Article & Journal Resources

Build It And They Will Come

2008-01-03T18:22:00.000+01:00

Iowa is home to the Field of Dreams, the location of the 1989 movie of the same name. The film introduced the phrase “build it, and they will come” into the nation’s lexicon and, while sometimes over-used, it’s as good an explanation as any for what’s happening in the state as the 2008 caucuses loom.

Build it the candidates have, at least most of them. While some of the big names like Rudy Giuliani and John McCain made strategic decisions to basically skip the state, or at least de-emphasize its importance to their campaigns, most have put their all into it. Months filled with stump speeches, question and answer sessions and the ingestion of just about any kind of food you can think of that could possibly be served on a stick at the state’s fairs, they have “built it.”

But will “they” come? Campaign operatives and political observers of all stripes have spent the better part of the last two days chewing over the results of the Des Moines Register poll which, if accurate in its findings on turnout, signals a dramatic shift in voting behavior in the state. The most striking findings were among likely Democratic caucus goers. The poll showed that, among those who said they were likely to caucus, 60 percent would be attending one for the very first time and 40 percent were identified as Independents.

For a process in the past dominated by a relatively small core of party activists, having so many first-timers and independents would be nothing less than shocking. Campaign operatives quickly questioned the poll’s turnout predictions, with even the Barack Obama campaign sounding cautious about a poll which showed their candidate with a sizable lead. Pundits are quick to point out that other polls, taken around the same time, show the race much closer.

Much of the debate has been about the intricate details of polling – which lists are used, how independents are identified, etc. But those arguments may be missing the bigger picture, which is that it is not inconceivable that the presidential campaigns have “built” something unique in Iowa.

For Obama, first-time Independents have been a focus of his outreach efforts, for Clinton, it’s been first-time women. With the unprecedented micro-level of targeting individuals for the caucuses – and more time spent at it than ever before – it shouldn’t be a shock to anyone that this year’s voters would look quite a bit different than they have in the past.

“Iowa? I could have sworn this was Heaven,” said Ray Kinsella’s ghostly father in the movie. It may be a line that ends up in someone’s victory speech tomorrow night.

Mukasey Appoints Durham To Lead Probe Over CIA Tapes

2008-01-03T18:21:00.000+01:00

For DOJ watchers wondering whether Michael Mukasey would be a "loyal Bushie" or independent from the White House, there's some evidence today that would point to the latter.

The Justice Department opened a criminal investigation and appointed an outside prosecutor to handle the probe into the CIA's destruction of video tapes showing detainee interrogations. Mukasey said that a joint preliminary inquiry by the DOJ's National Security Division and the CIAs inspector general determined there is a basis for initiating a criminal investigation of this matter.

Meet John Durham (pictured), the first assistant U.S. Attorney in Connecticut, who has been appointed an Acting U.S. Attorney to lead the investigation. He will report directly to the deputy attorney general. The probe would normally be handled by the U.S. attorney in eastern Virginia, where the CIA headquarters are located, but the office recused itself. Mukasey said the move was made in order to avoid any possible appearance of a conflict with other matters handled by that office.

Durham played baseball at Colgate University -- Go Red Raiders! -- and received his J.D. from Connecticut Law. He worked first as a local prosecutor in Connecticut before moving to the DOJ's organized crime strike force, which was later folded into the local U.S. Attorney's offices.

This isn't Durham's first high-profile assignment from Main Justice. In 1998, then-AG Janet Reno appointed Durham to explore allegations that FBI agents and police officers in Boston have been in bed with the mob. Click here for a hagiographic 2001 profile of Durham from the Hartford Courant. Said Boston lawyer Anthony Cardinale of Durham: "I've been up against them all over the country and I'd put him in the top echelon of federal prosecutors. He's such a decent guy you can't hate him." Said an FBI agent: "There is no more principled, there is no more better living, there is no finer person that I know of or have encountered in my life."

With those quotes seven years old, we wanted to see if he was still such an awesome guy. So the Law Blog checked in with Richard Blumenthal, the attorney general in Connecticut, who also sung Durham's praises. "He is relentless and tireless in pursuing every lead and every bit of information that could open avenues for prosecution but he is also a prosecutor of absolute integrity who will never shade or distort a piece of evidence to achieve some desired result," said Blumenthal, who has worked with Durham on numerous cases. "He lets the chips and the facts fall without any predisposition and often agonizes about what's legally right and fair."

MONEY RATES

2008-01-03T18:20:00.000+01:00

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

International rates
Prime rates
Latest Wk ago
U.S.
7.25 7.25

Canada
6.00 6.00

Euro zone
4.00 4.00

Japan
1.875 1.875

Switzerland
3.84 3.86

Britain
5.50 5.50

Australia
6.75 6.75

Hong Kong
8.00 8.00

Overnight repurchase
Latest Wk ago
U.S.
4.15 4.15

U.K. (BBA)
5.575 5.583

Euro zone
3.99 3.92

U.S. government rates
Latest Wk ago
Discount
[ Effective Date: 12/11/2007 ]
4.75 4.75

Federal funds
[ Effective Date: 12/11/2007 ]
Effective rate
4.10 4.25
Target rate
4.25 4.25
High
4.5000 4.7500
Low
3.0000 1.0000
Bid
3.5000 1.0000
Offer
4.5000 2.5000

Treasury bill auction
[ Auction Date: 1/2/2008 ]
4 weeks
3.000 3.040
13 weeks
3.310 3.280
26 weeks
3.390 3.490

Secondary Market

Freddie Mac
30-year mortgage yields
Latest Wk ago
30 days
5.68 6.05
60 days
5.72 6.08
One-year ARM
3.375 3.375

Fannie Mae
30-year mortgage yields
Latest Wk ago
30 days
5.896 6.101
60 days
5.932 6.127

Constant maturity debt index
Latest Wk ago
Three months
4.258 4.397
Six months
4.195 4.328
One year
3.745 4.025

Bankers acceptance
Latest Wk ago
30 days
4.63 4.93
60 days
4.68 4.94
90 days
4.68 4.94
120 days
4.68 4.83
150 days
4.64 4.82
180 days
4.62 4.74

Other short-term rates

Latest Wk ago
Call money
6.00 6.00

Commercial paper
Latest Wk ago
30 to 47 days
4.25 ...
48 to 59 days
4.27 ...
60 to 97 days
4.29 ...
98 to 105 days
4.31 ...
106 to 120 days
4.29 ...
121 to 180 days
4.24 ...
181 to 210 days
4.21 ...
211 to 240 days
4.15 ...
241 to 270 days
4.11 ...

Dealer commercial paper
Latest Wk ago
30 days
4.60 4.98
60 days
4.63 4.95
90 days
4.65 4.93

Euro commercial paper
Latest Wk ago
30 day
4.03 4.02
Two month
4.24 4.24
Three month
4.30 4.28
Four month
4.30 4.30
Five month
4.30 4.30
Six month
4.28 4.31

London interbank offered rate, or Libor
Latest Wk ago
One month
4.57000 4.85500
Three month
4.68063 4.84250
Six month
4.56625 4.71750
One year
4.18750 4.34375

Libor Swaps (USD)
Latest Wk ago
Two year
3.669 4.072
Three year
3.751 4.182
Five year
4.031 4.470
Ten year
4.551 4.923
30 year
4.912 5.252

Euro Libor
Latest Wk ago
One month
4.226 4.437
Three month
4.663 4.763
Six month
4.702 4.774
One year
4.735 4.774

Euro interbank offered rate
Latest Wk ago
One month
4.239 4.459
Three month
4.665 4.765
Six month
4.703 4.775
One year
4.733 4.772

Hibor
Latest Wk ago
One month
3.053 3.535
Three month
3.401 3.680
Six month
3.477 3.689
One year
3.451 3.606

Asian dollars
Latest Wk ago
One month
4.605 4.861
Three month
4.698 4.854
Six month
4.594 4.725
One year
4.253 4.353

Certificates of Deposit
Latest Wk ago
One month
4.650 5.000
Three month
4.700 5.000
Six Month
4.640 4.800

Merrill Lynch Ready Assets Trust
Latest Wk ago
Call money
4.480 4.500

Eurodollars (mid rates)
Offer Bid
One month
4.50 4.62
Two month
4.55 4.65
Three month
4.60 4.70
Four month
4.58 4.68
Five month
4.55 4.65
Six month
4.52 4.62

Freddie Mac
Weekly survey
Thursday, December 27, 2007

Latest Wk ago
30-year fixed
6.17 6.14
15-year fixed
5.79 5.79
Five-year ARM
5.90 5.90
One-year ARM
5.53 5.51

CHINA SLUMP?

2008-01-03T18:19:00.001+01:00

The New Year might sap strength from the already limping China bull market. Corporate profit growth, a key stimulus for the country's soaring stock prices last year, is likely to noticeably lose momentum in 2008, especially for the bellwether financial and energy sectors, analysts say.

Analysts estimate that earnings per share jumped 29% to 31% in 2007 for companies measured by the closely watched MSCI China Index. In many cases, per-share earnings rose more than twice that rate at financial heavyweights like banks, insurers and brokerage firms that dominate market capitalization on China's exchanges. The country's benchmark Shanghai Composite Index nearly doubled last year.

Profits will almost surely remain relatively robust this year, as economic growth continues to power ahead at about a 10% rate. However, average growth in net income per share could slow toward 25%, according to a recent report by Morgan Stanley analysts.

PAKISTAN DELAY

2008-01-03T18:18:00.002+01:00

Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf, warning the country faced "great danger," appealed for calm and unity as his government delayed crucial parliamentary elections and sought outside help for a probe into the assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto.

In a televised address, Mr. Musharraf expressed grief over the Dec. 27 death of Ms. Bhutto, who was killed at a campaign rally in Rawalpindi. But he also catalogued extensive damage caused by the rioting, looting and arson -- mostly in the Bhutto family stronghold of Sindh -- in the wake of the assassination. He said that Islamist terrorists, who he blamed for the attack, were seeking to take advantage of the country's political troubles.

Mr. Musharraf said that public disorder made holding elections, originally scheduled for Jan. 8, extremely difficult. Earlier in the day, the Pakistani government said it would delay a national vote until Feb. 18, more than six weeks later than originally scheduled, because of the country's "law and order" situation.

What $100 Oil Means

2008-01-03T18:18:00.001+01:00

Oil briefly touched $100 in Nymex trading Wednesday - and the sharp rise over the past year has caught economists, commodity traders and even seasoned energy executives flatfooted.

Looking back, several factors came together at the same time to help oil shoot up roughly tenfold in less than a decade and briefly touch $100 today. Those factors are likely to stick around, perhaps pushing prices up further.

Adding more volatility, oil is increasingly traded as an investment by financial players with little interest in owning the barrels. After years of internal friction, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries has been more disciplined about keeping global inventories lean and prices buoyant.

The world's ability to pump enough oil is being tested. "Demand has surged ahead and the industry has been playing an intense game of catch up," says Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates.

High oil prices also test the progress made by many of the world's industrialized economies toward greater energy efficiency since the oil shocks of the 1970s and early 1980s. In the U.S., which remains the most oil-dependent industrialized nation, oil at $100 would threaten consumer spending, and the impact could ripple through other economies.

Asia's rapidly developing nations have flush cash reserves to continue subsidizing fuel for its population. But China's 10% rise in government-controlled fuel prices shows higher oil costs are putting a greater strain on Asian nations. Also, China in particular is heavily dependent on consumer spending in the U.S. Should higher fuel prices curb U.S. consumer spending, China -- the U.S.'s factory floor -- would suffer.

President Bloomberg

2008-01-03T18:14:00.000+01:00

It's his money, but a race for the White House might not be the wisest way of spending it.

The first Presidential nominating contests are only beginning, but already New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is stealing attention as a potential third-party candidate. We trust he's read the history of what usually happens to such candidates--they lose, finishing essentially as spoilers.

The billionaire mayor has no shortage of cheerleaders for such a contest, including his staff, assorted consultants, and even the usually hard-headed editors at the New York Sun and New York Post. He's rich enough to get on the ballot in every state, and has been widely quoted as saying he'd spend $500 million or more if he did decide to run. That's more than enough to get his message out, if he can find one.

So far that's the rub, though presumably the Democrat turned Republican turned Independent would try to position himself as a kind of postpartisan progressive "centrist." Along those lines, this Sunday the mayor is ostentatiously attending a conference of other self-styled centrists at the University of Oklahoma. Hosted by former Democratic Senator David Boren, the session will include the likes of former Democratic Senator Sam Nunn, current Republican Senator Chuck Hagel (who famously predicted the "surge" in Iraq would be a disaster), and others who argue that the main poison in our politics is too much partisanship. With so many voters soured on Washington, there's a market for this kind of Rodney King can't-we-all-just-get-along politics.

The question is how big that market would be on Election Day, and our guess is not very. Most third-party candidates have run on some issue or cause that the main parties had ignored. Lincoln and the Republicans supplanted the Whigs in 1860 over slavery, Teddy Roosevelt promised a return to progressive Republicanism in 1912, Strom Thurmond represented Southern segregationists in 1948, and even Ross Perot had the budget deficit in 1992.

Independent Losers
How prominent 20th-century third-party presidential candidates did on Election Day
Pop % EV
Teddy Roosevelt,1912 27.5% 88
Robert La Follette, 1924 16.5% 13
Strom Thurmond, 1948 2.5% 39
George Wallace, 1968 13.5% 46
John Anderson, 1980 7% 0
Ross Perot, 1992 19% 0

We aren't aware of any such cause or idea that Mr. Bloomberg represents. Perhaps he could run on "competence," but that's a less than thrilling call to arms. In our view, Mr. Bloomberg has been a good mayor but not a great one. His main achievements have been taking over the school system from a feckless school board and trying to reform it, to so far mixed results; building on the anticrime progress made by his predecessor, Rudy Giuliani; and breaking down the antizoning and political barriers to developing more of the city's under-used areas.

What Mayor Bloomberg hasn't done is challenge the union status quo over the unsustainable city work force and pensions, which will become a crisis for some future mayor. He has dodged this burden himself because of the revenue boom that has flowed from New York's financial industry in the wake of the Bush tax cuts. He has also been able to play the role of nonpartisan healer in part because Mr. Giuliani was willing to take on the city's liberal interest groups on taxes, welfare, crime and public order. Mr. Bloomberg has a better bedside manner than Mr. Giuliani, but it's also easier to be popular when you're not picking as many policy fights.

We also doubt the conceit that all Washington needs is a President who is a better and more ideologically flexible manager. The reason health-care and entitlement reform are so difficult is because the two main parties have such different visions of how to do it. The next President won't be able to wave those differences away, but will instead have to decide whose solutions to favor. Certainly Mr. Bloomberg won't be able to claim he has more foreign-policy experience.

It's entirely possible that a third-party President would accomplish less than a Democrat or Republican because he would have fewer allies on Capitol Hill. Both Arnold Schwarzenegger in California and Jesse Ventura in Minnesota accomplished much less than they promised as nonideological, nonpartisan Governors.

Mr. Bloomberg would also first have to get elected, and this has to be considered a very long shot. His best chance would be if the two parties nominate candidates on the ideological extremes--say, John Edwards on the left and Mike Huckabee on the right. But even if this happens, which of the 50 states would Mr. Bloomberg be able to win to deny one of his competitors an Electoral College majority? Even if he did carry enough states to throw the election into the House of Representatives, Mr. Bloomberg would then face a majority controlled in all likelihood by Democrats.

Our own guess is that Mr. Bloomberg would cut into the support of the weaker of the two major-party candidates, making victory easier for the other. That was Mr. Perot's main legacy in 1992. After eight years out of power, Democrats are eager enough to win this year that we suspect they will unite around whoever their nominee is to get to 270 electoral votes in a three-man race. Mr. Bloomberg would end up spending $500 million to elect a Democrat he probably would vote for himself if he stayed out of the race. Of course, it is his money.

The Pre-Election Paradox

2008-01-03T18:13:00.000+01:00

While 70% say U.S. is a mess, 84% say they're happy. Is progress possible?

BY DANIEL HENNINGER

On New Year's Eve, Gallup's poll delivered unto us the good news that 84% of Americans say they are satisfied with how things are going for them personally. What Woody Allen might say about that phenomenal datum of good cheer one can only guess. One then has to account for the darker data Gallup released two weeks earlier: Some 70% of those responding believe the nation is headed in the wrong direction.

Explanations for this paradox would fill screen after screen of comments on Internet blogs, written no doubt by the 16% who can never be satisfied with "how things are going." Sample: It's the 46 million uninsured, stupid!

Starting tomorrow morning, with the results of the Iowa caucuses, the state of the nation likely will strike many as worse. Aaargh, those fools in Iowa have handed victory to the most dangerous man or woman in America. This we've gotta stop!

For the next 10 months they will be agitated, glum and apoplectic about many things. The candidates themselves, professional marketers of anxiety, will contribute. Then come a Wednesday morning after the presidential vote in November, nearly half the country, the losers, will see darkness falling across the land.

Before any of this happens, let's get a grip. To quote a children's classic I read out loud perhaps a hundred times: "Could be worse!"

Let me describe a pre-election moment of perspective this way: Later today some people who will start their evening with Iowa's caucus by watching angry Lou Dobbs--convincing themselves, again, that they and this country are getting shafted, and coming to this conclusion while watching a $700, 32-inch Samsung flat-panel, high-definition TV with Lou's sad song flowing through Monster digital coax cables to five Onkyo HT-SR800 home theater speakers.

If the possibility of human progress strikes you as so much background noise to the higher calling of political street-fighting, turn immediately to today's installment of Mitt versus Mike. Don't get me wrong, it is great theater. The perfect last act to a year spent living out of suitcases in Iowa was the irrepressible Elizabeth Edwards's verbal poke Monday to the eye of Michelle Obama. The Democratic candidates are kind of boring compared to their spouses.

None of this is to suggest that what is at stake in the election doesn't matter, or that those deeply invested in it are misallocating life's limited days. It matters.

It is to suggest that the never-off eye of modern political media leaves the impression that nothing good is possible. If progress happens, as with the surge in Iraq or a new therapy for cancer, it must be diminished by "analysis," listing four things that could "go wrong." As a way to absorb the way the world works, this is depressing. Good things happen. Get over it.

The Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics annually publishes data on the well-being of the nation's children, thought by many to be the point of all this effort.

In 1980, deaths per 100,000 U.S. children aged 5 to 14 was 30.6; by 2004, that number fell to 16.8. Some 25 years ago, daily cigarette smoking among 12th graders was about 21%; in 2006 it was about 12% for both males and females. Childhood immunizations are rising steadily.

In August, the Centers for Disease Control noted that the death rate in 2004 fell by 3.8% in a year, "a record low historical figure." Life expectancy for men and women at birth in 1940 was 63 years; it is now nearly 78 years. We, or someone, must be doing something right.

Many people think that the war in Iraq was a mistake. It indeed contributes to the belief that the U.S. is on the wrong track. This will be argued more deeply when just two candidates are running, and millions of voters will weight Iraq heavily in their November choice. So be it.

That said, the remarkable 12-month progress of the surge strategy demonstrated it is not beyond the ability of "the system" to respond to seemingly overwhelming problems. Credit is due to Gen. David Petraeus certainly, but an infrastructure of U.S. military brains went into designing the Army's Counterinsurgency Manual, published in 2006. Its bibliography includes many studies published since 2003. As such it represents the U.S. military's "best practices" on fighting a modern enemy like al Qaeda, and the surge's success showed we are not helpless before this latest form of nihilism. This to some may be bitter progress, but it is so.

One needs reminding, amid a presidential election as wide open as this, that however other nations wrestle with their wrong directions, we use the system that the Founding Fathers left for us. What's worth remembering is that they knew politics piles up retarding levels of animosity, and so created a political system that would let us both vent spleen and move forward. Our progress, though, would nearly always be slow and by increments. Sometimes, it's hard to notice.

It will continue to be the case here that people are going to kvetch over corners of the culture--over immigration and national identity, or over relative wage levels, even as the rest of the world's poor finally start to join the middle class through globalizing trade channels (suppress those trade flows, as Congress is threatening, and you'll discover the real meaning of wrong direction). And not least there will be--and should be--concern over whether the progress I've described has the time or space in its good life for a sturdy spiritual soul.

The New Year demands an admission that some good has been achieved, not by the wave of a politician's magic wand but through many daily hands at work in the nation.

A reader of this column, Richard A. Fazzone of Potomac, Md., recently got these matters as well focused as I could, so with the presidential trenches waiting, he gets the final speech:

"There is no Great Depression, no WWII, no Cold War, no racism as it was in the 20th Century or before--no really big problem or solution. Unless something changes, voters want practically nothing from government, or more precisely, relatively few want the same thing, and without political consensus, a democracy does little or nothing new. In one respect, Mr. Henninger is correct to observe that 'in American politics, ambiguity is all you get,' but that may say enough. As another new year begins, we might consider ourselves fortunate for ambiguity, rather than the opposite and what would accompany it."

Huckabee and the Intelligence Report on Iran

2008-01-03T18:11:00.000+01:00

By Marc Santora

Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas Governor, is again making misleading statements about how long he was unaware of a National Intelligence Estimate finding that Iran was not pursuing nuclear weapons.

The report was released the morning of Dec. 3 and dominated the news that day. He was asked by reporters his reaction to the report the afternoon of Dec. 4 - more than 30 hours after its release - and said he had not heard about it. His aides also said at the time that he’d been campaigning all day long, and hadn’t been briefed.

Yet, Mr. Huckabee asserted Monday that he was ambushed by reporters questioning him about the report when there was really little time for him to have looked into the matter.

“The whole perception was based on an ambush question on the NIE report,” Mr. Huckabee told the Quad City Times. “From there, it was like, Wow.’ That was released at 10 o’clock in the morning. At 5:30 in the afternoon, somebody says, ’Have you read the report?’”

He made a similar misstatement about the matter back in mid-December when questioned on “Fox News Sunday” about whether the episode reinforced doubts about his foreign policy experience.

Kucinich Tells Supporters to Caucus for Obama

2008-01-03T18:10:00.000+01:00

By Jeff Zeleny

SIOUX CITY, Iowa – Representative Dennis Kucinich urged his Iowa followers today to select Senator Barack Obama as their second choice at the caucuses on Thursday if his support is not strong enough to be viable in the 1,781 precincts across the state.

“Senator Obama and I have one thing in common: Change,” Mr. Kucinich said in a statement today.

The two spoke briefly by telephone before Mr. Obama flew here for an afternoon rally. In a statement, Mr. Obama took advantage of the opportunity to point out that he, along with Mr. Kucinich, opposed the war in Iraq. “He and I have been fighting for a number of the same priorities,” Mr. Obama said.

Four years ago, during his first presidential bid, Mr. Kucinich announced a similar second-choice partnership with John Edwards. At the time, aides to Mr. Edwards said it helped contribute to his second-place finish in the caucuses.

This year, however, Mr. Kucinich has barely waged a campaign in Iowa. He has no paid organizers or offices in the state and he was not invited to participate in The Des Moines Register’s debate in December. Still, it is not uncommon to see faded Kucinich bumper stickers on cars at rallies for Democratic presidential candidates.

We’ll see on Thursday whether they follow Mr. Kucinich’s advice.

Debatable Democracy

2008-01-03T18:09:00.000+01:00

By Matt Bai

On my flight back to Des Moines today, I read an interesting piece by my colleagues Michael Falcone and Sarah Wheaton about the upcoming debates in New Hampshire. It seems that both Fox and ABC have taken it upon themselves to winnow the field of candidates by excluding those who don’t seem viable at this point. Fox, for instance, is shutting out Ron Paul, despite his having reached fourth place in some recent New Hampshire polls and his having spent a truckload of money on ads in the state. (I swear, you can’t drive three miles in New Hampshire without hearing Ron Paul on the radio; he’s more overplayed than Fergie, albeit easier to listen to.) ABC has decided that if you don’t finish in the top four in Iowa, and you don’t reach five percent in New Hampshire or national polls, then you’re just cluttering up the stage and should watch at home like everyone else.

I understand the impulse here. Every four years, the campaigns, the media and even the voters complain that there are too many trivial candidates sucking up time in the debates. Last time around, there were calls to disinvite Al Sharpton and Dennis Kucinich; now it’s Duncan Hunter and Mike Gravel, who’s already been dinged from recent debates. The presence of these candidates does, in fact, devalue the debates, and we’d all be less annoyed if there were fewer candidates on both sides. The problem is, there aren’t, and that’s why I think the networks are wrong.

Almost 10 years ago now, I covered the election of Jesse Ventura to the governorship of Minnesota, which might just be my favorite of all the political stories I’ve chronicled. Mr. Ventura, an independent, started out that race as a typical gadfly, barely registering in the polls. But he participated in at least half a dozen televised debates, and every time he did, answering questions bluntly and candidly, his poll numbers rose. The lesson for me was that voters are pretty great at listening to candidates and deciding for themselves. The notion that a candidate is hopelessly peripheral and shouldn’t be allowed to state his case in a debate because not enough people have heard about him yet, or because 100,000 voters in Iowa didn’t like him, or because he hasn’t raised enough money, is not only presumptuous but also antithetical to democratic principles, which have nothing to do with polls or bank accounts.

My own view is that if you’re on enough actual primary ballots to conceivably get the nomination (or, in a general election, to conceivably win the share of the electoral college necessary to win), then you ought to be able to debate. Sure, it makes for some frustrating and unwieldy debates, and a lot of people will have to deploy the fast-forward buttons on their Tivo remotes, but it also leaves the power of decision in the hands of the voters, where it belongs.

Matt Bai, who covers politics for the Sunday Times Magazine, is the author of “The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics.”

Clinton’s Run-Up to the Caucus

2008-01-03T18:08:00.000+01:00

By Patrick Healy

ABOARD THE CLINTON PRESS BUS – The politico who runs Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign in Iowa, Teresa Vilmain, gave reporters a rundown Wednesday morning of her team’s run-up to the presidential caucuses Thursday night.

Her presentation went along these lines: “We have salt in all the offices,” she said – that is, salt to sprinkle on ice at caucus precinct locations so voters don’t slip.

The other day, the campaign shipped out more than 600 shovels, packed on nine different U-Hauls, to drop off with staff members and volunteers to clear voters’ front walks and sidewalks and precinct sites as well.

And today, the campaign has 625 people going door-to-door today to knock on the door of every voter who has signaled support for Mrs. Clinton, and every undecided voter leaning her way – likely many thousands of Iowans.

As for caucus night, more than 5,000 drivers have been recruited to ferry people to voting sites. Ms. Vilmain also said she would look into a reporter’s question about how many cars had been rented by the campaign. “How bout ‘a lot’?” she replied.

Ms. Vilmain, like other Clinton aides, underscored the unpredictability of Thursday night’s caucuses. This is the first time that the voting has taken place so close to the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, a fact that may likely have skewed public polling somewhat, and voters have been hard to reach because they have been celebrating or shopping – and, in some cases, even less amenable than usual to the persistent telephone calls from campaign aides seeking support.

“Folks are getting a little tired of getting calls,” she said, noting that the Clinton campaign is doing more home visits and leaving door hangers with caucus night information and offers of babysitting and transportation assistance.

Diane Keaton's Mr. Right A No-Show

2008-01-03T18:07:00.002+01:00

(AP) Diane Keaton says she planned to wait until she was in a "strong and substantive" relationship before becoming a mother - but that never happened for her.

"Motherhood was not an urge I couldn't resist, it was more like a thought I'd been thinking for a very long time," says Keaton, who celebrates her 62nd birthday Saturday. "So I plunged in."

The Oscar-winning actress, whose past romantic partners include Woody Allen and Warren Beatty, adopted daughter Dexter, now 12, and son Duke, 7.

"I've had such an unusual life. Obviously career-oriented. I was happy to be a daughter well into my 40s. That was something that meant a lot to me," Keaton tells Ladies' Home Journal in its February issue, on newsstands next Tuesday. "I didn't think that I was ever going to be prepared to be a mother."

"Hannah Montana Tix Moms": Bad Role Models

2008-01-03T18:07:00.001+01:00

(CBS) Parents want to give their children the best of everything, from the coolest gadgets to the hottest concert tickets.

But some parents go too far, experts point out, and end up teaching very wrong lessons.

Parents such as Priscilla Ceballos -- the Texas woman who tried to win tickets for her six-year-old daughter for a concert by Miley Cyrus, better-known as Hannah Montana, by having the girl lie in an essay-writing contest and claim help her father had died in Iraq.

Ceballos later admitted to a local TV station, "We never said anything like this was a true story, never. It was just an essay."

It was hardly the first time mothers had gone to extremes for their kids.

In 2006, 16-year-old Megan Meier committed suicide. Later, her parents found out she had been tormented on MySpace.com by someone she thought was a boy named Josh Evans, but who was actually the mother of a friend Megan had been feuding with.

"She knew our daughter struggled with depression," Megan's father, Ron, said later, "and was on medication since she was in third grade."

But perhaps the most memorable meddling mother was Wanda Holloway, the Texas woman who tried to help her daughter make the cheerleading squad by hiring a hit-man to kill the mother of a rival cheerleader.

Said prosecutor Alice Brown at the time, "I think it's the act of a person who is used to getting what she wanted, and when she was frustrated, was willing to go a little farther than most of us might go."

On The Early Show Wednesday, psychotherapist Dr. Leslie Austin, Ph.D. told co-anchor Harry Smith, "I don't think these moms are bad people, but they're really modeling the wrong values for their kids. And what they're broadcasting is, 'I want what I want, I want it now, I'll do anything I can to get it.' That's what they're telling their kids, including, 'Lie, cheat, and steal,' which is not OK."

"Really," Austin continued, "it would be better if (Ceballos) were teaching her daughter, 'You do your best, you try to get what you want, and if you don't get it, life will present you with other opportunities. You have to get a habit of resiliency, self-respect, good values.' This is instant gratification over long-term values, and it's a bad road to go down."

In her practice, Austin says, she's seeing a growing number of extra-meddlesome parents, and that sort of upbringing is showing up now in the business world, where you have "kids who grew up with this ... 'I'm important. Anything I want, I get. It doesn't matter what I have to do or who I have to harm to get it.' In corporate America, we have an energy and a mood now that it's OK to do anything as a company, just to succeed and sell things.

"But, where are the ethics, the values, the self-respect as an individual? Where are the basic, old-fashioned values? 'Don't lie, don't cheat, don't steal, and most of all, don't retaliate, even just for practical reasons. It will always come back and get you. ' "

Which comes first, Smith wondered? Is it a societal message parents are taking, or the other way around?

"It's a chicken / egg question," Austin asserted. "They both feed each other. Our media, which I'm now speaking on, can do great things, but also we broadcast some really negative images sometimes. We idolize pop stars who have really bad values as parents and as people. They may be great performers, but they're not great role models, and we idolize them and follow them and obsess. So, our kids say, 'This one has all this money and all this fame, and look how great they are, and everybody follows them around, the paparazzi.'

" ... It's not a good sense of values and parenting. You really want to teach your kids to have self-respect, develop a habit of being resilient, to have ethics, and take the long view instead of instant gratification."

Austin added, "Here's the really important thing: I know it's hard for parents. Your child is a separate person from you, and you have to grow them up properly. I know that sounds very old-fashioned. But I need to sound old-fashioned. You really have to teach them values. You have to teach them, 'You don't always get what you want. ... Life goes on. You are more important, as a person -- you have more self-respect than any concert, any MP-3 player, any video game, and if you don't get those things, and you don't have the things all your friends have, you can still be a really good person and you can get them if you earn them.' That's a different set of values.

"Unfortunately, we're in a very protective culture, the one who has the most toys, wins -- the one who has the most money, the most fame. And, really, you've got to remind yourself -- you're a good person. Most Americans are not famous or rich and they're really good people and they live very good lives, and their kids grow up to be happy."

Our galaxy has approximately 250 billion stars

2008-01-03T18:05:00.000+01:00

Here's a look at what we are working on for tonight's broadcast of The CBS Evening News from Anchor and Managing Editor, Katie Couric..

Hi everyone,

It’s zero hour in Iowa, and we’re preparing to bring you complete political coverage as the clock ticks down to the very first votes cast of the 2008 presidential primaries. Our correspondents are stationed all over the Hawkeye State to bring you the latest from the campaign trail and I’ll be anchoring tonight’s broadcast from the center of the action in Des Moines.

New polls show both the Democratic and Republican races to be extremely tight - and extraordinarily competitive. But one candidate who’s had an up-and-down campaign is seeing a fresh surge of support: John McCain. Kelly Cobiella will have the scoop on how his campaign is reacting.

McCain’s fellow Republican Mike Huckabee is caught in a bit of a conundrum - and it could involve crossing a picket line tonight. Nancy Cordes will have the story.

Meanwhile, the top three Democratic candidates are at a near dead heat. Looking for a boost, John Edwards is on a 36-hour campaign blitz. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are simply concentrating on getting supporters to caucus. But that can involve going to extreme lengths, Jim Axelrod and Dean Reynolds will report.

Can Iowa voters really make or break a candidate? Bob Schieffer will take a look back through history for some precedent on the making of presidents.

Another deceptively simple question: What exactly goes on inside the all-important caucuses? Our senior political correspondent Jeff Greenfield does - and he’ll walk us through the steps.

Finally tonight, who are these people who each campaign is working feverishly to court and who wield so much political power? I’ll give you a detailed look at the voters of Iowa.

I hope you’ll join us, Katie

Fed Minutes Show Possibility

2008-01-03T18:04:00.001+01:00

By BRIAN BLACKSTONE

WASHINGTON -- Federal Reserve policy makers agreed at last month's meeting that they might need to cut interest rates again as turmoil in the credit and housing markets began to crimp consumer spending.

Some Fed members even saw the risk of a vicious cycle pulling down both financial markets and the economy, and possibly requiring "substantial further easing of policy," according to minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee's Dec. 11 meeting, released yesterday with the usual three-week lag.

At the meeting, the FOMC voted 9-1 to lower the federal-funds rate at which banks lend to each other by a quarter percentage point to 4.25%. That was the third straight reduction since September, bringing the total cut to one percentage point. Boston Federal Reserve Bank President Eric Rosengren dissented in favor of a half-percentage-point cut.

According to the minutes, the extent of the housing slump was worse than expected, and "participants agreed that the housing correction was likely to be both deeper and more prolonged than they had anticipated in October."

Meanwhile, financial-market strains "could persist for quite some time," the minutes stated, though some officials saw the possibility that conditions could improve more quickly than anticipated, "in which case a reversal of some of the rate cuts might become appropriate."

Though the policy makers decided against issuing a balance-of-risks assessment last month, the tone of the minutes suggests risks are heavily weighted toward economic weakness, and not a quick rebound in economic activity that might lead to inflation.

Fed officials grew decidedly more pessimistic about consumer spending, citing its "marked deceleration" as "tighter credit conditions, higher gasoline prices and the continuing housing correction might be restraining growth in real consumer spending," according to the minutes. As recently as late October, officials had referred to spending as "well maintained."

