mother appears mysteriously, from somewhere in the upper reaches of my vast dairy barn, for her supper. But one recent night, Henrietta came zooming over from the chicken roost, chased Mother from her bowl, and then, flapping her wings and squawking, drove her right out of the barn.

I was astonished when Henrietta proceeded to eat all of Mother's Fancy Feast, while the cat returned to complain loudly from a rafter. Given Mother's kill count of rodents and birds, I was astonished that Henrietta was alive at all. Now this pair interacts all the time. Mother hides in the barn, then pops down to startle Henrietta, who gives chase. Henrietta sometimes stages ambushes from atop a donkey, waiting for Mother to pass by in pursuit of some hapless mole, then swooping down.

It looks like they're playing hide-and-seek or tag. My neighbors had never seen a cat run from a chicken; now they have. On the other hand, some nights Mother sleeps right next to Henrietta on a shelf in the barn. Though it appears they're having fun, I know better than to anthropomorphize. They could well be at war. I'm not always sure there's a difference, or that I'd recognize it if there is.

Nor can I really say what gives Henrietta such sass. Partly breeding, I think—her father's Churchillian courage getting passed along. Partly, Annie's tender care early on. If you give animals little reason to fight, compete, or cower, I've found, they often don't.

But who really knows? Some things simply can't be accounted for by human perception. Often, the best part of living on a farm is the mystery.

When you go to see the world's tallest basketball player, you're paying to watch a guy stand up. Tonight, Sun Ming Ming is sitting down. It's the third quarter, and the 7-foot-9 center is riding the bench with six fouls. One enterprising fan tries to make the best of it. He creeps up behind Sun then puts an arm around the giant's sweaty shoulder. Sun grimaces and pushes him off—no posing for photos during the game. A few steps away, in the gym's back corner, kids gawk at a life-size cardboard effigy. The cutout shows Sun in profile, his eyes cast upward. It looks like he's searching the horizon for a nine-footer, a Goliath to lure away the camera phones.

Sun Ming Ming plays for the ABA's Maryland Nighthawks, a minor-league team based in the D.C. suburbs. Sun's big-man-in-a-small-gym act—the Nighthawks' tiny, rented arena looks like a set for a basketball-themed Gulliver's Travels—is the perfect tonic for a small-time, attention-hungry hoops league. Since its rebirth in 2000, the ABA has tried, and usually failed, to win over fans with wacky rules (a four-point shot), groundbreaking personnel moves (the Nashville Rhythm hired, and fired, the first female head coach of a men's pro basketball team), and brute force (the league has had as many as 57 teams at a single time). Sun Ming Ming's Nighthawks debut, which attracted a standing-room-only crowd, proved that even the ABA can't screw up the King Kong marketing strategy. Nothing drives ticket sales like a freak of nature.

What does Sun get out of being enlisted as a basketball sideshow? A little bit of competition and a lot of conditioning work. The 23-year-old Sun, who was born in rural Northern China, grew to 7-feet-8 3/4 inches—almost tall enough to make him the world's tallest man—thanks to an undiagnosed brain tumor. Excess growth hormone turned Sun into a basketball scout's fever dream, a player who can dunk without jumping, but it also left him too sluggish to run around. After two surgeries to remove the tumor, Sun can now train for hours without getting tired. Charles Bonsignore, Sun's American agent, says he now simply needs to "spend as much time on the floor as possible."

Considering that he's spent more time on talk shows than basketball courts the last few years, it's no surprise that Sun is a long way from the NBA. The requisite YouTube highlight videos—including this one, which shows him banking in a series of unguarded layups—are most notable for what they don't show: Sun Ming Ming running. For someone 7-foot-6, the Houston Rockets' Yao Ming is astoundingly quick and agile. Still, Yao was the runaway winner of a recent poll asking pro basketball players to name the slowest player in the NBA. If Yao is a tortoise, then Sun is a giant tortoise. He's not a beanpole like, say, Shawn Bradley, and he struggles to lug his 370 pounds up and down the court. For Sun, the up-tempo ABA is an acid test. If he's going to make it big, he's going to have to keep up with smaller, quicker players.

In his Nighthawks debut, I watch as Sun spends half the game on the wrong side of the court. When the team's point guard—a street-ball star who answers to "White Chocolate"—sprints ahead of the pack, he hangs back, waiting for everyone to reverse course. Once everyone's all together, it's clear that Sun isn't just slow in wide open spaces. On defense, he plays the same role as the windmill on a minigolf course, moving his arms back and forth in a deliberate pattern, making contact with the ball and opposing players whenever they stray into his path. When the ball caroms off the rim, he can't ratchet his arms up fast enough to snare the rebound. And despite weighing nearly 400 pounds, he can't outmuscle players who are a foot shorter and 150 pounds lighter.

On the offensive end, Sun has some moments of brilliance. He dribbles once and swishes a baseline jumper. He rattles the ball down from just past the free-throw line, and he makes a short hook shot. When he holds the ball tentatively instead of firing it up, a teammate yells, "Shoot that big man!" The crowd, though, finds it harder to adjust to the idea of a 7-foot-9 guard. When Sun misses a 15-footer, a woman yells, "Get under the basket!"

Sun's excellent shooting ability is kind of poignant, considering it's the one basketball skill a big man doesn't need. To make himself useful, a humongous center must be able to rebound, block shots, and push guys around in the paint. Sun can't do those things because he's reached the height of diminishing returns. He's probably the first basketball player who's too tall to play basketball.

There are a few enormously tall guys who have proved the doubters wrong. Gheorghe Muresan, who along with Manute Bol is the tallest player in NBA history at 7-foot-7, averaged 14.5 points in 1995-96 and won the league's Most Improved Player award. After retiring because of chronic injuries, he became a basketball teacher in suburban Maryland. When Sun moved to town, Muresan had himself a client.

Muresan knows a lost cause when he sees one: The man once gave me a basketball lesson. But he doesn't think Sun is hopeless. During the Chinese center's second home game, I watch Muresan watch his new pupil. He tells me that he needs to "keep his hands up for rebounds, keep his hands on the ball." In the third quarter, Sun gets the ball in the low post. "Go up! Go up! Go up!" Muresan yells. Instead, Sun passes to a teammate. "He can do a lot of stuff," Muresan says, turning to me. "He's not very athletic, but he has very good ball-handling."

After the game, Sun goes straight for Muresan and extends his hand. Soon after, Muresan slips out the door, and Sun is the only giant in the room. I ask him some stupid questions—"How do you think you played?"—but he laughs and doesn't answer. He's surrounded by autograph seekers and picture takers. The crowd looks up, and he looks straight ahead, over the tops of their heads. Sun signs his name in Chinese characters—on scraps of paper, minibasketballs, a kid's shoe. "I just want to stand next to him," a blond woman announces. She poses with her back facing him, her fingers pointing up.

Equus (Gielgud Theatre, London). The fuss about this West End revival of Peter Shaffer's 1973 psychosexual mystery has nearly everything to do with its star, Daniel Radcliffe, better known for playing Harry Potter in the eponymous films. In this play, he's better known for getting buck-naked onstage. Harry Potter puns aside, critics are complimentary. The Guardian remarks, "Forget all the prurient press speculation about Harry Potter's private parts. The revelation of this revival is that Daniel Radcliffe really can act, proving that his screen appearances as JK Rowling's boy-hero are no flash in the magic pan." BBC News reports, "Boasting a well-toned physique and a compelling stage presence, Radcliffe quickly distances himself from his boy wizard alter-ego. Indeed, the overriding impression is of a gifted young actor casting off the shackles of a restrictive screen persona." And the Daily Telegraph echoes its peers, noting, "Radcliffe has come at the role with both seriousness of purpose and real talent."

America's Next Top Model (The CW, 8 p.m. ET). The eighth season of Tyra Banks' high-camp reality competition kicks off Wednesday night, and critics finally seem to be tired of the formula. The New York Daily News sighs that the "runway and photography challenges are still interesting—especially an issues-oriented photo shoot and a rapid-fire shopping spree at Goodwill—but not very dramatic." But perhaps that's beside the point. While several reviewers complain that the show has failed in its promise to produce major new talent, it has created one superstar: its host. As the Seattle Post-Intelligencer points out, the show "continues to be the top-rated series on The CW because for young girls everywhere, it is the equivalent of Sunday service in the Church of Tyra."

Philip Roth. On Monday, Roth became the first writer to win the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction three times when he received the prize for Everyman, a novel chronicling the deterioration and eventual death of its protagonist. Published last spring, the book was a critical smash. Nadine Gordimer wrote in the New York Times Book Review, "One comes away from the strong political overtones in Everyman with the open truth that subservience, sexual connotations aside, is a betrayal of human responsibility." One of the judges tells the Washington Post, "Roth has faced such terrifying truths absolutely straight, and made even this devastating material into a thing of beauty." Another judge comments to the AP, "Roth never looks away, never trivializes, never shrugs. He manages to wrestle with grief, the immensity of losing self." Losing out to Roth were runners-up Charles D'Ambrosio for The Dead Fish Museum, Deborah Eisenberg for Twilight of the Superheroes, Amy Hempel for The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel, and Edward P. Jones for All Aunt Hagar's Children. (Buy Everyman.)

Bambi vs. Godzilla, David Mamet (Pantheon). Mamet's new book of essays is subtitled "On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business," and it's in many ways a diagnosis and prescription for what's wrong with Hollywood today. In the New York Times Book Review, Slate contributor Walter Kirn remarks, "Since so many of Mamet's beefs with Hollywood are familiar and indisputable … one suspects that his interest in restating them is technical, aesthetic." The San Francisco Chronicle concludes that the book "is funny and angry and intemperate and passionate enough to tell the truth about movies and the desires that go into our making and loving (very, very few of) them." That's probably due, at least in part, to Mamet's prose style, which the Los Angeles Times' Maria Russo characterizes as "an odd—and oddly appealing—combination of wintry New England headmaster and former Chicago street-punk who's been stabbed and shot, but won the ensuing fistfight." (Buy Bambi vs. Godzilla.)

The Oscars. No one in Hollywood seems to begrudge Martin Scorsese his first-ever award, for Best Director, as David Carr muses on his Carpetbagger blog on the New York Times Web site: "Who among us can say with a straight face that Martin Scorsese did not deserve an Oscar, or, as luck would have it, a couple of them?" The Departed snagged best picture as well, and LA Weekly's Nikki Finke approved of the academy's decision in her Deadline Hollywood blog: "[T]he Oscars weren't sending a message, political or otherwise. They simply went with the best picture, which happened to be a gangster tale this year." Critics were pleased if unsurprised when Dreamgirls' Jennifer Hudson won best supporting actress—the "Cinderella story of this year's Oscars," as her hometown Chicago Tribune put it. But the nearly four-hour broadcast, and all its bells and whistles, exhausted some viewers. Los Angeles Times blog the Envelope gripes that, "[I]t felt more like we'd just watched a PBS pledge drive, not the 79th annual Oscar ceremony."

The Astronaut Farmer (Warner Bros.). Billy Bob Thornton plays a former NASA astronaut trainee turned rancher (last name: Farmer) who builds a spaceship in his backyard. Cheerful bromides about individualism and American gumption ensue, and some critics are charmed. In Entertainment Weekly, Lisa Schwarzbaum reflects, "Now might not be the ideal time to release a movie about an astronaut with an obsession, but Charlie's madness is far grander than any ho-hum NASA employee meltdown." In the New York Times, A.O. Scott notes that a different actor in the lead role (he names Kevin Costner) could have turned this film into an overly treacly mess, but Thornton "can be relied upon for understated dignity accompanied by an intriguing undertone of serious craziness." Other critics see a darker side to Farmer's fantasies. The Chicago Reader connects the film to the war in Iraq, warning, "The value of his dream and its potential for destruction are irrelevant. Refusing to accept defeat is all that matters—at least if you're the designated good guy." (Buy tickets to The Astronaut Farmer.)

The Number 23 (New Line). A very buff Jim Carrey takes a noir turn in this would-be thriller, but most critics write it off as an incompetent snooze. The Los Angeles Times warns, "[T]he filmmakers get it all wrong from the get-go. Everyone seems to be approaching the material from a different direction with unintentional humor seeping in from all angles." Carrey plays a dogcatcher who becomes obsessed with the number 23, which begins appearing everywhere—and eventually leads him to a dead girl and the mystery surrounding her death. Part of the problem is the former Pet Detective himself, who has less to offer when funny faces and physical antics are off the table. New York magazine's David Edelstein remarks: "Shackled by realism—and by the seriousness of this enterprise—he can only act more catatonic: His brain seems to be grinding emptiness." But director Joel Schumacher is also to blame. The Washington Post's Stephen Hunter observes, "Schumacher, who's old enough to know better, gives the movie a jittery quality, as if he's having a nervous breakdown, too." (Buy tickets to The Number 23.)

Amazing Grace (Samuel Goldwyn Films). Mixed reviews for director Michael Apted's latest, based on the life of British parliamentarian and abolitionist William Wilberforce. The filmmaker and his crew "understand the challenges of this kind of story and have met them with intelligence and energy," writes the Los Angeles Times' Kenneth Turan. In the New York Times, Manohla Dargis notes that the film "carries a strong whiff of piety," but concedes that it is "generally pleasing and often moving, even when the story wobbles off the historical rails or becomes bogged down in dopey romance." Critics seem to agree that Apted avoids falling into the traps of cliché and hagiography, though some quibble with his historical interpretation. Variety notes that the movie's "convenient tale of good vs. evil nevertheless makes its forceful point that Wilberforce's youthful obsessiveness and unorthodox methods aided tremendously in ending British transport of slaves and accelerating the demise of the slave trade"—but, in actuality, the Slavery Abolition Act wasn't passed until a month after Wilberforce died in 1833. (Buy tickets to Amazing Grace.)

