After Cheney

IN THE FIELD Biden meeting in Baghdad with Gen. Raymond T. Odierno and Christopher Hill, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq.

An interesting article about Biden as Vice President. His experience in the Senate, his personality, his garrulousness, his role in the Obama administration, his succession of Cheney.

Some details from the story stand out for me.

First, this web and tangle of relationships: while Cheney’s staff fought for dominance with the White House, Biden’s is deeply enmeshed in the policy-making structure. His national-security adviser, Antony J. Blinken, and two other aides are also directors in the National Security Council, while a number of former Biden aides occupy important posts in the N.S.C. Thomas Donilon, deputy national-security adviser and coordinator of policy across agencies, has been a close friend of Biden’s since the 1980s; Donilon’s brother, Michael, is a senior adviser to Biden, and Donilon’s wife, Catherine Russell, was Biden’s former administrative assistant and is now chief of staff to Biden’s wife, Jill. During the transition, Biden told James Jones that he didn’t want his own N.S.C. but wanted to be able to call on the N.S.C. as needed. Jones complied; on the first day in office, he told his staff, “You work for the president and the vice president.” National-security aides routinely accompany Biden on his foreign trips. As one policymaker who was not authorized to comment publicly on internal administration issues said to me: “I don’t in my head distinguish between Office of the Vice President people and N.S.C. people. We’re all the White House staff.”

Whether such a sweeping statement is full reality or a variation of reality and wishful thinking, there seems little doubt that the style and substance of the Bush and the Obama administrations are quite different.

THE MEDIATOR So far, Biden has avoided the White House infighting that marked Cheney’s tenure.


The difference between Biden’s role and Cheney’s has at least as much to do with the culture of the two administrations as it does with the men themselves. Bush’s discomfort with world affairs created a vacuum that Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and others fought to fill. Moreover, Bush’s tendency toward the snap judgment and the gut call undermined the formal policy process in favor of jockeying for position at key moments. By contrast, there is little question where foreign policy is now decided — in the Oval Office — and the absence of a San Andreas fault line has as much to do with clarity of authority as it does with personal vibes. What’s more, as the agonizingly deliberative debate over policy in Afghanistan has demonstrated, Obama wants to hear a case fully argued out before reaching a conclusion, even at some political risk. This perfectly suits Biden, a gifted expostulator and an indifferent schemer.

Biden is described as a knowledgable Washington hand, experienced in foreign policy matters, and the like.

“When you’re talking about a country which has an 85 percent rate of illiteracy, which has virtually no history of modern governance, you should go in with an overwhelming dose of humility,” he told me. “And you’d better damn well have as precise a notion as you can of what your objective is.”

Saying virtually is, perhaps, being kind.

Biden and those around him do not seem to believe that McChrystal’s strategy can work — not because they question the abilities of the military, but because they think the generals are far too optimistic about the civilian elements upon which the overall plan depends. They are deeply skeptical that the government of President Hamid Karzai can somehow gain legitimacy in the eyes of the Afghan people; that the U.S. can quickly develop the enormous civilian capacity that would accompany a military surge, or can train as many as 400,000 Afghan soldiers, especially with attrition rates now running around 25 percent; that Pakistan will accept a policy designed to bolster Afghanistan’s Pashtun-led government; that NATO allies will overcome public resistance to offer major help; or that the U.S. can afford to spend something like $250 billion on Afghanistan at a time when deficits are already running very high.

Key point there: Pakistan accepting a Pashtun-led Afghani government.

If Al Qaeda can be bottled up on the border with Pakistan through counterterrorism measures involving troops as well as drone attacks, and with the help of an expanded Afghan army, then it is unnecessary to build a secure Afghanistan that can defeat the Taliban.

And perhaps provide a handle on an exit strategy?

Patient and humble are not words that come to mind when you think of Joe Biden; yet even his limitations may suit him for this new world. Biden is the one who knows many little things but no big thing. As gifted as he is at retail politics, he has none of Barack Obama’s talent for the sweeping formulation or inspirational language, which perhaps explains why he has fared so poorly in presidential campaigns. Biden does not project even slightly in the realm of myth. But for this very reason, he is allergic to magical, wish-fulfillment thinking. “Guys,” he’ll say — this is how he describes addressing the Joint Chiefs of Staff — “what if it doesn’t work?” An administration full of youthful true believers, enraptured with their heroic leader, needs a skeptic and a scold. Obama may need one himself. And yet Biden is also, like Obama, an optimist. As vice presidents go, he has more in common with Hubert Humphrey, the happy warrior, than with dark Dick Cheney. He may well, as Tom Lehrer once sang of Humphrey, dream of staging a coup; but he is likely to remain happy as long as he has apple carts to overturn.

Uninvited

Samantha Appleton/The White House - In a photo released by the White House, President Obama greeted Michaele and Tareq Salahi, right, at his first state dinner on Tuesday.


O, boy, does the media love this story!

President Obama and his wife, Michelle, had a face-to-face encounter with the couple who sneaked into a state dinner at the White House this week, White House officials acknowledged on Friday. The revelation underscored the seriousness of the security breach and prompted an abject apology from the Secret Service.

A White House spokesman said that the couple, Michaele and Tareq Salahi of Virginia, met and shook hands with the president and the first lady in the receiving line in the Blue Room, as the Obamas greeted each of their 400 invited guests Tuesday night before moving to a tent on the South Lawn for dinner.

Of course, this is serious: uninvited guests got into a White House fête with, perhaps, a combination of guile and charm on their part (aspiring reality teevee people that they are, all the better for them), and security breakdown on the Secret Service's part (disastrous public relations, and serious implications for the security of the President and the WHite House: if the WH itself can be penetrated, what is safe?).

That disclosure coincided with a statement from the director of the Secret Service, Mark Sullivan, saying that his agency was “deeply concerned and embarrassed” by the events. Secret Service officials said the agency wanted to interview everyone connected with the episode, including the Salahis, and had not ruled out criminal charges.

Filing criminal charges seems a way to get even, but would amount to more free publicity for the couple, and could well backfire in the face of the Secret Service.

Related
The TV Watch: For Some, a Search for Celebrity Is Worth Any Risk (November 28, 2009)
Obamas’ Uninvited Guests Prompt an Inquiry (November 27, 2009)

For their part, White House officials took pains to publicly refrain from criticizing the Secret Service. “The men and women of the Secret Service put their lives on the line every day to protect us; they are heroes, and they have the full confidence of the president of United States,” said Nick Shapiro, a White House spokesman.

Heroes? They do perform hazardous duty, but heroes? Heroes are those who perform extraordinarily, and are "distinguished by exceptional courage and nobility and strength." These days the word hero is bandied about too often and dropped far too easily.

Region finds U.S. lacking on Honduras

Scrawl outside a military base where ballots for Sunday's presidential election are stored tells Hondurans not to vote.