Fed officials said that while inflation readings were "slightly less favorable" between the October and December FOMC meetings, they still expect core inflation, which excludes food and energy prices, to "trend down a bit over the next few years." Overall "headline" inflation, meanwhile, should slow "more substantially from its currently elevated level," according to the FOMC minutes.

Still, Fed policy makers "remained concerned" about the potential for inflation from high energy and commodity prices, while "some also cited the weaker dollar," which could increase import prices.

The Fed also released details of a Dec. 6 conference call in which officials discussed creating the Term Auction Facility, or TAF, as well as a currency swap agreement with the European Central Bank.

The Fed has auctioned $40 billion in loans to banks through the facility, and more offerings are planned this month. "Meeting participants recognized that a TAF wouldn't address all of the factors giving rise to stresses in money and credit markets," and "a few" officials questioned the need for such a program, according to the FOMC minutes. St. Louis Fed President William Poole voted against establishing a swap arrangement with the ECB, citing the size of the ECB's dollar-denominated reserves.

Write to Brian Blackstone at brian.blackstone@dowjones.com

U.S. Prosecutor to Probe CIA Destruction of Tapes

2008-01-03T18:02:00.000+01:00

By EVAN PEREZ

The Justice Department appointed a prosecutor to conduct a criminal investigation into the Central Intelligence Agency's destruction of videotape recordings of detainee interrogations.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey said that a joint preliminary inquiry opened Dec. 8 by Justice's National Security Division and the CIA's inspector general determined "there is a basis for initiating a criminal investigation of this matter."

Mr. Mukasey named John Durham, the No. 2 federal prosecutor in Connecticut, to lead the investigation. Prosecutors in eastern Virginia, where the CIA headquarters is located, recused themselves from the probe, as did the CIA inspector general's office.

Prosecutors in the office of the U.S. attorney in eastern Virginia have handled several major terror cases that could be affected by the CIA tape destruction, including the one against Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person in prison for charges related to the 9/11 attacks. In October, prosecutors in the office also first alerted a federal judge about the existence of the CIA tapes and their destruction, contradicting the CIA's earlier assertion to the court that there were no such tapes.

Mr. Mukasey, in a statement, said the prosecutors' recusal was made "in order to avoid any possible appearance of a conflict with other matters handled by that office."

CIA Inspector General John Helgerson said he recused himself and other officials in his office to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest. "Personnel from the Office of Inspector General reviewed the tapes at issue some years ago as part of the Office's review of CIA's detention and interrogation activities," he said. "I was personally involved in the preparation and approval of the subsequent Office of Inspector General report and in discussions of the issues raised in that report with U.S. government officials."

The appointment of Mr. Durham, a career prosecutor since 1982, allows Mr. Mukasey to demonstrate the Justice Department's independence despite the political pressures that surround the case and much else the department does of late. Mr. Mukasey is trying to restore the department's reputation after months of political upheaval that led to the resignation of former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Some Democrats, however, have pushed for the Justice Department to name an independent special counsel and aren't pleased with the appointment of Mr. Durham, who will report directly to the deputy attorney general. The law governing independent counsels expired in 1999, when Congress didn't renew it. In the case of the investigation into the leak of the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame, overseen by Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago, some critics of the Bush administration complained that the probe never answered key questions because he didn't publish a final investigative report, as an independent counsel would do.

Michigan Democratic Rep. John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said of Mr. Mukasey's move: "Because of this action, the Congress and the American people will be denied -- as they were in the Valerie Plame matter -- any final report on the investigation."

Mr. Durham is highly regarded in the department. In 1999, Clinton administration Attorney General Janet Reno appointed Mr. Durham to lead a special team that investigated alleged criminal misconduct by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and other law-enforcement corruption in Boston.

CIA Director Gen. Michael V. Hayden has said that the tapes were legitimately destroyed to protect the identities of interrogators, and prosecutors have played down the importance the tapes may hold in several continuing or past terror cases. The CIA also didn't share the tapes with the commission that investigated the 9/11 attacks. Critics of the Bush administration have alleged that their destruction may amount to destruction of evidence, which could be a crime.

CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said the agency would "cooperate fully" with the investigation. Already, the agency has allowed congressional investigators to review documents related to the tape destruction. Congressional committees are planning hearings into the matter, and the House Intelligence Committee has ordered Jose Rodriguez, former chief of the CIA's National Clandestine Service who directed that the tapes be destroyed in late 2005, to appear before the committee Jan. 16.

President Bush said last month that he had "no recollection" of the tapes' existence or their destruction until he was briefed by CIA officials just before news stories were about to be published on the matter.

A book with all the elements - except graceful prose

2008-01-03T17:59:00.002+01:00

There are many ways to die. Starving to death on a raft at sea is among the nastiest.

Such was the fate of 147 survivors of the French frigate Medusa. Adrift for two weeks on a cobbled-together raft, they were forced to eat leather and fabric, murder each other, and even use the body of a deceased colleague to "nourish those who, only short while before, had clasped his hands in friendship" - in other words, to cannibalize.

"The Wreck of the Medusa: The Most Famous Sea Disaster of the Nineteenth Century," is Jonathan Miles's account of this debacle that shocked and shook Restoration France. On July 2, 1816, the Senegal-bound Medusa slammed into a reef. The captain, Hugues de Chaumareys, whose incompetence doomed the voyage, fled for the Medusa's lifeboats, along with a few choice passengers and crew. The captain promised the raft would be towed behind the convoy of lifeboats, but he cut the tow ropes. His group made landfall and wandered the Sahara before being rescued. As for the 147 stuck on the raft, only 15 survived.

In an effort to re-animate the events, Miles follows the intersecting stories of two key players in the drama: Alexandre Corréard, a survivor of the raft who went on to write a best-selling exposé of his ordeal, and Théodore Géricault, a troubled painter whose canvas immortalized the disaster.

The narrative begins promisingly enough. In a macabre scene, Géricault sneaks through the streets of Paris, a severed head, obtained under mysterious circumstances, under his arm. Still smarting from an impossible love affair with his aunt, the painter is searching for a subject whose horror might match his tortured heart. In the catastrophe of the Medusa, he finds his calling. Raiding the morgue, he fills his studio with body parts. He listens to Corréard's account, and paints the half-decomposed arms and legs.

The studies become "The Raft of the Medusa" - a painting so controversial that, exhibited at 1819 Salon, it is renamed "The Scene of the Shipwreck." In a clichéd story of artistic suffering, Géricault himself dies young, anonymous, and penniless, but today, his masterpiece hangs in the Louvre.

The artist and the survivor's efforts to turn tragedy into something tangible are intrinsically compelling. But in telling the tale, Miles, who also wrote "David Jones: The Maker Unmade," seems somewhat marooned among history's details. He recounts the events of the shipwreck well enough, recounting the rafters' chilling decision to kill off the weakest among them. However, just when the author develops narrative tension, or we begin to see the events through a single passenger's eyes, the author piles on more back story or mires the reader in French politics.

The impressive level of detail about the events and individual behavior on the raft - the deliberations, the riots, the cannibalism - suggests an intimate knowledge of the events or, at least, an imaginative leap from the source materials. So why not go the extra step and narrate the book like fiction, paced to build suspense and peppered with dialogue? Miles may be a fastidious historian, but his storytelling lacks the skill to emotionally hook the reader.
more stories like this

His ponderous style does not help, either. "The relaunching of the French monarchy promised a turbulent passage fraught with conflict, and it was against such an unpropitious background of stormy division and strife that the new repainted Medusa . . ." reads but one of many examples.

The repetitive and conventional descriptors "turbulent," "fraught," "stormy," etc., all unnecessarily clamor for attention. Likewise, in a single paragraph describing the castaways' landfall, Miles's prose takes on a purple hue. "Scorching shore," "lacerating July sun," "immense expanse of undulating sand," "heaving sea," and "menacing desert" are the many stock phrases trotted out to convey a sense of crisis. Miles does not trust his descriptive powers; he overcompensates with too many adjectives that aren't all that effective anyway, when one or two would do.

Another drawback: Other than the partially obscured image on the jacket itself, the book contains no full-color reproduction of the painting. But other black-and-white illustrations do give the reader an idea of Géricault's vision, and Miles does nicely analyze the historical significance of the painting.

After the first third of "The Wreck of the Medusa," the shipwreck itself is over. What follows is the aftermath: the trial, a lenient prison term for Captain Chaumareys, the political wreckage of the corruption charges that reached as high as the Bourbon king, and the making of the painting. Whether this is enough to hold one's attention largely depends upon the tastes of the reader. Clearly, Miles has researched his topic.

But clunky, amateur closing statements such as "Our inability to discover the truth behind the terrible events that have been variously recounted according to the interests of differing writers remains problematic" make it hard for the reader to care much.

Lovers of seafaring dramas and French history will find "The Wreck of the Medusa" a suitable, if flawed, addition to the growing body of nautical literature. But for the rest of us, Jonathan Miles makes for tough rowing.

Ethan Gilsdorf is a Boston-based writer. Contact him at ethan@ethangilsdorf.com.

Cairo, N.Y.

2008-01-03T17:59:00.001+01:00

by Cornelius Eady

The town near our house

Isn’t fancy, but it is ripe.

At present, it is still on

The wrong side of

The Hudson River,

But there’s potential.

What happened

In Woodstock,

What happened

In Red Hook,

What’s happening

In Catskill,

Could easily

Happen here.

Our streets are sad

In the way our bodies

Are sad as we

Dream of our

Beautiful selves,

Floating, light,

Light-filled,

Transcendent.

How could anyone

Have missed or

Overlooked us,

Even with our

Bad haircuts,

Our paunchy clothes,

Our gin-mill

Mouths?

One day

Some car drives by

And the rich folk

Who hunt for

Cut-rate rubies

Slow down,

And here we are,

They think,

All ready to be

Scrubbed.

Snarling surf closes east coast beaches

2008-01-03T17:58:00.001+01:00

Jano Gibson

WILD seas whipped up by a tropical low off Queensland forced the closure of hundreds of beaches along the eastern seaboard yesterday, with dangerous surf conditions set to continue over the coming days.

Dozens of people - many of them surfers who dared to enter the treacherous waters - required assistance from lifeguards as waves towering up to five metres high pummelled the coast.

The huge seas came on the last day of Sydney's wettest December in 15 years. The city recorded 123 millimetres of rain last month, compared with the long-term average of 78 millimetres.

The weather caused the cancellation or postponement of almost all of the New Year's Eve fireworks displays planned for beaches along the Gold Coast.

By 2pm yesterday, all of Sydney's main metropolitan beaches, which were being bombarded by two- to three-metre waves, had been closed to swimmers.

Beaches from Nambucca Heads to the Gold Coast were also off limits, as were many others at Newcastle and on the Central Coast.

"Given the forecast and given conditions on New Year's Eve, it would be expected that many beaches in the Sydney metropolitan area and throughout the state will remain closed," a Surf Life Saving NSW spokesman, Brett Moore, said. "People are strongly discouraged from entering the water unless there is a patrol on duty, which is signified by the red-and-yellow flags."

Thousands of surfers took advantage of the big seas, but two, who were washed onto rocks at Stanwell Park, had to be winched to safety by the Westpac Lifesaver helicopter.

A surfer at Woolgoolga, north of Coffs Harbour, was treated by an ambulance officer after injuring himself when heavy seas washed him onto rocks.

And a crew member participating in the Navy George Bass Surfboat Marathon near Moruya, on the South Coast, had to be rescued following three unsuccessful attempts to get their boat to shore.

Stephen Leahy, a lifeguard co-ordinator for northern NSW, said waves were peaking up to five metres at some North Coast beaches, while the more sheltered Byron Bay beaches experienced peaks of about three metres.

More than 600 swimmers were ordered from the water and eight people had to be rescued at northern NSW beaches, he said.

Mick Sylvester from the Pittwater lifeguard service said inexperienced surfers were endangering themselves in the huge seas. "There's so much volume in these waves, they are what we call a meaty wave … When [the surfers] wipe out, their board gets whipped off."

As he spoke to the Herald, three lifeguards at Palm Beach had to be sent to pull four surfers from the water after they became separated from their boards.

The tropical low that has caused the wild weather was last night located about 400 kilometres north-east of Fraser Island. The Bureau of Meteorology said waves in the surf zone at some southern Queensland and northern NSW beaches could exceed five metres today.

Because of the tropical low's slow pace, it is likely the wild weather will remain for several days, although wave heights are expected to gradually decrease.

"It's what [surfers] dream of. It will be Christmas and New Year's for them to remember for a long time," a forecaster, Dave Williams, said.

DNA database to get blood samples of all Illinois homicide victims

2008-01-03T17:56:00.000+01:00

By Gerry Smith

During an autopsy, Kane County Coroner Charles West routinely draws blood from a stiffening corpse, letting four droplets dry on a DNA card.

When police are investigating a case, West makes a second card to give them. But in some cases, the blood samples are simply filed away in the morgue and never entered into Illinois' growing DNA database.

But under a law taking effect in June, the blood samples of all homicide victims will be entered into the database. Authorities hope the measure will help unlock secrets about cold cases, potentially revealing that the victim of one crime had been the perpetrator of another.

"Victims of homicide, in some instances, come from a lifestyle that may have some risks to it," said Cook County Assistant State's Atty. Meribeth Mermall. "They may be taking information from other crimes to their grave."

If effective, the law may be expanded to include victims of other causes, including car accidents, suicides and heart attacks, said state Rep. Dan Brady (R-Bloomington), who sponsored the bill.

The legislation was prompted by the success of a similar law in Louisiana requiring coroners to submit blood samples from victims of all violent crimes to a DNA database.

Since that law took effect in 2003, it has helped close many unsolved crimes in areas with high gang activity, said Tammy Pruet Northrup, former DNA manager for the Louisiana State Police Crime Lab.

"This is the power of DNA," she said. "It doesn't necessarily say the deceased person did it, but it provides investigative leads."

By expanding Illinois' DNA database, officials hope the new requirement will be as effective as a 2003 law requiring DNA collection from convicted felons.

"It's just another cross reference that might possibly make a connection," said Jeff Lair, coroner in central Illinois' Morgan County. "The more information you've got, the better."

Brady said the measure will prevent potentially key DNA evidence from languishing in coroners' files.

"It's one thing to take a DNA sample and put [it] in a filing drawer in a morgue," Brady said. "It's another thing to continually review the sample for hits and leads."

West said the new law won't inconvenience him the way others have. He said his office is running out of space because of a law passed a few years ago requiring coroners to indefinitely keep all evidence related to homicides.

"We've got freezers absolutely full of specimens from homicides that we can't destroy even if the case has gone through litigation," West said.

Now the blood samples of those victims may register a match to crimes that investigators have been trying to solve for years, Mermall said.

In Louisiana, the law has helped ease the minds of rape victims who had lived in fear that their attacker could strike again, Northrup said.

"It's brought them a great deal of closure knowing that person was deceased."

-----------

gfsmith@tribune.com

Protest turns into all-day looting spree

2008-01-03T17:55:00.002+01:00

By Michela Wrong in Kisumu

Guests at the Kisumu hotel had not expected to spend quite so much time in each other's company. Events, however, intervened in the form of riots that exploded in the Kenyan opposition stronghold on Saturday as the city's residents sensed electoral victory was about to be snatched from their candidate's grasp.

On the previous evening, it had appeared that Raila Odinga, son of Luo leader Oginga Odinga, had the election in the bag. Kisumu's inhabitants, who belong mainly to the Luo tribe and accord Raila near god-like status, knew better.

The deserted morning streets were the giveaway. Once at the heart of a thriving sugar, cotton and fish trade, Kisumu is in the economic doldrums. Its prospects were about to get a whole lot grimmer. In the slums, supporters of Raila's ODM movement were taking out their fury on residents from the rival Kikuyu and Kisii tribes suspected of voting for the government.

The blue waters of Lake Victoria, framed by the jewel-green Maseno hills, glittered enticingly. But the smoke rising from burning barricades in the city centre lent the scene a revolutionary flavour. "Close the door," shouted a female security guard as guests spotted young men running towards the hotel, fleeing a police charge.

Situated just round the corner from the main shopping street, the hotel verandah was the ideal vantage from which to monitor a day-long looting spree. Locked inside, the guests - mostly middle class Luos who had returned to Kisumu to vote and to celebrate Christmas - kept up an appalled, increasingly sardonic running commentary on events outside.

First came Bata, the famous shoe chain. It is not easy to carry 10 pairs of shoes, but many looters managed it. "Look at that woman, she's got hundreds of shoes; all she ever wanted in her life," said a guest.

Then it was electronics: generators, microwaves, ghetto blasters, even double-compartmented freezers, herded along the street like cattle. "You can bet none of these guys have electricity at home," remarked a US-accented entrepreneur. Scores of televisions were wheeled past on boda boda taxi bikes.

Next were furnishings: rolls of linoleum, fake Persian carpets, sheets of corrugated iron, entire velour sofas, balanced on heads or carried by two men, piled high with goodies. "Terrible, just terrible," muttered a guest, lifting her daughter to get a better view. Occasionally the General Service Unit (GSU) riot police drove by, firing tear gas in a desultory fashion. But it was like trying to dam the tide: 10 minutes later looters were back. Nearby buildings were burning, black smoke billowing, gas cylinders exploding.

The same looters were coming back for second, third and fourth helpings. A surprising number were female. Two strapping girls, running in kitten heels, made a strong impression. "These are thugs, women thugs," said the hotel clerk with a shake of his head.

As the sun set, the looters tired. The occasional "ODM, ODM" chant had come a definite second in a sustained operation of self-enrichment. During 12 hours, Kisumu's most impoverished inhabitants had done their bit to narrow Kenya's yawning gap between rich and poor, reducing one of the country's most charming urban hubs to the state of a city in a war zone.

Long after they could play any useful part, riot police with helmets and shields deployed across the burning commercial centre. A hotel guest, surreally chirpy, was on the mobile phone to a friend: "Hey, don't bother coming shopping down here tomorrow. There's nothing left to buy."

Impunity must end at all levels

2008-01-03T17:55:00.001+01:00

By L MUTHONI WANYEKI

Just how many ways still exist to rig an election? Until now, I actually (overly-optimistically) thought: “Not that many.” But, even in this phase of Kenya’s democratic development, I was proved wrong.

Yes, the elections have been pronounced “free and fair” by national and international observers alike, the former including the organisation I myself work for. But this does not mean that our electoral process was not marred by electoral malpractices or human-rights violations.

It is not acceptable that, in 2007 — seven years into the new millennium — we still have aspirants who think attempts at ethnic cleansing are an acceptable campaign strategy. It is a fact that many would-be voters were disenfranchised in Kuresoi because their houses were burnt down together with their identity and voter cards. And disenfranchised out of fear.

The incoming government must act to address, once and for all, the root causes of the violence in Kuresoi. Which are not about ethnicity and indigeneity — to be honest, the only communities that can make that claim, the Masaai and the Ogiek, are only nominally involved. Neither is it truly about land. It is about the continued impunity of those who first planned and supported the politically instigated clashes of the 1990s.

It is also not acceptable that only polling stations in Langata constituency seemed to have lost sections of the register of voters covering those whose names begin with “O.” I personally visited some of those polling stations on December 27. Given that this had affected no less a voter than Raila Odinga himself, tensions were so high at Olympic Primary School, for example, that the primarily Luo residents of Kibera had begun their own vetting process, not only of vehicles trying to enter the polling station, but also of would-be voters trying to do the same. This, of course, is unacceptable. But it happened as a consequence of equally unacceptable provocation.

THE INCOMING GOVERNMENT MUST thus also ensure that those responsible for these apparently conscious and deliberate malpractices are brought to book, particularly those actually working for the ECK. In the atmosphere of rumour and tension that preceded polling day, it was incumbent on the ECK to explain its every decision and move clearly — so that cars moving in and out of polling stations were not assumed to be ferrying already marked ballot papers and already full ballot boxes and so on. So that the ECK continued to be seen as a judicious arbitrator of the electoral process. That, in the end, was not just a sad reflection on its current composition and some of its staff. It was dangerous for us all.

But the ECK was not the only public institution that could be faulted —not only for the above, but also for failing to stop electoral bribery, conducted in full view, right out in the open at some polling stations in Westlands! The national, supposedly “public” broadcaster was shamelessly partisan — going to the extent of airing what were effectively political party advertisements the night before the poll.

THE POLICE FORCE FAILED TO PREVENT the 30 or so deaths and many more injuries that occurred during the electoral period — including those of administration police — by failing to investigate each instance of electoral violence to its logical conclusion and prosecuting offenders. Senior civil servants and public administration officials failed to remain outside of the campaign process. The list goes on.

The ultimate consequences of all of these failures — to our rights to life and security of the person and property as well as to rights more directly associated with the electoral process — must be addressed.

We cannot allow all these malpractices and violations to fade away in the clamour surrounding the incoming government’s first steps. Impunity at all levels must end.

L. Muthoni Wanyeki is executive director of the Kenya Human Rights Commission

UNC All-American Larkins break bone in left hand

2008-01-03T17:53:00.001+01:00

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. -- North Carolina All-American Erlana Larkins broke her left hand Sunday in a win over Liberty.

The senior forward injured the hand while reaching for a rebound with 17:24 left in No. 4 North Carolina's 88-67 victory. She screamed and fell to the floor, holding the hand as play continued for about 20 seconds.

Coach Sylvia Hatchell said a preliminary examination showed a broken bone inside the palm. Larkins was taken to UNC Hospitals for X-rays and further treatment.

"It's her left [non-shooting] hand," Hatchell said. "Knowing Erlana, she'll be OK. She's tough."

UNC orthopedic physician Dr. Tim Taft examined the hand briefly along with trainers before Larkins was taken to the locker room. She returned less than 10 minutes later with the hand wrapped over ice and watched the rest of the game from the bench.

A three-time All-Atlantic Coast Conference player, Larkins was a third team Associated Press All-American and MVP of the 2007 NCAA Dallas Regional as a junior. She won a gold medal playing with the U.S. Pan American Games team last summer.

Larkins ranks first in team history in field-goal shooting (.577) and came into Sunday's game averaging 11 points, fourth highest on the team, and a team best 8.5 rebounds a game.

Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press

An urban space with something for all

2008-01-03T17:52:00.000+01:00

It is a great escape. It is also the perfect place to find yourself. A fine platform for brave new thoughts. A cool hangout if you don’t want to think about anything at all. The India Habitat Centre (IHC) is many worlds rolled into one.

From professionals to artists to social workers to students, there’s something for everyone. “This is a unique experiment in urban living. It’s a place for those who have time on their hands. It is not always that one finds company. We want to create a passion for them by putting out a canvas, be it film appreciation, art or books,” said Raj Liberhan, director, IHC.

Home to 37 institutions, the IHC also has an art gallery, a library, a resource centre, an auditorium and an amphi-theatre. “It is an excellent facility and is very well-kept. It has some lovely restaurants too,” says former RBI governor and MP Rajya Sabha Bimal Jalan.

Designed by legendary architect Joseph Allen Stein, the IHC has a massive courtyard.“The garden is charming. I also like the gallery and the restaurants. All in all, IHC is a very effective resource centre,” says Tara Sinha, head of leading ad agency Tara Sinha Associates.

Its monthly calendars are action-packed with talks, panel discussions, book club meetings, film appreciation, classical dance, music, theatre and what have you.

“The gallery for me is the most interesting place. When a show opens there, it gets a lot of attention,” says Gopi Gajwani, eminent photographer and artist.

And, of course, the eatouts — the food court, Eatopia, and the All American Diner, which are open to the public. There are workshops for children on art, cinema and music. And there are Sunday walks too, to heritage sites.

“We want to be looked at as creating a value system that serves as a light house” says Liberhan.

all-American flags are law of the land

2008-01-03T17:51:00.000+01:00

A requirement that all American flags sold in the state to be manufactured in the United States is just one of the new laws taking effect in 2008.

By MARK BRUNSWICK

At the Earl James Howe Post 298 American Legion in Foley, Minn., club manager Mary Donovan can look around the hall and count the flags. Five hang proudly inside, not including the ones they keep for sale at $25 a piece. And there's the one flying outside.

Donovan can also assure you that they are all made in the U.S.A. "We wouldn't have them here if they weren't," she said.

From now on, all flag-waving Minnesotans will have to buy into that policy. A new state law that takes effect Tuesday requires all American flags sold in the state to be manufactured in the United States.

Violations of the law, sponsored by Iron Range legislators Rep. Tom Rukavina, DFL-Virginia, and Sen. David Tomassoni, DFL-Chisholm, could be punishable by a $1,000 fine or 90 days in jail.

In Arizona, schools and public colleges were required starting July 1 to put an American-made flag in every classroom from junior high on up. Tennessee requires all U.S. flags bought via state contract to be made domestically, and similar legislation was considered in New Jersey and Pennsylvania this year.

In 2006, $5.3 million worth of American flags were imported into the United States, nearly all of them made in China.

The Times of London sniffed at the anti-imported flag sentiment in its reporting on the Minnesota measure earlier this year, calling the law "a most draconian action" and saying it would "chime with the protectionist mood sweeping America."

But at the Earl James Howe Post, all 250 members are probably in support of the law, Donovan said.

"Just because it's what we believe in. It honors our country," she said.

Other new measures

While perhaps draped in less symbolism, several other laws take effect Tuesday in Minnesota that could have an impact on everyday life:

Car buyers' rights: New consumer disclosure requirements for vehicle add-ons will become available for car buyers. The law, sponsored by Rep. Steve Simon, DFL-St. Louis Park, and Sen. Ron Latz, DFL-St. Louis Park, also requires dealers to disclose whether a consumer credit report was used to approve a car loan and to provide a toll-free number for the car buyer to obtain a copy of the report.

Ride inspections: Operators of amusement rides will be required to get annual inspections by a certified inspector and then conduct an additional inspection each day under a new law sponsored by Rep. Tim Faust, DFL-Mora, and Sen. John Marty, DFL-Roseville. The law came in response to an incident in Faust's district in which two girls fell out of an amusement ride because of an operator error.

Mercury banned: Numerous products sold in Minnesota must be mercury-free, including stoves, barometers, cosmetics, toiletries and fragrances. In addition, some other products that contain mercury must have a label that notifies consumers of proper disposal procedures, under a law sponsored by Marty and Rep. Melissa Hortman, DFL-Brooklyn Park.

Medical coverage: Unmarried dependent children up to age 24 will have to be covered by some health insurers under family plans, no matter whether they are full-time students, under a measure from Rep. Tom Huntley, DFL-Duluth, and Sen. Linda Berglin, DFL-Minneapolis. Previously, only students were covered. The new rules do not apply to self-insured plans.

Bus standards: Some new regulations apply to school buses, including deeper and taller seats, under a law sponsored by Rep. Mindy Greiling, DFL-Roseville.

Mark Brunswick • 651-222-1636

Nanan All Star five nips RP’s Telecoms

2008-01-03T17:49:00.000+01:00

By Roy Luarca

SHUI TOU, CHINA -- Fifth Avenue Telecoms’ fiery rally fell short Saturday night, allowing the Nanan All Stars to score a 70-67 victory in the 7th Zheng Chenggong Cup international basketball tournament here.

The loss dropped the Filipinos into a tie with their tormentors at 1-1 and left the defending champions with the tough task of sweeping their three remaining games to get a crack at the title won by the Laguna Lakers in 1999 and a FedEx-backed squad in 2003.

They will try to get back on track against Bumi Kaya of Indonesia, which is powered by national players and is unbeaten after two games, Sunday night.

In other games Saturday, Indonesia trounced Macau, 90-71, and Hong Kong dumped Singapore, 82-60, in Nanan City.

Visibly tired after arriving in this chilly marble-producing town barely three hours before the game, the Filipinos still managed to threaten at 65-64 with still a minute left behind Ronnie Zagala and Luis Palaganas.

But the taller Chinese kept their poise with burly 6-foot-8 center Xu Nan scoring on a short stab then added two free throws for 69-64 following a flubbed three-pointer by Fil-Am Michael Andre Burtscher.

Zagala, 5th Avenue’s top scorer with 35 points in a 93-91 nipping of Macau Friday, struck with a three-point jumper in the last six seconds, 69-67.

But Romel David was forced to foul Xie Ya Cai in the ensuing play and the Chinese made the front end of his free throws for the final count.

“Masyadong malamig (It’s too cold),” complained East Avenue playing coach Junnel Mendiola, referring to the prevailing 12-degree temperature. “Naninigas ang kamay namin pag naka-upo (Our hands get stiff when we are on the bench).”

The 26-year-old Zagala, a three-time national player, wound up with 18 points, seven rebounds and four assists with Palaganas and former pro Braulio Lim adding 10 points each.

With springy Wen De Long at the firing end, the Chinese kept the nine-man 5th Avenue squad at bay throughout, posting their biggest lead of 45-36 midway in the third quarter.

The victory wheeled the Chinese, boasting an average ceiling of nearly 6-foot-5, back into contention in the six-team, single-round tournament.

They absorbed a 68-62 beating from a pesky Hong Kong side in the inaugural matches in Nanan City on Friday.

The 6-foot-5 forward Wen powered the Chinese with 20 points and a tournament-high 19 rebounds. Wng Xiao Dong contributed 16 points, including four triples, along with Ding Zhen Xiong.

Fifth Avenue, champion of the Millennium Basketball League, tangles with Thong Whye of Singapore Monday night before closing its stint here against Hong Kong, the 2003 runner-up of the quadrennial event, on New Year’s Day.

The scores:
NANAN ALL STARS 70 -- Wei DL 20, Wang XD 16, Ding ZX 16, Xu N 8, Xie YC 3, Zhang W 3, We CH 2, Ye CH 2, Chen YF 0.
5TH AVENUE 67 -- Zagala 18, Palaganas 10, Lim 10, Dizon 9, David 7, Mendoza 7, Mendiola 4, Burtscher 2.
Quarters: 17-15, 38-32, 50-48, 70-67

Copyright 2008 Philippine Daily Inquirer. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

That wasn’t such a bad year after all, so the statistics say

2008-01-03T17:35:00.000+01:00

Anatole Kaletsky: Economic view

My last article of every year looks back on the predictions I made in early January to shed some light on the economic and financial events of the previous 12 months. This tends to be a humbling experience, and this year it is even more so than usual.

While the world economy has not done nearly as badly as one might suppose from the financial turmoil that has dominated the headlines, it is still embarrassing to read the opening paragraph of my January outlook: “The period of greatest risk to the world economy is probably over. Interest rates may have a little way to rise in Europe and Japan. But the big rise in American rates, the doubling of oil prices and the inevitable correction in the US housing market have now happened. The biggest risks stem not from economics but from geopolitics. In most of the world, the mid-cycle slowdown is probably almost over and economic strength, rather than weakness, is likely to be the main surprise of 2007.” Only in the eurozone and Japan did I feel that consensus forecasts were a touch overoptimistic and the risks “were mainly on the downside”.

My financial predictions seemed even more egregious, since I ended by suggesting that “the bull markets in shares and property have every reason to continue, at least if we look at economics alone”. From today’s vantage point, in the midst of a banking crisis and housing slump that is spreading from America to Britain and Europe, these comments seem absurdly complacent.

But delving a little deeper into events suggests some justification for my apparent smugness and, more importantly, helps to explain why the past 12 months have proved so confusing to policymakers and so expensive to the banks that placed bets worth hundreds of billions of dollars on faulty financial judgments.

The fact is 2007 was very much a year of two halves. The first half unfolded more or less as I expected: in America, economic growth accelerated strongly after a slow first quarter, while Britain continued to enjoy a boom in economic activity, employment and, above all, housing. Europe and Japan, by contrast, started strongly but had slowed substantially by the middle of the year (see charts). Meanwhile, the emerging economies, especially in Asia, continued to enjoy the best economic conditions in their history. By midsummer the main concern among central bankers and investors was not a possible recession but the risk of global economic overheating. As a result, bond yields in America rose in early June to almost 5.5 per cent – their highest since the start of this global expansion. And analysts were almost unanimous in warning that the 25-year downtrend in long-term interest rates had been broken once and for all.

How different the world looked only a few weeks later, after the seizure suffered by inter-bank lending markets in August and the near-collapse of Northern Rock and a host of mortgage lenders in the US. Much has been written about these events and this is not the place to analyse them again. All I want to do is to put them into perspective by recalling two points that are easy to forget in the present panic. First, that economic growth had a lot of momentum behind it, especially in America and Asia but also in Britain, when the credit crisis struck in August. This is why expectations that the housing crisis would trigger a collapse of US consumption and employment have, so far, proved wide of the mark. Second, and this is easy to lose sight of, shares and house prices have ended this year considerably higher than they began, despite all the horror stories.

In America, the Dow Jones is 7 per cent higher than 12 months ago, having hit a record as recently as October 9. The FTSE 100 is up 5 per cent and Germany’s DAX has gained no less than 23 per cent and is near its all-time high, having fully recovered the losses of July and August. In Asia, stock markets are all far above levels before the credit crisis, with Hong Kong up 40 per cent on the year and Shanghai up 70 per cent. Only in Japan have asset prices substantially fallen, hardly surprising considering the renewed incompetence of the country’s economic and political management since Junichiro Koizumi resigned as prime minister in 2006.

Property markets, too, have faired much better that one might imagine, at least outside America. Last week, Nationwide said its house-price index fell for a second consecutive month in December and most analysts (including me) expect the market to get a lot worse. But it’s the strength, not weakness, of house prices in 2007 that is most remarkable. Nationwide’s figure is 5 per cent higher than a year ago, even after the recent falls. In London, where prices are falling more steeply than in the rest of the country – and are likely to fall faster in the year ahead – the average house price is still about 10 per cent up on the year.

So why do the official statistics differ so totally from the grim picture presented by financial markets and media comments, including mine?

There are three reasons: first, official statistics are, by definition, backward-looking and while it is unlikely that the next few months will see the widely predicted slump into recession, a much weaker period probably does lie ahead, especially outside the US. Second, aggregate statistics give no indication of the huge shifts in activity, employment and profitability between sectors and regions. US housing has suffered a steep decline, but this has been offset by very strong export growth. That, in turn, has reflected a shift in the world economy towards emerging markets, which now contribute almost 30 per cent of economic activity and much more to growth. Third, the haemorrhage suffered by the financial system in the mortgage bubble has so far done very little damage to the real economy of jobs, consumption and investment. But the banks cannot continue to lose at the rate they have since August without eventually weakening economic activity around the world.

The key question for the year ahead, therefore, is whether the banking crisis is almost over or whether investors and governments will allow the spiral of losses to accelerate until it drags the entire world economy into some kind of a black hole. My views, for what they are worth, about this and the other risks to the global economic outlook will appear here on January 14.

