Jimmy Jazz Politics and More

In which Form Defeats Substance for the Soul of the Republican Party

2012-01-22T20:25:00.000-08:00

The definition of insanity is repeating the same mistake over and over, expecting different results. By that measure the Republicans sure are acting insane. To the extent that they have any substantive ideas heading into this presidential election, they are the same ideas that failed under Bush: trickle-down tax cuts for the rich (now supposed to balance the budget and create jobs), deregulation, disentitlement, belligerence in foreign affairs. But more fundamentally, the Republicans aren’t really campaigning on ideas, just attitude. And it could easily be argued that attitude as a substitute for ideas has also failed – failed America as an approach for dealing with the complicated problems our country faces, and even failed the Republican Party as an electoral strategy. No matter, it seems the Republicans would rather lose with attitude than win with ideas. Playing the victim fires up their base even more when they lose. What is alarming is that they seem ready to take the country down this insane road with them.

the keystone pipeline

2012-01-19T18:21:00.000-08:00

A lot of the arguments both for and against the pipeline are hollow.

Denying the permit for this pipeline won’t have any effect on global climate change. It won’t stop those Canadian oil sands from being developed; it won’t even stop that oil from being shipped to the United States by pipeline, just maybe by a different route. Trying to reduce hydrocarbon consumption is a much more practical way to combat global warming than some whack amole effort to limit production.

But building the pipeline won’t improve “energy security” (whatever that means) or oil prices either. That oil will reach the world market one way or another, and world oil prices are fixed by OPEC. Anyone who thinks that oil from this pipeline will cost a penny less than from Iran or anywhere else, after differences in shipping and refining costs are factored in, is, to quote Newt Gingrich, stupid. And if we’re concerned about “energy security,” obviously the smartest thing for us would be to help every other country in the world pump their oil as fast as possible, so that as global reserves shrink, our percentage of what’s left grows. The stupidest thing from the point of view of dependence on foreign suppliers is to pump out all of our own oil as fast as possible. Canada, our most important and most reliable ally, should be our partner in this too.

What about government regulations interfering with the free market? Here there’s a really important point to be made. The owners of this pipeline should be required to pay all of the costs, including environmental costs. An environmental impact assessment needs to be done, by an impartial outside body and not by the pipeline owners themselves as was the case, I understand, with Keystone, and the owners should be required to set money aside or buy insurance up front to provide against any actual or potential environmental damage. We can’t keep letting energy companies stick taxpayers with the bill for the environmental damage they cause. That isn’t market capitalism, it is theft. Conversely, keeping the pipeline owners responsible for all of the costs of their investment will let market forces guide them to find the safest possible route for the pipeline.

Jobs? Constructing the pipeline will provide good but temporary jobs. So will other critical infrastructure investments, like bridges, highways and ports. Let the pipeline go forward, as safely as possible, but let’s get going with all these other projects too.

The President Surrenders

2011-08-01T06:37:00.000-07:00

The New York Times

July 31, 2011

The President Surrenders

By PAUL KRUGMAN

A deal to raise the federal debt ceiling is in the works. If it goes through, many commentators will declare that disaster was avoided. But they will be wrong.

For the deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party. It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status.

Start with the economics. We currently have a deeply depressed economy. We will almost certainly continue to have a depressed economy all through next year. And we will probably have a depressed economy through 2013 as well, if not beyond.

The worst thing you can do in these circumstances is slash government spending, since that will depress the economy even further. Pay no attention to those who invoke the confidence fairy, claiming that tough action on the budget will reassure businesses and consumers, leading them to spend more. It doesn’t work that way, a fact confirmed by many studies of the historical record.

Indeed, slashing spending while the economy is depressed won’t even help the budget situation much, and might well make it worse. On one side, interest rates on federal borrowing are currently very low, so spending cuts now will do little to reduce future interest costs. On the other side, making the economy weaker now will also hurt its long-run prospects, which will in turn reduce future revenue. So those demanding spending cuts now are like medieval doctors who treated the sick by bleeding them, and thereby made them even sicker.

And then there are the reported terms of the deal, which amount to an abject surrender on the part of the president. First, there will be big spending cuts, with no increase in revenue. Then a panel will make recommendations for further deficit reduction — and if these recommendations aren’t accepted, there will be more spending cuts.

Republicans will supposedly have an incentive to make concessions the next time around, because defense spending will be among the areas cut. But the G.O.P. has just demonstrated its willingness to risk financial collapse unless it gets everything its most extreme members want. Why expect it to be more reasonable in the next round?

In fact, Republicans will surely be emboldened by the way Mr. Obama keeps folding in the face of their threats. He surrendered last December, extending all the Bush tax cuts; he surrendered in the spring when they threatened to shut down the government; and he has now surrendered on a grand scale to raw extortion over the debt ceiling. Maybe it’s just me, but I see a pattern here.

Did the president have any alternative this time around? Yes.

First of all, he could and should have demanded an increase in the debt ceiling back in December. When asked why he didn’t, he replied that he was sure that Republicans would act responsibly. Great call.

And even now, the Obama administration could have resorted to legal maneuvering to sidestep the debt ceiling, using any of several options. In ordinary circumstances, this might have been an extreme step. But faced with the reality of what is happening, namely raw extortion on the part of a party that, after all, only controls one house of Congress, it would have been totally justifiable.

At the very least, Mr. Obama could have used the possibility of a legal end run to strengthen his bargaining position. Instead, however, he ruled all such options out from the beginning.

But wouldn’t taking a tough stance have worried markets? Probably not. In fact, if I were an investor I would be reassured, not dismayed, by a demonstration that the president is willing and able to stand up to blackmail on the part of right-wing extremists. Instead, he has chosen to demonstrate the opposite.

Make no mistake about it, what we’re witnessing here is a catastrophe on multiple levels.

It is, of course, a political catastrophe for Democrats, who just a few weeks ago seemed to have Republicans on the run over their plan to dismantle Medicare; now Mr. Obama has thrown all that away. And the damage isn’t over: there will be more choke points where Republicans can threaten to create a crisis unless the president surrenders, and they can now act with the confident expectation that he will.

In the long run, however, Democrats won’t be the only losers. What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question. After all, how can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nation’s economic security, gets to dictate policy? And the answer is, maybe it can’t.

Families Also Need to be Careful Not to Cut Spending Too Fast

2011-07-08T06:43:00.000-07:00

Spending cuts jeopardize a fragile economy the same way tax increases do. If we can't afford tax increases, we also can't afford huge spending cuts. Second, ending the entitlement guarantees that millions of seniors depend on wouldn't "solve the problem" at all, just create a whole host of new ones. Third, this Congress has no right to tie the hands of every Congress that follows it. Let's set modest, achieveable deficit reduction targets.

Tea Party Tax Increases

2011-06-30T15:00:00.000-07:00

Tea party Republicans in Congress are going to have to vote for tax increases. The fact is, even in God's greatest democracy ever, you can't get everything you dream up that you think you want. Tea partyers cried fire in a crowded theater, but now they refuse to do what it takes to put the alleged fire out. You got what you wanted, everybody agrees that the deficit is too high. So now, you have to raise taxes to lower it.

Obama not pro-Israel enough?

2011-06-29T14:54:00.000-07:00

We are already paying a high price for supporting Israel, and getting nothing but scorn in return. Shall we increase the hundreds of thousands of our children we've already sent to fight and die to defend Israel's security? Shall we add to the billions of dollars in cash we already give Israel every year, among other things buying Israelis universal health care that we can't even afford for ourselves? Please, if it isn't enough, vote Republican.

Handicapping the Republican Field: Part I, the Top Tier

2011-06-23T18:11:00.000-07:00

THE NEW YORK TIMES
JUNE 23, 2011, 4:31 PM

Handicapping the Republican Field: Part I, the Top Tier
By NATE SILVER

It is too soon to apply a purely objective approach to forecasting the outcome of the Republican primaries. But I do not think that it is too soon to start getting specific about the chances that we might assign to each candidate. Most of the crucial candidates have kicked off their campaigns. Debates are being held, the Iowa Straw Poll is only about 50 days away, and one candidate has already begun running commercials in Iowa.
What will follow, in a three-part series, is the way I would handicap the Republican field as of today. In this piece, we’ll look at the four top candidates, in my view.
The odds listed below are based on a combination of objective and subjective factors. I’m constantly thinking about the Republican field in this fashion, comparing the odds I’d assign to each candidate with those that are available, for instance, according to betting markets like Intrade. Although I’m reluctant to publish specific numbers without the backing of a formal statistical model, I thought I should be explicit about sharing my thought process with you. This is also a good excuse to touch at least briefly upon each candidate, including some whom I might not have written about for some time.
The Republican contenders currently sort themselves into five relatively neat groups or tiers, although one group consists of a single candidate. That candidate, Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, has broken away from the pack and is the front-runner.

The Front-Runner

Mitt Romney, 3-2 odds against (40 percent chance of winning nomination)

Mr. Romney is perceived as having run a slow-and-steady campaign — but he’s made the largest gains of any Republican candidate in the last two months, to an average of 26 percent of the vote in polls conducted in June from 18 percent in those conducted in April. Some of this is a result of other Republican candidates dropping from the field. Yet while candidates like Tim Pawlenty and Newt Gingrich have remained flat in polling, Mr. Romney has gained ground.
In fact, when I run Mr. Romney’s numbers through our purely objective model — which needs to be taken with ample grains of salt but can, perhaps, provide a useful starting point — it gives him pretty close to a 50-50 chance of being the Republican nominee. Historically, once a candidate’s polling gets into the high 20s or the low 30s, he can be thought of as a legitimate front-runner, rather than first among equals.
I list Mr. Romney as having only about a 40 percent chance of winning, however, because of the concerns over how his health care bill might play out once voters become more exposed to it, and his apparent reluctance to fully engage in Iowa.
But Mr. Romney also has some factors working in his favor. He’s a former governor, and governors historically outperform their polling. He has run a campaign for president before, something few other Republican candidates have done. He has something of a firewall in New Hampshire, where his polling is very strong. He does well when it comes to raising money.
And Mr. Romney can point toward polls showing him running reasonably well against President Obama — some polls show him roughly tied against Mr. Obama, for instance, something that is not really true for any of the other candidates. Although I don’t think these head-to-head polls have much predictive value at this early stage, that doesn’t mean they can’t make for good talking points.
Mr. Romney (perhaps along with Jon Huntsman) already seems to be speaking as much to a general-election audience as to Republican voters. That strategy implicitly emphasizes the candidate’s “inevitability” and encourages voters to look forward to November. It can backfire: recall what happened to Hillary Rodham Clinton four years ago. But my guess is that the weaker Mr. Obama’s position seems to be (and it’s weaker now after a month of poor economic numbers), the more those arguments will resonate with Republican voters.
Following Mr. Romney are three candidates who, while not quite sharing his position of strength, have the most control over their electoral destinies.

The First Tier

Tim Pawlenty, 9-2 odds against (18 percent chance of winning nomination)

I’ve generally considered myself to be somewhat bearish on Mr. Pawlenty’s candidacy, mostly out of concern that he lacked the raw political talent to differentiate himself from the pack. In some ways, these concerns might seem to have been validated by the last couple of months. Mr. Pawlenty’s polling has barely improved, despite increasing name recognition. He missed an opportunity to attack Mr. Romney during the Republican debate in New Hampshire last week. And he has a potential problem in the form of Rick Perry, who could adopt a somewhat similar strategy and compete for some of the same voters and resources.
Still, at the price being offered at Intrade, which gives Mr. Pawlenty just a 10 percent chance of becoming the nominee, I think he is an attractive buy. Along with Mr. Romney, he’s been running a full-fledged campaign from the get-go — really, since the day the 2008 campaign ended — which could pay all sorts of “intangible” dividends down the road, from having a staff capable of weathering speed bumps to doing well in states like Iowa that require a candidate to have a lot of roots in the ground.
His ideological positioning is very close to that of the median Republican voter, and polls find that a very high percentage of the Republican electorate considers him an acceptable (if not necessarily exciting) nominee. He’s a former governor and one who has run in a couple of competitive campaigns. And he clearly has a decent chance to win Iowa, particularly if Mr. Romney fails to commit fully.

Rick Perry, 7-1 odds against (12.5 percent chance of winning nomination)

If Mr. Perry were to announce this afternoon that he was running, I’d list him and Mr. Pawlenty at roughly equal odds to win the nomination. Both have traditional credentials and can appeal to a fairly large segment of the Republican electorate. Both have some geographic advantages — Mr. Pawlenty’s potential strength in Iowa, and Mr. Perry’s in the South.
That isn’t to say that the two candidates are identical. Mr. Perry is a little more dynamic on the stump and might prove to be the better fund-raiser, whereas Mr. Pawlenty (even if Mr. Perry enters the race) will benefit from having begun his campaign earlier and may be perceived as being more electable. I’d view these factors as essentially canceling one another out.
But Mr. Perry is not yet fully committed to running — an adviser told Politico that the chances were closer to 50-50. I suspect the odds are a touch better than that — Mr. Perry’s interest in the campaign is clearly more than casual, and it’s not a bad sign that a candidate is doing his due diligence. Still, it’s too soon to take for granted that he must be written into the script. Also, if and when Mr. Perry decides to run, he will be subject to more scrutiny than he is receiving currently. It is not obvious, for example, that Republican thought leaders will hold him in the same high regard that they do Mr. Pawlenty.

Michele Bachmann, 15-2 odds against (12 percent chance of winning nomination)

Ms. Bachmann has averaged 7 percent of the vote in polls conducted so far in June — a slight improvement from a couple of months ago, but not a terrific performance. That does not distinguish, however, between polls conducted before and after last week’s Republican debate, where she performed very well and announced her candidacy. The only post-debate poll that meets our methodological standards had Ms. Bachmann surging to 19 percent of the vote (although the poll did not include Sarah Palin). Her standing has also improved significantly in some state-level polls.
My view is that if Ms. Bachmann’s polling settles into the mid-teens, she will have elevated herself from being a wild card to being a legitimate contender for the Republican nomination. In fact, there is probably some upside in the numbers: her name recognition is not yet universal (62 percent of Republicans could identify her in the most recent round of Gallup polls), and as it grows, she may gain support from low-information voters who had previously expressed a preference for well-known politicians like Sarah Palin or Newt Gingrich.
Of course, her candidacy has its issues. One is that she is a member of the House of Representatives, and members of the House don’t have a very good track record in primary campaigns. I don’t think this is a major drawback. My analysis suggests that while governors perform better than members of Congress there is little difference between how senators and members of the House perform, relative to their polling. And Ms. Bachmann has essentially been a nationalized figure for several years; she is the leader of the Tea Party Caucus, and her re-election campaigns have drawn tens of millions of dollars in contributions, tantamount to what a Senate or gubernatorial candidate would normally receive.
The more significant barrier is that Republicans might be worried about her chances in a general election. Ms. Bachmann’s voting record, according to the objective system DW-Nominate, is roughly as far from the middle of the electorate as George McGovern’s was in 1972 — and her red-meat rhetoric does nothing to disguise those positions. If Ms. Bachmann won Iowa, there would be an effort to rally around some more moderate alternative, most likely the candidate who wins New Hampshire.
Ms. Bachmann could get lucky if the establishment vote is stalemated between two or more alternatives — for example, Mr. Romney and Mr. Pawlenty — while she monopolizes votes from the conservative wing. But most likely, she will need to be at the top of her game to survive this.
It’s far from out of the question that she might pull it off. Ms. Bachmann’s favorability ratings aren’t terrible — in fact, they’re basically identical to Mr. Pawlenty’s. So the critiques about her electability may not be able to rely on the same hard evidence that they would, for example, in the case of Sarah Palin. In addition, Ms. Bachmann seems to have a strategy to address the arguments. In last week’s debate, she spoke confidently about the idea that Mr. Obama would be a one-term president — challenging conservatives to maximize the amount of ideological ground they might gain since he is bound to lose anyway. (Essentially, this is the opposite of the argument that a candidate like Mr. Romney might make, who will cite Mr. Obama’s vulnerability as reason to nominate a more moderate candidate.)
Ms. Bachmann has a lot of natural talent, as was on display during the debate. Unlike Ms. Palin, she seems to recognize that it takes a village to run a presidential campaign, having surrounded herself with competent advisers like Ed Rollins, who managed Mike Huckabee’s overachieving campaign in 2008. Even those who are skeptical about her candidacy would probably concede that she has a good chance of winning Iowa, where she was born and will devote much of her attention.
It’s hard to say exactly how much value Republicans will place on electability. But “extreme” candidates like Mr. McGovern and Barry Goldwater have received their party’s nominations before, and the conditions for a repeat of these circumstances are probably better than average. My view is that there is about a 1-in-5 chance that Mr. Obama will benefit from running against such a candidate, with Ms. Bachmann being the most likely of those alternatives.

We’ll look at the next tier of Republican candidates in the next part of the series.

Is Huntsman Moderate?

2011-06-21T05:37:00.000-07:00

Besides having been Ambassador to China under President Obama, Huntsman was also Deputy U.S. Trade Representative under President George W. Bush, Ambassador to Singapore under Pres. George H.W. Bush, and even worked in the Reagan White House. Adding that to his time as Governor of Utah, the picture that emerges is of a bureaucratic chameleon who got where he is by blowing with the wind. It will be a monumental task to get him to reveal any personal opinions at all.

Advances in Military Drones

2011-06-20T07:08:00.000-07:00

War Evolves With Drones, Some Tiny as Bugs

By ELISABETH BUMILLER and THOM SHANKER
The New York Times
Published: June 19, 2011

WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio — Two miles from the cow pasture where the Wright Brothers learned to fly the first airplanes, military researchers are at work on another revolution in the air: shrinking unmanned drones, the kind that fire missiles into Pakistan and spy on insurgents in Afghanistan, to the size of insects and birds.
The base’s indoor flight lab is called the “microaviary,” and for good reason. The drones in development here are designed to replicate the flight mechanics of moths, hawks and other inhabitants of the natural world. “We’re looking at how you hide in plain sight,” said Greg Parker, an aerospace engineer, as he held up a prototype of a mechanical hawk that in the future might carry out espionage or kill.
Half a world away in Afghanistan, Marines marvel at one of the new blimplike spy balloons that float from a tether 15,000 feet above one of the bloodiest outposts of the war, Sangin in Helmand Province. The balloon, called an aerostat, can transmit live video — from as far as 20 miles away — of insurgents planting homemade bombs. “It’s been a game-changer for me,” Capt. Nickoli Johnson said in Sangin this spring. “I want a bunch more put in.”
From blimps to bugs, an explosion in aerial drones is transforming the way America fights and thinks about its wars. Predator drones, the Cessna-sized workhorses that have dominated unmanned flight since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, are by now a brand name, known and feared around the world. But far less widely known are the sheer size, variety and audaciousness of a rapidly expanding drone universe, along with the dilemmas that come with it.
The Pentagon now has some 7,000 aerial drones, compared with fewer than 50 a decade ago. Within the next decade the Air Force anticipates a decrease in manned aircraft but expects its number of “multirole” aerial drones like the Reaper — the ones that spy as well as strike — to nearly quadruple, to 536. Already the Air Force is training more remote pilots, 350 this year alone, than fighter and bomber pilots combined.
“It’s a growth market,” said Ashton B. Carter, the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer.
The Pentagon has asked Congress for nearly $5 billion for drones next year, and by 2030 envisions ever more stuff of science fiction: “spy flies” equipped with sensors and microcameras to detect enemies, nuclear weapons or victims in rubble. Peter W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and the author of “Wired for War,” a book about military robotics, calls them “bugs with bugs.”
In recent months drones have been more crucial than ever in fighting wars and terrorism. The Central Intelligence Agency spied on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan by video transmitted from a new bat-winged stealth drone, the RQ-170 Sentinel, otherwise known as the “Beast of Kandahar,” named after it was first spotted on a runway in Afghanistan. One of Pakistan’s most wanted militants, Ilyas Kashmiri, was reported dead this month in a C.I.A. drone strike, part of an aggressive drone campaign that administration officials say has helped paralyze Al Qaeda in the region — and has become a possible rationale for an accelerated withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan. More than 1,900 insurgents in Pakistan’s tribal areas have been killed by American drones since 2006, according to the Web site www.longwarjournal.com.
In April the United States began using armed Predator drones against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces in Libya. Last month a C.I.A.-armed Predator aimed a missile at Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical American-born cleric believed to be hiding in Yemen. The Predator missed, but American drones continue to patrol Yemen’s skies.
Large or small, drones raise questions about the growing disconnect between the American public and its wars. Military ethicists concede that drones can turn war into a video game, inflict civilian casualties and, with no Americans directly at risk, more easily draw the United States into conflicts. Drones have also created a crisis of information for analysts on the end of a daily video deluge. Not least, the Federal Aviation Administration has qualms about expanding their test flights at home, as the Pentagon would like. Last summer, fighter jets were almost scrambled after a rogue Fire Scout drone, the size of a small helicopter, wandered into Washington’s restricted airspace.
Within the military, no one disputes that drones save American lives. Many see them as advanced versions of “stand-off weapons systems,” like tanks or bombs dropped from aircraft, that the United States has used for decades. “There’s a kind of nostalgia for the way wars used to be,” said Deane-Peter Baker, an ethics professor at the United States Naval Academy, referring to noble notions of knight-on-knight conflict. Drones are part of a post-heroic age, he said, and in his view it is not always a problem if they lower the threshold for war. “It is a bad thing if we didn’t have a just cause in the first place,” Mr. Baker said. “But if we did have a just cause, we should celebrate anything that allows us to pursue that just cause.”
To Mr. Singer of Brookings, the debate over drones is like debating the merits of computers in 1979: They are here to stay, and the boom has barely begun. “We are at the Wright Brothers Flier stage of this,” he said.
Mimicking Insect Flight
A tiny helicopter is buzzing menacingly as it prepares to lift off in the Wright-Patterson aviary, a warehouse-like room lined with 60 motion-capture cameras to track the little drone’s every move. The helicopter, a footlong hobbyists’ model, has been programmed by a computer to fly itself. Soon it is up in the air making purposeful figure eights.
“What it’s doing out here is nothing special,” said Dr. Parker, the aerospace engineer. The researchers are using the helicopter to test technology that would make it possible for a computer to fly, say, a drone that looks like a dragonfly. “To have a computer do it 100 percent of the time, and to do it with winds, and to do it when it doesn’t really know where the vehicle is, those are the kinds of technologies that we’re trying to develop,” Dr. Parker said.
The push right now is developing “flapping wing” technology, or recreating the physics of natural flight, but with a focus on insects rather than birds. Birds have complex muscles that move their wings, making it difficult to copy their aerodynamics. Designing insects is hard, too, but their wing motions are simpler. “It’s a lot easier problem,” Dr. Parker said.
In February, researchers unveiled a hummingbird drone, built by the firm AeroVironment for the secretive Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which can fly at 11 miles per hour and perch on a windowsill. But it is still a prototype. One of the smallest drones in use on the battlefield is the three-foot-long Raven, which troops in Afghanistan toss by hand like a model airplane to peer over the next hill.
There are some 4,800 Ravens in operation in the Army, although plenty get lost. One American service member in Germany recalled how five soldiers and officers spent six hours tramping through a dark Bavarian forest — and then sent a helicopter — on a fruitless search for a Raven that failed to return home from a training exercise. The next month a Raven went AWOL again, this time because of a programming error that sent it south. “The initial call I got was that the Raven was going to Africa,” said the service member, who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss drone glitches.
In the midsize range: The Predator, the larger Reaper and the smaller Shadow, all flown by remote pilots using joysticks and computer screens, many from military bases in the United States. A Navy entry is the X-47B, a prototype designed to take off and land from aircraft carriers automatically and, when commanded, drop bombs. The X-47B had a maiden 29-minute flight over land in February. A larger drone is the Global Hawk, which is used for keeping an eye on North Korea’s nuclear weapons activities. In March, the Pentagon sent a Global Hawk over the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan to assess the damage.
A Tsunami of Data
The future world of drones is here inside the Air Force headquarters at Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Va., where hundreds of flat-screen TVs hang from industrial metal skeletons in a cavernous room, a scene vaguely reminiscent of a rave club. In fact, this is one of the most sensitive installations for processing, exploiting and disseminating a tsunami of information from a global network of flying sensors.
The numbers are overwhelming: Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the hours the Air Force devotes to flying missions for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance have gone up 3,100 percent, most of that from increased operations of drones. Every day, the Air Force must process almost 1,500 hours of full-motion video and another 1,500 still images, much of it from Predators and Reapers on around-the-clock combat air patrols.
The pressures on humans will only increase as the military moves from the limited “soda straw” views of today’s sensors to new “Gorgon Stare” technology that can capture live video of an entire city — but that requires 2,000 analysts to process the data feeds from a single drone, compared with 19 analysts per drone today.
At Wright-Patterson, Maj. Michael L. Anderson, a doctoral student at the base’s advanced navigation technology center, is focused on another part of the future: building wings for a drone that might replicate the flight of the hawk moth, known for its hovering skills. “It’s impressive what they can do,” Major Anderson said, “compared to what our clumsy aircraft can do.”
A version of this article appeared in print on June 20, 2011, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: War Evolves With Drones, Some Tiny as Bugs.

Newt Gingrich's version of history

2011-06-15T19:55:00.000-07:00

It was ironic to see Newt trying to compete with Herman Cain over who hates Muslims more during Monday's debate. Gingrich, history professor and looked up to by many Republicans as an "intellectual," thundered that in the past Americans have rightly rooted out dangerous Communists and Nazis from within our midst. The history professor apparently forgot about the shameful episode during WWII when we put hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans in prison camps just because of their ethnicity. And that it was in fact Hitler and Stalin who effectively used guilt by association as the basis for their attempts at radical right wing social engineering, AKA genocide.

Republican "social moderates"

2011-06-15T19:50:00.000-07:00

What does social moderation even mean for today's Republicans? Jailing only doctors who perform abortions, but not women who want to have one? Separate but equal unweddings for gay people? The Republican candidates are racing each other to the bottom, competing to appeal to the most judgmental, narrow-minded, mean-spirited Americans among us.

Republican "Debate"

2011-06-14T13:53:00.000-07:00

It isn't a debate if they are all saying the same thing. Is Rep. Bachmann better than the others if she says it with more feeling? A different facial expression? If you support more tax cuts for companies and rich people; and you oppose Medicare, Social Security, labor unions and abortion -- pick a Republican, any Republican. What's the difference?

Is all Politics Tribal?

2011-06-11T12:45:00.000-07:00

Daniel Shea
Director of the Center for Political Participation, Allegheny College:

Tribal politics: Understanding the 'other'

I’ve been thinking about George Allen’s apology this week for his “macaca moment,” and how that event in 2006 might underscore an important aspect of contemporary politics.

Allen’s slur was at a gathering in rural Virginia, during which he offers the young Webb volunteer a sarcastic greeting: “Welcome to America, the real world.” Apparently, the young man was not of his tribe.

Tribalism is an old tune in politics, of course. The call of “us” against “them” lay at the center of myriad hurtful policies, untold mobilization strategies and countless private prejudices. But the flames of tribal politics have been stoked in recent years.

Beyond tagging Barack Obama as an “elite intellectual,” implicit in the birther movement is the claim that he cannot be part of our tribe because he is not even a citizen! The same can be said of the stunningly large portion of Americans who continue to hold that Obama is a Muslim and/or a socialist.

Make no mistake, tribal politics has proved to be a handy tool of the left as well. Bill Clinton helped liberals temper their ridicule of politicians with Southern accents, but it’s still fair game to scorn those with rural roots. Sarah Palin cannot be of our tribe, with her messy college pedigree, broken English and, OMG, all those guns! And who would watch NASCAR? What is NASCAR?

Might this help us understand the rise of vitriol in politics?

Here, the work of cognitive neuroscientists may help. At the risk of oversimplification, research suggests that humans are hard-wired for contradictory impulses. On the one hand, we are empathetic. Our benevolent tendencies, even in times of stark depravation, underscore a very human impulse: kindness. On the other hand, we have a very powerful defense impulse. We respond to perceived threats in aggressive ways and we are anxious to protect loved ones.

The key point as this relates to politics is that when we perceive threat as coming from someone in the “other” tribe, our aggressive impulse overwhelms our empathy. That is to say, when George Allen determined that the young man was not part of “real America,” using a racial slur came easier. Perhaps it is also easier to use violent terms and symbolism in our rhetoric these days.

Perhaps we should all remember that when it is all said and done, we are all of the same tribe; we are all Americans.

Failed Jobs Policy

2011-06-03T18:43:00.000-07:00

The policy of cutting taxes for rich "job creators" has failed completely. These tax cuts have been in effect for 10 years now and have produced no jobs, only misery. More predictably to any trained economist, attacking government spending at all levels has of course amounted to putting a strangle hold on the economy. Let's watch to see how much richer our rich people got while our economy was shedding jobs.

Reforming Medicare

2011-05-26T05:11:00.000-07:00

The more you make, the more you should have to pay in to Medicare, with no ceiling. A millionaire pays in a lot more than a person who makes $10,000, and a billionaire pays a lot more than a millionaire. On the other end, the wealthier you are when you turn 65, the smaller your Medicare benefit all the way down to zero. If you don't need Medicare, you shouldn't get it.

Pawlenty

2011-05-23T07:58:00.000-07:00

Republicans need to focus less on which empty suit to put forward against President Obama and more on how to unchain the Ryancare albatross from around their necks. If, as Pawlenty says, "America is in big trouble," how come we can afford to keep giving subsidies to oil companies and cutting taxes for millionaires? If "we want to assure our children a better future," why must we take away their Medicare? What kind of truth is that?

Republicans Using Pelosi as Scapegoat?

2011-05-20T15:27:00.000-07:00

Maybe Republicans are figuring out how far back to retreat to find solid political ground again. Ryancare lies in tatters, with no Republican message to replace it and no viable presidential candidate to coalesce behind. So its natural for them to hearken back to the happier days of 2010. But drawing the wrong conclusions from what has happened since then only dooms Republicans to more failure. It has nothing to do with Nancy Pelosi.

Gang of Six-Minus-One

2011-05-18T14:18:00.000-07:00

Ryancare isn't going to fly. Republicans aren't so much negotiating with Democrats -- they're negotiating with reality. The Orwellian new talking point, that strangling Medicare is the only way to "save" it, is as sad as it is ridiculous. Since our budget crisis isn't serious enough to sacrifice a few billion in subsidies to oil companies, we must be in pretty good shape.

Obama Wasting Time on Texas?

2011-05-11T08:24:00.000-07:00

Its a good idea for the President to make a serious effort in one of the nominally most confederate of neo-confederate states. This is more than a matter of electoral votes, it is about who we are as a nation, the United States of America. Moderate, practical-minded Texans should not be abandoned to the mercies of their state's most radical far-right fringe. Together we stand, divided we fall.

Obama Revives Immigration?

2011-05-10T10:36:00.000-07:00

Maybe we'll see immigration reform -- DREAM act? -- appear on the table as part of the grand agreement Republicans are demanding in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. They lack leverage on the debt ceiling because the most alarmed constituency will be Wall Street. Besides, the Ryan plan is now in the scrap heap, -- reducing Boehner to plaintively demanding "trillions." And immigration is a net no-win issue for Republicans. Independents will leave them if they dig in their heels too much and the right wing fringe will leave them if they don't.

Who Will Blink on the Debt Ceiling?

2011-04-21T05:20:00.000-07:00

Republicans have weak leverage on the debt ceiling and will eventually let it go. A parallel deal on the 2012 budget is eminently possible, but only without any binding commitments past then. This Republican Congress was elected for two years, not ten, and their multi-year plan is a complete non-starter, conceptually and politically. Meanwhile the twin albatross of birtherism also weighs ever heavier on Republican 2012 electoral prospects.