Of course, the headline should read Some in Region finds U.S. lacking on Honduras

The ouster of Manuel Zelaya, the Honduran populist president, five months ago propelled the deeply impoverished country onto President Obama’s packed agenda. The question now is whether his administration’s support for the presidential election being held there on Sunday will be seen as a stamp of approval for a coup or, as senior administration members maintain, the beginning of the end of the crisis.

Curiously, when the action went down in Honduras, Latin America as a whole, including Chávez and Ortega, implored the US to step in and fix things. That is, they invited what in other cases they call meddling.

Most countries in the region see it as the former. Haunted by ghosts of authoritarian governments not long in the grave, countries like Brazil, Argentina and Chile have argued that an election held by an illegal government is, by definition, illegal.

Illegal by their standards; some Hondureños see the removal of Zelaya as proper and legal.

They worry that if Mr. Obama appears to set aside that principle in Honduras, where the United States has long been a power broker, what would Washington do if democracy were threatened in a more powerful country where it wields less influence?

What principle? The US has supported the restoration of Zelaya, and an agreement was reached between Zelaya and Micheletti (though not instituted because the Honduran legislature did not ratify it). Is it supposed that other Latin govenments wish the US to impose its will on the Honduran legislature?

Last week, Marco Aurélio García, a senior adviser to the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said his country “continues to have great hopes” for good relations with the United States. But, he added, “the truth is so far we have a strong sense of disappointment.”

O, por favor.

Latin American governments accused the administration of putting pragmatism over principle and of siding with Honduran military officers and business interests whose goal was to use the elections to legitimize the coup.

Pragmatism over principle: what a curious charge to lob. Curious charge made by, say, the Chavista government that has installed relatives and cronies in positions of power. To say nothing of Cuba. This is an argument with nothing but subterfuge and cynicism wrapped in the mantle of idealism. Easily dismissed.

“They really thought he was different,” said Julia Sweig of the Council on Foreign Relations, referring to Latin America’s view of Mr. Obama, adding, “But those hopes were dashed over the course of the summer.”

This is all public posturing. In six months there will be different public arguments being waged.

Show Me the Money

Who decides what a trader is worth: His bosses? The government? The public? Inside the tug-of-war over pay at AIG, where compensation has become a proxy for a whole lot more.


AIG was saved by the federal government. Of course, it was saved for the benefit of the at-large economy and not for its own sake, but the fact remains that the government saved it. Despite that fact, executives and board members chafe at the pay restrictions imposed by Kenneth Feinberg, federal pay czar. Robert Benmosche, whom I met when he joined Metlife, is now CEO of AIG. He is chafing at Feinberg's rules, and perhaps his very presence.

Feinberg is familiar with emotionally charged disputes about money. As the special master of the 9/11 victim fund, Feinberg ruled on the dispensation of $7 billion to victims’ families. “The 9/11 fund was much more emotional and tragic,” he said. “There you’re dealing with dead bodies and burn victims and families that had their husbands and wives and sons incinerated. No, there’s no comparison.”

But in other ways, there are parallels. His true power as pay czar is not only to set specific compensation guidelines for the seven largest firms still using TARP money but also to inform Masters of the Universe what the taxpayers ultimately think they’re worth. It is a painful ego check many of them can’t stomach. “This is about money, but don’t pooh-pooh money,” he says. “In our society, money is a surrogate for worth, integrity, self-respect, power, and so there’s a lot of emotion associated with this. That’s a very important point. Contrary to what many people think, it’s not just about compensation and how much will be earned. It’s not just dollars and cents.”


Benmosche demanded $10.5 million as his compensation. Money matters greatly to him, in pretty much the way Feinberg defines it above.

On his first official day on the job in August he told the FP traders, “I think you are all worth every dime that you’re owed in these plans,” he said, according to a person present. “If it had been my son or daughter and they had come home and told me the story of what was going on here, I would have been outraged.”

He does not understand the populist revulsion against his ilk.

Next he took on Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, who’d threatened to release names of FP employees who received retention payments. “What [Cuomo] did is so unbelievably wrong,” Benmosche told a group of insurance workers, according to Bloomberg News. “He doesn’t deserve to be in government, and he surely shouldn’t be the attorney general of the State of New York. What he did is criminal. You don’t create lynch mobs to go out to people’s homes and do the things he did.”

Arrogance drips off his words and attitude. Arrogance was obvious when I met him, and that goes back a dozen years.

The AIG board was not happy that Benmosche was potentially inciting a political fight with Washington. A week after his Cuomo remarks, Benmosche apologized to the directors at a board dinner in New York, telling them he had no idea his comments were being recorded. Since then, AIG has muzzled Benmosche and declined to make him available for this piece.

He apologized for being recorded, not for saying what he said.

If anything, the political stakes in the current struggle are even greater than financial ones. In the year since the government committed more than a trillion dollars of taxpayer money to rescue the financial system, AIG remains the proxy for everything the public hates about the bailout and Wall Street’s culture of entitlement and greed. Benmosche’s insistence that FP’s traders receive retention contracts strikes many as outrageous given the billions spent to fix a mess created by traders at the same desks. And AIG suffers from the Goldman Sachs backlash, because Goldman, at the peak of the crisis, when Hank Paulson was Treasury secretary and Geithner was head of the New York Fed, was paid 100 cents on the dollar for its credit-default swap contracts, $13 billion, money it would have lost had the government allowed the firm to go under. A year later, Goldman is set to pay as much as $22 billion in bonuses. For Geithner, everything goes back to Goldman, the original sin. “Everyone is watching Goldman,” one person close to Geithner says. “The pay problem is really a Goldman problem.”

Speaking of arrogance. Blankfein apologized and Goldman donated chunks of money purportedly to help small businesses and others, but filled with empty promises and large tax deductions.

Senior AIG executives contend that an exodus of traders over punitively reduced contracts risks blowing up the $1.1 trillion derivatives portfolio still left to be unwound, destroying the taxpayers’ $180 billion investment in the company and potentially dragging the fragile economic recovery back into the abyss.

That would be bad.

Feinberg, along with everyone in the Obama White House, recognizes the risks. “I’m concerned about that. I don’t want to see that happen.” But privately, Feinberg has indicated to Treasury officials that he’s not sure the FP employees are as crucial as they say. When the crisis erupted last fall, AIG hired McKinsey and Blackstone to study the portfolio and devise a strategy to wind down the trades. If a mass of FP traders leave, advisers might be able to stabilize the positions in time to bring in new traders. “You could triage it,” a former senior FP trader told me. Essentially, as long as someone managed risks to interest-rate and foreign- exchange moves, traders could be hired to continue the unwind.

Is anyone indispensable?

Inside AIG, senior executives came to believe that Treasury was manipulating the debate to deflect populist rage from blowing back on the government’s participation in the bailout.

Congress is good at grandstanding and pomposity, and the amount of demagoguery has been reaching very high levels. And surely Treasury is trying to cover its ass. For AIGers to charge bad faith is incredibly pompous and hypocritical.

Of course, there has been a lot of posturing by Andrew Cuomo and populist groups, fanning the ire of people outraged by remaining pockets of affluence seeming immune to the wretchedness of the recession and the financial crisis.