Pray for, be kind to all God’s animals, Church urged

2008-01-03T17:34:00.000+01:00

By Tessa Salazar

MANILA, Philippines -- Start the New Year with a compassionate eye for animals, animal welfare groups have appealed to members of the Catholic Church.

After all, they reason, animals were the only ones with the Holy Family when Jesus was born in a manger.

The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the Animal Welfare Coalition (an umbrella organization of 21 groups nationwide and two groups from the United Kingdom) and the Philippine Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) are calling on Catholic bishops and priests to include compassion for animals in their New Year homilies to the faithful.

The animal welfare groups stress that people should reduce their meat consumption during the holidays, not just for health reasons but also out of compassion for animals that are cruelly slaughtered for the traditional media noche (midnight meal) feast.

The beef, pork or chicken they’re enjoying had their “throats slit, limbs hacked off and skin torn from their bodies while still conscious. Pigs were plunged into vats of scalding water for hair removal while still conscious and chickens were scalded alive in feather-removal tanks,” says Rochelle Regodon, campaigns manager of PETA-Asia Pacific.

They should also reduce, if not totally forego, the use of ear-splitting firecrackers to avoid stressing their pets. A dog’s hearing -- as well as a cat’s -- is 10 times more sensitive than a human’s.

Violent places on earth

PETA says slaughterhouses are among “the most violent places on Earth ... it’s ironic that the celebration of the [birth] of the Son of God is a feast of slaughtered pigs, cows, chicken and animal flesh.”

“In Jesus’ time, animal sacrifice was largely an excuse for people to eat animal flesh, and Jesus challenged the practice at every turn. He drove the merchants selling animals for sacrifice and consumption from the temple, instituted baptism in place of animal sacrifice, saying that God ‘requires mercy, not sacrifice.’ He also rejected both animal flesh and sacrifice at the Last Supper -- a vegetarian Passover meal,” notes Regodon.

Ramona Eliza T. Consunji, external affairs officer of the Animal Welfare Coalition, says that there are “references on the rights and welfare of animals found in the Bible. The connection between cruelty to animals and desensitized men are clearly defined in the Bible.”

She cites Proverbs 12:10 which says: “A good man takes care of his animals, but wicked men are cruel to theirs.”

Pray for animals

For her part, Nita Hontiveros Lichauco, president of PAWS, has this to say: “The secret to real and lasting peace is staring us in the face ... Simply let the animals into our lives. It is what the natural law dictates -- humans and animals are co-beneficiaries of this world.”

How do humans let animals into their inner sanctum?

“One great way is to pray for them daily,” Lichauco says.

Another is “to officially include them in church prayers, not only in October (when World Animal Day is celebrated) but also during New Year’s Eve ceremonies. Then watch and see true and lasting peace expand in homes, in our lives, in our country, in the world,” she says.

Consunji adds: “Preaching about love and forgiveness for one’s neighbor without teaching respect for all creatures is hypocritical.”

Gluttonous proportions

“Ironically, there is no other season which exploits animals more than on the very month that Jesus was born. We continue the feast as we usher in the New Year, to gluttonous proportions,” says Regodon. “Wouldn’t it be better if food on the table wasn’t the result of cruelty and abuse?”

PETA explains that animals raised for food are subjected to violent, painful procedures such as de-horning, de-beaking, and castration, all of which are done without anesthesia.

“In order to maximize profits, factory farmers confine animals to spaces so small they can barely turn around,” Regodon says. “Many never see the light of day or feel soil or grass beneath their feet. When they have reached the end of their brief growth cycles (artificially accelerated by drugs), they are trucked away to their deaths.”

Free vegetarian kit

“Our intention is to raise awareness on behalf of God’s creatures and to make the world a more merciful place. We want to put a stop to animal abuse and foster compassion toward all creatures by encouraging the adoption of a vegetarian diet. This is entirely in keeping with the most cherished ideals of people of faith,” Regodon says.

PETA is encouraging those who want to give up meat to visit www.petaasiapacific.com for a free vegetarian starter kit which is loaded with information, tips and recipes.

“Please consider exploring veganism, the only diet that is compassionate and respectful of all God’s creation. To find out more, visit www.jesusveg.com,” adds Regodon.

Solving world hunger

In his book “Diet for a Small Planet,” Frances Moore Lappe wrote that the feed cost of an eight-ounce steak is equivalent to a full cup of cooked cereal grains for 45 to 50 people. The 4.8 pounds of grain fed to cattle to produce one pound of beef for human beings represents a colossal waste of resources in a world still teeming with people who suffer from profound hunger and malnutrition.

According to the British group Vegfam (a famine relief charity organization which believes in vegetarianism), a 10-acre farm can support 60 people growing soybeans, 24 people growing wheat, 10 people growing corn but only two producing cattle.

According to Food Revolution author John Robbins, “under even the best of circumstances ... a meat-based diet is incredibly wasteful of the resources and inputs that make food production possible. If we are serious about creating a thriving, just and sustainable way of life for all, it is imperative that we shift to a plant-based diet.”

Physician and author Dean Ornish M.D., who developed the Ornish Diet, specifically formulated to reverse heart disease, recommends a vegetarian diet together with exercise, meditation, an emotional support group and no smoking.

Copyright 2008 Philippine Daily Inquirer. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

AIADMK open to all options: Jayalalithaa

2008-01-03T17:29:00.000+01:00

Chennai (PTI): AIADMK supremo Jayalalithaa on Sunday said the party was 'open to all options' with regard to alliances.

"We are keeping our options open on having alliances with other political parties," she said evading a direct answer to a query at a press conference here about speculation that she was getting closer to the BJP.

When asked about her congratulatory letter to Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, after he won the assembly elections in the state recently, she said "Modi is a friend. It is natural to congratulate a friend for his electoral victory," she said.

Any political significance being attached to it was "for the media to infer", she added.

She also informed that Modi would be in the city on January 14 and she had extended an invitation for him to meet her at home.

Celebrations given the all clear

2008-01-03T17:28:00.002+01:00

Peter Hawkins and Linton Besser

The city's $4 million New Year's Eve party on the harbour will not be hampered by bad weather this year, with mostly clear conditions forecast for the celebrations.

Last year's fireworks were jeopardised by strong winds, but the Bureau of Meteorology has forecast light winds and is not expecting rain tonight. The city's temperature is expected to peak at 26 degrees.

"All our prayers have been answered this year with the weather," said Wayne Harrison, the City of Sydney's New Year's Eve creative director.

"Usually we are very anxious at this stage with bad predictions. Everyone will be in their party clothes and fingers crossed a storm won't come from nowhere."

But organisers said there would be another surprise as the hourglass lit up the Harbour Bridge during the fireworks.

"There is a surprise in store for the countdown; people will be wowed by it if it works," Mr Harrison said. "All I can say is that it involves the bridge."

More than a million people are expected to attend the 33 official vantage points, private functions and other foreshore areas on and around the harbour to welcome in the new year.

The night's "Time of Our Lives" celebrations will include a fireworks show costing about $600,000. Although the amount is similar to previous years, onlookers are being told to expect more bang for their buck

The City of Sydney said it would be the largest and most technologically advanced fireworks display in the world.

More than 1700 police will swamp New Year's Eve hot spots in a bid to prevent any trouble.

The NSW Police Commissioner, Andrew Scipione, yesterday said the heavy police presence would not be as aggressive as what the city experienced during the APEC summit.

"It's not one that's going to be necessarily very assertive until it's required," he said.

The 1750 police officers will patrol 21 precincts under the control of the Assistant Commissioner, Catherine Burn.

Foot patrols will be concentrated at known trouble spots in the inner-city such as the Rocks, Kings Cross and Oxford Street. But police will also be concentrated at suburban locations such as Norton Street in Leichhardt, St George and Cronulla.

"For those that would choose to go out there and do the wrong thing, understand that the police are out there and they're out there in very big numbers and if you play up you are likely to get locked up," Mr Scipione said.

NSW Ambulance will also station extra crews at the Opera House, Darling Harbour and the Rocks, as well as Manly, Blues Point and Nielsen Park.

Authorities urged Sydneysiders not to bring glass into the city, not to drink to excess and to be aware of large crowds.

The Police Minister, David Campbell, also warned people not to stage fireworks displays in their backyards without a permit. "They're dangerous, but they're also illegal," he said.

with AAP

Top 3 Dems all insist they're most electable

2008-01-03T17:28:00.001+01:00

BY ABDON M PALLASCH Political Reporter apallasch@suntimes.com

KEOKUK, Iowa -- With the top Democratic White House hopefuls in a three-way Iowa deadlock, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) called out his chief rivals by name Saturday, arguing he is the most electable, while former Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) said he would be tougher on lobbyists than Obama.

As the Democrats barnstormed on the weekend before Thursday's caucuses, Obama and Edwards sparred as they hunted for the same voter -- someone probably not for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and undecided between two contenders who are both pitching change and sharing the signature issue of eroding the influence of lobbyists in government.

"The most recent polls show I am the only Democrat who beats every single Republican opponent," Obama told 350 people at Hawthorne Elementary School. "I beat [Rudy] Giuliani, I beat [Mitt] Romney, I beat [John] McCain, I beat [Mike] Huckabee, I beat [Fred] Thompson."
Touts independents

No other Democrat does, Obama said.

"John Edwards doesn't do it, and part of the problem John Edwards has in the general election is that the issues that he's taken on are not the things he said four years ago," Obama said. "And Sen. Clinton doesn't beat all five of them because you start off with half the country not wanting to vote for her.

"And the reason I beat 'em all and Hillary doesn't and Edwards doesn't is because I get more support from independents," Obama added at another stop.

Clinton, campaigning in Clinton, Iowa, with Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, said he and her other backers "are not on a political suicide mission," according to the Associated Press. "They are assessing each and every one of us, and they are concluding ... I am the Democrat most likely to be elected."

In Des Moines on Saturday night, Edwards pushed back at Obama on electability.

"I am the Democrat who ran and won in a red state," he said, noting that the last two Democratic presidents were Southerners who talked like he does, with a twang.
Lobbyists at issue

Edwards raised the ante with Obama over the role lobbyists would have in the White House. Edwards proposed a ban on "anyone" who has worked as a "corporate" or foreign government lobbyist.

Obama says he would ban federal lobbyists from working in his White House on issues they lobbied on. Earlier this month, Obama was forced to revise a stump speech line -- a flat declaration that lobbyists "won't work in my White House" -- after it turned out his own written plan says they could, with some restrictions. A new television spot for Obama doctored the audio of a speech Obama made in November to delete the phrase where Obama says lobbyists "will not get a job in my White House."

Obama made an impromptu stop at George's Pizza and Steak in Fairfield, shaking hands with diners, urging them to caucus for him and buying six pizzas for the press bus following him.

"How much do I owe you?" Obama asked the owner. Pulling four $20 bills off the roll he took from his pocket, he said, "You can't give me a discount -- it's against the law."
'Superman' to swoop in

While Clinton had Strickland by her side Saturday, Obama rolled out Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, an African American from Chicago's South Side, who told Iowa voters to disregard pundits who say Obama, 46, ought to wait to run until he's older or more experienced. They said the same thing when Patrick ran for governor of Massachusetts, Patrick said.

Today, Obama will be joined by Iowa native and "Superman" actor Brandon Routh on the stump.

Contributing: Lynn Sweet, reporting from Des Moines

Kenya suspends all live broadcasts

2008-01-03T17:26:00.000+01:00

Nairobi (30 December) - The authorities in Kenya have suspended all live radio and television broadcasts about Thursday's presidential elections. The move came as riots erupted across the country after the electoral commission declared President Mwai Kibaki the winner. He was sworn in immediately for a second five-year term. At least seven people were reported killed during the unrest.

President Kibaki defeated opposition leader Raila Odinga by just over 200,000 votes, the country's narrowest margin ever. Mr Odinga accuses the president of rigging the result and has claimed victory. The opposition leader intends to be sworn in at an alternative ceremony on Monday.

The chief election observer from the European Union has expressed doubt about the accuracy of the final count. Former colonial ruler Britain voiced deep concern over the possible irregularities.

Latest News

* Israeli Gaza Strip raids kill at least 8
* Kenyan AG calls for election probe
* EP president calls for release of Chinese dissident
* China to use lethal injection for executions
* Europe in the grip of bad weather
* British company creates bird flu vaccine
* Dutch privacy protection record poor
* Dutch citizens to serve on Moroccan commission
* US to investigate destruction of CIA tapes
* Iowans kick off caucus season
* California challenges federal emissions standards
* Five die in the Indian temple stampede
* Chile rescues tourists stranded by volcano eruption
* Sri Lankan government ends ceasefire
* Crude oil hits 100 dollars a barrel
* Four killed in Algerian suicide attack
* Pilgrims returning to Gaza Strip
* Aid workers freed in Somalia
* Israeli troops kill five in Gaza clashes
* Kenya protest rally called off
* Pakistani elections postponed
* Kenyan police try to stop anti-government protest
* Syria in dispute with France over Lebanon
* First US presidential primary tomorrow
* Six Hamas militants die in Israeli attack
* Thailand mourns king's sister
* Eight die in Rio prison blaze
* African boat people reach Canary Islands
* Australian citizenship test questioned
* African Union head to mediate in Kenya

No Time For Diversions

2007-12-30T21:47:00.001+01:00

Events on the world stage don't necessarily translate into the American political process but they can have a big impact. In December of 2003, Howard Dean appeared headed toward an easy walk to the Democratic nomination. That month, U.S. forces captured Saddam Hussein, a major development in a war Dean had based his candidacy on opposing. When Dean claimed that Hussein's capture had "not made America safer," a comment that drew criticism from his primary opponents who wondered aloud about the risk of nominating a governor from Vermont with little foreign policy experience and even less restraint.

A month later, voters in Iowa agreed with those criticisms and sent Dean into a tailspin with a third-place finish. Dean's remarks on Hussein weren't the only reasons for his campaign meltdown of course, but events did contribute to it. It's worth looking at how campaigns handled the news of yesterday's assassination of Pakistan opposition leader Benazir Bhutto – especially two Iowa front-runners.

Mike Huckabee, who vaulted into a strong lead in the caucus state last month, spent part of the day explaining what he meant when he first responded to news of the crisis. As CBS News' Nancy Cordes reports, Huckabee expressed his "sincere concern and apologies for what has happened in Pakistan" – a statement that led to questions about what exactly he was apologizing for. The Huckabee campaign clarified his remarks, saying that the candidate "intended to extend his deepest sympathies to the people of Pakistan when he used the word 'apologies.'"

And, when voicing his concerns about what may happen in Pakistan as a result, Huckabee indicated that he was worried about whether martial law in the country will be "continuing" despite the fact it has been suspended for almost two weeks. The campaign again responded, saying, "Governor Huckabee firmly believes that emergency rule/martial law in Pakistan, as a practical matter, should not be viewed as having been completely lifted until the restrictions imposed during that period on the press and judges are removed." It's a lot of parsing, perhaps, but in the last week of the campaign, nearly everything a front-runner says will be under a microscope. For a candidate with little foreign policy experience and almost no policy advisors, those words will be even more finely parsed.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, seemed to say all the right things. As he has throughout the campaign, he said that the war in Iraq has diverted the nation's attention to the dangerous situation in Pakistan. "It’s an indication that we are in a dangerous world," he said, "right now that we have to apply good judgment in our foreign policy." But Obama advisor David Axelrod took that argument a little further as it applies to Hillary Clinton. "I think people need to judge where these candidates were and what they've said and what they've done on these issues," Axelrod told reporters. "She was a strong supporter of the war in Iraq, which we would submit, was one of the reasons why we were diverted from Afghanistan, Pakistan and al-Qaeda, who may have been players in this event today, so that’s a judgment she’ll have to defend."

Axelrod later told CBS News' Chief Political Consultant Marc Ambinder that he was "in no way" implying that Clinton's position had anything to do with the assassination. "All I’m implying is [about] the policy that the war in Iraq that Obama said in 2002 was going to distract us from Afghanistan and Pakistan and Al Qaeda, and that they would regenerate themselves and that they would become more powerful and influential. He exercised good judgment. She’ll have to explain her position."

Obama himself addressed Axelrod's comments in an appearance on "Larry King Live" last night. "He was asked very specifically about the argument that the Clinton folks were making that somehow this was going to change the dynamic of politics in Iowa," Obama said. "First of all, that shouldn't have been the question. The question should be, how is this going to impact the safety and security of the United States, not how is it going to affect a political campaign in Iowa." He added, "he in no way was suggesting that Hillary Clinton was somehow directly to blame for this situation. That is the kind of, I think, gloss that sometimes emerges out of the heat of campaigns that doesn't make much sense."

Whether it makes sense or not, there are just six days left before Iowans weigh in on this presidential race. A day spent explaining what candidates or advisors meant to say isn't the most efficient use of that time.

Plus: Clinton, Huckabee lead in latest Iowa poll, Obama and Romney head fields in New Hampshire; Romney and McCain battle it out over the airwaves in the Granite State; Club for Growth expands Huckabee criticism to South Carolina; Giuliani defends use of 9/11 images in ad and most Republicans indicate they’re still willing to change their minds. In today's Horserace.

MONEY RATES

2007-12-30T21:45:00.000+01:00

Friday, December 28, 2007

International rates
Prime rates
Latest Wk ago
U.S.
7.25 7.25

Canada
6.00 6.00

Euro zone
4.00 4.00

Japan
1.875 1.875

Switzerland
3.90 3.84

Britain
5.50 5.50

Australia
6.75 6.75

Hong Kong
8.00 8.00

Overnight repurchase
Latest Wk ago
U.S.
3.80 3.75

U.K. (BBA)
5.475 5.550

Euro zone
4.37 3.97

U.S. government rates
Latest Wk ago
Discount
[ Effective Date: 12/11/2007 ]
4.75 4.75

Federal funds
[ Effective Date: 12/11/2007 ]
Effective rate
4.17 4.32
Target rate
4.25 4.25
High
4.4375 4.5000
Low
4.0000 4.2300
Bid
4.0000 4.3750
Offer
4.2500 4.5000

Treasury bill auction
[ Auction Date: 12/28/2007 ]
4 weeks
3.040 2.750
13 weeks
3.280 3.000
26 weeks
3.490 3.280

Secondary Market

Freddie Mac
30-year mortgage yields
Latest Wk ago
30 days
5.90 5.97
60 days
5.93 6.00
One-year ARM
3.375 3.375

Fannie Mae
30-year mortgage yields
Latest Wk ago
30 days
6.110 5.962
60 days
6.130 5.988

Constant maturity debt index
Latest Wk ago
Three months
4.394 4.334
Six months
4.311 4.289
One year
4.017 3.993

Bankers acceptance
Latest Wk ago
30 days
4.70 4.93
60 days
4.80 4.94
90 days
4.80 4.94
120 days
4.74 4.86
150 days
4.70 4.82
180 days
4.65 4.78

Other short-term rates

Latest Wk ago
Call money
6.00 6.00

Commercial paper
Latest Wk ago
30 to 36 days
4.26 ...
37 to 59 days
4.28 ...
60 to 90 days
4.35 ...
91 to 122 days
4.33 ...
123 to 151 days
4.31 ...
152 to 180 days
4.30 ...
181 to 210 days
4.28 ...
211 to 241 days
4.26 ...
242 to 270 days
4.20 ...

Dealer commercial paper
Latest Wk ago
30 days
4.98 4.98
60 days
4.95 4.95
90 days
4.93 4.93

Euro commercial paper
Latest Wk ago
30 day
4.02 4.02
Two month
4.24 4.24
Three month
4.30 4.28
Four month
4.30 4.30
Five month
4.30 4.30
Six month
4.30 4.31

London interbank offered rate, or Libor
Latest Wk ago
One month
4.63125 4.86500
Three month
4.72875 4.85750
Six month
4.64875 4.72750
One year
4.29500 4.31750

Libor Swaps (USD)
Latest Wk ago
Two year
3.883 4.010
Three year
3.990 4.090
Five year
4.267 4.360
Ten year
4.747 4.825
30 year
5.081 5.160

Euro Libor
Latest Wk ago
One month
4.294 4.466
Three month
4.689 4.776
Six month
4.708 4.780
One year
4.754 4.779

Euro interbank offered rate
Latest Wk ago
One month
4.294 4.476
Three month
4.690 4.774
Six month
4.709 4.781
One year
4.754 4.777

Hibor
Latest Wk ago
One month
3.326 3.551
Three month
3.519 3.686
Six month
3.626 3.679
One year
3.579 3.627

Asian dollars
Latest Wk ago
One month
4.680 4.901
Three month
4.738 4.879
Six month
4.685 4.746
One year
4.338 4.356

Certificates of Deposit
Latest Wk ago
One month
5.000 5.000
Three month
5.000 5.000
Six Month
4.800 4.800

Merrill Lynch Ready Assets Trust
Latest Wk ago
Call money
4.490 4.500

Eurodollars (mid rates)
Offer Bid
One month
4.60 4.75
Two month
4.65 4.80
Three month
4.70 4.90
Four month
4.68 4.78
Five month
4.65 4.75
Six month
4.60 4.75

Freddie Mac
Weekly survey
Thursday, December 27, 2007

Latest Wk ago
30-year fixed
6.17 6.14
15-year fixed
5.79 5.79
Five-year ARM
5.90 5.90
One-year ARM
5.53 5.51

Sexy M&A Litigation: Judge Orders Specific Performance!

2007-12-30T21:44:00.003+01:00

Specific performance. If those two words don't take you back to first-year contracts, we're not sure what will. (The pregnant-cow case, perhaps? Or Raffles v. Wichelhaus?)

Courts don't often grant specific performance in contract disputes -- i.e., enforcing a transaction against a party that doesn't wish to complete it. Rarer still: A judge who grants specific performance to enforce a billion-dollar M&A deal.

But that's exactly what Tennessee chancery-court judge Ellen Hobbs Lyle did yesterday, ruling that Finish Line must complete its $1.5 billion acquisition of rival retailer Genesco. She criticizes Finish Line and its UBS bankers for how they handled details of the merger. The judge concluded that Finish Line's contract was too solid to be broken by claims of material adverse changes at Genesco. (Law Blog Editorial Nugget: It's unfair that Delaware gets all the sexy corporate litigation. Isn't it nice to see states like Minnesota and Tennessee get in the mix?)

The WSJ points out that Finish Line could still wiggle its way out of the deal. UBS, which is financing the deal, has filed a separate lawsuit in New York state court arguing that it would be funding a merger that would create an insolvent company. If UBS can persuade the court of that, Chancellor Lyle said, she would "halt the merger." (Law Blog Trivia: Most states have merged chancery courts, or courts of equity, with courts of law. Four have not -- Delaware, Mississippi, Tennessee and New Jersey.)

The 43-page ruling is a big win for Genesco's lawyers, led by lead trial counsel Jim Denvir of Boies Schiller & Flexner and the Law Blog Moustache Society.

And if you're sorry to see this case and the United Rentals-Cerberus spat come to an end, have no fear. It looks like there will be plenty of sexy M&A litigation well into '08. Yesterday, private equity shop Platinum Equity sued PPG Industries in New York state court to terminate or renegotiate its $500 million deal for the company's auto-glass business, arguing that the business is in worse shape than PPG had indicated during negotiations. In the complaint Platinum called PPG's conduct "repugnant, wanton, and involved a high degree of moral turpitude." PPG said the claims are without merit.

Rusty Hardin: Slicker N Deer Guts On a Doorknob

2007-12-30T21:44:00.001+01:00

The New York Times profiles Rusty Hardin, the lawyer hired by Roger Clemens to defend him from claims he used steroids. Here's how one Texas writer described the high-profile Houston lawyer in a profile. "He is all things a great defender must be raconteur, showman, charmer, tactician, egotist and he has a ferocious charisma that a rival once described as slicker 'n deer guts on a doorknob.'"

Hardin has repeatedly lambasted the 400-page report on drug use in baseball prepared by another lawyer, George Mitchell. He accuses Mitchell of McCarthyism -- a phrase inspired by another lawyer -- in naming players without adequate proof of wrongdoing.

Very good, well-respected people are sometimes wrong, Hardin told the Times about Mitchell. They are wrong not through malice, not through intent, but they are wrong. None of us is beyond making a mistake." He added: "Theres this automatic assumption to believe what the Mitchell report says."

Scott Atlas of Weil Gotshal in Houston gives the Times an insightful quote that, in describing Hardin, really describes the traits of any good lawyer: He outworks everybody. And primarily he does his own investigation, pursues every lead, doesnt take anything for granted. I would say that is what really sets him apart from most lawyers. He will challenge every assumption people have to see what happened, and thats whats happening here.

After 15 years as a prosecutor, Hardin (Wesleyan, SMU Law) -- Go Cardinals! -- went into private practice in 1990. Rusty Hardin & Associates is a nine-lawyer firm specializing in trial work (check out the firm's fun bio page). He has successfully represented a stable of professional athletes who have found themselves in hot water. In 2002, he lost a six-week trial representing Arthur Andersen on charges it destroyed Enron documents.

Though on his Web site he says, "I worship at the shrine of juries," in his representation of Clemens he finds himself outside the courtroom. He tells the Times: "Were having to try this thing in the court of public opinion, where there are no rules."

Determined Homeowner Staves Off Foreclosure for 11 Years

2007-12-30T21:43:00.002+01:00

But one Cleveland-area man hit the law books and fought off a foreclosure lawsuit for 11 years, without making a mortgage payment, before getting evicted earlier this year. It's believed to be the longest residential foreclosure case of its kind in Cuyahoga County.

Here's Law Blog colleague Amir Efrati's page-one article on Richard Davet in the WSJ.

Davet turned his foreclosure case into a full-time job, starting with trips to the library at Case Western Law. He flooded the court with motions, objections and affidavits, and he appealed the judge's rulings at every chance, which bought him extra years in his home.

The mortgage company that filed the suit, then NationsBanc Mortgage Corp., had so much trouble with the case that four years into it they brought in lawyers from Jones Day. (Law Blog readers: Have any of you at other big firms handled a single-family-home foreclosure case?)

Here's the latest twist: An argument Mr. Davet made when the case was filed -- that NationsBanc couldn't bring the suit because it didn't legally own his mortgage -- is the same red-hot legal theory now being embraced by judges and regulators in Ohio and elsewhere to help give homeowners a chance against foreclosure.

Relying on these recent rulings, Davet has made a plea to the Sixth Circuit.

Law Blog readers, check out the story, and tell us your take. Is this all about a legal system at work, or not working?

Open Thread the Pros and Perils of Pro Se

2007-12-30T21:43:00.001+01:00

irst, there was the Journal's page-one story today, and Law Blog readers' excellent comments, about the Ohio fellow who staved off foreclosure for 11 years.

Now, a pro se tale from neighboring Indiana.

Laura and Scott Bell didn't like their children's school district's dress-code policy. So they sued the school in Indiana state court, claiming violations of their guarantee of a free education and their children's rights to free expression. To save money, they represented themselves. The school district had the case removed to federal court in Indianapolis, where the judge granted the school's motion to dismiss the case and ruled that the Bells had to pay the school's attorney fees -- $40,931.50.

"What in the hell are we supposed to do?" Laura Bell asked, according to a report in the Indianapolis Star. "It's flat ridiculous." Later, she answers her own question: "I'm not paying it, obviously."

Here's the story (Hat Tip: How Appealing). And here is the judge's order dismissing the case and the attorney's fees ruling, courtesy of the Indiana Law Blog.

"The court even gave them guidance on how to focus on the proper issues before the court," wrote the judge. "Plaintiffs were advised on more than one occasion that the losing party in this case may be required to pay the other side's costs, and even attorneys' fees." He added: "The court allowed them as pro se parties every latitude to pursue their claims, and encouraged them to obtain the assistance of counsel."

The Star story uses the Bells predicament to spotlight the risks of representing oneself in court. It says that more and more people are appearing pro se. Readers, here's a topic -- the pros and perils of pro se. Discuss.

Seventh Circuit Tosses $156 Million Award in Terrorist Suit

2007-12-30T21:42:00.002+01:00

Looking for some weighty weekend reading? Click here for a 102-page opinion handed down today by the Seventh Circuit. A split panel set aside a $156 million judgment awarded to parents of David Boim, a 17-year-old shot to death in Israel, allegedly by gunmen affiliated with the terrorist organization Hamas. (HT: How Appealing)

In Dec. 2004, federal magistrate judge Arlander Keys ordered three Islamic charities and a man accused of raising money for Hamas to pay $156 million to the Boims. Judge Keys had tripled the $52 million jury award. The Boims had brought suit under the Antiterrorism Act of 1990, which allows any American who is a victim of terrorism abroad to collect damages in United States courts. The Boims are represented by Richard Hoffman of Wildman Harrold.

The Seventh Circuit said that Boim's parents did not show a link between the contributions to Hamas and their son's death, ruling that the trial court erred in granting the plaintiffs' summary judgment motion and sent the case back down. Here's the rather dramatic money quote from the majority ruling by Judge Ilana Diamond Rovner:

Belief, assumption, and speculation are no substitutes for evidence in a court of law. However the plaintiffs might establish a line of proof connecting the defendants with the murder of David Boim, the law demands that they demonstrate such a nexus before any defendant may be held liable for David's death. We must resist the temptation to gloss over error, admit spurious evidence, and assume facts not adequately proved simply to side with the face of innocence and against the face of terrorism. Our endeavor to adhere to the dictates of law that this great nation has embodied since its founding must persevere, no matter how great our desire to hold someone accountable for the unspeakably evil acts that ended David

Tom Goldsteins Supreme iPhone YouTube Video

2007-12-30T21:42:00.001+01:00

Back in March 2006, the Law Blog called the rise of Tom Goldstein "one of the more improbable stories in the recent history of Supreme Court advocacy." Goldstein seemingly came out of nowhere to become a player at One First Street NE. At his own firm he argued more than a more than a dozen cases in front of the high court. He also founded SCOTUSblog, an essential online Supreme Court resource. In May 2006, Akin Gump recruited Goldstein to co-head the firm's Supreme Court practice.

YouTube Video Of the Day: Now Goldstein has put together an entertaining video demonstrating his wicked-cool iPhone and, at the same time, his obsession with all things Supreme. Click here and enjoy.

DECLARATIONS

2007-12-30T21:39:00.000+01:00

Be Reasonable
By PEGGY NOONAN

By next week politically active Iowans will have met and tallied their votes. Their decision this year will have a huge impact on the 2008 election, and a decisive impact on various candidacies. Some will be done in. Some will be made. Some will land just right or wrong and wake up the next day to read raves or obits. A week after that, New Hampshire. The endless campaign is in fact nearing its climax.

But all eyes are on Iowa. Iowans bear a heck of a lot of responsibility this year, the first time since 1952 when there is no incumbent president or vice president in the race. All of it is wide open.

Iowa can make Obama real. It can make Hillary yesterday. It can make Huckabee a phenom and not a flash, McCain the future and not the past. Moments like this happen in history. They're the reason we get up in the morning. "What happened?" "Who won?"

This is my 2008 slogan: Reasonable Person for President. That is my hope, what I ask Iowa to produce, and I claim here to speak for thousands, millions. We are grown-ups, we know our country needs greatness, but we do not expect it and will settle at the moment for good. We just want a reasonable person. We would like a candidate who does not appear to be obviously insane. We'd like knowledge, judgment, a prudent understanding of the world and of the ways and histories of the men and women in it.

Here are two reasonables: Joe Biden and Chris Dodd. They have been United States senators for a combined 62 years. They've read a raw threat file or two. They have experience, sophistication, the long view. They know how it works. No one will have to explain it to them.

Mitt Romney? Yes. Characterological cheerfulness, personal stability and a good brain would be handy to have around. He hasn't made himself wealthy by seeing the world through a romantic mist. He has a sophisticated understanding of the challenges we face in the global economy. I personally am not made anxious by his flip-flopping on big issues because everyone in politics gets to change his mind once. That is, you can be pro-life and then pro-choice but you can't go back to pro-life again, because if you do you'll look like a flake. The positions Mr. Romney espouses now are the positions he will stick with. He has no choice.

John McCain? Yes. Remember when he was the wild man in 2000? For Republicans on the ground he was a little outré, if Republicans on the ground said "outré," as opposed to the more direct "nut job." George W. Bush, then, was the moderate, more even-toned candidate. Times change. Mr. McCain is an experienced, personally heroic, seasoned, blunt-eyed, irascible American character. He makes me proud. He makes everyone proud.

Barack Obama? Yes, I think so. He has earned the attention of the country with a classy campaign, with a disciplined and dignified staff, and with passionate supporters such as JFK hand Ted Sorensen, who has told me he sees in Obama's mind and temperament the kind of gifts Kennedy displayed during the Cuban missile crisis. Mr. Obama is thoughtful, and it would be a pleasure to have a president who is highly literate and a writer of books.

Is he experienced enough? No. He's not old enough either. Men in their 40s love drama too much. Young politicians on fire over this issue or that tend to see politics as a stage on which they can act out their greatness. And we don't need more theatrics, more comedies or tragedies. But Mr. Obama doesn't seem on fire. He seems like a calm liberal with a certain moderating ambivalence. The great plus of his candidacy: More than anyone else he turns the page. If he rises he is something new in history, good or bad, and a new era begins.

Hillary Clinton? No, not reasonable. I concede her sturdy mind, deep sophistication, and seriousness of intent. I see her as a triangulator like her husband, not a radical but a maneuverer in the direction of a vague, half-forgotten but always remembered, leftism. It is also true that she has a command-and-control mentality, an urgent, insistent and grating sense of destiny, and she appears to believe that any act that benefits Clintons is a virtuous act, because Clintons are good and deserve to be benefited.

But this is not, actually, my central problem with her candidacy. My central problem is that the next American president will very likely face another big bad thing, a terrible day, or days, and in that time it will be crucial -- crucial -- that our nation be led by a man or woman who can be, at least for the moment and at least in general, trusted. Mrs. Clinton is the most dramatically polarizing, the most instinctively distrusted, political figure of my lifetime. Yes, I include Nixon. Would she be able to speak the nation through the trauma? I do not think so. And if I am right, that simple fact would do as much damage to America as the terrible thing itself.

Duncan Hunter, Fred Thompson, and Bill Richardson are all reasonable -- mature, accomplished, nonradical. Mike Huckabee gets enough demerits to fall into my not-reasonable column. John Edwards is not reasonable. All the Democrats would raise taxes as president, but Mr. Edwards's populism is the worst of both worlds, both intemperate and insincere. Also we can't have a president who spent two minutes on YouTube staring in a mirror and poofing his hair. Really, we just can't.

I forgot Rudy Giuliani. That must say something. He is reasonable but not desirable. If he wins somewhere, I'll explain.

Because much of the drama is on the Democratic side, a thought on what might be said when they win or lose. If Mrs. Clinton wins, modesty is in order, with a graceful nod to Mr. Obama. If she loses -- well, the Clintons haven't lost an election since 1980. For a quarter century she's known only victory at the polls. Does she know how to lose? However she acts, whatever face she shows, it will be revealing. Humility would be a good strategy. In politics you have to prove you can take a punch. I just took one. (On second thought that's a bad idea. She might morph at the podium into Robert DeNiro in "Raging Bull" and ad-lib the taunt: You didn't knock me down Ray! I'm still standing!)