George R.R. Martin and "A Dance With Dragons"

2011-04-15T02:53:00.000-07:00

THE NEW YORKER
Just Write It!
A fantasy author and his impatient fans.
by Laura Miller April 11, 2011

The writer George R. R. Martin left Hollywood in 1994, determined to do what he wanted for a change. He’d had some success in television, working on a new version of “The Twilight Zone” and on the fantasy series “Beauty and the Beast.” But the pilot for “Doorways,” a series he’d developed, hadn’t been picked up, and he was tired of the medium’s limitations. “Everything I did was too big and too expensive in the first draft,” he told me recently. He wanted castles and vistas and armies, and producers always made him cut that stuff. A line producer for “The Twilight Zone” once explained to him, “You can have horses or you can have Stonehenge. But you can’t have horses and Stonehenge.”
On the printed page, however, he could have it all. He recalls telling himself, “I’m going to write a fantasy and it’s going to be huge. I’m going to have all the characters I want and all the battles I want.” In 1996, he published a novel of seven hundred pages, “A Game of Thrones,” the first volume of a projected trilogy called “A Song of Ice and Fire.” The series chronicles the struggle for power among several aristocratic families in the Seven Kingdoms, an imaginary medieval nation. In a genre crowded with stale variations on what Joseph Campbell called “the hero’s journey,” with plots distilled from ancient legends, Martin took his inspiration from history instead of from mythology; he based his tale, loosely, on the Wars of the Roses, the bloody dynastic struggles in medieval England. Compared with most epic fantasy fiction, Martin’s story contained relatively little magic, and it felt dangerous, lusty, and real.
Although “A Game of Thrones” was not initially a hit, it won the passionate advocacy of certain independent booksellers, who recommended it to their customers, who, in turn, pressed copies on their friends. A following was born, albeit a spotty one. Parris McBride, Martin’s wife, recalls, “When George went on the first signing tour for the series, the manager at Joseph-Beth Booksellers, in Kentucky, had four hundred people waiting for him. A few weeks later, he’s in St. Louis, and nobody turns up for the signing at all.”
The days when nobody showed up for a Martin signing are long gone. In January, at a hastily scheduled appearance at Vroman’s Bookstore, in Pasadena, hundreds of fans waited in a line that coiled around the store. They presented Martin with volumes from “A Song of Ice and Fire” and works from his early years as a science-fiction writer, as well as with calendars, posters, e-readers, yellowing pulp magazines, and replica swords. Three young women wore handmade T-shirts emblazoned with the coats of arms of their favorite clans from the series. Martin was unflaggingly attentive to his supplicants, including the couple who asked him to pose for a photograph with their infant daughter, who was named Daenerys, for one of his heroines.
Martin has now sold more than fifteen million books worldwide, and his readership will likely multiply exponentially after the launch, this month, of “Game of Thrones,” a lavish HBO series based on “A Song of Ice and Fire.” He is committed to nurturing his audience, no matter how vast it gets. “It behooves a writer to be good to his fans,” he says. He writes a lively blog, and though he has an assistant, Ty Franck, who screens the multitude of comments that are posted on it, he tries to read many of them himself. A fan in Sweden, Elio M. García, Jr., maintains an official presence for Martin on Facebook and Twitter, and also runs the main “Ice and Fire” Web forum, Westeros.org. (Westeros is the name of the fictional continent that is home to the Seven Kingdoms.) When Martin is travelling, which is often, he attends the gatherings of the Brotherhood Without Banners, an unofficial fan club with informal chapters around the world, and he counts its founders and other longtime members among his good friends. In many respects, he’s a model for contemporary authors confronted with a wobbly publishing industry and a fractured marketplace. Anne Groell, Martin’s editor at Random House, tells her authors, “Outreach and building community with readers is the single most important thing you can do for your book these days. You need to make them feel invested in your career.”
Still, a close relationship with one’s audience has its drawbacks. As Martin puts it, “The more readers you have, the harder it is to keep up, and then you can’t get any writing done.” He added to his burden when he decided that his planned trilogy needed to be at least a seven-book series. “The tale grew in the telling,” Martin often says, quoting J. R. R. Tolkien, a writer he greatly admires.
The tale also got stalled. There has been no addition to the “Song of Ice and Fire” series since 2005, when the fourth volume appeared. And that book, titled “A Feast for Crows,” was only half a novel: it had been surgically removed from a manuscript that, at twelve hundred pages, still wasn’t complete nearly five years after the publication of the third volume. Because “A Feast for Crows” followed the adventures of a number of new characters—and left the fates of several popular characters unresolved after the previous book’s cliffhanger ending—some fans were disappointed by it. Martin included a postscript in “A Feast for Crows,” explaining what he’d done—and then, as he told me, “I made the fatal mistake of saying, ‘But the other book is half-written and I should be able to finish it within a year.’ ”
In the six years since, some of Martin’s fans have grown exceedingly restless. The same blogging culture that allows a fantasy writer like Neil Gaiman to foster a sense of intimacy with his readers can also expose an author to relentless scrutiny when they become discontented. Fans desperate to find out what happened to Martin characters like Tyrion Lannister—a smart, cynical dwarf born into one of the most powerful families in the Seven Kingdoms—found it irksome to check Martin’s Web site for updates about the series’ fifth book, “A Dance with Dragons,” and find instead postings about sports or politics. They began to complain in the comments section of Martin’s blog and on Westeros.org.
As the chief moderator of Westeros.org, García deleted forum posts that he regarded as “not constructive,” including increasingly wild speculation about the cause of the delay and the ultimate fate of the series. Martin’s blog was similarly monitored. Even so, the discontent soon spilled over into other platforms—from science-fiction and fantasy forums to discussion boards on Amazon.com. One poster wrote, “George R. R. Martin, you suck. . . . Pull your fucking typewriter out of your ass and start fucking typing.” Another joked that Martin had written a book called “How to Cash in Big Time After You Write Half a Series.” Such invective has flourished even after Martin, in early March, announced that “A Dance with Dragons” will finally be published on July 12th. One skeptic, posting on Amazon.com, said of the release date, “Don’t hold your breath on this one unless you like passing out.”
An entire community of apostates—a shadow fandom—is now devoted to taunting Martin, his associates, and readers who insist that he has been hard at work on the series and has the right to take as much time as he needs. Even Gaiman got dragged into the feud when he responded, on his own blog, to an inquiry about Martin’s tardiness by issuing this reproof: “George R. R. Martin is not your bitch.”
The online attacks on Martin suggest that some readers have a new idea about what an author owes them. They see themselves as customers, not devotees, and they expect prompt, consistent service. Martin, who is sixty-two, told me that Franck calls the disaffected readers the Entitlement Generation: “He thinks they’re all younger people, teens and twenties. And that their generation just wants what they want, and they want it now. If you don’t give it to them, they’re pissed off.”
Martin and McBride live in a stucco house in Santa Fe. Martin also owns the place across the street, which he uses as an office. He’s converted the closets into dioramas to display his large collection of miniatures. Most of them are medieval, with the knights outnumbering infantrymen—“I like the pageantry and the color,” he told me, his voice still tinged with the accent of his home town, Bayonne, New Jersey. When I visited, in January, Martin, a short, portly man whose jaw is fringed with a gray beard, opened a door in the hallway to show me a tiny scene from the banqueting room of a castle, complete with gossiping ladies, an amorous couple, dogs begging for scraps, and a drunk passed out with his head on the table.
Like his closets, Martin’s head is crammed with people. By García’s count, there are already more than a thousand named characters in “A Song of Ice and Fire,” although many of them are mentioned only in passing. Martin was startled by the size of García’s census, but he enjoys being surprised by his own work. He thinks of himself as a “gardener”—he has a rough idea where he’s going but improvises along the way. He sometimes fleshes out only as much of his imaginary world as he needs to make a workable setting for the story. Tolkien was what Martin calls an “architect.” Tolkien created entire languages, mythologies, and histories for Middle-earth long before he wrote the novels set there. Martin told me that many of his fans assume that he is as meticulous a world-builder as Tolkien was. “They write to say, ‘I’m fascinated by the languages. I would like to do a study of High Valyrian’ ”—an ancient tongue. “ ‘Could you send me a glossary and a dictionary and the syntax?’ I have to write back and say, ‘I’ve invented seven words of High Valyrian.’ ”
Tolkien created the genre of epic fantasy, and it is still dominated by his example. Martin is widely credited with taking such fiction in a more adult direction. David Benioff, who, with Dan Weiss, is an executive producer of the HBO series, told me that he had given up reading fantasy because “so many of the writers seemed to be a pale imitation of Tolkien. After a while, you don’t need to read another book about hobbits or hobbit-like creatures trying to destroy some evil artifact.”
A typical post-Tolkien epic fantasy is the best-selling “Wheel of Time” series, by Robert Jordan. David McCaman, a marketing executive and one of the founding members of the Brotherhood Without Banners, dismissively summarizes the genre this way: “The young kid on the farm discovers he has powers, and no one dies, and they find the magic to rule the world.” He calls it “Nerf fantasy,” meaning that “it’s really safe.” By contrast, “A Song of Ice and Fire” doesn’t truck with “orcs and goblins and dark lords and bad and good. It revolves around people, really gritty people, and real situations, things that you don’t see in fantasy—sex and language and betrayal.” Benioff once told New York that “Game of Thrones” was “ ‘The Sopranos’ in Middle-earth,” and although he now winces at the formulation, it remains sound; the book’s intricate, racy narrative practically feels custom-built for HBO. The series especially resembles “Rome” and “Deadwood,” although, unlike them, it’s free from even the most perfunctory obligation to be historically accurate.
Martin’s characters indulge in all the usual vices associated with the Middle Ages, and some of them engage in behavior—most notably, incest—that would shock people of any historical period. Characters who initially seem likable commit reprehensible acts, and apparent villains become sympathetic over time. Martin transgressed the conventions of his genre—and most popular entertainment—by making it clear that none of his characters were guaranteed to survive to the next book, or even to the next chapter. “When Indiana Jones goes up against that convoy of forty Nazis, it’s a lot of fun, but it’s not ‘Schindler’s List,’ ” he explained. He wants readers to feel that “they love the characters and they’re afraid for the characters.”
The serial nature of “A Song of Ice and Fire” is key to the involvement it elicits. Although story lines conclude in each of the novels, the larger narrative arc remains unresolved, encouraging readers to speculate about what might ultimately happen. Online forums are an ideal place to debate rival theories, allowing participants to forge the emotional bonds that define contemporary fandom.
“George and I are fans first,” McBride told me. During his teen-age years in New Jersey, Martin wrote for comic-book fanzines, inventing his own superheroes and writing new adventures for the superheroes created by other fans. But it was in science-fiction fandom that he found a lasting home.
Martin attended his first science-fiction convention in 1971. At the registration desk, he was greeted by Gardner Dozois, who, coincidentally, had pulled from the slush pile of the magazine Galaxy Martin’s first professionally published story, “The Hero.” (It appeared in 1970.) The two men remain friends and collaborators. Martin attends about six conventions a year, and he says that since college “virtually all the women in my life, including Parris, were people I met at science-fiction conventions.”
When Martin and McBride met, at a convention in Nashville in 1975, she told him that one of his stories, “A Song for Lya,” had made her cry. The gathering was in the free-spirited mode of the times—in an autobiographical essay, Martin notes that, when this conversation took place, they were both naked. (He does not elaborate.) He was, however, engaged to someone else. McBride went to work for a travelling circus for a while. By the time he moved to Santa Fe, in 1979, she was waiting tables in Portland, Oregon. They’d kept in touch, and after his marriage broke up they began what McBride calls a “fannish romance,” meeting at conventions and exchanging letters. In 1981, he persuaded her to move to New Mexico.
McBride likes living in Santa Fe—the area has a “strong fan group.” She calls the science-fiction community “my perfect tribe.” With Martin, she has tried to instill the Brotherhood Without Banner with the mores of her generation of fans. The Brotherhood, whose origins can be traced to a convention ten years ago in Philadelphia, doesn’t charge a membership fee or have a defined organizational structure. Anything too official, in McBride’s opinion, “is not the fannish way.”
In the Brotherhood, local gatherings are called “moots.” On the night of the Pasadena book signing, a moot was held in the back yard of a Spanish-style house in town. Brotherhood members from way back mingled with relative newcomers. Martin leaned against the railing of a deck, drinking beer and swapping anecdotes about past conventions.
There is no doubt where the Brotherhood’s members come down on the question of the long wait for “A Dance with Dragons.” One group at the party responded with head-shaking and exclamations of disgust when Martin informed them, “I’m still getting e-mail from assholes who call me lazy for not finishing the book sooner. They say, ‘You better not pull a Jordan.’ ” Robert Jordan, whose real name was James Oliver Rigney, Jr., died of amyloidosis in 2007, before the “Wheel of Time” series was finished. (Another writer, Brandon Sanderson, will finish it.) Martin said that he found such remarks particularly heartless: “I knew Jim, which is what his friends called him. He was a friend of mine.”
“How dare he die?” a woman said, witheringly. “I mean, what an inconvenience to the fans.”
Several veterans briefed me on the group’s traditions. At that first Brotherhood party, in 2001, a tipsy reveller (this is a crowd that likes to lift a glass) asked Martin to knight him. Martin said, “I can’t knight you. You haven’t gone on a quest yet!” When his petitioner implored Martin to invent one, he sent the fan and several others off in search of Philly cheesesteaks. When their prize was secured, Martin dubbed the group the Knights of the Cheesesteak. So began the custom of Martin sending fans off in the middle of the night with orders to bring back local street food. The Brotherhood quests are a gentler version of a fraternity hazing, providing people who have in common only a particular literary taste with the shared experiences that turn them into pals.
It was a brisk night, and as we clustered by a clay fireplace a fan named Erik Kluth recalled the moot in Kansas City where he was knighted. Martin had commanded him and some other fans to retrieve barbecued smoked brisket tips. But by the time Martin issued his decree restaurants had closed. In desperation, the fans rooted through garbage left outside one establishment. Finally, they tried to cook the dish themselves, in a drug-store parking lot. Martin was impressed enough by the effort to dub them the Knights of the Dumpster.
I also met Kim Ohara, a soft-spoken woman who has been a Brotherhood member since the first moot. She told me that, even on Internet forums dedicated to Martin’s work, much of the discussion isn’t about “A Song of Ice and Fire.” “You can talk about the books only so much,” she said. Once the fans get to know each other, the focus tends to shift to the stories of their own lives. Several Brotherhood members had got married. In one case, Martin assisted a fan by signing one of the “Ice and Fire” novels with a remarkable inscription: a marriage proposal to another fan.
Elio García estimates that he spends up to thirty-five hours a month supervising Westeros.org, the “Song of Ice and Fire” discussion site. García, a Cuban-American, moved to Sweden to be with his girlfriend in 1999, the same year that the two of them established Westeros.org. She had introduced him to Martin’s series, and he soon shared her obsession with it. The site now has about seventeen thousand registered members. Despite his attachment to the books, García did not get to meet Martin or his fellow-fans until 2005. “I never really did the whole convention thing,” he told me. “I consider a lot of these people friends. But they’re not physical, next-door-neighbor friends. They are people I know on the Internet.”
García is a superfan. His knowledge of Martin’s invented world is so encyclopedic that the author has referred HBO researchers to him when they have questions regarding the production of “Game of Thrones.” Although García’s participation in Westeros.org is voluntary, his involvement with Martin’s work has become semi-professional. He is being paid to consult with licensors creating tie-in merchandise and to write text for a video game based on the series. He and Martin are collaborating on a comprehensive guide to the books, “The World of Ice and Fire.” Martin himself sometimes checks with García when he’s not sure he’s got a detail right. Martin told me, “I’ll write something and e-mail him to ask, ‘Did I ever mention this before?’ And he writes me right back: ‘Yes, on page 17 of Book Four.’ ”
The proliferation of plot elements is a major reason that Martin’s writing pace has slowed. “A Song of Ice and Fire” primarily takes place over several years on a continent about the size of South America. Each chapter is narrated in the third person, from the point of view of a single character. The first book had eight major viewpoint characters, but by “A Feast for Crows” the total for the series had grown to seventeen, each in a different location and enmeshed in a complex plot—fighting in wars, journeying through arduous terrain, scheming to steal a throne.
Making sure that the chronologies of the different stories line up has particularly bedevilled Martin. He said, “I have to ask myself, ‘How long is it going to take this character to get from point A to point B by ship? Meanwhile, what’s happened in the other book? If it’s going to take him this long, but in the other book I said that he’d already arrived there, then I’m in trouble. So I have to have him leave earlier.’ That kind of stuff has driven me crazy.” Last year, he wrote on his blog, “I know perfectly well that as soon as ‘Dance’ is published, some of you out there are going to attempt to correlate its chronology with that of ‘A Feast for Crows.’ . . . Well, it may well make your head explode. It did mine. The ‘Dance’ timeline alone is a bitch and a half.”
Martin is in the unusual position of being a writer whose work is attended to even more closely by his readers than by himself. And, as the panorama of “A Song of Ice and Fire” has grown ever more expansive, Martin has become increasingly afraid that he’ll make mistakes. He has already made some tiny ones: “My fans point them out to me. I have a horse that changes sex between books. He was a mare in one book and a stallion in the next, or something like that.” The eyes of one supporting character are described as green in one passage and blue in another. As Martin puts it, “People are analyzing every goddam line in these books, and if I make a mistake they’re going to nail me on it.”
A Norwegian schoolteacher named Remy Verhoeve is one of these hyper-dedicated readers. Until a friend persuaded him to try “A Game of Thrones,” he had never especially liked fantasy fiction, with the exception of “The Lord of the Rings.” In his opinion, the first three volumes of “A Song of Ice and Fire” are “the finest novels I’ve ever read.” After discovering the series, he read those three books ten times each. “Sometimes some piece of art comes along and changes everything,” he told me. Yet Verhoeve, operating under the nom de guerre of Slynt, now runs a Web forum dedicated to denigrating Martin and his supporters. The site is called Is Winter Coming?—a snide play on “Winter is coming,” the motto of the Starks, one of the central families in the series.
Like every protracted Internet war, the schism in Martin’s fandom is difficult to comprehend from the outside. Each camp nurses grievances against the other, and any conversation between the two degenerates into ad-hominem attacks. (Actually, the quarrel may never have consisted of anything but ad-hominem attacks.) Hunkered down in their respective forts, each side magnifies its own indignation. Yet if you chat with one of the participants he or she will claim to be dispassionate. “Personally, I just feel kind of sad for them,” García said of his foes.
In Verhoeve’s telling, disaffected fans—who sometimes call themselves GRRuMblers—formed a renegade movement in 2009, after Martin posted a blog entry titled “To My Detractors.” It was Martin’s attempt to deliver a definitive response to “the rising tide of venom about the lateness of ‘A Dance with Dragons.’ ” He went on, “Some of you are angry that I watch football during the fall.” Other online posters, he noted, objected to him “visiting places like Spain and Portugal (last year) or Finland (this year).” The post ended, “As some of you like to point out in your e-mails, I am sixty years old and fat, and you don’t want me to ‘pull a Robert Jordan’ on you and deny you your book. Okay, I’ve got the message. You don’t want me doing anything except ‘A Song of Ice and Fire.’ Ever. (Well, maybe it’s okay if I take a leak once in a while?)”
Verhoeve, who has been banned from Westeros.org, was incensed by Martin’s post, and a few days later he set up Is Winter Coming? The forum’s tone was inspired by Finish the Book, George, a blog begun in 2008 by two brothers using the monikers Pesci and Liotta—a reference to two actors from the gangster film “GoodFellas.” The pseudonymous pair had taken their cue from another Martin blog post, this one admonishing visitors to stay on topic or butt out. (“If you want to comment on other matters, including, but not limited to, the lateness of ‘A Dance with Dragons,’ that’s fine, just go do it on your own blogs.”) In response, Pesci and Liotta began publishing one blistering post after another, making them heroes, of a sort, to the detractors. One post reads, “Since we all know GRRM can’t write unless he is in his special place with his special writing booties on and the temperature at exactly 69 degrees and the sun aligned with Aquarius, I take this as another sign that the big guy hasn’t typed a word of ADWD today.”
The brothers have been less active of late, but Is Winter Coming? is humming with hostile creativity. So far, the forum has produced a “field guide” to the various types of Martin defenders and how they may be refuted; a pseudo-legal brief titled “The People Against George R. R. Martin”; detailed charts attempting to expose how few hours Martin has devoted to writing “A Dance with Dragons” per year, based on his blog postings; and a three-hundred-page “Encyclopedia GRRuMbliana,” which includes a spirited history of the forum. Members have also written “A Feast for Trolls” and “A Dance with Detractors,” long parodic narratives, in the style of “A Song of Ice and Fire,” which feature broad caricatures of Martin and his key defenders, including Gaiman. A small publishing house made a deal with Verhoeve to compile some of his blog postings into a book, to be titled “Waiting for Dragons.”
This is an astonishing amount of effort to devote to denouncing the author of books one professes to love. Few contemporary authors can claim to have inspired such passion. The HBO team of Benioff and Weiss, novelists themselves, were taken aback when I told them about the shadow sites. “I’m going to start an Ian McEwan troll site,” Weiss joked. “I love him, but . . . ”
“Where is ‘Atonement II’?” Benioff interjected. “We’ve been waiting and waiting.”
Martin knows what it’s like to be provoked by a serial entertainment. He experienced it himself as a faithful viewer of “Lost,” the ABC adventure series about a group of castaways trapped on a mysterious island. “I kept watching it and I was fascinated,” he recalls. “They’d introduce these things and I thought that I knew where it was going. Then they’d introduce some other thing and I’d rethink it.”
Like many “Lost” fans, Martin resented the series’s mystical ending, which left dozens of narrative threads dangling. “We watched it every week trying to figure it out, and as it got deeper and deeper I kept saying, ‘They better have something good in mind for the end. This end better pay off here.’ And then I felt so cheated when we got to the conclusion.” He does think of himself as being bound by an informal contract with his readers; he feels that he owes them his best work. He doesn’t, however, believe that this gives them the right to dictate the particulars of his creative process or to complain about how he manages his time.
Although some detractors, like Verhoeve, attribute their disgust with Martin to what they view as his poor P.R. skills and “lack of proper communication,” the essence of their complaint is transactional. In one posting, Liotta fumed that he and “literally hundreds of thousands of other people have spent countless hours and dollars in faithful dedication” to Martin’s work. It makes little difference to these fans that they knew the series wasn’t finished when they started reading it, and that they still own the books they spent all that time and money on. As far as the detractors are concerned, Martin’s contract with them was for a story, their engagement with it offered on the understanding that he would provide them with a satisfying conclusion.
Contrary to what his more extravagant critics allege, Martin insists that he has been working continuously on “A Dance with Dragons.” “They have all these insane theories that the book has been finished for years, but I’m sitting on it until the HBO series comes out so I’ll make more money,” he says. “Or I farmed out the book to another writer, or I’ve lost all interest in the series and now I just want to do other stuff.”
Nevertheless, I pointed out, “A Dance with Dragons” has taken him longer than any of the preceding four novels. “Maybe I’m rewriting too much,” he suggested, after a fretful silence. “Maybe I have perfectionist’s disease, or whatever.” We were seated in an addition to his office that he calls his “library tower.” Built in 2009, the renovation has provoked a mixture of scorn and resentment among his detractors, who alternately regard it as a faux-medieval affectation and as a flaunting of the wealth that they believe has dulled Martin’s motivation to finish the series. It’s a handsome but hardly extravagant structure lined with bookshelves, a tower only in comparison with the low-lying architectural style common to Santa Fe. Its sole medieval aspect is a set of stained-glass windows with the sigils of five houses from the Seven Kingdoms. Although the miniature knights in Martin’s dioramas reminded me of the Technicolor artificiality of a Hollywood costume picture like “Ivanhoe,” the windows looked surprisingly authentic, and I found them beautiful.
Martin explained that he’s been tinkering with some parts of “A Dance with Dragons” for ten years. He has a “real love-hate relationship” with a chapter that focusses on Tyrion Lannister, the dwarf: “I ripped it out and put it back in, I ripped it out and put it back in. Then I put it in as a dream sequence, and then I ripped it out again. This is the stuff I’ve been doing.”
Such indecision, Martin suspects, may be fuelled by the mounting expectations for “A Song of Ice and Fire.” The reviews for the series have been “orders of magnitude better” than he’s received for anything else. After the fourth volume came out, Time anointed him “the American Tolkien.” Many readers have told Martin that his tale is the greatest fantasy story of all time. With the HBO show and his online critics breathing down his neck, the pressure has become even more intense.
“I don’t want to come across as a whiner or a complainer,” Martin said, as tinted light from the afternoon sun filtered through the stained-glass windows. “No! I’m living the dream here. I have all of these readers who are waiting on the book. I want to give them something terrific.” There was a pause. “What if I fuck it up at the end? What if I do a ‘Lost’? Then they’ll come after me with pitchforks and torches.”
Martin hopes that, after he surmounts the particularly thorny problems of “A Dance with Dragons,” the final two books will come much faster. Some detractors insist that he’ll never complete the series, and they like to kibbitz about who ought to fill in for him if he pulls a Jordan. Martin, however, has indicated that he will not permit another writer to finish “A Song of Ice and Fire.” The story begins and ends with him.
At one point, I posed a question to Remy Verhoeve. Suppose that “A Song of Ice and Fire” never does get a proper ending. He’d still have those three novels, the ones he considers the finest he’s ever read. Would that not be a consolation? He was quiet for a while before answering: “Yeah. I guess it is. Though sometimes I wish I had never read those books.” ♦
ILLUSTRATION: DAVID HUGHES

Background On Recent Atrocities in Western Cote d'Ivoire

2011-04-10T10:27:00.000-07:00

Below is an excerpt from Amnesty International's 2005 report on human rights in Cote d'Ivoire. In a nutshell, ethnic violence in the west has deep and longstanding roots in the campaign since 1995 by Gbagbo and his ilk to whip up southern hatred of all people from the north as foreigners and, since the 2002 northern insurrection, as rebels. It also has roots in the cocoa industry, since much of the country's cocoa comes from the west. Ethnic northerners who had migrated into these western areas to farm cocoa eventually came into conflict with ethnically and religiously different indegenous people. During the 2002 rebellion Gbagbo recruited militias sometimes heavily supported by mercenaries from Liberia, including child soldiers, to fight back any northern military advance into this economically crucial region. The west has now fallen to those northern rebels.

This is not in any way to justify ethnic reprisals that northern forces apparently carried out now in the west. However, it is to lay blame also on Gbagbo for cynically whipping up violent communal hatred in the west, just as in Abidjan, for his own political purposes. It is also to underscore that in no way are northern forces carrying out Ouatarra's bidding in these massacres. Rather, he sees his daunting task as stepping up to be leader of all the people in a nation deeply dvided by regional and cultural hatreds. (A bit like President Obama?) At the same time, Ouattara must rely on the northern forces to dislodge Gbagbo and get on with this task of unification. If they kill him, or if the UN and the French do most of the work to smoke him out, Ouattara's unification job will become much more difficult.

Here's Amnesty International, from 2005. At the bottom is a link to the full report.

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Inter-ethnic clashes

For more than a decade, Côte d’Ivoire has witnessed inter-ethnic clashes, especially in the west of the country, between “autochthon” (autochtone) villagers and the “allogenous” (allogène) population (the term used to describe people coming from other parts of Côte d’Ivoire and neighbouring countries, especially Burkina Faso, to work on cocoa and coffee plantations.) These clashes have been precipitated by disputes over land tenure, stemming from a policy that aims to confer the right to possess land only to Ivorian citizens. Antagonism has also been aggravated by xenophobic rhetoric fuelled by some political figures and news media, which have encouraged the “autochthon” population to claim land that had by custom been handed over – sometimes for decades – to cultivators from other regions of Côte d’Ivoire or neighbouring countries such as Burkina Faso.

With the insurgency of September 2002, these tensions heightened as everyone with a Dioula name could be accused of sympathies with the “rebellion” and thus at risk of being expelled from their land. The security forces and UNOCI troops have been unable to prevent confrontations – sometimes very violent – which constitute one of the main risks of inflaming the situation. The most serious confrontations this year occurred at the beginning of June 2005 when dozens of people from the Guéré ethnic group (originating from the west of the country) were killed in the villages of Guitrozon (5km from Duékoué) and Petit Duékoué by unidentified individuals armed with shotguns and knives. The following day, apparently in an act of reprisal, some 10 people with Dioula names were killed in the centre of Duékoué.

Above and beyond these confrontations is the whole question of co-existence between different ethnic groups in some regions of the west of the country. During the first six months of 2005 “allogenous” people were forced from their plantations in several villages, in particular Bloléquin and Guiglo. Representatives of both political and traditional authorities, as well as the Head of State himself, called on members of all communities to learn to live with each other again. During a visit to the region in June 2005 Laurent Gbagbo recommended the formation of reconciliation committees in villages in order to jointly find solutions to their problems. However, distrust remains. Some “autochthons” blame the “allogenous” population of not wanting to integrate, of “not wanting to undergo a census in order to establish their exact number, of encroaching on the property of landowners, of not respecting the habits and customs of the “tuteurs” [autochthon landowners] [and] of desecrating the forest with illicit burials”. In this atmosphere, any advocacy of hatred or disagreement, in particular over land, between members of the “autochthon” and “allogenous” communities could degenerate into massacres all the more bloody because they often occur in remote areas, far from the gaze of both political authorities and ONUCI forces.

To understand the origin and political reasons for these inter-ethnic clashes, the decisive role played over many years by the xenophobic rhetoric spread by some newspapers and politicians must be stressed: they have accused foreign nationals living in Côte d’Ivoire – and more widely all Ivorians originating from the north of the country and of Muslim heritage – of being responsible for the economic and subsequent political crises experienced by the country for more than a decade.

Xenophobic rhetoric in the name of “ivoirité”

In the name of a theory known as “ivoirité” (“Ivorianness”), developed by some intellectuals closely associated with former President Henri Konan Bédié, some news media and politicians have for around a decade increasingly made pronouncements and published articles setting “true” Ivorians against the “allogenous” population, commonly known as Dioulas. This term has been used to describe, according to the prevailing situation, any person of Muslim background and originating from the north of Côte d’Ivoire or other countries in the sub-region (Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Senegal etc.).

The theory of “ivoirité” was particularly developed during a conference that took place in Abidjan in March 1996 under the rubric “Ivoirité”, or the spirit of the new social contract of President H.K. Bédié. One of the participants provided a definition of “ivoirité” that drew on an analysis of both economic and psychological factors:

“Several factors can be shown to justify the disquiet of Ivorians. First of all, the large number of foreigners in Côte d’Ivoire […] added to a high rate of immigration and a high birth rate […]. Foreigners […] occupy a dominant and sometimes overwhelming place in the Ivorian economy. This foreign presence therefore threatens to destroy the socio-economic balance of the country. Secondly, striving to understand what it is to be Ivorian goes back to the search for a national cultural identity. […] Finally, what it is to be Ivorian is an expression of the political claim to be in your own country. […] “Ivoirité” is, we believe, a requirement of sovereignty, identity, creativity. The Ivorian people must first of all assert their sovereignty, their authority in the face of dispossession and subjugation: whether it concerns immigration or economic and political power.”

These expressions of xenophobia found a fertile breeding ground in the economic crisis that had gripped the country since the beginning of the 1990s when the price of cocoa, the country’s main commodity, collapsed. Tensions were exacerbated when former Prime Minister Alassane Ouattara declared his candidature in the presidential election of 2000 but was refused the right to take part on the grounds that he was Burkinabè, not Ivorian. Following the armed insurgency of 19 September 2002, the Dioulas as a whole were considered “rebels” by some news media and political leaders close to the President. This resulted in serious abuses against the Dioulas, in particular extrajudicial executions and “disappearances”. The role of these expressions of xenophobia in exacerbating existing tensions in Côte d‘Ivoire was clearly demonstrated in March 2004 by Doudou Diène, the UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance:

“… Côte d’Ivoire seems to be caught up in a dynamic of xenophobia stemming, in his view, from a concatenation of several factors, which, if proper solutions are not found urgently, may lead to the emergence of real xenophobia. Firstly, the imposition of the multiparty system introduced in 1990 on the multi-ethnic situation literally triggered the latent ethnic and cultural tension. In addition, in this context, the instrumentalization of the ethnic group in politics and the media constituted a temptation which politicians were unable to resist. The emergence of the concept of ‘ivoirité’ (‘Ivorianness’) in 1995 was given an ethnicist interpretation and profoundly influenced the political debate. Lastly, the irruption of war, which took the form of manifestations of ethnic violence, had a radicalizing effect and constitutes a major factor in this dynamic of xenophobia”.
The decisive role played by some sectors of the media in inflaming xenophobic sentiments was further clearly emphasized by the UN Secretary-General in his sixth progress report on UNOCI published on 26 September 2005: “[D]uring the period under review [17 June to 26 September 2005] incitements to violence, exclusion and intolerance and calls for a resumption of the armed conflict continued uninterrupted by the Ivorian media, in particular those associated with the ruling party”.

link: http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/pdfid/4394523c4.pdf

Ludicrous and Cruel (Ryan Budget Proposal)

2011-04-09T07:45:00.000-07:00

THE NEW YORK TIMES
April 7, 2011

Ludicrous and Cruel
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Many commentators swooned earlier this week after House Republicans, led by the Budget Committee chairman, Paul Ryan, unveiled their budget proposals. They lavished praise on Mr. Ryan, asserting that his plan set a new standard of fiscal seriousness.

Well, they should have waited until people who know how to read budget numbers had a chance to study the proposal. For the G.O.P. plan turns out not to be serious at all. Instead, it’s simultaneously ridiculous and heartless.

How ridiculous is it? Let me count the ways — or rather a few of the ways, because there are more howlers in the plan than I can cover in one column.

First, Republicans have once again gone all in for voodoo economics — the claim, refuted by experience, that tax cuts pay for themselves.

Specifically, the Ryan proposal trumpets the results of an economic projection from the Heritage Foundation, which claims that the plan’s tax cuts would set off a gigantic boom. Indeed, the foundation initially predicted that the G.O.P. plan would bring the unemployment rate down to 2.8 percent — a number we haven’t achieved since the Korean War. After widespread jeering, the unemployment projection vanished from the Heritage Foundation’s Web site, but voodoo still permeates the rest of the analysis.

In particular, the original voodoo proposition — the claim that lower taxes mean higher revenue — is still very much there. The Heritage Foundation projection has large tax cuts actually increasing revenue by almost $600 billion over the next 10 years.

A more sober assessment from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office tells a different story. It finds that a large part of the supposed savings from spending cuts would go, not to reduce the deficit, but to pay for tax cuts. In fact, the budget office finds that over the next decade the plan would lead to bigger deficits and more debt than current law.

And about those spending cuts: leave health care on one side for a moment and focus on the rest of the proposal. It turns out that Mr. Ryan and his colleagues are assuming drastic cuts in nonhealth spending without explaining how that is supposed to happen.

How drastic? According to the budget office, which analyzed the plan using assumptions dictated by House Republicans, the proposal calls for spending on items other than Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — but including defense — to fall from 12 percent of G.D.P. last year to 6 percent of G.D.P. in 2022, and just 3.5 percent of G.D.P. in the long run.

That last number is less than we currently spend on defense alone; it’s not much bigger than federal spending when Calvin Coolidge was president, and the United States, among other things, had only a tiny military establishment. How could such a drastic shrinking of government take place without crippling essential public functions? The plan doesn’t say.

And then there’s the much-ballyhooed proposal to abolish Medicare and replace it with vouchers that can be used to buy private health insurance.

The point here is that privatizing Medicare does nothing, in itself, to limit health-care costs. In fact, it almost surely raises them by adding a layer of middlemen. Yet the House plan assumes that we can cut health-care spending as a percentage of G.D.P. despite an aging population and rising health care costs.

The only way that can happen is if those vouchers are worth much less than the cost of health insurance. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that by 2030 the value of a voucher would cover only a third of the cost of a private insurance policy equivalent to Medicare as we know it. So the plan would deprive many and probably most seniors of adequate health care.

And that neither should nor will happen. Mr. Ryan and his colleagues can write down whatever numbers they like, but seniors vote. And when they find that their health-care vouchers are grossly inadequate, they’ll demand and get bigger vouchers — wiping out the plan’s supposed savings.

In short, this plan isn’t remotely serious; on the contrary, it’s ludicrous.

And it’s also cruel.

In the past, Mr. Ryan has talked a good game about taking care of those in need. But as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, of the $4 trillion in spending cuts he proposes over the next decade, two-thirds involve cutting programs that mainly serve low-income Americans. And by repealing last year’s health reform, without any replacement, the plan would also deprive an estimated 34 million nonelderly Americans of health insurance.

So the pundits who praised this proposal when it was released were punked. The G.O.P. budget plan isn’t a good-faith effort to put America’s fiscal house in order; it’s voodoo economics, with an extra dose of fantasy, and a large helping of mean-spiritedness.

Pastor Who Burned Koran Demands Retribution

2011-04-01T21:24:00.000-07:00

THE NEW YORK TIMES
April 1, 2011

Pastor Who Burned Koran Demands Retribution
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ and DON VAN NATTA Jr.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Before a Koran was burned at his modest church here on March 20, the pastor Terry Jones held a self-styled mock trial of the holy book in which he presided from the pulpit as judge. The prosecutor was a Christian who had converted from Islam. An imam from Dallas defended the Koran.

Sitting in judgment was a jury of 12 members of Mr. Jones’s church, the Dove World Outreach Center. After listening to arguments from both sides, the jury pronounced the Koran guilty of five “crimes against humanity,” including the promotion of terrorist acts and “the death, rape and torture of people worldwide whose only crime is not being of the Islamic faith.”

Punishment was determined by the results of an online poll. Besides burning, the options included shredding, drowning and facing a firing squad. Mr. Jones, a nondenominational evangelical pastor, said voters had chosen to set fire to the book, according to a video of the proceedings.

Mr. Jones said in an interview with Agence France-Presse on Friday that he was “devastated” by the killings of 12 people in a violent protest in Afghanistan when a mob, enraged by the burning of a Koran by Mr. Jones’s church, attacked the United Nations compound in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. “We don’t feel responsible for that,” he told the news service.

Unlike the worldwide outcry that greeted the pastor’s plan to burn 200 copies of the Koran on Sept. 11 — which he ultimately abandoned — the event last week at the 50-member church was largely ignored by the news media. As of 2 p.m. on Friday, the video of the Koran’s burning on the church Web site had been viewed only 1,500 times.

“The local strategy of everybody was to ignore this,” said the Rev. Lawrence D. Reimer, pastor of the United Church of Gainesville. “It’s just a horrible tragedy that this act triggered the deaths of more innocent people.”

Some church members were surprised by the violent reaction in Afghanistan on Friday, said Fran Ingram, an assistant at the church. She explained that it was decided in the weeks leading up to the burning that a jury of churchgoers and volunteers would hear both sides before deciding what to do.

In a statement, Mr. Jones demanded that the United States and United Nations take “immediate action” against Muslim nations in retaliation for the deaths. “The time has come to hold Islam accountable,” he said.

He also called on the United Nations to act against “Muslim-dominated countries,” which he said “must alter the laws that govern their countries to allow for individual freedoms and rights, such as the right to worship, free speech and to move freely without fear of being attacked or killed.”

Some members of the Dove World Outreach Center said they feared they would be attacked.

“We have a huge stack of death threats,” Ms. Ingram said. “We take precautions. I have a handgun. A lot of us have concealed weapons permits. We’re a small church, and we don’t have money to hire security.”

Before the March 20 service, Mr. Jones asked if the church’s Web site was streaming the event, according to the video. He was assured that it was. Mr. Jones then gave the “defense attorney” the opportunity to leave.

“It is not that we burn the Koran with some type of vindictive motive,” Mr. Jones said. “We do not even burn it with great pleasure or any pleasure at all. We burn it because we feel a deep obligation to stay with the court system of America. The court system of America does not allow convicted criminals to go free. And that is why we feel obligated to do this.”

On the video, a pastor named Wayne Sapp is seen igniting a kerosene-drenched copy of the Koran with a plastic lighter. Members of the church watch the book burn for several minutes while several photographers snap pictures.

Finally, Mr. Jones says, “That actually burned quite well.”

Lizette Alvarez reported from Gainesville, and Don Van Natta Jr. from Miami. Timothy Williams contributed reporting from New York.

Washington in Fierce Debate on Arming Libyan Rebels

2011-03-30T00:21:00.000-07:00

THE NEW YORK TIMES
March 29, 2011

Washington in Fierce Debate on Arming Libyan Rebels
By MARK LANDLER, ELISABETH BUMILLER and STEVEN LEE MYERS

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is engaged in a fierce debate over whether to supply weapons to the rebels in Libya, senior officials said on Tuesday, with some fearful that providing arms would deepen American involvement in a civil war and that some fighters may have links to Al Qaeda.