Inside FP, conspiracy theories have taken hold. Depending on who you talk to, there’s a feeling that Feinberg is a political puppet for the socialist politics of the Obama White House. “Who is truly controlling Feinberg? Our understanding is that it’s Rahm Emanuel,” one FP executive says. Another, more bizarre idea has it that Michelle Obama and Valerie Jarrett have convinced the president to redistribute wealth and make an example out of AIG. “Does Michelle Obama have a social agenda?” one FP employee asked.

Anyone mention the grassy knoll?

It’s the moral-hazard problem writ on a truly gigantic scale: Goldman, Morgan, Merrill, et al., took risks—for what was dealing with AIG but a risk—and didn’t ultimately have to pay any of the costs. AIG should not be a place to get rich, after all that’s happened. But the AIG FP traders are right that, in some sense, they’re stand-ins for the sins of an entire class.

Feinberg told me he doesn’t see binary choices. His job is to weigh competing interests and “come up with a fair number.” The problem is that fairness from a Wall Street point of view is very different from how most Americans think of the word. Part of Feinberg’s job is to bring them into harmony. “The companies will stay in business, they’ll thrive, and the taxpayer will get all, or some, of their loan back,” he says.

And for AIG, that question is a $180 billion gamble. The FP traders are well aware of their leverage in letting everyone know the stakes. “As a trader,” one senior FP executive says, “you’re only as good as the hand you have.”

Repeat Defender
After taming crime in Los Angeles, Bill Bratton has won over the skeptics who doubted his success in New York. But all he really wants is his old job back.

In the tumultuous days after 9/11, while his nemesis Rudy Giuliani established himself as a bona fide American hero, Bill Bratton, the city’s former police commissioner, stood very much on the outside. He was working with the private security group Kroll, and the closest he came to the action was helping to arrange for one of his clients to get some of its gold out from underneath a collapsed building near ground zero. “That to me was not meaningful,” Bratton says. “I used to be in charge. And now you’re one of 8 million. I had no role of significance.”

It’s one of Bratton’s favorite expressions and deepest desires—to have a role of significance. And in 1994, when Giuliani put him in charge of the New York City Police Department, he had just that. He came into One Police Plaza promising the impossible—to “reengineer” the NYPD and to reduce crime. Then he delivered, as the murder rate dropped 39 percent and the city became the safest it had been in a quarter-century. In the process, Bratton became a celebrity—a combination Lee Iacocca–Eliot Ness who fought criminals with management theory; Time put him on its cover under the headline FINALLY, WE’RE WINNING THE WAR AGAINST CRIME. HERE’S WHY.

Indeed, Bratton’s success as commissioner seemed to guarantee future roles of significance. His admirers speculated he might one day make an excellent mayor, and Bratton himself talked about parlaying his NYPD post into a Master of the Universe corporate post. “When I leave,” he said after about a year on the job, “I don’t want to go out as a consultant, I don’t want to go out as Joe Blow the security director.”

But Bratton’s success, or at least his desire to take credit for it, ultimately proved his undoing. He became embroiled in a battle of egos with Giuliani, and after just 27 months as police commissioner, the mayor forced him out. The Fortune 500 did not come calling, so Bratton took a series of Joe Blow security-consulting gigs. Meanwhile, the significance of his accomplishments came into question. As crime continued to fall in New York, prominent academics and politicians began to argue that larger societal forces, rather than police tactics, were really responsible for the drop—or, if the NYPD was responsible, then Bratton hadn’t been that instrumental in its success. “Bratton was good at public relations,” Giuliani told the Times in a typical bit of knife-twisting, “but I had to supply the substance. Three-quarters of his ideas were ideas we gave him.”

So in 2002, when the Los Angeles Police Department’s top job became open, Bratton saw a chance to redeem himself. “I’ve got to be honest, I was very reluctant to even interview Bill,” says Rick Caruso, who was then the president of the city’s Police Commission. “I was concerned about some of the things I’d heard about New York and Giuliani.” After ferocious lobbying by Bratton and supporters like Bill Clinton, he got the job, taking over a department that was, in some ways, even more vexed than the one he’d inherited in New York.

The LAPD was protecting and serving a city that had recently become the murder capital of the United States; it was also operating under federal supervision—called a consent decree—owing to a series of corruption scandals and civil-rights violations. “The potential for failure was very, very high,” Bratton says today. But over his next seven years as LAPD chief—the longest tenure Bratton has had at any of the six police departments he’s run in his career—he achieved results akin to those he had in New York. When he announced his resignation in August, violent crimes in Los Angeles had declined by nearly half and a judge had lifted the consent decree. What’s more, after years of being hated by Angelenos, especially minorities, the LAPD had a performance-approval rating of 83 percent, according to a Harvard study. Bratton was, as he told me, “leaving Los Angeles at the top of my game.”

He already has a new job, as the CEO of a firm called Altegrity Security Consulting, based in midtown. If the name sounds Joe Blow–ish, Bratton insists that its mission is not: The company is hoping to overhaul criminal-justice systems in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and other “post-conflict nations.” “Let’s face it, half the world was not democratic a few years ago,” Bratton says. “So here’s an opportunity to take a democracy that works—ours—and take the best practices and make a difference in the world.”

For all the big talk, though, no one expects that Altegrity will be Bratton’s capstone—least of all himself. His hair is slightly thinner and grayer, but at first glance, the 62-year-old Bratton doesn’t seem to have changed at all since his last tour of duty in New York: same Hermès ties, same Boston accent, same inexplicable devotion to Elaine’s. “Elaine’s got radar all over the city,” he says. “If we don’t stop in, we’re in trouble.”

One of the things Bill Bratton learned in Los Angeles: how to get along with Al Sharpton.


Most of all, he continues to have the same burning need for significance, and his stock has never been higher. His old boss, Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, hails him as “America’s top cop”; a California police official says Bratton is “as close as there is to a deity in our business.” Even a onetime critic like Steven Levitt, who in Freakonomics disparaged Bratton’s role in New York’s crime drop—instead attributing it to the legalization of abortion—is now a believer. “Someone who’s able to go to two different places and reduce crime dramatically in both of them? You have to give the guy some credit,” Levitt says. “If you asked me who I’d want as police commissioner in my city, I’d say Bratton.”

The New York Post has editorialized that he should challenge Kirsten Gillibrand in next year’s U.S. Senate race. There’s also constant speculation he’ll join the Obama administration. “Bill Bratton would make a great FBI chief,” Villaraigosa says. “I think he’d be a great secretary of Homeland Security.”

Not so long ago, Bratton would have been gunning for all those jobs. He’s never been shy about expressing his ambition. But now, for the first time in his life, Bratton seems hesitant. Sitting in the Altegrity conference room, he reflected on his career prospects. “I come out of Los Angeles with the idea that we made a difference in the quality of life in the city and that we made a difference in our profession and in our criminal-justice system,” he said, pausing to pick at a bagel in a brown paper bag. “Where do you go from there?” He sounded as if he genuinely didn’t know.