For Mr. Obama: a lot of America will be looking at him for the first time, and under the most favorable circumstances: as the winner of something. This is an opportunity to assert freshly what his victory means, and will mean, for America. This is a break with the past, a break with the tired old argument, a break with the idea of dynasty, the idea of the machine, the idea that there are forces in motion that cannot be resisted . . . But what is it besides a break from? What is it a step toward, an embrace of?

Good luck, Iowa. The eyes of the nation are upon you.

Bear Market

2007-12-30T21:38:00.000+01:00

Cold War classics for an age of a resurgent Russia.

BY ERNEST LEFEVER

1. "The Twenty Years' Crisis: 1919-1939" by E.H. Carr (Macmillan, 1939).

Published in 1939 just before Hitler invaded Poland, "The Twenty Years' Crisis: 1919-1939" was one of the first modern books on world politics in the classic tradition of Thucydides and Machiavelli. During the long weekend between the two world wars, says British scholar E.H. Carr (1892-1982), there was in the English-speaking world an almost "total neglect of the factor of power." Like Reinhold Niebuhr, whom he often quotes, Carr believes that a balance of power among states is the starting point in foreign policy but that morality is an essential consideration. Utopian "superstructures such as the League of Nations," he said, were not the answer. Carr's critics point to his early pro-Nazi stance and his muddled thinking about communist Russia. He once wrote that "the Russian Revolution gave me a sense of history" and it "turned me into a historian." That said, this book remains a seminal work on the realism that instructed U.S. and British Cold War statesmen.

2. "Darkness at Noon" by Arthur Koestler (Macmillan, 1941).

Born into a learned Jewish family in Budapest, Arthur Koestler (1905-83) was educated in pre-Nazi Germany. He became a Communist, served as a journalist in the Spanish Civil War and later visited the Soviet Union--experiences that led him to conclude that both fascism and Marxism were evil political religions. Fluent in five languages, he wrote the novel "Darkness at Noon," one of the 20th century's most stirring anticommunist works, in English. He said that his characters in "Darkness at Noon" were fictitious but that "their actions are real," a composite of Stalin's "so-called Moscow Trials" and its victims, several of whom he knew personally. This intimacy with real victims enabled Koestler to make vivid the torture, brainwashing and forced confessions of uncommitted crimes. With consummate skill he underscored the vital moral issues of the Cold War, indeed of the human drama.

3. "The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness" by Reinhold Niebuhr (Scribner, 1944).

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), born in St. Louis of German parents, was the best-known American moral philosopher of his time. Following his pioneering "Moral Man and Immoral Society" (1932) and his monumental "Nature and Destiny of Man" (1942), this slim volume, with its primer-like title, may seem like a trivial afterthought. But it is a profound analysis of man and history, and of democracy, then under siege by Hitler and Stalin. Calling his book "a vindication of democracy and a critique of its traditional defense," Niebuhr argues that "man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary."

4. "The Super-Powers" by William T.R. Fox (Harcourt, 1944).

William T.R. Fox (1912-88), a Yale scholar, is generally credited with coining the word "superpower" with the publication of this book. Writing even as World War II rages, he invokes classic concepts such as the balance of power to explain the dynamics of the coming postwar world. A morally sensitive realist, Fox castigates dreamers like the Federal Council of Churches executive who in 1942 declared bluntly that "alliances and balances of power . . . are destructive of world peace," and he disabused his readers of any thought that the nascent United Nations would be able to maintain peace and order.

5. "The True Believer" by Erich Hoffer (Harper & Row, 1951).

Six years after Hiroshima, as the Cold War was revving up, this slender volume by self-educated longshoreman Eric Hoffer (1902-83) came off the presses to immediate acclaim. In idiosyncratic prose, Hoffer offers his "thoughts on the nature of mass movements," from early Christianity to the rise of modern totalitarian states. He condemns with equal fervor Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia and Western intellectuals seduced by their own guilt-ridden longings for utopia. Throughout his days as a blue-collar worker, Hoffer said, he "read indiscriminately everything within reach," and he quotes just as freely, from the Bible, Milton, Dostoevsky, Tocqueville, Thomas a Kempis and Yeats. Hoffer, an unabashed American patriot, championed honesty, integrity and the work ethic.

Mr. Lefever, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is the author of "The Irony of Virtue: Ethics and American Power" (1998) and "America's Imperial Burden" (1999).

Iowa means more to the Democrats this year

2007-12-30T21:37:00.002+01:00

The first contest of the Presidential election season is finally upon us with Thursday's Iowa caucuses, and for our money it comes both too early and too late.

Iowa arrives too early this cycle in that it comes a full 10 months before the general election next November. We think the public was better served when the first primaries didn't begin until much later. In 1976, Ronald Reagan barely lost to President Ford in New Hampshire in February, but he was still able to make a contest of the nomination by winning the North Carolina primary in late March. That the Iowa home stretch is taking place this year when most families are preoccupied with the holidays is especially silly.

But Iowa comes late because the truncated nature of this primary season means the candidates have already been campaigning for more than a year. As Karl Rove wrote on these pages, both parties need to think about changing a nominating process that has turned into a two-year marathon yet could still yield nominees the public barely knows. There has to be a better way. Our own suggestion would be for primaries that began in the late spring and played out over three months, culminating in the nominating conventions close to Labor Day. Either that, or bring back the smoke-filled room.

This time we are nonetheless stuck with what we have, and at least Iowa will begin to cull the field. This year the state's caucuses seem especially important to the Democrats. Barack Obama and John Edwards need a victory to show they can challenge the Hillary Clinton juggernaut. Mr. Edwards has invested heavily in the state, and if his message of "two Americas" can't win amid the liberals who dominate Iowa's Democratic caucus-goers, it's not going to win anywhere.

With his recent rise in the polls, Mr. Obama has the new burden of higher expectations. Mrs. Clinton can afford to lose and fight on with her money and organization. As the upstart, Mr. Obama has to show he can put together enough of an organization to defeat her in Iowa and develop momentum to overtake Mrs. Clinton's lead in New Hampshire and beyond.

At least Mr. Obama has begun to challenge Mrs. Clinton on her central claim that her candidacy represents a return to the Age of Pericles, a k a the 1990s. The Clinton candidacy--everyone knows it is a her-and-his affair--is at its core an appeal to selective nostalgia. We are supposed to remember the lack of a hot war, not the "holiday from history" as al Qaeda gained strength. We are supposed to recall the late-1990s boom, not that it began only after the GOP took Congress and repudiated many Clinton policies.

And we are supposed to forget entirely about Travelgate, Whitewater, lost billing records, the Rose law firm, the Lippo Group, Johnny Chung, Harold Ickes, miraculous cattle-future winnings and lying under oath. So selective is our memory supposed to be that we are asked to credit Mrs. Clinton as a kind of co-President during her husband's eight years, while her husband blocks public access to his Presidential records that might let us examine her actual contribution.

Mr. Obama's agenda is conventionally liberal. But his personal charisma and message of uniting the country seem to fit the public desire for change better than does Mrs. Clinton's transparent triangulation. He has nonetheless been reluctant to tell Democrats openly about the electoral risks they are taking if they nominate Mrs. Clinton. This week he began to sound those notes, but if he loses we suspect it will be because he feared taking on the Clinton legacy as forthrightly as the moment demands.

As for the Republicans, Iowa may do little more than knock out the minor players. The rise of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee as the favorite of many social conservatives has complicated Mitt Romney's strategy of betting on early state victories to catapult him into the lead elsewhere. A second place finish would be a blow to Mr. Romney, who spent heavily in the state trying to prove he's a social conservative and tough on immigration. Mr. Huckabee's campaign of one-liners and religious symbolism has worked in the caucus state but may not in other parts of the country. He remains, if we can put it this way, a leap of faith for GOP voters who still know little about him.

Iowa is also Fred Thompson's chance for a breakthrough. The former Senator has many good ideas but has only recently shown the energy that voters expect in a candidate for the nation's highest office. Both John McCain and Rudy Giuliani have downplayed Iowa, so their first big tests will come in New Hampshire and South Carolina.

Among the striking facts about the Presidential race so far is how little ideas seem to have mattered. The debate in both parties has been more about biography, resume and records than about what the candidates want to accomplish if elected. This may change as the campaign unfolds--and we hope the contest continues long enough so that the voters have more than a news cycle or two to assess these potential Presidents.

A Voice for Freedom

2007-12-30T21:37:00.001+01:00

U.S.-backed broadcasts remain the ultimate in "soft power."

BY MATTHEW KAMINSKI

PRAGUE--Can radio change the world? It used to. On the walls at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty here hang pictures of Solidarity rallies in Poland and a smiling Vaclav Havel. The message isn't subtle, or inaccurate: This legendary U.S.-funded broadcaster helped win the Cold War.

The glory days are past at RFE/RL, and for American public diplomacy as a whole. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, when history ended and freedom triumphed (or so it seemed), Munich-based RFE/RL landed on the chopping block. It was saved, on a threadbare budget, partly thanks to then Czech President Havel. In gratitude, he offered cheaper digs in a communist-era eyesore here in Prague that previously housed the Czechoslovak Parliament. Yet in the public mind, the station founded in 1950 by the likes of George Kennan and John Foster Dulles might as well be gone.

"We're trying to revive it," says Jeffrey Gedmin, the broadcaster's new president. Doing that, and making the station a valued tool of U.S. foreign policy again, won't be easy.

The neoconservative expert on Germany, and longtime denizen of Washington's think-tank world, makes an energetic pitch. In his nine months in office, Mr. Gedmin has told anyone who'll listen that government-funded, robust "surrogate broadcasting"--a stand-in where the real thing is missing--matters as much as ever. "Massive evidence suggests that it irritates authoritarian regimes, inspires democrats, and creates greater space for civil society," he says.

The mission at RFE/RL, a pioneer in U.S. international public broadcasting, didn't end in 1989. It merely moved further east and south. (The Europe in its name is an anachronism; the original Central European stations were shuttered years ago.)

RFE/RL broadcasts in 28 languages to some of the highest-priority and most difficult countries for U.S. foreign policy today. It's the most popular station in Afghanistan (with a 67% market share in a country where radio is the main source of information), and one of the last free broadcast outlets in Russia, Central Asia and Belarus, and the American voice in Persian in Iran.

But there are several strikes against them. The first is the new "media rich" environment. With so much competition from the Internet, podcasts, widespread satellite television and radio--none of which existed in Cold War days--the surrogate stations, such as RFE/RL, Radio Free Asia or Radio Marti for Cuba, are struggling to hold on to listeners and influence, along with the rest of old media.

In addition, the "surrogates" suffer from an existential crisis of their own. The nine-person Broadcast Board of Governors, the federal agency responsible for all government-supported international stations, is bipartisan, but deeply politicized and with a reputation for micromanagement. Recent years saw the division blurred between surrogate (epitomized by RFE/RL's stations) and traditional public diplomacy broadcasting that had been the preserve of the Voice of America, which as the name suggests is tasked with explaining U.S. policies to the world.

The board experimented with different approaches, pushing a commercial radio model on the stations intended to win young listeners with music and playing down the old staple of serious programming about politics, the economy and culture. Old timers were aghast. "The war of ideas has been demoted to the battle of the bands," noted one participant at a McCormick Tribune Conference earlier this year on the future of U.S. international broadcasting.

The quality and professionalism of the stations have come under attack as well, most notably at Radio Farda, the Iranian service, until recently run jointly by RFE/RL and Voice of America. Alhurra, the television broadcaster to the Arabic-speaking world, got into political trouble earlier this year for airing interviews with terrorists. Its director resigned.

The final strike is structural. Government-run agencies tend to be bureaucratic and inertia-bound; in other words, wholly ill-suited for the fast-paced media world. Marc Ginsberg, an Arabic-speaking former U.S. ambassador, says "public diplomacy needs to evolve" and tap the best of America's private sector expertise in Hollywood or on Madison Avenue.

Mr. Ginsberg co-founded a nonprofit television production company, Layalina, which makes shows that are then sold to Arab-language networks in the Middle East. Its "On the Road in America," which followed four Arabs on a 10-week trip across the U.S., was one of the most popular shows in the Arab world this year.

Mr. Gedmin, 49, spent a chunk of his career at the American Enterprise Institute and then ran the Aspen Institute Berlin before taking his current job in Prague. He agrees with a lot of this criticism. Early on he shuffled personnel and pushed RFE/RL back toward its original "surrogate radio" role with the caveat, he says, that when appropriate, the stations shouldn't shy from trying to explain America to a world so rich with anti-Americanism.

"Our mission is news," he says. "It's not psy-ops, it's not U.S.-G [government] line, it's news. But we tell [local staff] two things. It has got to have a purpose--to be promoting democratic values and institutions. We also tell them to shoot straight. It's indispensable for credibility in our markets. The moment that any country like Iran thinks that we are a front for the Bush administration or for U.S. policy we will lose credibility."

He acknowledges some people in the U.S. won't like it. Aware of the political damage done by Alhurra to the reputation of U.S. international broadcasting, Mr. Gedmin quickly adds that anti-Americanism isn't tolerated and dares anyone to provide proof of it at his shop. But émigré-run stations are prone to factionalism and to broadcast what sometimes sounds strange to American ears.

"You've got to create space to let them find their own voice to talk to their own people," Mr. Gedmin says. "It is not my voice. My voice doesn't translate well into Persian."

Radio Farda is the priority fix. He wrested full control over the station from Voice of America upon taking office, and put in new Iranian management. Next he looked at the programming.

"The editorial content was very weak, and very underwhelming, and in some cases just downright misguided," Mr. Gedmin says. "When I came they thought, 'Oh my gosh, Washington, Bush, neocon.' All I did was I sat down with them day after day and said, 'What kind of groups do you want to reach inside Iran?' And they said, 'Labor, students, women--a political class open to political change.' And I said, 'Do we do that?' 'Not really,' they said. 'Ok, so what are the issues [they care about]?' I asked." The response: "Economy, corruption are very big. Human rights."

Radio Farda has moved to push these different kinds of stories more forcefully. Its news and commentary is now supposed to be geared at an elite audience.

There as elsewhere, the idea behind surrogate broadcasting is to inform as well as to start a conversation and encourage critical thinking inside those countries by injecting independent news and ideas unavailable in the local media. Mr. Gedmin cites the coverage of fuel rationing this summer in Iran, which the state-run broadcasters avoided.

"We sent reporters to gas stations who went up to people who said, 'I've been waiting for five hours in my car and this government is giving my money to Hezbollah. I'm furious.' We put it on the Web site, we put it on the radio. We had about three hundred calls."

Mehdi Khalaji, a former Farda staffer now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who put out a critical report about the station just before Mr. Gedmin took over, says quality control and training remain a problem. "[Mr. Gedmin] needs to hire impartial journalists to monitor Radio Farda," he says. Mr. Gedmin says attracting top journalists to Prague, and on contracts paid in the sinking U.S. dollar, is a challenge. But he says the station is now on the right track.

Most of the region covered by Prague-based stations is on the wrong track, marked by rising authoritarianism (and anti-Americanism), particularly in Russia. Prague has, reprising the role played by Munich, become one meeting point for people interested in championing the free press and democracy in Russia, the Caucasus, Iran and Central Asia.

In October, the station marked the one year anniversary of the assassination of Russia's best-known journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, with a large conference. A small research team, though a shadow of its Cold War self, looks at media and political trends in its new region. It's probably too small. The McCormick Tribune report notes "substantial analytical research capability" is a "prerequisite for fully effective 'surrogate' broadcasting."

Mr. Gedmin says the radio needs to push further into cell phone texting, podcasts and other new technology to deliver its programming. He hired a new editor for its dowdy Internet site.

With the crackdown on independent voices in Vladimir Putin's Russia, the Russian-language Radio Liberty will have to find new ways to broadcast radio, television and written news and analysis into the country through the Web. "The Russians are kicking us off the air," Mr. Gedmin says. "Pretty soon we're going to have to go to an Internet strategy. If we get it right, it could be the refuge for liberal thought in Russia."

It's effect is hard to gauge and a source of dispute--in the target countries and in budget battles on Capitol Hill. Radio Farda is listened to by about 13.5% of the radio audience, according to telephone surveys. For all 28 services, the average is 10%. "We care about audience size," Mr. Gedmin says. "Never misunderstand me. But you can't measure our success by audience size alone."

As far as its importance goes, Mr. Gedmin cites all the efforts made by governments to jam the radio signal, block the Web site and publicly denounce RFE/RL. Its journalists, as others in repressive countries, take considerable risks to do their jobs. This year, two RFE/RL reporters have been killed and one kidnapped (and freed after two weeks) in Iraq, two went missing for several weeks in Turkmenistan, two fled Russia, one was detained in Iran for eight months, and two Afghans were threatened with beheading by the Taliban and one kidnapped.

A 26-year-old reporter for the Uzbek service was shot and killed in October in front of his office in Kyrgyzstan. He had told colleagues in Prague that he had been followed by Uzbek security.

Skeptics notice the early changes. "Jeff's the best thing to happen to RFE/RL in a decade," says Enders Wimbush, a vocal critic who headed Radio Liberty in 1987-93 and currently works at Washington's Hudson Institute.

Yet the outcome of Mr. Gedmin's battle to convince Congress that American taxpayers ought to pick up more of the tab won't be known for a while. Its budget, at $77 million this year, is down from $230 million in 1995, when the U.S. cashed the "peace dividend." None of Mr. Gedmin's successors managed to get Capitol Hill to commit any new resources in 12 years.

How to put American public diplomacy in support of democracy back in high gear is an immediate challenge, no matter who ends up living in the White House. Mr. Gedmin wants to get international surrogate broadcasters back into the discussion. "At a time when everybody is arguing 'soft power' is so important, this kind of broadcast is the ultimate in soft power," he says. "It costs peanuts. And it has a measurable impact of success."

Mr. Kaminski is editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe.

Memoirs of a Rolling Stone: It's all a blur, with a blind spot

2007-12-30T21:32:00.000+01:00

By Ira Robbins

Ronnie The Autobiography By Ronnie Wood Illustrated. 358 pages. $25.95. St. Martin's Press.

In his fourth decade as a Rolling Stone, Ron Wood is still "the new boy" - as close as anyone alive to the band's surviving core, but never an equal member. As he puts it in "Ronnie," his entertaining memoir of a career divided between rocking and painting, he is the "little brother" and "sparring partner" to Keith Richards, which leaves his insider's perspective something of an outsider's tale. He's up there all right, a jolly passenger on the Stones' superstar ride, but he never conveys a substantial sense of steering the ship, or even of being certain where it's headed.

In the generous and sincere tone of a speechmaker at a retirement party, Wood recounts the earning and spending of several fortunes, copious cocaine and alcohol intake, women he's loved, the great musicians and celebrities he's known and farcical scrapes with the law, drug dealers and other nefarious businessmen - none of which he takes too seriously. But what could have been the saddening diary of a dissolute scoundrel finds its charm in his unabashed enthusiasms for his second wife, Jo; snooker; thoroughbreds; the television show "CSI"; and Ireland. The balance of mischief and decency seesaws comfortably until the coda, which lards on the happily-ever-after clichés in praise of sobriety, art and family.

Wood writes extensively about the rigors and comforts of touring, and describes the characters and conflicts of other Stones, but doesn't say much about the music. He runs quickly through prior parts of his rock career, with Rod Stewart in the Jeff Beck Group and the Faces, where he had a much stronger creative voice than in the Stones; his solo albums are ticked off like signposts on a road. Evincing at least as much pride in his artwork as in his music, Wood includes 30 of his own illustrations along with handwritten epigrams.

The stories here are amusing, with some minor revelations. Wood boasts of a fling with George Harrison's wife Pattie Boyd before she ran off with Eric Clapton. He once emptied Tony Curtis's wine cellar, has had to remind Mick Jagger and Richards how to play songs they wrote, and was first considered for membership in the Stones in 1969. In a dubious recollection that contradicts the historical record, Wood says he was asked to join Led Zeppelin before Jimmy Page. (Page instigated the band's creation.) Otherwise, considering the understandably blurred memories of his lengthy fast-lane life, Wood seems to have a detailed and realistic grip on names, events and places. There is one serious omission - the death of his first wife - and a few misapprehensions and typos, but the story feels truthful and carefully observed.

Like any good memoirist, Wood is shamelessly honest and devoted to his own irresponsibility. And like any good addict, he has a huge blind spot.

If alcohol has had a "tricky role" in his life, then the Stones are a promising little combo.

Explaining that he thought about cleaning up for a Stones tour in the early 1980s, he writes, "I knew it was dope and drink messing me up and clouding my judgment. . . I'm not sure at that point I even wanted to stop"; he then pivots into a story about stealing cocaine from a dealer sleeping in his house. Much farther down the road, without having mentioned any grave concerns about his physical condition, Wood admits that he "came close to being left out" of a Stones tour in 2002 because of his drug and alcohol use.

Instead, he got sober (temporarily, as it happens). "Now I was taking the music seriously," he exults. Well, it's about bloody time, mate.

Ira Robbins, a music journalist and the editor of TrouserPress.com, is completing a novel about 1960s radicalism.

Boxer Haye to fight Maccarinelli in all-British bout

2007-12-30T21:31:00.002+01:00

LONDON (AFP) — An all-British title fight between Enzo Maccarinelli and David Haye has been confirmed for March 8, promoter Frank Warren announced on Friday.

The contest between WBO world champion Maccarinelli and newly crowned WBC/WBA world champion Haye will take place at a venue to be decided.

Maccarinelli last fought on the Joe Calzaghe-Mikkel Kessler undercard in November, stopping Mohamed Azzaoui in the fourth round.

"I'm delighted that Haye has finally put pen to paper and the fight is happening. There is nothing like a big fight between the top two British fighters in the division to get the public excited," said Maccarinelli.

"I believe that this will rival, if not better the Nigel Benn-Chris Eubank epics. We are both big punchers but I believe that I am the hardest hitter out of the two of us. Once I drop Haye he won't be getting up."

Haye had to get up from the canvas to sensationally stop Jean Marc Mormeck in the seventh round and claim the WBC and WBA titles in November.

Maccarinelli has stopped 21 of his 29 opponents with 16 coming inside the first three rounds, while Haye has halted 19 of his 21 opponents early with 14 inside the first three rounds.

Babcock adjusts family plans to accomodate All-Star inclusion

2007-12-30T21:31:00.001+01:00

Posted by George James Malik

Detroit Red Wings coach Mike Babcock suggested that he'd have to "be careful" in wording his approval of the fact that he's headed to the All-Star Game in Atlanta as the Western Conference's coach thanks to the Red Wings' tremendous first-half record. Babcock deflected praise to the Wings players, who've ensured that no team will match the Wings' record before the cut-off date on January 5th:

December 28, Detroit News: "What it means is, you coach good players that are professional and enjoy coming to the rink and find a way to win," said Babcock, passing the credit to the players. "You go there (the All-Star Game) but it's the team that has done it. You have to represent them over there."

Babcock was planning a skiing vacation at Boyne Mountain with his family that weekend. Now, they'll get together in Atlanta.

"We'll have a good time in Atlanta," Babcock said. "I don't know what we'll do but we'll do it together, I can tell you that."

All but 1 Beijing Olympics venues complete, 8 months before Games

2007-12-30T21:30:00.001+01:00

2 days ago

BEIJING - Most venues for the Beijing Olympics have been completed according to plan with the only outstanding project - the 91,000-seat National Stadium - scheduled to be finished by March, an official said Friday.

Construction for the Games that begin Aug. 8 have hummed along, with workers labouring around the clock. Unlike Athens in 2004, there will be no last-minute scramble to finish venues.

"This year, venue construction was under way according to plan. All the new venues were finished as scheduled by the end of the year," said Jiang Xiaoyu, spokesman and executive vice-president for the Beijing Games.

Though he did not give specifics, 36 of the 37 competition venues were to be finished by Dec. 31. The National Stadium, nicknamed the "Bird's Nest" because of its exterior lattice work of enormous twisted beams, was expected to be finished by March.

Next to the "Bird's Nest" is the "Watercube," the swimming venue that is covered by a translucent, blue-toned skin that makes it look like a cube of bubbles.

"As for the Water Cube, it has been completed. There is a test event next January and we are making preparations for the test event now. If there wasn't this event we might not fill the pool now, but because of the event of course we have to fill the pool," Jiang said.

Beijing is spending an estimated US$40 billion to modernize for the Olympics.

All is Fred and done, so let's move on

2007-12-30T21:28:00.002+01:00

Grantley Bernard

THE spirit and legend of Helbert Frederico Carreiro da Silva lives on. Make no mistake.

That is because the ghost of Fred, as the Brazilian attacking midfielder is better known, has hovered over Melbourne Victory throughout its poor A-League season and not many, especially fans and critics, have been prepared to exorcise it.

Such is the power of that lingering ghost that it has spawned an imposter. A man purporting to be Fred's brother has been contacting the media and the club claiming Victory is going to sign him and that Melbourne erred badly in its negotiations with Fred.

Using the name Tiago, the man has been exposed as not even a relative of Fred, who has three younger brothers, none of whom live in Melbourne.

It is another outrageous example of the legend of Fred, which may have grown so large that his departure for DC United in the US Major League Soccer is considered the one and only reason for Victory's slump.

That Victory has gone from a premiership-championship double to fighting to avoid the wooden spoon is due to more than Fred not being in the navy blue shirt he wore for 20 of 24 games last season.

Those reasons have been well-documented, with injuries and suspensions major factors in Melbourne's struggle this year.

But was all that down to hard-running Fred and his four goals and nine assists, four of which were supplied to Archie Thompson during the 6-0 grand final thrashing of Adelaide United?

Can it simply be said that because Fred has gone, Thompson and fellow striker Danny Allsopp are nowhere near last season's combined 27 goals or that captain Kevin Muscat has not been as clinically effective in midfield?

What might be hurting Victory most is the perception it did not try hard enough to keep Fred -- that he was allowed to leave because club officials did not add a little extra cash to his contract.

If Fred was so eager to stay, as he publicly stated, why did he not take up the new offer that was put on the table in November and rejected in March?

The bottom line is, Fred thought that after his good season Victory would offer him an enormous contract to stay.

With the A-League's salary cap and Thompson as Victory's marquee player who is paid outside the cap, that was never going to happen.

So with DC United offering a deal said to be at least $350,000 per season plus a car and a house, it cannot have been too difficult a decision. Especially after Fred and his Brazil-based agent Marcio Bittencourt declined an offer from an A-League rival to make Fred its marquee player for 2008.

It is worth revisiting a post on the Victory internet forum from Bittencourt, which read in part: "I indicated to (Victory football operations manager) Gary Cole that the offer had to be higher and he worked hard to make the offer better, which he did, but unfortunately with A-league salary cap restrictions, they could not go higher.

"When an official proposal came finally from an American club and a Brazilian (first) division club, they were two to three times more than Victory.

"Fred is 28-years-old, and had to make a decision based on his future and his family's. It was too hard for him to refuse."

The memory of Fred carving up Adelaide United like a Christmas turkey in the grand final is one for all Victory fans to cherish.

Keep the memory, but it is time for the ghost of Fred to be released.

MCG it's all so simple for Symonds

2007-12-30T21:28:00.001+01:00

Ron Reed

THE MCG has learned to love Andrew Symonds - and he certainly likes it.

The dreadlocked one kept the crowd of 36,265 entertained for an hour and quarter yesterday, which was a more welcome contribution than might be discerned from the scorebook.

He made only 44, but on a day played out to a predictable script - Australia was always going to spend the day accumulating an unchallengeable lead, thus consigning the contest to an inevitable outcome - Symonds at least provided some light and shade.

There might have been an unspoken but satisfying sub-plot in the mix, too.

Certainly, Symonds' big bat seemed to say something very loudly when Harbhajan Singh entered the fray, his first delivery instantly disappearing into the Members' Stand.

Harbhajan had replaced skipper Anil Kumble, who had received the same rough treatment.

Harbhajan was one of the prime aggressors when the sledging was in full swing during the one-dayers in India recently, with Symonds returning fire freely.

The Queenslander was also on the receiving end of monkey taunts from the crowd, which has inspired an anti-racism crackdown at this match. You wouldn't want the job of policing this one.

The Herald Sun reported yesterday that some Indian fans were offended by chants of "show us your visa" and there was some surprise that nobody got thrown out, booked or banned because of it.

At the risk of under-estimating the problem, it will be a dismal day when something as harmless as that is deemed punishable.

Symonds probably didn't enjoy the Indian experience much but neither does he seem to be the type to let stuff like that get to him. He is a relaxed cricketer these days and it shows in his batting.

That's what happens, of course, once it becomes apparent that you've done the hard yards and proved to yourself and the sceptics - of which there were many, this column no exception -- that you can cut it in the big time.

For Symonds, the breakthrough came at the 'G against England last year when he made a powerful 156, much to his unconfined joy.

The previous year, with his fledgling career under even more pressure, he narrowly avoided the sack with an aggressive 72 and five wickets against South Africa.

Now he's an established player who even admits to captaincy aspirations and says his piece publicly in a newspaper column. Things have changed quickly and comprehensively.

Yesterday he looked perfectly at home on the Australian game's grandest stage, even if the gods were called on to lend a hand.

Well, if not the gods then at least Billy Bowden. Symonds was on eight when the flamboyant New Zealand umpire - are we right in thinking he has toned down the theatrics? - reprieved him with a no-ball call when paceman Zaheer Khan disturbed the stumps.

Another such call negated a good lbw shout from the same bowler.

Symonds responded with a classic cover-drive for four and then a perilous edge between wicketkeeper and slip, both to the boundary. His repertoire is nothing if not eclectic.

Khan finally got his man, but by then Symonds and Michael Clarke had added 82 and the last fragments of hope that the Indians could fight their way back into the contest had disappeared.

Khan's regular no-ball transgressions - 21 for the match - were profligate for a bowler of his experience, and helped create the distinct impression that India is in the trouble it is because it is simply less professional than the Australians.

It shows most clearly in its sub-standard ground fielding, which betrays a middle-aged weariness.

Australia has plenty of 30-somethings, too, but they work hard at it. The Indians apparently do not, perhaps because there is no coach cracking the whip. Recently appointed South African Gary Kirsten has plenty of work ahead.

One of the worst offenders yesterday was Yuvraj Singh, who is only 26, but appeared to be uninterested, perhaps even sulking after his petulant response to being given out for a duck the day before.

For all their star quality, the tourists can ill-afford to have anyone pulling less than their weight, but the reality is that only their two most accomplished players - Kumble and Sachin Tendulkar - have been able to take the game to the Australians.

The upshot is they are condemned to certain defeat, perhaps with a day to spare. That's great for Australian cricket, not nearly so alluring for the fans who have been hanging out for a competitive summer.

Love is all she needs to shine

2007-12-30T21:26:00.000+01:00

Lenny Ann Low

IF THERE IS one thing cabaret vixen Meow Meow will never tire of, it is love. Fresh, raw, old, lost, obsessive or dangerous, love fires her every waking moment. "Love is harsh, it is a battlefield," she says melodramatically.

Adorned with bejewelled tulle, white feathers and gold-and-pink satin, she is posing for photographs. Skip back 30 minutes and Meow, doing her make-up and adjusting her lithe figure into a long, slinky and shiny red dress backstage at the tiny Pilgrim Theatre on Pitt Street, is having trouble applying her crimson lipstick. "I'm finding it hard to concentrate, I'm getting all excited about love," she says.

Meow is only preparing to be photographed yet her vivacious and lippy demeanour is already a performance. Not once does she drop the vampy, comic, sexy and slightly deranged Eurotramp-chanteuse character that has cajoled and unnerved audiences in Berlin, New York, Shanghai, Paris, Sydney and every nook and cranny of the Famous Spiegeltent as it toured Edinburgh, Adelaide and Melbourne. The glamorously manic diva was personally selected by David Bowie for High Line, a New York festival he curated in May, which also featured Ricky Gervais, Laurie Anderson and Arcade Fire on its inaugural bill.

Any questions about who might lurk behind the velvet-voiced one are met with a delicate smile and a gracious warning. "I'm very lucky if there is someone behind me," she says, coating one eyelid in shimmering blue glitter. "And in front of me, I must say. I'm not that choosy these days. Desperate, some might say. So, yes, I'm afraid the person behind me should just move away, they might get kicked … " Meow fixes me with a sweet but steely gaze, " … hard."

She points down to her feet with a make-up brush. "You've seen, of course, my beautiful Givenchy shoes?"

One long, fishnet-clad leg is swung up to reveal a weighty black high heel, its ankle buckle glimmering in the dressing room mirror's lights. "They were given to me by a fantastic man, known as Tsar Stefan, in New York. He called out during one of my shows, 'What is your shoe size?' and then I received these wonderful things. He's a great supporter of the arts and, certainly, he's supporting my legs very well."

Meow's brand of performance art has been likened to "a punk-cabaret artist and shambolic showgirl", "an iron fist in a velvet glove" and a "grade-schooler trapped in a woman's body". A recent collaborator, the original Hedwig of the musical Hedwig And The Angry Inch, filmmaker John Cameron Mitchell, described her as "a beautiful old Art Deco building that's just been condemned", a description that delights Meow.

Her extraordinary voice can move from a wailing blend of gravelly opera to velvety seduction and furious squeals, as if an angry and orgasmic dolphin is within. Songs by Jacques Brel, Bertolt Brecht, Dolly Parton, Kurt Weill along with Chinese courtesan tunes are up-ended with a wild, sensual and melodic vigour.

At High Line, Meow sang Bowie's Rock'n'Roll Suicide while screaming at crowd members to get out of her way, "I'm a professional", descending a staircase and crowd surfing to the stage where a chorus of children dressed as mini-Meows finished the song.

In Portland she blindfolded audience members and made them suck lollipops to the beat of burlesque tunes.

In the Famous Spiegeltent, as in most venues she steamrolls through, Meow conjured up and contorted 1920s Berlin by belting, screeching and growling old-time cabaret tunes in Chinese, German, Polish and French. Patrolling the mirror tent, with the crouched and crotchety air of a broken-down cabaret trouper, she ordered patrons to unzip her skin-tight trousers and jacket then straddled their grouped shoulders - her legs, arms and groin careening wildly - breaking into song and using other crowd members as microphone holder and sheet music stand.

"It is all about the voice but I will use whatever gymnastic means I can, be that vocal chords or inner-thigh muscles, to get some kind of reaction," Meow says.

There is a sincere purpose behind Meow's turbulent and extreme deconstruction of traditional cabaret. She is passionate about live music and theatre, about the old songs and their role and importance in the world.

"I would be completely indulgent if I thought I could change the world through theatre," she says. "But I do think I can hit a couple of people over the head with my ideas and also make people laugh. And maybe end up with an extra pair of Givenchy shoes at the end."