The debate has drawn in the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon, these officials said, and has prompted an urgent call for intelligence about a ragtag band of rebels who are waging a town-by-town battle against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, from a base in eastern Libya long suspected of supplying terrorist recruits.

“Al Qaeda in that part of the country is obviously an issue,” a senior official said.

On a day when Libyan forces counterattacked, fears about the rebels surfaced publicly on Capitol Hill on Tuesday when the military commander of NATO, Adm. James G. Stavridis, told a Senate hearing that there were “flickers” in intelligence reports about the presence of Qaeda and Hezbollah members among the anti-Qaddafi forces. No full picture of the opposition has emerged, Admiral Stavridis said. While eastern Libya was the center of Islamist protests in the late 1990s, it is unclear how many groups retain ties to Al Qaeda.

The French government, which has led the international charge against Colonel Qaddafi, has placed mounting pressure on the United States to provide greater assistance to the rebels. The question of how best to support the opposition dominated an international conference about Libya on Tuesday in London.

While Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the administration had not yet decided whether to actually transfer arms, she reiterated that the United States had a right to do so, despite an arms embargo on Libya, because of the United Nations Security Council’s broad resolution authorizing military action to protect civilians.

In a reflection of the seriousness of the administration’s debate, Mr. Obama said Tuesday that he was keeping his options open on arming the rebels. “I’m not ruling it out, but I’m also not ruling it in,” Mr. Obama told NBC News. “We’re still making an assessment partly about what Qaddafi’s forces are going to be doing. Keep in mind, we’ve been at this now for nine days.”

But some administration officials argue that supplying arms would further entangle the United States in a drawn-out civil war because the rebels would need to be trained to use any weapons, even relatively simple rifles and shoulder-fired anti-armor weapons. This could mean sending trainers. One official said the United States might simply let others supply the weapons.

The question of whether to arm the rebels underscores the difficult choices the United States faces as it tries to move from being the leader of the military operation to a member of a NATO-led coalition, with no clear political endgame. It also carries echoes of previous American efforts to arm rebels, in Angola, Nicaragua, Afghanistan and elsewhere, many of which backfired. The United States has a deep, often unsuccessful, history of arming insurgencies.

Mr. Obama pledged on Monday that he would not commit American ground troops to Libya and said that the job of transforming the country into a democracy was primarily for the Libyan people and the international community. But he promised that the United States would help the rebels in this struggle.

In London, Mrs. Clinton and other Western leaders made it clear that the NATO-led operation would end only with the removal of Colonel Qaddafi, even if that was not the stated goal of the United Nations resolution.

Mrs. Clinton — who met for a second time with a senior opposition leader, Mahmoud Jibril — acknowledged that as a group, the rebels were largely a mystery. “We don’t know as much as we would like to know and as much as we expect we will know,” she said at a news conference.

In his testimony, Admiral Stavridis said, “We are examining very closely the content, composition, the personalities, who are the leaders of these opposition forces.”

The coalition members discussed other ways to help the rebels, like humanitarian aid and money, Mrs. Clinton said. Some of the more than $30 billion in frozen Libyan funds may be channeled to the opposition.

But a spokesman for the rebels, Mahmoud Shammam, said they would welcome arms, contending that with weaponry they would already have defeated Colonel Qaddafi’s forces. “We ask for political support more than arms,” Mr. Shammam said, “but if we have both, that would be good.”

So far, the rebels have obtained arms from defecting Qaddafi loyalists, as well as from abandoned ammunitions depots.

A European diplomat said France was adamant that the rebels be more heavily armed and was in discussions with the Obama administration about how France would bring this about. “We strongly believe that it should happen,” said the diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat and chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said he had had conversations with two senior administration officials about this issue. Mr. Levin said he was most concerned about how the rebels would use the weapons after a cease-fire. “Would they stop fighting if they had momentum, or would they be continuing to use those weapons?” he asked.

Gene A. Cretz, the American ambassador to Libya, said last week that he was impressed by the democratic instincts of the opposition leaders and that he did not believe that they were dominated by extremists. But he acknowledged that there was no way to know if they were “100 percent kosher, so to speak.”

Bruce O. Riedel, a former C.I.A. analyst and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said some who had fought as insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan were bound to have returned home to Libya. “The question we can’t answer is, Are they 2 percent of the opposition? Are they 20 percent? Or are they 80 percent?” he said.

Even if the administration resolves these concerns, military officials said it was unclear to them how an effort to arm the rebels would be carried out.

They said the arms most likely to be of use were relatively light and simple shoulder-fired anti-armor weapons for defense against tanks, as well as rifles like Soviet AK-47s and communications equipment. Although these weapons are not especially sophisticated, months, if not years, of on-the-ground training would still be necessary.

Even with training, anti-armor weapons and rifles would allow the rebels only to consolidate their gains and hold the territory they have, said Nathan Freier, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

One crucial voice, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has experience in the unintended consequences of arming rebels: As a C.I.A. official in the late 1980s, he funneled weapons to the Islamic fundamentalists who ousted the Soviets from Kabul. Some later became the Taliban fighting the United States in Afghanistan.

Mark Landler and Elisabeth Bumiller reported from Washington, and Steven Lee Myers from London.

Obama's Libya Speech

2011-03-29T07:55:00.000-07:00

Many who demanded this speech so stridently only wanted more words to twist to bring our President down. Just because we can't save every country does not mean we can't save any. The President has no obligation to give advance notice of our combat strategy to the enemy. It is also ridiculous to demand that the President predict the outcome of this and every future crisis in detail and with absolute certainty before we take a single step forward.

American Thought Police

2011-03-29T04:08:00.000-07:00

THE NEW YORK TIMES
March 27, 2011

American Thought Police
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Recently William Cronon, a historian who teaches at the University of Wisconsin, decided to weigh in on his state’s political turmoil. He started a blog, “Scholar as Citizen,” devoting his first post to the role of the shadowy American Legislative Exchange Council in pushing hard-line conservative legislation at the state level. Then he published an opinion piece in The Times, suggesting that Wisconsin’s Republican governor has turned his back on the state’s long tradition of “neighborliness, decency and mutual respect.”

So what was the G.O.P.’s response? A demand for copies of all e-mails sent to or from Mr. Cronon’s university mail account containing any of a wide range of terms, including the word “Republican” and the names of a number of Republican politicians.

If this action strikes you as no big deal, you’re missing the point. The hard right — which these days is more or less synonymous with the Republican Party — has a modus operandi when it comes to scholars expressing views it dislikes: never mind the substance, go for the smear. And that demand for copies of e-mails is obviously motivated by no more than a hope that it will provide something, anything, that can be used to subject Mr. Cronon to the usual treatment.

The Cronon affair, then, is one more indicator of just how reflexively vindictive, how un-American, one of our two great political parties has become.

The demand for Mr. Cronon’s correspondence has obvious parallels with the ongoing smear campaign against climate science and climate scientists, which has lately relied heavily on supposedly damaging quotations found in e-mail records.

Back in 2009 climate skeptics got hold of more than a thousand e-mails between researchers at the Climate Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia. Nothing in the correspondence suggested any kind of scientific impropriety; at most, we learned — I know this will shock you — that scientists are human beings, who occasionally say snide things about people they dislike.

But that didn’t stop the usual suspects from proclaiming that they had uncovered “Climategate,” a scientific scandal that somehow invalidates the vast array of evidence for man-made climate change. And this fake scandal gives an indication of what the Wisconsin G.O.P. presumably hopes to do to Mr. Cronon.

After all, if you go through a large number of messages looking for lines that can be made to sound bad, you’re bound to find a few. In fact, it’s surprising how few such lines the critics managed to find in the “Climategate” trove: much of the smear has focused on just one e-mail, in which a researcher talks about using a “trick” to “hide the decline” in a particular series. In context, it’s clear that he’s talking about making an effective graphical presentation, not about suppressing evidence. But the right wants a scandal, and won’t take no for an answer.

Is there any doubt that Wisconsin Republicans are hoping for a similar “success” against Mr. Cronon?

Now, in this case they’ll probably come up dry. Mr. Cronon writes on his blog that he has been careful never to use his university e-mail for personal business, exhibiting a scrupulousness that’s neither common nor expected in the academic world. (Full disclosure: I have, at times, used my university e-mail to remind my wife to feed the cats, confirm dinner plans with friends, etc.)

Beyond that, Mr. Cronon — the president-elect of the American Historical Association — has a secure reputation as a towering figure in his field. His magnificent “Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West” is the best work of economic and business history I’ve ever read — and I read a lot of that kind of thing.

So we don’t need to worry about Mr. Cronon — but we should worry a lot about the wider effect of attacks like the one he’s facing.

Legally, Republicans may be within their rights: Wisconsin’s open records law provides public access to e-mails of government employees, although the law was clearly intended to apply to state officials, not university professors. But there’s a clear chilling effect when scholars know that they may face witch hunts whenever they say things the G.O.P. doesn’t like.

Someone like Mr. Cronon can stand up to the pressure. But less eminent and established researchers won’t just become reluctant to act as concerned citizens, weighing in on current debates; they’ll be deterred from even doing research on topics that might get them in trouble.

What’s at stake here, in other words, is whether we’re going to have an open national discourse in which scholars feel free to go wherever the evidence takes them, and to contribute to public understanding. Republicans, in Wisconsin and elsewhere, are trying to shut that kind of discourse down. It’s up to the rest of us to see that they don’t succeed.

Good Job on Libya!

2011-03-21T04:55:00.001-07:00

President Obama has been pitch perfect on Libya. Didn't tip our hand, didn't bluster, didn't overreach, let actions not words tell the story. Most importantly, and lost in the predictable fog of arm chair generalship, is that Mrs. Clinton met first in Paris with the rebels to sound out better who they are and what they will do when they win. This is foreign policy with brains. Heck of a job, Mr. President!

Republicans Want to Eliminate All Remaining Restrictions on Campaign Spending?

2011-03-18T14:02:00.000-07:00

Republicans are all about elbowing their way to the trough, but have no clue how to lead if they ever get there. Throwing so much effort into defunding unions and empowering Republican rich donors assumes that American voters are easily susceptible to manipulation with slick TV ads. Let's hope real democracy will prevail over the upcoming tsunami of rich money nakedly intended to buy government back for the Republican wacky voodoo economists.

Walker Taunts that Federal Workers Don't Have Collective Bargaining Rights

2011-03-17T07:44:00.000-07:00

As everyone remembers from their Mom, two wrongs do not make a right. For the record, Federal workers are not at all pleased with pay and benefts that are significantly inferior to equivalent work in the private sector, and eroding further every year, nor with being scapegoats for all the stupid tax and spending decisions of Congresses over the last two and a half centuries. President Carter's civil service reform included a promise -- a PROMISE -- to increase federal pay by a couple of percentage points more than inflation every year for 15-20 years, till it reached equivalency with the private sector. Naturally, that promise was never kept, and obviously now it has been forgotten. Government's most precious resource is its human capital. Walker was an idiot to spurn the offer of cooperation and sacrifice extended by the hundreds of thousands of people who have dedicated their lives to public service instead of self-enrichment, and who provide the brains, bodies and love of country to keep his state humming.

Lady Gaga on Jay Leno

2011-03-11T21:03:00.000-08:00

http://www.nbc.com/the-tonight-show/video/lady-gaga-part-1-2-14-11/1293326
http://www.nbc.com/the-tonight-show/video/lady-gaga-part-2-2-14-11/1293304
http://www.nbc.com/the-tonight-show/video/lady-gaga-part-3-2-14-11/1293325

federal budget, two weeks at a time?

2011-03-03T09:09:00.000-08:00

Doesn't matter whether Republicans turn over their anti-spending cards one at a time or all at once, the fact is they've got nothing. Their cherished spending cuts, really nothing more than numbers pulled out of thin air, were never doable and will never happen. The anti-abortion and now anti-union sideshows we are seeing, both acknowledge and exacerbate dwindling public confidence that Republicans have any clue how to manage economic policy.

Egypt -- What Now?

2011-02-11T07:12:00.000-08:00

Mubarak seems to have finally made his "elegant exit" and the military has begun guiding Egypt to democratic elections. We should support this, both morally and materially, but our profile should be practically invisible. No tea party political missionaries. No preaching at all -- the Egyptians clearly already get it. We can prove our exceptionalism through respect for them, and for the universality of human yearning for democracy.

Wacky Republican Ideas About Monetary Policy

2011-02-10T23:42:00.000-08:00

The New York Times
February 10, 2011
Abraham Lincoln, Inflationist
By PAUL KRUGMAN
There was a time when Republicans used to refer to themselves, proudly, as “the party of Lincoln.” But you don’t hear that line much these days. Why?

The main answer, presumably, lies in the G.O.P.’s decision, long ago, to seek votes from Southerners angered by the end of legal segregation. With the old Confederacy now the heart of the Republican base, boasting about the party’s Civil War-era legacy is no longer advisable.

But sooner or later, Republicans were bound to notice other reasons to disavow Lincoln. He was, after all, the first president to institute an income tax. And he was also the first president to issue a paper currency — the “greenback” — that wasn’t backed by gold or silver. “There is nothing more insidious that a country can do to its people than to debase its currency,” declared Representative Paul Ryan in one of two hearings Congress held on Wednesday on monetary policy. So much, then, for the Great Liberator.

Which brings me to the story of what went on in those monetary hearings.

One of the hearings was called by Representative Ron Paul, a harsh critic of the Federal Reserve, who now has an oversight role over the very institution he wants abolished in favor of a return to the gold standard. Mr. Paul’s subcommittee called three witnesses, one of whom was an odd choice: Thomas DiLorenzo, a professor at Loyola University and a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

What was odd about that choice? Well, Mr. DiLorenzo hasn’t actually written much about monetary policy, although he has described Fed policy — not just recently, but since the 1960s — as “legalized counterfeiting operations.” His main claim to fame, instead, is as a critic of Lincoln — he’s the author of “Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed to Know About Dishonest Abe” — and as a modern-day secessionist.

No, really: calls for secession run through many of Mr. DiLorenzo’s writings — for example, in his declaration that “healthcare freedom” won’t be restored until “some states begin seceding from the new American fascialistic state.” Raise the rebel flag!

O.K., it’s going to be a while before the G.O.P. as a whole embraces neo-secessionism, and Mr. Paul, although highly visible, is, in fact, a somewhat marginal figure even within his own party. But Mr. Ryan, who led the other hearing — the one at which Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, testified — is a rising Republican star. So it’s worth noting that Mr. Ryan’s hard-money rhetoric was nearly as bizarre as Mr. DiLorenzo’s.

Start with that bit about debasing our currency. Where did that come from? The dollar’s value in terms of other major currencies is about the same now as it was three years ago. And as Mr. Bernanke pointed out, consumer prices rose only 1.2 percent in 2010, an inflation rate that, for the record, is well below the rate under the sainted Ronald Reagan. The Fed’s preferred measure, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, was up only 0.7 percent, well below the target of around 2 percent.

But Mr. Ryan is sure that the dollar is being debased and won’t take no for an answer. In an attempt to create a gotcha moment, he waved a copy of a newspaper bearing the headline “Inflation Worries Spread” at the Fed chairman. But the gotcha actually went the other way. As Mr. Bernanke immediately pointed out, the article was about inflation in China and other emerging markets, not in the United States. And the Fed chairman declared, correctly, that “inflation made here in the U.S. is very, very low.”

Advantage Bernanke. But the facts don’t matter, because conservative hard-money mania, the demand that the Fed stop trying to rescue the economy, isn’t really about inflation fears.

Mr. Ryan said as much in Wednesday’s hearing, in which he declared that our currency “should be guided by the rule of law, not the rule of men.” A few years ago, my response would have been, say what? After all, even Milton Friedman saw the conduct of monetary policy as a technical issue, not a matter of principle; his complaint about the Fed’s role in the Great Depression was that it didn’t print enough money, not that it printed too much.

But then Friedman, who believed that it sometimes makes sense to let your currency depreciate, who urged Japan’s central bank to adopt a policy very similar to what the Fed is doing now, was a leftist by the standards of today’s G.O.P.

Wednesday’s hearings aren’t likely to have any immediate effect on monetary policy. But they offer a revealing — and appalling — look at the mind-set of one of our two major political parties. We’ve always known that the modern G.O.P. wants to take America back to the way it was before the New Deal; but now it’s clear that the party wants to build a bridge to the 19th century, and maybe even to the antebellum era. Backward, march!

The North Pole Will Melt Long Before America Becomes Greece

2011-02-07T07:13:00.000-08:00

The real looming fiscal disaster we face is Republican vodoo economics. Their thrice failed "ideas" for balancing the budget can only plunge the economy back into recession and throw millions more out of work. And what's all this about business confidence? Are American companies really so mollycoddled that they are unable to get out and compete in a free market economy without even more pacifiers shoved into their mouths?

2 Detained Reporters Saw Secret Police’s Methods Firsthand

2011-02-05T05:44:00.000-08:00

THE NEW YORK TIMES

February 4, 2011
2 Detained Reporters Saw Secret Police’s Methods Firsthand
By SOUAD MEKHENNET and NICHOLAS KULISH
CAIRO

WE had been detained by Egyptian authorities, handed over to the country’s dreaded Mukhabarat, the secret police, and interrogated. They left us all night in a cold room, on hard orange plastic stools, under fluorescent lights.

But our discomfort paled in comparison to the dull whacks and the screams of pain by Egyptian people that broke the stillness of the night. In one instance, between the cries of suffering, an officer said in Arabic, “You are talking to journalists? You are talking badly about your country?”

A voice, also in Arabic, answered: “You are committing a sin. You are committing a sin.”

We — Souad Mekhennet, Nicholas Kulish and a driver, who is not a journalist and was not involved in the demonstrations — were detained Thursday afternoon while driving into Cairo. We were stopped at a checkpoint and thus began a 24-hour journey through Egyptian detention, ending with — we were told by the soldiers who delivered us there — the secret police. When asked, they declined to identify themselves.

Captivity was terrible. We felt powerless — uncertain about where and how long we would be held. But the worst part had nothing to do with our treatment. It was seeing — and in particular hearing through the walls of this dreadful facility — the abuse of Egyptians at the hands of their own government.

For one day, we were trapped in the brutal maze where Egyptians are lost for months or even years. Our detainment threw into haunting relief the abuses of security services, the police, the secret police and the intelligence service, and explained why they were at the forefront of complaints made by the protesters.

Many journalists shared this experience, and many were kept in worse conditions — some suffering from injuries as well.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, over the period we were held there were 30 detentions of journalists, 26 assaults and 8 instances of equipment being seized. We saw a journalist with his head bandaged and others brought in with jackets thrown over their heads as they were led by armed men.

In the morning, we could hear the strained voice of a man with a French accent calling out in English: “Where am I? What is happening to me? Answer me. Answer me.”

This prompted us into action — pressing to be released with more urgency, and indeed fear, than before. A plainclothes officer who said his name was Marwan gestured to us. “Come to the door,” he said, “and look out.”

We saw more than 20 people, Westerners and Egyptians, blindfolded and handcuffed. The room had been empty when we arrived the evening before.

“We could be treating you a lot worse,” he said in a flat tone, the facts speaking for themselves. Marwan said Egyptians were being held in the thousands. During the night we heard them being beaten, screaming after every blow.

We were on our way back to Cairo after reporting about the demonstrations from Alexandria for The Times. We were traveling with journalists from the German public television station ZDF, a normal practice in such conditions — safety in numbers.

At the outskirts of Cairo, we were stopped at what looked like a civilian checkpoint.

We had been through many checkpoints without problems, but after the driver opened our trunk a tremendous uproar began. They saw a large black bag with an orange ZDF microphone poking out. In the tense environment, television crews had been attacked and accused of creating anti-Egyptian propaganda. We had been in the middle of a near-riot with the same crew the day before.

The crowd shouted and banged on the car, pulling the doors open. The ZDF crew in the other car managed to drive off, while we were stuck. Instead of dragging us out as we expected, two men pushed their way into the backseat. We were relieved that they were taking us from the crowd, until one pulled out his police identification. Rather than helping us escape, he was now detaining us.

The officer gave the driver directions to an impromptu police station in the Sharabiya district of Cairo, on the roof of a lumber warehouse. The officer in charge there, who identified himself as Ehab, said they were the secret police.

They searched the ZDF bags and found much more than just a camera. “We have a woman with a German passport of Arab origin and an American in a car with camera, satellite equipment and $10,000,” he said. “This is very suspicious. I think they need to be checked.”

Anxiety turned to anticipation when we were driven to a military base. The military had been the closest thing Egypt had to a guarantor of stability and we thought once we explained who we were and provided documentation we would be allowed to go to our hotel.

In a strange exchange that only made sense later, Ms. Mekhennet asked a soldier, “Where are you taking us?” The soldier answered: “My heart goes out to you. I’m sorry.”

After driving to several more bases we were told we were being handed over to the Mukhabarat at their headquarters in Nasr City.

It was sundown when they had us bring everything in from the car. The items were inventoried, from socks and a water bottle to a band of 50 $100 bills. Our cellphones, cameras and computers were confiscated.

We were taken to separate rooms with brown leather padded walls and interrogated individually. Mr. Kulish’s interrogator spoke perfect English and joked about the television show “Friends,” mentioning that he had lived in Florida and Texas.

The Mukhabarat has had a working relationship with American intelligence, including the C.I.A.’s so-called rendition program of prison transfers. During our questioning, a man nearby was being beaten — the sickening sound somewhere between a thud and a thwack. Between his screams someone yelled in Arabic, “You’re a traitor working with foreigners.”

Egyptian journalists had a freer hand than many in the region’s police states, but the secret police kept a close eye on both journalists and their sources. As the protests became more violent, a campaign of intimidation against journalists and the Egyptians speaking to them became apparent. We appeared to have stumbled into the middle of it.

Ms. Mekhennet asked her interrogator, “Where are we?” The interrogator answered, “You are nowhere.”

We were blindfolded and led to the blank room where we would spend the night and into the next afternoon on the orange plastic chairs. The screams from the torture made it nearly impossible to think.

We were not physically abused. Ms. Mekhennet explained that she had been sick and a man appeared with a blood-pressure gauge, but she declined the offer. One officer gave each of us Pepsi and a small package of cookies. It was after 10 o’clock at night, and we had not eaten since breakfast, but the agonizing cries instantly stilled our appetites.

We were told we could go in the morning, and starting at 6 a.m. we asked repeatedly to be released.

Marwan first appeared around 11 a.m. He became visibly annoyed by our requests, complaining that thousands of Egyptians civilians were in detention. He did not appreciate our sense of entitlement.

That was when he opened the door and showed us our handcuffed, blindfolded colleagues from international news outlets. He said that he was exhausted, but would find our cellphones and computers.

About an hour later, we were given back our belongings. Our greatest fear, that the innocent driver would be kept for “processing,” did not come to pass.

We left together, with pangs of guilt as we saw our blindfolded, injured colleagues again, and new people led in, past guards with bulletproof vests and assault rifles.

Were we going to a hotel? we asked.

“You don’t get to know that,” a guard answered.

They put us in our car with orders to put our heads down. “Look down, and don’t talk. If you look up you will see something you don’t ever want to see.”

They left us that way for 10 minutes. The only sounds were of guns being loaded and checked and duct-tape ripping.

An interrogator appeared and asked our driver, “What did you do in Tahrir Square?” He said we weren’t there. The interrogator said to the driver, “So you’re a traitor to your country.”

In Arabic, Ms. Mekhennet, a German citizen with Arab roots, kept telling the questioner that we are journalists for The New York Times. “You came here to make this country look bad,” the interrogator said.

We were told we would be driving out in our car, but escorted by a man with an assault rifle. Again, we were told to look down.

Finally, after a while, our escort ordered the driver to stop the car and got out. “You can go now.”

The driver began yelling “Alhamdulillah” or “Praise be to God.” We looked around and realized we were alone, somewhere in the middle of Cairo, but away from the protests, the normal street traffic slowly moving past.

Drill Faster Because of Egypt Crisis?

2011-01-31T05:57:00.000-08:00

Not so sure the most sensible response to MidEast unrest is speed up using up what hydrocarbon resources we have left. Wouldn't it be smarter to encourage non-Mideast countries like Brazil to speed up their hydrocarbon production, and save ours for a rainy day? Isn't that what conservative means? Then again, as a progressive, maybe smarter to suck out all the oil the red states have, then toss them aside like empty useless husks.

Republicans Wrong About Europe Debt Problems

2011-01-29T22:06:00.000-08:00

THE NEW YORK TIMES

THEIR OWN PRIVATE EUROPE
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: January 27, 2011

President Obama’s State of the Union address was a ho-hum affair. But the official Republican response, from Representative Paul Ryan, was really interesting. And I don’t mean that in a good way.
Mr. Ryan made highly dubious assertions about employment, health care and more. But what caught my eye, when I read the transcript, was what he said about other countries: “Just take a look at what’s happening to Greece, Ireland, the United Kingdom and other nations in Europe. They didn’t act soon enough; and now their governments have been forced to impose painful austerity measures: large benefit cuts to seniors and huge tax increases on everybody.”
It’s a good story: Europeans dithered on deficits, and that led to crisis. Unfortunately, while that’s more or less true for Greece, it isn’t at all what happened either in Ireland or in Britain, whose experience actually refutes the current Republican narrative.
But then, American conservatives have long had their own private Europe of the imagination — a place of economic stagnation and terrible health care, a collapsing society groaning under the weight of Big Government. The fact that Europe isn’t actually like that — did you know that adults in their prime working years are more likely to be employed in Europe than they are in the United States? — hasn’t deterred them. So we shouldn’t be surprised by similar tall tales about European debt problems.
Let’s talk about what really happened in Ireland and Britain.
On the eve of the financial crisis, conservatives had nothing but praise for Ireland, a low-tax, low-spending country by European standards. The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom ranked it above every other Western nation. In 2006, George Osborne, now Britain’s chancellor of the Exchequer, declared Ireland “a shining example of the art of the possible in long-term economic policy making.” And the truth was that in 2006-2007 Ireland was running a budget surplus, and had one of the lowest debt levels in the advanced world.
So what went wrong? The answer is: out-of-control banks; Irish banks ran wild during the good years, creating a huge property bubble. When the bubble burst, revenue collapsed, causing the deficit to surge, while public debt exploded because the government ended up taking over bank debts. And harsh spending cuts, while they have led to huge job losses, have failed to restore confidence.
The lesson of the Irish debacle, then, is very nearly the opposite of what Mr. Ryan would have us believe. It doesn’t say “cut spending now, or bad things will happen”; it says that balanced budgets won’t protect you from crisis if you don’t effectively regulate your banks — a point made in the newly released report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which concludes that “30 years of deregulation and reliance on self-regulation” helped create our own catastrophe. Have I mentioned that Republicans are doing everything they can to undermine financial reform?
What about Britain? Well, contrary to what Mr. Ryan seemed to imply, Britain has not, in fact, suffered a debt crisis. True, David Cameron, who became prime minister last May, has made a sharp turn toward fiscal austerity. But that was a choice, not a response to market pressure.
And underlying that choice was the new British government’s adherence to the same theory offered by Republicans to justify their demand for immediate spending cuts here — the claim that slashing government spending in the face of a depressed economy will actually help growth rather than hurt it.
So how’s that theory looking? Not good. The British economy, which seemed to be recovering earlier in 2010, turned down again in the fourth quarter. Yes, weather was a factor, and, no, you shouldn’t read too much into one quarter’s numbers. But there’s certainly no sign of the surging private-sector confidence that was supposed to offset the direct effects of eliminating half-a-million government jobs. And, as a result, there’s no comfort in the British experience for Republican claims that the United States needs spending cuts in the face of mass unemployment.
Which brings me back to Paul Ryan and his response to President Obama. Again, American conservatives have long used the myth of a failing Europe to argue against progressive policies in America. More recently, they have tried to appropriate Europe’s debt problems on behalf of their own agenda, never mind the fact that events in Europe actually point the other way.
But Mr. Ryan is widely portrayed as an intellectual leader within the G.O.P., with special expertise on matters of debt and deficits. So the revelation that he literally doesn’t know the first thing about the debt crises currently in progress is, as I said, interesting — and not in a good way.

U.S. Farmers Are to Blame for Riots in Egypt

2011-01-29T05:43:00.000-08:00

U.S. taxpayer-funded agriculture subsidies, averaging $45,000 per farmer per year, are a major factor fueling current unrest in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere. Surging world food prices pushed up by these obscene subsidies are further enriching already rich U.S. farmers and impoverishing people all over the world getting by on a few dollars a day. Cowboy up, Republicans, make welfare queen farmers work honestly for a living like the rest of us.

Gene and the Machine: The shocking truth about the electric Volt

2011-01-29T03:04:00.000-08:00

WASHINGTON POST

Gene and the Machine: The shocking truth about the electric Volt
By Gene Weingarten
Sunday, January 30, 2011; W10

Here's the hyphen-heavy heap of hype on the Chevy Volt, GM's new, highly touted plug-in hybrid electric car: It's packing a 16-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery. It has a 1.4-liter, 16-valve, 4-cylinder, in-line gasoline engine fed by a 9.3-gallon fuel tank. It's got front-wheel drive and does a peppy 8.8-second zero-to-60.

You don't care about all that? Me, either. I'm not sure why automotive writers think we do. Ordinary people tend to make their car-buying judgments on a different, non-hyphenated calculus. This is particularly true for a concept car such as the Volt, which has been selling disproportionately to men, and which is why, to better serve you, the discerning consumer, I am stopping an attractive woman on a Bethesda sidewalk and asking her if she would sleep with me.

K.C. Hernandez is 32, a marketing associate visiting from Chicago. I assure her that I am a working journalist and that my question is purely hypothetical. Judging by appearances alone, I ask, what would be my theoretical chance of having sex with her, expressed as a percentage?

K.C.'s friend is frantically girl-coding, bugging out her eyes and shaking her head no, no! But K.C. is laughing. She'll play. She surveys my body, which has the muscle tone of a yam souffle. I am 59. I did not arrive there the way some men -- say, Harrison Ford -- did.

"Three," she says finally.

Three percent! I'm pretty sure it's a mercy vote, but I'll take it. Next, we walk across the street for the second part of the experiment. I pat the hood of an obsidian-black 2011 Chevy Volt, on loan to me for the day.

"This is my ride," I say. "Does this new information change the hypothetical answer at all?"

K.C. has heard of the Chevy Volt but hadn't seen one yet. Almost no one has, actually; it just hit the streets last month in the Washington area and four other markets nationwide -- a tantalizing trickle of a rollout. For a vehicle aimed at the eco-friendly, it is surprisingly sleek and growly-looking. It has clean lines, a youthful, video-game feel to its dashboard display, and a few mildly decadent luxury-car amenities, such as butt-warmer seats. After a big federal tax rebate, it costs about 35 grand, bottom line.

K.C. keeps looking from it to me dubiously, as if to reconcile the one with the other.

"Okay," she says.

She takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly.

"Three-point-five."

***

So this won't be a conventional automotive review. First, I'm not qualified to write a conventional automotive review, inasmuch as I know next to nothing about automobiles. Second, I am nakedly biased. I very much wanted to hate this car. It challenges my worldview.

Life is bewildering -- essentially, it's a fatal disease of uncertain course and unknown duration. If we are to make any sense of it, if we are to tame our existential terrors, we must gratefully cling to those few established truths on which we know we can rely: Day follows night. Sex causes babies. To lose weight, eat less. American cars suck.

I arrived at that last truth reluctantly but bitterly, like the millions of other boomers who long ago motored on in their automotive loyalties from Detroit to Yokohama or Dusseldorf.

My last American car was a 1985 Ford with brain damage; an irreparably faulty computer would periodically shut all systems down in mid-drive, flat-lining like a fresh corpse, the car slowly rolling to a standstill. Before that, I had a two-door Chevy that got 15 miles to the gallon and churned through brake pads as though they were pencil erasers. Seeking economy, my wife naively bought a Chevy Vega, a rattling deathtrap with an aluminum engine that warped and died at 50,000 miles, which was okay, because by then the chassis had rusted out, anyway.

American cars suck. With me, it's a mantra. I passed it along to my children in lieu of religion.

It is true that with globalization, there is less of a meaningful distinction these days between foreign cars and domestic. And yes, Detroit has been incrementally improving its products for some time. This is a splendid achievement that I've been content to applaud from a safe distance, behind the wheel of a succession of Mazdas and Toyotas and Hondas that have never once betrayed me.

But the Volt, it is said, is different. There's nothing incremental about it. It's being heralded as an overnight game-changer -- a car with an original concept and a compelling, heroic narrative: It was designed by a fanatic team of GM engineers who held fast to their vision while hounded by naysayers, even as their company was economically collapsing around them.

Some professional car reviewers have gone gaga. Dan Neil of the Wall Street Journal, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic renowned for his jaundiced eye, unabashedly called the Volt "a spark of genius." He went on:

"A bunch of Midwestern engineers in bad haircuts and cheap wristwatches just out-engineered every other car company on the planet."

Not good, not good at all for my worldview. But also not an insurmountable obstacle. Mr. Neil had one handicap I don't have: a starting point of impartiality.

About the time I read his review, The Post asked me if I'd like to do one of my own. Why, yes, I said. Yes, I would be delighted to.

Muhahaha.

***

In a sense, the Volt isn't doing anything scientifically groundbreaking. It's not the first electric car -- you can Google up photos of women in bustles, petticoats and parasols riding around in goofy-looking electrics at the turn of the last century. And of course it's not the first hybrid, a technology that for years has been delivering exceptional gas mileage to cars such as the Toyota Prius and the Honda Insight by efficiently switching between gas and electric power.

What makes the Volt the Darling of Detroit is that it has been reverse-engineered to match the perverse American psyche. Americans hate buying gas but love to drive. We definitely want to stick it to the sheikhs, and in the process maybe save the planet, so we want cars that run on sunshine, twigs and happy thoughts. But these cars also have to kick some ass. And be able to make an impulsive 90-mile run to Philly when we suddenly have a hankering for cheese steak. And we don't want to worry about hunting for twig refueling stations along the way.

All of that is what the Volt is theoretically designed to deliver.

The Volt is an all-electric car, with an asterisk. You can plug it in overnight -- even to the same sort of dinky wall outlet that runs your coffee maker -- and by morning, the car's battery is fully charged. It's ready to power the Volt's two electric motors, which will carry you 30 or 40 miles on that wall juice alone. If your life is circumscribed by a daily commute of 40 miles or less -- this applies to about three-quarters of Americans -- you can run this car without ever using even a teaspoon of gas, at the cost of about a buck fifty a day in electricity. But if you really, really want that cheese steak, you can get it, too.

The Volt's dainty gasoline engine doesn't usually power the car directly; it acts primarily as a generator to recharge the battery, which keeps the electric motors going another 300 miles or so after that initial charge is exhausted. Running on gas only, albeit premium, the Volt's motors still generate power at a respectable 37 miles to the gallon.

This versatility is the insight that separates the Volt from any other car ever made -- and, most significantly, from its equally new competitor, the cheaper, greener, fuddier-looking Nissan Leaf. The Leaf is purely electric, running on a battery from which Nissan engineers impressively have coaxed a 100-mile range. Their gamble is that our thirst for gas savings and eco-tech will outweigh a considerable downside: When the Leaf is out of juice, you're out of options. Even partial recharging takes time -- at least 30 minutes, and only if you can find access to special, high-voltage charging stations. That trip for cheese steak might require some fitful naps along the way. In Detroitspeak, this uncertainty is called "range anxiety." The Leaf has it. The Volt doesn't.

How daunting is it? The Leaf's GPS display puts your car in the center of a circle with a hundred-mile radius, with dots blinking the location of any quick-charge stations. It's a nifty trick but seems like a tacit confession of weakness. Do we really want to drive with the on-edge mind-set of air-traffic controllers? GM is banking that we don't.

Nissan and manufacturers of other all-electric cars -- Tesla Motors, for example, and Ford, which will roll out an all-electric Focus this year -- are gambling on a quick expansion of a nationwide high-voltage infrastructure: businesses, commercial parking lots and gas stations that will offer quick charges free or at a fee. That would help the Volt, too, but is far less essential. Like Leaf owners, Volt owners can buy a 220-volt home charging station. It looks like a vacuum cleaner and costs about $1,500 installed. That reduces charge time to about four hours.