In the debate over whether policing is an art or a science, Bratton is a firm believer that it’s a science. His successes, he says, were attributable to two basic policing strategies: CompStat and “broken windows.” The former is the system Bratton and his NYPD deputy commissioner, the late Jack Maple, developed in 1994 that introduced computer analysis of crime patterns and strict accountability measures to modern policing. The latter is the theory first articulated by the academics George Kelling and James Q. Wilson in 1982, and later put into practice by Bratton with New York’s transit cops and then with the NYPD, that by cracking down on minor quality-of-life crimes—graffiti, fare-hopping, breaking windows—police can reduce serious crime as well. “There’s nothing going on in Los Angeles that’s different from what I did in New York,” Bratton says. “I have CompStat and I have very assertive cops making a lot of arrests.”

And yet it was Bratton’s willingness to adapt these strategies to two very different environments that accounts for his successes. In other words, he was as much of an artist as he was a scientist. One crucial adjustment was patience. In New York City, Bratton had commanded 38,000 cops and was able to flood multiple high-crime areas simultaneously with hundreds of officers. In Los Angeles, he had only 9,000 cops. “Throwing 50 cops at a problem in Los Angeles was really difficult,” says Kelling, a consultant to the LAPD during Bratton’s tenure. “It meant he couldn’t do everything at once.” So, while Bratton cracked down immediately on prostitution in Hollywood, cleaning up the city’s notorious skid row had to wait. “This was much more of a patient, unfolding enterprise,” says John Linder, a consultant who worked with Bratton in New York and Los Angeles. “He was not as worried about the immediate impact as he was in New York.”

“Everything we do today,” says a New York cop, “is simply a Bratton program that they’ve changed the name of.”

Los Angeles’s manpower shortage also forced Bratton to rely heavily on technology. CompStat itself has always been very 1.0. “It’s basically a computerized map,” says one Los Angeles politico. “You look at it and you think, This is the revolution?” But Bratton introduced more cutting-edge gadgetry to the department to create what he believes is a new model of crime-fighting called “predictive policing.” “We have advanced the state of gathering information and making intelligence out of it that on maps, we can track crime developing and evolving in real time,” Bratton explains.

Technology was just one area that needed improvement. The historic shortage of cops in Los Angeles had led to a destructive style of policing. “If you put cops out there who have no idea if backup will come in time to save their lives, they’re going to be hard-asses and propagate fear so that they can protect themselves,” says Linder. So Bratton worked with Villaraigosa, who was elected mayor three years after Bratton was hired, to pry more money from the City Council for almost 1,000 new cops.

All that fresh blood helped Bratton make his biggest adjustment, which was orienting himself to the minority community, something he didn’t have much experience with. In Bratton’s preferred telling, New York’s poisonous race relations in the nineties were the fault of his old boss. “Giuliani’s an incredibly astute politician, but on issues dealing with these racial sensitivities, there was a critical failing of his,” he says. The truth is that Bratton and his deputies weren’t all that cuddly themselves. Indeed, Bratton, who bristled at what he called “racial racketeers,” made a big show in his first week as NYPD commissioner of snubbing Al Sharpton.

But in Los Angeles, where race relations between the LAPD and black and Latino Angelenos made New York in the nineties look like Pleasantville, Bratton couldn’t afford to be disdainful. Instead, he courted prominent minority leaders who, according to Los Angeles councilman Eric Garcetti, “chew up police chiefs for a living,” becoming a regular visitor to restaurants in East Los Angeles and barbershops in South Central. “We went into Watts on a Saturday, and kids were in the park of a housing project, playing hip-hop at a picnic, and there was the chief sitting with them and eating ribs with them,” recalls Fred Booker, an African-American LAPD lieutenant who served as Bratton’s community-relations special assistant. “I’d never seen anything like it before.” Bratton even patched things up with Sharpton. “Al and I get along very, very well,” Bratton says.

For all his nostrums, Bratton’s greatest talent is his flexibility. Despite his ego, he has no trouble implementing ideas from others—whether it was “broken windows” from Kelling and Wilson or CompStat from Maple. And for all his vanity, he’s secure enough not to micromanage. “People usually like working for me because I do leave them alone,” he says. The secret of Bratton’s success is that he values success more than anything else.

It’s Mike Scagnelli’s NYPD retirement party (a “racket,” in department parlance), and more than 1,000 people have come out to honor the three-star chief at a restaurant in the outer reaches of Queens. “Bill Bratton changed the face of the New York City Police Department,” Scagnelli tells me. “Everything we do today is simply a Bratton program that they’ve changed the name of.”

The last line is a clear dig at the current NYPD commissioner, Ray Kelly, who’s been a rival of Bratton’s since the early nineties, when David Dinkins chose Kelly over Bratton as his chief. A couple of years later, the newly elected Giuliani dumped Kelly for Bratton. Kelly is said not to be fond of Bratton. Bratton professes admiration for Kelly—“We’re not buddy-buddies hanging out at Elaine’s, but you can’t argue with his success”—though he seems to take pleasure in ticking off the current commissioner. It’s a good bet he’s doing just that by turning up at Scagnelli’s racket.

“They’ll stand and applaud Kelly too,” says one partygoer as he waits his turn to greet Bratton, “but that’s the reign of fear. The NYPD is all about retribution, so you have to applaud the current commissioner. With Bratton, it’s the real deal.” In fact, just a few weeks earlier, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association named Bratton its man of the year, thirteen years after his 27-month tenure as NYPD commissioner. Kelly has never been so honored.

The next morning, as Bratton settles into his seat on the Acela, he’s still basking in the glow of the previous evening. “Scagnelli was very laudatory in his comments about me,” he says. “It’s nice to be thought of in that way. It’s pretty widespread in the NYPD.” For the next few hours, as we head toward Washington—where Bratton is scheduled to testify before a House Committee—I ask him about all the various jobs that his name gets attached to. He shoots them all down. Running for mayor or governor? “Not of interest. I’m not interested in a lot of the environmental issues, or all the other issues that a mayor or a governor has to spend their time on.” FBI director? “I don’t know anybody in federal government that’s happy. [FBI director Robert] Mueller has twenty-some-odd oversight committees. So his freedom of action is very limited. It’s brutal.” Homeland Security? “The best thing to do with DHS is to break it up.”

Bratton’s ego has survived intact. He stills feels the need to mention that his leadership skills are taught at Harvard, that Johnson & Johnson assigns his book to all of its top managers, that Barack Obama crossed a room to say hello a few years back at a Los Angeles party, and that seven people approached him on his recent flight from Los Angeles to New York to tell him how much they appreciate the job he did in their city.

But he also seems to have reached an understanding that being a cop is what he loves doing. The question is, where’s there left to go? “He wants New York again,” says a close friend. “It’s unfinished business for him.” Despite the friction with Giuliani, the memories are overwhelmingly good. In New York, there was Elaine’s and the helicopter rides and the Sunday dinners he’d have for his inner circle at his apartment. “In Los Angeles,” he says, “I’ve never had anybody from the department over to the house.” His tone gets wistful. “It was probably more fun in New York. We really had a good time—a very, very good time. They were Camelot years.”