Of all the crazy ironies in modern church-state jurisprudence, none is more vexing than the notion that some fundamentally religious ideas and symbols have been so completely drained—by time or overuse—of religious significance that they are now essentially secular. The word God on coins and the Christmas in trees are oft-touted examples. And at argument in this morning's case, Hein v. Freedom From Religion Foundation, we discover that the next casualty of lost religious symbolism is, well, the bagel.

In 2001 President Bush established the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, whose purpose was to "level the playing field" between religious and secular social-service providers. The government hosted a bunch of conferences that helped such religious groups compete for federal grant money. The Freedom From Religion Foundation likened those conferences to "revival meetings" and sued, claiming that the government was using taxpayer dollars to favor sectarian groups, in violation of the First Amendment's bar on state "establishment" of religion.

Now you may be thinking: "Hey, wait a second. If being a taxpayer means I get to sue the government for every lame thing it does, there are some highways/health clinics/wars I'd rather to go to court about." To which my answer would be the doctrinally important, if yawn-worthy, "You don't have standing as a taxpayer to sue the government over every little thing that aggrieves you." Nevertheless, a narrow exception has been carved out when the state pushes religion. That you can sue over, thanks to the 1968 Warren Court case Flast v. Cohen, which allowed taxpayers to sue the government for spending funds on religion. Whether the atheists can squeeze through this mouse hole and into court is the only question today. No one has yet determined whether Bush's faith-based program in fact violated the Establishment Clause.

The federal district court ruled against the atheists. The 7^th Circuit Court of Appeals, in an opinion authored by the prodigious Judge Richard Posner, determined that the taxpayers had standing to sue. The alternative, Posner said, could allow crazy amounts of unchecked executive-branch spending on religion.

Solicitor General Paul Clement represents the Bush administration, and he has the misfortune of being at the court on one of Justice Antonin Scalia's all-time record-breaking "laugh-episode" days. Scalia appears to have forgotten that he is largely on Clement's side in this fight. Perhaps purely in the service of the laughter gods, he gives the SG a pretty hard time.

Clement opens by explaining that the Flast taxpayer exception is a narrow one that has only been narrowed further by the cases that followed. He claims that only if the government gives funds directly to outside religious groups could taxpayers sue.

Scalia asks why Congress can't pass a statute authorizing the construction of a church, if, as Clement insists, allowing the government to build a church itself would be OK? Justice David Souter agrees that the test should be a Madisonian one: Has the state itself spent "thruppence" on religion? He rolls the R's in thruppence, thus getting as close as a New Englander gets to gleeful.

Justice Stephen Breyer offers a hypothetical in which the Congress passes a statute authorizing the building of a massive church at Plymouth Rock. Does a California taxpayer have standing to sue, he asks? Clement says no; Breyer comes back with, "I'm just trying to think of something even more amazing than what I just thought of." What if, he asks, all over America, in every city, town, and hamlet, the government builds Pilgrim churches? Chief Justice John Roberts replies that any religious group that felt excluded from that program would still have standing to sue, but not "just because he was paying taxes."

Justice Samuel Alito has to jump in to save Clement when the Pilgrim hypo becomes too silly. He asks whether the line Clement is drawing "makes sense in an abstract sense or whether this is just the best that can be done with the body of precedent the court has handed down in this area?" When Clement grins, "The latter, Justice Alito," Scalia snaps back with, "Well why didn't you say so? And here I was trying to make sense of what you're saying!"

When most of the justices are treating the key precedent as a punch line, it's a good clue they are preparing to pull the plug. Breyer tries to defend the Flast exception with the rationale that people become "real upset when they see other religions receiving government money to build a church." Which prompts Scalia to recall that he's actually on Clement's side after all. He purrs, "So getting upset is now a constitutionally valid basis on which to bring lawsuits?" Breyer looks annoyed.

Andrew J. Pincus is representing the Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation, and the laugh episodes only ramp up on his beat. Chief Justice Roberts opens with a query as to why taxpayers can't sue the court's marshal for standing up at each argument session and "saying 'God save the court.' " Alito asks Pincus to show him how striking down the administration's faith-based program would reduce anyone's tax rates. Then Scalia asks whether spending federal tax dollars on Air Force One violates the constitution if the president travels in it to attend a church service.

Justice Anthony Kennedy performs some feat of acrobatic reframing by claiming this is all a speech issue somehow. He does make it clear where he ultimately stands, however, when he suggests that it's "unduly intrusive" for the courts to "tell the president he can't talk to specific groups about better using their talents."

Pincus tries to lay out a clear test: Is the sum the government spends on religion identifiable and more than incidental? But Alito, Scalia, and Roberts just keep poking him with the crazy hypos. Which eventually leads Scalia (who is on some kind of comedic crack today) to wonder whether there would be standing for taxpayers to challenge a presidential directive that would only fund the bagels for evangelical prayer breakfasts. Cross talk. Laughter. Then Scalia, with only a hint of an accent, wonders if there is taxpayer standing because, after all, "What could be worse than not buying bagels for the Jewish prayer breakfast?"

Pincus sits down.

Now, I could watch Paul Clement do two-minute rebuttals until the cows come home. He's just that good. And this morning is no exception. By the time he sits down, he seems to have convinced a majority of the court that there's no harm in obliterating the taxpayer exception for religion cases because suits can still be filed on other grounds. And that if the court has to put a torch to Flast in order to preserve the constitutional well-being of the rest of the universe, well, hey. Some court watchers expect this to be a close case. It didn't look close today. But the enduring lesson of Hein may just be that the law is so confusing that it's unclear whether the constitutional violation is the hypothetical prayer breakfasts or just the hypothetical bagels.

As a kid, I fantasized about having a kitchen sink with dozens of faucets. Not only would it dispense hot and cold water, but also chocolate milk, macaroni and cheese, and boneless fried chicken. It's a testament to the primitiveness of the times (and my imagination) that I never dreamed of owning such a device for movies. At age 10, I watched my worn-out VHS copy of Ghostbusters pretty much exclusively. A decade and a half later, I snap my fingers and a red envelope arrives bearing whatever movie I want. Still, for all its convenience, I can't help but feel that Netflix is an artifact of an earlier, less convenient age.

You might say that Netflix brought this upon itself. By making it radically easier to rent movies, the company raised the bar high and fast. These days it's clear that Netflix is not, in fact, the height of convenience. Rivals like Blockbuster have rolled out similar services. The rise of digital cable, complete with on-demand video, has proved a godsend for the infirm and the criminally lazy. Internet behemoths Amazon.com and iTunes both recently rolled out their own on-demand services.

For Netflix, the heat is on, and it has responded with something called Watch Now. Like a magical movie faucet, the service streams video straight to your Web browser. Right now, about 1,000 of Netflix's 70,000 titles are available for instant watching.

Though Netflix doesn't offer unlimited streaming, you still get a hefty amount of watching time—roughly one hour for every dollar you pay in monthly subscription fees, at no additional cost. Three-disc subscribers who pay $17.95 a month, for example, can supplement their regular DVD watching with 18 hours of online time. If you need to watch more than 18 hours of streaming video per month, I can assure you that this problem will solve itself when you go blind. (Netflix plans to roll out Watch Now to every subscriber by June. To see a walk-through of how it works, check out this video from the site Hacking Netflix.)

Conceptually, Watch Now is the perfect vessel for instant movie gratification. Ever rent, say, Street Fighter Alpha and discover that it's not the modern classic your "friend" promised? With Watch Now, you can watch two minutes and abandon ship. You'll still have 17 hours and 58 minutes of watching time to go.* So, in between checking sports scores and reading blogs, you'll be able to catch up on old episodes of that new hit TV show everyone's raving about. (Actually, you'll be able to catch up on episodes of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, but we'll get to that in a moment.)

In reality, Watch Now is less than perfect. The first and by far the most vexing snag is that, for the moment, it's available only for Windows. Watch Now also isn't compatible with Firefox—my browser of choice when I'm forced to use Windows. This will change, of course. Netflix is run by savvy people, and I'm sure they don't want to run afoul of the effete iMac intellectuals. Still, I count this as strike one.

Fortunately, a comrade allowed me to commandeer his Sony VAIO. Despite my initial annoyance over the format business, setting up Watch Now took about 10 seconds. I didn't even need to reboot! The viewing format is elegant, clean, and simple. Video streams into a box at the center of a black screen. Underneath, you have simple sliders for volume, rewind, and fast forward, as well as play and pause buttons. I have a decent Internet connection, and it never took more than 30 seconds for a movie to get started. The quality is good. I'm no connoisseur, but to my untrained eye recent titles like The Prince and Me and The Puffy Chair look just barely sub-DVD. Older movies like Living in Oblivion and 2010, however, look about as gnarly as VHS.

Now for another complaint. The video downloads progressively as you watch, which means it's not easy to skip around. This proved particularly frustrating while I was watching The Cars: Unlocked: The Live Performances. I struggled desperately to skip over band high jinks and lesser-known singles, but each time the damn thing had to rebuffer. Instant gratification is never instant enough.

Ideally, Watch Now would import all the functionality of an actual DVD, complete with chapters, subtitles, and maybe even commentary tracks. We're not there yet technologically, and the whole point of streaming is that you don't download the movies to your machine permanently. But for now, instantly watchable streaming video works best for traditional movie watchers—the kind who make popcorn before the show starts and then sit still for an hour and a half. That's not me.

I will note here that my Netflix habits are unconventional. During my early days as a Netflix subscriber, I spent anywhere from 1 to 3 hours a night watching DVDs on fast forward with the subtitles on. Because I read fairly quickly, I was able to follow twists and turns at high speed, thus increasing my cultural literacy in record time. This is impossible with Watch Now. To fast-forward, you grab the slider and drag it to the right, then wait. It's more like teleporting than running at high speed.

Of course, all this talk of functionality means nothing if there's nothing to watch. Amazon Unbox and iTunes offer awesome content, including new movies and TV shows fresh from the boob tube, at obscenely high prices. (It costs $12.99 to buy a download of The Prestige on iTunes.) Thanks to its all-you-can-eat pricing scheme, Watch Now is a giant step forward. I can honestly say, however, that in the 12 or so hours I've spent watching Netflix's streaming offerings, I've seen nothing I would pay to see. At the risk of sounding needlessly harsh, I found the offerings impressively bad, as though some schlock curator from an Ivy League cinema studies department was called upon to select the dreckiest soft-porn screwball comedies ever made. Find Caddyshack too highbrow? Try Golfballs! You won't find any of Kieslowski's Trois Couleurs movies. You will find Andy Sidaris' Triple B trilogy, which features more "bullets, bombs, and babes" than you can shake a stick at. If you search hard enough, you'll find a handful of newish highbrow releases like Sherrybaby and Conversations With Other Women. But good luck finding enough to keep you entertained.

The Big Media Mafia guards its content so jealously that I can't really blame Netflix—I'm confident that its library will expand in the weeks and months to come. But right now, Watch Now is all promise. My fantasy would be to have a collection almost as expansive as Netflix's dizzyingly wide selection of DVDs. My heart sings at the thought of lighting up my beautiful big-screen iMac with almost-new episodes of Ego Trip's (White) Rapper Show and The Wire or a film classic like Dazed and Confused. But it's all too easy to imagine another, darker future in which the digital-rights management powers that be crush my hopes and dreams under their steel-toed stiletto, reducing me to slogging joylessly through hours of the BBC adaptation of Martin Chuzzlewit. Please, entertainment industry, don't let me down.

Correction, March 1: Because of an editing error, the sentence originally read "You'll still have 17 hours minus 58 minutes of watching time to go." (Click here to return to the corrected sentence.)

Taking the gun and leaving the cannoli, the Irish-American gangster is enjoying a moment in the pop-culture sun and the film-noir shadows. The Departed—Martin Scorsese's spiritual update, by way of Hong Kong, of James Cagney's Angels With Dirty Faces—has its Oscar. Brotherhood—the Showtime series about a Rhode Island politician and his mobbed-up kin—will be back later this year, presumably to retail its dark and overheated crypto-fantasy about the Kennedy family. And now we have The Black Donnellys (NBC), which premiered last night. The next four episodes are nowhere near as patient and controlled as that cinematic pilot, but, man, are they Irish: the wakes, the neon shamrock, the epigraphs from W.B. Yeats and D.P. Moynihan. And the show keeps this magnificent blarney up even as it swipes half its ideas from the playbooks of Scorsese and The Godfather.

So, the Donnelly boys: As explained by one charismatic little weasel of a narrative device named Joey Ice Cream, there are four of them. Kevin is the problem gambler with the sensitive eyes and a touch of Fredo Corleone. Little Sean is the ladies' man with the sensitive eyes and a touch of Fredo Corleone. Jimmy is the hophead, the hothead, the loose canon; there's some Fredo to him and some Sonny, too, but he's mostly a store-brand version of Johnny Boy from Mean Streets. Then there's Tommy, limned by Jonathan Tucker in a performance that is all darts of the eyes, ducks of the chin, and menacing baby steps. In essence, it's a complete De Niro pantomime kept fresh by Tucker's sunken cheeks.

As Joey said last night, "Tommy had a knack for two things, drawing and getting his brothers out of trouble. What he didn't seem to understand is that he'd never go anywhere with the first if he couldn't let go out of the second." Tommy thought he was out—in the pilot, they pulled him back in.