If the Volt proves to be a triumph, then, it will be a triumph not so much of innovation as of the quieter virtues of pragmatism and compromise. Still, this would still be no small victory for an American carmaker. Remember that the American carmaker responded to the threat of smaller, cheaper, better, more economical foreign cars in the 1970s by taking a long, hard look at its fleet of behemoths, nodding sagely, and then adding spiffier "landau roofs."

***

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that the Volt represents a renaissance for good, old American know-how. As a loyal American, shouldn't I want to love it, even at the cost of a severe body blow to my sense of an ordered universe?

I should. Or, at least, I should try to put myself in the mood to be receptive to considering the possibility of liking it just a little. Which is why, right now, just before my first test-drive of the Volt, I am attempting to build an electric motor from scratch.

The homely tools lie before me: two jumbo-size safety pins, a length of wire, a crayon, a flashlight battery, a pair of screws, three magnets from a toy set, and a nail file.

The Web says a moderately handy person can build this in 10 minutes: a whirring, humming motor based on timeless principles of electromagnetism, the very technology at the center of the Volt. That's my goal: to feel a small, microcosmic surge of that American can-do spirit.

Indeed, the superstructure takes mere minutes. When I'm done, it looks like it's supposed to look: a tight wire coil on an axle over a magnet stack. But it's not spinning. It's as lifeless as a flat-lined, brain-dead 1985 Ford.

A little tinkering should get it humming, I figure. I rewire it. I reposition the magnets. I resecure the battery connections. I try larger safety pins, then smaller safety pins, then, in desperation, bobby pins.

Three hours later, my motor is still inert. Angry and frustrated, I head out for my first test-drive of the Volt.

***

It feels opulent. The interior is handsome, the seats buttery, the steering tight and responsive.

Volts are hard to come by -- only 10,000 will be sold in 2011 -- so GM was parsimonious about doling out early test-drives to automotive writers. For the most part, these were five- or 10-minute, chaperoned events for which writers queued up. But I wangled a guarantee of seven hours alone in the car over four days, a concession so huge that I was initially asked not to reveal the source of my car, lest a stink about favoritism be raised by the National Fraternity of Serious Auto Writers. This stricture was eventually relaxed, so I am now permitted to disclose that the car was lent to me personally, but not as authorized corporate policy, by a GM executive.

I'd like to think that this decision was based on a profound respect for the extreme fabulousness of my professional oeuvre, but I suspect it had more to do with the promise of a cover story in this magazine. And also because GM must know I am a dolt, car-wise. I suspect it occurred to the company that, given enough time with the car, a more knowledgeable reviewer than I would be far more likely to find any soft spots.

So, here I am, behind the wheel. I depress the accelerator with roughly the force that I'd use to put my Honda Civic into a slow roll. The Volt bolts. Just rockets forward.

"Whoa," I blurt.

"Yeah, that's low-end pep. Electric motors hit full torque right off the bat."

This is my friend Brady Holt, who is sitting beside me. I arranged to meet him in secret minutes after picking up the car. Brady reviews automobiles for Examiner.com.

(I may be a dolt, but I am a conniving dolt.)

Unlike internal-combustion engines, Brady explains, electric motors don't need to work their way up to maximum horsepower; they deliver it instantly, giving a distinctive mettle to the pedal at start-up speeds.

Brady is staying professionally reserved, but it's clear he is thrilled at getting extended time in this intriguing, hard-to-find car. One reason it's clear is that he has a small camera and is furtively taking pictures, like the Russian ambassador from "Dr. Strangelove" who finds himself momentarily unsupervised in the Pentagon's War Room.

The car rides low and stolid, like a limo, probably because its main battery, which runs the length of the chassis (and bifurcates the rear seat, limiting the likelihood of three passengers or recumbent teenage sex) also weighs as much as a fully stocked Maytag refrigerator.

A stylized icon of that battery dominates the dashboard display. Below it is a number, which is, at the moment, "21." That number provides a constant update of how many miles remain before the battery power is exhausted and the engine kicks in.

I'm getting excited. The battery readout had been "24" exactly 1.4 miles ago. This seems to be a huge discrepancy in accuracy, suggesting a battery with only half the advertised road range -- ergo, a brazen lie, a metastatic neoplasm right at the heart and soul of the machine!

"No, it's not," Brady says.

Those figures, he says, are just momentary guesstimates that fluctuate with temperature and terrain, and that self-correct over time. GM, he says, would neither miscalculate nor misrepresent something this critical to promised performance and this easily debunked.

In a few minutes, the numbers do, in fact, align.

Rats.

***

Rats.

I try recoiling the wire around the crayon counterclockwise. Doesn't help. Lubricating the axle doesn't help. Powering up by subbing a nine-volt for a D-cell creates sparks but still no spin.

Rats. Rats, rats, rats.

***

I'm heading out to Criswell Chevrolet in Gaithersburg for a photo op. Criswell will be handing a new Volt to its first Maryland buyer. On my radio, a commercial comes on. It begins: "This is a car that is destined to change the world!"

I listen. Turns out the car it is talking about is your old clunker. It is an ad for donations to the Melwood academy.

The Volt's ad campaign, by contrast, has actually been under-selling the novelty of the car, emphasizing that the buyer is not sacrificing utility for uniqueness. Rather than touting its alternative nature, the Volt's official motto almost apologizes for it:

"It's More Car Than Electric."

Why the humility? I'm thinking maybe GM is feeling guilty because it knows a more honest slogan would have been:

"Powered by Coal."

In the mainstream media's coverage of the rollout of the Volt, the merits of electric fuel have mostly been accepted as a given, as though electricity were magic fairy dust; seldom has this attitude been subjected to the rigorous scrutiny that might be applied by, say, a grumpy reviewer with an ax to grind.

Ecologically, electric power is not, when you get right down to it, all that clean. The single largest source of America's electric power grid -- at 44.5 percent -- is coal. The second largest is another fossil fuel, natural gas. So just how green is that snazzy new Volt -- with its electric butt-warmer seats -- that's charging up in your garage?

Basically, it depends on where that garage is. If it's in California, which is big on nuclear power, your Volt is practically pristine. If it's in Pennsylvania, in coal country, not so much.

To be fair, studies have shown that even dirty coal is kinder to the atmosphere than is gasoline. And while the electric power grid is getting cleaner year by year, gasoline isn't. So the "Powered by Coal" issue isn't a huge one, except for the fact that you probably shouldn't be reading about it here for the first time. There has been more than a bit of unquestioning, rah-rah, home-team nationalism to some of the media coverage of this car.

Speaking of which, I've now arrived at Criswell Chevrolet, and the handoff of the first Volt is proceeding splendidly. There's a reporter and camera crew from Fox 5 News.

Whether by design or accident, the new owner could not have provided better PR for GM. Chuck Rogers, 63, is lanky and laconic, a no-nonsense, cowboy-squinty kind of guy. Chuck ordered the car eight months ago and has driven 70 miles from Pennsylvania to get it -- not because he's a trend junkie or a publicity seeker but because he's a retired electrical engineer. He knows.

In Channel 5's report the next day, the news anchor will blithely misinform the viewers that the Volt is the "world's first electric vehicle" before handing off to the reporter, whose enthusiastic, upbeat segment will end with Chuck Rogers driving the car away, happy as a clam.

Alas, the reporter left too soon. There was a problem with the brakes. Chuck Rogers turned the car right around and drove back into the service bay. The mechanics couldn't fix it. Chuck went home that day carless.

***

Washington Post writer Phil McCombs once described a cave as having "a silence so utter, so austere, you can hear the crackle of neck gristle as your head turns." It's oddly like that in the Volt when it's on pure electric power. The silence is the first thing you notice. Then, that neck gristle. You hear ambient sounds you could never make out over the noise of an engine. I'm on the George Washington Memorial Parkway, heading toward the airport, and I can hear the movement of the steering column.

New technologies often involve awkward transition. Early TV news reports read like newspaper copy with sound bites weirdly introduced by a clipped "He said." In the early days of the auto industry, a company in Michigan designed a car, called the Horsey Horseless, in which the front-mounted gas tank was a full-size, realistic horse's head. The idea was that horses wouldn't be spooked by seeing this come up beside them. (It's not clear whether this car was ever actually built, but its design survives.)

There's some of that transitional silliness in the Volt. When you start the car, there is an artificial engine noise, to make the moment seem familiar. Most peculiarly, GM has outfitted the turn-signal lever so that if you pull it back toward you, it utters a little bleat to tell unwary pedestrians an otherwise silent car is approaching. Actually, calling this a bleat is unfair to sheep; it's more like someone with a head cold clearing his sinuses.

Hork snork, it proclaims. Volt driver coming through!

***

Remember before the Microsoft era, back when the archetype of the computer engineer was not that of a laid-back, semi-cool, scruffy geek but that of a strait-laced, uptight, button-down IBM company man with a company haircut? Ever wonder what happened to that archetype? It's still around in the auto industry!

I'm in a room full of these guys at the monthly meeting of the Washington Automotive Press Association at a luncheon near Reagan National Airport. The journos have invited executives from GM, and from the automotive and energy-technology industries, to talk about the Volt. The place is thick with car jargon understandable to everyone but me. ("OEMs," I learn, means "original equipment manufacturers," which means "car companies.")

Someone raises an interesting point: If it is indeed possible to drive this car for months on end without using a drop of gas, might the gasoline degrade in the tank and wind up damaging the engine?

The room is silent for an instant. This is apparently a very savvy question.

Then the Volt guy answers:

"Actually, we deal with that. ..."

Impressed heads nod, mine among them.

It turns out that after many months, the Volt senses when the gas is getting too old and alerts the driver so he can have the old gas siphoned out and the tank refilled.

On the way back home, on the highway, something absolutely amazing happens: nothing. Nothing whatsoever occurs at the moment the Volt makes that apocalyptic leap from all-electric power to gas. I know it has happened because the stylized battery icon suddenly is replaced by a stylized gas-pump icon. But there is no change in ride, no discernible handoff from one power source to another. And still no sound of an engine. That comes a minute or two later -- a quiet purr, much lower than you'd expect on a highway, and, curiously, it doesn't vary as you speed up or slow down. That's because the engine isn't driving the car, it's feeding the battery at a constant rate.

It all seems so ... elegant.

This would be a good time to address an issue I'd hoped would be pivotal: This car is designed to annoy people like me, by which I mean obnoxious, proselytizing proponents of clutch-and-stick driving.

I consider Americans' love affair with the automatic transmission to be a national disgrace, symptomatic of our softness as a people. This preference is lazy, unsophisticated and dumbed-down -- as I see it, philosophically inextricable from our lard-butted, couch-potato affinity for junk food, junk TV and celebrity gossip.

The Volt doesn't come with a stick shift option. I was poised to hate it for that reason alone, if necessary -- my fallback position -- until I learned that the car, basically, has no transmission at all.

That's the nature of an electric motor drive train: It speeds up and slows down smoothly without the need for "torque mediation," a term I just made up because I don't understand the actual physics. The Volt motors are almost always operating at one gear speed. The Volt's acceleration is smooth and steady; you don't experience that familiar, momentary, squishy ebb in power during automatic-transmission gear changes.

Disrespecting this car because it doesn't have a clutch seems churlish and off-point, like disrespecting dogs because they don't have gills.

Rats.

***

Chuck Rogers, the guy who didn't drive away with his new Volt, finally did, four days later. Jubilantly, he informs me by phone that he made the half-electric, 70-mile trip home on one gallon of gas -- exactly, mathematically, what the Volt promises for such a trip. He loves the car. Handles like a dream, he says.

Grimly, I set off for a prearranged meeting. It is my last shot at real dirt, and I am leaving nothing to chance.

My Volt is parked in a nondescript parking garage in downtown Rosslyn. A car approaches in spooky silence, a silence that is amplified -- if such a paradox is possible -- by the close quarters. The driver parks his silver Volt next to mine.

The man is wearing a trench coat and a cowboy hat, details I would have made up if this were fiction. He has a mild face; powerful people often do. This man once guarded our nation's biggest secrets. I assure him that I will never reveal his identity to anyone. If subpoenaed for it, I say, I'll go to prison and rot there.

"I don't mind if you identify me."

Dang.

Okay, this is James Woolsey, a director of the CIA under Bill Clinton. Woolsey is one of a handful of ordinary citizens who were selected by GM months ago to test-own the Volt and privately report back to the company. They were chosen for sundry reasons, some practical, some promotional. Chef Bryan Voltaggio of Frederick got one because he owns a restaurant named Volt. Woolsey is a venture capitalist in the field of alternative energy.

This handful of people has two combined qualities no one else on Earth does: 1) extended driving experience in the Volt and 2) no financial connection to GM. They can be honest, if they feel like it.

I want this guy to feel like it. So I tell him why I've brought him to this particular place.

"We are standing in the precise location where Bob Woodward used to meet Deep Throat. This is hallowed ground, a citadel to truth. It would be sacrilege to lie to a journalist in this place, or even to withhold information."

Woolsey smiles tightly. "I can see that."

"Good. Now dish the dirt."

He looks at the car, then at me.

"Okay, there is something," he says. I nod encouragingly in my best Woodwardian manner.

"When I reach to change the radio station, if my finger grazes the dashboard, it puts the radio in 'seek' mode. They have to fix that."

My pen is poised over my notebook.

"And?"

"And that's it."

What follows is a 24-minute disquisition on the evils of our dependence on fossil fuels and on the transcendent wonderfulness of the Volt. Woolsey plans on leasing a Volt for the next two years, then buying the 2013 model, which he has been told will have an engine that can run mostly on ethanol.

Pathetically, I try one last question:

"Does the expression 'follow the money' apply here?"

"Yes," he says, "but it's kind of the opposite! Many really good new ideas lose money when first implemented. The Prius did, and the Volt will. But GM was following the short-term money for years. The Japanese invested in quality and, over time, ate their lunch. With the Volt, GM is listening to people with a longer-term view. Bravo!"

Swell.

Woolsey gets in his Volt, soundlessly starts it up and whooshes away. On his rear bumper is a sticker: "Osama bin Laden hates this car."

Sigh. I don't.

I tried my best, but I can't. What I can do, though, is leave no stone unturned. So I make an extraordinary request to GM. I ask to speak to a man seldom heard from: Andrew Farah, the chief engineer of the Volt. GM put him on the phone.

There are no restrictions on what I can ask or what he can disclose.

It's a real opportunity. In a sense, I feel I am representing not only The Washington Post, and American journalism, but also you, the consumer.

"So," I say, "I've been trying to build this electric motor. ..."

Farah listens patiently to my methodology. Finally:

"My guess is, you need to get the timing right on the brushes, the commutation point."

"Where the axles go through the safety pins?"

"Yeah, that's going to be your problem area, right there. It requires precise angular tuning."

Dubiously, I redo those contacts, but this time aligning them fanatically with a magnifying glass and tweezers, as instructed.

The motor whirs into life, a blur right from the get-go, an explosion of low-end pep. It's purring, like a Volt.

Gene Weingarten is a columnist for the Magazine. He can be reached at weingarten@washpost.com. Join him Monday at 12 ET for a live discussion about this story.

Protests in Egypt

2011-01-28T08:16:00.000-08:00

Stakes are very high for us in Egypt now, while leverage is limited. The Muslim Brotherhood were violent anti-democracy (and pro-Nazi) extremists in Egypt long before Osama bin Laden was born. Biden probably got it right -- Mubarak should move gradually toward democracy without letting the MB genie out of the bottle. Closing down of the internet is especially problematic. We have to call for it to be reopened, but maybe not too loudly.

Koch conference now a target

2011-01-27T02:29:00.000-08:00

POLITICO
Koch conference now a target
By: Kenneth P. Vogel and Simmi Aujla
January 27, 2011 04:18 AM EST

This weekend, for the eighth straight year, the billionaire Koch brothers will convene a meeting of roughly 200 wealthy businessmen, Republican politicians and conservative activists for a semi-annual conference to raise millions of dollars for the institutions that form the intellectual foundation – and, increasingly, the leading political edge – of the conservative movement.

In the past, the meetings have drawn an A-list of participants – politicians like Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, leading free-market thinkers including American Enterprise Institute president Arthur Brooks, talkers Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and even Supreme Court justices - to mingle with the wealthy donors who comprise the bulk of the invitees. The meetings adjourned after soliciting pledges of support from the donors – sometimes totaling as much as $50 million – to non-profit groups favored by the Kochs.

For the most part, the meetings, which are closed to the public and reporters, have attracted little attention outside conservative circles. But very different circumstances surround the Koch conference set to begin Saturday at an exclusive resort outside Palm Springs, Calif.

The Koch brothers – Charles and David – have come under intense scrutiny recently for their role in helping start and fund some of the deepest-pocketed groups involved in organizing the tea party movement such as Americans for Prosperity, and for steering cash towards efforts to target President Barack Obama, his healthcare overhaul, and congressional Democrats in the run-up to the 2010 election.

Liberal critics have launched a campaign to highlight what they say is the systematic way in which the Kochs use their political giving to advance a conservative economic and regulatory agenda designed to further the interests of their oil, chemical and manufacturing empire.

Common Cause, the liberal watchdog group, is planning a protest called “Uncloaking the Kochs” and what it calls “the billionaires caucus” on Sunday a few miles down the road from the resort in Rancho Mirage, Calif., where this weekend’s conference will be held, and a handful of reporters have made plans to try to cover the Koch’s closed-door gathering.

While the Koch conferences have taken on an undeniably political edge – a June summit featured sessions on voter mobilization efforts for the 2010 midterms as well as solicitations for an ad campaign attacking Democratic lawmakers – those who have attended say the meetings say the critics have it all wrong.

“The main goal of the seminars appeared to me to be education on the challenges that face the American system of free enterprise and democracy, and what people can do about them,” said Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, a conservative Republican who has attended at least seven of the meetings.

McDonnell, who is not attending this weekend’s conference, said he was introduced to the gatherings by “free market friends up in Northern Virginia, some in the Koch enterprises institution,” and he cast the conferences as playing an important role in the political process.

“Groups on the right, left and in the middle get together all over this great country to exercise their first amendment rights to talk about these issues - some of them are public. Some of them are closed meetings,” he said. “So, to the degree that some on the left may be trying to attack these Koch seminars is really ridiculous.”

Until recently, the secrecy surrounding the meetings had always been tight.

A packet distributed to participants at the last session, held in June in Aspen, Colo., warned attendees not to talk to the press about the meetings, to wear their nametags at all times, and stressed that the meetings are “confidential” and “invitation-only.”

When that packet, which contained a tentative agenda and the names of about 200 invitees hand-picked by the Kochs, was leaked to the New York Times and the White House-allied ThinkProgress blog, it prompted a concerted effort by Koch operatives to locate the source of the leak.

Wealthy business leaders – in particular – have reason to be cautious about publicizing their participation in the conferences and might not participate if they were open to the public, said Herman Cain, a conservative activist and former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza who has participated in three Koch conferences and plans to attend this weekend’s.

“If you happen to be someone who sits on the board of a corporation or you own your own company, and you’re quoted out of context, it could impact your relationship with your owners, your stockholders and your employees,” he said. “That’s why the meetings are closed, so that you don’t have to try to say what’s politically correct. You can just talk about solutions and ideas about what needs to be done in order to try to make this country stronger.”

But the scrutiny from the media, liberal watchdogs and Democrats, including the White House, not only failed to discourage new participants, asserted a source close to the Kochs, it may have increased interest for this weekend’s meeting. “As a result of left-wing attacks, attendance is booming,” said the source.

In addition, the Kochs have been asking select participants to talk publicly about the conference to counter any effort to frame it as a secretive cabal.

Still, when contacted by POLITICO, most of those who had attended past conferences either refused to comment or would do so only on background, with some expressing concern about running afoul of the Koch brothers – who are reportedly worth $21.5 billion each – and being blacklisted from receiving invitations or funding.

According to a POLITICO analysis of Federal Election Commission and Internal Revenue Service Records, participants in last year’s Aspen conference, their clients and companies, have accounted for $48.3 million in contributions to mostly conservative candidates and causes since 2003.

And those tallies don’t include contributions to Koch-backed non-profit groups such as Americans for Prosperity or the Cato Institute which are registered under sections of the tax code that don’t require them to disclose their donors, making it difficult to accurately assess the total impact of Koch-linked giving.

Cain, who is openly discussing a long-shot bid for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination as a tea party alternative to the front-runners, echoed McDonnell that the left’s criticism is hypocritical.

“The liberals in this country are always looking for a big conservative target, but the Democracy Alliance does the same thing – so why is this one so suspect?” he said, citing a group of Democrat-allied donors who have been meeting twice a year in secret since 2005.

In some ways, the comparison between the groups is apt.

Democracy Alliance, which kicked a POLITICO reporter out of its November meeting, was patterned after the Kochs’ efforts to steer major donor funding to a set of permanent think tanks and policy-based non-profits that aren’t directly linked to elections.

And POLITICO has learned the Kochs are trying to launch a voter micro-targeting operation called Themis that their operatives hope will one day rival the Democrats’ vaunted Catalist database, which was funded with help from Democracy Alliance.

Plus, the Kochs are becoming targets for the left in the same way the billionaire financier George Soros, a founding Democracy Alliance donor, has long been vilified by conservatives.

Former U.S. Attorney General Ed Meese, who has attended almost every Koch conference and sits on the board of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, which the Kochs helped create and fund, rejected the Soros comparison. Conservative attacks on Soros, he said, “have been scrupulous in being careful with the truth and presenting only facts, whereas on the left, you have a lot of false and misleading rhetoric about the Kochs.”

Charles and David Koch each own about 40 percent of the Wichita, Kansas-based Koch Industries, which was founded by their father in the 1940s as an oil concern. Today, it’s the second-largest privately held company in the U.S., with interests in producing and distributing oil, chemicals, energy, pulp and paper, and various other concerns.

Students of libertarian free-market philosophy, the Koch brothers, their foundations and company focused their giving in the 1970s, 80s and 90s on think tanks that churned out mountains of studies and white papers promoting libertarian-infused free-market policies and legislation.

The family’s money either launched or helped launch such pillars of the conservative establishment as the Cato Institute, the Mercatus Center, and the Institute for Justice, while the Koch-funded Citizens for a Sound Economy, founded in 1984, engaged in so-called grassroots lobbying on a narrow range of issues that sometimes seemed to jibe with the interests of the Koch’s companies.

By the mid-point of the Bush administration, though, many fiscal conservatives had become disenchanted with what they saw as the fiscally reckless course charted by the Republicans who controlled both the White House and Congress.

It was against this backdrop that David Koch spearheaded the creation of Americans for Prosperity and that Charles Koch began organizing the donor conferences, with the inaugural meeting occurring in Chicago in 2003.

While critics have charged that their support for free markets represents a thinly veiled rationale to oppose federal regulation, one donor who has attended six or seven Koch conferences insists it is a fundamental belief.

“For the left to characterize the Kochs’ efforts in the policy arena as self-interested is to misjudge the extent to which they are motivated by an intellectual belief system,” said the donor, “just as the philanthropic efforts of George Soros and Peter Lewis and others on the left are driven by their very different beliefs.”

But their newfound prominence as liberal targets is due largely to their support for more activist groups, many of which have sought to harness or fan the energy of the tea party movement.

Their summer 2010 Aspen conference, for instance, featured a heavy emphasis on the efforts of Koch-linked groups to shape the midterm elections by rallying grassroots activists around issues important to the tea party.

An ad was screened attacking Obama’s healthcare overhaul, and plans were announced to air it in districts of vulnerable congressional Democrats who supported it, while Karl Crow, a former Koch Foundation staffer who left to run Themis last year, introduced the project to donors.

Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, which David Koch helped found in 2004 and which played a leading role in organizing early tea party events, talked about his group’s effort to mobilize voters ahead of the midterms, as well as its planned $45-million campaign ripping Democrats in 50 swing House districts and half a dozen targeted Senate races.

At the luncheon on the final day, a donor stood up and pledged $1 million to fund some of the Koch-backed non-profits, followed by a number of other 7-figure pledges, and a combined $12 million pledge by the Koch brothers, according to multiple attendees, one of whom estimated that the pledges received at that luncheon alone totaled $25 million.

But the Kochs and their operatives have expressed some uneasiness about being linked to grassroots activism, generally, and tried to distance themselves from the tea party movement, specifically.

“I’ve never been to a tea-party event,” David Koch in July told New York magazine in a rare interview. “No one representing the tea party has ever even approached me.”

In a May interview with FrumForum, Koch’s top executive, Richard Fink, said of Americans for Prosperity: “I don’t consider them a Tea Party institution,” then clarified “While they participate in events with tea party groups, our support of them has included no funds specifically for tea party-related efforts.”

A session at the January 2009 Koch donor conference in Palm Springs seemed to highlight the tension between the establishment and the new populist, grassroots movement. It featured a spirited debate about how best to advance free-market conservative principles in Washington between DeMint, who was then emerging as a champion of the anti-establishment conservative movement that became a pillar of the tea party, and Sen. John Cornyn, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

Cornyn told the donors about Republican efforts to win more seats in the Senate, while DeMint made the argument – as he has repeatedly, both before and since – that the cause would be better served by having a GOP minority comprised entirely of uncompromising conservative purists, than having a majority compromised of moderates and centrists.

“That’s a pretty establishment crowd,” said someone familiar with the panel. “But DeMint completely won them over.”

© 2011 Capitol News Company, LLC

Which Party Is More Serious About Budget Cuts?

2011-01-26T10:44:00.000-08:00

The party that eliminates farm subsidies will be the one that proves it is serious about jobs and growth. It is indefensible to keep giving welfare payments to this highly profitable industry. Generally speaking, the free market will never produce growth industries of the future as long as government continues to interfere with subsidies based on the past. Textiles and steel took it on the chin; agriculture too must sink or swim on its own.

Michael Steele and Haley Barbour

2011-01-14T11:40:00.001-08:00

It was shameful how Barbour brutally pulled the rug out from under Steele and assured that contributions to the RNC would dry up before the last elections. This is Southern back room politics at its sleaziest. Yet it is also how George W. Bush, the emptiest empty suit there ever was, got elected and relected. Don't count Barbour out just because he is crude and shallow.

Reading the Constitution Out Loud in the House?

2011-01-06T06:49:00.000-08:00

For heaven's sake, we're meant to debate the Constitution as rational independent human beings with inalienable rights, not worship it like a golden calf. Like creationists with the Bible, these "founderists" insist their interpretation is the only possible correct one, ever. This is unreasonable, illogical, and inconsistent with the principles actually contained in the document. And a lot more consistent with Islamic fundamentalism.

You Wanted tax Cuts For the Rich?

2010-12-08T14:09:00.000-08:00

Tax cuts for the rich were bad policy when Bush shoved them down our throats before, and they are bad policy now that McConnell and Boehner shoved them down our throats again. This is right wing extremism poised to drive our economy to ruin one more time. Man up, Republicans. Don't chicken out now and try to lay it off on President Obama. You wanted tax cuts for the "job creating" rich people and you got them. Now, let's see those jobs.

A Better Way to Manage Our Federal Budgets

2010-12-01T09:38:00.000-08:00

John Boehner's propsal to slice the federal budget up agency by agency is a very bad idea, because there's no plan for how the overall picture will emerge. Here's a better idea:

First, the White House, Congress and Federal Reserve agree on an appropriate target budget deficit, obviously lower than the previous year but not so sharply lower as to send the economy crashing back into recession. This will produce preliminary revenue and spending estimates derived from existing revenue forecasts, statutory spending obligations (debt repayment, Social Security/Medicare, etc.), and the previous year's discretionary spending.

Second, the White House and Congress hash out any and all legislative changes on taxes and other things on the revenue side for the coming year, and produce a revised revenue target.

They also hash out any legislative changes to statutory spending.

Now we have our discretionary spending target -- revenue target, plus deficit target, minus discretionary spending obligations.

The White House then sends Congress a single, consolidated spending plan for the year within the target spending limit.

Negotiations then ensue between the White House and Congress on a committee by committee basis about individual agency and program discretionary spending budgets. In the end, Congress approves a single consolidated spending plan in as much, or as little, detail as needed.

Over the course of the coming year, any changes in the revenue or spending picture are addressed through appropriately negotiated legislation that sticks as closely as possible to the agreed deficit target.

This way budget discipline is self-imposed by both executive and legislative branches, while ensuring that the most important thing, the deficit, is predictable for the public and for markets.

Don't Ask Don't Tell and START

2010-12-01T08:00:00.000-08:00

Where does the Constitution say that Congress shall decide who can serve in the military? DADT served its historical purpose; now Congress should get out of the way. Similarly, Sen. Kyle should put up or shut up on START. The right to advise and consent is not a right to hem and haw. God help us if Republicans can really get away with using our nuclear arsenal as a political football in their cynical, reckless game to unseat the President.

great essay on the U.S, macroeconomic situation

2010-11-27T08:33:00.000-08:00

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/11/battered-but-not-beaten.html

Israelis say, "Obama doesn't understand us."

2010-11-22T11:55:00.000-08:00

Americans understand Middle East realities all too well. Thousands of us died on 9/11. Thousands have died in Afghanistan and Iraq, and hundreds of thousands more are deployed in the region, lives on the line to bring peace. Balanced against that are Israeli fanatics frantically populating Palestinian neighborhoods and Palestinian factions squabbling over the scraps of dignity they have left. Where is their respect for our sacrifices?

In Writings of Obama, a Philosophy Is Unearthed

2010-10-27T13:01:00.000-07:00

The New York Times
October 27, 2010

In Writings of Obama, a Philosophy Is Unearthed
By PATRICIA COHEN

When the Harvard historian James T. Kloppenberg decided to write about the influences that shaped President Obama’s view of the world, he interviewed the president’s former professors and classmates, combed through his books, essays, and speeches, and even read every article published during the three years Mr. Obama was involved with the Harvard Law Review (“a superb cure for insomnia,” Mr. Kloppenberg said). What he did not do was speak to President Obama.

“He would have had to deny every word,” Mr. Kloppenberg said with a smile. The reason, he explained, is his conclusion that President Obama is a true intellectual — a word that is frequently considered an epithet among populists with a robust suspicion of Ivy League elites.

In New York City last week to give a standing-room-only lecture about his forthcoming intellectual biography, “Reading Obama: Dreams, Hopes, and the American Political Tradition,” Mr. Kloppenberg explained that he sees Mr. Obama as a kind of philosopher president, a rare breed that can be found only a handful of times in American history.

“There’s John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Quincy Adams, then Abraham Lincoln and in the 20th century just Woodrow Wilson,” he said.

To Mr. Kloppenberg the philosophy that has guided President Obama most consistently is pragmatism, a uniquely American system of thought developed at the end of the 19th century by William James, John Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce. It is a philosophy that grew up after Darwin published his theory of evolution and the Civil War reached its bloody end. More and more people were coming to believe that chance rather than providence guided human affairs, and that dogged certainty led to violence.

Pragmatism maintains that people are constantly devising and updating ideas to navigate the world in which they live; it embraces open-minded experimentation and continuing debate. “It is a philosophy for skeptics, not true believers,” Mr. Kloppenberg said.

Those who heard Mr. Kloppenberg present his argument at a conference on intellectual history at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center responded with prolonged applause. “The way he traced Obama’s intellectual influences was fascinating for us, given that Obama’s academic background seems so similar to ours,” said Andrew Hartman, a historian at Illinois State University who helped organize the conference.

Mr. Kloppenberg’s interest in the education of Barack Obama began from a distance. He spent 2008, the election year, at the University of Cambridge in England and found himself in lecture halls and at dinner tables trying to explain who this man was.

Race, temperament and family history are all crucial to understanding the White House’s current occupant, but Mr. Kloppenberg said he chose to focus on one slice of the president’s makeup: his ideas.

In the professor’s analysis the president’s worldview is the product of the country’s long history of extending democracy to disenfranchised groups, as well as the specific ideological upheavals that struck campuses in the 1980s and 1990s. He mentions, for example, that Mr. Obama was at Harvard during “the greatest intellectual ferment in law schools in the 20th century,” when competing theories about race, feminism, realism and constitutional original intent were all battling for ground.

Mr. Obama was ultimately drawn to a cluster of ideas known as civic republicanism or deliberative democracy, Mr. Kloppenberg argues in the book, which Princeton University Press will publish on Sunday. In this view the founding fathers cared as much about continuing a discussion over how to advance the common good as they did about ensuring freedom.

Taking his cue from Madison, Mr. Obama writes in his 2006 book “The Audacity of Hope” that the constitutional framework is “designed to force us into a conversation,” that it offers “a way by which we argue about our future.” This notion of a living document is directly at odds with the conception of Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court, who has spoken of “the good, old dead Constitution.”

Mr. Kloppenberg compiled a long list of people who he said helped shape Mr. Obama’s thinking and writing, including Weber and Nietzsche, Thoreau and Emerson, Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison. Contemporary scholars like the historian Gordon Wood, the philosophers John Rawls and Hilary Putnam, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz and the legal theorists Martha Minow and Cass Sunstein (who is now working at the White House) also have a place.

Despite the detailed examination, Mr. Kloppenberg concedes that President Obama remains something of a mystery.

“To critics on the left he seems a tragic failure, a man with so much potential who has not fulfilled the promise of change that partisans predicted for his presidency,” he said. “To the right he is a frightening success, a man who has transformed the federal government and ruined the economy.”

He finds both assessments flawed. Conservatives who argue that Mr. Obama is a socialist or an anti-colonialist (as Dinesh D’Souza does in his book “The Roots of Obama’s Rage”) are far off the mark, he said.

“Adams and Jefferson were the only anti-colonialists whom Obama has been affected by,” he told the audience in New York. “He has a profound love of America.”

And his opposition to inequality stems from Puritan preachers and the social gospel rather than socialism.

As for liberal critics, Mr. Kloppenberg took pains to differentiate the president’s philosophical pragmatism, which assumes that change emerges over decades, from the kind of “vulgar pragmatism” practiced by politicians looking only for expedient compromise. (He gave former President Bill Clinton’s strategy of “triangulation” as an example.)

Not all of the disappointed liberals who attended the lecture in New York were convinced that that distinction can be made so easily. T. J. Jackson Lears, a historian at Rutgers University, wrote in an e-mail that by “showing that Obama comes out of a tradition of philosophical pragmatism, he actually provided a basis for criticizing Obama’s slide into vulgar pragmatism.”

And despite Mr. Kloppenberg’s focus on the president’s intellectual evolution, most listeners wanted to talk about his political record.

“There seemed to be skepticism regarding whether Obama’s intellectual background actually translated into policies that the mostly left-leaning audience could get behind,” Mr. Hartman said. “Several audience members, myself included, probably view Obama the president as a centrist like Clinton rather than a progressive intellectual as painted by Kloppenberg.”

Frank Caprio -- another loud-mouth?

2010-10-27T11:50:00.000-07:00

Rhode Island Democratic gubernatorial candidate Frank Caprio's intemperate outburst is reminiscent of Carl Paladino, or Todd Palin raging at Joe Miller for hesitating to endorse Sarah Palin for President. (Caprio said President Obama can "take his endorsement and just shove it.") America needs more civility in political discourse, not louder shouting. Besides, it was "centrist" Democrats like Caprio in Congress that hung a half-hearted economic stimulus and half-hearted health insurance reform around the President's neck like twin albatrosses. And now they run away from him?

Lobbyists Buying Republicans

2010-10-26T22:59:00.000-07:00

October 26, 2010
Lobbyists Court Potential Stars Of House Panels
By ERIC LIPTON and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

WASHINGTON — Ernst & Young, the global accounting firm, hosted a fund-raising breakfast late last month for Representative Dave Camp that drew so many donors the firm’s lobbyists had to pull extra chairs into their largest conference room.

The day before, Mr. Camp was at a Capitol Hill town house owned by a founder of the Online Lenders Alliance, raising thousands of dollars more. And then there was the dinner reception and fund-raiser at Carmine’s, a downtown Italian restaurant, for Mr. Camp that same week.

To an outsider, it might be confounding why Mr. Camp, a relatively unknown Michigan Republican who has no viable challenger in his re-election bid this year, would be seeing such a flood of cash, including contributions from names like Bob Dole, the former United States senator turned lobbyist, and Joseph E. Gallo, the chief executive of E. & J. Gallo Winery in California.

But there is nothing mysterious for the lobbyists and corporate executives writing most of these checks. Mr. Camp is slated to take over the powerful, tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee if Republicans win the majority next week, transforming this low-key conservative Republican almost overnight into one of the most powerful men in town.