Could there be a restoration? Before I can ask the question, Bratton brings up the possibility himself. “There are some people who want me to come back as New York City police commissioner,” he says. “And that’s not so far-fetched at all. If you were a candidate in the city running for mayor, and you’ve got one of the biggest names in American policing and somebody who had basically begun the process of making New York safe? They’ll all be knocking on my door.” More than anything, it seems, Bill Bratton wants his final act to be an encore.

Soviets' Afghan Ordeal Vexed Gates on Troop-Surge Plan

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev also faced a troop-increase request during his first year, for a war he had inherited. Soviet generals in 1985 asked for tens of thousands more soldiers to bolster their 100,000-strong contingent, roughly the same size as the current Western force in Afghanistan.

Mr. Gates, discussing that period in his 1996 memoir "From the Shadows," wrote: "The Soviets had to either reinforce or lose. Because they clearly were not winning." Gen. McChrystal used similar language in his recent warning about possible American "failure" in Afghanistan unless adequate resources are committed. Mr. Gorbachev ended up authorizing a small troop surge; 18 months later, he announced plans for a withdrawal.


The future of the war in Afghanistan was on the line as Gen. Stanley McChrystal met with Defense Secretary Robert Gates in a secret rendezvous at a Belgian airbase in August. Gen. McChrystal, the top Western commander in Afghanistan, pushed for more U.S. troops to roll back the spreading Taliban-led insurgency. Mr. Gates, officials say, was skeptical.

A quarter-century ago, he was a top Central Intelligence Agency officer aiding the anti-Soviet rebels in Afghanistan, and he remembered how a 1985 decision by the Soviet Union to widen that earlier war had failed to turn the tide.

The Soviets left Afghanistan, their southern neighbor, with their collective tail dragging the ground, defeated.

Few American officials know the Soviets' bitter Afghan predicament better than Mr. Gates. In the 1980s, he was the deputy director of the CIA, overseeing a massive U.S. effort to fund, train and equip the Islamic insurgents, called mujahedeen, who fought the Soviet army to a standstill.

Now some of the most prominent of these insurgents, such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, are allied against America with the Taliban and al Qaeda. Almost daily their men are killing Western troops, who often operate from former Soviet bases and use Soviet-drawn military maps with faint Cyrillic markings.

Irony of history?

"It's an eerie sense of deja vu," said Bruce Riedel, a Brookings Institution scholar who headed the Obama administration's Afghan policy review in the spring and who in the 1980s worked under Mr. Gates as a CIA officer in the region. "America," he said, "is in the rare position of fighting the same war twice in one generation, from opposite sides. And it's easier to be the insurgents."

That point is not discussed often: the US is fighting the same war, and this second time it is the object of, not the supporter of, insurgents. Heck, Osama bin Laden was supported by the CIA.

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev also faced a troop-increase request during his first year, for a war he had inherited. Soviet generals in 1985 asked for tens of thousands more soldiers to bolster their 100,000-strong contingent, roughly the same size as the current Western force in Afghanistan.

Mr. Gates, discussing that period in his 1996 memoir "From the Shadows," wrote: "The Soviets had to either reinforce or lose. Because they clearly were not winning." Gen. McChrystal used similar language in his recent warning about possible American "failure" in Afghanistan unless adequate resources are committed. Mr. Gorbachev ended up authorizing a small troop surge; 18 months later, he announced plans for a withdrawal.

Eerie parallel, or mere coincidence?

In Afghanistan's dusty capital, dotted with blast barriers, talk of democracy is hard to square with widespread ballot-stuffing during Mr. Karzai's recent re-election. As for rebuilding, the middle classes here still aspire to live in Soviet-built neighborhoods of decayed housing blocks that would be an eyesore elsewhere but are luxurious by Afghan standards. Despite billions in U.S. aid since 2001 spent on roads, clinics and schools, there is little comparably prominent evidence of American reconstruction.

To us, perhaps things are fixed and fine now, but, what about Afghans?

"What have the Americans done so far? They're only busy building their own military bases," said Mohammad Nassim, a 40-year-old Kabul resident, airing a frequently heard opinion.

The Karzai government fully controls only Kabul, the provincial capitals and a few other areas. Even the main supply roads north and south of Kabul are studded with Taliban checkpoints. All over the country, the Taliban run shadow local administrations, collecting taxes and dispensing justice. "There is a total lack of government authority in rural Afghanistan, which is similar to Soviet times," said Haroun Mir, director of the Afghanistan Center for Research and Policy Studies.

I'm reminded of the South Vietnamese government.

Against all predictions, after the last Soviet soldier left in February 1989, Mr. Najibullah's government, instead of collapsing, went on the offensive. Scoring key victories against the rebels, it outlived the Soviet Union, unraveling only when Russian-supplied food and weapons ran out. Absent continuing American aid for the guerrillas, it could have remained in power much longer, many former mujahedeen say.

Consider the sources, but, nonetheless, the US was quite complicit in the chaos.

Few in Kabul expect the Karzai government would display similar longevity should Western forces go home. "Najibullah had the support of a strong and well-equipped Afghan army, air force and intelligence, and of a strong party," said Mohammed Mohaqeq, a powerful former mujahedeen commander who is a parliament member and a Karzai supporter. "I don't think we can even compare these two governments to each other."

Karzai's government is a straw man. And we are committed to supporting it. A holy mess.

Political cartoons

Modern Flourishes at Obamas’ State Dinner

Gursharan Kaur, the first lady of India, Michelle Obama, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India, and President Obama arrived for the state Dinner.


More Photos »


It is an old tradition, a White House dinner governed by ritual and protocol that happens to be this city’s hottest social event. But at their first state dinner on Tuesday night, President Obama and his wife, Michelle, made sure to infuse the glittering gala with distinctive touches.

They hired a new florist, Laura Dowling, who bedecked the tented outdoor dining room with locally grown, sustainably harvested magnolia branches and ivy. They selected a guest chef, Marcus Samuelsson of Aquavit in New York, an American citizen who was born in Ethiopia, reared in Sweden and cooks up melting pots of flavors and cuisines.

They invited local students to witness the arrival of the guests of honor, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India and his wife, Gursharan Kaur, and presented a mélange of musical entertainment, including the National Symphony Orchestra; Jennifer Hudson, the singer and actress; Kurt Elling, the jazz musician from Chicago; and A. R. Rahman, the Indian composer who wrote the score to the movie “Slumdog Millionaire.”

And at the tables, the meatless menu included a mix of Indian and American favorites, including some African-American standards. Collard greens and curried prawns, chickpeas and okra, nan and cornbread were served to the 320 guests — including some well-known Republicans and prominent Indian-Americans — who started off with arugula from the White House garden and finished up with pumpkin pie tart. (After a tasting at the White House on Sunday, the Obamas gave the dishes their stamp of approval, Mr. Samuelsson said.)