Hearing this makes it easier to believe that beneath the one-liners and sequins and violently backcombed dark wig is Melissa Madden Gray, an Australian contemporary opera singer with blonde hair, a thesis in performance art and pornography, a law-fine arts degree and an extensive stage, film, music and multimedia repertoire. Madden Gray, who is from Melbourne, will feature alongside Susan Prior in Venus And Adonis, a Bell Shakespeare production, in 2008.

For now, however, she is irrefutably Meow Meow, readying to perform her new show, Insert The Name Of The Person You Love. The show is directed by Rodney Fisher and will be part of Sydney Festival 2008. Inspired by a magazine article about scientific research into the brain mechanics of falling in love, Meow will merge her famed kamikaze cabaret methods with a compendium of love experiments performed each night.

"I am always obsessed with heartbreak and love and, obviously, torch singers," Meow says. "Those songs are usually the most beautiful and applicable. Mixing that with the science of discovering that the place in the brain that has passionate love in it is the place of hunger and addiction, that's very interesting to me.

"This will be quite a serious piece in a way, not a concert but an intimate piece about love. So there are songs and fishnets and all of those things but it's half laboratory experiment as well."

Should audience members prepare to be guinea pigs in the name of love?

"It's a secret how we will do it but expect contact," she says. "I'd be lying if I said anything else. Although, with me I might just sit on the floor and cry. That's part of love, that's part of the beauty of the malleable concert format."

AC Milan All-Time Best XI

2007-12-30T21:25:00.000+01:00

With Calcio taking a two week break, Carlo Garganese takes the opportunity to pick the best all-time elevens from the top teams. The second in the series are AC Milan...

Lorenzo Buffon (1949-59) – Buffon made his debut at the age of just 20 and won four Scudetti during a decade with the Rossoneri. He played an important role in Milan’s first great team, a squad that included the Gre-No-Li Swedish trio. Buffon, who is related to the current Juventus and Italy No.1 Gianluigi Buffon, won 16 caps for the Italian national team.

Franco Baresi (1977-97) – Arguably the greatest ‘libero’ in the history of the game along with Franz Beckenbauer and Gaetano Scirea, Baresi (pictured above in the 1993 European Cup final) was voted as Italy’s Player of the 20th Century. Like Maldini, he was a one-club man, playing for Milan for his entire career. He won six Scudetti and three European Cups, and when he hung up his boots the Rossoneri retired his iconic No. 6 shirt. Also played 81 times for his country, captaining the Azzurri to a runner-up spot at USA 94’.

Karl-Heinz Schnellinger (1965-74) – Brilliant blonde-haired defender, who is perhaps most famous for scoring the last-minute equaliser in normal time for Germany in their 4-3 ‘match of the century’ semi-final defeat to Italy in the 1970 World Cup. In nine years at Milan he won one Scudetto, one European Cup, two Cup Winners’ Cups and three Coppa Italia’s.

Paolo Maldini (1984-) – One of the game’s all-time legends, Maldini has been playing at the top of European football for almost a quarter-of-a-century. He made his debut for the club in January 1985, and has since become the most capped player both in the history of the club and Serie A. Has won seven Scudetti and five European Cups among a host of honours, and is also the record appearance-maker for the Italian national team with 126 caps.

Nils Liedholm (1949-61) – Perhaps the most legendary of football anecdotes regards this great Swede. A magnificent passer of the ball, it is said that Liedholm went two seasons without misplacing a pass. When he finally did give the ball away he received a five-minute standing ovation from the San Siro crowd. Liedholm formed one third of Milan’s famous Gre-No-Li – the Swedish triumvirate that also included Gunnar Gren and Gunnar Nordahl. He won four Scudetti at the club and later coached them and Roma to the Serie A title.

Frank Rijkaard (1988-93) – A fantastic holding midfielder, who was just as world-class playing in defence, Rijkaard never received the recognition that his fellow Dutchman in the Milan team, Gullit and Van Basten got. He won two Scudetti and two European Cups with the Rossoneri, scoring the winner against Benfica in the 1990 final. Also had an eventful international career, winning Euro 88’, however he blotched his copybook by infamously spitting at Rudi Voller at Italia 90’.

Roberto Donadoni (1986-96 & 1997-99) – Over the years Italy have not been blessed with too many world-class wingers but Donadoni was certainly one of them. Milan beat Juventus to Donadoni’s signature in 1986 and over the next decade he won every major club honour in the game. A skilful and tricky wideman with brilliant technique, he also played 63 times for Italy, but is sadly most remembered for missing a crucial penalty in the semi-final shoot-out defeat to Argentina at Italia 90’.

Gianni Rivera (1960-79) – ‘The Golden Boy’ made his Serie A debut for hometown club Alessandria at the age of just 15. This prompted Milan to snap him up and in the next 19 years, he won three Scudetti and two European Cups among a host of other honours. His display in the 4-1 final victory over Ajax Amsterdam in 1969 is regarded as one of the best individual performances of all time. It led to him winning that year’s Ballon d’Or, however like another ‘Golden Boy’ of today, Alessandro Del Piero, he never had the same impact at international level.

Jose Altafini (1958-65) – Many regard Altafini as the greatest Brazilian to have ever played in Serie A. He scored 168 goals in 248 matches for the club and won trophies galore during his seven seasons. The forward’s most prized moment came in the 1963 European Cup final when he scored both goals as Milan came from behind to beat Eusebio’s Benfica 2-1 at Wembley. He later moved on to Napoli and Juventus, where he also enjoyed great success. Finally left Serie A at the age of nearly 38 after 18 years in the peninsula.

Marco Van Basten (1987-93) – One of the game’s most complete forwards, Van Basten was the final piece of the famous Dutch triad. He won the Ballon d’Or and the Scudetto three times respectively, the European Cup twice and scored 108 goals in 168 matches for the club. He was also a star for Holland, scoring a memorable goal in the final of Euro 88’. Retired at the age of 29 due to injury.

Gunnar Nordahl (1949-56) – With a quite incredible record of 210 goals in 257 games, Nordhal is not only the top goalscorer in Milan’s history, but also second highest in Serie A behind Silvio Piola. He finished Capocannonieri five times, won the Scudetti twice, while he also scored 33 goals in 43 games for the Swedish national team.

Formation: 3-4-3:

Buffon

Schnellinger Baresi Maldini

Rijkaard Liedholm

Donadoni

Rivera

Altafini Van Basten Nordahl

Carlo Garganese

The Injustice of it all

2007-12-30T21:24:00.000+01:00

The administration of justice has always been a source of simmering anger for the public and editorial writers alike.

In 2007, a number of high profile cases brought that anger to a roiling boil.

The deaths of Crystal Taman and Phil Haiart focused attention on a justice system many say favours the rights of offenders over victims.

Other cases highlighted below paint a sobering picture of a city seemingly aground in drugs and violence.

1. PLEA BARGAIN UPROAR

No other court story this year sparked more public anger than the case of former city cop Derek Harvey-Zenk, who was driving home after a night spent partying with fellow officers when he plowed into the back of Crystal Taman's car, killing her. A slipshod investigation into the February 2005 crash resulted in a controversial plea bargain that saw Harvey-Zenk agree to plead guilty to dangerous driving causing death in exchange for a conditional sentence. The public furor prompted the provincial government to announce it would hold a formal inquiry into the matter.

2. HEIST HAS LINKS TO TERRORISM

It had all the elements of a Hollywood thriller: Millions in stolen swag, an international rogues gallery with links to Middle Eastern terrorism, and a purloined Austrian gem. Winnipeg-born bank thief and swindler Gerald Blanchard was sentenced in November to eight years in prison after pleading guilty to a host of audacious crimes, including the theft of more than $500,000 from a city bank and possessing a historic gem stolen from an Austrian castle. At Blanchard's sentencing, it was revealed he worked for a mysterious London "boss" who used some of the illegal profits to fund terrorist activities in Iraq.

3. HELLUVA YEAR FOR HELLS ANGELS

Full-patch bikers Ian Grant and Jeff Peck received hefty jail sentences this year thanks to evidence from a police informant, while a trial is underway for former president Ernie Dew. It got worse for the Hells: a similar police sting netted the arrests this month of new president Dale Donovan and several associates.

4. HAIART MURDER CONFOUNDS

In November, Corey Spence was sentenced to life in prison for a murder that shone a spotlight on the city's violent drug world. Phil Haiart, 17, was walking near a McGee Street crack house in October 2005 when he was caught in the crossfire of a gang turf war. A jury convicted Spence of second-degree murder, finding that he had ordered another man to shoot at rival gangsters. The alleged shooter, Jeff Cansanay, was acquitted earlier in the year after Amyotte, Abdullah, and another witness, Jammal Jacob, refused to testify at his trial and Justice Morris Kaufman refused to accept their videotaped police statements as evidence. The Crown is appealing Cansanay's acquittal and Spence is appealing his conviction.

5. PILOT CONVICTED FOR FATAL CRASH

He was praised as a hero in the days following a dramatic plane crash on a busy Winnipeg street five years ago. But there was no talk of heroism in November when a judge convicted former Keystone Air pilot Mark Tayfel of one count of criminal negligence causing death, four counts of criminal negligence causing bodily harm and one count of dangerous operation of an aircraft in the 2002 crash. Tayfel, who now lives in Calgary, is still awaiting sentencing.

6. EX-SOLDIER CALLS SEX ASSAULT VICTIM AT HOME

A landmark case involving a former soldier acquitted of sexual assault after he argued he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder took a strange turn in November when the man was re-arrested for allegedly phoning the young victim's home. Roger Borsch, 35, is accused of breaching a court order he not contact the teenage victim and has been returned to custody. In September, the Manitoba Court of Appeal ordered a new trial after the Crown argued the sentencing judge erred in accepting the testimony of defence psychiatrists without evaluating the credibility of Borsch's claims.

7. A CHOICE OF LIFE OR DEATH

In a case still before the court, a judge is being asked to consider whether religious faith or medical ethics should guide a decision to withdraw an 84-year-old man from life support. Samuel Golubchuk, an Orthodox Jew, has been on life support at Grace Hospital since early November. Doctors say Golubchuk has only minimal brain activity and no hope of recovering. His family is fighting to keep him on life support, arguing it would be a sin to hasten his death.

8. MAN CONVICTED IN TOT'S DEATH

Veter an cops de scrib ed it as one of the most brutal cases of abuse they had ever seen. Sixteen-month-old baby Amelia was savagely assaulted and allowed to suffer for more than two days before she died in hospital. In November, her attacker, 24-year-old Alexandro Suazo, was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

9. CROWN ATTORNEYS THREATENED

A pair of high profile incidents brought home the dangers Crown attorneys can face putting away criminals. Convicted robber Patrick Noble threatened to kill a Crown attorney one day before her home was raided by violent thugs. Noble, 25, pleaded guilty in July to two counts of uttering threats and was sentenced to two more years in prison. A month later, police arrested another man after he allegedly disrupted a trial and followed a female Crown attorney home from work.

10. METIS LAND CLAIM TOSSED

In December, a judge dismissed a mammoth Metis land claim that threatened to put the provincial and federal governments on the hook for billions of dollars in compensation. The Manitoba Metis Federation-led lawsuit was seeking cash or compensation for 560,000 hectares of land it says Metis people were promised in the Manitoba Act of 1870.

PM calls all-party meet on Pak developments

2007-12-30T21:23:00.001+01:00

In the wake of Benazir Bhutto's assassination, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will hold a meeting with political leaders today to discuss the situation in Pakistan.

The all-party meeting is expected to assess the possible impact of the Pakistani developments on India.

The meeting comes a day after Leader of Opposition L K Advani called up the Prime Minister and sought an early meeting to discuss the "worrisome" developments.

Advani said "Talibanisation of Pakistan" is a threat to India's security, and the recent developments in that country needed to be deliberated upon.

During the telephonic conversation with Advani, Singh, who was in Goa, agreed to hold the meeting.

Lesson for all in Everett comeback

2007-12-30T21:22:00.000+01:00

I want to reference a story I have mentioned on the Bears' beat several times this season: Kevin Everett. The Bills tight end initially was paralyzed from the neck down after suffering a spinal cord injury in the Buffalo's season opener. Bears tight end Greg Olsen, a teammate of Everett's at the University of Miami, expressed how tragic it was to see his friend suffer such a devastating blow. Olsen's sadness turned to joy after learning Everett was up and walking again, returning to the Bills' locker room on Sunday. Everett's story should make us all appreciate life a little more.

In a disappointing season, the Bears still managed to show a flair for the dramatic. No game was more exhilarating than the 37-34 overtime triumph over the Broncos, a game that featured two jaw-dropping touchdown returns by Devin Hester. Visions of Hester leaping over ex-Bears punter Todd Sauerbrun still dance in my head.

My story that got the most reader response

Have to call it a three-way tie: Brian Griese being named the starter over Rex Grossman; Grossman regaining the job over Griese; and then Kyle Orton getting the call. Posting those stories on our Huddle Up blog generated plenty of responses that cannot be repeated in print.

Play of the year

Griese's 15-yard touchdown pass to Muhsin Muhammad to beat the Eagles. It's still unclear who was responsible for the play-calling, but that last-minute drive was memorable, regardless.

Best interviews

Alex Brown and Tommie Harris. When either player enters the locker room, media members swarm as if they were lining up for the pregame meal. Brown is likely to give the opposing team bulletin board material, and you never know when to take Harris seriously.

Garnett tops All-Star voting

2007-12-30T21:21:00.001+01:00

Celtics center Kevin Garnett is the leading vote-getter for the 2008 NBA All-Star Game with 1,186,690 votes.

Cavaliers star LeBron James, the leading vote-getter last year, had the second-highest total in the NBA with 1,005,733 votes. Guards Dwyane Wade of the Heat and Jason Kidd of the Nets, and Magic center Dwight Howard also were in position to start for the East in the Feb. 11 game in New Orleans.

Lakers guard Kobe Bryant was the leading Western Conference vote-getter with 941,716, followed by Rockets center Yao Ming (813,305) and Nuggets forward Carmelo Anthony (767,722).

Spurs forward Tim Duncan and Houston guard Tracy McGrady also were among the West leaders.

* McGrady will miss the Rockets' next two games to rest his ailing left knee. McGrady is the NBA's 10th leading scorer, averaging 22.8 points per game.

* Heat center Shaquille O'Neal and point guard Jason Williams were listed as day-to-day Thursday, after both had nagging injuries checked out by Miami team doctors. O'Neal got treatment on his achy hips. Tests performed on Williams' sore left knee did not reveal any major problems. ... Spurs guard Brent Barry will miss up to two weeks after tearing a muscle his left calf against the Bulls.

Donadoni Tells Domenech: You’re All Talk And No Action

2007-12-30T21:19:00.000+01:00

Azzurri boss Roberto Donadoni has finally hit back at French national coach Raymond Domenech after months of criticism.

Domenech is public enemy number one in the Italian peninsula after repeated outbursts against Calcio.

During this time Donadoni has always kept a dignified silence, however he has now chosen to finally hit back.

“Domenech is good with words, but probably not as good when it comes to playing. If he wants, one day we could play a game and see who wins,” said the former AC Milan star.

Domenech has been particularly critical of Italy’s defensive tactics, saying that they played for a draw against France back in September, and predicting that they would tie their crucial qualifier with Scotland last month, a match they eventually won 2-1.

“In Scotland we had the perfect approach. Abroad they like to say we are a defensive team, but we didn’t look like that in Glasgow,” he continued.

“It was great to reach the finals of Euro 2008, but now we need to forget about the qualifiers. We have no reason to complain about ending up in a difficult and complicated group with France, Holland and Romania.”

“We have shown we are a balanced team and will do our outmost to honour the Azzurri shirt.”

Donadoni was finally asked for any hints on who would be in his final 23-man squad for Austria and Switzerland.

“I will be following all the players in their games and then I will make my mind up. I just hope they won’t suffer any injuries,” he concluded.

Anthony Sormani

Crosby, Wings dominate All-Star voting

2007-12-30T21:17:00.000+01:00

Hockey
Penguins forward Sidney Crosby and the Detroit Red Wings are looking good as voting for the NHL All-Star Game winds down. The 20-year-old Crosby leads the league with 445,144 votes and Detroit is set to have three starters in the Jan. 27 game in Atlanta with balloting ending Wednesday. Crosby's total is more than twice as many as the next Eastern Conference forward, Vincent Lecavalier of Tampa Bay with 198,953. Red Wings defenseman Nicklas Lidstrom maintained his lead in the Western Conference with 420,436 votes, and teammates Henrik Zetterberg (291,952) and Pavel Datsyuk (262,619) were the conference leaders among forwards. Vancouver's Roberto Luongo leads all goaltenders with 228,583 votes. Martin Brodeur of New Jersey leads Eastern Conference goalies with 185,003 . . . Joe Sakic will undergo hernia surgery today, and the Colorado Avalanche captain will be out of action for up to three months. Sakic has been out since Nov. 30, missing 12 games . . . New York Islanders goalie Rick DiPietro has a sprained left knee, but might miss only one game . . . Tuukka Rask stopped 23 shots and Pascal Pelletier scored twice as the Providence Bruins downed the Albany River Rats, 3-1, at the Times Union Center to improve to 25-5-2 . . . Hayley Wickenheiser, who led Canada to the women's world hockey title, was voted her country's female athlete of the year by The Canadian Press. She is the first hockey player to capture the honor since its inception in 1933.
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* Conklin, Crosby help Pens top Sabres 2-0
* Hockey returns to outdoor roots to start New Year
* Gonchar finds net in overtime
* Flyers snap six-game skid with win over Leafs
* Comeau gets first goal as Isles top Pens
*

Continued...
Basketball
Marbury plans to return after holiday
Guard Stephon Marbury informed the Knicks he plans on returning to the team after the new year, the club announced. Spokesman Jonathan Supranowitz spoke with Marbury after Knicks coach Isiah Thomas said at practice that he did not know if Marbury would return to the team. Marbury has missed eight of the Knicks' last 12 games as he grieves the death of his father, Don. Earlier this season, Marbury left the team after a dispute with Thomas and was fined nearly $200,000 . . . Tracy McGrady will miss Houston's next two games to rest his ailing left knee. McGrady played a total of 50 minutes in Houston's last two games, a win in Chicago Dec. 22 and a loss to Detroit Dec. 23. An MRI performed Monday revealed swollen tendons in the knee but no structural damage. The Rockets play Memphis tonight and Toronto tomorrow . . . Spurs guard Brent Barry will miss up to two weeks after tearing a muscle in his left calf against Chicago Wednesday night . . . LSU senior forward Sylvia Fowles, the leading scorer (17.4 points per game) and rebounder (9.7) for the No. 8 Lady Tigers, will miss 2-4 weeks after undergoing arthroscopic surgery on her right knee.

Players unlikely to appear at hearing
Representative Christopher Shays, a member of a congressional panel probing the use of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs in baseball, said there is little to be gained by calling players to testify at hearings scheduled for next month. "If we went back to every player, we would have to do research every morning, noon, and night," said Shays, a Connecticut Republican. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has scheduled a Jan. 15 hearing featuring former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, author of the recent report linking more than 80 baseball players to the illegal use of performance-enhancing drugs . . . Free agent outfielder Darin Erstad signed a one-year contract worth $1 million plus incentives with the Houston Astros . . . The New York Yankees finalized a $3.75 million, one-year contract with LaTroy Hawkins, strengthening their weak middle relief with the veteran righthander. Hawkins, 35, was 2-5 with a 3.42 ERA last season for the Colorado Rockies . . . Catcher Miguel Olivo, the Florida Marlins' primary catcher the past two seasons, signed a one-year contract with the Kansas City Royals . . . Former major league player and longtime Atlanta Braves coach Jim Beauchamp died of leukemia. He was 68.
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Miscellany
Goolagong finishes long climb to No. 1
Evonne Goolagong finally made it to No. 1, although the honor was 30 years late in coming. The Australian tennis star was told by the WTA Tour that she should have been top-ranked for a two-week period in 1976. That was a stretch in which she was in the middle of winning six tournaments, including the Australian Open and the season-ending Virginia Slims Championship. But when some tournament records were transferred to a computer in 1976, all of Goolagong's points were not entered and she never received the top ranking, the WTA said. The WTA has amended its records, making Goolagong the 16th No. 1 player since the introduction of tour computer rankings in 1975. Two weeks ago, the 56-year-old Goolagong received a trophy from the WTA that is now displayed in her oceanside home. "I'm very proud of the achievement," Goolagong told the Associated Press. "I was on a roll for that stretch in 1976. It was a great surprise to hear after all these years." . . . The governing body of men's tennis confirmed that Italians Potito Starace and Daniele Bracciali bet on tennis matches, and the players had no excuse for not knowing this was a rules violation. Starace, ranked 31st, was suspended for six weeks and fined $30,000. Bracciali, ranked 258th, was banned for three months and fined $20,000. Both suspensions begin Monday . . . Sydney yacht Wild Oats XI became the first yacht in nearly 60 years to win the Sydney to Hobart race three times in a row. Wild Oats, skippered by Mark Richards, finished the 723-mile race today in 1 day 21 hours 24 minutes. British yacht City Index was expected to finish about 30 minutes behind.

Bhutto risked all for democracy

2007-12-30T21:11:00.000+01:00

With Benazir Bhutto's murder, Pakistan has yet another martyr for democracy. During a storied political career, including two stints as prime minister, Bhutto was a charismatic, courageous champion of rule-by-the-people who risked everything challenging generals and mullahs who felt they knew best. She embodied Pakistan's recent hope of breaking with military rule and countering the religious fanaticism that threatens to tear apart her fragile country.

Bhutto made history in 1988 as the Muslim world's first woman prime minister. She followed her late father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan's first popularly elected prime minister before Gen. Zia ul-Haq deposed him in 1977, then hanged him. She again won office in 1993.

"It's a passion for me, to save my country," she told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. She also wrote, presciently, that her patrician life reflected Pakistan's "turbulence, its tragedies and its triumphs."

Her assassination yesterday clouds Pakistan's future, deprives her Pakistan People's Party of an imperious and polarizing but forward-looking and able leader, even as it demoralizes progressives and destabilizes the nuclear-armed nation of 165 million.

Yet the attack in Rawalpindi that killed Bhutto and many others cannot legitimize another long night of military rule. However President Pervez Musharraf may seek to exploit the situation, Canada, the Commonwealth and the world must send a blunt message that the democratic transition must survive this attack, and continue.

Musharraf is utterly discredited, after having imposed an unjustified state of emergency Nov. 3 to secure his own re-election, firing the Supreme Court and jailing civil libertarians. Now the promised Jan. 8 election has been subverted. Bhutto's party is in disarray. And former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, who heads the Pakistan Muslim League, is threatening a boycott. Yet credible elections must be held once this trauma is past. Anything less would reward murderers.

Whatever the failings of Pakistan's corrupt, family-dominated, feudal political system, rule by junta has never been a good alternative. Pakistan's current turmoil proves it. For all his talk of "managed democracy," Musharraf has not reformed and strengthened politics, cleansed the army of extremists, suppressed terror or stabilized the country. The death of one woman has plunged the nation into crisis.

Some will reflexively turn to Musharraf and the army as guarantors of stability. But as news spread yesterday of Bhutto's death, protesters chanted "Dog, Musharraf, dog," and demanded he resign. For many, Sharif included, one-man rule is the problem, not the remedy.

Bhutto, in contrast, would have placed her faith in the people, civil institutions and the rule of law. After Pakistan's three days of national mourning are over, leaders of all the secular parties should press for the swift restoration of credible civilian rule through free and fair elections. That is the best way to honour a brave woman's memory, and serve the country she had a passion to save.

Washington's Gift

2007-12-24T18:53:00.000+01:00

By THOMAS FLEMING

There is a Christmas story at the birth of this country that very few Americans know. It involves a single act by George Washington -- his refusal to take absolute power -- that affirms our own deepest beliefs about self-government, and still has profound meaning in today's world. To appreciate its significance, however, we must revisit a dark period at the end of America's eight-year struggle for independence.

The story begins with Gen. Washington's arrival in Annapolis, Md., on Dec. 19, 1783. The country was finally at peace -- just a few weeks earlier the last British army on American soil had sailed out of New York harbor. But the previous eight months had been a time of terrible turmoil and anguish for Gen. Washington, outwardly always so composed. His army had been discharged and sent home, unpaid, by a bankrupt Congress -- without a victory parade or even a statement of thanks for their years of sacrifices and sufferings.

Instead, not a few congressmen and their allies in the press had waged a vitriolic smear campaign against the soldiers -- especially the officers, because they supposedly demanded too much money for back pay and pensions. Washington had done his utmost to persuade Congress to pay them, yet failed, in this failure losing the admiration of many of the younger officers. Some sneeringly called him "The Great Illustrissimo" -- a mocking reference to his world-wide fame. When he said farewell to his officers at Fraunces Tavern in New York early in December, he had wept at the sight of anger and resentment on many faces.

Congressman Alexander Hamilton, once Washington's most gifted aide, had told him in a morose letter that there was a "principle of hostility to an army" loose in the country and too many congressmen shared it. Bitterly, Hamilton added that he had "an indifferent opinion of the honesty" of the United States of America.

Soon Hamilton was spreading an even lower opinion of Congress. Its members had fled Philadelphia when a few hundred unpaid soldiers in the city's garrison surrounded the Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall), demanding back pay. Congressman Hamilton called the affair "weak and disgusting to the last degree" and soon resigned his seat.

The rest of the country agreed. There were hoots of derision and contempt for Congress in newspapers from Boston to Savannah. The politicians took refuge in the village of Princeton, N.J., where they rejected Washington's advice to fund a small postwar regular army, then wandered to Annapolis.

In Amsterdam, where brokers were trying to sell shares in an American loan negotiated by John Adams, sales plummeted. Even America's best friend in Europe, the Marquis de Lafayette, wondered aloud if the United States was about to collapse. A deeply discouraged Washington admitted he saw "one head turning into thirteen."

Was there anyone who could rescue the situation? Many people thought only George Washington could work this miracle.

Earlier in the year he had been urged to summarily dismiss Congress and rule as an uncrowned king, under the title of president. He emphatically refused to consider the idea. Now many people wondered if he might have changed his mind. At the very least he might appear before Congress and issue a scathing denunciation of their cowardly flight from Philadelphia and their ingratitude to his soldiers. That act would destroy whatever shreds of legitimacy the politicians had left.

At noon on Dec. 23, Washington and two aides walked from their hotel to the Annapolis State House, where Congress was sitting. Barely 20 delegates had bothered to show up.

The general and his aides took designated seats in the assembly chamber. The president of Congress, Thomas Mifflin of Pennsylvania, began the proceedings: "Sir, the United States in Congress assembled are prepared to receive your communications."

Mifflin had been one of the generals who attempted to humiliate Washington into resigning during the grim winter at Valley Forge. He had smeared Washington as a puffed-up egotist, denigrated his military ability, and used his wealth to persuade not a few congressmen to agree with him. A few months later, Mifflin was forced to quit the army after being accused of stealing millions as quartermaster general.

Addressing this scandal-tarred enemy, Washington drew a speech from his coat pocket and unfolded it with trembling hands. "Mr. President," he began in a low, strained voice. "The great events on which my resignation depended having at length taken place; I now have the honor of offering my sincere congratulations to Congress and of presenting myself before them to surrender into their hands the trust committed to me, and to claim the indulgence of retiring from the service of my country."

Washington went on to express his gratitude for the support of "my countrymen" and the "army in general." This reference to his soldiers ignited feelings so intense, he had to grip the speech with both hands to keep it steady. He continued: "I consider it an indispensable duty to close this last solemn act of my official life by commending the interests of our dearest country to the protection of Almighty God and those who have the superintendence of them [Congress] to his holy keeping."

For a long moment, Washington could not say another word. Tears streamed down his cheeks. The words touched a vein of religious faith in his inmost soul, born of battlefield experiences that had convinced him of the existence of a caring God who had protected him and his country again and again during the war. Without this faith he might never have been able to endure the frustrations and rage he had experienced in the previous eight months.

Washington then drew from his coat a parchment copy of his appointment as commander in chief. "Having now finished the work assigned me, I retire from the great theater of action and bidding farewell to this august body under whom I have long acted, I here offer my commission and take leave of all the employments of public life." Stepping forward, he handed the document to Mifflin.

This was -- is -- the most important moment in American history.

The man who could have dispersed this feckless Congress and obtained for himself and his soldiers rewards worthy of their courage was renouncing absolute power. By this visible, incontrovertible act, Washington did more to affirm America's government of the people than a thousand declarations by legislatures and treatises by philosophers.

Thomas Jefferson, author of the greatest of these declarations, witnessed this drama as a delegate from Virginia. Intuitively, he understood its historic dimension. "The moderation. . . . of a single character," he later wrote, "probably prevented this revolution from being closed, as most others have been, by a subversion of that liberty it was intended to establish."

In Europe, Washington's resignation restored America's battered prestige. It was reported with awe and amazement in newspapers from London to Vienna. The Connecticut painter John Trumbull, studying in England, wrote that it had earned the "astonishment and admiration of this part of the world."

Washington shook hands with each member of Congress and not a few of the spectators. Meanwhile, his aides were bringing their horses and baggage wagons from their hotel. They had left orders for everything to be packed and ready for an immediate departure.

The next day, after an overnight stop at a tavern, they rode at a steady pace toward Mount Vernon. Finally, as twilight shrouded the winter sky, the house came into view beside the Potomac River. Past bare trees and wintry fields the three horsemen trotted toward the white-pillared porch and the green shuttered windows, aglow with candlelight. Waiting for them at the door was Martha Washington and two grandchildren. It was Christmas eve. Ex-Gen. Washington -- and the United States of America -- had survived the perils of both war and peace.

Mr. Fleming is the author, most recently, of "The Perils of Peace: America's Struggle for Survival After Yorktown" (Collins, 2007).

In Hoc Anno Domini

2007-12-24T18:52:00.000+01:00

When Saul of Tarsus set out on his journey to Damascus the whole of the known world lay in bondage. There was one state, and it was Rome. There was one master for it all, and he was Tiberius Caesar.

Everywhere there was civil order, for the arm of the Roman law was long. Everywhere there was stability, in government and in society, for the centurions saw that it was so.

But everywhere there was something else, too. There was oppression -- for those who were not the friends of Tiberius Caesar. There was the tax gatherer to take the grain from the fields and the flax from the spindle to feed the legions or to fill the hungry treasury from which divine Caesar gave largess to the people. There was the impressor to find recruits for the circuses. There were executioners to quiet those whom the Emperor proscribed. What was a man for but to serve Caesar?

There was the persecution of men who dared think differently, who heard strange voices or read strange manuscripts. There was enslavement of men whose tribes came not from Rome, disdain for those who did not have the familiar visage. And most of all, there was everywhere a contempt for human life. What, to the strong, was one man more or less in a crowded world?

Then, of a sudden, there was a light in the world, and a man from Galilee saying, Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's.

And the voice from Galilee, which would defy Caesar, offered a new Kingdom in which each man could walk upright and bow to none but his God. Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. And he sent this gospel of the Kingdom of Man into the uttermost ends of the earth.

So the light came into the world and the men who lived in darkness were afraid, and they tried to lower a curtain so that man would still believe salvation lay with the leaders.

But it came to pass for a while in divers places that the truth did set man free, although the men of darkness were offended and they tried to put out the light. The voice said, Haste ye. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness come upon you, for he that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth.

Along the road to Damascus the light shone brightly. But afterward Paul of Tarsus, too, was sore afraid. He feared that other Caesars, other prophets, might one day persuade men that man was nothing save a servant unto them, that men might yield up their birthright from God for pottage and walk no more in freedom.

Then might it come to pass that darkness would settle again over the lands and there would be a burning of books and men would think only of what they should eat and what they should wear, and would give heed only to new Caesars and to false prophets. Then might it come to pass that men would not look upward to see even a winter's star in the East, and once more, there would be no light at all in the darkness.

And so Paul, the apostle of the Son of Man, spoke to his brethren, the Galatians, the words he would have us remember afterward in each of the years of his Lord:

Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.

This editorial was written in 1949 by the late Vermont Royster and has been published annually since.

Raising McCain

2007-12-24T18:47:00.000+01:00

Lieberman gives the nod, as Republicans take a second look. Plus can America survive the writers strike?

Paul Gigot: This week on "The Journal Editorial Report," he's crossing party lines to endorse John McCain for president. Sen. Joe Lieberman's here to tell us why. And with Rudy Giuliani slipping in the national polls, our panel takes a look at the wide-open Republican race. Plus, the Hollywood writers strike is looming large over the Oscars and Golden Globes. Will celebs cross the picket line to get their awards, and who stands to lose the most in the seven-week-old showdown? Our panel weighs in after the headlines.

Gigot: Welcome to "The Journal Editorial Report." I'm Paul Gigot.

The campaign of Republican presidential candidate John McCain is enjoying a resurgence of late, with two new polls putting him in second place in the all-important state of New Hampshire. With that primary less than three weeks away, he's gotten lots of positive buzz and a handful of new endorsements, including one from my guest this week. Independent Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman joins me now from Connecticut.

Senator, thanks for being here. Good to have you.

Lieberman: Good to be with you, Paul. Thank you.

Gigot: All right, so, you've endorsed John McCain. What response have you received from your fellow Democrats this week?

Lieberman: Oh, some puzzlement, some anger, I mean, a lot of phone calls. People were angry. But you know, to me, I know it's unusual for a Democrat, even an independent Democrat, to endorse a Republican, but there's too much as stake in this presidential election to let the choice be governed solely by what party you're in. And to me, John McCain is simply the best qualified to lead our country forward, so I wasn't going to stop from endorsing him because he happens to have an "R" after his name and I happen to have a "D"--or an "ID," as it were.

Gigot: One of the reasons you've cited is the fact that you think a President McCain could reach across the aisle and restore some bipartisanship to foreign policy. Why would he be able to do that better than, say, somebody like Sen. Obama, one of whose main themes is kind of get beyond this partisan divide and bring the country together?

Lieberman: Right. Look, there are two reasons, two main reasons, that I supported and am proud to support John McCain. One is his very strong record on national security. I think he understands the threat of Islamist extremism. He understands how to put together a principled, strong American foreign and defense policy. So I'm with him on all that.

The second reason is that he's had a record of working across party lines over a long period of time. John McCain is a proud Republican, but he has a restless desire to get things done, and he knows that, to do it, you've got to work across party lines. So more than any of the other candidates, I think he's got the proven record.

And look, with all respect to Sen. Obama, who is a friend of mine, I simply disagree with him on a lot of the positions he's taken on national security, with regard to Iraq, Iran, for instance. Whereas, I totally agree with John McCain, worked side-by-side with him, so I think he's got the ability from the--day one, to be a strong commander in chief who will bring us back, Paul, to where we used to be on foreign policy, which was that you had debates here at home, but then, as former senator Arthur Vandenberg famously said, politics ends at the water's edge because we've got common enemies.