Across Washington, lobbyists have been working behind the scenes now for months to prepare for this possible power shift. Former aides to Mr. Camp, who now work as lobbyists, are checking in with their onetime boss, chatting with him and his aides about staff appointments he might make when he takes over the Ways and Means Committee, and what tax or health care issues will be at the top of his agenda. Other lobbyists have gone to his staff to try to get to the head of the line in presenting proposed tax changes that will benefit their clients.

“You don’t wait until Nov. 3 and say, ‘What is the plan,’ ” said Jennifer Bell, a former aide to Mr. Camp who is now a health care lobbyist. She flew to Michigan last month in part to catch up with Mr. Camp while he was in his district. “Obviously, it is the majority that sets the agenda.”

The chairman’s spot on the Ways and Means Committee has long been a magnet for big dollars; Representative Charles B. Rangel, Democrat of New York, saw his campaign war accounts surge after he took over the committee in 2007.

The full list of likely Republican chairmen is not yet known. The choices are based on a mix of seniority and popularity, and some positions are still up for grabs. And, of course, voters still have to decide, regardless of what the polls are predicting, which party will control Congress. Still, the jockeying to influence the class of likely new leaders started months ago.

Representative Howard P. McKeon, Republican of California, who is slated to take over the Armed Services Committee, has been a particular focus of attention, as military contractors fret over spending cuts proposed by the Obama administration.

For his 2008 campaign, Mr. McKeon collected $86,000 from the military industry for his political action committee and re-election bid. This time, even before the two-year election cycle is over, he has pulled in nearly $400,000, and has emerged as the top recipient of money in both the House and the Senate from military contractors like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.

Two of his former aides — who now work as military industry lobbyists — cornered him last month at a Capitol Hill reception held to unveil a portrait of Mr. McKeon, painted to honor his former service as chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee. (He held that spot for only several months, just before Republicans last lost control of Congress, but he still had a portrait commissioned.)

Recognizing the enormous power Mr. McKeon could soon have in helping shape Defense Department policy and spending, military contractors are teaming up with his office to form a new association of military suppliers they are calling the Aerospace Defense Coalition of Santa Clarita Valley, to make sure he can deliver as much money as possible to his district in California, where several of the big contractors already have large operations.

Mr. McKeon, who is known as Buck, has already hinted to industry lobbyists that he wants to push for more spending on unmanned aerial vehicles, which could benefit contractors in his district.

“Buck is a great advocate for our war fighters and for the industrial capabilities that support their mission,” said Hanz C. Heinrichs, a former aide to Mr. McKeon who now represents military contractors like L3 Communications..

One lobbyist who knows Mr. McKeon well and has contributed the maximum allowed by law to his re-election campaign has met with several military contractors in recent weeks as he seeks a way to profit from the rise of Mr. McKeon to chairman.

“I don’t want to count the chickens before they hatch,” said the lobbyist, referring not to the possible Republican takeover but to his possible surge in new clients. “But I would be surprised if it didn’t help me in one way or another. Business should be very good.”

Mr. McKeon, in a statement, said that if named chairman, he would continue a tradition of bipartisan leadership at the Armed Services Committee, “providing our warfighters and their families with the resources and support they need — and that commitment will continue regardless of the outcome in November.”

Mr. Camp declined a request for comment, but an aide to Mr. Camp, Sage Eastman, said his agenda would be dictated by voters not lobbyists.

“You are hired or fired based on your ability to reflect the will of the American people,” Mr. Eastman said.

The possible shift in power has also generated excitement among energy-sector lobbyists, who welcome the likely rise of Representative Doc Hastings, Republican of Washington, as chairman of the Natural Resources Committee. Even while oil was still spilling into the Gulf of Mexico this summer, Mr. Hastings was condemning the moratorium on new drilling, and tried to block a Democrat-backed bill that would impose new safety standards on off-shore drilling operations, while also increasing taxes that oil drilling companies must pay.

Mr. Hastings has long been popular with the oil and gas interests. He got $10,000 from the industries in the last election cycle. But this time around, he has collected $70,000, making him one of the top recipients of money from those industries. That contrasts with Representative Nick J. Rahall II, Democrat of West Virginia, the current committee chairman, who has been an outspoken critic of the oil industry, but is a major recipient of donations from railroad and coal mining executives.

Industry lobbyists said they were hopeful that the Natural Resources Committee under Mr. Hastings would take a more aggressive stand in challenging the many costly environmental and safety regulations the Obama administration has tried to impose on the industry.

“Clearly, he is pro-energy development,” said Michael D. Olsen, a former Natural Resources Committee staff member and Bush administration Interior Department official, who now is a lobbyist at Bracewell & Giuliani, a firm that specializes in energy.

In some cases, the lobbyists must wait for outcomes, like the chairmanship of the Appropriations Committee, which controls all federal spending. Representative Jerry Lewis of California is the senior Republican on the panel, but he may be blocked from the post because of party-imposed term limits.

Besides the jobs that affect certain industries, other names are emerging for leadership positions in the new Congress.

Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, who would lead the Budget Committee, has been a point person for Republican leaders on fiscal issues in recent years. Mr. Ryan is one of the “Young Guns,” a moniker that Republicans have used to brand a new generation of leadership, along with a recently released book of the same name.

Representative Darrell Issa of California is poised to become the chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which puts him in position to investigate the Obama administration and issue subpoenas.

Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida is expected to become chairwoman of the Foreign Affairs Committee. Born in Havana, she is a strong opponent of the Communist government in Cuba and at one point called publicly for the assassination of Fidel Castro.

Fund-raising for all of these members is likely to become easier. Ed Kutler, a Republican lobbyist close to Mr. Camp, found that out when he organized a fund-raising event for him this year.

“I was calling around inviting clients to the event, asking if they would be willing to help out,” said Mr. Kutler, a onetime Republican aide in the House. “With one client, at first he said, ‘Probably not.’ Then there was a pause and he said, ‘If Republicans take over, could he be chairman?’ And then he said, ‘O.K., put me down.’ ”

Kitty Bennett and Barclay Walsh contributed research.

2010-10-25T19:44:00.000-07:00

The New York Times
October 24, 2010
Falling Into the Chasm
By PAUL KRUGMAN
This is what happens when you need to leap over an economic chasm — but either can’t or won’t jump far enough, so that you only get part of the way across.

If Democrats do as badly as expected in next week’s elections, pundits will rush to interpret the results as a referendum on ideology. President Obama moved too far to the left, most will say, even though his actual program — a health care plan very similar to past Republican proposals, a fiscal stimulus that consisted mainly of tax cuts, help for the unemployed and aid to hard-pressed states — was more conservative than his election platform.

A few commentators will point out, with much more justice, that Mr. Obama never made a full-throated case for progressive policies, that he consistently stepped on his own message, that he was so worried about making bankers nervous that he ended up ceding populist anger to the right.

But the truth is that if the economic situation were better — if unemployment had fallen substantially over the past year — we wouldn’t be having this discussion. We would, instead, be talking about modest Democratic losses, no more than is usual in midterm elections.

The real story of this election, then, is that of an economic policy that failed to deliver. Why? Because it was greatly inadequate to the task.

When Mr. Obama took office, he inherited an economy in dire straits — more dire, it seems, than he or his top economic advisers realized. They knew that America was in the midst of a severe financial crisis. But they don’t seem to have taken on board the lesson of history, which is that major financial crises are normally followed by a protracted period of very high unemployment.

If you look back now at the economic forecast originally used to justify the Obama economic plan, what’s striking is that forecast’s optimism about the economy’s ability to heal itself. Even without their plan, Obama economists predicted, the unemployment rate would peak at 9 percent, then fall rapidly. Fiscal stimulus was needed only to mitigate the worst — as an “insurance package against catastrophic failure,” as Lawrence Summers, later the administration’s top economist, reportedly said in a memo to the president-elect.

But economies that have experienced a severe financial crisis generally don’t heal quickly. From the Panic of 1893, to the Swedish crisis of 1992, to Japan’s lost decade, financial crises have consistently been followed by long periods of economic distress. And that has been true even when, as in the case of Sweden, the government moved quickly and decisively to fix the banking system.

To avoid this fate, America needed a much stronger program than what it actually got — a modest rise in federal spending that was barely enough to offset cutbacks at the state and local level. This isn’t 20-20 hindsight: the inadequacy of the stimulus was obvious from the beginning.

Could the administration have gotten a bigger stimulus through Congress? Even if it couldn’t, would it have been better off making the case for a bigger plan, rather than pretending that what it got was just right? We’ll never know.

What we do know is that the inadequacy of the stimulus has been a political catastrophe. Yes, things are better than they would have been without the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: the unemployment rate would probably be close to 12 percent right now if the administration hadn’t passed its plan. But voters respond to facts, not counterfactuals, and the perception is that the administration’s policies have failed.

The tragedy here is that if voters do turn on Democrats, they will in effect be voting to make things even worse.

The resurgent Republicans have learned nothing from the economic crisis, except that doing everything they can to undermine Mr. Obama is a winning political strategy. Tax cuts and deregulation are still the alpha and omega of their economic vision.

And if they take one or both houses of Congress, complete policy paralysis — which will mean, among other things, a cutoff of desperately needed aid to the unemployed and a freeze on further help for state and local governments — is a given. The only question is whether we’ll have political chaos as well, with Republicans’ shutting down the government at some point over the next two years. And the odds are that we will.

Is there any hope for a better outcome? Maybe, just maybe, voters will have second thoughts about handing power back to the people who got us into this mess, and a weaker-than-expected Republican showing at the polls will give Mr. Obama a second chance to turn the economy around.

But right now it looks as if the too-cautious attempt to jump across that economic chasm has fallen short — and we’re about to hit rock bottom.

2010-10-25T13:20:00.000-07:00

The New York Times
October 24, 2010, 5:15 pm
Stories vs. Statistics
By JOHN ALLEN PAULOS

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.

Half a century ago the British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow bemoaned the estrangement of what he termed the “two cultures” in modern society — the literary and the scientific. These days, there is some reason to celebrate better communication between these domains, if only because of the increasingly visible salience of scientific ideas. Still a gap remains, and so I’d like here to take an oblique look at a few lesser-known contrasts and divisions between subdomains of the two cultures, specifically those between stories and statistics.

I’ll begin by noting that the notions of probability and statistics are not alien to storytelling. From the earliest of recorded histories there were glimmerings of these concepts, which were reflected in everyday words and stories. Consider the notions of central tendency — average, median, mode, to name a few. They most certainly grew out of workaday activities and led to words such as (in English) “usual,” “typical.” “customary,” “most,” “standard,” “expected,” “normal,” “ordinary,” “medium,” “commonplace,” “so-so,” and so on. The same is true about the notions of statistical variation — standard deviation, variance, and the like. Words such as “unusual,” “peculiar,” “strange,” “original,” “extreme,” “special,” “unlike,” “deviant,” “dissimilar” and “different” come to mind. It is hard to imagine even prehistoric humans not possessing some sort of rudimentary idea of the typical or of the unusual. Any situation or entity — storms, animals, rocks — that recurred again and again would, it seems, lead naturally to these notions. These and other fundamentally scientific concepts have in one way or another been embedded in the very idea of what a story is — an event distinctive enough to merit retelling — from cave paintings to “Gilgamesh” to “The Canterbury Tales,” onward.

With regard to informal statistics we’re a bit like Moliere’s character, who was shocked to find that he’d been speaking prose his whole life.
The idea of probability itself is present in such words as “chance,” “likelihood,” “fate,” “odds,” “gods,” “fortune,” “luck,” “happenstance,” “random,” and many others. A mere acceptance of the idea of alternative possibilities almost entails some notion of probability, since some alternatives will be come to be judged more likely than others. Likewise, the idea of sampling is implicit in words like “instance,” “case,” “example,” “cross-section,” “specimen” and “swatch,” and that of correlation is reflected in “connection,” “relation,” “linkage,” “conjunction,” “dependence” and the ever too ready “cause.” Even hypothesis testing and Bayesian analysis possess linguistic echoes in common phrases and ideas that are an integral part of human cognition and storytelling. With regard to informal statistics we’re a bit like Moliere’s character who was shocked to find that he’d been speaking prose his whole life.

Despite the naturalness of these notions, however, there is a tension between stories and statistics, and one under-appreciated contrast between them is simply the mindset with which we approach them. In listening to stories we tend to suspend disbelief in order to be entertained, whereas in evaluating statistics we generally have an opposite inclination to suspend belief in order not to be beguiled. A drily named distinction from formal statistics is relevant: we’re said to commit a Type I error when we observe something that is not really there and a Type II error when we fail to observe something that is there. There is no way to always avoid both types, and we have different error thresholds in different endeavors, but the type of error people feel more comfortable may be telling. It gives some indication of their intellectual personality type, on which side of the two cultures (or maybe two coutures) divide they’re most comfortable.

Erin Schell
People who love to be entertained and beguiled or who particularly wish to avoid making a Type II error might be more apt to prefer stories to statistics. Those who don’t particularly like being entertained or beguiled or who fear the prospect of making a Type I error might be more apt to prefer statistics to stories. The distinction is not unrelated to that between those (61.389% of us) who view numbers in a story as providing rhetorical decoration and those who view them as providing clarifying information.

The so-called “conjunction fallacy” suggests another difference between stories and statistics. After reading a novel, it can sometimes seem odd to say that the characters in it don’t exist. The more details there are about them in a story, the more plausible the account often seems. More plausible, but less probable. In fact, the more details there are in a story, the less likely it is that the conjunction of all of them is true. Congressman Smith is known to be cash-strapped and lecherous. Which is more likely? Smith took a bribe from a lobbyist or Smith took a bribe from a lobbyist, has taken money before, and spends it on luxurious “fact-finding” trips with various pretty young interns. Despite the coherent story the second alternative begins to flesh out, the first alternative is more likely. For any statements, A, B, and C, the probability of A is always greater than the probability of A, B, and C together since whenever A, B, and C all occur, A occurs, but not vice versa.

This is one of many cognitive foibles that reside in the nebulous area bordering mathematics, psychology and storytelling. In the classic illustration of the fallacy put forward by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, a woman named Linda is described. She is single, in her early 30s, outspoken, and exceedingly smart. A philosophy major in college, she has devoted herself to issues such as nuclear non-proliferation. So which of the following is more likely?

a.) Linda is a bank teller.

b.) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

Although most people choose b.), this option is less likely since two conditions must be met in order for it to be satisfied, whereas only one of them is required for option a.) to be satisfied.

(Incidentally, the conjunction fallacy is especially relevant to religious texts. Imbedding the God character in a holy book’s very detailed narrative and building an entire culture around this narrative seems by itself to confer a kind of existence on Him.)

Yet another contrast between informal stories and formal statistics stems from the extensional/intensional distinction. Standard scientific and mathematical logic is termed extensional since objects and sets are determined by their extensions, which is to say by their member(s). Mathematical entities having the same members are the same even if they are referred to differently. Thus, in formal mathematical contexts, the number 3 can always be substituted for, or interchanged with, the square root of 9 or the largest whole number smaller than pi without affecting the truth of the statement in which it appears.

In everyday intensional (with an s) logic, things aren’t so simple since such substitution isn’t always possible. Lois Lane knows that Superman can fly, but even though Superman and Clark Kent are the same person, she doesn’t know that Clark Kent can fly. Likewise, someone may believe that Oslo is in Sweden, but even though Oslo is the capital of Norway, that person will likely not believe that the capital of Norway is in Sweden. Locutions such as “believes that” or “thinks that” are generally intensional and do not allow substitution of equals for equals.

The relevance of this to probability and statistics? Since they’re disciplines of pure mathematics, their appropriate logic is the standard extensional logic of proof and computation. But for applications of probability and statistics, which are what most people mean when they refer to them, the appropriate logic is informal and intensional. The reason is that an event’s probability, or rather our judgment of its probability, is almost always affected by its intensional context.

The focus of stories is on individuals rather than averages, on motives rather than movements, on context rather than raw data.
Consider the two boys problem in probability. Given that a family has two children and that at least one of them is a boy, what is the probability that both children are boys? The most common solution notes that there are four equally likely possibilities — BB, BG, GB, GG, the order of the letters indicating birth order. Since we’re told that the family has at least one boy, the GG possibility is eliminated and only one of the remaining three equally likely possibilities is a family with two boys. Thus the probability of two boys in the family is 1/3. But how do we come to think that, learn that, believe that the family has at least one boy? What if instead of being told that the family has at least one boy, we meet the parents who introduce us to their son? Then there are only two equally like possibilities — the other child is a girl or the other child is a boy, and so the probability of two boys is 1/2.

Many probability problems and statistical surveys are sensitive to their intensional contexts (the phrasing and ordering of questions, for example). Consider this relatively new variant of the two boys problem. A couple has two children and we’re told that at least one of them is a boy born on a Tuesday. What is the probability the couple has two boys? Believe it or not, the Tuesday is important, and the answer is 13/27. If we discover the Tuesday birth in slightly different intensional contexts, however, the answer could be 1/3 or 1/2.

Related More From The Stone
Read previous contributions to this series.
Of course, the contrasts between stories and statistics don’t end here. Another example is the role of coincidences, which loom large in narratives, where they too frequently are invested with a significance that they don’t warrant probabilistically. The birthday paradox, small world links between people, psychics’ vaguely correct pronouncements, the sports pundit Paul the Octopus, and the various bible codes are all examples. In fact, if one considers any sufficiently large data set, such meaningless coincidences will naturally arise: the best predictor of the value of the S&P 500 stock index in the early 1990s was butter production in Bangladesh. Or examine the first letters of the months or of the planets: JFMAMJ-JASON-D or MVEMJ-SUN-P. Are JASON and SUN significant? Of course not. As I’ve written often, the most amazing coincidence of all would be the complete absence of all coincidences.

I’ll close with perhaps the most fundamental tension between stories and statistics. The focus of stories is on individual people rather than averages, on motives rather than movements, on point of view rather than the view from nowhere, context rather than raw data. Moreover, stories are open-ended and metaphorical rather than determinate and literal.

In the end, whether we resonate viscerally to King Lear’s predicament in dividing his realm among his three daughters or can’t help thinking of various mathematical apportionment ideas that may have helped him clarify his situation is probably beyond calculation. At different times and places most of us can, should, and do respond in both ways.

John Allen Paulos is Professor of Mathematics at Temple University and the author of several books, including “Innumeracy,” “Once Upon a Number,” and, most recently, “Irreligion.”

2010-10-21T09:37:00.000-07:00

The New York Times
Keith Richards Has Memories to Burn
By JANET MASLIN
Published: October 20, 2010

It is 3 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time in the New York office of Keith Richards’s manager, a place that might look ordinary if every wall and shelf were not crammed with some of the world’s most glorious rock ’n’ roll memorabilia. Mr. Richards has a 3 o’clock appointment. “Come on in, he’ll be here in a minute,” an assistant says — and here he comes in a minute, at 3:01. This from a man who once prided himself for operating on Keith Time, as in: the security staff ate the shepherd’s pie that Keith wanted in his dressing room? Then everyone in this packed stadium can bloody well wait. The Rolling Stones don’t play until another shepherd’s pie shows up.
Chalk up the promptness to the man’s new incarnation: he is now Keith Richards, distinguished author. True, he is far from the only rock star to turn memoirist, and far from the only Rolling Stone to write a book about himself — very much about himself. The raven-haired Ron Wood wrote “Ronnie,” in which he described Brian Jones as “me in a blond wig.” Bill Wyman, the band’s retired bass player and bean counter, wrote “Stone Alone,” in which not a 15-shilling demo disc went unmentioned. Now Mr. Richards has written the keeper: “Life,” a big, fierce, game-changing account of the Stones’ nearly half-century-long adventure.

“It’s the most difficult thing I’ve ever done,” he says about the book. “I’d rather make 10 records.”

But he sounds anything but weary. And he seems refreshed, bearing surprisingly little resemblance to the battered, kohl-eyed pirate Keith Richards who looks like 50 miles of bad road. Today, in neutral street clothes and hot-green shoes, he is positively debonair. On his hands: the ubiquitous silver skull ring, swollen knuckles, the thin white scar from a hunk of steaming phosphorus that burned his finger to the bone while he played through a concert without stopping. On his head: both a headband and a raffish, straw-colored hat, gray tufts poking out in all directions. Not a single gewgaw hangs off it. “I’ve been through that phase,” he says. “Don’t know that the hair will take the pressure anymore.”

He’s been through quite a lot of phases. And they’re all on the page in “Life”: the Boy Scout (really); the tyro rocker; the lovestruck kid (mad for Ronnie Spector, unbeknownst to Phil Spector); the astonished new star; the heroin-addicted older one; the jaded veteran of countless world tours; and the longtime sparring partner of Mick Jagger. (Despite tabloid shock over the bickering in the book, these two have seriously been calling each other names at least since the early 1980s.) All of this is recounted with straight-up candor, and some of it is easily sensationalized. But the book’s single biggest stunner is a hand-written note on its jacket flap: “Believe it or not, I haven’t forgotten any of it.”

How, he is asked, is this humanly possible from a man as well known for stupefaction as “Satisfaction?” “I think my main concern at the beginning was whether my memory was really reliable,” he says. “Fox had to do a little sleuthing.” Fox is James Fox, the journalist and author of “White Mischief,” who has been Mr. Richards’s friend over many years and was his collaborator in putting “Life” together. (It was sold to Little, Brown & Company for a reported advance of more than $7 million.)

Mr. Fox wound up researching Mr. Richards’s past, conducting interviews with those who knew him long ago and drawing upon wonderfully candid old letters and journal entries. “Spent day practising,” the 19-year-old Mr. Richards wrote in January 1963, when the Stones were just beginning to play in public. “Worthwhile, I hope!” Also exhumed: a 1962 letter from Mr. Richards to his Aunt Patty describing a boy he had known in primary school, Mick Jagger. He signs off “Luff/Keith xxxxx”

These artifacts turned out to be the Richards equivalent of Proust’s madeleines, though Mr. Richards, whose reading taste runs to naval history and the novels of Patrick O’Brian and George MacDonald Fraser, would hardly put it that way. In any case they prompted recollections that he never expected to rediscover, and “Life” began to click. Once his stories were told and a draft was written, he and Mr. Fox wound up sitting together with separate copies of the manuscript as Mr. Fox read the whole book aloud. “What I couldn’t guess was that he’d be such a very good natural editor,” Mr. Fox, reached by e-mail, says of Mr. Richards. “He cut, accordingly, for pace and rhythm — a real musical cut.”

As for calling the book “Life,” Mr. Richards did some editing there too. “My Life” was what the book was to be called. “I said ‘I tell you what, just cut off the ‘My,’ and you’ve got a title,” he says. He might just as appropriately have used another title he likes, “Keep It Dark.” But, he says, “I’m saving it for a song.”

The contents of “Life” are dark enough already. The book begins with a 1975 drug bust in Arkansas and a judge who was persuaded to free Mr. Richards after confiscating his hunting knife (which still hangs in the courtroom) and having a picture taken with him. How did Mr. Richards get so lucky? “I really can’t explain it,” he says, deadpan, about that now. “Maybe I’ve got an honest face.”

It covers many other arrests too, as well as Mr. Richards’s grueling efforts to kick his heroin addiction, which he claims to have done successfully 30 years ago. “Stories like this aren’t told very much,” he insists. “There aren’t many people willing to tell them.”

Then there are the other health hazards that the book describes. Like electrocution. “My most spectacular one was in Sacramento. ...” he now says with a smile, drifting off into a fond-sounding reverie that involves a guitar string touching an ungrounded microphone and clouds of smoke billowing out of his mouth. He has a good laugh at the memory of finding himself in a hospital and hearing a doctor say, “Well, they either wake up or they don’t.”

“Life” has already attracted undue attention for a schoolyard-sounding anatomical swipe at Mr. Jagger. But this is a book that pulls no punches, and most of its disses are more serious than that. “Cold-blooded” and “vicious” are only two of the more printable words he uses to describe Brian Jones. Allen Ginsberg was an “old gasbag.” Mick Taylor, the former Rolling Stone, “didn’t do anything” after he left the band, and Donald Cammell, the film director (“Performance,” starring Mr. Jagger and Anita Pallenberg, Mr. Richards’s longtime lover and partner in crime), couldn’t commit suicide quickly enough to suit Mr. Richards. (He shot himself in 1996.) When Marlon Brando propositioned him and Ms. Pallenberg, Mr. Richards remembers replying with this: “Later, pal.”

As for Mr. Jagger, the complaints are deep-seated. They involve credit hogging, social climbing, egomania, insecurity, unethical business behavior and — here comes a Freudian’s holiday for anyone who’s ever watched the bare-chested young Jagger and Richards vamp it up together — uncertain sexual identity. There’s also a cool condescension about Mr. Jagger’s contributions to the duo’s songwriting. And a nasty nickname or two, like “Disco Boy.”

In conversation about all this, Mr. Richards is emphatically blasé: “It’s bound to be somewhat rough, but the point is I’m trying to tell the story from Day 1 to now,” he says. And sure: “There’s the odd conflict here and there. But if you weigh it all out, those things count for nothing.” Mr. Richards did see to it that Mr. Jagger knew what was in the book ahead of time. “The important thing to me,” he says, “was that Mick had been through it and seen it and knew what was what.” And is there anything that one Stone can say about another Stone and really give offense at this point? “No.”

But is there anything new that can be said about the Stones anyway? As “Life” emphatically demonstrates, the answer is yes. And some of its most surprisingly revelatory material appears in what Mr. Richards jokingly calls “Keef’s Guitar Workshop.” Here are the secrets of some of the world’s most famous rock riffs and the almost toy-level equipment on which they were recorded, like the cassette recorder onto which Mr. Richards dubbed guitar layer after guitar layer for “Street Fighting Man,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and part of “Gimme Shelter.” Here’s how the silent beats in Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” worked their way into some of Mr. Richards’s most inspired solos. Mr. Fox found that “Heartbreak Hotel” itself was the key to some of Mr. Richards’s best musical memories.

Some of this is by now well known to music critics. But Mr. Richards makes it fascinating at the layman’s level. And he is surprised to find that early readers haven’t been skipping the musicology, even though the book cordially invites them to do so. What he finds most gratifying about having written “Life” is the chance for both him and his readers to grasp the breadth and range of this book’s material. He is the rare memoirist who can say, without hyperbole, “that what I hoped was worth sharing with people turned out to be far more important than I could possibly imagine.”

It’s getting late. Time to leave this bright orange room where Mr. Richards’s name is emblazoned on a director’s chair; where assorted music awards and platinum records are everywhere; where there’s a discreet little skull in the middle of the wall mirror; where his Louis Vuitton guitar case — he did an ad for Vuitton — is parked in a corner. But the items likeliest to catch his eye are the ones on the coffee table: loose cigarettes neatly arrayed in a holder, a lighter, more cigarettes in a pack.

“Do you mind if I smoke?” he had asked when he first appeared. Easy one: Who, aside from Keith Richards and certain legal authorities, has ever kept Keith Richards from doing anything? But an hour has gone by, and he hasn’t touched the cigarettes. He hasn’t even looked at them. He has done not one thing to make him resemble the sullen, haunted, diabolically beautiful creature on the cover of his book, the one with hellfire blazing up from his hand to meet the blurry white thing he’s smoking.

“That?” he says innocently when asked about the picture. “Oh, that’s just me lighting a cigarette. That’s all I was doing.”

making ignorance chic

2010-10-20T10:36:00.000-07:00

The New York Times
October 19, 2010
Making Ignorance Chic
By MAUREEN DOWD

Casanova’s rule for seduction was to tell a beautiful woman she was intelligent and an intelligent woman she was beautiful.

The false choice between intellectualism and sexuality in women has persisted through the ages. There was no more poignant victim of it than Marilyn Monroe.

She was smart enough to become the most famous Dumb Blonde in history. Photographers loved to get her to pose in tight shorts, a silk robe or a swimsuit with a come-hither look and a weighty book — a history of Goya or James Joyce’s “Ulysses” or Heinrich Heine’s poems. A high-brow bunny picture, a variation on the sexy librarian trope. Men who were nervous about her erotic intensity could feel superior by making fun of her intellectually.

Marilyn was not completely in on the joke. Scarred by her schizophrenic mother and dislocated upbringing, she was happy to have the classics put in her hand. What’s more, she read some of them, from Proust to Dostoyevsky to Freud to Carl Sandburg’s six-volume biography of Lincoln (given to her by husband Arthur Miller), collecting a library of 400 books.

Miller once called Marilyn “a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes.”

“Fragments,” a new book of her poems, letters and musings, some written in her childlike hand with misspellings in leather books and others on stationery from the Waldorf-Astoria and the Beverly Hills Hotel, is affecting. The world’s most coveted woman, a picture of luminescence, was lonely and dark. Thinking herself happily married, she was crushed to discover an open journal in which Miller had written that she disappointed him and embarrassed him in front of his intellectual peers.

“I guess I have always been deeply terrified to really be someone’s wife since I know from life one cannot love another, ever, really.”

Her friend Saul Bellow wrote in a letter that Marilyn “conducts herself like a philosopher.” He observed: “She was connected with a very powerful current but she couldn’t disconnect herself from it,” adding: “She had a kind of curious incandescence under the skin.”

The sad sex symbol is still a candle in the wind. There’s a hit novel in Britain narrated by the Maltese terrier Frank Sinatra gave her, which she named “Maf,” for Mafia, and three movies in the works about her. Naomi Watts is planning to star in a biopic based on the novel, “Blonde,” by Joyce Carol Oates; Michelle Williams is shooting “My Week With Marilyn,” and another movie is planned based on an account by Lionel Grandison, a former deputy Los Angeles coroner who claims he was forced to change the star’s death certificate to read suicide instead of murder.

At least, unlike Paris Hilton and her ilk, the Dumb Blonde of ’50s cinema had a firm grasp on one thing: It was cool to be smart. She aspired to read good books and be friends with intellectuals, even going so far as to marry one. But now another famous beauty with glowing skin and a powerful current, Sarah Palin, has made ignorance fashionable.

You struggle to name Supreme Court cases, newspapers you read and even founding fathers you admire? No problem. You endorse a candidate for the Pennsylvania Senate seat who is the nominee in West Virginia? Oh, well.

At least you’re not one of those “spineless” elites with an Ivy League education, like President Obama, who can’t feel anything. It’s news to Christine O’Donnell that the Constitution guarantees separation of church and state. It’s news to Joe Miller, whose guards handcuffed a journalist, and to Carl Paladino, who threatened The New York Post’s Fred Dicker, that the First Amendment exists, even in Tea Party Land. Michele Bachmann calls Smoot-Hawley Hoot-Smalley.

Sharron Angle sank to new lows of obliviousness when she told a classroom of Hispanic kids in Las Vegas: “Some of you look a little more Asian to me.”

As Palin tweeted in July about her own special language adding examples from W. and Obama: “ ‘Refudiate,’ ‘misunderestimate,’ ‘wee-wee’d up.’ English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!”

On Saturday, at a G.O.P. rally in Anaheim, Calif., Palin mockingly noted that you won’t find her invoking Mao or Saul Alinsky. She says she believes in American exceptionalism. But when it comes to the people running the country, exceptionalism is suspect; leaders should be — as Palin, O’Donnell and Angle keep saying — just like you.

In Marilyn’s America, there were aspirations. The studios tackled literary novels rather than one-liners like “He’s Just Not That Into You” and navel-gazing drivel like “Eat Pray Love.” Walt Disney’s “Fantasia” paired cartoon characters with famous composers. Even Bugs Bunny did Wagner.

But in Sarah’s America, we’ve refudiated all that.

DIY Foreign Aid Revolution

2010-10-20T09:31:00.000-07:00

The New York Times
D.I.Y. Foreign-Aid Revolution
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: October 20, 2010

Like so many highly trained young women these days, Elizabeth Scharpf has choices. She could be working in a Manhattan office tower with her Harvard Business School classmates, soaring through the ranks as a banker or business executive and aspiring to become a senator or a C.E.O. someday.

After all, there’s no question that women around the world enjoy opportunities that simply didn’t exist a few decades ago. Yet the women exerting the greatest pressure for change often aren’t the presidents and tycoons but those toiling further down the pyramid, driven by a passion to create a better world. And in particular, a better world for women.

That’s Scharpf’s choice. Now 33, Scharpf was interning in the summer of 2005 for the World Bank in Mozambique, helping local entrepreneurs, when she encountered a business impediment that she had never heard of. It was unmentionable, and thus unmentioned. It was menstruation.

A female boss griped to Scharpf about absenteeism caused by women reluctant to come to work during their menstrual periods. “It was because pads were too expensive,” Scharpf recalls. “I was trying to figure out why I had never heard of this before. This was causing productivity rates to go down.”

Scharpf began asking around, and everybody told her — in whispers — that, yes, of course menstruation was keeping women and girls from jobs. Back at Harvard, where she was pursuing joint degrees at the business school and the John F. Kennedy School of Government, she began asking friends from Bangladesh, Nicaragua and other countries if they were aware of this problem. Of course, they said. “This spoke to me,” Scharpf recalled. “Hasn’t every girl or woman experienced the inconvenience, the disadvantage and the embarrassment in her life, when her period strikes at the ‘wrong’ time? I think half the world can relate to that. What really struck me was that this was a global issue that seemingly had significant costs. From back-of-the-envelope calculations, it had huge costs. And it could have a simple solution.” She paused and smiled tightly. “I was a little naïve there.”

Scharpf is a mild-mannered policy wonk, but the more she thought about it, the more indignant she became. Girls were missing school because they couldn’t afford sanitary pads? Women couldn’t go to work for lack of pads? And all this was taboo to discuss? Scharpf began to scheme.

And so Scharpf joined a revolution, so far unnamed because it is just beginning. It’s all about what might be called Do-It-Yourself Foreign Aid, because it starts with the proposition that it’s not only presidents and United Nations officials who chip away at global challenges. Passionate individuals with great ideas can do the same, especially in the age of the Internet and social media.

I became interested in such figures while writing a book with my wife, Sheryl WuDunn, about educating and empowering women as a solution to many of the world’s problems. We ran into extraordinary men, like Muhammad Yunus of Grameen Bank, who pioneered microfinance in Bangladesh. Or Bill Drayton, an American who is a godfather of entrepreneurs working for social change and who now runs a group called Ashoka to support them. Or Greg Mortenson, whose struggles to build schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan are chronicled in “Three Cups of Tea.” But it struck us that women in particular were finding creative ways to help the world’s most vulnerable people, many of them also women.

As a college sophomore, Jennifer Staple founded Unite for Sight, which has now provided eye care to more than one million people around the world. Kyle Zimmer, a corporate lawyer who tutored inner-city school children on the side, went on to create First Book, which over nearly 20 years has delivered more than 70 million books to book-deprived children in the United States and Canada. One of the world’s largest grass-roots organizations is India’s Self-Employed Women’s Association, or SEWA. It was founded in 1972 by a lawyer named Ela Bhatt, who helped people living on the margins — textile workers and later peasants and small vendors, among others — by organizing them so that they could improve their health, start businesses and even bank among themselves.

Are these young idealists unsophisticated about what it takes to change the world? Yes, often. At first, they don’t always appreciate the importance of listening to local people and bringing them into the management of projects, and they usually overestimate the odds of success. They also sometimes think it will be romantic to tackle social problems, a view that may fade when they’ve caught malaria.

After college at Notre Dame and before grad school at Harvard, Scharpf worked for three years in global pharmeceuticals and biotech. As soon as she finished her graduate programs at Harvard, she began harnessing her contacts to design a company that would manufacture inexpensive sanitary pads for Africa and Asia, to be distributed by women themselves on a franchise system. Soon Scharpf was in Rwanda, where schoolgirls told her they routinely stayed home during their periods to avoid the risk of humiliation, with one explaining: “What if I get called to go to the blackboard and I have a stain on the back of my skirt?” Scharpf found that the cheapest pads commercially available cost $1.10 for a pack of 10. In rural villages, women and girls used rags or sometimes bark or mud instead.

Commercial pads turned out to be expensive to manufacture largely because the raw materials were pricey, so Scharpf started from scratch. She recruited a team of like-minded wonks, and they consulted villagers, agriculture experts and professors of textile engineering. What is there that is really absorbent, widely available and cheap? The team came up with five finalists: cassava leaves, banana leaves, banana-tree trunk fibers, foam mattresses, textile scraps. “We brought a blender to Rwanda and started blending things, boiling leaves from potato and cassava, things like that,” Scharpf said. “We would drop Coke on it to measure absorbency.” That was when they had their eureka moment. “We saw, hey, those banana fibers really slurp up the Coke!”