Obamas Host State Dinner

The Caucus: The State Dinner Guest List

The Caucus: State Dinner Highlights

After humbling spiral, Kerry back to Form

John Kerry lost his race for president, became a campaign pariah and was passed over for secretary of state. But if he was ever adrift, he seems well anchored now.



at 65, after a humbling spiral — from almost-president to Democratic scapegoat to campaign pariah (2006) to wannabe secretary of state (passed over for Hillary Rodham Clinton) — Massachusetts’ new senior senator has settled into an influential role as legislative bridge builder, international troubleshooter and party elder statesman.

What if? What if he had won in 2004? Well, one thing: John Edwards, he of the out-of-wedlock child, would be Vice President. Oy vay.

Through experience and adversity, friends say, Mr. Kerry became a more fully grounded occupant of the Senate. “John always liked the high wire, aiming for the sky and all the action that came with it,” said Tom Vallely, the director of the Vietnam Program at Harvard University. “But when you’re 65 and you’ve been through some things, the high wire gets a little lower.”

Lawmakers say Mr. Kerry now lingers in hallways more often than before, cracking jokes and finding common cause with colleagues he previously had little to do with. He has bonded with Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, over their shared love of the Pink Panther movies (“We even have a little dog called Clouseau,” Mr. Kerry said of his black schnauzer, named for the films’ detective.) This Pink Panther alliance recently grew into a partnership on energy and climate change that many see as the best chance of any bipartisan success in passing an energy bill.

“If we save the planet, it will be because of Inspector Clouseau,” Mr. Graham said.

From such alliances are political compromises made; at times, the liberal talking heads on cable fail to focus on such simple, yet crucial, matters.

Mr. Kerry is especially proud of his association with Mr. Obama, whom he selected to give the keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, essentially catapulting Mr. Obama’s national career. Next to Mr. Kerry’s office fireplace hangs a framed invitation to the 2009 presidential inauguration. “I’m here because of you” is how the president signed it.

After Mr. Obama was elected, Mr. Kerry lobbied hard to become his secretary of state — too hard, some administration officials say.

Dooffus

Lou Dobbs, speaking with Bill O’Reilly of Fox News.

Doofus: dimwit.

People take this jerk seriously?




A spokesman for Mr. Dobbs said he was seriously considering a race in 2012 against Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, above, as “an intermediary step.”

Intermediary? Another dim bulb. Intermediary is a go-between; surely the spokes-jerk meant intermediate. Spare us, Yahweh.


he told a Washington radio station, “For the first time, I’m actually listening to some people about politics,” adding: “I think that being in the public arena means you’ve got to be part of the solution.”

Really? there are scads of people in the public arena who are nothing more than part of the problem.

That'll cost ya, buddy

November 25, 2009
Citation for Gesture Costs Pittsburgh
By Sean D. Hamill

PITTSBURGH — The City of Pittsburgh has agreed to pay $50,000 to a man who sued after being issued a disorderly conduct citation for gesturing offensively at a police officer.

Offensively? Musta been da bird.

The settlement, in which the city also agreed to retrain its officers in the limits of disorderly conduct law, was reached with Dave Hackbart, 35, after research undertaken by his lawyers found that police citations for swearing or offensive gestures were common here.

From March 2005 to July 2009, the research found, Pittsburgh officers cited 198 people for disorderly conduct on the basis of that sort of behavior, even though the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has consistently found such citations unlawful on free speech grounds.

“Hopefully we’ll send a message to other police officers across the state, where this is a consistent problem, that this is not legal,” said Sara J. Rose, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, which helped represent Mr. Hackbart in a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city.

Pittsburgh’s deputy police chief, Paul J. Donaldson, said the city had retrained officers in the law twice since 2006 but would do so again, to emphasize that “the disorderly conduct statute can’t be used to protect the police from all verbal indignities.”

Mr. Hackbart was charged on April 10, 2006, while trying to parallel-park. According to his lawsuit, another car pulled up and blocked him from parking, frustrating Mr. Hackbart, who gestured with his middle finger at the other driver.

I knew it.

When a third driver objected to the gesture, Mr. Hackbart delivered it to him as well.

Yeah.

That driver turned out to be an officer, Sgt. Brian Elledge, who wrote the citation. Mr. Hackbart was found guilty by a magistrate and fined court costs. “I felt really let down by the system,” Mr. Hackbart said. “I challenged it as a matter or principle.” Of the $50,000 settlement, he will get $10,000; the rest goes to his lawyers.

Pyrrhic victory, pun intended.

Mr. Hackbart said that the case had raised his interest in law and that he had he quit a job as a waiter and gone back to school to become a paralegal. He is considering going on to law school. “A lot of good things have come out of this,” he said. “Hopefully it’s a big deterrent and it helps other people down the road who are in my shoes.”

Spare change?

Rodney Williams working at one of the United Homeless Organization’s tables in Union Square in New York on Tuesday.




I often wondered about these.

In Manhattan, they are as common a sight as the homeless themselves: the United Homeless Organization’s street-corner donation tables, operated with little more than a large plastic jug and a worker pleading for coins and bills for the needy.

The workers, clad in aprons bearing the group’s logo, are all homeless or formerly homeless, and the organization says that the donations help pay for food pantries, clothing, detox centers and other services. Skeptical New Yorkers who wondered over the years just where the money ended up wondered just as often if they were perhaps being too skeptical.

One begins to wonder: am I being too cynical? too skeptical? Is my heart hard?

Until Tuesday, that is, when New York’s attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo, described the United Homeless Organization as a sham. His office filed a lawsuit against the group, alleging that its president, a formerly homeless Bronx man named Stephen Riley, and its director, Myra Walker, used tens of thousands of dollars from the group for personal expenses while failing to provide any services for the homeless.

Fear not the vaccine

El secretario de Salud dijo que la inmunización contra el virus A H1n1 es confiable | Ver nota


That is a lot of media.

Interfaith amigos

From left, Sheikh Jamal Rahman, Pastor Don Mackenzie, and Rabbi Ted Falcon read from their respective holy books during their presentation at the Second Presbyterian Church in Nashville, Tenn., in October.


They call themselves the “interfaith amigos.” And while they do sometimes seem more like a stand-up comedy team than a trio of clergymen, they know they have a serious burden in making a case for interfaith understanding in a country reeling after a Muslim Army officer at Fort Hood, Tex., was charged with opening fire on his fellow soldiers, killing 13.

What distinguishes the “amigos,” who live in Seattle but make presentations around the country, is a unique approach to what they call “the spirituality of interfaith relations.” At the church in Nashville, the three clergymen, dressed in dark blazers, stood up one by one and declared what they most valued as the core teachings of their tradition The minister said “unconditional love.” The sheik said “compassion.” And the rabbi said “oneness.”

The room then grew quiet as each stood and recited what he regarded as the “untruths” in his own faith. The minister said that one “untruth” for him was that “Christianity is the only way to God.” The rabbi said for him it was the notion of Jews as “the chosen people.” And the sheik said for him it was the “sword verses” in the Koran, like “kill the unbeliever.”