"They" is the Italians and also family loyalty. Kevin and Jimmy kidnapped a bookie whose uncle ran the local Mafia franchise. In recompense, pretty boy Sean got his face split open in a beat down. Tommy intuited that the only way to keep Jimmy alive was to off the bosses of both the Irish and Italian mobs, which created a whole new set of hassles. The show is highly erratic, veering from the comedic to the grotesque to the poignant to the overwrought—and that's just the upcoming scene where Tommy and Kevin try to dispose of a body. Jimmy is one of the more inconsistent characters ever to make it to air; they keep telling us he's junkie, and we keep not believing them. I'm not even going to get into Tommy's romance with Jenny Riley. Still, there are some fine fraternal moments here, and some moral force, and a good slow-motion pummeling.

The show is supposedly set in contemporary New York, but it's not until the fourth hour that we see either cell phones or minorities. For ethnic contrast, we get a smattering of extraordinarily entitled WASPs. Meanwhile, the Irish call the Italians guineas, and the Italians call the Irish micks, and the neon shamrock looks quite handsome reflected in the barroom floor.

America's health-care system runs the gamut from capitalism to socialism, stopping at all points between. At the free-market extreme are 10 million people who buy private insurance without any government help and 48 million people with no insurance at all. At the collectivized end are 5 million military veterans who see government doctors in government hospitals, 32 million retirees covered directly by the federal government under Medicare, and 37 million insured by Medicaid. In the middle are the majority, 153 million workers and their families, who get government-subsidized private insurance through their employers

A growing consensus recognizes this patchwork as economically disadvantageous and morally intolerable. Viewed as a whole, the American system is inefficient, expensive, and possibly unsustainable, consuming 16 percent of GDP and growing at a rate of 6.4 percent a year. European countries manage to provide universal, high-quality care for half as much per capita. Employer-based coverage is a drag on the economy, tethering workers to jobs they would otherwise leave and harming the competitiveness of American manufacturing by adding to the cost of goods. Health-care spending is a budget-wrecker at every level of government. And for all we spend, 16 percent of the population, including 8 million children, must make do at the system's charitable margins.

But if the status quo is untenable, the Euro alternative remains an impossible sell. Americans place a high premium on personal liberty and individual choice in all matters. A single-payer system, in which government insures everyone directly, diminishes consumer freedom for the sake of greater equity and efficiency. Many resist making that trade-off, even where it would serve their interests. As recently as 2000, Oregon, which is either the most—or the second-most, after Vermont—progressive-minded state in the country, defeated a single-payer initiative by a margin of 4-to-1.

The action at the moment is all in the big space between the status quo and single-payer. President Bush started the conversation in his January State of the Union address, in which he proposed capping the tax deductibility of employer-provided plans and creating a new tax deduction for individuals. By turning the health-care tax deduction into a kind of voucher, Bush would discipline spending and allow more individuals to afford insurance. His proposal didn't deserve the scorn heaped on it by leading Democrats. A paper from the liberal Tax Policy Center calls the president's proposal "in some respects … innovative and a step in the right direction." But Bush is thinking too small. His plan risks undermining the current employer-based system without replacing it, and fails to grapple in a serious way with the problem of the uninsured.

John Edwards recently became the only presidential candidate to get specific on the subject, when he laid out a plan bolder than Bush's that would build on the employer-based system. Edwards would require companies that don't insure their workers to pay into a fund for the uninsured. Following the trend in Massachusetts and California, he would add an individual mandate, a requirement that anyone not covered at work buy insurance in a regulated market. The chief advantages of the Edwards plan are that it achieves universal coverage without disrupting the way most Americans now receive health care, and that it's straightforward about raising taxes to pay for extending coverage to the uninsured. Its chief disadvantages are that it would do little to control costs and that it fails to break the anachronistic connection between employers and insurance.

Ron Wyden, the Democratic senator from Oregon, would directly sever that link. Wyden is a politically savvy wonk, who in drafting the bill he recently introduced has tried to learn from previous Democratic mistakes. He recently told me he had read The System, David Broder and Haynes Johnson's massive tome on the failure of the Clinton health-care reform plan, no less than five times. (Apparently, Starbucks now offers an intravenous drip.) Wyden's bill is 166 pages against Hillary's 1364, and he thinks he can pare it further. When he was getting started, Wyden drew a grid of the major interest groups and made sure there were plusses as well as minuses for each in his bill. He has support from CEOs, labor leaders, and even one maverick health-insurance executive. And instead of trying to flatten the opposition, as the Clintons did in 1994, Wyden is courting Republicans. He recently got five of the most conservative men in the Senate to join him and four other Democrats as co-signers of a letter to Bush responding to the White House proposal. The letter endorses the principles of universal coverage and cost containment, and proposes that they all work together on a compromise

Under Wyden's plan, employers would no longer provide health coverage, as they have since World War II. Instead, they'd convert the current cost of coverage into additional salary for employees. Individuals would use this money to buy insurance, which they would be required to have. Private insurance plans would compete on features and price but would have to offer benefits at least equivalent to the Blue Cross "standard" option. Signing up for insurance would be as easy as ticking off a box on your tax return. In most cases, insurance premiums would be withheld from paychecks, as they are now.

Eliminating employers as an additional payer would encourage consumers to use health care more efficiently. Getting rid of the employer tax deduction, which costs a whopping $200 billion a year, would free up funds to subsidize insurance up to 400 percent of the poverty line, which is $82,000 for a family of four. The Lewin Group, an independent consulting firm, has estimated that Wyden's plan would reduce overall national spending on health care by $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years and that it would save the government money through great administrative efficiency and competition.

Can Wyden and his allies market this kind of bill as an advance for competition and choice, which it is? Or will opponents succeed in framing it negatively, as they did the Clinton bill in 1994, as an expansion in the scope of government—which is also an accurate description? Will moderate Republicans see their advantage in sharing credit for fixing the system or in denying an accomplishment to Democrats, as they did last time? To design a system that covers the uninsured, removes the medical burden from employers, lowers government costs, and even slightly reduces what the average family spends is no mean feat. But Ron Wyden may soon discover that coming up with the smartest health-care plan we've seen yet was the easy part of the job.

Dear Steve and Aidan,

Last week was W.H. Auden's 100^th birthday—or would have been, had he not died at the age of 67 in 1973. According to a biographer, Richard Davenport-Hines, Auden seemed worn down at the time of his death, and the poet's friends have said that the years of drinking, heavy smoking, and barbiturate use had taken their toll. But it is tempting to imagine that it wasn't the drugs and liquor that prematurely aged him, but his literary aesthetic itself: the mantle of moral and political responsibility he believed came with the job of being a poet. If he was a formidably craggy slab of a man by the time he turned 60, it wasn't just the Chesterfields, it was the crushing responsibility.

Auden has enjoyed a jag in popularity during the last decade. His poem "Funeral Blues" was a cornerstone of the film Four Weddings and a Funeral. His drumbeat of a poem, "September 1, 1939"—composed after Germany invaded Poland—was e-mailed and faxed around the country in the days after 9/11. Its unexpected relevance and its closing note of uplift gave it grassroots appeal: "May I .../ Beleaguered by the same/ Negation and despair,/ Show an affirming flame." So perhaps it's not a surprise that this anniversary brings with it not one but two new editions of his poetry, each compiled by Edward Mendelson, Auden's literary executor: the hefty Collected Poems (Modern Library), and a revised and expanded Selected Poems from Vintage (with a new set of notes). The Selected Poems is more likely to be of interest to lay readers: It's lighter and the notes are helpful. It's also the only of the two to contain the poem "September 1, 1939." The other edition bends to Auden's wishes, expressed when he put together a Collected Poems in 1966, and leaves it out. Auden's disavowal of this poem and others is characteristic of an ambivalence he felt about his own rhetorical powers—and is one of the many things I hope we can talk about.

What made Auden so important, and why is he still so present in the cultural conversation? Aidan, you're our resident expert. Trying to take Auden's measure as a student-dabbler, I've found myself going back to the poet and critic Randall Jarrell, who zeroed in on at least two Audens—a reductive view that has come in for lots of debate, but that gets at one basic tension in the work of this endlessly evolving poet. In this narrative, Auden began his career in England in the 1920s composing precociously stunning love poems and meditative fantasias. (Among my favorites is "Lullaby": "Lay your sleeping head, my love/ Human on my faithless arm.") The early Auden was, as Jarrell put it, "oracular (obscure, original), bad at organization, neglectful of logic, full of astonishing or magical language, intent on his own world and his own forms." This is some of the work I love most, with its curious Icelandic preoccupations (Auden had a romance with the idea of Northernness); the frequency of phrases like "spring's green/ preliminary shiver" and "love's worn circuit re-begun"; and its Anglo-Saxon tones (inspired by Gerard Manley Hopkins), rung in lines like "Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle."

In the 1930s, though, Auden self-consciously turned away from the private rhythms of Modernism—away from Eliot and Pound and even Hardy—in search of another kind of poetry: an accessible rhetoric that would connect the individual to the public world—what he later called "the common meditative norm." More of the poems he began to write in the 1930s (and after) were highly organized, logical, formal, didactic, and above all rhetorical, if we mean by that word language that is intent on persuasion. They concerned themselves with the legacy of Marx and Freud—with, well, civilization and its discontents. Plenty of the poems still displayed the lovely lyric figuration Auden was capable of; but a distinct category needed it less, the way a politician has less need for the sublime vistas of the sea. I'm being schematic, here—there were poems, many very good ones, that occupied the wide territory between these modes (more on this below)—but I'm thinking mainly of work like "New Year Letter" (an essay in tetrameter couplets) and even the "The Age of Anxiety" from the Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same title.

This shift probably had something to do with Auden's political commitments. Like the rest of the so-called "Auden Group"—Louis MacNeice, Cecil Day Lewis, and Stephen Spender, all of whom met at Oxford—Auden started out as a left-leaning thinker whose intellect and poetic outlook were shaped by witnessing firsthand Europe's struggle against fascism. He spent time in Weimar Berlin and in Spain during the Civil War, and he came back frustrated at the ineffectiveness of "pink liberalism." (Around this time, as Jarrell puts it, Communists thought he was too liberal, and liberals thought he was too Communist.) And he began to follow through on the impulse toward oratory that had always been there in his poems. In 1939, he immigrated to America, where he re-embraced Christianity and grappled with what it might mean to anatomize, in verse, the work that citizens could do to create a better world—to become more humanist, more subtle in their interactions, more committed to the Christian principles of love—of "caritas" and "agape."

The poems of the "second" Auden help explain why he still matters in the public arena—why so many journalists, liberals, and public intellectuals admire him: They spoke to the cultivated reader of op-ed pages (and there was no Sanskrit in them, as there was in Eliot's poems). And the search for a common idiom in which to combat the soapbox orthodoxies of fascism helped Auden shape gems like "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" and "Musée Des Beaux Arts," which direct a moralizing public rhetoric at an intimate audience—at the individual. These are pretty great poems. And given poetry's almost total isolation from public discourse today, there's something deeply appealing about Auden's quest to establish a poetry of public intimacy. His own hands-on experiences lent that quest some nuance; poets should have "more than a bit of a reporting journalist," he once said. If his poems could devolve into vague liberal wishes for the individual to be an "affirming flame," he also knew that "art … cannot be midwife to society."

Yet the spokespoet stance plainly could lead Auden into torturous abstraction: "Alone, alone, about a dreadful wood/ Of conscious evil runs a lost mankind,/ Dreading to find its Father lest it find/ The Goodness it has dreaded is not good:/ Alone, alone about our dreadful wood." A number of the resulting poems were neither elegant poetry nor philosophically astute. Finally, it is important to note Auden's own ambivalence about much of this work. He revised his poems obsessively because he found earlier tones and expressions false, and he cut some of his most famous poems ("Spain" and "September 1, 1939") from later editions: "Some poems which I wrote and, unfortunately, published, I have thrown out because they were dishonest. … A dishonest poem is one which expresses, no matter how well, feelings or beliefs which its author never felt or entertained," he said.

This last bit is, let's face it, pretty odd. Most poets don't repudiate their earlier work so absolutely. I'd love to know what you make of it, and how you think it's most helpful to conceptualize the many different Audens to be found in this big body of work. Which do you like most?

Best,

Meghan

Hi, Meghan and Aidan,

I thought I'd fill in and counterpoint your terrific first post by offering some ideas about Auden's oddly mixed reception in this country, and then by engaging his poetry more directly. It's true that Auden has enjoyed a recent and encouraging spike in popularity. But I'm not convinced (yet) that this is an important shift in his reputation among Americans, a reputation that is not so much good or bad as indistinct. I think there are three reasons for this. First, inasmuch as Americans experience poetry at all, they tend to get their most consequential dose of it early on, as students. But Auden is not a young person's poet, the way T.S. Eliot, say, can be. The contrast with Eliot is instructive. Eliot, the American who went to England, is superficially obscure but easily mastered. For 50 years his work has filled bright high-school students with feelings of high cultural and metaphysical dread, a useful derivative, for the English teacher, of adolescent self-importance. In spite of his being personally repulsive, and disliked by the Yale (and Yale-derived) critics who have dominated literary criticism since the '60s, Eliot remains a totemic presence on the syllabus. On the other hand Auden, the Englishman who emigrated to America, is a poet for adults. In fact, he is everything Eliot was not: supple, feminine, urbane, funny, relaxed, erotic, gossipy, generous, worldly, and humane. It is easy to teach a person under 22 The Wasteland. Now try teaching him or her The Age of Anxiety.

Secondly, though Auden matured far beyond his origins as a '30s poet nurtured in the homosocial Petrie dish known as Oxford and became a poet deeply engaged with the reality of postwar life, he remained very English—meticulously careful in his effusions, effortlessly catholic in his erudition, relaxed in that way that only the most intimidating people can be relaxed. He was the last poet for whom the university was never a meaningful patron, and for whom Latin and Greek and the entire canon of English poets seemed casually ready-to-hand. An American can become acclimated, and come to love unsentimentally, the crabby-crabbed eccentricities of Yeats more easily than he can grasp Auden's, in part because Auden's eccentricities are not meant to be easily grasped, if grasped at all.