Scharpf accepted a $60,000 grant from Echoing Green, an organization that works like a venture-capital fund to finance people with great ideas. Later she won a social-entrepreneurship fellowship from Harvard Business School, and now her team has engineered a new sanitary pad that she hopes can transform life for women and girls in the developing world. It looks like a regular pad but is made chiefly out of banana-tree fibers, so it is sustainable and for the most part biodegradable. Best of all, it’s cheap: a pack of 10 should retail for 75 cents or less.

Scharpf’s organization, Sustainable Health Enterprises (or SHE), will begin manufacturing pads early next year in a tiny factory in Rwanda. It will be a pilot project, producing some 1,200 pads per hour, but once the kinks are worked out she hopes to have women in other countries franchise the system so that it spreads around the world. SHE has also taken on advocacy, calling on the Rwandan government to lift an 18 percent sales tax on feminine hygiene products so that they become more affordable. Awakened to the issue, the Rwandan Parliament recently appropriated $35,000 to pay for sanitary pads for impoverished girls who otherwise might miss school — a small sum, but an acknowledgment that the problem is important and real. Some Rwandan women Scharpf has interviewed say that the attention has made a difference in their homes: their husbands are now more willing to allow them to spend money on pads.

Will banana-fiber sanitary pads succeed? No one knows. It is entirely possible that Scharpf will find that even if manufacturing goes smoothly — a huge “if” — there is simply not much of a market for sanitary pads in poor countries. Families may consider a 60- or 70-cent pack just as unaffordable as a $1.10 pack. Or suppose for a moment that everything goes perfectly, and pad franchises spread and families buy packets of pads for girls who are now missing school because of difficulties managing menstruation. Will those girls now stay in school? We can’t be sure of that either.

One study in Nepal found that while girls appreciated help with hygiene, they weren’t significantly more likely to attend school as a result. Menstrual cramps were more of an impediment than a lack of pads. And so aspirinlike medicines may need to be part of the solution as well. Research in Malawi by the Population Council suggests that bicycles would keep more kids in school than sanitary pads would. On the other hand, a study in Ghana suggests that supplying pads to rural girls there might reduce girls’ absenteeism significantly.

In short, it’s complicated. Scharpf is engaged in a noble experiment — but entrepreneurs fail sometimes. And anybody wrestling with poverty at home or abroad learns that good intentions and hard work aren’t enough. Helping people is hard.

It’s also clear that sanitary pads won’t save the world. In the best case, Sustainable Health Enterprises will spread and make it easier for girls to go to school and women to work — but it will be only an incremental improvement. In the real world, that’s usually how progress arrives (with screams of vexation along the way).

Fortunately, one factor buttressing D.I.Y. foreign aid is that altruism is contagious. In 2005, Lisa Shannon and her live-in boyfriend ran a stock photography business in Portland, Ore. But she was feeling a nagging emptiness, and then she happened to watch an “Oprah” show about women suffering from war and rape in eastern Congo. The episode featured Zainab Salbi, an Iraqi-American who started an organization called Women for Women International to help such survivors in places like Congo. Shannon was dazzled by Salbi and decided to pitch in herself by cajoling friends to sponsor her for a 30-mile run to raise money for women in Congo.

That first run was exhilarating, and left Shannon with the warm, fuzzy and novel feeling that she was really doing some good in the world. After sponsoring several Congolese women and reading their letters, she founded an organization called Run for Congo Women that held fund-raising runs across America and around the world. Eventually, she made a trip to Congo and had a joyous meeting with her new “family.” She was bowled over when one of the women she sponsored introduced her baby girl: the mother named the baby “Lisa,” after Shannon. She poured her soul into the cause, but her fiancé grumbled as their business floundered. Finally he told her she had to choose: him or the Congolese women.

So in the end Shannon lost her business and her fiancé. She is struggling with no income, because she pays herself no salary and passes on all the money she raises to Women for Women International. Devoting yourself to helping others may seem wonderfully glamorous — until you’re single, jobless and alone on a Saturday night. Shannon has taken in five roommates to share her house, and she saves pennies everywhere she can, but at some point she will become a pauper unless she finds a way of supporting herself.

I caught up with Shannon earlier this year in Congo. She took me to see the Congolese Lisa, and also to visit the hut of the Congolese woman she’s closest to, Generose Namburho, a 40-year-old former nurse. Namburho is a stocky, self-assured woman who led us down a mud path, using a crutch to replace her missing right leg. An extremist Hutu militia invaded Namburho’s home a few years ago, killed her husband, raped her and then hacked off her leg with a knife. Then the soldiers cooked the flesh from her leg and forced her children at gunpoint to eat it. When her beloved oldest son refused, they shot him in front of her.

Shannon paid $1,500 to buy this home for Namburho so she would have somewhere to live after she returned from a stay in the hospital. “I believe God sent Lisa to rescue me from my misery,” Namburho told me, as Shannon squirmed in embarrassment.

This year Shannon organized one of her runs right there in Congo. Shannon ran alongside Namburho, who limped along with her crutch. “She said that if she could run on only one leg, then people would see that anybody could do this,” Shannon said, adding: “That was probably the best day of my life. It was fantastic. It’s one thing to support women rebuilding their lives, and another to see them emerge as leaders. We raised about $50,000, and these are women earning maybe $20 a month, and they raised money for other Congolese women.”

Shannon has expanded her mandate this year, engaging in advocacy work to try to stop the rapes and killings in the first place. There are no simple solutions to the ongoing crisis in Congo, but Shannon has concentrated on embarrassing electronics makers, because they use parts that may contain minerals like tantalum from the area. Warlords sell these “conflict minerals,” and the idea is that if you can interrupt those supply chains, the warlords will find killing less profitable and may be more willing to negotiate.

By one estimate, auditing supply lines to assure an absence of conflict minerals could cost as little as a penny per finished cellphone, laptop or electronic camera. So early this year Shannon and other activists showed up at Intel’s offices near her Oregon home with 45,000 pennies, representing the 45,000 people whose deaths can be attributed to the fighting in Congo each month, according to a mortality study by the International Rescue Committee. “We said we’d be more than happy to pay a penny per product if that‘ll save lives,” Shannon said. “Nobody at Intel would talk with us. They just sent a security person out. They wouldn’t accept the pennies.”

So Shannon jumped in her car with her mother, and they drove 11 hours down to Silicon Valley to the headquarters of Intel. There they made a similar pitch, and also visited Apple and Hewlett-Packard. Finally they dropped in on an Apple conference, and then an Apple Store opening in Washington. This was all quite uncomfortable for Shannon, who until then had been around like-minded activists who thought she was wonderful; now she was engaging in confrontational behavior and encountering people who thought she was naïve, immature and boorish. One man told her to put down a sign with the word “rape,” because he found it offensive — and all Shannon could think was that it should be even more offensive that so many Congolese women are raped.

In the end, Shannon’s work — along with that of many, many other activists — seemed to make a difference. Some electronics companies became more aggressive about scrubbing supply chains of tainted minerals. Most important, Congress addressed the issue in this year’s financial-reform law, which requires companies to disclose whether they use minerals from Congo or an adjoining country, and if they do use them, to reveal how the minerals were acquired. It’s a step forward, and Shannon hopes that the result will be fewer Congolese enduring rapes and massacres.

It’s striking that the most innovative activists aren’t necessarily the ones with the most resources, or the best tools. If that were true, a team at the World Bank would have addressed the menstruation problem long ago, and G20 countries would be leading the effort to prevent Congolese warlords from monetizing their minerals. Rather, what often happens is that those best positioned to take action look the other way, and then the initiative is taken by the Scharpfs and Shannons of the world, who are fueled by some combustible mix of indignation and vision.

Maggie Doyne epitomizes this truth, for she began her philanthropic work as an 19-year-old financed by her baby-sitting savings. Yet she has somehow figured out how to run a sophisticated aid project in a remote area of Nepal.

Doyne grew up in New Jersey and excelled in high school — top grades, editor of the yearbook, three-sport varsity athlete — but felt burned out and unready to go to college when she graduated in 2005. So she took a “gap year” after high-school graduation and ended up in northern India, working with needy children. It was an impoverished area, yet Nepali refugees were pouring in and sleeping on the bare ground, fleeing civil war in their country. Doyne couldn’t imagine what kind of conditions would be so bad that people would flee to where she was. So when the Maoist insurgency in Nepal calmed, she boarded a crammed public bus with a Nepali teenage girl to visit the girl’s hometown. They got off, 48 hours and several bus breakdowns later, at the end of the bus line. Then Doyne and her friend hiked for another three days to the girl’s home in the heartland of the Maoist insurgency.

It was a gorgeous Himalayan village, with a river running through it. But it was also ravaged by the war. Temples had been burned down, and the girl’s home had been converted into a rebel camp. Most children couldn’t afford school. In the cities, she had seen them working with hammers, breaking rocks into gravel to sell.

“The first little girl I met was Hema,” Doyne remembers. Then 6 or 7 years old (few children know their precise age), Hema spent her time breaking rocks and scavenging garbage and had no chance to go to school. But she was radiant and adorable and always greeted Doyne in Nepali with a warm, “Good morning, Sister!”

“Maybe I saw a piece of myself in her,” said Doyne, who decided to take Hema under her wing and pay for her education: “I knew I couldn’t do anything about a million orphans, but what if I started with this girl?” So she took Hema to school and paid $7 for the girl’s school fees and another $8 for a uniform so that she could enter kindergarten.

“It became addictive,” Doyne said. “I said, if I can help one girl, why not 5? Why not 10? And along with scholarships, they needed the most basic things: food, shelter, clothing.” Doyne found a ramshackle telephone “booth” — actually, a mud hut — where she could place an international call and telephoned her parents with a strange and urgent request: Can you wire me the money in my savings account? Doyne’s parents were concerned about the choices she was making and the delay in going to college, but it was her money — $5,000 made baby-sitting while in high school — and they could hear the passion in her voice over a crackly line.

“It was like being hit by a stun gun,” recalled Maggie’s mother, Nancy Doyne, a real estate agent. “But there’s no stopping that child.” Nancy Doyne worried about her daughter and had trouble sleeping when she thought of the perils of rural Nepal — but she also knew: “I had to cut my string to that child and let her fly.” So the parents sent Maggie the money, and she bought land and began working with villagers to build a shelter for orphans.

Doyne returned to New Jersey and began to take odd jobs and proselytize for her shelter. People in her hometown thought that she was nuts, but in a benign way — and they wrote checks. After a few months, when Doyne had raised $25,000, she moved back to Nepal to oversee construction of the shelter, called the Kopila Valley Children’s Home.

The first resident was a girl named Nisha, a 7- or 8-year-old whose parents had died and who had been sold to be a domestic servant. Nisha turned out to be a prodigy and quickly picked up English. In Nisha’s first year of school, she skipped three grade levels. Nisha would scavenge old textbooks and read them on her own, then come to Doyne with questions. And while Doyne herself now speaks fluent Nepali, American volunteers who work with her often use Nisha as their interpreter. Less than three years after Doyne took her in, Nisha is a poised sixth grader with immense promise.

The children’s home was soon overflowing with orphans, and Doyne was desperate for money to expand it. At that moment she received a call from CosmoGirl magazine. Now, Doyne never wears so much as lipstick in Nepal. If there’s enough water, she showers — and if there isn’t, she splashes water on her face, brushes her teeth, puts her hair in a ponytail and is ready for another day. Sometimes she misses dating, but she has no boyfriend and has put her romantic life completely aside. “My main concern beauty-wise,” she says, “is trying to keep the lice out of my hair.”

But now CosmoGirl was on the phone, telling her that she had won a $20,000 prize for her work, financed by Maybelline. Doyne could now pay to add second and third floors to her shelter and bring in more homeless orphans. “It gets even better!” the woman on the phone went on excitedly. “We’re going to whisk you away to New York for a Maybelline makeover!”

Once Doyne expanded the children’s home (and had her makeover, gaining false eyelashes and blond highlights— all very briefly), she began to focus on education. Last year, she won a $100,000 grand prize in a contest run by www.DoSomething.org, and that money provided the wherewithal to start a new school that she had long dreamed of. An Australian architect who met Doyne on Facebook flew to Nepal to design the buildings, and the project began taking shape. The school now has classes from kindergarten through sixth grade, as well as a library, a cafeteria and an outdoor auditorium. The plan is to expand it one year at a time until it is a high school as well.

Having become in effect a principal who never went to college, Doyne was passionate that the school would be academically outstanding. She recruited teachers who would forswear corporal punishment and encourage creativity rather than rote learning. The entire region has taken heed of Doyne’s school project, with officials pleading for their children’s admission. Some upper-caste parents were aghast that low-caste mothers would be preparing meals for upper-caste children, but they bit their lips and were silent in the hope that their children could attend. A one-hour enrollment session seeking just 40 children was swamped by 500 kids pleading for admission.

The school opened with 220 students and will soon expand to 300. The plan is to offer health care and dental care as well, starting with deworming the children — because their load of intestinal worms leaves them anemic. A $300 donation covers a child’s educational costs for a year at the school, including health and dental care. Doyne is also working on a vocational element, training kids to raise livestock for a living, to repair bicycles or to develop other skills that will give them steady incomes. The school is coed, but the girls who attend are particularly important to Doyne, for two reasons. One is that uneducated girls are particularly at risk of exploitation. The other is that there’s considerable evidence that educating girls is one of the best investments available in the developing world, because it leads to lower birth rates and a more skilled and productive labor force.

As for her own needs, Doyne is blasé. When she had an infected tooth in a remote village far from any doctor, and her face swelled up so that she couldn’t even see, a local man obligingly took a chisel and pliers and pulled the tooth — without any painkiller. Regarding education, Doyne is thinking about earning a college degree by correspondence someday (my hunch is that she’ll have an honorary doctorate before she has a B.A.). Listening to her chatter about her shelter and school, describing her hopes to replicate her model in other countries, it’s easy to forget something quite extraordinary: she’s still only 23.

It’s fair to object that activists like Doyne are accomplishing results that, however noble, are minuscule. Something like 101 million children aren’t attending primary school around the world, so 220 kids in Doyne’s school constitute the teensiest drop in the bucket. The larger problem can be solved only if governments make education a top priority (which they haven’t), just as ending the wars in Congo may require the concerted action of states. Well-meaning individuals like Doyne help at the edges but don’t fundamentally change the nature of the challenge; indeed, charitable construction of schools and hospitals may sometimes free up governments in poor countries to use their money to buy weapons instead.

All that is true — but it’s equally true that if you happen to be that drop in the bucket, Doyne is transforming your life. And afterward, you may become an education advocate as well, transforming other people’s lives. As Doyne herself puts it, “If your own children were born orphans in Nepal, you wouldn’t wait for the U.N or the government to do something about it while they were hungry and cold and breaking rocks by the side of a riverbed.”

Of course, not everyone is ready to move off to Nepal and exchange bar-hopping for lice-minimization. Many people want to connect to a cause larger than themselves, but they are busy and juggling priorities, have limited time and don’t know quite what to do. There’s a market failure there: so many people who would like to help, and so many people who would benefit from that help, but there’s a shortage of channels to connect them. (On my blog, nytimes.com/ontheground, I’ve listed some practical ideas for how to help as well as contact information for organizations working at the grass roots — including those mentioned in this article.)

The challenge is to cultivate an ideology of altruism, to spread a culture of social engagement — and then to figure out what people can do at a practical level. Peter Singer, a Princeton University professor, is the philosopher of this effort, and it has a thousand foot soldiers. In Seattle, for example, a couple named Eugene and Minhee Cho are encouraging middle-class Americans to think of themselves as philanthropists, every bit as much as Bill Gates is. Eugene is a minister and Minhee a stay-at-home mom who looks after their three children but recently returned to grad school. They were moved by the suffering they’d seen around the world, but they weren’t well off and didn’t know what they could do to make a difference. Then Eugene happened to take a trip to Burma, visited a school and saw how tiny sums could keep children in class. “That kind of wrecked my life,” Eugene says, laughing.

After the trip, they resolved that for one year they would donate all their earnings — Eugene’s salary of $68,000 — to Burmese education and other charities to show that you don’t have to be a zillionaire to be generous. Later, they founded One Day’s Wages, which asks people to donate a single day’s pay — 0.4 percent of annual income — to various causes and organizations that they have vetted and put on their Web site. Forsaking a year’s salary was a romantic idea when the Chos conceived it, but life without paychecks turned out to be brutal, even humiliating. They exhausted their life’s savings, and Eugene sold his beloved car. With several months to go, they had to sublet their home and become homeless — taking their children and moving onto friends’ couches. “That was the most painful decision I’ve had to make as a father,” Eugene says.

The One Day’s Wages campaign has proved more practicable. In the past year, the Chos have raised more than $400,000, all of which will be forwarded to the organizations they work with. About 60 percent of the donors have been women or girls, they think, the youngest being a 6-year-old who gave up her birthday presents and started a birthday campaign on the onedayswages.org Web site. “The aim is to inspire the everyday person,” Eugene says, summing up the rise of do-it-yourself foreign aid. “We’re trying to communicate that you don’t have to be a rock star or a millionaire to make a difference.”

Nicholas D. Kristof is a New York Times Op-Ed columnist. He is the author, with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, of “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.”

Has 2010 Obama Turned Into 2008 McCain?

2010-10-15T05:21:00.000-07:00

Republicans today are running on exactly the same policies McCain ran on in 2008. They aren't just like McCain, they are McCain. Anybody who thought President Obama could fix America in 18 months is kidding themself. As is anybody who thinks reversing toward the imaginary past that Republicans lovingly depict is even possible, much less a good idea. Policies matter, not politics. Sensible policies, not fake fire and brimstone ideology.

Oil Dependence

2010-10-12T22:25:00.000-07:00

Depending on oil from the Middle East isn't any less alarming than depending on oil from Texas and Alaska. People who hate other Americans have no place in our country.

Democrats Lite?

2010-10-12T22:24:00.000-07:00

The Democratic Party is well rid of anybody who talks Republicanspeak just to get elected. Promising to cut spending and taxes is old and worn out. The tax and spend bogeyman doesn't exist. The real choice is between reaching for the future or clinging to an imaginary past. Pragmatism over failed ideology. Farm subsidies are the only truly wasteful government program ripe for elimination.

Hey, Small Spender

2010-10-11T07:18:00.000-07:00

The New York Times
October 10, 2010

Hey, Small Spender
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Here’s the narrative you hear everywhere: President Obama has presided over a huge expansion of government, but unemployment has remained high. And this proves that government spending can’t create jobs.

Here’s what you need to know: The whole story is a myth. There never was a big expansion of government spending. In fact, that has been the key problem with economic policy in the Obama years: we never had the kind of fiscal expansion that might have created the millions of jobs we need.

Ask yourself: What major new federal programs have started up since Mr. Obama took office? Health care reform, for the most part, hasn’t kicked in yet, so that can’t be it. So are there giant infrastructure projects under way? No. Are there huge new benefits for low-income workers or the poor? No. Where’s all that spending we keep hearing about? It never happened.

To be fair, spending on safety-net programs, mainly unemployment insurance and Medicaid, has risen — because, in case you haven’t noticed, there has been a surge in the number of Americans without jobs and badly in need of help. And there were also substantial outlays to rescue troubled financial institutions, although it appears that the government will get most of its money back. But when people denounce big government, they usually have in mind the creation of big bureaucracies and major new programs. And that just hasn’t taken place.

Consider, in particular, one fact that might surprise you: The total number of government workers in America has been falling, not rising, under Mr. Obama. A small increase in federal employment was swamped by sharp declines at the state and local level — most notably, by layoffs of schoolteachers. Total government payrolls have fallen by more than 350,000 since January 2009.

Now, direct employment isn’t a perfect measure of the government’s size, since the government also employs workers indirectly when it buys goods and services from the private sector. And government purchases of goods and services have gone up. But adjusted for inflation, they rose only 3 percent over the last two years — a pace slower than that of the previous two years, and slower than the economy’s normal rate of growth.

So as I said, the big government expansion everyone talks about never happened. This fact, however, raises two questions. First, we know that Congress enacted a stimulus bill in early 2009; why didn’t that translate into a big rise in government spending? Second, if the expansion never happened, why does everyone think it did?

Part of the answer to the first question is that the stimulus wasn’t actually all that big compared with the size of the economy. Furthermore, it wasn’t mainly focused on increasing government spending. Of the roughly $600 billion cost of the Recovery Act in 2009 and 2010, more than 40 percent came from tax cuts, while another large chunk consisted of aid to state and local governments. Only the remainder involved direct federal spending.

And federal aid to state and local governments wasn’t enough to make up for plunging tax receipts in the face of the economic slump. So states and cities, which can’t run large deficits, were forced into drastic spending cuts, more than offsetting the modest increase at the federal level.

The answer to the second question — why there’s a widespread perception that government spending has surged, when it hasn’t — is that there has been a disinformation campaign from the right, based on the usual combination of fact-free assertions and cooked numbers. And this campaign has been effective in part because the Obama administration hasn’t offered an effective reply.

Actually, the administration has had a messaging problem on economic policy ever since its first months in office, when it went for a stimulus plan that many of us warned from the beginning was inadequate given the size of the economy’s troubles. You can argue that Mr. Obama got all he could — that a larger plan wouldn’t have made it through Congress (which is questionable), and that an inadequate stimulus was much better than none at all (which it was). But that’s not an argument the administration ever made. Instead, it has insisted throughout that its original plan was just right, a position that has become increasingly awkward as the recovery stalls.

And a side consequence of this awkward positioning is that officials can’t easily offer the obvious rebuttal to claims that big spending failed to fix the economy — namely, that thanks to the inadequate scale of the Recovery Act, big spending never happened in the first place.

But if they won’t say it, I will: if job-creating government spending has failed to bring down unemployment in the Obama era, it’s not because it doesn’t work; it’s because it wasn’t tried.

Outraged, and Outrageous

2010-10-11T07:09:00.000-07:00

The New York Times
October 8, 2010

OUTRAGED AND OUTRAGEOUS
By ANNE BARNARD and ALAN FEUER

PAMELA GELLER’S apartment, in the fashion of the blogosphere, doubles as her office. It is a modern full-floor unit in a high-rise on the East Side of Manhattan that could belong to a socialite or the editor of a lifestyle magazine. There is ample light and a tasteful lack of clutter. The kitchen appliances are made of brushed steel; the countertops are slate. In the earth-toned living room hangs a painting, in vibrant colors, of a woman in a swimsuit.

It is in this genteel setting that Ms. Geller, 52 and a single mother of four, wakes each morning shortly after 7, switches on her laptop and wages a form of holy war through Atlas Shrugs, a Web site that attacks Islam with a rhetoric venomous enough that PayPal at one point branded it a hate site. Working here — often in fuzzy slippers — she has called for the removal of the Dome of the Rock from atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem; posted doctored pictures of Elena Kagan, the Supreme Court justice, in a Nazi helmet; suggested the State Department was run by “Islamic supremacists”; and referred to health care reform as an act of national rape.

Ms. Geller has been writing since 2005, but this summer she skyrocketed to national prominence as the firebrand in chief opposing Park51, the planned Muslim community center she denounces as “the ground zero mega-mosque.”

Operating largely outside traditional Washington power centers — and, for better or worse, without traditional academic, public-policy or journalism credentials — Ms. Geller, with a coterie of allies, has helped set the tone and shape the narrative for a divisive national debate over Park51 (she calls the developer a “thug” and a “lowlife”). In the process, she has helped bring into the mainstream a concept that after 9/11 percolated mainly on the fringes of American politics: that terrorism by Muslims springs not from perversions of Islam but from the religion itself. Her writings, rallies and television appearances have both offended and inspired, transforming Ms. Geller from an Internet obscurity, who once videotaped herself in a bikini as she denounced “Islamofascism,” into a media commodity who has been profiled on “60 Minutes” and whose phraseology has been adopted by Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin.

FOR Ms. Geller, the battle against Park51 is only part of a much larger crusade in which she is joined by an influential if decentralized coalition that includes former generals, new-media polemicists, researchers and evangelicals who view Islam as a politically driven religion, barbaric at its core and expansionist by nature. Her closest partner is Robert Spencer, the proprietor of Jihadwatch.org. Incorporation papers for their American Freedom Defense Initiative list as founding members Anders Gravers, a Danish “anti-Islamization” activist (“Jihad is the knife slicing the salami of freedom”) and John Joseph Jay (“There are no innocents in Islam”). Their lawyer, David Yerushalmi, has sought to criminalize the practice of Islam, when defined as adherence to Shariah, Islamic religious law.

This loose-knit cadre’s vision of Islam in an age of terror is not unlike a cold war view of Communism: a stealthy global threat creeping into nodes of power that must be opposed at all cost. “In the war between the savage and the civilized man,” Ms. Geller says, “you side with the civilized man.”

It remains unclear how much Ms. Geller is driving opposition to the Islamic center and how much she reflects it — polls suggest most Americans oppose the project — but her involvement can hardly be ignored. Atlas Shrugs, which gets about one million unique visitors a month, helped draw thousands to protests against Park51 on June 6 and Sept. 11. Ms. Geller, supported by a divorce settlement and blog advertisements, also played an important role in winning the resignation in 2007 of Debbie Almontaser, a Muslim principal who started an Arabic-language public school in Brooklyn; brought 200 people to Ohio last year to support Rifqa Bary, a Muslim girl who accused her parents of abuse; and helped draw vociferous objectors to a hearing this summer on a since-scrapped proposal for a mosque on Staten Island.

In conversation, Ms. Geller habitually refers to herself as a “racist-Islamophobic-anti-Muslim-bigot” — all one word in her pronunciation — which hints at her sense of humor and her evident frustration at her public persona. She wields a similarly broad brush against opponents, using terms like “diabolical” and “stealth jihadist” even for people like the journalist Christiane Amanpour and the Republican operative Grover Norquist.

The outrageous and the solemn are deeply intertwined in her character. Ms. Geller admits to using Atlas Shrugs to test topics significant (the conflict in Sudan) and outlandish (that a young Barack Obama slept with “a crack whore”). She has taken up arms against “honor killings” as well as against a Disneyland employee who fought to wear a head scarf. She inspires laughs at sites like Loonwatch, but critics say her influence is serious: a spreading fear of Islam and a dehumanization of Muslims comparable to the sometimes-violent anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism of earlier eras. Even some of her former right-wing allies say she has gone too far.

“I think she’s enabling a real bigotry — a lot of people are convinced by the propaganda she repeats like a mantra,” said Charles Johnson, who runs the blog Little Green Footballs, where Ms. Geller got her start as a frequent commenter. “Nine-eleven didn’t happen in a vacuum — it came from a long history. But when people like Pam Geller are the loudest voices out there talking about it, it drowns out everything else and makes everyone look crazy.”

Like many writers, Ms. Geller is fond of what she calls her “little darlings” — rhetorical flourishes, such as accusing the imam behind Park51 of “totalitarian Khomeinism.” Asked during an interview on Sept. 28 whether these extreme constructions undermine her credibility, Ms. Geller spontaneously erupted into song. “I gotta be me,” she sang, sounding not too bad, though not at all like someone who has opined extensively about the Mufti of Jerusalem and the Iranian revolution. “I gotta be free.”

“I’m serious,” she added, returning to her Long Island-accented voice. “I haven’t thought about that song in a million years. But it’s really true.”

THE day last December when The New York Times first reported plans to build a Muslim community center two blocks from ground zero, Atlas Shrugs immediately objected. “I don’t know which is more grotesque,” Ms. Geller wrote, “jihad or the NY Times preening of it.”

She dropped the topic until May 5, when the project — including a mosque, sports facilities and cultural programs to promote understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims — won unanimous approval from a committee of Community Board 1.

The next day, Atlas bristled with outrage. It was a “monster mosque.” It was “sort of like a victory lap” — analogous to Muslims’ reconsecrating the iconic Hagia Sophia cathedral as a mosque after conquering Constantinople in 1453. “Insulting and humiliating.” “A stab in the eye of America.”

“This is Islamic domination and expansionism,” Ms. Geller declared. The only Muslim center appropriate near ground zero, she said, would be devoted to “expunging the Koran” of “incitement to violence.” (Though, she added, such a center “probably wouldn’t last two minutes without being bombed by devout Muslims.”)

Two days later, Ms. Geller invited readers to protest the “9/11 monster mosque being built on hallowed ground zero,” in a post that was among the first to spread the misimpressions that the project was at the World Trade Center site and would solely house a prayer space. The next week, The New York Post took up the cause (“Mosque Madness at Ground Zero”). Fox News booked Ms. Geller on Mike Huckabee’s television program. Sean Hannity hosted her on the radio.

The community board received hundreds of letters and calls from across the country; Ms. Geller had posted its contact information. She advertised its May 25 hearing, which was packed and marked by heckling (“You’re building on a Christian cemetery!”).

Next, the organization she and Mr. Spencer took over in April, Stop Islamization of America, held a rally on the anniversary of D-Day, which Ms. Geller marks as the moment Park51 became a national sensation. A post about it by El Marco, a conservative blogger, “went viral,” she said, a rare instance of a big debate’s bursting on the scene without “the mainstream media telling people what to think.”

Ms. Geller, though, had some suggestions. She and other bloggers quoted selectively from the imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf, stressing his description of United States policy as partly responsible for 9/11. They branded him a “radical Islamist.” They declared that his talks against extremism and violence were “taqiyya” — the hiding of true beliefs, religiously sanctioned for Muslims, usually minority Shiites, under hostile rule. And Ms. Geller said, without evidence, that the center’s financing might be tied to terrorists.

Her assertions became common talking points for Republican leaders and other opponents. Soon, Rick A. Lazio, running for governor of New York, was calling the imam a “terrorist sympathizer.” Rush Limbaugh was describing Park51 as a “victory mosque.” Mr. Gingrich was talking about fighting “stealth jihad,” a favorite Geller phrase and the title of a book by Mr. Spencer.

Over the summer, Ms. Geller, irresistibly appealing to television bookers, appeared on programs across the political spectrum as the face of opposition to the Muslim center. Her claims were disputed often enough that the liberal media-tracking group Media Matters called on stations (ineffectually) to stop presenting her as an expert.

Opposition to Park51 grew — and with it, antipathy for Islam. A New York Times poll last month found that two-thirds of city residents thought the project should be relocated. A Quinnipiac University poll of likely New York State voters showed that 90 percent of Republicans — compared to 34 percent of Democrats — thought that a mosque near ground zero was wrong. And the portion of Americans with a favorable view of Islam reached its lowest ebb since 9/11 — 37 percent, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll.

Ms. Geller said in the interview that it was “insulting to the American people” to suggest that she and her allies inspired the anger over the project. But if many people have a general unease over the idea of a mosque downtown, Ms. Geller has provided a vocabulary to express it and a framework to understand it: worries about Islam.

“I have an interesting play on words sometimes,” she said. “If people like it, I think that’s great.”

Mr. Spencer says Ms. Geller’s “genius” is translating his sometimes-obscure concepts into vernacular, plus a “charm and appeal” that motivates people to take action. Rich Davis, a founding member of their group, likened her to the lead singer who made the Who’s challenging music popular.

“I think of her like Roger Daltry,” said Mr. Davis, a Navy veteran from Pennsylvania. “He had a good look, a strong personality, and that’s how I think of her. She’s the front man for so many of us who feel the same way.”

PAMELA GELLER was born in 1958, the third of four girls. She grew up in Hewlett Harbor, one of Long Island’s Five Towns, an affluent, heavily Jewish enclave that spawned notables like the fashion designer Donna Karan. Her father, Reuben, owned a textile mill in Brooklyn and often worked 16 hours a day; he died in 1996. “I was closer to my dad than anyone,” Ms. Geller has written. “There was no one like him. He came up the hard way and made a success of his life the hard way.”

Her mother, Lillian, who died in 2006, was often in the kitchen when Pamela and her sisters — two became doctors, one a teacher — returned from school for lunch. Pamela was the most adventuresome and the most enthralled by New York, said Jessica Geller, the eldest. “She was the girl who couldn’t wait to drive,” Jessica added. “She loved everything about the city, the buzz, the excitement, the vibrancy.”

Theirs was, Jessica Geller said, an “unremarkable” postwar suburban household — mom, dad, school, work, cars, boys. The sisters went to Hebrew school, but attended synagogue mainly on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. (“It was more of a fashion show in many respects,” Jessica Geller recalled.)

Israel, which now forms a crucial piece of Pamela Geller’s politics, was not frequently discussed. Both parents were Democrats, but, in Jessica Geller’s view, “the liberal moms and dads of the ’60s and ’70s would be considered right-wing nuts by today’s standards.”

Pamela Geller said her early years were imbued with a sense of American power and rectitude, so pervasive that it need not be articulated. Many of her current concerns — political correctness, media cowardice, changing national identity, eroding individual rights — can be connected to those times.

“Growing up as the sort of tail end of the baby boomers, there was this feeling of invincibility in America,” she said. “We were free. The good guys won. The good cop is on the beat. I certainly don’t get a sense of that anymore.” (Jessica Geller put it this way: “What my sister really wants is for everything to get back to normal in America.”)

Pamela went to Lynbrook High School and Hofstra University, but left without a degree. She worked on the business side of The New York Daily News through the 1980s, then became the associate publisher at The New York Observer.

Colleagues at The Observer remembered her as brassy and vulgar — not an easy fit with the salmon-colored broadsheet’s effete ethos. Ms. Geller recalled pushing the publisher to endorse Rudolph W. Giuliani in his first mayoral bid, and being satisfied when the paper issued no endorsement. Married in 1990 to Michael H. Oshry, a wealthy car dealer from the Five Towns who was himself the son of a wealthy car dealer from the Five Towns, she quit in 1994 to stay home with her daughters.

Ms. Geller got nearly $4 million when the couple divorced in 2007, and when Mr. Oshry died in 2008, there was a $5 million life-insurance policy benefiting her four daughters, said Alex Potruch, Mr. Oshry’s lawyer. She also kept some proceeds from the sale of Mr. Oshry’s $1.8 million house in Hewlett Harbor.

“Pamela wanted to live in the city,” Mr. Potruch said. “He made certain that she had sufficient support to buy a co-op in the city and survive there without having to work.

“He supported her blogging,” the lawyer added, “even though he didn’t always agree with what she was saying.”

IT was 9/11 that drove Ms. Geller to her keyboard. She had barely heard of Osama bin Laden, she said, and “felt guilty that I didn’t know who had attacked my country.”

She spent the next year educating herself about Islam, reading Bat Ye’or, a French writer who focuses on tensions over Muslim immigrants in Europe; Ibn Warraq, the pseudonym for a Pakistani who writes about his rejection of Islam; and Daniel Pipes, whom she ultimately rejected because he believes in the existence of a moderate Islam.

Ms. Geller commented prolifically on Web sites focused on Islamic militancy, like Little Green Footballs. “She was always one of the first ones to start going way out there,” said Mr. Johnson. (Ms. Geller, in turn, dismissed him as “a reviled figure” who had abandoned his principles.) A fellow commenter called Pookleblinky urged Ms. Geller to start her own blog. She named it in homage to Ayn Rand’s championing of individual rights — Ms. Geller, unlike some of her allies, favors abortion rights — and, perhaps, to conjure the weight of the world on her shoulders.

Readership grew steadily, and spiked whenever she took on hot-button issues. In early 2006, when Muslims rioted over cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad printed in a Danish newspaper, Atlas — unlike much of the news media — posted the cartoons, and hits leaped from scores to tens of thousands.

During the Lebanon-Israel war later that year, Ms. Geller video-blogged from an Israeli beach, flicking water at the camera, arching her bikini-bared back provocatively and equating Palestinians with Hamas.

In 2007, she wrote often about Ms. Almontaser, the teacher who founded the Khalil Gibran International Academy in Brooklyn — Ms. Geller called Arabic-language instruction a front for Islamist indoctrination. She joined Stop the Madrassa, an organization formed to fight the school, which later thanked her for speeding Ms. Almontaser’s ouster. It was this victory, critics say, that emboldened Ms. Geller’s circle and set it on a path to national influence.

“New York is the cosmopolitan city of the world,” Ms. Almontaser said last week. “They figured that if they could do it here, they could do it anywhere. And sadly, they did.”