Gigot: When Sen. McCain came in to see us at the Wall Street Journal last week, we asked him how he would explain the opposition from Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to the surge in Iraq and support for more funding. He attributed it to, quote, "a lack of patriotism," unquote. That's pretty tough. Do you agree with that?

Lieberman: Yeah, well, it is tough, and John's a straight talker. I'd say I agree with him in the sense that I'm afraid too many Democrats put both ideology and partisan interests ahead of the national interest, and so even after--it was one thing to say last year--earlier this year, let's say--that people were skeptical about whether we could win the war in Iraq. And then when Gen. Petraeus and the president came forward with the surge strategy, whether it would work. But now it is working, quite miraculously. And so for people to continue to say the war is lost and to fight to cut funding for our troops or set deadlines for withdrawal--to me, that's not having partisan politics end at the water's edge.

Gigot: Let me ask you a question about Iraq. Do you think that no matter who's president next year, Democrat or Republican, that there are going to be American troops, maybe tens of thousands of American troops, in Iraq for many years to come?

Lieberman: I believe so, and I suppose I'd say I think it's important to our security that that is so. Look, here's the good news. Because the surge in Iraq is working, we are now beginning to draw down over 20,000 troops from now until July. Gen. Petraeus is going to come back and speak to the Congress and the president in April. He'll tell us whether he thinks we can withdraw more in the rest of the year. That all has got to depend not on some arbitrary formula dictated by Congress but on conditions on the ground.

But no one thinks--unless you just want to give up on Iraq and let al Qaeda and Iran take it over--that all of our troops are going to be out of Iraq in 2009, and it was interesting in one of the Democratic debates, Sen. Clinton, Obama and Edwards, much to my surprise, all said if they were president, we would still have troops in Iraq in 2009.

Gigot: Let me ask you about another bit of news in the Middle East this week. Iran, where the Russians are supplying fuel, announced that they're going to supply nuclear fuel for what they say is a civilian nuclear plant at Bushehr. President Bush said he had no problem with that. Are you as sanguine as the president?

Lieberman: I'm not, and frankly, I think with all respect to the president, that he was putting a good face on this, because I think in the best of all worlds, particularly with all the evidence--the National Intelligence Estimate notwithstanding--that we have and that the international community has, that Iran is enriching nuclear fuel to get ready to build a bomb, that we don't want to encourage them in any way. And I think the Russian sale of this fuel does encourage them.

Look, it's great--not great--but it is better that apparently this fuel will be under the control of the International Atomic Energy Agency. But this is not a time when I'd give this fanatical anti-American extremist regime anything that takes them closer to having a nuclear weapon. So I regret what the Russians did.

Gigot: But it sounds like there's not much we can do about it. They're going to deliver it, and what else can the president do?

Lieberman: There's not much we can do about that right now. We can of course go forward and try to pass another sanctions program in the United Nations, which we I hope will do after the first of the year.

I'll tell you what else. I'm really glad that the secretary of state has designated the Iranian Guard Corps and the Quds Force there as terrorist organizations, now with the capacity to impose economic sanctions on them. I hope after the U.N. resolution, that the United States will use the legal powers we have to impose some economic sanctions, both on the Iranians and on some foreign companies that are doing business with them in a way that we think makes it easier for them to get nuclear weapons, which everyone here in American politics pretty much says we will not allow to happen.

So Iran is a menace under this regime. The Iranian people are not. Iran is in this fanatical regime, and we've got to do everything we can to both contain them, to support the reformers in Iran, and to stop them from getting nuclear weapons.

Gigot: All right, Sen. Joseph Lieberman. Thanks so much for being here.

Lieberman: Paul, great to be with you. Take care.

Gigot: Still ahead, Rudy Giuliani slips in the national polls and the Hucka-boom continues. With less than two weeks to Iowa, our panel handicaps the Republican race.

Gigot: With the nation's first primary contest less than two weeks away, the GOP race is wide open. Two new national polls show former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani losing significant ground with the so-called Hucka-boom taking a toll on the onetime front-runner.

Joining the panel this week, Wall Street Journal columnist and deputy editor Dan Henninger, editorial board members Dorothy Rabinowitz and Jason Riley and, in Washington, Steve Moore.

Dan, I have to say this Republican race is as wide open as any in my adult lifetime. Why hasn't any candidate been able to break from the pack?

Henninger: As you just noted, Paul, there's a feeling out there Rudy Giuliani's candidacy is in decline and others are rising. You know, I think we all in this business kind of flatter ourselves on the idea that this campaign's been running since January, and the conceit is the whole country is waiting with bated breath day-to-day to see. That's not the way it works. The Iowa caucus is Jan. 3. New Hampshire is just over that. Obviously what's going on is people are beginning to pay attention and focus. And they're starting to think about which candidate makes the most sense to them, and, as always, the pack is beginning to tighten.

Gigot: But what's the problem with the nature of this pack--these candidates, Jason, that nobody--there's no Ronald Reagan this time, there's no George W. Bush from 2000, somebody who is really the clear front-runner?

Riley: True. But at the same time I think you have to question Giuliani's strategy to some extent, which is basically to ignore Iowa and concentrate on states that were going to hold primaries in February. And it's backfired to some extent.

Henninger: Well, just to get back for a second to Paul's question. I think one of the problems, Paul, is that there's no really authentic Southern conservative or authentic conservative from California or the West. You know, George Allen of Virginia thought he was going to be that guy. We know what happened to him. Fred Thompson really hasn't caught fire. So as a result, you've got conservatives like Giuliani, who are economic and national security conservatives, but social-issue moderates. And so this has created a lot of confusion for the Republican base.

Gigot: Go ahead, Steve.

Moore: I was just going to say, to me the big story of how this has evolved is you've got two kind of frontrunners in Rudy Giuliani and Romney--the ones with the most money and name recognition. And if you look at the polls today, the two of them combined are only getting about a third of the Republican primary vote, and what that suggests to me is that there are a lot of doubts among Republican primary voters about what I call the big two. That's the reason you've got this Huckabee boom that you're talking about.

Gigot: Steve, why haven't they been able to make the sale?

Moore: Clearly, Rudy Giuliani is culturally too far to the left for Republican voters. He's from New York. Don't forget, all of you up in New York, a lot of the people around the rest of the country have a negative attitude towards New York.

Gigot: We never forget about that, Steve, OK?

Moore: And Romney, I just do think, has an authenticity issue.

The one other point I'd like to make, Paul, is that Democrats that I talk to--and Kim Strassel talked about this in her column--Democrats are salivating for Mike Huckabee, because they know he is the weakest candidate in the general election for the Republicans.

Gigot: Now, the Huckabee boom is explainable, in part, I think as a result of the social conservatives, particularly in Iowa. But there's something else that's happening here, Dorothy, and that is of late something of a resurgence--a mini-resurgence, at least--for John McCain, who a lot of people had written off. Is this real, and how do you explain it?

Rabinowitz: Yes, I think it's real, because underneath the surface all the time, not just now, people were daunted by the--uh, he's gone. There was a tremendously bad news over the summer about his campaign falling apart. But underneath it all, if you asked people, what do you think? Well, it was always McCain. In the end, when they thought about it, it was always he ranks better. He's the most likely to defeat the Democratic candidate; he's the one can you depend on for security reasons. And it has all come together now, magically but not surprisingly.

Gigot: Particularly, as Rudy Giuliani descends and he picks up some of the support from the former Giuliani supporters.

Riley: Right. He does, he does. And he will definitely benefit from Huckabee's surge in Iowa, that is McCain in New Hampshire. It'll take some wind out of Romney's sails.

But the other thing to remember about McCain is he matches up very well against the Democratic front-runners, not only Clinton, whom he matches up against much better than Romney or Giuliani, but also against Obama. He matches up much better against them in the general election than Romney and Giuliani.

Gigot: Steve, let me ask you a question about Fred Thompson, who was supposed to be the Southern conservative that Dan talked about. He has not gone anywhere so far. But is there's a chance here at the end, particularly if Huckabee deflates, that he could be the de facto landing place for some of these conservatives?

Moore: No, I think he has flatlined. And the other big story here has been that where Huckabee is right now, Paul, is where Fred Thompson should be. This is where a lot of us who are political prognosticators thought that Thompson would come in as the conservative and rush into first place. The difference between Huckabee and Fred Thompson is Huckabee has energy and charisma, and unfortunately, Thompson really falls flat with voters.

Gigot: All right, Steve, thank you.

Still ahead, would Letterman and Leno actually be funny with nobody to write their stuff? Well, we may be about to find out. When we come back, a look at the winners and losers in the seven-week-old showdown between Hollywood writers and the studios.

Gigot: If the jokes seem particularly bad at the upcoming Golden Globes and Oscars, blame the ongoing writers strike. The Writers Guild of America denied requests this week to let comedy writers prepare material for both of the annual award shows. The six-week-old strike is threatening to make attendance at the ceremonies scarce as well, with talk of picket lines sure to spook the union-friendly folks in Hollywood.

Dorothy, this fight is about downstream revenues for things like DVDs and new technology, I gather. Who has the upper hand, the studios or writers?

Rabinowitz: In my view, unequivocally the studios have. They have deep pockets. They have a chance now to renegotiate some very extensive contracts. Don't forget, NBC is owned by Westinghouse. These are people who can wait it out. There are writers who have been living for a long time as though they were in the dot-com era making scads of money, some making $10 million a year, and this is the opportunity. They are now going to face problems with the Directors Guild, which is about to set to negotiate separately. And they are not going to support the writers strike.

Somehow or other, the union has put itself in a terrible place. They are not going to win this, because the studios can wait. Now, can you say that they don't have scripts and they don't have--

Gigot: But I thought content was king here. Isn't that what we in the media have been telling ourselves for a long time?

Riley: But it doesn't mean they'll be out of content, first of all. They can negotiate contracts with international studios, for instance. They can bring in writers. They have other channels. As Dorothy said, these are big companies. I mean, Disney owns ABC. GE owns NBC. And these companies would like to see some more efficiencies in the business anyway, so they have an incentive to wait out the large contracts.

Moore: Yeah, but Jason--

Gigot: Hold it. Go ahead, Steve. Steve, you're for the working man.

Moore: I guess Jason and Dorothy aren't watching evening TV, because I am, and it's lousy stuff. I mean ,Dorothy, have you seen this new game show they've got on, "The Duel"? I mean, it's horrible stuff.

The people that I talk to in Hollywood, they're, on both sides, are getting nervous. I call this strike mutually assured destruction. And the one question really is, if these shows go on, like Letterman and Leno and the Oscars--you said are they going to be any less funny? I don't think they're funny right now. And the question is, if Leno and Letterman go on and they're pretty funny, a lot of people are going to wonder, Well, maybe we don't need these writers after all.

Henninger: But let's make one thing clear here. This is not about television, OK? This is about the Web. It's about new distribution channels. It's about cell phones. And no one yet understands how that economic model is going to work, because most people think what they get on the Web should basically be free.

Gigot: And the writers want a big guaranteed take on that? Is that what they want?

Henninger: They want a big guaranteed take. The question is what's the take? Where's it coming from? Nobody knows that yet.

Gigot: Nobody knows what it will be. What about the proliferation of reality TV, which is doing pretty well, it doesn't cost a lot of money? Can't the studios use that, not have to pay a lot of money for content, and ride this out.

Riley: Well, some can.

Rabinowitz: They are doing it.

Riley: FOX's No. 1 show is "American Idol." They're sort of strike-proof here.

Rabinowitz: They are strike-proof. But that started a long time before this writers strike. It was cheap stuff, and it didn't depend on the writers strike.

But the writers learned from the DVD experience, they were getting nothing. And this so enraged them that they have now been catapulted into this adversarial position because they think this world of technology's going to produce that.

Gigot: All right, Jason, briefly, are those actors and actresses going to cross the picket lines at these award shows to--they've got the glitz and the publicity. Will they have to give that up?

Riley: I think some will and some won't. I think they're going to wait and see who does. No one wants to go first, but someone will go first.

Gigot: Someone will cross it.

Moore: They're looking out for No. 1.

Gigot: OK, Steve. All right. Thanks.

We have to take one more break. When we come back, our "Hits and Misses" of the week.

Gigot: Winners and losers, picks and pans, "Hits and Misses." It's our way of calling attention to the best and the worst of the week.

Item one, Dan Henninger's about to get $25 richer. Congratulations, Dan.

Henninger: Thank you. This is a class-action settlement notice that I received in the mail last week, and I suspect a few of our viewers did too. Thirty million of them have been sent out. It involves a class-action settlement with Diner's Club, MasterCard and Visa, which came to $336 million. Now, it involves some surcharges on foreign transactions, but primarily what this says is that if you take the first easy option, you get a refund of $25.

Now, apparently a lot of people who've received this think it's a scam--that it's sort of like swampland sale in South Carolina, and they've been throwing it away. Well, maybe it is a scam, because the lawyers involved are going to get $86 million. Happy New Year.

Gigot: All right, Dan.

Next, a hit to the newest owner of the Magna Carta. Jason?

Riley: Yes, this is a big hit for David Rubenstein. I'm sure we all remember this from ninth-grade history class, but the Magna Carta, which dates to 1215, is one of the most important documents in the history of democracy. And there are only 17 copies in existence, and only one here in the United States. It came up for auction a few days ago, and Mr. Rubenstein, who made a fortune in private equity, went out and paid $21 million to make sure that it stays on display at the U.S. Archives in Washington. That was a very classy move.

Gigot: Yeah, it really is. Terrific.

Finally, the reality TV explosion. Dorothy?

Rabinowitz: Yes, well, how can I persuade you enough that this started long before any writers strike? So ask yourself, what happens when your relatives complain to you there's nothing to watch on television? You know what they're talking about? They're talking about network TV. And why? It's because of these reality shows, one worse than another.

And the worst aspect of them is that everybody is crying and sobbing on them relentlessly and at the drop of the hat. All of the contestants are doing this, whether they've lost 40 pounds or 140 pounds or gained it on this program. They are sobbing.

And I want to ask now, in all honesty, whether if people who are so worried--those political sages--about our place in the world, our profile to the world, why, instead of stopping the administration, don't they pause here first and think about this American image. Can this be the image of America projected around the globe? Can these be the people who will reassure our allies and make our enemies fearful? These sobbing masses? I doubt it.

Gigot: You know, if you keep this up, you're going to get an invitation to be on "Dancing With the Stars." They're going to insist on it.

Henninger: Can't wait.

Gigot: All right, thank you, Dorothy.

That's it for this week's edition of "The Journal Editorial Report." Thanks to my panel and to all of you for watching. I'm Paul Gigot. Merry Christmas. We hope to see you right here next week.

Whitewash

2007-12-24T18:46:00.000+01:00

The racist history the Democratic Party wants you to forget.

BY BRUCE BARTLETT

In his new book, "The Conscience of a Liberal," New York Times columnist Paul Krugman makes a strong case for his belief that the political success of the Republican Party and the conservative movement over the past 40 years has resulted largely from their co-optation of Southern racists that were the base of the Democratic Party until its embrace of civil rights in the 1960s. A key piece of evidence for Mr. Krugman is that Ronald Reagan gave his first speech after accepting the Republican presidential nomination in 1980 near Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. In the course of this speech, Reagan said he supported "states' rights." Mr. Krugman says this was code declaring his secret sympathy for Southern racism.

Others, including Mr. Krugman's Times colleague David Brooks and Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, have come to Reagan's defense, denying that he was a racist or had any racist intent in his 1980 speech. That's fine but unlikely to change the minds of those like Mr. Krugman who are determined to smear the Republican Party with the charge of racism, and who are adept at finding racist code words like "law and order" by Republicans that are completely convincing to liberals and Democrats in support of this accusation, even though they are invisible to those with no political ax to grind.

However, if a single mention of states' rights 27 years ago is sufficient to damn the Republican Party for racism ever afterwards, what about the 200-year record of prominent Democrats who didn't bother with code words? They were openly and explicitly for slavery before the Civil War, supported lynching and "Jim Crow" laws after the war, and regularly defended segregation and white supremacy throughout most of the 20th century.

Following are some quotes from prominent Democrats largely drawn from my new book, "Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party's Buried Past." Even with the exclusion of all quotes that contain the N-word, it is clear that many of the Democratic Party's most important historical figures have long made statements that reduce Reagan's alleged transgression to a drop in the ocean. If we are going to hold him and his party accountable for a single mention of states' rights, then the party of those listed below is far more culpable in promoting and defending racism.

Blacks "are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both of body and mind."

--Thomas Jefferson, 1787
Co-founder of the Democratic Party (along with Andrew Jackson)
President, 1801-09

"I hold that the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding states between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good--a positive good."

--Sen. John C. Calhoun (D., S.C.), 1837
Vice President, 1825-32
His statue stands in the U.S. Capitol.

If blacks were given the right to vote, that would "place every splay-footed, bandy-shanked, hump-backed, thick-lipped, flat-nosed, woolly-headed, ebon-colored Negro in the country upon an equality with the poor white man."

--Rep. Andrew Johnson, (D., Tenn.), 1844
President, 1865-69

"Resolved, That the Democratic Party will resist all attempts at renewing, in Congress or out of it, the agitation of the slavery question, under whatever shape or color the attempt may be made."

--Platform of the Democratic Party, 1852

Blacks are "a subordinate and inferior class of beings who had been subjugated by the dominant race."

--Chief Justice Roger Taney, Dred Scott v. Sandford, 1856
Appointed Attorney General by Andrew Jackson in 1831
Appointed Secretary of the Treasury by Andrew Jackson in 1833
Appointed to the Supreme Court by Andrew Jackson in 1836

"Resolved, That claiming fellowship with, and desiring the co-operation of all who regard the preservation of the Union under the Constitution as the paramount issue--and repudiating all sectional parties and platforms concerning domestic slavery, which seek to embroil the States and incite to treason and armed resistance to law in the Territories; and whose avowed purposes, if consummated, must end in civil war and disunion, the American Democracy recognize and adopt the principles contained in the organic laws establishing the Territories of Kansas and Nebraska as embodying the only sound and safe solution of the 'slavery question' upon which the great national idea of the people of this whole country can repose in its determined conservatism of the Union--NON-INTERFERENCE BY CONGRESS WITH SLAVERY IN STATE AND TERRITORY, OR IN THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA" (emphasis in original).

--Platform of the Democratic Party, 1856

"I hold that a Negro is not and never ought to be a citizen of the United States. I hold that this government was made on the white basis; made by the white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and should be administered by white men and none others."

--Sen. Stephen A. Douglas (D., Ill.), 1858
Presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, 1860

"Resolved, That the enactments of the State Legislatures to defeat the faithful execution of the Fugitive Slave Law, are hostile in character, subversive of the Constitution, and revolutionary in their effect."

--Platform of the Democratic Party, 1860

"The Almighty has fixed the distinction of the races; the Almighty has made the black man inferior, and, sir, by no legislation, by no military power, can you wipe out this distinction."

--Rep. Fernando Wood (D., N.Y.), 1865
Mayor of New York City, 1855-58, 1860-62

"My fellow citizens, I have said that the contest before us was one for the restoration of our government; it is also one for the restoration of our race. It is to prevent the people of our race from being exiled from their homes--exiled from the government which they formed and created for themselves and for their children, and to prevent them from being driven out of the country or trodden under foot by an inferior and barbarous race."

--Francis P. Blair Jr., accepting the Democratic nomination for Vice President, 1868
Democratic Senator from Missouri, 1869-72
His statue stands in the U.S. Capitol.

"Instead of restoring the Union, it [the Republican Party] has, so far as in its power, dissolved it, and subjected ten states, in time of profound peace, to military despotism and Negro supremacy."

--Platform of the Democratic Party, 1868

"While the tendency of the white race is upward, the tendency of the colored race is downward."

--Sen. Thomas Hendricks (D., Ind.), 1869
Democratic nominee for Vice President, 1876
Vice President, 1885

"We, the delegates of the Democratic party of the United States . . . demand such modification of the treaty with the Chinese Empire, or such legislation within constitutional limitations, as shall prevent further importation or immigration of the Mongolian race."

--Platform of the Democratic Party, 1876

"No more Chinese immigration, except for travel, education, and foreign commerce, and that even carefully guarded."

--Platform of the Democratic Party, 1880

"American civilization demands that against the immigration or importation of Mongolians to these shores our gates be closed."

--Platform of the Democratic Party, 1884

"We favor the continuance and strict enforcement of the Chinese exclusion law, and its application to the same classes of all Asiatic races."

--Platform of the Democratic Party, 1900

"The repeal of the fifteenth amendment, one of the greatest blunders and therefore one of the greatest crimes in political history, is a consummation to be devoutly wished for."

--Rep. John Sharpe Williams (D., Miss.), 1903
House Minority Leader, 1903-08

"Republicanism means Negro equality, while the Democratic Party means that the white man is supreme. That is why we Southerners are all Democrats."

--Sen. Ben Tillman (D., S.C.), 1906
Chairman, Committee on Naval Affairs, 1913-19

"We are opposed to the admission of Asiatic immigrants who can not be amalgamated with our population, or whose presence among us would raise a race issue and involve us in diplomatic controversies with Oriental powers."

--Platform of the Democratic Party, 1908

"I am opposed to the practice of having colored policemen in the District [of Columbia]. It is a source of danger by constantly engendering racial friction, and is offensive to thousands of Southern white people who make their homes here."

--Sen. Hoke Smith (D., Ga.), 1912
Appointed Secretary of the Interior by Grover Cleveland in 1893

"The South is serious with regard to its attitude to the Negro in politics. The South understands this subject, and its policy is unalterable and uncompromising. We desire no concessions. We seek no sops. We grasp no shadows on this subject. We take no risks. We abhor a Northern policy of catering to the Negro in politics just as we abhor a Northern policy of social equality."

--Josephus Daniels, editor, Raleigh News & Observer, 1912
Appointed Secretary of the Navy by Woodrow Wilson in 1913
Appointed Ambassador to Mexico by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933
USS Josephus Daniels named for him by the Johnson Administration in 1965

"The Negro as a race, in all the ages of the world, has never shown sustained power of self-development. He is not endowed with the creative faculty. . . . He has never created for himself any civilization. . . . He has never had any civilization except that which has been inculcated by a superior race. And it is a lamentable fact that his civilization lasts only so long as he is in the hands of the white man who inculcates it. When left to himself he has universally gone back to the barbarism of the jungle."

--Sen. James Vardaman (D., Miss.), 1914
Chairman, Committee on Natural Resources, 1913-19

"This is a white man's country, and will always remain a white man's country."

--Rep. James F. Byrnes (D., S.C.), 1919
Appointed to the Supreme Court by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941
Appointed Secretary of State by Harry S. Truman in 1945

"Slavery among the whites was an improvement over independence in Africa. The very progress that the blacks have made, when--and only when--brought into contact with the whites, ought to be a sufficient argument in support of white supremacy--it ought to be sufficient to convince even the blacks themselves."

--William Jennings Bryan, 1923
Presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, 1896, 1900 and 1908
Appointed Secretary of State by Woodrow Wilson in 1913
His statue stands in the U.S. Capitol.

"Anyone who has traveled to the Far East knows that the mingling of Asiatic blood with European or American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results. . . . The argument works both ways. I know a great many cultivated, highly educated and delightful Japanese. They have all told me that they would feel the same repugnance and objection to have thousands of Americans settle in Japan and intermarry with the Japanese as I would feel in having large numbers of Japanese coming over here and intermarry with the American population. In this question, then, of Japanese exclusion from the United States it is necessary only to advance the true reason--the undesirability of mixing the blood of the two peoples. . . . The Japanese people and the American people are both opposed to intermarriage of the two races--there can be no quarrel there."

--Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1925
President, 1933-45

"This passport which you have given me is a symbol to me of the passport which you have given me before. I do not feel that it would be out of place to state to you here on this occasion that I know that without the support of the members of this organization I would not have been called, even by my enemies, the 'Junior Senator from Alabama.' "

--Hugo Black, accepting a life membership in the Ku Klux Klan upon his election to the U.S. Senate as a Democrat from Alabama, 1926
Appointed to the Supreme Court by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1937

"Mr. President, the crime of lynching . . . is not of sufficient importance to justify this legislation."

--Sen. Claude Pepper (D., Fla.), 1938
Spoken while engaged in a six-hour speech against the antilynching bill

"I am a former Kleagle [recruiter] of the Ku Klux Klan in Raleigh County. . . . The Klan is needed today as never before and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia. It is necessary that the order be promoted immediately and in every state in the union."

--Robert C. Byrd, 1946
Democratic Senator from West Virginia, 1959-present
Senate Majority Leader, 1977-80 and 1987-88
Senate President Pro Tempore, 1989-95, 2001-03, 2007-present
His portrait stands in the U.S. Capitol.

President Truman's civil rights program "is a farce and a sham--an effort to set up a police state in the guise of liberty. I am opposed to that program. I have voted against the so-called poll tax repeal bill. . .. I have voted against the so-called anti-lynching bill."

--Rep. Lyndon B. Johnson (D., Texas), 1948
U.S. Senator, 1949-61
Senate Majority Leader, 1955-61
President, 1963-69

"There is no warrant for the curious notion that Christianity favors the involuntary commingling of the races in social institutions. Although He knew both Jews and Samaritans and the relations existing between them, Christ did not advocate that courts or legislative bodies should compel them to mix socially against their will."

--Sen. Sam Ervin (D., N.C.), 1955
Chairman, Committee on Government Operations, 1971-75

"The decline and fall of the Roman empire came after years of intermarriage with other races. Spain was toppled as a world power as a result of the amalgamation of the races. . . . Certainly history shows that nations composed of a mongrel race lose their strength and become weak, lazy and indifferent."

--Herman E. Talmadge, 1955
Democratic Senator from Georgia, 1957-81
Chairman, Committee on Agriculture, 1971-81

"These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don't move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there'll be no way of stopping them, we'll lose the filibuster and there'll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It'll be Reconstruction all over again."

--Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson (D., Texas), 1957

"I have never seen very many white people who felt they were being imposed upon or being subjected to any second-class citizenship if they were directed to a waiting room or to any other public facility to wait or to eat with other white people. Only the Negroes, of all the races which are in this land, publicly proclaim they are being mistreated, imposed upon, and declared second-class citizens because they must go to public facilities with members of their own race."

--Sen. Richard B. Russell Jr. (D., Ga.), 1961
The Russell Senate Office Building is named for him.

"I did not lie awake at night worrying about the problems of Negroes."

--Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, 1961
Kennedy later authorized wiretapping the phones and bugging the hotel rooms of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

"I'm not going to use the federal government's authority deliberately to circumvent the natural inclination of people to live in ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods. . . . I have nothing against a community that's made up of people who are Polish or Czechoslovakian or French-Canadian or blacks who are trying to maintain the ethnic purity of their neighborhoods."

--Jimmy Carter, 1976
President, 1977-81
Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, 2002

"The Confederate Memorial has had a special place in my life for many years. . . . There were many, many times that I found myself drawn to this deeply inspiring memorial, to contemplate the sacrifices of others, several of whom were my ancestors, whose enormous suffering and collective gallantry are to this day still misunderstood by most Americans."

--James Webb, 1990
Now a Democratic Senator from Virginia

"Everybody likes to go to Geneva. I used to do it for the Law of the Sea conferences and you'd find these potentates from down in Africa, you know, rather than eating each other, they'd just come up and get a good square meal in Geneva."

--Sen. Ernest F. Hollings (D., S.C.) 1993
Chairman, Commerce Committee, 1987-95 and 2001-03
Candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, 1984

"I do not think it is an exaggeration at all to say to my friend from West Virginia [Sen. Robert C. Byrd, a former Ku Klux Klan recruiter] that he would have been a great senator at any moment. . . . He would have been right during the great conflict of civil war in this nation."

--Sen. Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.), 2004
Chairman, Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs
Candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, 2008

* "You cannot go into a Dunkin' Donuts or a 7-Eleven unless you have a slight Indian accent."

* "My state was a slave state. My state is a border state. My state has the eighth largest black population in the country. My state is anything [but] a Northeastern liberal state."

* "I mean, you got the first mainstream African American [Barack Obama] who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice looking guy."

* "There's less than 1% of the population of Iowa that is African American. There is probably less than 4% or 5% that is, are minorities. What is it in Washington? So look, it goes back to what you start off with, what you're dealing with."

Sen. Joseph Biden Jr., (D., Del.), 2006-07
Chairman, Committee on the Judiciary, 1987-95
Chairman, Committee on Foreign Relations
Candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, 2008

Bonus quote:

"It has of late become the custom of the men of the South to speak with entire candor of the settled and deliberate policy of suppressing the negro vote. They have been forced to choose between a policy of manifest injustice toward the blacks and the horrors of negro rule. They chose to disfranchise the negroes. That was manifestly the lesser of two evils. . . . The Republican Party committed a great public crime when it gave the right of suffrage to the blacks. . . . So long as the Fifteenth Amendment stands, the menace of the rule of the blacks will impend, and the safeguards against it must be maintained."

--Editorial, "The Political Future of the South," New York Times, May 10, 1900)

Mr. Bartlett is author of "Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party's Buried Past," to be published next month by Palgrave Macmillan, which is available from the OpinionJournal bookstore.

The Plight of Bethlehem

2007-12-24T18:43:00.000+01:00

Why Christians can't visit the holy shrines in Jerusalem.

BY KENNETH L. WOODWARD

A mere nine kilometers separates Bethlehem, where Jesus was born, from Jerusalem, where he was crucified, died and was buried. Pilgrims can easily visit both the Church of the Nativity and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in half a day--as long as they are not Palestinian Christians. Israel's security wall, its restrictive exit permit system, roadblocks and military checkpoints now make it impossible for most Holy Land Christians to visit the shrines that, for all Christians, make the Holy Land holy.

Like East Jerusalem, Bethlehem is part of the West Bank, not the State of Israel. Temporary exit visas to go from one to the other to worship--or see a doctor or even visit relatives--are hard to come by, of brief duration even when granted, and always subject to the whims of Israeli soldiers.

The squeeze is economic as well as religious. Few producers in Bethlehem can get their goods to markets in Jerusalem. Fewer buyers can get to Bethlehem to sustain its markets. Tourism, a huge segment of the city's economy, is up since 2004, but it is still far from robust.

When last I was in Bethlehem, in 2000, an average of more than 91,000 tourists visited the city monthly. This year, the average is half that number. When buses do arrive, tourists are routinely whisked in and out without time to shop. As a consequence, nearly 100 hotels and restaurants have closed since my last visit. More than 250 workshops that made olive wood crèches, mother-of-pearl crosses and other religious souvenirs have disappeared too. And so, of course, have many of the stores that sold them. In sum, where Bethlehem once enjoyed one of the lowest urban unemployment rates in the Holy Land, it now has one of the highest--by some estimates as much as 60%.

Recently on a visit, former British prime minister Tony Blair tried to boost tourism to Bethlehem, even though his own country, like the U.S., discourages its citizens from traveling there. He also called on Israel, which bans its own citizens from traveling to the West Bank, to ease its restrictions.

Israel, of course, must protect its security. But it cannot blame the Christians' dire circumstances on the second intifada: Muslims are suffering just as much as the tiny Christian minority. Indeed, Bethlehem has historically been one place where Muslim-Christian relations have been remarkably friendly. Now, however, urban Bethlehem finds itself encircled by Israeli settlements, and where the settlers go, there follows the concrete wall, topped in places by razor wire and snipers' towers.

For example, the wall is being completed around Beit Jala, separating this Christian village from 70% of its lands, which are mostly owned by Christian families. Some of the families are attempting to contest the confiscations in court, but construction--and the confiscation--goes on.

In Bethlehem itself, the wall severs the city from nearly three-fourths of its western villages' remaining agricultural lands, as well as water resources that have served the region since Roman times. This area contains much of Bethlehem's remaining room for development and its nature reserve, where city dwellers took their children.

From the Church of the Nativity, Christians can also look out on Har Homa ("Wall Mountain"), a verdant Jewish settlement on a hillside that was formerly Christian land. Since the Annapolis, Md., meeting just a few weeks ago, the Israelis have approved construction on 300 additional homes--despite an official complaint from U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice--that further constrict the city's population.

Unfortunately, many Christians in the Holy Land have no legal recourse to this absorption of their lands and property. As part of the 1993 treaty between Israel and the Vatican, by which the Holy See officially recognized the State of Israel, Israel was to codify the rights of Christian churches and institutions as part of a comprehensive agreement. But because of disputes over taxation of churches and related issues, the Knesset has yet to act. The Franciscans, the Sisters of Charity and other religious groups both Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox have had property confiscated and Christian housing destroyed.

Israel cannot afford to lose the Palestinian Christians: They have long represented a moderating force. A century ago, they accounted for 25% or more of the Holy Land population. Today, they represent less than 1.5%. Since 2000, Bethlehem alone has lost 10% of its Christian population.

Palestinian Christians regard their ancestors as the first Christians, and no doubt some of them were. They call themselves the "living stones" of Biblical Christianity, preserving ancient communities and traditions in the midst of repeated armed conflicts. They deserve to keep their land and work for "peace on earth, goodwill toward men."

In this crisis they deserve the support of all Americans, not just Christians. And not just at Christmas.

Mr. Woodward is a contributing editor at Newsweek.

U.S. urges all sides respect Thai poll results

2007-12-24T18:37:00.000+01:00

By Jim Wolf

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States called on all sides on Sunday to respect the outcome of Thailand's first parliamentary elections since a September 2006 coup prompted Washington to suspend millions of dollars in aid.

Washington welcomed what it called initial reports the vote had been free and fair, said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack.

The party backing exiled former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, the People Power Party, declared victory in the poll and said it would seek to form a coalition government.

"We call on all sides to respect the results, and for a fair and transparent process for the adjudication of any disputes or fraud claims," McCormack said in a statement.

A spokesman for President George W. Bush had said on Friday the United States eagerly awaits the return of democracy in Thailand "so that we may resume our close and abiding relationship with this important ally."

Under a U.S. law that curbs aid after an elected leader is deposed by a military coup, Bush suspended about $24 million in assistance to Thailand, including funds designed to promote military professionalism.

"The United States welcomes initial reports indicating that Thailand's parliamentary election today was conducted in a free and fair manner and congratulates the people of Thailand on taking this crucial step toward a return to elected government," McCormack said.

"The United States looks forward to engaging seriously across a range of issues with an elected Thai government," he added.

(Editing by Doina Chiacu)

All change for Munster

2007-12-24T18:36:00.002+01:00

Coach Declan Kidney has tinkered with his selection for Munster's Magner's League crunch match against Connacht at Musgrave Park on Thursday.

Denis Hurley, John Kelly, Kieran Lewis, Paul Warwick, Frank Sheahan, Tony Buckley, Donnacha Ryan and Niall Ronan have all been ushered to the side.