So I wish you first a

Sense of theatre; only

Those who love illusion

And know it will go far:

Otherwise we spend our

Lives in a confusion

Of what we say and do with

Who we really are.

"Who we really are" is an American, maybe the American, obsession. It was not Auden's, and to an American ear he can sound slippery and fey.

Thirdly, Auden has never found a dominant American critic to champion him. I may be wrong on this, but I remember Auden as entirely absent from the syllabus at every stage of my education, and have never found him written about with the same disciplined adulation that American critics have offered up to Yeats, Stevens, Moore, Bishop, Lowell, Berryman, to produce a quick list. Jarrell, as you point out, was neurotically preoccupied with Auden, and finally could not side with him; Bloom once dismissed his work as "reducing too easily to paraphrase," though I am paraphrasing here from memory. The highly placed shill has eluded Auden. Maybe this is for the best.

Enough reputation; the poems! My favorite Auden is the American Auden, the middle-ish Auden, the Auden that started to emerge in the '40s, with New Year Letter, and came out more fully in the Yeats and Freud elegies, "In Sickness and in Health," "The Fall of Rome," "In Praise of Limestone," and "Under Sirius," to name some obvious choices, and culminates in the longer works The Sea and the Mirror, The Age of Anxiety, and The Shield of Achilles. This Auden had self-consciously moved on: from Freud and Marx to Kierkegaard and Neibur; from the literary swim of Oxford and London to the vast, encompassing anonymity of New York City. You mentioned New Year Letter, and I agree it's a good place to start.

New Year Letter is a long poem—eyeballing it, over a thousand lines, easy—in octosyllabic couplets, divided into three parts. It is addressed to a new friend, a German refugee living on Long Island named Elizabeth Mayer, an older woman whose company Auden is coming to realize he cherishes. The poem is about our inexorably divided self, an idea Auden was refining by reading (of course!) Montaigne and Lincoln. As Montaigne had put it: "We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe, we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn." Auden had expanded on this in reviewing a biography of Lincoln. "The one infallible symptom of greatness is the capacity for double focus. [Great men] know that all absolutes are heretical but that one can only act in a given circumstance by assuming one … "

The opening of the poem is instructive. The new year is a time for forward-looking reassessment—"All our reflections turn about/ A common meditative norm/ Retrenchment, Sacrifice, Reform"—especially in the new world, but this one finds Auden harkening back to the previous New Year, when he was still in Europe. " … round me, trembling in their beds,/ Or taut with apprehensive dreads,/ The sleepless guests of Europe lay/ Wishing their centuries away/ And the low mutter of their vows/ Went echoing through her haunted house,/ As on the verge of happening/ There crouched the presence of The Thing." The Thing—what is it? Sin, we discover as we move through the poem, by which Auden means something like: our tendency to morbid self-disowning and disorder. He also certainly has in mind the fascism that he recently fled. And, I'd like to argue, he is also thinking of our old friend Eliot. As Auden continues:

All formulas were tried to still

The scratching on the window-sill,

All bolts of custom made secure

Against the pressure of the door,

But up the staircase of events

Carrying his special instruments,

To every bedside all the same

The dreadful figure swiftly came.

How Eliotic, "the scratching on the window-sill," the little irritant that reinforces how trapped you are in your own human smallness, how uncomfortable you are (or ought to be) in your own human skin. And precisely the sort of snickering diminution New Year Letter will go on to protest against. I believe Auden is announcing, I refuse to extract even the thinnest gauze of self-importance or rhetorical urgency from the thing I hate, even by detesting it; because by drawing on its power, I only enhance its power. Instead, the poem is about the tentative little utopia that friendship can be, though Auden wants to work, and make us work, to arrive at that affirmation. And so the first part of the poem is about not surrendering to the "vast apocalyptic dream," and instead acknowledging that, even through our imperfection, we put forth order and calm, most commonly in works of art. There are extraordinary passages—they seem to bring together the urbanity of Dryden with the rinsing fire of Blake:

All the more honor to you then

If, weaker than some other men,

You had the courage that survives

Soiled, shabby, egotistical lives,

If poverty or ugliness

Ill-health or social unsuccess

Hunted you out of life to play

At living in another way …

And later:

Now large, magnificent and calm,

Your changeless presences disarm

The sullen generations, still

The fright and fidget of the will,

And to the growing and the weak

Your final transformations speak.

The second part details the machinations of the devil, though again, a devil of our own making, and a possible instrument of our own enlightenment. The poem ends joyously, and in a total repudiation of Europe, of fascism, of Eliot:

Convict our pride of its offense

In all things, even penitence,

Instruct us in the civil art

Of making from the muddled heart

A desert and a city where

The thoughts that have to labor there

May find locality and peace,

And pent-up feelings their release …

I suspect this is why Auden may have repudiated his earlier work. It drew too much on the specter of European collapse, and so took its self-importance from a way of thinking and feeling, about the miseries of history, that Auden wanted to transcend. New Year Letter affirms Auden as an honorary if still doubt-afflicted American—as at least a somewhat optimistic and forward-looking poet. Anyhow, I am out of time.

Steve

Hi Meghan and Steve,

At the risk of being pegged as an academic Auden shill, I'm always happy to talk about this amazing, challenging, maddening, endearing, crucial poet, and I'm delighted to be toasting his birthday with such enthusiastic Auden readers.

Meghan, you mention Auden's poetic appearance in Four Weddings. On the cover of my Vintage paperback edition of Auden's Collected, a 900-page doorstop of a book I bought as a grad student back in the mid-'90s, is a little red promotional sticker reading: "Includes the poem featured in Four Weddings and a Funeral." You have to admire the marketing chutzpah there, and I have amused imaginings of romantic-comedy fans riffling through this mammoth volume in search of that nougaty chunk of filmic sentiment (the poem's on page 141, simply titled "IX" in a sequence of "Twelve Songs") and stumbling instead across some of the more freakishly alienating poems in the book—for instance, the late one that begins, "Steatopygous, sow-dugged/ and owl-headed,/ To Whom—Whom else?—the first innocent blood was formally shed/ by chinned mammal that hard times/ had turned carnivore." Meghan, you ask which Auden I like most. I'm not sure I can choose just one among the myriad Audens out there. But I will say that I get a big kick out of the Auden whose serious playfulness and love of language for its own sake allows him to begin a poem with the word steatopygous (it means having protuberant buttocks, in case you were wondering).

But there's a weightier point here, too, about how poetry gets marketed in our moment, as well as about how Auden himself resists the efforts of readers to delimit him or publishers to comfortably sell him as, for instance, the poet who will "Tell Me the Truth About Love"; that was the title of a pamphlet of Auden poems that was to be found by the cash registers of every Barnes & Noble after Four Weddings. The poet who makes me go to his beloved OED to find out what those obscure, toothsome words mean is the same poet who demanded that the poems in his first Collected Poetry in 1945 be printed alphabetically according to the first word of each poem rather than chronologically, so as to frustrate readers' preconceived notions about him. "I wanted to test the reader who believes that my earliest poems are the best," he said of this famously confounding editorial decision. "Make him read a poem and then guess its date."

Now, we could see this as a species of the curiously intense orneriness that you talked about, Meghan, on display in his notorious disavowals of some of his most well-known poems. But maybe we could see it as something else, something that gets to a really interesting point you made, Steve. In talking about the via negativa of "New Year Letter," its mode of affirmation by denial, you suggest that Auden wants to make his reader work. This seems to me right and really important. Auden is, in every way, a poet of work. In his life, he saw himself as a working professional, keeping strict business hours and paying his way with the profits from his poetic labor. In his poems, too, the idea of making his readers pay their own way seems to me crucial to how they function, and can perhaps point to some of their enduring power.

Feeling the force of your lament that Auden is woefully underrepresented on syllabi and in classrooms, Steve, I'll take perhaps the one Auden poem that everybody knows, "Musee des Beaux Arts," and try to talk a little more about Auden's idea of poetic work. I love teaching this poem, not because it's necessarily my favorite, but because of how students respond to it. One of the clear moral lessons of that poem is a very melancholy one, suggesting that there's very little we as individuals can do to make anything happen in the big terrible world of human suffering (and, at the time the poem was written in 1938, of impending and unstoppable war). The best we can do is keep our heads down and our shoulders to the plow (which is what the farmer is doing in the Breughel painting the poems describes), because if we paid attention to all the suffering around us we'd go mad. Which is indeed how lots of students (and occasionally myself) read it: It gives us a kind of relief to see the world as so overpoweringly awful that we can be excused from any effort at trying to change it.

But the poem also exerts a strange kind of counter tug that inevitably someone in the classroom responds to. It asks us to rebel against this apparently cleareyed and unsentimental diagnosis of the inescapable "human position" of suffering. And this rebellion is further stirred by the imperious lecturing tone the poem affects ("About suffering they were never wrong, the old Masters … "), prompting some readers to say, "Screw that pompous bastard! I'm not going to be like that 'expensive delicate ship,' calmly indifferent to the suffering of the person right next to me. I'm going to do something. Even if I know I can't stop a war, or wipe out human pain, if I were on that ship I would at least try to save the life of this boy who has plunged into the sea right in front of me!" Which is, I'd argue, precisely what the poem wants to do to you: force you to work to make an interpretive choice that is also a kind of moral choice. Your reading of the poem brings with it a moral choice in the real world. You can keep your head down in the interests of your own sanity, or you can go out into the world and do something, however small. The poem gives you options, but the choice, the hard intellectual and moral work, is yours alone.

It seems to me that's what Auden is talking about in the complex distinction he famously draws in his elegy for Yeats (the first poem he writes after his arrival in New York) between the apparently contradictory assertions, made within a few lines of one another, that "Poetry makes nothing happen" but is, nonetheless, "a way of happening, a mouth." The poetry Auden had spent much of the 1930s trying to write couldn't stop a war, but, he suggests, perhaps "it survives" and, in a kind of idealized vision of engaged citizenship, its exercise of moral and intellectual dialectic can help send the individual reader back out into the world to act justly to his neighbor. I wonder, does this claim for poetry's moral power hold up, or is Auden's hopeful vision of art's civic role in helping to build the "Just City" (as he calls it in "New Year Letter," following Plato) something we've left behind along with his unfiltered Chesterfields?

This question is related to another one you raise, Steve, that I'd love for us to talk more about. Namely, Auden's vexed relation to Americanness. It was no coincidence, it seems to me, that this redefinition of poetry's place in the world developed as Auden was moving to, and settling in, America. As the self-designated shill, I'd like to make the argument for reading Auden, not as a posh-accented import but as an essential, and essentially American, poet. To kick off the big discussion that I think Auden's American career raises—a discussion about his influence on the shape of postwar American poetry in general—I'll throw down this gauntlet: American poetry as we know it in the second half of the 20^th century would not exist without Auden. Disagree?

Cheers,

Aidan

Steve, Aidan—

The question of Auden's Americanness is interesting, but I'm going to defer that to focus for a moment on the substance of Auden, and, for the sake of argument, to foment some disagreement. Both you and Steve have made excellent cases for Auden's strengths—cases with which I do agree—but perhaps have skimmed over his limitations. Namely, on the level of language, what Auden does can be unsatisfying. He's a poet whose work can seem strangely indifferent to the range of sensations that poetry, uniquely, can capture. The reason for this is one we've touched on. Auden himself spent a lot of time puzzling over the two possible functions of poetry: First, its power of unconscious incantation, its manner of eliciting deeply human apprehensions that can't be captured in prose; second, its role as social wisdom and political argument.

The two needn't be exclusive, but when Auden got interested in his essayistic message, he sometimes skimped on the meter and the rhyme and mystery of the first—in many of his expository poems, there's no shimmer, as there often is in Milton's, as there surely was in Shakespeare's. Auden relied on language as a transparent screen when he wanted to write a poem that made a broader point. And here is where—this may be the poet in me speaking more than the critic—I stumble up against the great mystery of Auden: how a poet with such a tremendous lyric gift—what Anna Akhmatova called "lyrical wealth"—could have been content to let it molder while he wrote lines like: "For every day they die/ among us, those who were doing us some good,/ who knew it was never enough but/ hoped to improve a little by living." No wonder Bloom apparently dismissed him as "paraphraseable" and Jarrell felt betrayed! The lines are dull. They may say something that is not dull, but as poetry, they are flat.

Obviously, the larger significance of Auden's work is more complex than whether a few lines snap, crackle, and pop, and Aidan, I wholeheartedly second your beautiful reading of how "Musée Des Beaux Arts" engages us in textual work as a path to life-work. But I think there is a deeper issue here, one that may even connect us back to the issue of Americannness. In my experience of Auden as a reader, I find that when Auden turns toward rational language—in an effort to steer us toward top-of-the-head decisions—he imposes his will on his poems in a fashion that often swerves away from a level of sublimity, a level of unconscious vision, a level of illogical logic that is inherent in language.

Highly skilled, Auden could, as Seamus Heaney once put it, subjugate "all the traditional poetic means to his own purposes." Yet, odd though this may sound, the origins of great poetry, I think—and especially great American poetry—have less to do with subjugation than with submission, and I don't find a lot of submission in Auden. By submission, I mean that there is a profound tension in the American poets I love best, Whitman and Dickinson, and on through Stevens, Frost, and Bishop, between the forces of order (embodied by art, and those who create it) and the forces of chaos (the world, that which is the material for creation). In all these poets, there is a profound recognition—and even exultation in—the idea that to be an artist is a little like that American pastime, bronc riding: You'll get bucked off the poem and lose yourself, and that's the point.