The next turning point for Ms. Geller, a few months later, was a “counter-jihad” conference in Brussels. It threw her — and Mr. Spencer of Jihad Watch — together with anti-Islamic Europeans whom even some allies considered too extreme, like Filip Dewinter of Vlaams Belang, an offshoot of a Belgian party banned that was for racism and was allegedly founded by Nazi sympathizers.

Mr. Johnson of Little Green Footballs, a former comrade, attacked Ms. Geller and Mr. Spencer — whose interest in Islam began with family lore about a Greek great-grandfather killed by Turks — for meeting with “neo-Nazis.” They insisted they were not responsible for the views of everyone who stands in a room with them (though they have lobbed similar guilt-by-association accusations at Muslims, including the people behind Park51).

Ms. Geller went on to champion as patriotic the English Defense League, which opposes the building of mosques in Britain and whose members have been photographed wearing swastikas. (In the interview, Ms. Geller said the swastika-wearers must have been “infiltrators” trying to discredit the group.) And she formed a lasting partnership with Mr. Spencer.

It is partly philosophical: They and the anti-Islam movement in Europe share a fear of Muslim takeover. And it is partly practical: He helps her raise money and source some assertions; she helps him spread his ideas and, he said, “get results.”

THEIR first collaboration was informal. In 2008, Mr. Spencer posted Ms. Geller’s appeal to raise $4,000 for a headstone for Aqsa Parvez, a Muslim-Canadian immigrant killed by her father and brother for not wearing a head scarf. More recently, Mr. Spencer worked with Ms. Geller on her book “The Post-American Presidency,” published this summer by Simon & Schuster for what she described as a six-figure advance. He helped her sober up her tone, she said, by removing those “little darlings,” in hopes of bolstering the credibility of her argument that Mr. Obama is “not only presiding over but actively promoting the decline of America.”

The pair populated the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference with anti-Islam sympathizers by renting a room in the same hotel and hosting a talk by Geert Wilders, the Dutch anti-Islam activist who has tried to ban the Koran in his country. At this year’s conference, they hosted Mr. Gravers, head of Stop Islamization of Europe, whose motto is “Racism is the lowest form of human stupidity, but Islamophobia is the height of common sense.” Mr. Gravers then asked Ms. Geller and Mr. Spencer to take over his group’s American affiliate, and turn it from a staid Web site into a political force.

They delivered. In April, they founded a nonprofit group called American Freedom Defense Initiative, which also uses the name Stop Islamization of America. They took out bus ads offering to help Muslims who wanted to leave the religion but were afraid of violent reprisals — and won in court when cities tried to suppress the ads. They brought crowds to support Rifqa Bary in Ohio and urged people to oppose the mosque on Staten Island.

Then Park51 emerged.

Mr. Spencer and Ms. Geller said they would rather have galvanized the nation with accounts of Muslim girls killed by male relatives over violations of family “honor.” But, Mr. Spencer said, to many Americans the plight of a Muslim immigrant girl is too abstract. “Most people are only concerned with their families and friends and their immediate circle,” he said. “There is a visceral connection that Americans have with 9/11 that is not felt about other issues.”

It is difficult to determine who finances their movement, since their new organization has yet to win tax-free status requiring documentation of donations. Mr. Spencer estimated that since 2009, the two have raised and spent about $150,000 for things like the bus ads and giant television screens for the 9/11 rally, some of it donated through Mr. Spencer’s Jihad Watch, a 501(c)3 nonprofit agency. In recent years, Jihad Watch has been a program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which pays him a $132,000 salary and, as Politico.com has reported, has received significant contributions from philanthropists who back the Israeli right.

Asked how much her blog collects in reader donations and advertisements (one promotes a creationist Web site), Ms. Geller said only that it was enough to live on.

She is barreling ahead. Just last week, Atlas called on readers to boycott Campbell’s soup after the company announced that it planned to certify some products as halal — the Muslim equivalent of kosher — with the supervision of a group that Ms. Geller considers a front for terrorists.

“Warhol,” she wrote, “is spinning in his grave.”

Jack Begg contributed research.

should we force universities to accept ROTC?

2010-09-30T14:34:00.001-07:00

With all my heart I respect all the members of the U.S. military it was my honor to serve with, top to bottom. Truly their intelligence and character make your jaw drop. At the same time my life has been ripped apart by the loss of those closest to me. Many of our military heros ended up dead, their families bereft. The right wing propaganda machine needs to approach how we sacrifice America's best and brightest kids with a lot more respect.

let's force faux cowboys to work for a living

2010-09-23T23:25:00.001-07:00

At least the Republican Party is now on record promising to repeat the same things that failed in the past, but expecting a different result. If Republicans were really serious about cutting wasteful spending, the first thing they would eliminate would be farm subsidies. Let's force these faux cowboys to actually work for a living!

downhill with the Republican party

2010-09-23T23:20:00.000-07:00

New York Times
September 23, 2010

Downhill With the G.O.P.
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Once upon a time, a Latin American political party promised to help motorists save money on gasoline. How? By building highways that ran only downhill.

I’ve always liked that story, but the truth is that the party received hardly any votes. And that means that the joke is really on us. For these days one of America’s two great political parties routinely makes equally nonsensical promises. Never mind the war on terror, the party’s main concern seems to be the war on arithmetic. And this party has a better than even chance of retaking at least one house of Congress this November.

Banana republic, here we come.

On Thursday, House Republicans released their “Pledge to America,” supposedly outlining their policy agenda. In essence, what they say is, “Deficits are a terrible thing. Let’s make them much bigger.” The document repeatedly condemns federal debt — 16 times, by my count. But the main substantive policy proposal is to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, which independent estimates say would add about $3.7 trillion to the debt over the next decade — about $700 billion more than the Obama administration’s tax proposals.

True, the document talks about the need to cut spending. But as far as I can see, there’s only one specific cut proposed — canceling the rest of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which Republicans claim (implausibly) would save $16 billion. That’s less than half of 1 percent of the budget cost of those tax cuts. As for the rest, everything must be cut, in ways not specified — “except for common-sense exceptions for seniors, veterans, and our troops.” In other words, Social Security, Medicare and the defense budget are off-limits.

So what’s left? Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has done the math. As he points out, the only way to balance the budget by 2020, while simultaneously (a) making the Bush tax cuts permanent and (b) protecting all the programs Republicans say they won’t cut, is to completely abolish the rest of the federal government: “No more national parks, no more Small Business Administration loans, no more export subsidies, no more N.I.H. No more Medicaid (one-third of its budget pays for long-term care for our parents and others with disabilities). No more child health or child nutrition programs. No more highway construction. No more homeland security. Oh, and no more Congress.”

The “pledge,” then, is nonsense. But isn’t that true of all political platforms? The answer is, not to anything like the same extent. Many independent analysts believe that the Obama administration’s long-run budget projections are somewhat too optimistic — but, if so, it’s a matter of technical details. Neither President Obama nor any other leading Democrat, as far as I can recall, has ever claimed that up is down, that you can sharply reduce revenue, protect all the programs voters like, and still balance the budget.

And the G.O.P. itself used to make more sense than it does now. Ronald Reagan’s claim that cutting taxes would actually increase revenue was wishful thinking, but at least he had some kind of theory behind his proposals. When former President George W. Bush campaigned for big tax cuts in 2000, he claimed that these cuts were affordable given (unrealistic) projections of future budget surpluses. Now, however, Republicans aren’t even pretending that their numbers add up.

So how did we get to the point where one of our two major political parties isn’t even trying to make sense?

The answer isn’t a secret. The late Irving Kristol, one of the intellectual godfathers of modern conservatism, once wrote frankly about why he threw his support behind tax cuts that would worsen the budget deficit: his task, as he saw it, was to create a Republican majority, “so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.” In short, say whatever it takes to gain power. That’s a philosophy that now, more than ever, holds sway in the movement Kristol helped shape.

And what happens once the movement achieves the power it seeks? The answer, presumably, is that it turns to its real, not-so-secret agenda, which mainly involves privatizing and dismantling Medicare and Social Security.

Realistically, though, Republicans aren’t going to have the power to enact their true agenda any time soon — if ever. Remember, the Bush administration’s attack on Social Security was a fiasco, despite its large majority in Congress — and it actually increased Medicare spending.

So the clear and present danger isn’t that the G.O.P. will be able to achieve its long-run goals. It is, rather, that Republicans will gain just enough power to make the country ungovernable, unable to address its fiscal problems or anything else in a serious way. As I said, banana republic, here we come.

The Angry Rich

2010-09-22T08:26:00.000-07:00

New York Times
September 19, 2010

The Angry Rich
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Anger is sweeping America. True, this white-hot rage is a minority phenomenon, not something that characterizes most of our fellow citizens. But the angry minority is angry indeed, consisting of people who feel that things to which they are entitled are being taken away. And they’re out for revenge.

No, I’m not talking about the Tea Partiers. I’m talking about the rich.

These are terrible times for many people in this country. Poverty, especially acute poverty, has soared in the economic slump; millions of people have lost their homes. Young people can’t find jobs; laid-off 50-somethings fear that they’ll never work again.

Yet if you want to find real political rage — the kind of rage that makes people compare President Obama to Hitler, or accuse him of treason — you won’t find it among these suffering Americans. You’ll find it instead among the very privileged, people who don’t have to worry about losing their jobs, their homes, or their health insurance, but who are outraged, outraged, at the thought of paying modestly higher taxes.

The rage of the rich has been building ever since Mr. Obama took office. At first, however, it was largely confined to Wall Street. Thus when New York magazine published an article titled “The Wail Of the 1%,” it was talking about financial wheeler-dealers whose firms had been bailed out with taxpayer funds, but were furious at suggestions that the price of these bailouts should include temporary limits on bonuses. When the billionaire Stephen Schwarzman compared an Obama proposal to the Nazi invasion of Poland, the proposal in question would have closed a tax loophole that specifically benefits fund managers like him.

Now, however, as decision time looms for the fate of the Bush tax cuts — will top tax rates go back to Clinton-era levels? — the rage of the rich has broadened, and also in some ways changed its character.

For one thing, craziness has gone mainstream. It’s one thing when a billionaire rants at a dinner event. It’s another when Forbes magazine runs a cover story alleging that the president of the United States is deliberately trying to bring America down as part of his Kenyan, “anticolonialist” agenda, that “the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s.” When it comes to defending the interests of the rich, it seems, the normal rules of civilized (and rational) discourse no longer apply.

At the same time, self-pity among the privileged has become acceptable, even fashionable.

Tax-cut advocates used to pretend that they were mainly concerned about helping typical American families. Even tax breaks for the rich were justified in terms of trickle-down economics, the claim that lower taxes at the top would make the economy stronger for everyone.

These days, however, tax-cutters are hardly even trying to make the trickle-down case. Yes, Republicans are pushing the line that raising taxes at the top would hurt small businesses, but their hearts don’t really seem in it. Instead, it has become common to hear vehement denials that people making $400,000 or $500,000 a year are rich. I mean, look at the expenses of people in that income class — the property taxes they have to pay on their expensive houses, the cost of sending their kids to elite private schools, and so on. Why, they can barely make ends meet.

And among the undeniably rich, a belligerent sense of entitlement has taken hold: it’s their money, and they have the right to keep it. “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes — but that was a long time ago.

The spectacle of high-income Americans, the world’s luckiest people, wallowing in self-pity and self-righteousness would be funny, except for one thing: they may well get their way. Never mind the $700 billion price tag for extending the high-end tax breaks: virtually all Republicans and some Democrats are rushing to the aid of the oppressed affluent.

You see, the rich are different from you and me: they have more influence. It’s partly a matter of campaign contributions, but it’s also a matter of social pressure, since politicians spend a lot of time hanging out with the wealthy. So when the rich face the prospect of paying an extra 3 or 4 percent of their income in taxes, politicians feel their pain — feel it much more acutely, it’s clear, than they feel the pain of families who are losing their jobs, their houses, and their hopes.

And when the tax fight is over, one way or another, you can be sure that the people currently defending the incomes of the elite will go back to demanding cuts in Social Security and aid to the unemployed. America must make hard choices, they’ll say; we all have to be willing to make sacrifices.

But when they say “we,” they mean “you.” Sacrifice is for the little people.

America not threatened by anything but Gingrich inferiority complex

2010-09-18T12:32:00.000-07:00

Extremist Republicans like Newt Gingrich are talking both to and about an America that I don't even recognize, and I went to Glen Beck's rally at the Lincoln Memorial. We are a people that are soberly confident about our place as the most powerful country in the world and the most influential civilization in history. We aren't afraid of anything, or anybody, including Islam. Our approach to challenges is to embrace and absorb them. Tolerance of others is our very foundation -- we preach it and we practice it. We may fiercly disagree with each other's ideas, but above all we love and celebrate each other's freedom to express them. The socialist mystique that these Republican extremists cling to so lovingly as their enemy was consigned to the scrap heap of history a long time ago. In fact it seems like they don't know what to oppose any more, because they live in the past and don't even see, much less understand, today's realities.

thought experiment: tax cuts for the rich

2010-09-16T14:21:00.000-07:00

Ok, so the Democrats submit legislation to continue the tax cuts, except for the top bracket. Who will vote against that? Will Republicans take a stand that, "no tax cuts for the middle class unless also tax cuts for the rich?" If they do, the result is that all the tax cuts expire. The Republicans killed the bill to extend them for the middle class. Seems like a layup, Mr. President.

McConnell says the DREAM act is too controversial

2010-09-16T10:55:00.000-07:00

How funny to hear Republican outrage at the very idea of making immigration controversial! Who is trying to terrify the public about this issue at a time when illegal border crossings and violent crime in border areas are way down and deportations are up? What really confounds Republicans is exactly what the DREAM act puts its finger on -- what to do about all the illegal immigrants who are already here. The question struck Sarah Palin speechless in her July interview with Bill O'Reilly. Sure, there are some people who dream lovingly about illegal immigrants being rounded up like cattle and driven out of the country. Let's hear some responsible Republicans say once and for all that they oppose that. Let's hear Republicans talk about illegal immigrants as human beings, created equal as it says in the Bible and in our Declaration of Independence.

God bless America, your land and my land

2010-09-10T13:19:00.000-07:00

There is nothing new about right wing politicians staking an exclusive claim to the symbols of American patriotism: the flag, the pledge of allegiance, the Constitution and of course the date Sept. 11.

I wonder how many conservatives will remember as they bellow out the song "God Bless America" this weekend (or, as many of the words as they can actually remember) that their conservative forefathers stifled a movement to make this song the national anthem when it first came out, because its composer was a foreigner and a Jew. For me at least, those symbols have been sadly robbed of much of their deeper meaning by the extremists who have coopted them. Good thing they are just symbols. The underlying goodness and greatness they are really meant to symbolize is still there. God bless America indeed, your land and my land: Muslim, Jew and Christian.

entrepreneurs

2010-09-09T09:18:00.000-07:00

Nothing is more broken in America today than this archetype of the self-reliant, job-creating entrepreneur. Even Republicans are starting to openly admit that our so-called entrepreneurs are sitting on their money in the expectation of soon being able to shake us taxpayers down for more free handouts. It is a real shame that even after all the taxpayer money that has flowed into the economy over the past few years, these so-called entrepreneurs are still holding out for more.

Are rich people the new welfare queens?

2010-09-07T10:05:00.000-07:00

Are rich people the new welfare queens? Affordable health care for everybody is just too much of a tax burden on rich people. Saving the planet is just too much of a tax burden on rich people. What, are these people not able to work for a living? Bush gave rich people a tax cut to reward them for buying him the presidency. He sold it to the public as temporary, and muttered mumbo jumbo about job creation. So, where are the jobs? You want to keep your tax cuts rich people, show us the jobs?

The Bush Tax Cuts and Small Business: What We Know

2010-09-06T09:04:00.000-07:00

TAX POLICY CENTER
URBAN INSTITUTE and BROOKINGS INSTITUTION

The Bush Tax Cuts and Small Business: What We Know
by Howard Gleckman
on Wed 04 Aug 2010 08:11 PM EDT

Those who would extend all of the Bush tax cuts, including for the highest-earners, are zeroing in what would happen to small business if Congress lets those top tax rates rise. And they are not subtle. Allowing top rates to increase would be a “job-killing tax hike” says Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah).
So let’s take a closer look at these firms and what higher taxes might mean both for them and the overall economy.
This is what we know: Most small businesses report their income on individual tax returns, either on Schedule C (for self-employment or sole proprietorships), Schedule E (for S corporations) or schedule F (for farms). We don't know how many of these businesses are really small, but next year about 36 million taxpayers will report income from these sources on their 1040s. Only about 900,000, or 2.5 percent, would pay higher rates if the Bush tax cuts were allowed to expire for those in the top brackets. However, that relative handful of business owners will report $400 billion, or almost 44 percent of all the business income included in individual returns.
The average positive business income reported on 1040s is less than $40,000. If this was their only income, an average business filer would be miles from the top two tax brackets. Obama would continue the tax cuts for individuals making $200,000 or less and couples making $250,000 or less. A single filer who has only business income and makes the average of $40,000 would have to see his profits rise five-fold before he’d be hit by higher tax rates.
But for many of those reporting postive business income, these earnings are a relatively small fraction of their total taxable income. Some may be earning a little something from a side business. Perhaps they own a piece of rental property. Or do a bit of baby sitting. Some may be plumbers or computer technicians who work a day job and pick up a few extra bucks after hours, or corporate accountants trying to start a cupcake business in their free time.
On the other hand, some reporting business income would face higher taxes if the top rates returned to their pre-2001 levels of 36 percent and 39.6 percent, up from today's 33 percent and 35 percent. Ninety percent of high-earners who receive business income will get at least half of their AGI from this source in 2011. A half million top-bracket filers will report net positive business income averaging more than $700,000. These are the people--not the mom-and-pop business owners-- who would be hit by the expiration of the top bracket tax cuts.
Who are they? Many are doctors, lawyers, and investors. Others are very successful entrepreneurs who may own a chain of grocery stores or dry cleaners, or a lot of real estate. Do they fit your image of a small business owner? That, I suppose, is in the eye of the beholder.
And now to the bottom line: Would raising their taxes be a job-killer? That is less clear. Some research suggests that higher tax rates actually encourage small business formation. Why? Because these firms allow their owners to shelter lots of income, behavior that is more lucrative when rates are higher. Other research suggests that higher rates do retard investment and hiring by existing firms. Donald Bruce and Tami Gurley-Calvez, who study small business for the Hudson Institute, have written a nice review of all these issues.
While we are not certain about what higher taxes will mean for small business, we know these firms will suffer if they are unable to access capital. And to the degree that ever-greater government borrowing makes it harder for these firms to raise money, they and their employees will pay a price. That is the other consequence of keeping taxes low for high earners, which will cost nearly $700 billion over the next decade.

Heath care reform takes aim at obese hospital workers?

2010-09-03T11:23:00.000-07:00

Interesting story in the news today about an Ohio health care CEO who sent a letter warning all his employees that the health insurance reform bill would deny Medicare reimbursements to hospitals whose employees are too obese. The point, I guess, is that private sector companies are not some kind of Divinely-created perfect economic entities. As Adam Smith wrote so eloquently, businessmen are human beings motivated by greed. Maybe this is why free marketeers reflexively personify government as innately greedy? Because greed is the only principle of economic behavior that they recognize?

Free-spending Republican daddy will be home any minute

2010-09-03T10:30:00.001-07:00

So many Republicans keep eating what Grover Norquist has called the same old lousy dog food. Now they have a new talking point, that ending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy will hurt small businesses. Leaving aside the factual inaccuracy of that wild surmise, where oh where are all the jobs that those tax cuts were supposed to create? How come all these free marketeers never fault the private sector for not doing its job to provide jobs? And how come no economic incentives offered by Democrats are even interesting to businesses? Nudge nudge, wink wink, why listen to practically-minded Democrats when indulgent Republican daddies will be home any minute, eager to bribe them to do what they should already be doing for their own good?

Sarah Palin hates this article

2010-09-02T18:32:00.000-07:00

VANITY FAIR
September 2, 2010

PALIN’S PALADINS
by Michael Joseph Gross

Backstage in the arena, a little girl in Mary Janes pushes her brother in a baby carriage, stopping a few yards shy of a heavy, 100-foot-long black curtain. The curtain splits the arena in two, shielding the children from an audience of 4,000 people clapping their hands in time to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The music accompanies a video “Salute to Military Heroes” that plays above the stage where, in a few moments, the children’s mother will appear.

When the girl, Piper Palin, turns around, she sees her parents thronged by admirers, and the crowd rolling toward her and the baby, her brother Trig, born with Down syndrome in 2008. Sarah Palin and her husband, Todd, bend down and give a moment to the children; a woman, perhaps a nanny, whisks the boy away; and Todd hands Sarah her speech and walks her to the stage. He pokes the air with one finger. She mimes the gesture, whips around, strides on four-inch heels to stage center, and turns it on.

And how. Palin and the crowd might as well be one. She’s glad to be here with the people of Independence, Missouri, “where so many of you proudly cling to your guns and your religion”—the first laughline in a 40-minute stump speech that alludes to many of the perceived insults she and her audience have suffered together, and that transforms their resentments into badges of honor. Palin waves her scribbled-on palm to the crowd, proclaiming that she’s using “the poor man’s teleprompter.” Of the Obama administration, she says, “They talk down to us. Especially here in the heartland. Oh, man. They think that, if we were just smart enough, we’d be able to understand their policies. And I so want to tell ’em, and I do tell ’em, Oh, we’re plenty smart, oh yeah—we know what’s goin’ on. And we don’t like what’s goin’ on. And we’re not gonna let them tell us to sit down and shut up.”

The crowd’s ample applause at these lines swells to something vastly bigger when Palin vows defiantly that “come November, we’re taking our country back!” The phrase plays on the name of this event, “Winning America Back,” which has been billed as a Tea Party rally organized by a grassroots Missouri political-action committee that no one had heard of until a few months ago, when the event was announced.

Behind the curtain, Piper plays with other children, oblivious to the speech. She runs in circles, plays hide-and-seek, poses for snapshots, and generally acts as if she were in another world—until she gets the signal to do her job: march to the podium, pick up Palin’s speech, and allow Palin to make a public display of maternal affection.

On cue, Piper parts the curtain. As the child appears, a loud and doting “Awww” melts through the crowd.

Sarah Palin’s connection with her audience is complete. People who admire her believe she is just like them, and this conviction seems to satisfy their curiosity about the objective facts of her life. Those whose curiosity has not been satisfied have their work cut out for them. Palin has been a national figure for barely two years—John McCain selected her as his running mate in August 2008. Her on-the-record statements about herself amount to a litany of untruths and half-truths. With few exceptions—mostly Palin antagonists in journalism and politics whose beefs with her have long been out in the open—virtually no one who knows Palin well is willing to talk about her on the record, whether because they are loyal and want to protect her (a small and shrinking number), or because they expect her prominence to grow and intend to keep their options open, or because they fear she will exact revenge, as she has been known to do. It is an astonishing phenomenon. Colleagues and acquaintances by the hundreds went on the record to reveal what they knew, for good or ill, about prospective national candidates as diverse as Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Al Gore, and Barack Obama. When it comes to Palin, people button their lips and slink away.

She manages to be at once a closed book and a constant noisemaker. Her press spokesperson, Pam Pryor, barely speaks to the press, and Palin shrewdly cultivates a real and rhetorical antagonism toward what she calls “the lamestream media.” The Palin machine is supported by organizations that do much of their business under the cover of pseudonyms and shell companies. In accordance with the terms of a reported $1 million annual contract with Fox News, Palin regularly delivers canned commentary on that network. But in the year since she abruptly resigned the governorship of Alaska, in order to market herself full-time—earning an estimated $13 million in the process—she has submitted to authentic, unpaid interviews with only a handful of journalists, none of whom have posed notably challenging questions. She keeps tight control of her pronouncements, speaking only in settings of her own choosing, with audiences of her own selection, and with reporters kept at bay. (Despite many requests, neither Palin nor her current staff would comment for this article.) She injects herself into the news almost every day, but on a strictly one-way basis, through a steady stream of messages on Twitter and Facebook. The press plays along. Palin is the only politician whose tweets are regularly reported as news by TV networks. She is the only one who has been able to significantly change the course of debate on a major national issue (health-care reform) with a single Facebook posting (in which she accused the Obama administration, falsely, of wanting to set up a “death panel”).

Palin makes speeches before large audiences at least a few times a week, on a grueling schedule that has taken her to as many as four locations in three states in one day. She’s choosy, restricting herself to Tea Party gatherings; fund-raisers for charities and Republican organizations and candidates; and moneymakers for herself, mainly business conventions and “Get Motivated!” seminars. Judging from the bootleg videos that sometimes turn up, her basic speech varies little from venue to venue. She presents herself as the straight-shooting, plainspoken, salt-of-the-earth advocate for “hardworking, patriotic, liberty-loving Americans” and as the anti-Obama, the lone Republican standing up to a federal government gone “out of control.” Last July, the quarterly filing by Palin’s political-action committee, SarahPAC, revealed a formidable war chest and hefty investments in fund-raising and direct mail, the clearest signs yet that she may indeed run for president. Republican leaders privately dismiss her as too unpredictable and too undisciplined to run a serious campaign. But on she flies, carpet-bombing the 24-hour news cycle: now announcing her desire to meet with her “political heroine” Margaret Thatcher (the better to look like Ronald Reagan, presumably, though Palin seemed unaware that Thatcher is suffering from dementia); now yelping in theatrical complaint (“I want my straws! I want ’em bent!”), to shrug off revelations that her speaking contract demands deluxe hotel rooms, first-class air travel, and bottles of water with bendable straws; now responding (in a statement read on the Today show) to reports of her daughter Bristol’s re-engagement to Levi Johnston; and all the while issuing scores of political endorsements and preparing a fall media blitz. A TV show, Sarah Palin’s Alaska, for which Palin is being paid $2 million, will have its premiere on the TLC network in November. A new book, America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag, will be published the following week.

This spring and summer I traveled to Alaska and followed Palin’s road show through four midwestern states, speaking with whomever I could induce to talk under whatever conditions of anonymity they imposed—political strategists, longtime Palin friends and political associates, hotel staff, shopkeepers and hairstylists, and high-school friends of the Palin children. There’s a long and detailed version of what they had to say, but there’s also a short and simple one: anywhere you peel back the skin of Sarah Palin’s life, a sad and moldering strangeness lies beneath.

Fist of the North Star

It was a baking-hot Kansas afternoon, and from the lobby I watched as three slender, solemn young hairstylists and makeup artists approached a front-desk clerk at the Hyatt Regency hotel, in Wichita. The tallest of them said, “We’re here for North Star.” The desk clerk understood. He nodded and directed the three women to the Keeper of the Plains suite, on the 17th floor, where North Star herself awaited. The North Star is mentioned in Alaska’s state song and appears on its state flag. Fairbanks lies in a region called the North Star Borough. Palin is on the way to making North Star a personal brand. If she ever does run for president, it might well serve as her Secret Service code name.

Hours after the styling session, three bodyguards and one aide accompany Sarah, Todd, and Piper to a $1,000-a-plate V.I.P. dinner to raise money for Wichita’s Bethel Life School. Each guest has a photo taken with Palin and receives a “personally autographed bookplate copy” of Palin’s autobiography, Going Rogue. (The autographs are fake, made with an Autopen.) After dinner, Pat Boone, his skin a taut orange against the trademark white suit, leads the crowd in the singing of a spiritual. Congressman Todd Tiahrt, who will receive Palin’s endorsement in his race for the U.S. Senate, tells everyone to buy a copy of Palin’s book—“so Sarah can buy a Learjet!” (Learjet is based in Wichita.)

Palin delivers basically the same speech she gave 18 hours earlier to the Tea Party group in Independence. You could pretty much replace the word “constitution,” from yesterday’s remarks, with “Bible,” and be good to go. Then Palin departs from the script and speaks as if from the heart, describing her fear and confusion upon discovering that Trig would be born with Down syndrome. “I had never really been around a baby with special needs,” she tells her listeners. For what it’s worth, this statement is untrue. Depicting the same moment of discovery in her own book, Palin writes that she immediately thought of a special-needs child she knew very well: her autistic nephew. Such falsehoods never damage Palin’s credibility with her admirers, because information and ideology are incidental to this relationship. Palin owes her power to identity politics, pitched with moralistic topspin. She exploits the same populist impulse that fueled the career of William Jennings Bryan—an impulse described by one Bryan biographer as “the yearning for a society run by and for ordinary people who lead virtuous lives.”

Palin does not always treat those ordinary people well, however—it depends on who is watching. Of the many famous people who have stayed at the Hyatt in Wichita (Cher, Reba McEntire, Neil Young), Sarah Palin ranks as the all-time worst tipper: $5 for seven bags. But the bellhops had it good in Kansas, compared with the bellman at another midwestern hotel who waited up until past midnight for Palin and her entourage to check in—and then got no tip at all for 10 bags. He was stiffed again at checkout time. The same went for the maids who cleaned Palin’s rooms in both places—no tip whatsoever. The only time I heard of Palin giving a generous tip was in St. Joseph, Michigan, after the owner of Kilwin’s chocolate shop, on State Street, sent a CARE package to Palin’s suite, and Palin walked to the store to say thank you. She also wanted to buy more boxes of candy to take home. When the owner would not accept her money, Palin, encircled by the crowd that had jammed the store to get a glimpse of her, pressed a hundred-dollar bill into the woman’s hand, saying, “This is for the staff.” That Ben Franklin was the talk of State Street the whole rest of the day.

Warm and effusive in public, indifferent or angry in private: this is the pattern of Palin’s behavior toward the people who make her life possible. A onetime gubernatorial aide to Palin says, “The people who have worked for her—they’re broken, used, stepped on, down in the dust.” On the 2008 campaign trail, one close aide recalls, it was practically impossible to persuade Palin to take a moment to thank the kitchen workers at fund-raising dinners. During the campaign, Palin lashed out at the slightest provocation, sometimes screaming at staff members and throwing objects. Witnessing such behavior, one aide asked Todd Palin if it was typical of his wife. He answered, “You just got to let her go through it… Half the stuff that comes out of her mouth she doesn’t even mean.” When a campaign aide gingerly asked Todd whether Sarah should consider taking psychiatric medication to control her moods, Todd responded that she “just needed to run and work out more.” Her anger kept boiling over, however, and eventually the fits of rage came every day. Then, just as suddenly, her temper would be gone. Palin would apologize and promise to be nicer. Within hours, she would be screaming again. At the end of one long day, when Palin was mid-tirade, a campaign aide remembers thinking, “You were an angel all night. Now you’re a devil. Where did this come from?”

The intensity of Palin’s temper was first described to me in such extreme terms that I couldn’t help but wonder if it might be exaggerated, until I heard corroborating tales of outbursts dating back to her days as mayor of Wasilla and before. One friend of the Palins’ remembers an argument between Sarah and Todd: “They took all the canned goods out of the pantry, then proceeded to throw them at each other. By the time they got done, the stainless-steel fridge looked like it had got shot up with a shotgun. Todd said, ‘I don’t know why I even waste my time trying to get nice things for you if you’re just going to ruin them.’ ” This friend adds, “As soon as she enters her property and the door closes, even the insects in that house cringe. She has a horrible temper, but she has gotten away with it because she is a pretty woman.” (The friend elaborated on this last point: “Once, while Sarah was preparing for a city-council meeting, she said, ‘I’m gonna put on one of my push-up bras so I can get what I want tonight.’ That’s how she rolls.”) When Palin was mayor, she made life for one low-level municipal employee so miserable that the woman quit her job, sought psychiatric counseling, and then left the state altogether to escape Palin’s sphere of influence—this according to one person with firsthand knowledge of the situation. The woman did not want to be found. When I finally tracked her down, her husband, who answered the phone, at first pretended that I had dialed the wrong number and that the word “Wasilla” had no meaning to him. Palin’s former personal assistants all refused to comment on the record for this story, some citing a fear of reprisal. Others who have worked with Palin recall that, when she feels threatened, she does not hesitate to wield some version of a signature threat: “I have the power to ruin you.”

Palin’s public voice is an instrument of great versatility. In a few moments, she can turn from kind to hateful, rational to unhinged. At her best Palin can be folksy and pungent. But she needs outside help to give her voice its national range. For messaging strategy, Palin relies on William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, and Fred Malek, who was an aide to Presidents Richard Nixon and George H. W. Bush. The lawyer Robert Barnett, the most successful literary agent in Washington—his clients range from Hillary Clinton to Dick Cheney to Tony Blair—negotiated Palin’s reported $7 million advance for Going Rogue, and he helps oversee her speaking schedule, which is arranged by the Washington Speakers Bureau. The small inner circle that shapes Palin’s voice day to day includes lobbyist Randy Scheunemann, a director of the neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century, who advises Palin on foreign affairs, and Kim Daniels, a lawyer with the Thomas More Law Center, which has been called “the Christian answer to the A.C.L.U.,” who advises her on domestic issues. Palin’s speechwriter is Lindsay Hayes. Doug McMarlin and Jason Recher, both of whom did advance work for George W. Bush, serve as body men and confidants. Both Hayes and Recher were on Palin’s 2008-campaign road team, and both were known for indulging her whims, according to their colleagues. (When John McCain decided to pull out of Michigan, a decision Palin disagreed with, Recher and Palin hatched a plan one day to make an early-morning drive to Michigan anyway. The Secret Service, becoming aware of the plan, asked the McCain campaign what it should do. The answer came: “Shoot out the tires.”) Campaign e-mails indicate that Recher was disrespectful of field staff and support workers. “Our volunteers don’t want to do Palin trips because of the way they are treated by Recher,” wrote one of his supervisors. Of all those who have professional relationships with Palin, only Robert Barnett is generally considered to be at the top of his game, and he is basically just cutting deals, as he would for any client.

Palin’s most unconventional hire is a novice media consultant, Rebecca Mansour, a 36-year-old Los Angeles resident who has been identified in news stories as a screenwriter. Mansour has said that she volunteered for Obama early in the 2008 campaign and then became disillusioned. Not long after the election, with Joseph Russo, a then 23-year-old college student from New Jersey, who would also go to work for Palin, she co-founded the most popular pro-Palin blog, Conservatives4Palin, known informally as C4P (and not to be confused with the “adult swingers” Web site of that name). C4P functions as a hybrid news service, discussion board, and field headquarters for a virtual army of Palin supporters, who pride themselves on brute devotion. “Who We Are and What We Stand For,” a post written by Mansour, declares, “We’re ordinary barbarians here. No one controls us. We’re a horde.” A prominent C4P contributor, Nicole Coulter, told CBS.com this summer, “We would literally walk across hot broken glass for this woman… She’s our family, and you protect your family; it’s like the mafia.”

On C4P, any journalist or public figure who questions Palin in any way is flicked off as a “creep,” a “hack,” a “loser,” a “storm trooper,” a “liar,” or as just plain “slime.” “I assumed the governor was above that,” says Jay Ramras, an Alaska state legislator who has been a frequent target of the site. “Or at least that there was a Chinese wall between her and these people. But then they crossed over—she hired them.” Mansour’s words have continued to appear on the site occasionally, even after she was formally taken on board by SarahPAC. She used to police C4P message boards for dissenters from the party line and, under the name RAM (her initials, shortened from her earlier, more descriptive handle, RAM Hammer), rip them mercilessly: “Now you are banned for life, you sick son of a bitch.” In one comment string, a woman named Sandra wrote, “I wish Sarah would tell us more about what is involved with caring for Trig. I understand there are many professionals involved in his education and training. If we knew more about this there would be more support for organizations that are involved.” Mansour shot back, “Sandra, what are you implying?,” and the comment string went dead. The nastiness on C4P exists alongside an idealization of the former governor, as displayed in the closing lines of “Who is Sarah Palin?,” an 8,000-word posting by Mansour: “C4P has your back, Governor. And when you finally ride out from the north with your banner lifted high, we’ll rally.”

These words resonate with the code name Palin used in Wichita. Palin has invoked the North Star in several of her most important speeches, including her July 2009 farewell address, when she resigned as governor of Alaska (“Wherever the road may lead us, we have that steadying great North Star to guide us home”), her January 2009 state-of-the-state speech (“United, protecting and progressing under the great North Star, let’s get to work”), and her December 2006 inaugural address, in which she used the North Star concept to frame Alaska’s relationship to the rest of the country, much the way Ronald Reagan used the “city on a hill” image to portray America’s relationship to the rest of the world. “America is looking for answers. She’s looking for a new direction; the world is looking for a light,” Palin said. “That light can come from America’s great North Star; it can come from Alaska.” According to an account on US for Palin, another pro-Palin blog, Palin recently told a Christian audience in Georgia that “in Alaska they refer to the North Star a lot,” and indicated that this is sometimes meant as a reference to God.