In Fed Minutes, Worries About Low Rates’ Effects

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Federal Reserve officials are increasingly confident that the American economic recovery is sustainable, but they do not see employment picking up soon, according to minutes from their November meeting released on Tuesday.

What a time to be unemployed, never a pleasant experience.

Policymakers also expressed concern about possible adverse repercussions from their vow to keep interest rates low for an extended period, including unwanted speculation in financial markets. “Members noted the possibility that some negative side effects might result from the maintenance of very low short-term interest rates,” the central bank reported in the minutes.

Gold is over $1,100 an ounce, driven by inflation fears of gold bugs.

Some investors and policymakers have argued that the Fed’s policy of rock-bottom borrowing costs may be driving investors to beef up their bets by using the falling dollar to fund their trades. President Barack Obama, during a recent visit to Asia, was lectured on the subject by top government officials in China.

The Federal Reserve Open Market Committee, the central bank’s policy-setting body, did not believe such speculative activity had taken place to date, contending that the dollar’s decline had thus far been “orderly.”

What else they gonna say?

“Any tendency for dollar depreciation to intensify or to put significant upward pressure on inflation would bear close watching,” the minutes said. The dollar dropped to a 15-month low against a basket of major currencies last week. For now, the minutes indicated policymakers are not widely concerned about inflation in the medium term. This was already evident from a string of recent speeches in which even the hawkish regional presidents of the Dallas and Philadelphia Feds have expressed dovish views on the prospects for a sustained rise in consumer prices.

Hawks being dovish.

The “central tendency” forecasts of policymakers were slightly more sanguine on the economy’s prospects but not dramatically so. Gross domestic product was expected to shrink substantially less this year than previously estimated. Similarly, the jobless rate, currently at a 26-year high of 10.2 percent, was now expected to come down more quickly than policymakers believed back in June. “Most participants now view the risks to their growth forecasts as being roughly balanced rather than tilted to the downside,” the minutes said.

There's American English, Elizabethan English, and policy-speak.

Nonetheless, there was a sense that any turnaround in the labor market would not happen quickly enough to stem the rising tide of joblessness. “The weakness in labor market conditions remained an important concern,” the minutes said. “The considerable decelerations in wages and unit labor costs this year were cited as factors putting downward pressure on inflation.”

Mexico's Taste for Ketchup

Mexicans eat more ketchup by sales value than consumers in all but eight other countries. Many of them slather the thick red sauce on chicken, pasta and eggs—even pizza.

At the start of 2007, U.S. ketchup giant H.J. Heinz Co. held less than 1% of the Mexican ketchup market. In fact, Mexico was such a low priority that Heinz had fewer than 10 salespeople in the country, which is nearly three times as large as Texas. Tuesday, when Heinz releases quarterly earnings, its executives plan to boast that Heinz now accounts for 12% of the ketchup poured in Mexico, where a spokesman says the company now has 150 ketchup sales and marketing employees.

Mexicans love sweet food, and as the middle class grows, they seek out foods that represent that sort of progress: Mexico is one of Coca-Cola's biggest markets.

Though Heinz doesn't break out its ketchup sales in Mexico, the entire Mexican market for ketchup is a tiny fraction of the company's total annual sales of around $10 billion. Still, Heinz is excited about Mexico because the company's combined retail and food-service sales of ketchup there are growing at an annual rate of 25%, and Mr. Johnson said he expects that growth rate to continue for the next five years. By contrast, Heinz's overall sales, excluding the impact of currency translation, grew 5.5% during the fiscal year ended April 29, 2009.

In April 2005, Heinz's Latin American management bought a small manufacturer in Guadalajara that supplied its own ketchup, mustard and hot sauces to restaurant chains. Among its clients were Mexican outlets of Domino's Pizza Inc., Burger King Holdings Inc. and Yum Brands Inc.'s KFC brand.

Soon, Heinz began to see how popular ketchup was with Mexicans. Janet Aceves, a 28-year-old office worker is a case in point. At a Domino's one day last week, Ms. Aceves poured Heinz ketchup all over her cheese pizza before taking a big bite. The pizza sauce didn't provide enough zing for her taste buds, she said, adding, "It needs more."

I can not imagine putting ketchup on pizza; that's what powdered garlic and red pepper flakers are for, but, that's me.

Heinz's Mexico team scored a coup in mid-2006 by winning the contract to supply Domino's. Although the ketchup would be distributed in Domino's-branded packets, Mr. Pocaterra said the contract introduced millions of Mexican consumers to the taste of Heinz, which is a bit sweeter in Mexico than the company's U.S. ketchup formulation.

Sodas are sweeter in Mexico, too, than in the US (and that is incredible).

PM Singh visits

On World Focus last evening, host Martin Savidge talked with Amit Pandya (a senior associate at the Stimson Center, an organization dedicated to promoting international peace and security).I found Mr. Pandya a very interesting voice to listen to, insightful, incisive.

Subway offenses

A group called New Yorkers for Safe Transit said harassment on subways was often overlooked.

I shudder seeing this picture, a reminder of my many years as a subway commuter. I do not miss it, at all.









November 20, 2009
Sex Offenses on the Subways Are Widespread, City Officials Are Told
By Jennifer 8. Lee

The peak times in which women report sexual harassment or assaults on the subways are the late morning rush, roughly 8 to 10 a.m., followed by the early afternoon rush, 4 to 6 p.m. One stretch of the subways — the crowded Nos. 4, 5 and 6 lines between Grand Central Terminal and Union Square — is a particular source of complaints.

People pack into the cars, and more try to get on. There is hardly room to breathe. Feeling someone up is easy, for the pervert who wants to do so.

And the average age of the men arrested this year for sexual offenses on the subways is 39.

Average?

These facts emerged Thursday during a joint hearing of three City Council committees — Transportation, Women’s Issues and Public Safety — and officials from the Police Department and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to discuss a problem that has struck a chord with many subway riders, who say they have been ogled, groped, flashed, harassed and even attacked.

Ogling; curious term.

“There is a clamor for more prevention and more enforcement,” said Councilman John C. Liu, a Queens Democrat, who is chairman of the Transportation Committee and the city’s comptroller-elect. Darlene Mealy, a Brooklyn Democrat, who is chairwoman of the Women’s Issues Committee, said that sexual harassment and assaults were very serious, and that society should “not take them as social behaviors that have to be condoned.”

First to testify on Thursday was James P. Hall, chief of the Police Department’s Transit Bureau, who said that sexual harassment was the “No. 1 quality of life offense on the subway.” Chief Hall reported that as of Nov. 15, there had been 587 reports of sex offenses in the subway system this year. “However, we strongly suspect this is a highly underreported crime,” he said.

The police have arrested 412 people for sex offenses in the subway so far this year. Of that number, 71 had committed prior sexual offenses and 14 were registered sex offenders. Five of the 14 were the most serious level of sex offender.