The fact is, Britain has a stronger tradition in the didactic mode, and America has less of one. So, in this sense, Auden doesn't seem a thoroughly American poet to me at all. (Indeed, tellingly, he once said he considered it impossible to have a visionary intuition of love toward a person of a different class, which I imagine is easier to believe if you are British than American; and it meant that in order to pursue his exploration of democratic love, he felt he had to eschew the visionary and the sublime.) Consider the end of "New Year Letter," which you pulled out, Steve, as a joyous repudiation of fascism and Eliot:

Convict our pride of its offense

In all things, even penitence,

Instruct us in the civil art

Of making from the muddled heart

A desert and a city where

The thoughts that have to labor there

May find locality and peace,

And pent-up feelings their release …

Whatever is here, the poem gives us no feeling of how the "pent-up feelings" will find "their release." Everything is told, not shown; indeed, many of Auden's poems are forced to rely on single-word repetition for intensification, since other means of creating intensity (mystery, illogic, disjunction) have been eschewed: "O look, look in the mirror,/ O look in your distress"; "Dance, dance, for the figure is easy,/ the tune is catching and will not stop."

While I eagerly grant the poetic intelligence and skill of "rhetorical" Auden, I find myself lamenting, as Seamus Heaney did in a brilliant essay called "Sounding Auden," the passing of "the element of the uncanny." I like best the poems where "the strange" is mixed in with the poetic will—where Auden opened up some dusty corner of his mind for a second. Take, for example,"The Fall of Rome" (though we could also look at "In Transit" or "In Praise of Limestone"):

The piers are pummelled by the waves;

In a lonely field the rain

Lashes an abandoned train;

Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;

Agents of the Fisc pursue

Absconding tax-defaulters through

The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send

The temple prostitutes to sleep;

All the literati keep

An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may

Extol the Ancient Disciplines,

But the muscle-bound Marines

Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar's double-bed is warm

As an unimportant clerk

Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK

On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity,

Little birds with scarlet legs,

Sitting on their speckled eggs,

Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast

Herds of reindeer move across

Miles and miles of golden moss,

Silently and very fast.

I adore this poem for several reasons—yes, it is a brilliant indictment of postwar bourgeois solipsism (and another snarl at Eliot's Modernism), but what makes it is the fabulous inventiveness of its swerves: the way the syntax and strong enjambment shape the music of the poem, tilting it here into the march-measure of bureaucratese, and there back again to the private language of the poet; the way the intonations of earlier days are suggestive of the plagues of the moment, but are never offered as a pure one-to-one correspondence. This is not just allegory, but incantation, and it becomes incantation through the operation of language, the small surprise of "In a lonely field the rain/Lashes an abandoned train." The poem may crest toward peroration, but those muscle-bound Marines refuse to let matters get too literal, and a delicate, ironic note of empathy is struck over the next two stanzas. The big surprise is that fabulous last stanza, which contains, at last, a lyrical moment that works mysteriously to complicate the social wisdom of the poem. You may be able to paraphrase the fourth stanza, but not the sixth. And, tellingly: This is a poem that an American poet (were he or she talented enough) could write today.

Well, I've run out of both room and time. I think Auden is not an "American" poet but an anomaly, someone who broke with the past of English poetry in ways that opened up a crucial path forward; who came to America and was able to influence a generation of writers largely because he wasn't so American that they had to wrestle overmuch with defining themselves in opposition to him. But I'm eager to know what you two make of this: Do you agree with any of it? And does Auden's religion play into his choices in ways we ought to discuss?

Best,

Meghan

Wednesday, Feb. 28, 2007

The Big Hair: On Tuesday, the Boston Globe uncovered a 77-slide PowerPoint presentation outlining the Romney campaign's strategy. Dan Gross is right: Mitt Romney doesn't just flip-flop like a CEO, he even uses a CEO's favorite tool to walk you through it.

The Globe says that top Romney strategist Alex Castellanos helped draft the document. Judging from the Globe excerpts, Romney has another CEO's weakness: overpaying consultants to assert the obvious. The PowerPoint offers such clichés as "Own the future" and "Does he fit the Big Chair?" It fusses over the candidate's too-perfect hair, describes John McCain as a "mature brand," and suggests Massachusetts-bashing as "Primal Code for Brand Romney."

But by far the best part of Romney's strategy is his campaign's primal code for Brand Mormon. As the Globe explains:

"Enmity toward France, where Romney did his Mormon mission during college, is a recurring theme of the document. The European Union, it says at one point, wants to 'drag America down to Europe's standards,' adding: 'That's where Hillary and Dems would take us. Hillary = France.' The plan even envisions 'First, not France' bumper stickers."

According to his campaign, Mormonism is not some new-fangled, outside-the-mainstream religion. It's Romney's lifelong crusade against heathen France.

While John McCain was squandering his youth in a losing battle against Communists—started by the French—Mitt Romney had a mission worth fighting for: He was going door-to-door on foreign soil, storming the French Bastille before they destroy our way of life. The man has spent his life training to fight Joan of Arc. Other Republicans may attack Hillary, but only Romney will burn her at the stake.

The clunky bumper-sticker slogan in the PowerPoint might have worked better for another campaign—such as "Frist, not France"—but give Romney his due. Considering its politics, Massachusetts ought to be overrun with French types. But with Romney as governor, Massachusetts natives of French descent like John Kerry and E.J. Dionne spent most of their time in Washington—and Romney's Massachusetts remains the most Irish state in the nation, far surpassing Ronald Reagan's California.

Romney is smart to run against France, which may be the only opponent weak enough for him to beat. There's just one problem. In the defining moment of Romney's political career—the Salt Lake City Olympics—he helped France win more medals than it has anytime in the 80-year history of the Winter Games. Mitt Romney not only didn't stop the French from going downhill—he let them beat us at it.

Here, free of charge, are some facts for the opposition PowerPoint on Romney. At his 2002 Olympics, France won 11 medals, including four golds. For a man whose slogan is "First, not France," that's a lot of time watching the French strut atop the world stage to "La Marseillaise."

Before Salt Lake City, the most medals France had ever won was nine—both times at Winter Games the French themselves hosted (1968 at Grenoble and 1992 at Albertville). In the three other Winter Olympics held on U.S. soil—Lake Placid in 1932 and 1980, Squaw Valley in 1960—the French won a grand total of five medals. That means Mitt Romney handed France more than twice as many medals in one Olympics as the other three U.S. Winter Olympiads combined.

And that's not counting Salt Lake City's infamous skating scandal, in which the French judge tried to rob Canada of the pairs gold medal by voting for a Russian pair who had fallen. The Olympic Committee had to suspend the judge, who denied it was part of a quid pro quo to gain Russian support for a French couple that won the gold in ice dancing. In short, Romney didn't stop France from dragging us down to Europe's standards—he hosted it.

From George W. Bush to John Roberts, Francophiles have secretly infiltrated the U.S. government at the highest levels. The Romney campaign may be right that an unchecked France could be our Waterloo, but Mitt Romney is no Admiral Lord Nelson. If "Les Mitts" doesn't fit on the Big Chair, Romney's bumper stickers can just say "Loser." ... 1:21 A.M. (link)

Tuesday, Feb. 27, 2007

Make Me Chaste, Lord: If you happen to visit Washington this weekend, don't go anywhere near the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. Conservatives are so desperate for a presidential candidate who has never let them down, they might grab any stranger who walks by the Omni Shoreham. According to the New York Times, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford had barely finished speaking to a Christian right gathering in Florida earlier this month, when the group tried to draft him to run for president in 2008. If you've never sponsored a campaign finance reform bill or lived with a gay couple, you could be next.

For the past 40 years, the conservative movement has welcomed only one kind of person: the true believer. Iconoclasm in the pursuit of moderation was no virtue; orthodoxy in the name of conservatism was no vice. But this weekend, Grover Norquist—the leading bouncer at the conservative club—announced a more relaxed entrance policy. In light of the movement's current struggles, the far right will now welcome a second type of conservative: the false believer.

In a report on the right's underwhelming reaction to three also-rans—Sam Brownback, Duncan Hunter, and Mike Huckabee—David Kirkpatrick of the Times explains the world according to Grover:

"Mr. Norquist said he remained open to any of the three candidates who spoke to the council or to Mr. Romney. He argued that with the right promises, any of the four could redeem themselves in the eyes of the conservative movement despite their past records, just as some high school students take abstinence pledges even after having had sex.

" 'It's called secondary virginity,' Mr. Norquist said. 'It is a big movement in high school and also available for politicians.' "

No wonder we're losing the war on terror. Grover Norquist is telling conservatives that heaven is full of secondary virgins, while Osama Bin Laden is promising his followers the real thing.

According to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, there are no reliable data on how well the secondary virginity movement is doing in America's schools. But it's a huge hit in Republican presidential circles. Huckabee told the Times that despite (or, more likely, because of) raising taxes in Arkansas, he was leaning toward signing Norquist's perennial no-new-tax pledge. Romney never met a change of heart he didn't like.

But before conservatives get too excited about secondary virginity, they ought to consider its repercussions for the broader conservative faith. After all, the central animating principle behind conservatism has always been that there is no Plan B. That's President Bush's position on Iraq, and it's quite literally the conservative position on abortion. In political terms, secondary virginity is like a morning-after pill for politicians: An ambitious young Republican will no longer have to abstain from taking moderate stands—if he makes a mistake, he can take care of it later. On abortion, the Norquistian bargain is especially glaring: As long as Mitt Romney is opposed to Plan B for young couples, he can have a political Plan B for himself.

What is the world coming to, when absolutists start sending mixed signals? The far right opposes Bush's immigration plan as amnesty on the grounds that by forgiving illegal immigrants, it will only encourage more foreigners to follow suit. Norquist's plan represents something that true conservatives should hate even more: amnesty for moderates!

Essentially, Norquist is conceding that the job of running the country is work that no real conservatives want to do, so they need to import help from somewhere else. Mitt Romney got in trouble for running his own guest-worker program to do the yard work at his house in Boston. Now Grover Norquist wants to turn conservatism into a guest-worker program to hire Mitt Romney.

Wary conservatives should read a May 2006 Washington Post story titled "Virginity Pledges Can't Be Taken on Faith." According to the Post, a Harvard researcher found that "53 percent of adolescents in a large, federally funded study who said they made a virginity pledge denied doing so a year later, often after they had become sexually active." Another 10 percent became sexually active first, then made the pledge—and then claimed to be virgins. Norquist would have his candidate, if only any of them were old enough to run for president.

Conservatives would be better off listening to Sarah Brown, head of the National Campaign To Prevent Teen Pregnancy, who told the Post that the study "confirms that when people are asked about sensitive behavior, you have to take their answers with a grain of salt." As Columbia professor Peter S. Bearman, an expert on virginity progams, pointed out, "Pledging leads to a form of promise-breaking that's riskier."

Of course, the best proof that secondary virginity won't work for conservatives is right in front of their noses. This isn't the first time Grover Norquist has used his conservative pledge cards to force Republican candidates into a shotgun marriage. The first George Bush won the GOP nomination in 1988 because he signed Norquist's no-tax pledge and Bob Dole wouldn't. Conservatives ran Bush 41 out of office when he didn't keep it. Haunted by his father's mistake, the younger Bush happily stuck to every pledge conservatives sent his way—and as a result, governed so badly that even conservatives can't wait to run off with someone else.

Now that true and false believers alike have failed, the conservative movement might want to reconsider whether its promises are worth making. Don't count on it. For the Norquists and Romneys, the pledge's the thing. Belief, like so much else, is secondary. ... 10:57 A.M. (link)

Friday, Feb. 23, 2007

Gravel Pit: For the political press, this week's shootout between the Clinton and Obama campaigns was as intoxicating as a hunter's first whiff of gunpowder on Opening Day. The Hotline dubbed it "Slash Wednesday." The tabloids went Postal. The only way to make Roger Ailes happier would have been to let Maureen Dowd referee a Mark Penn/David Axelrod Jello-wrestling match on pay-per-view.

As a card-carrying Clintonite, I tend to agree with John Dickerson that Round 1 went to Clinton. But there's an easy way for everyone in the field to come away a winner: Don't bother having a Round 2.

Primary campaigns are by definition family feuds, so sparks are bound to fly, and it's hard not to take everything personally. I still haven't forgiven people for snide comments they made on behalf of rival campaigns two decades ago, even people I otherwise consider good friends from campaigns before or since. Moreover, a party's nomination is worth more if it's a real battle, not a love fest where real differences are swept under the carpet, only to resurface during the general election.

So, fights happen. But the key to a healthy, happy family or party is to make sure you spend your time on the fights that matter and get over the fights that don't.

The early days of a long campaign are almost always about fights that don't. For one thing, most of the family isn't around yet. Even in battleground states like New Hampshire and Iowa, most voters are watching American Idol, not Road to the White House. Candidates are mainly talking to each other, and trying to distinguish themselves in front of diehards in the party and the press.

A big field of musical chairs only heightens the competition to show measurable progress in areas that ultimately won't make the difference. Raising money won't be a problem for the Democratic front-runners, but insiders will obsess over their first quarter FEC reports, anyway. Endorsements, hires, and defections are even less important, but we'll pretend they're crucial for the next nine months, until real voters tune in and remind us that the only names that matter are the ones on the ballot.

The risk of a big field is that candidates will try too hard to win over those of us warped enough to obsess over their every current move, and lose sight of the far more sensible voters who won't make up their minds till the time comes. To measure the lasting import of Round 1, look at any newspaper from Nevada, where much of the shadow boxing took place. At a forum with the Democratic candidates, George Stephanopoulos raised the Geffen-Clinton-Obama flap. The national papers duly reported every word of that exchange—although they failed to point out that George would never mispronounce Geffen the way he did Nevada.