Kelly, 33, will bow out of his Munster career in the right manner with his first start for the province since pre-season.

MUNSTER (v Connacht): D Hurley; J Kelly, K Lewis, L Mafi, I Dowling; P Warwick, P Stringer; F Pucciariello, F Sheahan T Buckley, D O'Callaghan, D Ryan, D Leamy, N Ronan, A Foley.

Replacements: J Flannery, M Horan, M O'Driscoll, J Coughlan; G Hurley, R O'Gara, B Murphy.

British hospital treats all sides in Afghanistan

2007-12-24T18:36:00.001+01:00

CAMP BASTION, Afghanistan (AFP) — A petite village woman with dark henna on her hands lies wrapped in a blue sheet at the best hospital around -- a British military facility in southern Afghanistan.

Raheena, who puts her age at about 30, was brought here by helicopter in late October with gunshot wounds to her abdomen and chest.

She is one of the lucky Afghan civilians to benefit from world-class health care, at a place where it is not always clear which side the patients are on in the battle for the soul of the war-torn country.

In Raheena's case, she said through an interpreter, her sons found some bullets in the desert and somehow some of them exploded.

"Our children are uneducated," she said. "They were playing."

Helmand province is Afghanistan's opium heartland, an area from which drugs barons extract huge profits -- some of which fund the Taliban -- while villagers live in poverty with little access to decent health care.

But at the British Army Field Hospital at Camp Bastion, a town-like base built out of the vast Afghan desert, Raheena has had the best medical treatment in Afghanistan, perhaps even better than some people could get in Britain.

In the hive of tents that make up the hospital, there are top-class surgeons and consultants instantly available for any speciality -- besides a normal rotation of anaesthetists and nurses.

There is a pharmacy and a pathology lab with virtually instant results for which one might wait an hour in Britain, said Colonel Ian Goulbourne, a leading consultant surgeon in Britain who commands the hospital.

There are digital X-rays that take five seconds, a CT scanner and special blood warmers. A brand-new operating table came in early November.

"We can do most operations here, life- and limb-saving," the colonel said.

The staple is, of course, "typical war surgery" from gun shots, mines and improvised bombs -- one of the biggest threats to the 60,000 international troops in Afghanistan.

Then there was a case when surgeons had to remove a piece of the cranium of one Afghan child embedded in another after a suicide bombing.

"We see more trauma here in a week than most hospitals in the UK would see in a year," Goulbourne said.

The priority of this medical team of about 100 people is the soldiers -- Afghan and international.

The staff also treat the many civilians caught up in Taliban suicide bombings or military air strikes.

And there are the locals who just arrive, even though they are not strictly eligible and it might not be clear where their allegiances lie in Afghanistan's complicated conflict.

"We are set up for wounds of war, no matter which poor person has them," Goulbourne said.

For the team, he said, it may just be a "21-year-old who has a hole in him that needs fixing." If he turns out to be aligned with anti-Western rebel groups, "Maybe he will realise we are not so bad after all."

The hospital is to move in the coming months to a new facility that includes new accommodation and an extension of the runway to allow larger transport planes to land.

Conditions at the forward operating bases that are holding patches of land from the Taliban are more basic, with less access to power and water and none of Bastion's top-line machines.

In extreme cases, these doctors are required to stabilise severely wounded soldiers so they can be airlifted to Bastion.

In his first weeks to early November, doctor Jason Biswas had only encountered a few coughs and colds, skin infections and sand allergies among the troops at his base in Helmand's volatile southern town Garsmer.

But he was under pressure from the few locals in the largely deserted town to open up to the public, with Garmser's modern clinic now ruined and the nearest health facility 50 kilometres (30 miles) away.

"I am not here to treat locals but if locals come in for life- and limb-saving, I will," Biswas said.

Still, he did meet with an intelligence chief recovering from a suicide bombing a few months earlier and took in a little boy sporting a bright, pus-filled lump on a dirt-encrusted hand.

Bastion has had a stream of children wounded in this conflict, which started soon after the Taliban were removed from government in late 2001 in a US-led invasion.

For the kids there is a playroom with bright toys and sparkly fairy wings that are as popular here as anywhere.

They are invited to take some home when they leave but most often don't, said Tim Wright, one of the welfare officers.

"If they are seen to have Westernised toys or items, the Taliban and locals who are against Western culture could harm the family," he said.

Fukuda eyes bill to settle HCV dispute / Legislation to compensate all sufferers

2007-12-24T18:28:00.000+01:00

The Yomiuri Shimbun

Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda said Sunday that he will submit a lawmaker-initiated bill to the current extraordinary Diet session to pay compensation to all hepatitis C suffers regardless of when they were administered tainted blood products.

Fukuda's decision is a reversal of the government's policy on an out-of-court settlement of damages suits filed by HCV sufferers against the government and drugmakers.

On Thursday, the government proposed a modified settlement, which acknowledges the government's responsibility for HCV infections depending on when patients were given blood products, and also determines the level of compensation on the same basis.

In response to Fukuda's decision, a group of lawyers for the plaintiffs released a statement in which they said: "At long last, politics has come into play. We regard this as a major step forward." The group also asked the prime minister to meet the plaintiffs as soon as possible.

With Sunday's decision, the suits that began in 2002 can move forward to a complete settlement.

Following the prime minister's instructions, policy chiefs and other members of the ruling coalition will hold discussions Tuesday. They will draw up a framework for the bill before year-end and call upon the opposition bloc to jointly submit the bill. The opposition parties are expected to accept the request.

Speaking to reporters Sunday, Fukuda said, "The day before yesterday [Friday], I began consultations with members of the Liberal Democratic Party, asking them whether it would be possible to deal with the issue by drafting a bill by legislators, and decided to do so to compensate all the sufferers in a uniform way."

Expressing his intention to submit the bill in the ongoing Diet session, which is due to end Jan. 15, Fukuda sought the opposition bloc's cooperation in devising the bill.

Asked about the central government's responsibility for the infection, Fukuda repeated his stance, saying, "The responsibility of the government, which holds responsibility for approving drugs, cannot be avoided."

As for why he changed the government's policy on the settlement issue, Fukuda explained: "We realized that the issue couldn't be solved within the framework of the judicial and administrative systems. As a result, I concluded that we would never get a solution unless we came up with a new approach."

Speaking at a press conference in Fukuoka, Michiko Yamaguchi, 51, who represents the plaintiffs, said: "I hope justice will be done using the power of politics. But we've been messed around by politics so many times that I can't relax yet."

Under the new bill, all those infected with hepatitis C due to treatment with tainted fibrinogen and other products will receive compensation in accordance with the severity of their case, regardless of when they were treated with the infected products.

Those who will receive the relief under the bill will likely be approved by a third-party organization of experts or other bodies based on objective information, such as medical records.

Based on past settlement proposals, the compensation is expected to be an average of 20 million yen per person under the new bill. The bill will cover about 1,000 plaintiffs.

In this case, the compensation will total about 20 billion yen, but the government predicts the number of such patients will likely increase further.

Some plaintiffs have demanded that the government accept responsibility for all cases, regardless of time frame, as part of a comprehensive settlement.

The government is determined not to acknowledge legal responsibility for infections caused by tainted blood products administered to patients other than between August 1985 and June 1988--the time frame specified by the Tokyo District Court.

But to show consideration to the plaintiffs, it has shown willingness to accept responsibility for the delay in reaching a solution to the issue in the preamble to the bill.

In devising the bill, acknowledgement of the government's responsibility will become the main focus.

Speaking to reporters in Tokyo on Sunday, Health, Labor and Welfare Minister Yoichi Masuzoe said, "Regarding the decision on what kind of responsibility to be mentioned [in the preamble], there are legal, political and moral problems surrounding the issue, so I'd like the ruling bloc to discuss it thoroughly," expressing his intention to leave it to the ruling parties.

Sparkles Behind the Sullied

2007-12-24T18:25:00.000+01:00

Banks' Subprime Hits
Weigh on Big and Small,
But Not All Rightfully So

By VALERIE BAUERLEIN

Hardly a day goes by without one of the nation's big banks announcing more bad news tied to subprime mortgages. Investors, worried that the next blowup will hit them square in the portfolio, have driven down bank stocks 28% this year.

The selloff is justified for the likes of Citigroup Inc., Washington Mutual Inc. and Bank of America Corp., but other generally smaller names have been lumped in with the battered big boys. That has created opportunities for investors who are buying high-quality banks that have little or no subprime-mortgage exposure, are trading near book value and may see their businesses improve next year.

Many of these banks are still takeover candidates as the long trend of bank consolidation continues,

Investor favorites run from U.S. Bancorp, the Minneapolis bank with a $55 billion stock-market value, to tiny Community Bancorp of Las Vegas, with a market value of about $185 million.

"We're caught up in the overall hysteria," complains Edward M. Jamison, chairman and chief executive of Community Bancorp, where net income soared 62% in the first nine months of 2007 from a year earlier, helped by two acquisitions. "We have no first-mortgage business, no subprime loans," Mr. Jamison says. "Even though you speak it, the market doesn't hear it."

U.S. Bancorp, the nation's sixth-largest bank by market value, has the highest rate of return on assets, a gauge of efficiency, among its peer group, according to an analysis by SNL Financial of Charlottesville, Va. U.S. Bancorp also has a relatively small 28% of its loan portfolio in real estate.

But U.S. Bancorp shares are down 11% this year, making them look cheap to bank analyst Lori B. Appelbaum of Goldman Sachs. Ms. Appelbaum recommends U.S. Bancorp, describing the company in a Friday research report as "very defensive," as it has shielded itself through careful loan decisions and large reserves.

Kenneth J. Brusda, president of North Star Asset Management Inc., with $1 billion in assets under management, has been steadily adding small bank shares to the Menasha, Wis., firm's portfolio.

"I call it the bank double-play. The valuations are reasonable and you have the possibility of takeouts," he says. "These banks have been beaten up more than they should have."

One of his favorites: First State Bancorp of Albuquerque, N.M., the largest independent bank in New Mexico. A 51% stock-price decline so far this year has pushed the shares below book value, yet loan quality has held up well and the bank is expanding in Colorado. On Friday, First State rose two cents, or 0.2%, to $12.24.

Community's percentage of loans that are nonperforming is less than half that of a peer group. But with Las Vegas known for some of the worst excesses of the housing bubble, the bank's shares are down 40% in the past year. On Friday, they rose 3.5%, or 60 cents, to $17.97 in Nasdaq trading.

One problem facing such banks is their small following on Wall Street, giving them few defenders when investors began turning against the industry. "When Wall Street evaluates them, they have to depend on less-objective measures, like a gut feeling that it's located in a troubled region, or that it has more real-estate exposure than they would like," said Michael Andrews, an analyst with SNL.

Fans of off-the-beaten-track banks say they were far less susceptible to the horrible bets their bigger brethren made on securities tied to subprime loans. Sticking close to home likely helped some of these regional players avoid pitfalls, as long as they didn't get too caught up in real-estate euphoria. Some of these banks were hurt during the boom because more aggressive lenders took away business from them.

Now, not only will they get that lending business back, but less competition also means it will be more profitable.

According to SNL, there are a baker's dozen of small or medium-sized U.S. banks that trade below book value, yet have less than half of their loans in real estate and are outperforming their peers in return on assets. Many of these banks were trading at a premium until the third quarter and aren't haunted by subprime woes.

"Being below book value doesn't make any sense," says Rex Schuette, chief financial officer of United Community Banks Inc., the Blairsville, Ga., parent of 27 community banks in Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee. With a stock-market value of $819 million, the company has doubled its earnings in the past five years, but the share price has fallen near a five-year low. On Friday, its shares rose 17 cents, or 1%, to $16.99 on Nasdaq.

That said, these cheap banks aren't without potential troubles. Jonathan D. Holtaway, managing director of Danielson Capital Inc., a bank-consulting firm in Vienna, Va., said that while Community Bancorp in Las Vegas is cheap and isn't exposed to mortgages, it does have "massive" exposure to retail-shopping centers. "Can they weather the storm, and after the storm, can they grow?" Mr. Holtaway asks.

Mr. Jamison said his bank has seen continued strong occupancy in retail centers, but acknowledges it will take "consistent performance" to win back wary investors.

Brett Rabatin, a bank analyst at FTN Midwest Securities Corp., says investors who do their homework and are patient will be rewarded when the banking industry starts to rebound. He has been agonizing over a "buy" rating he placed on Sterling Financial Corp. of Spokane, Wash., three months ago. Since then, the stock is down 30%. Sterling rose 71 cents, or 4%, on Friday to $18.60.

Mr. Rabatin is sticking by his call, saying Sterling made solid loans, has clearly divulged its real-estate exposure and its CEO is nearing retirement age, increasing the likelihood of a takeover. "We're getting to a point where if you can hold a stock for two years, these things look awfully attractive," Mr. Rabatin says.

Many smaller banks have long traded at higher valuations in anticipation of a takeover. That premium has disappeared for many because investors feel like the big banks have too many problems to be out shopping. But the pace of deals has continued. There have been 229 bank mergers or takeovers so far this year, down from 247 a year ago, according to SNL.

Mr. Brusda, North Star's president, expects deal activity to accelerate, especially as non-U.S. banks capitalize on the dollar's weakness.

GOP Contest Heats Up in New Hampshire

2007-12-24T18:22:00.000+01:00

By ELIZABETH HOLMES

PETERBOROUGH, N.H. -- The Republican primary in New Hampshire next month is shaping up to be as frantic and unpredictable as the race in Iowa, though focusing on a different set of issues and cast of characters.

Mitt Romney remains a contender in both states. But while his closest rival in Iowa is former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, in New Hampshire, Arizona Sen. John McCain is closing in quickly. The increased competition, especially from Mr. McCain, is a blow to Mr. Romney, who has invested more time and resources in both states than his rivals.

A Boston Globe poll released yesterday shows the Arizona lawmaker threatening Mr. Romney's lead in New Hampshire, with 25% of voters supporting Mr. McCain compared with 28% for Mr. Romney, the former governor of neighboring Massachusetts and a part-time resident of New Hampshire. With the poll having a margin of plus or minus 4.9 percentage points, that is a virtual dead heat and a dramatic shift from just a few weeks ago, when a Zogby poll put Mr. Romney 18 points ahead of Mr. McCain there.

At least some of Mr. McCain's success seems to have come at the expense of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who has dropped in the New Hampshire polls from the mid 20s to the mid-teens.

The Globe poll shows changes in the Democratic camp as well, with Illinois Sen. Barack Obama gaining the support of 30% of voters, putting him neck and neck with the 28% supporting New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has led for much of the year. Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards trailed with 14% of the vote, followed by New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson with 7%.

But the upheaval in the Republican race is particularly notable, and is requiring Mr. Romney to attack his opponents differently in the two states. New Hampshire's Jan. 8 primary comes just after the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses.

In Iowa, where voters pepper candidates with questions about illegal immigration, he last week defended his credentials as a social conservative, a strength of former Baptist minister Mr. Huckabee, the Republican front-runner in that state. Yet the next day, winding his way around snow-covered New Hampshire -- where residents want to know about taxes and foreign policy -- Mr. Huckabee was no more than an aside. Instead, Mr. Romney returned to his business roots, championing himself as a fiscal conservative against Mr. McCain.

"Senator McCain voted twice not to go along with the Bush tax cuts," he said during a house party in Tuftonboro, N.H., on Saturday. "He didn't want tax cuts for the rich. That sounds like Ted Kennedy and John Kerry."

In response to Mr. Romney's remarks, McCain senior adviser Mark Salter issued a statement blasting "Mitt Romney's bizarro world, in which everyone is guilty of his sins. He didn't support Ronald Reagan. He didn't support President Bush's tax cuts. He raised taxes in Massachusetts by $700 million."

Attacks on Mr. McCain are new to Mr. Romney's stump speeches -- and for good reason. Sen. McCain has benefited from a string of recent endorsements, including Sen. Joe Lieberman and notable newspapers in the early states: the Des Moines Register in Iowa and the Boston Globe, the Portsmouth Herald and the New Hampshire Union Leader.

Mr. Romney hasn't been so fortunate. The Concord (N.H.) Monitor published an editorial yesterday urging voters against supporting Mr. Romney. The newspaper called him a "disquieting figure who sure looks like the next president and most surely must be stopped."

Kelly Drew, a 43-year-old from North Conway, N.H., hasn't decided between the two front-runners. Of Mr. Romney, she said, "I like his fiscal responsibility. I like his ideas on how to run a business and how to handle it." Of Mr. McCain, she said, "I like his views on how to handle the world's politics."

Trying to win over those undecided voters, Mr. Romney packed schools, town halls and restaurants throughout New Hampshire over the weekend. He mentioned Mr. McCain multiple times in every speech, slamming him for refusing to support the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. He will hit New Hampshire after Christmas as well, with stops in the Granite State planned for Dec. 26 and 27.

On Saturday, Mr. Romney interrupted the breakfast of Michael and Cheryl Brooks, of Madison, N.H. Mr. Brooks, who spent six months last year in Iraq, hasn't decided which candidate to support, but would like to meet all of them. "I don't know if you call me old-fashioned or pig-headed," said Mr. Brooks, "but I judge a man by his handshake." Mr. Romney's handshake, he said afterward, was "pretty genuine."

Bob Rowe, a 74-year-old from Rochester, N.H., attended a Romney event Friday evening, though he too is undecided. "If one of them steps out of line or does something that we strongly disagree with, then probably I would switch to the other man," he said.

--Amy Chozick in Marshalltown, Iowa, contributed to this article.

Philips's Medical Malady

2007-12-24T18:20:00.000+01:00

Unit Looks to Expand
In Emerging Markets
As U.S. Business Slows

By LEILA ABBOUD

Philips Electronics NV's medical-equipment division has been a growth engine in recent years. But this year, it hit a speed bump: budget-conscious U.S. officials.

The federal government, concerned about ballooning U.S. health-care spending, beginning this year cut its Medicare reimbursement for out-of-hospital scanning procedures such as X-rays, CAT scans and MRIs. In large part because of the change, Philips's medical division, which had been pegged to grow at 6% a year, is now expected to grow no more than 3% to 4%, as hospitals and outpatient clinics postpone buying expensive medical scanners.

Half of the company's medical business comes from the U.S. The company's trimming of its forecast caused its stock to drop 12% from €30.33 ($43.54 at current exchange rates) on the day of the announcement in October, though it has regained some ground since then. In Friday's trading in Amsterdam, Philips shares fell 2%, or 60 European cents, to €30.11 apiece.

Competitors General Electric Co. and Siemens AG have also been affected and have said sales in their medical businesses would be mostly flat this year. But GE and Siemens have large units in other areas, including aviation, infrastructure and construction, to compensate for the slowdown. As a result, GE and Siemens are forecasting overall revenue growth of 10% or more, while Philips expects overall revenue to grow 5% to 6%.

To offset the slowdown in the U.S. imaging market, Philips is stepping up its efforts in fast-growing emerging markets. The company is also pushing into businesses aimed at medical procedures that appeal directly to consumers and are less dependent on government-reimbursement policies -- one reason behind its deal disclosed Friday to buy Respironics Inc., a U.S. maker of sleep and respiratory products focusing on the U.S. home health-care market, for €3.6 billion.

The company's approach differs from that of GE and Siemens, which seem to be willing to ride out the short-term slowdown in the U.S. The two companies declined to comment.

"We're trying to diversify our health-care portfolio to move into the home," said Stephen H. Rusckowski, who runs the company's Philips Medical Systems division. "We see it as a way we can differentiate ourselves from our competitors."

Philips's medical division was supposed to cure the ills that had begun to plague the 116-year-old company. When Chief Executive Gerard Kleisterlee took over six years ago, the company's big brand-name business of making compact-disc players and TV sets was getting crushed by cheaper Asian competitors, while its computer-chip division was hemorrhaging cash following the bursting of the Internet bubble.

Mr. Kleisterlee retooled the company to make health care the new center of its business, along with its fast-growing lighting division. He won over investors by arguing that focusing on higher-margin products in health and lighting would deliver strong long-term growth.

But the slowdown in the medical business has exposed the pitfalls of betting on health care. Although health-care spending increases every year, it isn't always easy to translate that big promise into profits. Since governments spend so much on health care, their policies have an outsize impact on sales of drugs, devices and treatments. Companies like drug maker Pfizer Inc. and insurer Aetna Inc. are accustomed to managing the risk of reimbursement policies, but Philips is new to the game.

Mr. Rusckowski predicted that the difficulties in the U.S. market would continue for at least an additional six to 12 months. But he was confident that medical sales would eventually rebound. "What happened in 2007 was a slowdown in one specific country, but it doesn't change our long-term expectations for the medical marketplace," he said.

Mr. Rusckowski described a confluence of factors that led to the slowdown. First, the U.S. government ratcheted down the amount it pays each time a patient on Medicare gets a scan or X-ray at a medical clinic outside the hospital. Although the reimbursement for in-hospital scans didn't change, some hospital administrators began to worry that the new lower rate would eventually be expanded to hospitals and backed off purchasing new equipment, said Mr. Rusckowski.

In addition, a new generation of CT scan machines was due to be released by GE, Siemens and Philips in mid-November, so hospitals stopped spending in anticipation of the new technology. Spending on CT scanners was down 20% this year.

Lastly, medical research has focused increased skepticism on devices that open clogged arteries, called stents. That led to a drop in operations to insert stents, lowering demand for equipment for catheterization labs where the operations are performed. Philips is a leader in catheterization lab equipment. Mr. Rusckowski said new studies that reach different conclusions on the issue have since been released and doctors would have to debate the best treatment options.

Scott Geels, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., said despite the downturn, he still believed that medical was a promising high-growth market for Philips. "This is a glitch that will work itself out with time," he said.

Philips's medical division grew 8% to €6.3 billion in revenue in 2005 and 6% to reach €6.7 billion in revenue in 2006. Mr. Geels is forecasting 2% growth and €6.85 billion in revenue this year; Philips's guidance is for 3% to 4% growth on the year.

The medical division accounted for about 40% of Philips's €1.2 billion in earnings before interest, taxes and amortization in the first three quarters of 2007, with lighting contributing 40%, and the rest coming from consumer electronics and household appliances. The overall company reported net income of €2.78 billion during that period.

As part of its efforts to reach emerging markets, Philips signed a joint venture in China with Neusoft, a software and medical technology firm, to design new low-cost imaging equipment tailored for poorer economies and bought an X-ray company in Brazil called VMI-Sistemas Médicos in June.

Philips is also building a consumer health-care business to sell things including home health monitoring and disease-management software. Philips can pitch these products or services directly to patients or their family members who help with their medical care. For example, its Lifeline business connects elderly people to call centers at the push of a button to allow them to live independently.

'Blank Checks' Generate New Interest

2007-12-24T18:17:00.000+01:00

Deals Gain Momentum as Investors
Seek Alternative to Private Equity

By LYNN COWAN

The black sheep of the IPO world quietly took over a large part of the market in 2007, with so-called blank-check debuts generating nearly a quarter of all new stocks that listed in the U.S.

There were 66 initial public offerings of blank checks -- also known as special-purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs -- priced this year in deals that raised a total of $12 billion. That is 23% of the total number of U.S. IPOs and 18% of the money raised, according to data from Dealogic. In 2006, blank-check IPOs raised $3.4 billion, accounting for 7% of the total money raised in IPOs and 16% of the number of new issues, a percentage-point increase equaled only by the growth in technology IPOs.

Once seen as deals of questionable quality, blank checks are essentially empty shells that generally give themselves 18 months to two years to acquire an operating company with the proceeds from an IPO.

These IPOs mostly lived under the radar for more than a decade before generating new interest from investors beginning in 2004, when 13 such deals priced. It was around that time that many managers made changes to the structure, including putting in more of their own money, that made blank checks more accountable. Still, it is likely that 2007 will be remembered as their breakout year.

The performance of these stocks is attention-worthy. The Morgan Joseph Acquisition Company Index, launched in 2006 to measure the performance of all blank-check companies that went public since 2003 up to the point that they complete an acquisition, was up 28.25% for the year as of Friday.

The increasing popularity of the structure marks a stark change in the deal-making environment. Blank-check companies are like private-equity firms in their mission to acquire operating companies. But private equity, a rival for acquisitions, has been stung in the past few months by strains in the corporate debt market, which they rely on heavily for financing. Blank checks, by contrast, turn to public stock markets for cash and issuance has kept going strong. Some investors like them because the structure offers a quicker route to cashing out of their investments than does private equity.

Wall Street has noticed. SPACs used to be underwritten primarily by smaller investment banks like Morgan Joseph & Co. and Ladenburg Thalmann, but big Wall Street firms and some big names in the world of deal making are joining in. Names such as Citigroup Inc., UBS AG, Deutsche Bank AG, Credit Suisse Group, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Merrill Lynch & Co. increasingly are showing up on prospectuses alongside the typical blank-check underwriters. Players such as Nelson Peltz and Ronald Perelman also are involved.

As larger underwriters have become involved, the amounts raised in such deals has increased to a half-billion dollars or more from less than $100 million just a few years ago.This month, a deal launched by Citigroup and Lehman, Liberty Acquisition Holdings Corp., raised $1.03 billion, a feat achieved by only a half-dozen "regular" IPOs in the U.S. in 2007. Liberty is the vehicle of billionaire Nicolas Berggruen, head of an eponymous family-owned investment vehicle with assets of more than $1 billion.

London hedge-fund manager GLG Partners Inc., the largest alternative-asset manager in Europe, became a publicly traded company this year after being purchased by Freedom Acquisition Holdings Inc., an empty shell headed by Mr. Berggruen that raised $480 million in 2006 through Citigroup.

"I think everyone has been a bit surprised by the volume that has been done," says Jeffrey Bunzel, head of equity capital markets for the Americas at Credit Suisse Group, which managed the November $400 million launch of Heckmann Corp., headed by Richard J. Heckmann, former chief executive of sporting goods maker K2 Inc. "If the level is running at 20% to 25% of the total IPO market, it's hard to ignore that."

Citigroup bankers say one reason they began to underwrite such deals was investor demand for private-equity type investments with shorter timelines than actual private-equity funds. The investment bank became more involved after underwriting Boulder Specialty Brands Inc., which went public in 2005 and this May acquired Smart Balance Inc., a food marketer best known for its trans-fat-free margarine.

"It became attractive to us only when we believed that M&A targets were taking these offers seriously, and when we saw that the management of these companies was truly capable of going out and sourcing acquisitions," says John Chirico, head of U.S. equity capital markets at Citigroup.

The management teams of several recent blank checks that have either priced or registered include Dallas billionaire and Texas Rangers owner Thomas Hicks; billionaire activist investor Nelson Peltz; Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide founder Barry Sternlicht; and Warren G. Lichtenstein, chief executive of hedge fund Steel Partners.

"This is the most innovative product that Wall Street has created in a long time," says Simon Rose, chief executive of investment bank Dahlman Rose, who once dismissed SPACs as mere "junk." Over the course of the past year, his views changed, and the firm, which specializes in the energy sector, expects to underwrite six to 10 SPAC offerings in 2008.

The segment has become so popular that hedge-fund manager Context Capital Management LLC is changing the focus of its multistrategy Context Opportunistic Fund and plans to invest more than 80% of its assets in blank-check offerings; to date, Context has invested in more than 50.

"The main advantages are liquidity and transparency," says William D. Fertig, chief investment officer of Context Capital. "If investors put money in a private-equity fund, they might get it back in four to five years. They have no say over what the fund buys. In a [blank-check company], investors get to call the shots." If shareholders don't like the proposed acquisition, they can get their money back, less fees, and walk away, even if the majority votes for a deal, he adds.

Blank checks aren't perfect. "A lot of deals get done that shouldn't get done," Mr. Fertig says. "The management team gets 20% of the company's stock for a relatively small investment. Their incentive to get a deal done does not necessarily translate into getting a great deal done."

Write to Lynn Cowan at lynn.cowan@dowjones.com

Hale outlines near term ECO strategy

2007-12-23T18:52:00.000+01:00

By William Harwood

5:30 PM, 12/21/07, Update: Hale hopeful near-term fix possible for ECO sensors; engineers tentatively cleared to remove suspect connector, plug

Engineers have been provisionally cleared to remove a suspect feed-through plug and an external connector from the shuttle Atlantis' external fuel tank for laboratory testing and a possible fix to eliminate intermittent electrical glitches with low-level engine-cutoff sensors.

In an interview today with CBS News, shuttle Program Manager Wayne Hale said no final decisions have been made, but one leading candidate for a near-term repair is to possibly solder the external socket to the male pins in the pass-through connector to eliminate any open circuits in that part of the system when it is chilled to cryogenic temperatuures.

This scenario assumes the internal connector is sound and is not contributing to the problem. The internal connector cannot be modified unless repair crews enter the external tank, work that likely would require a roll back to the Vehicle Assembly Building.

"The leading contender today is we will, starting next week, pull the through plug with the external connector, all in one piece, off (the tank), clip the wires and wire harness and send that whole assembly off to the lab for teardown and evaluation," he said.

"Then in parallel, we've got a (qualification) process that's going through a solder of the wires directly to the male pins of the pass through. And of course, you close all that out, splice your wires into the wire harness and plug it back in."

But that is simply one option under consideration. How the agency will actually proceed - and what that might mean in terms of an eventual launch date - will depend on what engineers find when they remove and examine the hardware.

The current "no-earlier-than" launch date is Jan. 10, but that target was announced before engineers had a good idea of what might be needed to fix the problem.

Of seven options presented to shuttle managers Wednesday, only two - simply replacing the external connector or swapping out the connector and the pass-through plug - lead to launch attempts in early to mid January. Replacing the external connector with a soldered pin-and-plug arrangement likely would result in additional delay.

But again, it's not yet clear how NASA will proceed.

Going into the weekend before the Christmas holiday, Hale said he had given the team "kind of a two-part guidance. If they can come to a consensus that we don't have to go into the tank taking these pieces out, then I basically told them to go ahead and do that. If they can't get to that and they need to go into the tank, then we need to have a management review before they do that because ... getting into a tank includes a fair amount of technical risk. So they're off working on those two things."

Engineers also are reviewing low-level engine cutoff - ECO - sensor problems in other rocket systems to learn about other possible approaches to the problem.

Lockheed Martin's Atlas-Centaur rockets "had some problems, Centaur (second stage) did, back in the early '90s and they have gone to not using the kind of pin-and-socket connectors that we use and actually soldering the wires through this kind of system," Hale said. "And then I've got a huge dump here from the NESC (NASA Engineering and Safety Center) on every other anomaly report they could find in the history of mankind, almost, on connector failures, particularly in the cryogenic experience.

"We've got problem reports with connectors from Los Alamos National Labs, the Ames Research Center, some ELV (unmanned rocket) problems, just all over the place, some of which sound like ours, some of which don't. So we're using that in our team to evaluate these things and say what can we learn from this history that's out there? So, that's going into the team that's working very hard to come up with a change."

Atlantis was grounded Dec. 6 and 9 when intermittent failures of ECO sensors at the base of the hydrogen tank occurred during fueling and later, draining. A fifth sensor, which indicates when the tank is 5 percent full, also malfunctioned when the tank was drained.

The wires that carry signals from all five sensors pass through the same connector in the wall of the external tank. The three-part connector features a pass-through fitting with male pins, embedded in glass, on both sides. Wires from the sensors inside the tank terminate in a female connector inside the tank that is plugged into the male pins of the pass-through. A similar female socket plugs into the pass-through on the outside of the tank.

Based on data collected during a fueling test Dec. 18, engineers believe the problem involves gaps in the external part of the connector that are occurring when the system is chilled to ultra-low temperatures. They believe the sensors themselves are healthy and that only two circuits are actually experiencing problems: ECO sensors 1 and 3.

"The feed-through plug is a male-male plug," Hale said. "If you think about it, each of the pins goes through this vitreous glass (in the wall of the tank) and then the connectors the wire harnesses terminate in are the female sockets.

"The guys reported yesterday ... they came back and said we're pretty sure that the ECO sensor 1 (problem) was on the outside but ECO sensor 3, we're king of indeterminate on. I haven't heard the results. It would really be nice if we could say with a high degree of confidence this is on the outside."

If the problem is, in fact, in the plug or external connector, repairs could be made at the launch pad. But if the problem involves the internal connector, engineers likely would have to go inside the tank and that, almost certainly, would require a rollback to the Vehicle Assembly Building.

"If we go inside, that's going to complicate our lives," Hale said. "You've got to go into the tank and that probably is going to require a rollback.

"But there are a multiplicity of options. The thing I've got to do as a manager is kind of sit on my hands for a couple of days, let the technical guys slug it out and come forward with a recommendation and not try to keep pulling this plan up by the roots to see how it's doing."

The goal of Atlantis' flight is to deliver the European Space Agency's Columbus research module to the international space station. But problems with the systems used to keep the station's solar arrays properly pointed at the sun could force station planners to schedule a spacewalk to swap out a so-called beta gimbal assembly motor.

Depending on when such a spacewalk might be scheduled, Atlantis could face additional delays not related to the ECO sensor work. Asked if NASA might take advantage of any such delay to implement a more extensive ECO sensor fix, Hale said the near-term goal is to get Atlantis ready to fly as soon as possible.

"I don't think that's going to factor at all," Hale said. "My goal is to get back to a highly reliable system as soon as we can to be ready to fly as soon as we practically can and then if station has other considerations, then we'll talked about what makes sense. And I know they're working their problems."

But engineers at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., are assessing potential long-term fixes that might be implemented several flights downstream. But for the two tanks at the Kennedy Space Center - Atlantis' and a tank scheduled for launch with the shuttle Endeavour in February - some sort of interim fix appears more likely.

"We've got the short-term team, which is looking on the near-term flights, the two tanks effectively that we have at the Kennedy Space Center, what are we going to do near term in which you would go off and do some kind of quick change that would mitigate if not everything, most things.

"Then we've put together what we call the long-term team under one of the chief engineer people at Marshall Space Flight Center, who's looking at a three- to four-month longer term investigation and come back with what we should do for the long term. I'd like to eliminate it as an issue."

As for whether NASA must find and address the "root cause" of the problem before Atlantis flies, Hale said "it depends on what our fix is."

"If you go to a completely different class of fix, which is why I think everybody is so enamored of the solder (technique), then you could probably say you don't need to go to root cause, I just need to know where the problem was occurring and we took it out.

"If we find out, for example, soldering doesn't work - and there's some discussion about what happens to solder joints in cryogenic temperatures, do they break or degrade - if that doesn't work and we need to go back with a plug-type socket connector again, but a different strength or different assembly method, something of that nature, then you really need to go to root cause. And that takes a bit of time."

Nightmare Before Christmas

2007-12-23T18:49:00.000+01:00

By BOB HERBERT

Christmastime is bonus time on Wall Street, and the Gucci set has been blessed with another record harvest.