Palin’s rooms in Wichita were booked by NorthStar Strategies, a Virginia company registered to Jason Recher. When a man in Wichita asked Palin how he could get involved if she decides to run for president, Doug McMarlin offered him a business card identifying himself as a partner in NorthStar. An Amazon.com store called the North Star Group, maintained by a Palin blogger, “sells Governor Palin’s books, and numerous products she has referenced or is known to use,” such as the red Naughty Monkey Double Dare pumps she often wears. As a side project to Conservatives4Palin, Joseph Russo in 2009 contributed to a separate pro-Palin blog called Fist of the North Star. The blog shares its name with a Japanese manga series set in a post-apocalyptic world devastated by nuclear war, in which a faithful remnant work to save their Heavenly Empress, who has been imprisoned by the corrupt Imperial Army. The Fist of the North Star blog once featured a staggeringly obscene mock news item about one of Palin’s Alaska nemeses, the activist Andree McLeod, who had filed a series of ethics complaints against the then governor: “On Friday, an international team of doctors successfully removed the world’s largest parasite from her desperately overstretched colon. One must wonder what kind of freaky shit this ghetto bitch was ingesting… You never know what else that Harpies Twat is carrying!”

As late as April 2009, Palin’s press spokesperson contended that C4P was “not affiliated in any way with the governor.” Mansour’s reaction to that statement suggested otherwise. The next day on C4P, she wrote, “Some readers have wondered if I felt tire tracks on my back this morning,” and went on to say, “I understand” why Palin’s spokesperson denied any connection, adding, “I’m not hurt … much.” Twelve days later she told a reporter for a McClatchy newspaper a different story: Sarah Palin, Mansour said, “has nothing at all, whatsoever, to do with any of what we’re doing here.” In early July, Mansour made a trip to Alaska to meet with Palin, according to a source in Anchorage. By mid-August, her byline, long the most prominent one on C4P, had vanished from the site.

But her voice, or at least a voice that sounds much like hers, was about to turn up in another venue. When it was first set up, in January 2009, Palin’s Facebook page might as well have been a file cabinet for official press releases (“Palin Pushes Parental Consent Legislation”) written mostly in a stiff, third-person form. The same was true of her Twitter feed, which went live in April. After Mansour’s voice disappeared on C4P, however, Palin’s voice on Facebook and Twitter started sounding increasingly provocative and irascible. A company called Aries Petra Consulting was formed in September and registered to Mansour’s home address, but under someone else’s name. (In astrology, Aries is the ram—or “RAM.”) SarahPAC’s first payment to the firm was made in October, about two weeks before Palin began her book tour. By then, Palin’s new virtual voice was growing in intensity. The more shrill it became, the more news Palin made: “QUIT MAKING THINGS UP DNC” … “OBAMA ADMINISTRATION’S ATROCIOUS DECISION: HORRIBLE DECISION, ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE” … “ARE YOU CAPABLE OF DECENCY, RAHM EMANUEL?” The payments to Mansour were not made public until February 1, 2010, when SarahPAC had to disclose its quarterly filings with the Federal Elections Commission. The day before the disclosure, knowing what was coming, C4P made an official announcement acknowledging that both Mansour and Russo had left the site months earlier and gone to work for SarahPAC. This summer, in her capacity as a SarahPAC staffer, Mansour insisted to a reporter that “anything that goes out under [Palin’s] name is hers.” Palin’s virtual voice does sometimes have the ring of authenticity. But often it sounds less like Palin herself than someone else’s fantasy version of Palin at her most vitriolic. On one occasion Palin’s virtual voice contradicted remarks she made in a TV interview two days later.

Angels and Demons

Early in the 2008 campaign, when John McCain’s aides discovered that Alaska-size gaps existed in Palin’s general knowledge (among those previously unreported: she had no idea who Margaret Thatcher was), they from time to time would give her some books to read in hopes of improving the candidate’s learning curve. On one such occasion, Palin accepted the books, set them aside, and for the next 25 minutes was held rapt by one of her three BlackBerrys.

Eventually, an aide asked, “What are you working on?”

“I’m reading these great e-mails,” she said, “from the prayer warriors.”

On the road, Palin gives “prayer warriors” regular shout-outs. She did it in Wichita and again in June during “An Evening with Sarah Palin” at Chicago’s Rosemont Theatre. Standing in front of a 50-foot-long American flag, wearing a black leather jacket, Palin thanked prayer warriors in the audience, just as at other events she has thanked them for keeping her “covered” and “providing [a] prayer shield.”

The term “prayer warrior” describes a person who offers a specific kind of supplication: asking God to direct an unseen battle between forces of light and darkness—literal angels and demons—that some Christians believe is occurring all around us. A leading member of Wasilla’s Church on the Rock, the non-denominational evangelical congregation where Palin sometimes attends worship, confirmed this understanding of the term. When Palin thanks prayer warriors for keeping her covered, she is thanking them for calling on angels to shield her from demonic attacks. On the night of the vice-presidential debate with Joe Biden, Palin received an e-mail marked “URGENT … Urgent for Sarah to read … ” The e-mail came from pastor Lou Engle, a prominent right-wing activist who identifies himself as a prayer warrior and is a central figure in dominionist theology. (Dominionists believe that, until Jesus Christ returns to earth, society should be governed exclusively by God’s law as revealed through a literal reading of Scripture.) In the e-mail, Engle compared Palin to the biblical Queen Esther. “This is an Esther moment in your life,” he wrote. “Esther hid her identity until Mordecai challenged her to risk everything for such a time as this. Your identity is ‘Sarah Barracuda.’ Esther removed corruption from the Persian government and Haman fell. She didn’t have experience, she had grace and favor. Sarah, don’t hide your identity tonight.”

Palin has often stated that the strokes of luck propelling her political success were divinely ordained: “There are no coincidences” is a favorite maxim. In Going Rogue, Palin casts herself as a reluctant prophet, accepting providential election against her wishes. The reluctant prophet is a character trope found throughout Hebrew and Christian scripture. (Jesus prays, “Father, if it is Thy will, let this cup pass from me.”) The opening scene of Going Rogue, at the 2008 Alaska State Fair, ends with Palin’s BlackBerry ringing. As she reaches to answer, Palin prays, “Please, Lord, just for an hour, anything but politics,” only to find John McCain on the line, “asking if I wanted to help him change history.”

Whenever I heard Palin speak on the road, her remarks were scored with code phrases expressing solidarity with fundamentalist Christians. Her talk of leading with “a servant’s heart” is a dog whistle for the born-again. Her dig at health-care reform as an expression of Democratic ambitions to “build a Utopia” in the United States is practically a trumpet call (because the Kingdom of God is not of this earth, and perfection can be achieved only in the life to come). But it is Palin’s persistent encouragement of the prayer warriors that most clearly reveals her worldview: she is good, her opponents are evil, and the war is on.

Palin’s belief that evil surrounds her may account for the secretive nature of her business arrangements. SarahPAC staffers and contractors have made what seem like concerted efforts to disclose an absolute minimum of information. Palin’s tours around the country are supported by a network of organizations that are not always what they claim to be. The Winning America Back conference was organized by a Missouri political-action committee called Preserving American Liberty (PAL-PAC). The group’s Web site states that “Members of Preserving American Liberty are from the Kansas City metropolitan area and are all unpaid volunteers who want to make a positive difference in the community.” Yet when I asked local politicians (including state representatives, a Senate candidate, and a congressional candidate) and local journalists about who had organized the event, I found that they knew nothing about the sponsors—“maybe because they’re Tea Partiers,” one reporter guessed, “and they’re all new to politics.”

PAL-PAC seems to have been created for a single purpose: to pay Sarah Palin to give a speech. PAL-PAC announced the Palin event at the same time that it announced its own formation. After the Palin event was over, most of the information on PAL-PAC’s Web site disappeared. In effect, PAL-PAC was a disposable entertainment company, set up to put on a one-day show that collected the contact information of thousands of people who came to see Palin in the flesh, and to give her their money. The organization has not been mentioned again anywhere online or in local newspapers. The group’s financial statements are curious. PAL-PAC was registered in Missouri last November; as of April 15, 2010, when it made its second quarterly disclosure report to the Missouri Ethics Commission, two weeks before Palin arrived in Independence, PAL-PAC had only $3,202 in the bank. This was not nearly enough money to reserve the venue, much less cover security, printing, advertising, or any of the other expenses associated with throwing an event for 4,000 people. PAL-PAC’s third disclosure report, filed on July 14, reveals large payments to Wayne Graves, a Kansas City physician, whose wife, Karladine, also a doctor, is the president of PAL-PAC. Wayne Graves performed a key service for Winning America Back: he personally paid the speakers’ fees and travel expenses. On June 23, according to the report, he was reimbursed for these outlays: $15,134.83 for “Reimburse Speak[er],” and $126,000, also for “Reimburse Speak[er].” By fronting the money for these expenses, Graves made it possible for PAL-PAC to keep details such as Palin’s precise fee under wraps. But the lion’s share of that $126,000, it seems safe to assume, went to Palin—that would tally with verified reports of what Palin has been paid elsewhere. When reached by phone, Karladine Graves refused to answer any questions about PAL-PAC: “I’m—we’re just a tiny little group, and we’re not really anything, I just, oh, no, I can’t talk about this.” (Palin is on track to earn well over $3 million in speaking fees for events this year. Washington Speakers Bureau did not respond to an interview request.)

Other stops on Palin’s road show raise questions similar to those surrounding Winning America Back. Palin spoke to a group in Dallas that claimed to be a 501(c)(3) nonprofit group but is not registered as one. That event was advertised as a fund-raiser for the Uptown Women’s Center, whose eponymous U.R.L. redirected visitors to a Web site selling tickets for the event, palin4life.com, which has since disappeared. In June, Palin was scheduled to go to Charlotte, North Carolina, for two events, a $300-per-ticket “Evening with Sarah Palin” and the free “Complete Woman Expo 2010.” Both were sponsored by a newly formed organization, the Blue Ridge Educational Resource Group. Like PAL-PAC, the Blue Ridge group had sprung up from nowhere, and also like PAL-PAC, it somehow landed one of the country’s most-sought-after female speakers to headline its very first event. Local officials eventually expressed skepticism that Blue Ridge was competent to manage the logistics for an expected crowd of 30,000, and at the last minute both events were canceled. The Blue Ridge group’s Web site, like PAL-PAC’s, was reduced to a shell.

Timothy Crawford, the treasurer of Sarah-PAC, presumably has some responsibility for the byzantine structures undergirding Palin’s travels. Before joining Palin, Crawford was the interim finance director of the Republican National Committee. He is currently being investigated by the Ohio secretary of state for his role in Let Ohio Vote, a state-referendum campaign bankrolled in its entirety by New Models, a Virginia organization Crawford owns, which calls itself a nonprofit. Earlier this year, he refused to respond to a subpoena—issued under state laws that prohibit concealment of campaign money—that sought to discover where New Models had gotten the $1.6 million to fund Let Ohio Vote. Ohio secretary of state Jennifer Brunner has called New Models “a ‘straw-person’ out of state corporation.” Also, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, New Models “was behind controversial automated calls to Pennsylvania voters made during the 2008 presidential election. The calls told voters that Barack Obama’s aunt was living in America illegally and that he accepted campaign contributions from his ‘illegal alien aunt.’ ”

If Satan and his associates top Palin’s list of enemies, the legions of anti-Palin bloggers may rank a close second. After the 2008 presidential campaign, when she returned briefly to the governor’s office, Palin became so obsessed with responding to criticism from bloggers that it sometimes paralyzed her administration. In the year since her resignation, independent bloggers have produced some of the most robust reporting about her—for instance, revealing that the Palins did not pay taxes for years on two vacation cabins, and pointing out that, during the “bus tour” to promote her book, Palin in fact sometimes traveled by private Gulfstream. The Anchorage Daily News no longer has a beat reporter assigned to Palin. Owing to newsroom cuts, the paper has no staff to spare, and editors reportedly see Palin as “a nonentity” in Alaska now—a phenomenon primarily of concern to the rest of the country (collectively referred to as “outside”). The blogs that keep closest tabs on Palin include Palingates, Mudflats, the Immoral Minority, and Shannyn Moore: Just a Girl from Homer. Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish and Arianna Huffington’s Huffington Post serve as the main conduits of information from the blogs to the mainstream media. Palingates is run by a German attorney who will identify himself only as “Patrick.” Jeanne Devon, who owns an Anchorage retail store, runs Mudflats. Jesse Griffin, a part-time assistant teacher in Anchorage, is the Immoral Minority.

All attend to Palin’s every move with a focus that could be called obsessive, and all are given, in varying degrees of intensity, to juvenile outbursts that can rival C4P at its worst. For instance, among the Immoral Minority’s fictional captions for screen grabs from a Palin interview with Sean Hannity was the following: “Yeah I tole Levi to place his nasty sperm filled nuggets right here before he started his apology to my family. And every time he did not look sorry enough to me, I just gave them a little squeeze.” Still, without these blogs, the world would have much less information about Palin’s life right now.

Of the group, only Shannyn Moore, an Anchorage radio and TV personality, has any experience as a journalist. Moore and Devon, who consider themselves political activists as well as reporters, have become close friends and share a dream of persuading wealthy donors to give them millions of dollars to renovate an old Anchorage theater as headquarters for a foundation, where they would study Alaskan politics and do proper investigative work on Palin. For now, they do what they can with the meager resources they have, which means they spend a lot of time reading tea leaves. Moore, a green-eyed blonde who, like Palin, was once an Alaska beauty queen, albeit a few stripes more self-aware, drives her Subaru through downtown Anchorage, steering with one hand, holding a cigarette and her smartphone in the other. When Devon calls to tell her that Glenn Beck has booked the Dena’ina Center, the largest venue in Anchorage, for a speech on September 11, 2010, she sits bolt upright and yells. Immediately, they start trying to figure out what the news might mean. “Listen, listen, listen: Why in the world do you imagine Glenn Beck would come to Anchorage on 9/11? You think he might have a special guest? With a special announcement? Oh,” she says, her whole face falling as the implications of a Palin campaign kickoff hit her, “Jesus Christ.”

The best-known investigative reporter to insert himself into Alaska is Joe McGinniss, the author of The Selling of the President and Fatal Vision, who moved to Wasilla in May to spend the summer reporting for a book about Palin to be published next year by Random House. McGinniss rented the property next door to Palin, who, upon learning his identity, wrote a scathing Facebook post, accompanied by a snapshot of McGinniss standing outside on his deck: “Wonder what kind of material he’ll gather while overlooking Piper’s bedroom, my little garden, and the family’s swimming hole?”

Overnight, C4P, Glenn Beck, talk-radio hosts, and many other Palin allies rallied around. Within 24 hours, McGinniss had received 5,000 hostile e-mails. Death threats were investigated by the F.B.I. A local man who helped move some furniture into McGinniss’s house had one of his truck’s windows shot out. The author, with his disingenuous response to all this, did himself no favors. On the Today show, McGinniss absurdly claimed that he “didn’t expect any publicity at all” for moving in next door to Palin. On July 3, the first anniversary of Palin’s surprise resignation, I had dinner with McGinniss on the deck of his rented house. “I can’t even see her windows!” he said, gesturing across the way. Actually, from where I stood on the deck, even with the 14-foot-high fence the Palins put up the week McGinniss moved in, it was possible to see several of the Palins’ windows, a fair bit of the yard, and much of the lakefront edge of their property.

McGinniss told me his version of the story of the night Todd came over to ask who he was and what he was doing there. After a tense conversation, McGinniss says, Todd left, and Track Palin, Sarah and Todd’s older son, came out to the front yard “to do sit-ups” while holding what McGinniss assumes was a digital camera—which he figures Track used to take the picture that Sarah posted on Facebook. While McGinniss and I talked, there was no sign of life in the Palin house, and the only noise on the water came from squawking grebes—until about 8:30, when a floatplane roared in for a landing on Lake Lucille. It slowed to a stop directly in front of the Palins’ house, turned, crept closer to the shore, then idled for a long moment in front of us before taking off and heading back in the direction whence it came. The airplane was too far away for me to read the tail number, but it was a white Piper PA-18 Super Cub with red stripes: the same model and colors as Todd Palin’s airplane.

The Palins that night were in Todd’s hometown of Dillingham, about a two-hour flight southwest of Wasilla. If this was Todd’s plane, and if he was flying it, the choice to make the trip up here seemed odd. Given that this was the anniversary of Sarah’s resignation, it perhaps made sense that the Palins would want assurance that no curiosity seekers would trespass. But why make such a long flight, just for a quick look at the house? “Wouldn’t it be easier to hire a guard?,” I asked aloud. McGinniss, whose reporting has put him in the frame of mind of his subject—where everything is fungible, and everyone is suspect—replied, “A guard would have a story he could sell.”

City of Fear

You might be tempted to dismiss such a thought as the product of paranoid contagion—and it does seem at odds with the way Wasilla likes to present itself. Outsiders’ descriptions of the town (population 7,245) usually highlight the strip malls and the drug problems—which are real, but are less salient features of life here than the townspeople’s connection to the landscape, especially the majestic peaks of the Chugach Range to the southeast, visible from almost everywhere. The people of Wasilla, in the main, are reflexively generous and open. During coffee hour after worship at Church on the Rock, where a moose head is mounted over the sanctuary entrance, a member of the congregation invites me to join him for a three-day fishing trip a mere 15 minutes after we meet.

When I ask about Palin, though, a palpable unease creeps in. Some people clam up. Others whisper invitations to call later—but on this number, not that one, and not before this hour or after that one. So many people answer “Off the record?” to my initial questions that it almost seems the whole town has had media training. They certainly have issues with the press. Some tell of reporters who seduced them with promises—Don’t worry, I’ll make you look good—and then published stories that made them out to be hicks, stupid, less-than. “These were people we let into our house,” one Wasilla resident says. “We served them food.” But the real concern is with Palin herself—they don’t want her to find out they have talked with a reporter, because of a suspicion that bad things will happen to them if she does. The salty, seen-it-all bartender at one of the town’s best restaurants says, “I wish you luck—but I like my job.” Has Palin actually had people fired for talking about her?, I always ask, and the answer always comes, Remember that trooper? The reference is to Mike Wooten, a state policeman who fell out with the family after divorcing one of Sarah Palin’s sisters and ended up at the center of the scandal known as Troopergate. The Alaska Legislative Council found in 2008 that Palin “abused her power” as governor in attempting to get Trooper Wooten fired.

Even Palin’s strongest supporters say they feel confused by what their former governor has become. “She quit us,” says one Wasilla woman. “We elected her, and she left us,” says another. (“Sarah was my babysitter,” she later adds, as an indication of goodwill.) Yet they are too nice to turn me away, and they are too honest to completely suppress what they themselves feel unable to tell. After one local Republican delivers 90 minutes of uninterrupted praise for Palin, I ask whom else I should talk to, and the answer comes so fast it’s like a cry for help—which is how, the next day, I end up in the living room of Colleen Cottle, who is the matriarch of one of Wasilla’s oldest families, and who served on the city council when Palin was mayor. She says she and her husband, Rodney, will pay a price for speaking candidly about Palin. Their son is one of Todd Palin’s best friends. “But it is time for people to start telling the truth,” Colleen says. She describes the frustrations of trying to do city business with a mayor who “had no attention span—with Sarah it was always ‘What’s the flavor of the day?’ ”; who was unable to take part meaningfully in conversations about budgets because she “does not understand math or accounting—she only knows buzzwords, like ‘balanced budget’ ”; and who clocked out after four hours on most days, delegating her duties to an aide—“but he’ll never talk to you, because he has a state job and doesn’t want to lose it.” This type of conversation is repeated so often that Wasilla starts to feel like something from The Twilight Zone or a Shirley Jackson short story—a place populated entirely by abuse survivors.

To appreciate how alien Palin has become in Wasilla, how inscrutable to her own people, you have to wrap your mind around the fact that Sarah Palin is more famous than any other Alaskan, ever, and to remember that mass-media fame is a property of “outside.” It still does not quite seem real to most Alaskans that there are all these thousands of people in the Lower 48 turning out for … Sarah. It seems all the more unreal because Palin’s image as an engaging, down-to-earth small-town hockey mom was more or less accurate until two years ago. To be sure, some elements of that image were never true to life. “This whole hunter thing, for Sarah? That is the biggest fallacy,” says one longtime friend of the family. “That woman has never hunted. The picture of her with the caribou she says she shot? She got out of the R.V. to pose for a picture. She never helps with the fishing either. It’s all a joke.” The friend goes on to recall that when Greta Van Susteren came to the house to interview Palin “[Sarah] cooked moose chili and whatnot. Todd was calling everyone he knew the day before—‘Do you got any moose?’ Desperate.” In any event, her life is very different now: flying by private jet, driving a gleaming new Escalade ESV with tinted windows, and speaking to the whole world via a Fox News feed from her house until the network installs a TV studio on her property, where contractors are now also finishing a 6,000-square-foot stone-clad château that will contain an airplane hangar for Todd’s Piper Cub, two private apartments, and an office for Sarah.

Almost any small-town person who makes it big has some slight edge of ruthlessness, or an above-average ability to cut and run. The nickname “Sarah Barracuda” doesn’t come from nowhere, and Palin’s edge was always harder than most people’s. Her sense of entitlement, fueled by persistent feelings that she was underappreciated, came to full blossom in the heat of the 2008 race. In late October, when stories of Palin’s exorbitant campaign clothing budget surfaced, Todd Palin dismissed the criticism in an e-mail (subject line: “Cloths”) to several campaign aides: “How many fundraiser’s has she done for RNC, how much money has she raised and how much has voter registration increased for RNC since she was announced. So what if RNC purchase’s some cloths for her for the work she has done for the party.” Though the clothing issue has been discussed at length, internal campaign documents reveal new information that contradicts the account Palin has given. The shopping sprees continued through late October and were not, as previously claimed, mainly undertaken to clothe the family for the unexpected emergency of the Republican National Convention, in St. Paul. The number and range of items purchased for the entire Palin family—more than 400 in total—is mind-boggling. For Sarah, the campaign bought about 30 pairs of shoes, roughly $3,000 worth of underwear (including many Spanx girdles), a pair of Bose headphones costing more than $300, and even her incidentals and toiletries. Charging a campaign for underwear would appear to be unprecedented. A campaign e-mail shows that one of Sarah’s senior aides requested that an outfit be purchased for Bristol for her birthday, explicitly stating that the items should be charged “via the campaign.” Todd Palin received as much as $20,000 worth of clothing—a wardrobe that would last most men for many years, if not for life.

Even after the campaign was over, and Palin had returned to Wasilla, she continued to try to get what she could. In an e-mail, she wrote, “Remember the five black leather Flyers bags w sweatshirts and jerseys and Flyers propaganda in each bag? Anyone know where they ended up?” At the same time, she was scrambling to contain the damage to her image: “Absolutely amazing … now the negative coverage that is on our local news, all regarding these campaign clothes that are not even mine. Amazing. Where are all the campaign spokespersons on all this?”

During these post-campaign days, according to insiders, Palin’s temper veered wildly. It was as if something had snapped. Visitors to her house witnessed her in core meltdown. To one of her children, she cried, “We weren’t good enough for America. We’ll never be good enough for America.” Sometimes when she went out in public, people were unkind. Once, while shopping at Target, a man saw Palin and hollered, “Oh my God! It’s Tina Fey! I love Tina Fey!” When other shoppers started laughing, the governor parked her cart, walked out of the store, and drove away.

After starting her new career as a national figure, Palin disengaged from the community. When in Wasilla, she rarely leaves the house. At her favorite coffee shop, Mocha Moose, Palin has been seen only once in the past three months. On those occasions when she goes to Church on the Rock, she usually arrives late, leaves early, and sits in the back. For runs to Target, she waits until it’s almost closing time. She has never darkened the doorway of Wasilla’s one independent bookstore, Pandemonium Booksellers, which took part in her Going Rogue book signing at the Curtis D. Menard Memorial Sports Center. Sarah’s mother, Sally Heath, is a charter member of the Valley Republican Women’s Club, which sells a batch of Palin-family recipes for $5, but Palin has not been to any of their meetings since resigning as governor.

Her Wasilla social circle has narrowed practically to nothing. People who know Kristan Cole and Kris Perry, her closest local friends and advisers of longest standing, say that the relationships have deteriorated. Her former aides Meg Stapleton and Ivy Frye are said to have parted with Palin on bad terms. (None of the four responded to requests for comment.) Palin’s only employees in Alaska appear to be the staff of True North L’Attitudes, a small scheduling firm in Anchorage. Someone must give the family a hand with errands; the rumor around town is that the Palins have “a Mexican” who helps out, though nobody knows his name. Palin does lean on her parents. Chuck and Sally Heath, together with at least one of Palin’s church friends, handle the mountains of mail that arrive for Palin at the post office. When Piper and Willow are not traveling with their mother, they go to schools east of Wasilla, not far from where the Heaths live in a house that gives some idea of how Charles Addams might have imagined Old MacDonald’s farm. It is full of stuffed and mounted animals ranging from a tarantula to a mountain goat. The license plate on Chuck’s truck reads “EIEIO.” One person at Church on the Rock said that the girls frequently sleep overnight at their grandparents’ because the Heaths’ house, unlike the Palins’, is near their schools. When Trig joins Sarah on the road, Palin’s mother sometimes goes along to take care of the baby.

Every year on July 4, a parade marches through downtown Wasilla, ending at a city park, where the mayor throws a picnic. When I saw Chuck and Sally Heath marching in the parade, behind the campaign float for the current governor, Sean Parnell, I jumped from the curb to say hello. Chuck wouldn’t—couldn’t—talk about his daughter; the strict rule in the family now is no interviews, ever, without Sarah’s permission. After we had been walking for a while, he looked around and asked where Sally had gone. “Sally’s upset,” said the woman marching next to him, glaring at me, “because you are not following orders.”

In whatever remains of Palin’s inner circle, however, most people are following orders. Some details of the Palins’ private life, however, suggest a reality at odds with Sarah’s image. In speeches, Palin pays tribute to the man she still calls “the First Dude.” One of the strangest passages in Going Rogue concerns post-election rumors that the couple was considering a divorce. “That day in sunny Texas when the divorce rumors were rampant in the tabloids, I watched Todd, tanned and shirtless, take the baby from my arms and walk him back to the ranch house,” she writes, like a frontier Barbara Cartland. “Dang, I thought. Divorce Todd? Have you seen Todd?” Locally, much speculation surrounds the marriage. Some say Todd is henpecked, and others see him as the heavy. One person who has been a frequent houseguest of the Palins’ says that the couple began many mornings with screaming fights, a fusillade of curses: “ ‘Fuck you,’ ‘Fuck this,’ ‘You lazy piece of shit.’ ‘You’re fuckin’ lucky to have me,’ Sarah would always say.” (This person never saw Todd and Sarah sleep in the same bed, and recalls that Todd would often joke, “I don’t know how she ever gets pregnant.”) Whatever the nature of the relationship, Todd is now as much a part of Sarah as Hillary Clinton is of Bill. Whether they like it or not, the Palins, like the Clintons, are probably stuck with each other.

There’s a general consensus in town that, at least since the start of the 2008 campaign, Todd has been shouldering the bulk of the parenting and that Sarah’s relationship with her children has grown more distant. The children did not, as Sarah has claimed, have a chance to weigh in on her decision to run for vice president. She did not even deliver the news to them personally; as has been reported, she asked McCain’s campaign manager, Steve Schmidt, to do it for her. Todd reportedly told Sarah that, if the children spent too much time on the campaign trail, they would pay a price: grades would tumble and discipline would fall apart. When she agreed to serve as McCain’s running mate, one of her children was already failing in school, according to campaign aides. But Sarah, these aides say, seemed comforted by having the children around, and she seemed lonely when they were gone. An aide overheard conversations between Sarah and Todd in which Sarah tried to make a self-serving argument sound selfless, holding that the campaign was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, one that she could not deny the children. “I don’t care what it costs,” she said. “I want them here.” Although the couple hired a nanny to help the children with their homework, little homework got done.

On the road, aides say, Sarah spared the rod. When one child refused to sign autographs unless she was provided with pink or purple Sharpies that had been custom-printed with her name, the staff tried to argue that black Sharpies—the only kind they had—would do just fine. But Sarah ordered them to do what the child said, and personalized pink and purple markers were produced. Another time, when one daughter wanted to have her hair and makeup done by Palin’s campaign stylists (the children’s grooming was not part of their job), Palin’s initial response seemed like an old-fashioned lesson in manners. According to an aide, Palin told the daughter that, since she was seeking a favor from the stylists, she should ask them nicely herself and see what they said. When the stylists apologetically told the girl they didn’t have time that day, Palin, incensed, sent the child back to give them a message: “Tell them they don’t have a choice. They have to do it.” And so they did. Despite railing at the press for invading her family’s privacy, Palin showed little ambivalence during the campaign about making some aspects of the childrens’ private lives public to serve her interests. Soon after her nomination, she brought up with McCain aides the subject of Bristol’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy by Levi Johnston: “Would it be good for the campaign if they got married before the election?” she asked, and went on to wonder whether one weekend or another would be more advantageous for media coverage.

Sometimes the children rebelled. A campaign aide remembers that one of the Palin children found her mother’s public displays of piety especially grating. Though Palin prayed and read the Bible every night, aides never saw the family join her for devotionals. “You’re just putting on a show. You’re so fake,” one of the children said when Palin made a point of praying in front of other people. “This is not who you are. Why are you pretending to be something you’re not?”

Managing the Palin family is an increasingly unwieldy business. Track was discharged from active duty in the army at the end of January and now reportedly lives at the Palin house. Bristol, who has said she works as a dermatologist’s assistant, also generates a healthy income from her celebrity and bought a $272,000 condominium in Anchorage. She enrolled in a certified-nursing-assistant program at a local technical school last year but quickly dropped out, according to one of her high-school classmates. In addition to TV appearances, including a guest spot on The View and playing a teen mom on an episode of The Secret Life of the American Teenager, she reportedly received $100,000 from In Touch magazine for rights to photographs of Tripp on his first birthday. The New York Post reported that she and Johnston received another $100,000 for giving the story of their re-engagement to Us Weekly.

A week prior to the engagement announcement, Johnston, who has been critical of Palin, told People magazine that, “against my better judgment, I publicly said things about the Palins that were not completely true. I have already privately apologized to Todd and Sarah. Since my statements were public, I owe it to the Palins to publicly apologize.” It was an odd pronouncement, never indicating which statements were not “completely true,” or where he had said them. (Johnston’s October 2009 article in Vanity Fair, “Me and Mrs. Palin,” was one possibility.) The negotiations that led to Johnston’s statement, like almost everything else about the family’s life, were more complex than may ever be fully known. According to a source close to Johnston, Levi met with Sarah Palin in June in hopes of burying the hatchet. Palin opened the meeting with two questions: “Are you recording this?” and “Are you wearing a wire?” When Johnston said he wasn’t, the source says, Palin told Johnston that burying the hatchet wasn’t good enough. He had to publicly recant his critical remarks about her. Asked whether this account is accurate, Johnston answered, through his attorney Rex Butler, “I do not want to respond to that… I don’t want to stir up that fight again.”

In a conference call involving Johnston, Butler, and representatives of the Palin family, Butler proposed that Johnston make a statement to the effect that “a maturing Levi has decided to reach out to the Palins and end an ongoing feud to bring the families together in the best interests of his son.” That formulation did not go far enough. Butler’s understanding is that Todd Palin wrote the statement that eventually was issued. Johnston, through his lawyer, now says, “I had nothing to do with putting that statement together.” Nor, in the end, did it secure the desired rapprochement. On the day the couple’s US Weekly cover hit newsstands, Bristol called the whole thing off, as she later explained in an interview with People. After that, an agreement for joint custody of Tripp, filed in Alaska Superior Court, forbade both Bristol and Levi to “speak badly about the other parent in front of the child… [or] allow anyone else to speak badly about the other parent or members of their family in front of the child.” A few days later, Johnston declined further comment on his relationship with the Palins, but suggested that the story is far from over. “If I am going to marry Bristol,” he said, again through his lawyer, “responding to that situation doesn’t help anything.”

Why are you pretending to be something you’re not? That is the question so many Alaskans have asked this year as they’ve watched Sarah Palin travel the nation. According to almost everyone who has ever known her, including those who have seen the darkest of her dark side, Sarah Palin has a great gift for making people feel good about themselves. Her knack for remembering names and faces and the details of her interactions with people—and for seeming to be present to the person in front of her—constitute an extraordinary power of engagement. Now she is using that power in a fundamentally different way. In part she is using it in the service of her own ambitions. But she is also planting the idea with audiences that they might not be good enough, by telling them she thinks they’re plenty good, no matter what anybody else may say. (“They talk down to us… They think that if we were just smart enough … ”) To some, the message sounds like an affirmation. But is it really? Or does it seed self-doubt and rancor among her partisans, and encourage them to see everyone else as malign?

Those who once felt close to Palin have followed her public transformation with a confused range of emotions. The common denominator is sadness. “People who loved Sarah Palin are disappointed,” said one woman in Wasilla, “because they found out that Sarah Palin loves Sarah Palin most of all.” I remembered that remark every time I drove past the Palins’ property. The entrance runs through a grove of birch trees, at least eight of which have NO TRESPASSING signs nailed to them. For all that, police have been called to the property only once in the past year, when someone at the house reported a Peeping Tom. The investigating officer found nothing.

The freshly paved driveway is blocked by a new, spiked gate, which, though forbidding, is ornamental and freestanding, and not connected to a fence. From a thin piece of wire looped over one of the gate’s central spikes hangs a large metal decoration. It is five-pointed and two feet high and wide. The North Star has long been seen as a symbol for Alaska—and for God. They can both move over now. It belongs to someone else.

Jerry Springer likes Obama?

2010-08-30T13:11:00.001-07:00

http://www.politico.com/click/stories/1008/springer_obamas_excellent.html

Ben Quayle Arizona Anchor baby? (from Politico Arena)

2010-08-25T12:00:00.000-07:00

Jim Wojtasiewicz (guest)
VA:

Scott: It's not fair and probably not good politics to link the fates of Scott and Affordable Care. Both should be judged on their own merits. Affordable Care is a good thing, not just the opposite of a bad thing. Scott redux: By the same token, Mr. Steckler and anyone else who is disappointed that Scott hasn't lived up to some false premise that businessman always equals good should blame the myth, not the messenger, and should read Adam Smith.

Rubio: Sorry, Mr. Conda, this might not be a good year for Hispanic Republicans. Rubio did escape having to share a statewide ticket with McCollum, but now who will slake all that anti-immigrant thirst that McCollum whipped up? Quayle: 14,266 Arizona Republicans voted for him. Wow. But, his father was senator from Indiana ... is Ben an Arizona anchor baby?

Boehner Dilemma: How to Announce New Ideas When You Don't Have Any

2010-08-24T12:06:00.001-07:00

Seems to me that congressional Republicans have two very difficult transitions to manage -- moving from opposing to proposing (aka leadership), and bringing new ideas to the table when they don't have any.

There's no reason to particularly associate Boehner's "ideas" with the failed economic policies of George W. Bush -- they failed under Ronald Reagan as well. Trickle-down economics, famously labeled "voodoo economics" by George H.W. Bush, produces nothing but trickle.

President Obama Not Ideological Enough? (from Politico Arena)

2010-08-23T12:30:00.000-07:00

The fact that President Obama has not spoken in broad ideological terms of his vision for the country speaks for itself. He's not an ideologue -- he's a pragmatist. Maybe that doesn't play perfectly well against the competing Republican narrative which is nothing but ideology: tired, failed intellectually incoherent ideology that is simplified to the point of condescension. What Mr Norquist calls the same old lousy dog food. Personally I don't want my country to become a battleground between competing absolutist visions. Mr. Steckler's rather unsavory image of right vs left as two gladiators in a stadium to the contrary, every nine year old knows that in the end all the gladiators were meant to kill each other, and the throngs of people watching them for idle sport personify the downfall of one of the greatest civilizations in history.