Yet in the Nevada papers, the Clinton-Obama feud didn't even come up. The Carson City paper, the Nevada Appeal, led with a mother who likes Edwards. Her son who favors Clinton "because she's a girl." The Las Vegas Sun quoted a woman who said she "could just kiss" Joe Biden—and did. The Reno Gazette-Journal actually found a debate viewer who liked Mike Gravel, although she had to refer to him as "the fellow who spoke last" because she didn't know his name.

Even as reporters have been privately hoping the fur will keep flying, commentators tsk-tsk about what will happen if the candidates keep this up for another 12 months. But the truth is, they can't, they shouldn't, and they won't, because the voters don't them want to.

Call it the doctrine of Mutually Assured Distraction: Ultimately, it's in every candidate's enlightened self-interest to prevent the other candidates from steering the campaign away from the debate voters want about where to take the country. The Clinton and Obama campaigns don't want a never-ending firefight that leaves an opening for another candidate like Edwards. The Edwards campaign doesn't want to be left out as the third wheel in a two-candidate race. The rest of the field, already starved for money and attention, doesn't want to achieve Mike Gravel status as the finest presidential candidate voters can't name.

If the campaigns are smart, this past week won't produce a surge of infighting, but a rush to substance instead. Clinton and Richardson were right to object that Geffen's snarky comments were out of bounds. Obama is right to want to avoid another sideshow. Now the campaigns can fast forward to the main attraction—a battle of ideas about the future.

Presidential campaigns often take a long time to sort out the trivial from the profound. Ironically, this week's dustup may help accelerate the process of realizing what really matters, by highlighting what doesn't. Next January, no one in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina will care who won Hollywood or who lost David Geffen. Out there, the voters are already a step ahead—they don't even care about that now. ... 11:08 P.M. (link)

Tuesday, Feb. 13, 2007

Don't Try This at Home: Hell didn't freeze over last week, but the Potomac did. If the next George Washington wanted to skip a silver dollar across the Potomac, this past weekend would have been the time to do it.

Some people in Washington walk on water. My family has a slightly different calling—to fall through ice. I grew up in North Idaho, near the Canadian border, and every cold snap, my father would throw his skates, hockey stick, and golden retriever in the car, and head off to the nearest lake or pond in search of new ice. Sometimes he returned with wet feet; at least twice a year, he came back shivering, half-frozen, and soaked from head to toe.

We never asked my father why he routinely risked his life this way for us. Our only question was whether he or the dog would fall in first.

My father is still at it at 78, restrained less by age than by global warming. My grandfather before him had the same flash-frozen impulse. He believed the best cure for a winter cold was to go outside, and thin ice was the reason God invented brandy.

I am a pale shadow of those hearty frontiersmen, and since Washington is essentially a Southern town, I've never been sure to what degree I inherited their suicidal tendency. But after this past week, I know: I'm a case of hypothermia waiting to happen.

All last week on my commute to work, I found myself weaving from lane to lane, staring out at the unbroken expanse of ice from Roosevelt Island to National Airport. Near the Jefferson Memorial, I would slow to a crawl, imagining myself gliding across the Tidal Basin. When birds perched serenely on the ice, I couldn't fully appreciate the beauty of the scene, because I felt a primal urge to risk my neck and go join them.

Unfortunately, I soon discovered a problem, a risk my youth in the great North woods hadn't trained me to face. Skating in places like the Tidal Basin isn't just foolhardy; it also appears to be against the law.

That's my hunch, at least, based on my past experiences in Washington. A decade ago, I took my daughter for a quick skate on the reflecting pool in front of the Capitol. The water was only a foot deep and frozen solid, so I wasn't putting her in any immediate danger. We had a great time, but I was glad she was too young to read the signs that said, "No Skating."

Last winter, our family enjoyed a lovely afternoon of skating on the C&O Canal. No signs were posted, and the ice was plenty thick, once you hopped over a small patch of open water near the edge. We were just untying our skates after an hour of hockey when a park ranger screamed at us to get off the ice and lectured us that skating was forbidden.

Skating wasn't always a high crime in Washington. Judging from old photographs, ice skating used to be commonplace on the Tidal Basin and even on the Potomac. According to the Park Service's official history, swimming in the Tidal Basin was allowed until the 1920s, when authorities banned it because of health risks caused by river debris and because of "racist policies which limited use of the beach to whites only." Fifty years later, Rep. Wilbur Mills's career tanked there when a stripper not his wife, Annabell Battistella—aka Fanne Fox, "the Argentine Firecracker"—clawed her way out of his car, ignored the swimming ban, and leaped into the Tidal Basin.

The Washington Post account of that episode is one of the finest front-page scandals in journalistic history. The Post asked doctors at St. Elizabeths why the Argentine Firecracker had gone off, and concluded: "Although police described Mrs. Battistella's leap into the Tidal Basin as a suicide attempt, hospital officials said the physicians who examined her did not think it was a 'genuine' suicide attempt."

That's the same way I feel about skating on the Tidal Basin—it wouldn't be a genuine suicide attempt, just a career-ending one likely to land me in a mental hospital.

From the standpoint of public safety—and tourist management—the prohibition on skating makes perfect sense. The Tidal Basin is supposed to showcase a national monument, not an attractive nuisance. Last week, the Park Police had to send in a SWAT team to rescue a seagull that was frozen in the ice on the Tidal Basin. The bird was released on its own recognizance.

But I also know what my father and grandfather would say about such laws. To them, the "No Fishing" and "Alcoholic Beverages Prohibited" signs along the Tidal Basin would be more than enough proof that skating is not expressly forbidden. They might even argue they were doing the public a service by double-checking ice safety—first by skating on it themselves, then by inspiring a park ranger to chase across it to arrest them.

I may never be half the man my father and grandfather were, but I am determined to be every bit the fool. So this weekend, I decided to take the plunge. First, I called the National Park Service's C&O Canal ice-skating hot line. A recorded voice began by declaring, "This message is valid for the 2004-05 winter season," stressed the importance of "self-rescue," and ended with the disturbing words: "Falling into any depth of water during the winter can lead to hypothermia, drowning, and death. Beep." The voice also reluctantly admitted that ice skating was allowed "unless specifically closed by signs."

People who see the glass as half-melted might not be encouraged by a three-year-old recording ending in certain death. To any glass-half-frozen type, however, that message screamed, "Come on down!" And sure enough, the ice on the canal was so thick, there wasn't a ranger in sight. My dog trembled like she'd called the hot line, but my son and daughter enjoyed our Hans Brinker moment.

That still left me the Tidal Basin and the Potomac to conquer and a legacy of foolishness to uphold. Break the law, or break the ice? In the end, I decided to take my chances with nature, passing up the Tidal Basin and dipping my toe in the Potomac instead.

On the path down to the river, I felt a twinge of doubt after passing a man who had two things I did not: a wetsuit—and a kayak. But doubt soon turned to superiority: If there's one thing dumber than trying to skate on a frozen river, it's trying to kayak on one.

At the shoreline, I tested the ice with my hockey stick. It was 3-4 inches thick, right on the border between safe and sorry. Still, a few steps couldn't hurt. I tiptoed a few feet offshore, listening for cracks. I went a few more feet, pausing to wonder what the people on shore who had stopped to watch were hoping would happen. That stretch of the Potomac is about 500 yards wide. At the rate I was inching, I'd reach the other side by nightfall.

With a wetsuit on and Wilbur Mills at my heels, I might have braved the crossing. But I was satisfied with my own foolishness after the first 15 feet. Just before I turned back, I saw a sign on the bank upriver: "Stop. Dam Ahead. Dangerous Undertow. Get to Shore." I scoffed at the summer folly of trying to outswim a riptide. Even so, getting ashore seemed like solid advice year-round. ... 12:48 P.M. (link)

Wednesday, Feb. 7, 2007

When I'm 1964: The far right used to inspire fear, not pity, but these days it's hard not to feel a little sorry for the conservative faithful. For a movement accustomed to morning in America, the hour is closer to midnight. First, a Republican Congress betrayed them for pieces of silver. Then a Republican administration ran their ideas into the ground. Now, when they need a conservative messiah, the bundle on their doorstep is Rudy Giuliani, who endorsed Bill Clinton's assault-weapons ban and Mario Cuomo's re-election campaign at the height of the Republican revolution in 1994.

Conservatives have not yet begun to ache. In coming months, they'll have to listen as Giuliani and his fellow gypsy moth Mitt Romney pretend not to be what they've spent the last decade pretending to be. The savior conservatives want is Newt Gingrich—but even with their movement tied to the railroad tracks, the right's Dudley Do-Right waits to ride to the rescue.

Ralph Reed may be content to settle for cheap knockoffs, but real conservatives deserve the real thing. The answer, as always, is in their past.

Most conservatives agree that the key moment in the history of their movement was Barry Goldwater's landslide loss in 1964. In defeat, conservatives found the courage to be ultra: "Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

Those were the days. The years since have brought conservatives one disappointment after another. In 1964, conservatives were finally comfortable in the minority. Then Democrats ruined everything by losing one presidential landslide after another themselves. The far right was stuck with a string of Republican presidents who governed often but not well.

In 2008, the conservative movement should go back to doing what it used to do best: losing. If governing turned out to be no virtue for the right, then defeat should be no vice. Instead of trying to decide which Republican can win the chance to disappoint them again as president, conservatives should remember 1964 and rally behind the candidate who can lose the biggest landslide.

The great conservative icon Joseph Schumpeter referred to this process as "creative destruction." In memory of Goldwater, the right can call it the Phoenix Project: In order to rise from the ashes, you must first throw yourself upon the flames.

If Bush could run again, a crushing landslide would be inevitable. The way the current administration is going, any Republican in the field might be able to lead the party to defeat in November 2008. But conservatives should know better by now than to entrust their fate to George W. Bush. If the future of their movement depends on an electoral blowout, conservatives must nominate a Republican they can count on to lose everywhere.

Wingers, behold! I have found the man to lead you back into the political wilderness. He's a fighter. He will not bend to those liberal demons of evidence or reason. He will say and do the outrageous, with a fervor and gusto the right hasn't seen in a decade or longer. Best of all, he will lose—quite possibly by the largest electoral margin in American history.

So, on behalf of the great state of Idaho and all four of its electoral votes, let me be the first to nominate for president a man who loves conservatism so much he would destroy the Republican Party to save it, my freshman congressman, Bill Sali.

Now, ultraconservatives are a suspicious lot and won't swoon for a guy just because he represents the nuttiest congressional district in America. But it's not just local pride that makes me confident Sali would soon sweep them off their feet. On the issues that matter, his ultraconservative credentials compare favorably to anyone else in the Republican field or on the sidelines:

Abortion: Giuliani is pro-choice, McCain is more interested in national security, and Romney is macrobiotic on the issue: He lives off whatever opinions are grown locally. Bill Sali has a perfect pro-life record and insists that abortion causes breast cancer—even saying as much to women who've had breast cancer.

Experience: Giuliani ran the biggest urban bureaucracy in America. McCain has been in Congress for a quarter-century. Romney signed a universal health-care bill in Massachusetts. Bill Sali has the kind of experience their money can't buy—namely, none whatsoever. He has been in Congress a month. He spent 16 years as a state legislator, which makes him twice as qualified as Abraham Lincoln – and since it was in the Idaho state legislature, there's no danger he'll take the GOP off on progressive tangents like Lincoln. Last time I checked, Sali's webpage on "Legislative Issues" was a conservative's dream come true—completely empty.

Strength: Giuliani backed down from a race against Hillary Clinton. McCain refused to slime George Bush's character in the South Carolina primary. Romney lost to Ted Kennedy. Bill Sali made his fellow Republicans in Idaho so mad that one trashed him to the papers and another tried to throw him out the window. When the Weekly Standard asked about his internecine feuds, Sali gave the right's favorite answer: He blamed the media.

Extremism: As soon as the primaries are over, Giuliani, McCain, and Romney will run to the middle. Bill Sali won his congressional primary with 26 percent—the most conservative quarter of one of the most conservative state parties in the country. But Sali stuck to his guns in the general and didn't lose them when he came to Washington. He's comfortable in his own skin—and, more important to the conservative movement, comfortable being all alone. Last week, he told a right-wing blogger, "I'm not responsible for the Republican brand. I'm responsible for me."

Sali's colleagues recognize his potential. They already elected him president of the House Republican freshman class. But it would be a shame to let Sali's florid conservatism wither on the vine in Congress. Already, the poor fellow has found himself apologizing for the administration—pointing out that "cost overruns during a time of war are as old as the Republic" and defending Bush's record on climate change, rather than asking whether climate change is worth the hype.

Republicans are so used to winning Idaho that they have forgotten Idaho's ability to help them lose everywhere else. If conservatives are so mad they want to throw the Republican Party out the window, Bill Sali could be just the ticket. ... 12:42 P.M. (link)

Saturday, Feb. 3, 2007

Profit of Doom: Punxsutawney Phil says we're in for a short winter but a long campaign. Although the nominations won't be decided until this time next year, candidates in both parties are already at full sprint. If a day is a lifetime in politics, then the campaign ahead is as long as all of human history since the last Ice Age—and will end just in time for the next one. (In the ultimate product tie-in, the gloomy new U.N. report on climate change came out the same week Fox announced it's going forward with Ice Age 3.)

The reason a long campaign feels like an eternity is not that we tire of the candidates. The frontrunners are still, in Sen. Clinton's phrase, famous but little-known; the long shots are just little-known. This is the getting-to-know-you phase, and for the most part, a friendly, curious country enjoys getting to know them all.

The real agony of the long windup is the endless, intense speculation about aspects of the campaign that don't much matter or aren't that interesting if they do. The next several months will be to politics what the last two weeks have been to football—flood-the-zone coverage of the game before the players even finish warming up.