Forget the turbulence in the financial markets and the subprime debacle. Forget the dark clouds of a possible recession. Bloomberg News tells us that the top securities firms are handing out nearly $38 billion in seasonal bonuses, the highest total ever.

But there’s a reason to temper the celebration, if only out of respect for an old friend who’s not doing too well. Even as the Wall Streeters are high-fiving and ordering up record shipments of Champagne and caviar, the American dream is on life-support.

I had a conversation the other day with Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union. He mentioned a poll of working families that had shown that their belief in that mythical dream that has sustained so many generations for so long is fading faster than sunlight on a December afternoon.

The poll, conducted by Lake Research Partners for the Change to Win labor federation, found that only 16 percent of respondents believed that their children’s generation would be better off financially than their own. While some respondents believed that the next generation would fare roughly the same as this one, nearly 50 percent held the exceedingly gloomy view that today’s children would be “worse off” when the time comes for them to enter the world of work and raise their own families.

That absence of optimism is positively un-American.

“These are parents who cannot see where the jobs of the future are that will allow their kids to have a better life than they had,” said Mr. Stern. “And they’re not wrong. That’s the problem.”

Record bonuses on Wall Street at a time when ordinary working Americans are filled with anxiety about their economic future are signs that the trickle-down phenomenon that was supposed to have benefited everyone never happened.

The rich, boosted by the not-so-invisible hand of the corporate ideologues in government, have done astonishingly well in recent decades, while the rest of the population has tended to tread water economically, or drown.

A study released last month by the Pew Charitable Trusts noted that “for most Americans, seeing that one’s children are better off than oneself is the essence of living the American dream.” But for the past 40 years, men in their 30s, prime family-raising age, have found it difficult to outdistance their dads economically.

As the Pew study put it: “Earnings of men in their 30s have remained surprisingly flat over the past four decades.” Family incomes have improved during that time largely because of the wholesale entrance of women into the work force.

For the very wealthy, of course, it’s been a different story. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the after-tax income of the top 1 percent rose 228 percent from 1979 through 2005.

What seems to be happening now is that working Americans, and that includes the middle class, have exhausted much of their capacity to tread water. Wives and mothers are already working. Mortgages have been refinanced and tremendous amounts of home equity drained. And families have taken on debt loads — for cars, for college tuition, for medical treatment — that would buckle the knees of the strongest pack animals.

According to Demos, a policy research group in New York, “American families are using credit cards to bridge the gaps created by stagnant wages and higher costs of living.” Americans owe nearly $900 billion on their credit cards.

We’re running out of smoke and mirrors. The fundamental problem, the problem that is destroying the dream, is the extreme inequality pounded into the system by the corporate crowd and its handmaidens in government.

As Mr. Stern said: “To me, the issue in America is not a question of wealth or growth, it’s a question of distribution.”

When such an overwhelming portion of the economic benefits are skewed toward a tiny portion of the population — as has happened in the U.S. over the past few decades — it’s impossible for the society as a whole not to suffer.

Americans work extremely hard and are amazingly productive. But without the clout of a strong union movement, and arrayed against the mighty power of the corporations and the federal government, they don’t receive even a reasonably fair share of the economic benefits from their hard work or productivity.

Instead of celebrating bonuses this Christmas season, too many American workers are looking with dread toward 2008, worried about their rising levels of debt, or whether they will be able to hang on to a job with few or no benefits or how to tell their kids that they won’t be able to help with the cost of college.

It’s not the stuff of which dreams are made.

Gail Collins is off today.
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Savior or Saboteur?

2007-12-23T18:42:00.000+01:00

By MAUREEN DOWD

Once it was about Hillary, but now, of course, it’s about Bill.

Our ubiquitous ex-president is playing his favorite uxorious game, and it goes like this: Let’s create chaos and then get out of it together. You ride to my rescue or I ride to yours. We come within an inch of dying and then recapture the day by the skin of our teeth. While we’re killing ourselves, we blame everyone else. We’ll be heroes.

It worked for Bill and Hillary in ’92 and ’96. It didn’t work in the health care debacle. Will it work in Iowa and New Hampshire?

Just when I thought I was out, the Clintons pull me back into their conjugal psychodrama.

Inside the Bill gang and the Hillary gang, there is panic and perplexity. Is Bill a loyal spouse or a subconscious saboteur?

Should Hillaryland muzzle him? Give him a minder? Is he rusty? Or is he freelancing because he relishes his role as head of the party his wife is trying to take over?

“For the first time since the Marc Rich pardon,” said a friend of the Clintons, “Bill is seriously diminishing his personal standing with the people closest to him.”

Certainly Bill wants to repay Hill for those traumatic times when he had to hide behind her skirt. And certainly he feels that his legacy is tied to her. He suggests to Matt Bai in today’s Times Magazine that she can be F.D.R. to his Teddy Roosevelt, getting through the ideas that fell flat the first time.

Is Bill torn between resentment of being second fiddle and gratification that Hillary can be first banana only with his help? Their relationship has always been a co-dependence between his charm and her discipline. But what if, as some of her advisers suggest, she turned out to be a tougher leader, quicker to grasp foreign policy, less skittish about using military power and more inspirational abroad? What if she were to use his mistakes as a reverse blueprint, like W. did with his dad?

When Bill gets slit-eyed, red-faced and finger-wagging in defense of her, is he really defending himself, ego in full bloom, against aspersions that Obama and Edwards cast on Clintonian politics?

Maybe the Boy Who Can’t Help Himself is simply engaging in his usual patterns of humiliating Hillary and lighting an exploding cigar when things are going well.

“They’re not Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, who had jealousy as the lifeblood of their marriage,” said one writer who has studied the pair. “The lifeblood of their marriage is crisis, coming to each other’s rescue.”

Bill is staying up late strategizing and recasting her message and speeches. But he’s off his game on the trail, making clumsy mistakes like his remark — bound to be shot down by Poppy Bush — that Hillary would send 41 and 42 around the world to restore prestige lost by 43.

Hillary advisers noted that when Bill was asked by a supporter in South Carolina what his wife’s No. 1 priority would be, he replied: C’est moi! “The first thing she intends to do is to send me ...” he began.

He got so agitated with Charlie Rose — ranting that reporters were “stenographers” for Obama — that his aides tried to stop the interview.

He also got in the way of her message with stretchers about opposing the Iraq war from the start, and — in a slap at Obama — deciding not to run in ’88 because he lacked experience. Truth is, he didn’t run for fear of bimbo eruptions.

While making a speech in Iowa, The Associated Press’s Ron Fournier reported, Bill used the word “I” 94 times in 10 minutes, while mentioning “Hillary” just seven times. At a London fund-raiser, one Hillaryite said, it took him nearly half an hour to mention her.

As the Arkansas journalist Max Brantley told the Billary biographer Sally Bedell Smith, “He’s always evangelizing for the church of Bill.”

It’s hard to feel sorry for Hillary because the very logic of her campaign leads right to Bill. When she speaks of her “experience,” she is referring not to the Senate but to the White House, thereby making her campaign a plebiscite on the ’90s.

Running this way, she is essentially asking people to like her if they liked him. Whether she knows it or not, this is a coattails strategy. It’s almost as if she’s offering herself to Clinton supporters as the solution to the problem of the 22nd Amendment.

Bill is a narcissist, but he’s also within his rights to think that she has invited him onstage. If she is his legacy, why should he muzzle himself? After all, you can’t ask Elvis to behave like Colonel Parker.

If voting for Obama is a roll of the dice, as Bill suggests, voting for Billary is a sure bet: an endless soap opera.

Taxes Are Reassessed in Housing Slump

2007-12-23T18:41:00.002+01:00

By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

LOS ANGELES — Home owners across the nation are looking to county governments to reassess the values of their homes in the face of flattening and falling prices that have befallen scores of markets. Downward assessments, done at the request of homeowners or pre-emptively by government, appear to be most pronounced in areas where the housing market was exploding just a few years ago, or where economic conditions are poorest.

In Maricopa County, the largest in Arizona, a “large percentage” of the one million single-family home owners will see their houses reassessed at lower rates in February, said Keith Russell, the county assessor. In Phoenix, the largest city in the county, housing prices fell 8.8 percent over the last year, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller index, which monitors the residential housing market.

Among the roughly 200,000 parcels in Lucas County, Ohio, 7,083 owners requested reassessments in 2007, about 10 times the yearly average, said Anita Lopez, the assessor, who ran for office on a campaign to adjust assessments.

“Citizens know the market is slow if not declining,” Ms. Lopez said, “and they are informed and feel comfortable in challenging their county values. People here can’t sell their homes, they have less money, and they don’t understand why the government is asking for more money in a declining housing market.”

Local governments, which rely heavily on property taxes, will have to find ways to replace lost revenue or face having to cut services, lay off staff members or delay projects. The possibility of those losses has alarmed officials in areas already facing large numbers of foreclosures and slumping sales, products, in part, of the mortgage credit crisis that has rippled through the country. [Sunday Business.]

“Government has been the beneficiary of increasing home prices,” said Relmond Van Daniker, the executive director of the Association of Government Accountants. “And now they are on the other side of that, and they will have to reduce expenses.”

While every state and local government has its own methods for assessing home values for tax purposes — some do it annually, some every five years, and everything in between — many counties are hearing from residents that they would like their homes reassessed, or have taken steps to bring the taxes down of their own volition.

While in some areas, a county or city is required to make whole any loss in revenues to schools, public education is a frequent beneficiary of property tax revenues. “They are obviously concerned,” Ms. Lopez said about her county’s school systems.

No one has aggregated the total number of counties reassessing home values, and many counties take at least a year to catch up to the marketplace. In some places where reassessments are rising, the numbers have yet to approach historical heights.

For example, in 2007 roughly 1,800 homeowners asked for reassessments in Los Angeles County, far above the average of about 500, yet far below the tens of thousands of homeowners in Los Angeles who looked for tax adjustments during some years of the downturn in the 1990s. But elected officials and property tax experts said that the numbers were notable and that they expected them to grow in 2008.

In San Bernardino County near Los Angeles, tens of thousands of owners of the 860,000 homes will have their assessments lowered in the coming year, said Bill Postmus, the assessor, rivaling the numbers during the California real estate crash of the 1990s.

“You should see more of this activity,” said Chris Hoene, director of policy and research at the National League of Cities. “It is mostly in areas most likely to be seeing some decline, like Southern California, Florida, and big cities in the Midwest,” rapid growth areas that are now seeing the other side of the curve.

The United States Conference of Mayors recently released a report showing that the value of taxable residential land had declined by $2.9 billion in California from 2005 to 2008 based on current tax rates, and by hundreds of millions of dollars in other major cities. “We are hearing a lot about this housing market change and its effect on city revenues every day,” Mr. Hoene said

Cities where home values have fallen the most are the obvious first place to look for residents clamoring for reassessments, but that is not always the case. Some states, like California, Michigan and Nevada, have statutory caps in property tax increases, which mean the market value of single family homes almost always exceeds the assessed tax values, except in a major downturn.

However, even in California, if a home buyer made his purchase during a market top in the last several years, he might be in the position of qualifying for lower assessed values. For instance, in Santa Clara County, where pricey Palo Alto and San Jose are located, 17,758 properties were reassessed downward for the 2007-2008 tax period, compared with the same period from 2000 to 2001, when the number was closer to 300.

“Obviously 2001 was the dot-com boom,” said Larry Stone, the Santa Clara assessor. “And the whole assessment role in my county was carried by a very hot residential market,” which has substantially cooled.

In his area, prices, and therefore values, remain strong in high end residential areas with great schools, Mr. Stone said. The coming reassessments are driven in large part in the lower and middle markets, especially the condo market, where the greatest part of the subprime lending problems have occurred.

Indeed, areas with high levels of foreclosures, vacant housing and a reduction in prices expect to see adjustments to the property taxes continue, which is bad news for local governments.

“Rising tax values are not usually a popular thing,” Mr. Hoene said , but homeowners tend to accept it, even begrudgingly, when they know the market value of their home is on the rise. “But the minute you think that your local government assessment practices are out of whack with what is happening in the market,” he said, “you will not accept it.”

Hoover Planned Mass Jailing in 1950

2007-12-23T18:41:00.001+01:00

By TIM WEINER

A newly declassified document shows that J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had a plan to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty.

Hoover sent his plan to the White House on July 7, 1950, 12 days after the Korean War began. It envisioned putting suspect Americans in military prisons.

Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The F.B.I would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under “a master warrant attached to a list of names” provided by the bureau.

The names were part of an index that Hoover had been compiling for years. “The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven per cent are citizens of the United States,” he wrote.

“In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus,” it said.

Habeas corpus, the right to seek relief from illegal detention, has been a fundamental principle of law for seven centuries. The Bush administration’s decision to hold suspects for years at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has made habeas corpus a contentious issue for Congress and the Supreme Court today.

The Constitution says habeas corpus shall not be suspended “unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it.” The plan proposed by Hoover, the head of the F.B.I. from 1924 to 1972, stretched that clause to include “threatened invasion” or “attack upon United States troops in legally occupied territory.”

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush issued an order that effectively allowed the United States to hold suspects indefinitely without a hearing, a lawyer, or formal charges. In September 2006, Congress passed a law suspending habeas corpus for anyone deemed an “unlawful enemy combatant.”

But the Supreme Court has reaffirmed the right of American citizens to seek a writ of habeas corpus. This month the court heard arguments on whether about 300 foreigners held at Guantánamo Bay had the same rights. It is expected to rule by next summer.

Hoover’s plan was declassified Friday as part of a collection of cold-war documents concerning intelligence issues from 1950 to 1955. The collection makes up a new volume of “The Foreign Relations of the United States,” a series that by law has been published continuously by the State Department since the Civil War.

Hoover’s plan called for “the permanent detention” of the roughly 12,000 suspects at military bases as well as in federal prisons. The F.B.I., he said, had found that the arrests it proposed in New York and California would cause the prisons there to overflow.

So the bureau had arranged for “detention in military facilities of the individuals apprehended” in those states, he wrote.

The prisoners eventually would have had a right to a hearing under the Hoover plan. The hearing board would have been a panel made up of one judge and two citizens. But the hearings “will not be bound by the rules of evidence,” his letter noted.

The only modern precedent for Hoover’s plan was the Palmer Raids of 1920, named after the attorney general at the time. The raids, executed in large part by Hoover’s intelligence division, swept up thousands of people suspected of being communists and radicals.

Previously declassified documents show that the F.B.I.’s “security index” of suspect Americans predated the cold war. In March 1946, Hoover sought the authority to detain Americans “who might be dangerous” if the United States went to war. In August 1948, Attorney General Tom Clark gave the F.B.I. the power to make a master list of such people.

Hoover’s July 1950 letter was addressed to Sidney W. Souers, who had served as the first director of central intelligence and was then a special national-security assistant to Truman. The plan also was sent to the executive secretary of the National Security Council, whose members were the president, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state and the military chiefs.

In September 1950, Congress passed and the president signed a law authorizing the detention of “dangerous radicals” if the president declared a national emergency. Truman did declare such an emergency in December 1950, after China entered the Korean War. But no known evidence suggests he or any other president approved any part of Hoover’s proposal.

To Dismay of Inspectors, Prowling Cats Keep Rodents on the Run at City Delis

2007-12-23T18:40:00.000+01:00

By KATE HAMMER

Across the city, delis and bodegas are a familiar and vital part of the streetscape, modest places where customers can pick up necessities, a container of milk, a can of soup, a loaf of bread.

Amid the goods found in the stores, there is one thing that many owners and employees say they cannot do without: their cats. And it goes beyond cuddly companionship. These cats are workers, tireless and enthusiastic hunters of unwanted vermin, and they typically do a far better job than exterminators and poisons.

When a bodega cat is on the prowl, workers say, rats and mice vanish.

That is the case at a narrow corner store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where a gray long-haired tabby named Halloween goes on regular patrols when she is not lounging on a plaid bed tucked behind dusty rows of Schweppes ginger ale and empty cardboard boxes.

“In the morning she is lazy, it is her nap time,” said Urszula Jawor, 49, the deli’s manager, a Polish immigrant who smiled with motherly pride at Halloween, adding that the cat was named for the day she wandered in off the street and claimed the Bedford Avenue store as her home.

“But in the afternoon she is busy,” Ms. Jawor said. “She spends hours stalking the mice and the rats.”

To store owners, the services of cats are indispensable in a city where the rodent problem is serious enough to be documented in a still popular two-minute video clip on YouTube from late February (youtube.com/watch?v=su0U37w2tws) of rats running amok in a KFC/Taco Bell in Greenwich Village. Store-dwelling cats are so common that there is a Web site, workingclasscats.com, dedicated to telling their tales.

But as efficient as the cats may be, their presence in stores can lead to legal trouble. The city’s health code and state law forbid animals in places where food or beverages are sold for human consumption. Fines range from $300 for a first offense to $2,000 or higher for subsequent offenses.

“Any animal around food presents a food contamination threat,” said Robert M. Corrigan, a rodentologist and research scientist for the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. “And so that means anything from animal pieces and parts to hair and excrement could end up in food, and that alone, of course, is a violation of the health code.”

Mr. Corrigan did concede that some studies have shown that the smell of cats in an enclosed area will keep mice away. But he does not endorse cats as a form of pest control because, he explained, the bacteria, viruses, fungi, parasites and nematodes carried by rats may infect humans by secondary transfer through a cat.

Still, many store owners keep cats despite the law, mainly because other options have failed and the fine for rodent feces is also $300. “It’s hard for bodega owners because they’re not supposed to have a cat, but they’re also not supposed to have rats,” said José Fernández, the president of the Bodega Association of the United States.

Luis Martinez, 42, has managed his brother’s grocery in East New York, Brooklyn, for two years. At first, despite weekly visits from an exterminator, the store’s inventory was ravaged constantly by nibbling vermin.

“Every night I had to put the bread in the freezer,” he said, pointing at shelves filled with bread and hamburger buns. “I was losing too much inventory. The chips and the Lipton soups all had holes in them.”

Then, last winter, a friend brought Mr. Martinez a marmalade kitten in need of a home. Mr. Martinez, who was skeptical of how one slinky kitten could fend off an army of hungry rats, set up a litter box in the back of the store, put down an old fleece jacket and named the kitten Junior.

Within two weeks, Mr. Martinez said, “a miracle.”

“Before you’d see giant rats running in off the streets into the store, but since Junior, no more,” he said.

Junior sometimes brings Mr. Martinez mouse carcasses as gifts, which he said bothers him less than the smell that permeates his store when the exterminator’s victims die and rot under a freezer.

In October, a health inspector fined Mr. Martinez $300 and warned him that if Junior was still there by the time of the next inspection he would be fined $2,000.

“He wants me to get rid of the cat, but the rats will take over if I do,” Mr. Martinez said. “I need the cat, and the cat needs a home.”

Because stores do not get advance notification of an inspection, Mr. Martinez is trying to keep Junior in his office as much as possible. Many bodega owners reason that a cat is less of a health threat than an army of nibbling rats. “If cats live in homes and apartments where people have food, a cat shouldn’t be a threat in a store if it’s well maintained,” Mr. Fernández said.

Some animal rescue groups, like the Spay and Neuter Intervention Project, support the legalization and regulation of store cats so that owners would be required to provide basic veterinary care and to spay or neuter their animals.

At a corner store in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Andre Duran, one of the owners, said he had kept a cat for six years and had never been fined.

“That’s Oreo,” he said, as he lifted a tiny black cat with white paws into his arms and carried her like a football. “No one’s ever complained about cat hair in their sandwiches, and if she weren’t here, you bet there’d be bigger problems than hair.”

As a line formed at Mr. Duran’s cash register and he excused himself to take orders, Oreo’s ears perked up and she slunk away toward the back of the store. She was, perhaps, in pursuit of something.

This Is the Sound of a Bubble Bursting

2007-12-23T18:39:00.000+01:00

By PETER S. GOODMAN

TWO years ago, when Eric Feichthaler was elected mayor of this palm-fringed, middle-class city, he figured on spending a lot of time at ribbon-cuttings. Tens of thousands of people had moved here in recent years, turning musty flatlands into a grid of ranch homes painted in vibrant Sun Belt hues: lime green, apricot and canary yellow.

Mr. Feichthaler was keen to build a new high school. He hoped to widen roads and extend the reach of the sewage system, limiting pollution from leaky septic tanks. He wanted to add parks.

Now, most of his visions have shrunk. The real estate frenzy that once filled public coffers with property taxes has over the last two years given way to a devastating bust. Rather than christening new facilities, the mayor finds himself picking through the wreckage of speculative excess and broken dreams.

Last month, the city eliminated 18 building inspector jobs and 20 other positions within its Department of Community Development. They were no longer needed because construction has all but ceased. The city recently hired a landscaping company to cut overgrown lawns surrounding hundreds of abandoned homes.

“People are underwater on their houses, and they have just left,” Mr. Feichthaler says. “That road widening may have to wait. It will be difficult to construct the high school. We know there are needs, but we are going to have to wait a little bit.”

Waiting, scrimping, taking stock: This is the vernacular of the moment for a nation reckoning with the leftovers of a real estate boom gone sour. From the dense suburbs of northern Virginia to communities arrayed across former farmland in California, these are the days of pullback: with real estate values falling, local governments are cutting services, eliminating staff and shelving projects.

Families seemingly disconnected from real estate bust are finding themselves sucked into its orbit, as neighbors lose their homes and the economy absorbs the strains of so much paper wealth wiped out so swiftly.

Southwestern Florida is in the midst of this gathering storm. It was here that housing prices multiplied first and most exuberantly, and here that the deterioration has unfolded most rapidly. As troubles spill from real estate and construction into other areas of life, this region offers what may be a foretaste of the economic pain awaiting other parts of the country.

Cape Coral is in Lee County, across the Caloosahatchee River from Fort Myers. In the county, a tidal wave of foreclosures is turning some neighborhoods into veritable ghost towns. The county school district recently scrapped plans to build seven new schools over the next two years. Real estate agents and construction workers are scrambling for other lines of work, and abandoning the area. As houses are relinquished to red ink and the elements, break-ins are skyrocketing, yet law enforcement is resigned to making do with existing staff.

“We’re all going to have to tighten the belt somehow,” says Robert Petrovich, Cape Coral’s chief of police.

FLORIDA real estate has long been synonymous with boom and bust, but the recent cycle has packed an unusual intensity. The Internet made it possible for people ensconced in snowy Minnesota to type “cheap waterfront property” into search engines and scroll through hundreds of ads for properties here. Cape Coral beckoned speculators, retirees and snowbirds with thousands of lots, all beyond winter’s reach.

Creative finance lubricated the developing boom, making it easy for buyers to take on more mortgage debt than they could otherwise handle, driving prices skyward. Each upward burst brought more investors — some from as far as California and Europe, real estate agents say.

Joe Carey was part of the speculative influx. An owner of rental property in Ohio, he visited Cape Coral in 2002 and found that he could buy undeveloped quarter-acre lots for as little as $10,000. Nearby, there were beaches, golf courses and access to the Caloosahatchee River, which empties into the Gulf of Mexico.

Builders were happy to arrange construction loans, then erect houses in as little as six months. Real estate agents promised to find buyers before the houses were even finished.

“All you needed was a pulse,” Mr. Carey said. “The price of dirt was going up. We took that leap of faith and put down $10,000.”

Backed by easily acquired construction loans, Mr. Carey’s investment allowed him to buy three lots and top off each with a new home. He flipped them immediately for about $175,000 each, he recalls. Then he bought more lots, confident that Cape Coral and Fort Myers — the county seat across the river — would continue to blossom. From 2000 to 2003, the population of the Cape Coral-Fort Myers metropolitan area grew to nearly 500,000 from 444,000, according to Moody’s Economy.com.

“Jobs were very plentiful,” Mr. Carey said. “The construction trade was up, stores were opening up, and doctors were coming in. It kind of built its own economy.”

10 Simple Appetizers in 20 Minutes or Less

2007-12-23T18:37:00.000+01:00

By MARK BITTMAN

YOU want good food at a holiday cocktail party and you want to impress people? You don’t want a caterer, you refuse to heat up frozen food, and you want to show that your expertise extends beyond buying perfectly ripe hunks of cheese and juicy olives? Then think about doing some cooking.

Here is a collection of party foods that are as easy to eat as they are to make. Each can be produced in 20 minutes or less. Many can be served at room temperature. And none require a plate. (Few people can juggle plate, wineglass and fork successfully, let alone gracefully.)

Most of these recipes are beyond minimalist: they never do in two steps what can be done in one, and they need no embellishment. As you scan these recipes for ideas, mostly think this: The ones you find most appealing are the ones your guests will like. Choose a few, spend an hour or two in the kitchen, and you’ll be in great shape.

On Bread or Crackers

1 Red peppers and anchovies: Drizzle piquillos or other roasted red peppers with olive oil, and top with a good anchovy fillet. A caper or two on each is not amiss.

2 Top rye flatbread with thin slices of crisp apple and pickled plain or schmaltz herring (not herring in cream sauce).

3 Sear skirt steak to medium-rare, not more than 8 minutes. Cut into chunks 1/2-inch to 1 inch, first with the grain, then against it. Spread bread with coarse mustard and/or butter. Top with steak and coarse salt.

4 Toss high-quality crab meat with minced shallots, a little tarragon or a lot of parsley and/or basil, and enough mayonnaise to bind. Also good on lettuce leaves.

5 Mash together best-quality tuna, minced anchovies, minced garlic, chopped oil-cured olives and olive oil as necessary.

6 New York comfort food: Spread cream cheese or crème fraîche on small bagels or bagel chips; black bread is also terrific. Top with sturgeon, sable or lox.

7 Slice soft goat cheese and brush with olive oil. Sprinkle with salt, pepper and chopped herbs, then with bread crumbs. Bake at 350 degrees until soft, about 10 minutes, and serve hot.

8 Might not be the new ketchup, but great stuff: purée skinned roasted peppers or piquillos with some of their liquid, salt and olive oil. Serve alone or with other foods — a piece of cheese, even.

9 Top buttered bread with shaved country ham, prosciutto or regular deli ham and bread-and-butter pickles.

10 Chop shrimp fine, then sauté in a minimum of oil, or poach quickly and drain. Mix premade pesto with mayonnaise so that it is gluey. Combine cooled shrimp with sufficient pesto to bind; chill.

Treating Mom to Art, Opera and Lots of Chilies

2007-12-23T18:33:00.002+01:00

The Cathedral of St. Francis of Assisi.

FOR almost 200 years, Santa Fe has been a site of pilgrimage. Every Good Friday since the early 18th century, believers have marched by foot, away from the center of town, with its Romanesque cathedral and rounded stucco buildings the color of roasted corn, toward El Santuario de Chimayo, the Lourdes of the Southwest, in the high-desert hills some 28 miles north. It’s a marathon of the devout, who reach the holy finish line wearing anything from hiking gear to their Sunday best.

When I arrived in Santa Fe, the capital of New Mexico, last summer, however, a different sort of Friday pilgrimage was under way. A remarkably homogeneous set of faithful were ambling up Canyon Road, where 100-plus art galleries had thrown open their doors, as they do every Friday night.

The women were all willowy, with long, pale hair that plumb-lined down the backs of their linen blouses. The men all wore freshly laundered jeans and crisp oxford shirts, their cuffs buttoned to the wrist. Most were in late middle age; many might once have been hippies. All exuded an aura of moneyed confidence.

All, that is, except me and my mother, who had flown in from Connecticut for the weekend. While the people around us were very likely spending hundreds, if not thousands, on Colonial-chic hotels, trendy restaurants and Navajo artifacts, I had a weekend budget of just $500, far from enough to support Mom in the style to which she should really be accustomed. More stressful yet, my mother had been my original tutor in frugality — a coupon-clipping budgetarian capable of transforming humdrum leftovers into Michelin-starred feasts. Now I had to live up to her example.

Yet our stay in this 400-year-old city began auspiciously, with a perfectly inexpensive art walk. Up Canyon Road we followed the pilgrims, popping into Marigold Arts to glance at Kenneth Parker’s vibrant Asian landscape photos (and drink the free ginger iced tea), then wandering down an alley to the Anahita Gallery for a stark behind-the-Iron-Curtain photography show (plus cheese and crackers).

The best show was “Flooded Desert,” Teresa Neptune’s painterly photographs of drenched dunes at White Sands. Not only was the show in El Zaguán, a rickety but quaint 1850s merchant’s home that houses the Historic Santa Fe Foundation, but Ms. Neptune had shot all these gorgeous images on just a few rolls of film. Whence such efficiency? As a poor art student, she said, “I had to learn to be very frugal.”

To beat the crowds, Mom and I departed Canyon Road for the Coyote Cafe, the storied restaurant that elevated Southwestern cuisine way beyond green-chili cheeseburgers. But because its entrees frequently hit the $30 mark, we went up to its more casual (and cheaper), bustling Rooftop Cantina. There, we munched chipotle shrimp, Cuban sandwiches and duck quesadillas and drank crisp, hoppy Santa Fe Pale Ale.

As I paid the bill, which came to $54, I jokingly suggested we celebrate our first trip together in 15 years the traditional Southwestern way — with tequila shots. Five minutes later, we were entering the Matador, a subterranean bar where the punk-ska band Operation Ivy was playing on the sound system and one wall displayed a poster for D.O.A., an early-’80s hard-core group.

This was a real dive bar. Well, a Santa Fe dive — instead of shots, we sipped smooth añejo ($19 with tip) until Mom announced she was tired.

I was beat, too, so we returned to the Camel Suites (just recently sold and renamed the Santa Fe Suites), the least expensive hotel I could find that still claimed to represent Santa Fe’s “rustic charm.” So, rustic charm meant the bedspreads were an indiscriminate medley of pink, purple, copper and turquoise, and the wood furniture was factory-made to look rough-hewn. But the beds were soft, the historic district just minutes way, and the rate was $90.75 a night (including tax). We slept soundly.

The next morning we drove to the Santa Fe Baking Company, a homey, crowded cafe where Mom loaded up on scrambled eggs with scallions and Cheddar cheese, and I ate light: a cinnamon bun, coffee and an imperial pint of fresh orange juice — all for a fair $20.

Then, it was off to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum (admission was $8 for me, $7 for my 60-or-older mother). We arrived in time to join a free tour, whose elderly docent sketched the painter’s life, from her discovery by Alfred Stieglitz to her artistic blossoming in New Mexico.

My mother, a part-time docent herself, questioned the way the guide played down O’Keeffe’s sensuality — an approach that, of course, had the opposite effect on us. We could see little else in O’Keeffe’s flowers and landscapes, and couldn’t help speculating on her relationship with Tony Vaccaro, whose intimate photographs of her adorned one gallery.

Post-museum, we window-shopped in the central plaza. (“Well!” Mom exclaimed. “It looks just like Taormina!”) At jewelry stores, Indian storyteller figures — ceramic characters on whose shoulders sit a rapt audience of children — were selling for $1,500, and at Shiprock Trading, antique Navajo rugs cost 10 times that.

We did find one bargain, though not really at a boutique: the Frito pie, $4.15 at the Five and Dime General Store on the tourist-flooded plaza. Back behind the aisles of shampoos and Hallmark cards lay the lunch counter where this delicacy — a small bag of chips sliced open and drenched with chili — was allegedly invented in 1962, when this was still a Woolworth’s. The pie is a satisfying snack. In fact, it weighed a ton — something like three pounds of meaty, beany, salty, corny goodness.

It necessitated a trip to the countryside to work off that weight. For Santa Fe is not simply its historic center but also the wild hills that lead into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. We drove past adobe-style gated housing developments, then around tight switchbacks, the forests of pine and aspen growing ever thicker.

At last, we reached 10,350 feet and Ski Santa Fe. The lifts that are now serving skiers were not open, so we ascended the unused trails on foot. Mom, alas, made it only partway before calling it quits — but she insisted that I soldier on, and I soon learned how steep even bunny slopes can be when there’s no high-speed quad to whisk you uphill.

Thirty minutes later, I arrived at a peak and saw what I’d been hoping for: sunbeams breaking through clouds; the hills, so red up close, now infinite shades of blue and gray; and Santa Fe itself, reduced to a little pueblo. It was a vista Mom would have loved. Then I rushed back down; we were due at the opera.

Now, I prefer Hollywood musicals to Mozart and Puccini, but at $14 a ticket, the open-air Santa Fe Opera, a few miles outside the city, was too good to pass up — especially since the opera-going culture there includes a unique aspect: gourmet tailgating. As Mom and I walked through the parking lot, we encountered a dozen parties, some in formal dress, seated at fold-out tables and finishing off bottles of wine.

This was serious feasting, and we actually began to feel a little ashamed of our takeout meal from Dave’s Not Here ($18.56). Mom had ordered her favorite, chiles rellenos, and I a green chili stew — delicious, but so sloppy that I wished I’d chosen Dave’s famous green-chili cheeseburger.

The opera? It was Strauss’s “Daphne,” and apart from the chic production design and the presence of live sheep onstage, its turgid plotting and lack of catchy hooks failed to convert this philistine. I’ll take “Gold Diggers of 1933” any day.

One mission remained for Sunday: the International Folk Art Market, the annual gathering of artisans from Nigeria, Kyrgyzstan, Ecuador, Laos and everywhere in between. On Saturday, admission had been $15; on Sunday, it was $5. But as we waited for the free shuttle to the fairgrounds, outside the Museum of International Folk Art, an official called out, “Anyone from Connecticut?” Mom answered his call, and he gave us free tickets, just for being from far away.

The fair itself was overwhelming. Crafts makers in traditional costumes demonstrated their techniques, live bands from Japan and West Africa performed on a stage, and thousands of shoppers pawed at jewelry, toys, textiles, masks and trinkets galore.

As afternoon approached, prices dropped. A $300 Mexican indigo rug was half off; a Kyrgyz felt rug went for $100. Mom picked a lovely, bright woodcut of an orange by the Brazilian artist Abraão Batista Bezerra (just $30!) while I went for one by his countryman José Francisco Borges ($20!).

We celebrated with a $5 cup of organic lavender ice cream from Tara’s booth — sublime.

With about $40 left before we hit our weekend limit, Mom and I decided to visit Ten Thousand Waves, a Japanese-style spa in the hills. But when I went online to double-check prices — $19 for an all-day soak in the communal hot tub — I discovered it was clothing optional. Now, my family’s fairly progressive, but some things, thankfully, remain off limits. I went alone, which was a smart decision: There was a single bathrobed woman lounging in a chair, but the communal tub was full of naked men. Mom would not have loved this vista.

Among the bamboo walls and the needly pine trees, I alternated between hot tub, cold plunge and sauna, drank tea and finally relaxed. All weekend, I realized, I’d been stressing, worried that, on this meager budget, my mother would be miserable. But she’d eaten gloriously, shopped thriftily and gotten a hefty dose of Santa Fe culture — and so had I.

Total: $493.30 (including taxes, parking fees and a mind-blowing $53 brunch — smoked trout hash, red chili with fried egg — at Café Pasqual’s on our final morning).