Of course, we devour every detail anyway, and talk it to death around the water cooler and in our blogs. But in our hearts, we know that victory will depend on the quarterback, not the long snapper. As the Washington Post says in its profile of Chicago Bears center Patrick Mannelly, "There is no glory in bending over ..."

At this stage in the cycle, the three most closely watched measures of campaign progress are money, organization, and endorsements. The first two are important (you can't win without them) but overrated (you'll lose if you think they're enough). The last measure is unimportant and overrated. And let's face it—all three are pretty boring. The long snapper's job begins to sound interesting compared to its political counterpart, the numbing and thankless task of raising and spending $100 million.

But at least in the end, money and organization matter. Endorsements only matter when they backfire. They should carry a disclaimer that says, "Warning: Endorsing can be hazardous to a campaign's health."

Most endorsements make no difference whatsoever. Michael Jordan is one of the greatest pitchmen on the planet and has made a fabulous living on product endorsements. Yet in the 2000 campaign, his much-ballyhooed entrée into politics to endorse Bill Bradley didn't boost sales whatsoever.

Some of the most highly sought endorsements have turned out to be political fiascoes. When I worked on Al Gore's 1988 campaign, his legendary political consultant David Garth considered it a coup to win Mayor Ed Koch's endorsement in the New York primary. But every time Koch opened his mouth, he'd say something Gore would have to disavow. The Gore campaign spent its final days scheduling events at take-out counters in Little Italy and elsewhere, on the apparent theory that Hizzoner would have more trouble sounding off if we kept stuffing his mouth full of cannoli.

But one category of endorsements is interesting: those that campaigns pursue knowing full well they could be deadly. In 2002, Joe Klein wrote a classic Slate piece on "the Shrum Primary"—the scramble to see which campaign would end up with consultant Bob Shrum, whose track record in presidential elections to that point was 0 and 7 lifetime. John Kerry won the Shrum Primary that cycle, enabling its namesake to retire the record at 0-8.

There will be no Shrum Primary in 2008. But this week brought signs of a new contest in self-immolation: the Ralph Primary. Ralph Reed has a shrewd political mind and a fierce competitive spirit. And pity whichever Republican candidate wins his support, for disaster looms.

The consequences of the Shrum Primary were clearcut. Klein wrote, "If history is any guide, Shrum's choice will lose either a) the nomination or b) the general election." In the Ralph Primary, a much broader range of bad outcomes are possible. If history is any guide, Ralph's choice will either a) lose the general election (Dole), or b) win the general election on a platform that runs the country into the ground (Bush).

But unlike Shrum, whose repertoire was limited to politics, Ralph's curse extends into all walks of American life. In the 2000 campaign, George Bush and Karl Rove won the Ralph Primary, then recommended him for a $10,000 to $20,000-a month consulting contract with Enron. Bush went on to lose the popular vote, while Enron promptly suffered the most spectacular bankruptcy in American history.

Jack Abramoff won the lobbying heat of the Ralph Primary, after Ralph emailed him, "Now that I'm done with the electoral politics, I need to start humping in corporate accounts!" Four years later, Abramoff e-mailed his partner, Michael Scanlon, that Ralph was "a bad version of us! No more money for him." Ralph got rich, and now awaits his next victim; Abramoff and Scanlon got sentenced to jail.

After Ralph couldn't win his own primary in Georgia last summer, you'd think his Abramoff ties alone would keep him off any campaign, even as a consultant. But according to the Politico and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, his services are in demand, and two of the three Republican frontrunners are in the running.

Ralph told the Politico's Jonathan Martin that he's "having conversations with just about every campaign"—except McCain, whom he helped smear in the South Carolina primary in 2000. Martin says "rumors have been circulating for weeks" that Ralph will sign on with Mitt Romney. A Romney campaign spokesman issued a nondenial, calling Ralph "one of the best minds in politics," but adding that "he doesn't have a formal role in our campaign organization."

In response, Tom Baxter and Jim Galloway of the Journal-Constitution reminded readers that Ralph has a prior IOU to Rudy Giuliani, who stumped for him in Georgia. According to the Hotline, Ralph sang Giuliani's praises at a National Review dinner this past weekend. The Hotline's Chuck Todd and Marc Ambinder report, "That induced 'a number of odd looks and rolled eyes from many of the attendees,' according to our source." They don't say who was making those eyes roll more—Ralph or Giuliani.

Whichever campaign wins the Ralph Primary, the mere fact that Romney and Giuliani need Ralph Reed should be enough to disqualify them from higher office. The sad part is, Ralph would fit well in either camp. Giuliani does business with sleazeballs and seems willing to do anything to make a buck. Ditto for Ralph. Social conservatives worry that Romney is a shameless political opportunist who'll say one thing and do another. With Ralph, that's the one thing conservatives can count on.

Many of us look at Ralph Reed and see an ambitious, unprincipled buckraker. Romney and Giuliani look at Ralph Reed and see the very premise of their candidacies—the hope that an ambitious, unprincipled buckraker can con the religious right.

Rudy and Mitt won't reverse the curse; they're doomed to repeat it. In the Ralph Primary, Ralph is the sole survivor. Like casinos, the only way to win is not to play. ... 12:12 A.M. (link)

Bloggers are shocked by reports of flawed intelligence on North Korea, celebrating the achievements of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and panning Laura Sessions Stepp's take on casual sex.

Not for all the uranium in Pyongyang: Testifying before Congress Wednesday, U.S. intelligence officials distanced themselves from the Bush administration's 2002 claims that North Korea has an active uranium enrichment program. The belief in these facilities led to the unraveling of the 1994 Agreed Framework. While the existence of the uranium facilities is now in doubt, North Korea proceeded with its plutonium enrichment, conducting a nuclear test late last year.

Liberals are full of righteous anger. At Eschaton, prominent liberal Duncan Black revisits Bush's 2002 tactics. "[T]he original 'Bush doctrine' was known as 'Anything But Clinton.' Basically, if Clinton had anything to do with it, it was time to scrap it. This included a lovely little agreement which had prevented North Korea, charter member of the 'axis of evil,' from obtaining nuclear weapons," he writes. Jim, the liberal at Simply Palaver, concurs. "The odds look decent, in other words, that the administration effectively let the DPRK build nuclear weapons for absolutely no reason at all other than its generally bad attitude toward diplomatic agreements and 'stuff Bill Clinton did.' "

"It's a screw-up that staggers the mind," Joshua Micah Marshall of liberal Talking Points Memo states. "[I]t was always clear that the uranium program was far less advanced than the plutonium one, which would be ready to produce weapons soon after it was reopened. Now we learn the whole thing may have been a phantom." Houstonian moderate Daryl Hooper at Polimom is aghast. "If we're going to say that a country is part of the Axis of Evil, suspend relations, and wax belligerent, then it stands to reason that we outta be really really sure we know what we're talking about. Right?"

Wonkette, D.C.'s most reliable purveyor of snark, delivers once again: "Remember 2002, when we were all flyin' high on paranoia and dread? Those reassuring warpigs in the Bush Administration knew what we needed: more enemies with more firepower, to keep America on its toes. … We bravely we cut off North Korea's oil and they threw out the weapons inspectors. Now we're all five years older, and because things are going so swimmingly in Iraq, the Bush administration has done the gentlemanly thing and admitted that NK's never really been all that likely to enrich uranium any time soon."

Washingtonian Effwit spins this news positively. "Oddly enough, this may be a good sign. Lately the intelligence has fallen apart only after we have attacked the nation in question. Analytical rigor could be making a comeback."

Many conservatives are mum on the revelation. Conservative pundit Ed Morrissey at Captain's Quarters chides liberals who call for perfect intelligence. "Intelligence is not an exact science, and conclusions have to be drawn on spotty evidence at times. The United States cannot allow itself the luxury of academic analysis paralysis; we have to prepare to meet danger before it becomes an unassailable fact."

The Economist's Democracy in America points out that the story dates from 2005, linking to this Foreign Affairs article.

Read more about uranium enrichment (or the lack thereof) in North Korea.

Farewell, Schlesinger: Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. passed away Wednesday at age 89. In his long career, he worked as an aide to President Kennedy and won the National Book Award and two Pultizer Prizes.

Arianna Huffington of the eponymous Huffington Post fondly remembers Schlesinger, with a touching story about how he would fax his blog posts to the online news outlet. During a lunch at New York's Century Club, he asked her, "What is a blog? And what is blogging?" "So in this bastion of the Old Guard, I found myself explaining to a man who didn't do e-mail, and who considered his fax machine a revolutionary way to communicate, what blogging is. Of course, he got it instantly," she writes. Rebecca Anne Goetz at group history blog Cliopatria believes that "Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. can still serve as a model for how historians can do excellent scholarship but still write for a broader audience and engage in public service. I can't think of any historians now who serve in a similar capacity."

Writing on National Review's The Corner, Rick Brookhiser ruminates on Schlesinger's legacy. "He was an eminence as well as a historian—not, generally, a good thing for a historian to be. But let us take the sweet with the bitter—he enjoyed life, and had his fatal heart attack in a restaurant. Way to go. R.I.P."

Read more about Arthur Schlesinger's legacy.

On Unhooked: The New York Times highlights the growing controversy around Laura Sessions Stepp's new book on college girls who, she says, forsake love for casual sex. In Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both, Sessions Stepp finds that a culture of "hooking up" has invaded college campuses and hampers women's chances of entering healthy relationships. Critics have dubbed the work anti-feminist and derided it for not considering how boys are affected.

At a Bird and a Bottle, a feminist and politics blog, twentysomething New Yorker Bean trounces Sessions Stepp's findings. "For someone who calls herself a feminist, as the author does, her arguments sound suspiciously like Eric Keroack's. …Why the assumption that hookup culture may not sometimes be damaging for men and gravy for women?" The Heights, a blog of the Boston College newspaper of the same name, college student Christy Dunn is skeptical:. "[I]t seems a little alarmist to say that hooking up is killing our chances for real love because doing so makes us destroys our ability to love. Our generation did not invent hooking up. If anything, we might have just made it more out in the open."

The thirtysomething Catholic woman at Seraphic Singles is horrified by the sexual escapades of Generation Y as portrayed in the book. "One of the driving forces behind hook ups is despair. The young don't believe in romance anymore. Romance is seen as fake, patriarchal, anti-feminist and unrealistic. Sex-without-strings, however, is advertised as healthy, 'liberating' (from what? Not HPV), feminist and fun." She wonders why college students today can't "dance the Charleston, swallow goldfish and cram themselves into phone booths like their ancestors?" she asks.

Read more reaction to Laura Sessions Stepp's Unhooked. In Slate, see Meghan O'Rourke's critique of the book.

Bloggers react to the administration's surprise turnaround in negotiating with Iran and Syria over Iraq. They also split on what to think about an ex-detainee's tale of torture by the CIA, and pretty much find ridiculous that an Arizona man caught with kiddie porn gets 200 years.

Keeping it realist: In what many are regarding as the White House's belated acceptance of one of the Iraq Study Group's "realist" recommendations, the United States has announced plans to convene with envoys from Iran and Syria to discuss the chaos in Iraq. The proposed round table, coordinated and overseen by Baghdad, will include Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and State Department officials. Inquiring minds want to know, "Why now?"

Joe Gandelman at The Moderate Voice breaks down the significance as "a policy shift cocooned in the face-saving device of not quite being an about-face: the U.S. will be there, but didn't call the conference."

Conservative Michael Rubin at the National Review's The Corner doesn't think the conference necessarily signals anything, really: "Analysts often talk about different factions and power centers in Iran, and see such differences as cause for optimism. In this Baghdad conference, the U.S. will be sitting down with representatives of the Iranian foreign ministry. Whatever the factional politics, Iranian diplomats are among the least influential members of the Islamic Republic"

Matthew O'Keefe at the Gun-Toting Liberal says follow the petro-dollars: "Now that the Iraqi government has reached an agreement to share the wealth of it's very profitable oil fields it is more than okay for the evil doers in the region to sit at a table and talk with our nation. … This meeting will be about the money and not the peace."

At The Washington Note, Steve Clemmons, the left-leaning director of the American Strategy Program, New America Foundation, writes that the cue to talk to Iran and Syria "has the markings of European and Saudi stage direction. This writer has reasons to suspect that European Union High Commissioner for Common Foreign and Security Policy Javier Solana and National Security Advisor to the Saudi King Prince Bandar bin Sultan have been moving chess pieces in consultation with departing US Ambassador to Iraq and incoming US Ambassador to the United Nations Zalmay Khalilzad to make this 'neighbors meeting' work. This is a necessary but not sufficient first step in re-establishing a new and more stable equilibrium of interests in the Middle East."

And righty Ed Morrissey at Captain's Quarters weighs a few theories, not least of which suggests "Condoleezza Rice may have prevailed over the Vice President, whose influence appears to be waning in the last two years of the Bush presidency. The abrupt replacement of Donald Rumsfeld and the questionable resolution of the Korean crisis indicates a softening of the approach taken by the administration, at least in tone."

Read more about the decision to engage Iran and Syria.

"Black site" memoirs: Marwan Jabour, a self-confessed enabler of the Taliban and al-Qaida, has offered the Washington Post [note: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.] his grim story of continent-hopping imprisonment under the authority of the CIA and foreign intelligence agencies. Jabour, who was captured in Lahore, Pakistan, says he was held without charges for four years and subjected to physical and psychological torture in Afghanistan and Jordan. (Israel, he says, was the nicest place to be.)

Conservative Honza P. at Pros & Cons has little sympathy for Marwan Jabour and doesn't find the account all that scandalous: " 'Renditions' are also known as 'extradition' when advocates of multilateralism support them. It's kind of like good pork and bad pork. I guess it's only really multilateral to extradite to states that refuse to prosecute these people, or who, like Germany, think planning 9-11 warrants less that ten years in prison."

Will Malven at The Houston Conservative likewise thinks the CIA's methods are legit: "I support what the CIA is alledged to be doing. I support interrogation techniques which cause discomfort. There is a difference between torture-as in sawing the head off of a prisoner while he is still alive and awake or feeding your prisoners into a plastics grinder feet first-and using discomfort to elicit information."

However, Joanne Mariner, the terrorism and counterterrorism director at Human Rights Watch, who was quoted in the Washington Post story, adds at liberal blog The Huffington Post: "While Human Rights Watch could not corroborate the details of Jabour's story, its outlines tally with what human rights groups have documented. Prisoners in the CIA program have been 'disappeared,' held for years in acknowledged detention in secret facilities, and barred from communicating with family members, lawyers, or anyone else outside."

Read more about Jabour's story.

Doin' time: Arizona native Morton Berger, 52, who was sentenced to 200 years in jail for possessing child pornography, will not have his case heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. Both the sentence and the squashed appeal are considered outrageous in cyberspace.

Indiana native Dave Haxton at MacRaven posts: "Methinks that perhaps we have things a bit reversed here: a conviction for rape in Arizona carries a minimum of 5.25 years and a max of 14 years."

And libertarian Jacob Sullum at Reason's Hit and Run is incensed: "Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas both believe the Eighth Amendment does not require proportionality in sentencing; it merely forbids 'cruel and unusual' forms of punishment. So if Berger had been sentenced to be flayed alive or burned at the stake, they might see a constitutional problem. But as far as they're concerned, state legislatures are free to choose a prison sentence of any length for any felony—1 million years for tax evasion, say. I'm not sure whether John Roberts or Samuel Alito have taken a position on this question yet, and I could see them siding with Scalia and Thomas. But the other justices (i.e., a majority) apply at least a 'narrow proportionality principle' prohibiting 'extreme sentences that are grossly disproportionate to the crime.'"

Read more about Berger's bicentennial lock-up.

Bloggers react to the Afghanistan bombing that the Taliban claims was aimed at Dick Cheney. They also crucify James Cameron for his new Jesus documentary and weigh the gravity of Hillary's unrecorded charitable contributions.

Cheney hunted? A suicide bomber attacked a U.S. military base in Afghanistan during Vice President Dick Cheney's visit Tuesday. Cheney was unharmed, but the Taliban took credit for the bombing and said he was the target. Bloggers wonder whether the attack and Cheney's visit were just a coincidence.

Ed Morrissey at conservative Captain's Quarters notes that Cheney had just come from Pakistan, where he had tried to persuade President Pervez Musharraf to help fight Taliban forces: "The Taliban could not have done more to prove the US case to Pervez Musharraf. Cheney's presence during the attack will put even more pressure on the beleaguered Pakistani leader." Cernig at liberal NewsHog takes the Taliban's claim of responsibility on its face and says the attacks might be a warning from—not to—Pakistan: "So the big question is—in the middle of a 'secrecy-shrouded' trip to the region, who told the Taliban where Cheney would be? The most likely informants would be inside the Musharaff regime or Karzai's office, surely. Could this be a warning from the [Pakistani] ISI after Cheney tried to get tough and threaten Musharaff?"

At The Left Coaster, Steve Soto calls the attack "a perfect illustration of the administration's failed foreign policy and war on terror." In other words, it wouldn't have happened were it not for specific failures: "[T]he Taliban would not be here to attack him if Cheney and Rumsfeld had finished Bin Laden off five years ago at Tora Bora. Nor would the Taliban be in this position had Bush and Cheney not encouraged Musharraf to give Bin Laden and the Taliban a free pass out of North Waziristan back in September."

Read more about the apparent assassination attempt.

King of kings of the world: At a news conference Monday to promote his new documentary, The Lost Tomb of Jesus, Titanic director James Cameron unveiled two ossuaries discovered in 1980 that he says contain the remains of Jesus and his wife, Mary Magdalene. Cameron says statistical and DNA evidence support his claim but insists it doesn't contradict Christian beliefs that Jesus was resurrected. Bloggers aren't so sure.

Beth Gaston Moon at AOL's Blogging Stocks smells a ploy for attention: "[W]hat's the best way to move back into the limelight? Find Jesus. And not in the same way that Stephen Baldwin has." Entertainment news blog Bumpshack doesn't believe the hype, either: "James Cameron is looking for the limelight again. ... We have to remember that this tomb was found nearly thirty years ago and very few people thought much about it. Cameron didn't appear to have much actual evidence that these coffins belong to Jesus outside of the 'very common names' being on the coffins."

At Huffington Post, author and travel writer Bruce Feiler takes issue with Cameron's claim that the names on the tomb prove the connection: "21 percent of names of women are Mary; Joseph and Jesus (Joshua) are among the top four male names. The presence of these names in a tomb would not have been rare. The name Jesus has been found in dozens of tombs over the years."

Conservative Christian blogger The Anchoress laughs at Cameron's argument, but worries that it damages Christianity in many people's eyes: "These little things do chip away, it's true—they do cause people who might be considering a toe-dip into the lake of faith to draw back. They might turn one whose faith is shallow back toward the world—for approval and acceptance—but one must not fret over DaVinci Codes, and 'new gospels' and 'found tombs,' for they will never defeat. Easter Sunday will still dawn."

Read more about James Cameron finding Jesus.

That's being charitable: Sen. Hillary Clinton failed to mention her position with the Clinton Family Foundation on her Senate financial disclosure reports. The charity has allowed the Clintons to write off about $5 million in income since 2001. Bloggers are split over how innocent the mistake is.

Mother Jones' MoJo Blog expresses surprise: "After Sen. Bill Frist and Rep. Nancy Pelosi attracted attention (though no penalties) for the same oversight, it seems bizarre at best that Hillary's professional army of advisers would have neglected to report the senator's role in the foundation."

Blogging at the Washington Monthly's Political Animal, Kevin Drum flogs the Post's John Solomon for what he calls a pretty "meager" scoop. The New Republic's Jonathan Chait, writing at The Plank, is equally unimpressed: "So that's it? What exactly is the angle here? 'Clinton Office Behind on Paperwork'? 'Clinton More Generous Than She Admits'? What?"

Jeanette at Hang Right Politics suspects the worst: "It brings back the nightmares of Whitewater, cattle futures trading, lost legal paperwork miraculously discovered in the White House, FBI files of opponents being investigated and on and on ad infinitum. … One Clinton was one too many. Two would be a disaster. Let's see if this story has any legs." 186 K Per Second gets right to the point: "It Depends On What The Meaning Of Disclosure Is."

Read more about the Hillary kerfuffle.

Bloggers recap the Academy Awards, pooh-pooh the Christian right's difficulties in finding an appropriate presidential candidate, and admonish Delta Zeta for asking some minority or overweight sisters to vacate one of its sorority houses.

And the Oscar for best liberal: Al Gore was the surprise "rock star" of Sunday night's Oscars, providing viewers with the strange spectacle of Ryan Seacrest interviewing Gore about who he was wearing. (A: Ralph Lauren)

Law blogger Ann Althouse has a play-by-play of Gore's big moment: "And Al wins the Oscar!!!!! …Why did they make the film? Because of the problem of global warming??? Oh, no: 'We were moved to act by this man.' So says the director, reaching over to touch the hem of Al Gore's garment. He's gasping with awe. It's kinda embarrassing. He pumps the Oscar weirdly twice in Al's direction and he says 'We share this with you.' The camera goes to Larry David, clapping righteously. Now, Gore speaks: global warming is 'not a political issue, it's a moral issue.' I like Al. He makes his wooden squareness hip and cool."

Not everyone loved Gore. James Joyner, writing at conservative Outside the Beltway, was on to a left-wing conspiracy: "Gore joins a growing line of liberal political activists to win major awards in recent years: The Dixie Chicks, Michael Moore, and Hillary Clinton come readily to mind in the 'arts.'… One wonders how long these awards will retain their credibility? …[T]o so overtly use these awards to send a political message can't sit that well with the majority of the country to whom that message is being sent."

Vonnie-K bestowed his own awards: "Funniest Bit: Will Farrell & Jack Black hitting on Helen Mirren in song, because... wouldn't you? (…How cool is that the object of collective lust/fanboying was a woman in her 60's?) Well, tied with Leo DiCaprio's intense man-crush on Al Gore, which was kind of adorable. Most Cringe-worthy Bit: Celine fucking Dion singing 'in tribute' to the poor Ennio Morricone. Seriously, Academy? What did poor Ennio ever do to you?"

Defamer liveblogs both the style and substance of the whole affair: "6:23 [PST]: Oscar Poll FuckageWatch: Upset! Alan Arkin's cracked out grandpa beats Eddie Murphy for Supporting Actor! The Curse of the Fat Suit is in effect. Five DreamWorks publicists bite down on the cynanide capsules they'd had available for just such a disappointment. J-Hud is feeling a little less sure of herself, sweating all over the tinfoil shrug she was obviously talked into wearing by an insane stylist."

Read more about the Oscars. Slate offers a "Dialogue" about the telecast, and fashion writer Amanda Fortini and culture editor Julia Turner dish on the fashion.

So few good men: Bloggers didn't have much sympathy for the New York Times' report that the Council on National Policy, a secretive organization of Christian conservatives, is struggling to find a worthy presidential candidate.

Lynn's Daughter, a teacher and atheist of late, had a typical reaction: "Give me a moment while I find a reason to feel their desperation. Nope, still not there. My questions is, is a schism opening between republican rich war-mongers and the christians? I sure hope so. … I'm feverently hoping that the rein of superstitious nonsense is finally over. After all, this is NOT, nor was it ever intended, to be a nation founded on religion."

Conservative dentist FulloseousFlap looks down the road: "When Rudy Giuliani wraps up the GOP nomination, the KINGMAKERS of the Evangelical Christian Right MIGHT turn to a third party candidate. The only question is how marginalized and irrelevant will they become. No GOP Senator, Governor or Congressman will foresake their political career to become a GOP spoiler in '08. Flap's bet is that these folks will splinter and divide. Some will covertly support Giuliani and some will support the third party candidate."

John Lowell, commenting at progressive TruthDig, predicted that "both Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson will find a way to support the Republican nominee regardless of his or her attitude on abortion and civil unions just as long as the nominee offers no opposition to West Bank ethnic cleansing. …Typical of the ambitious in any age we have in these three birds - and in Evangelicalism in general - a fascination with bigness, big stadiums rallies, big churches, big name conversions. That a given, you can be assured that no meaningful fuss whatsoever will be raised if a Giuliani, a Romney or a Mc Cain are nominated."

And Wonkette, who might have trademarked snark, hits the nail on the head: "The Christian RightTM is having a hard time finding a Presidential candidate that hates all the right things."

Read more about the Christian right's plight here.

So much for sisterhood: Pretty much everyone agrees that the Delta Zeta sorority has set a new low for shallowness, with the news that the national officers deemed 23 members of DePauw University's chapter—including all overweight or minority members—as "insufficiently dedicated," promptly vacating them from the house.

At Rudd Sound Bites, a blog on food policy and obesity, Sarah Novak writes, "What frustrates me the most about this story is the way the national DZ organizers place blame on the young women—insulting their level of commitment to the group—instead of admitting their institutionalized pettiness. … Instead of helping to boost recruitment by accentuating the chapter's strengths, the national DZ organizers have wrought havoc to uphold their preferred stereotype."

Debbie Schlussel, a conservative political commentator from Detroit, was unsurprised by the whole debacle: "I'm all against kicking out the minorities for the sake of being minorities. But as far as kicking out the looks-challenged members, well what did they think being in a sorority was all about? …Quit whining. That's life in the campus 'Greek' system, and many other places in society. Didn't they see 'Revenge of the Nerds'?"

Sailorman, father of two daughters, sees an upside in his comments at feminist Alas, A Blog: "When i saw that i figured it was intelligence, not racism: [the] students were in the 'smart' set and unwilling to devote their lives to becoming vapid beautiful mannequins out to get men. … The crucial thing to remember is that being 'insufficiently committed' is, in this case, a compliment."

Read more about the Delta Zeta sorority evictions.

The Washington Post, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times lead with the Army firing the commander of Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The Army said it had "lost trust and confidence" in Maj. Gen. George W. Weightman's ability to fix the problems plaguing wounded soldiers at outpatient facilities. But news that Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley was chosen to temporarily replace Weightman raised more than a few eyebrows, a fact the NYT fails to mention. Kiley was commander of Walter Reed until 2004, and many claim he was aware of the problems at the medical center but did nothing to improve the situation.

The WSJ tops its world-wide newsbox with word that North Korea's No. 2 leader reiterated his country's pledge to denuclearize. The statements came out of high-level talks with South Korea, where North Korea was seeking a resumption of aid. USA Today leads with a look at colleges that are banning smoking all over campus, including outdoor areas. So far, at least 43 colleges across the country have instituted the ban, and some think it is a rising trend. "Smokers still have rights, but just not on our campus," said the president of one of the universities.

A WP story yesterday said Kiley was told in 2003 that wounded soldiers were often neglected at Walter Reed, and he, along with many others, ignored the complaints. His successor in 2004 was retired Maj. Gen. Kenneth L. Farmer Jr., who said he was aware of outpatient problems and claims he informed Kiley of the issues. Weightman took over in August.

After the WP series came out, Kiley vehemently disputed the "one-sided representation" of the situation at Walter Reed. "While we have some issues here, this is not a horrific, catastrophic failure at Walter Reed," he said. Appointing Kiley "indicates that the Army's reshuffle is really about projecting the appearance of accountability, not punishing those most responsible," says a WP editorial. According to military officials, there have been others reassigned from their duties at Walter Reed, including a captain and four noncommissioned officers.