The average perpetrator is a 39-year-old man, while the vast majority of victims are women over 17. “It’s a crime that goes more to a middle-aged individual,” Chief Hall said. In contrast, other crimes in the subway generally involve younger men, from 17 to 25 years old, he said.

Interesting demographics of the criminal set.

Lois H. Tendler, the director of government and community relations at the transportation authority, said the authority last year started a public awareness campaign against sexual harassment that included ads, printed brochures and on-board announcements — an idea, Ms. Tendler said, that came from Councilman Peter F. Vallone Jr., a Queens Democrat and the chairman of the Council’s Public Safety Committee.

Announcements? Please do not grope, flash or ogle.

The advertising campaign ran for three months in 2008 and is running again through January, Ms. Tendler said. The on-board announcements, which have been running for six months, are recorded messages on newer trains but are read on the older trains.

Councilwoman Helen Sears, a Queens Democrat, questioned how effective the public announcements were, especially given the aging sound system. “They are not supposed to be a periodic thing,” she said. “I don’t think they should be an afterthought.”

Announcements on subways, many, go this way: mumble-mumble-mumble, and thank you for your cooperation.

Ms. Tendler said that they were part of a constant loop of recordings on the new trains, used on about one-third of the subway lines. However, other lawmakers wondered whether the messages were being read by personnel on the older trains. Mr. Liu questioned the state of the installation of cameras, which he believed would deter crimes and help catch offenders. Ms. Tendler said cameras were being installed under different programs. “We’re making progress,” she said.

In recent months, advocates have formed a organization to fight subway sexual harassment, New Yorkers for Safe Transit. The advocates support a bill, introduced this week by Councilwoman Jessica S. Lappin, a Manhattan Democrat, that would require the police to collect data on sexual harassment in the subways.

“This is important because historically, harassment is overlooked by law enforcement authorities,” said Oraia Reid, a founding member of New Yorkers for Safe Transit who testified at the hearing.

Ms. Reid, who is also the executive director of RightRides for Women’s Safety, said another challenge was to get law enforcement to take the harassment more seriously.

She added, “It’s actually been very disempowering to report sexual harassment and assault.”

Reid owns health care overhaul

Senator Harry Reid, left, the majority leader, on Thursday with Senator Christopher J. Dodd at a Capitol Hill news conference.



This one had better work. Defeat is not an option.

Colleagues say Mr. Reid’s extensive knowledge of Senate tactics and well-honed understanding of what drives and divides his Democratic colleagues leave him well positioned to pull off a legislative coup that has eluded seasoned and determined lawmakers for decades.

“I don’t think there are many people in the whole world other than Harry Reid who could do this,” said Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, one of the lawmakers who have been a thorn in Mr. Reid’s side with their reluctance to commit to supporting a preliminary vote to open debate. That vote is set for Saturday evening.

The looming vote is the first of what are certain to be multiple tests of Mr. Reid’s ability to deliver all 60 votes under nominal Democratic control in the Senate — 58 Democrats and 2 independents, and precisely the minimum number needed to overcome Republican blocking tactics.

Whatever their opinions, I do not understand how any senator can vote against debate. Senators Landrieu and Nelson appear ready to vote for reporting the bill to the floor. Senator Lincoln's opinion is guarded. Republicans, of course, are opposed as a bloc.

But Mr. Reid, who is known more as a legislative tactician than as a man steeped in public policy, appeared to have succeeded in fashioning a starting point for the health care fight that left most Senate Democrats satisfied even though all have one quarrel or another with the measure.

On Thursday, Mr. Reid traced the bill’s roots to another Harry — President Harry S. Truman, who wrote to Congress on Nov. 19, 1945, urging creation of a national health insurance program.

But at the moment, the legislation and the outcome are clearly in the majority leader’s hands.

Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi warned against attacking President Obama.



November 20, 2009
Political Memo
A Tilt Away From Social Issues
By ADAM NAGOURNEY

LOST PINES, Tex. — After two bleak years, Republican governors gathered here on Thursday to assess their political future — and they liked what they saw. With 37 governors’ seats open in 2010, the party is looking to topple some big-name Democrats.

What was most striking about the Republican governors was not simply their sense of optimism — a sentiment that would draw no Democratic quarrel these days — but exactly how they saw their road back to power and unity. The talk here was of the health care plan being debated in Congress, increased spending under President Obama, the climbing deficit and concern among Americans about jobs and the education of their children.

“The focus should be on bread-and-butter, kitchen-table, quality-of-life issues,” said Robert F. McDonnell, the Republican who was this month elected governor of Virginia, a seat that had been held by a Democrat, and whose victory is being held up as a formula for Republican reconstruction. “I think that really helped us. We ended up with a two-to-one margin with independent voters because of our focus on the economic problems.”

Mr. McDonnell’s mantra was echoed throughout the day, and it was easy to forget that this gathering was taking place at a secluded resort in the hills just outside of Austin, the city where former President George W. Bush and his chief political lieutenant, Karl Rove, began their effort to remake the Republican Party 10 years ago. There was little talk of the divisive social and political issues that Mr. Bush and Mr. Rove embraced as a way to attract independent and moderate Democratic voters and build a lasting Republican majority.

Thus for all the discussion about what it would take to build on this month’s victories of Mr. McDonnell in Virginia and another Republican, Christopher J. Christie, in the gubernatorial race in New Jersey, there was barely a whisper about abortion, gay marriage or gun control. The question of terrorism — Mr. Rove’s defining theme for much of the Bush presidency — barely came up, even in the week when Republicans in other places were attacking Mr. Obama’s Justice Department for deciding to hold the trial of four 9/11 suspects in a federal court in New York.

At one point, Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi warned the audience — a group of governors, their aides and lobbyists — against attacks on Mr. Obama, suggesting this was a path to defeat. (Mr. Barbour showed no hesitation about critically invoking the names of two other Democrats who are not blessed by Mr. Obama’s popularity, Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, and Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader.)

To a considerable extent, the tilting of these scales reflect the fact that governors tend to run different races than members of Congress, dealing with state and local concerns. Yet governors and Republican leaders said the tenor of the discussion also reflected the recognition that social issues no longer carried the punch they once might have.

No one here was about to rebuke Mr. Rove or Mr. Bush. Yet their names were mentioned so infrequently that it was hard not to conclude that the party has moved beyond two men into a still uncertain future.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, a likely presidential candidate in 2012, said: “In my case, and I think it’s true in most areas that are politically competitive, what most people want to know about candidates and officeholders is this: ‘Will you keep my taxes reasonable, hopefully decreasing; can you help me get my kid to a school so he or she can get a decent education?’ ”

Indeed, as a political issue — and also as a policy issue — these governors were much more likely to be focused on what Democrats were trying to do with health care than on gay marriage. Mr. Barbour said that he thought that Democrats were making a major miscalculation in assuming that getting a health care bill through Congress would, ultimately, prove to be a political advantage.

“The Democrats seem to believe that cramming this down the American people’s throat will make them more popular,” Mr. Barbour said. “I think the American people will be livid if a political party on a partisan vote crams an enormous change down their throat.”

As Mr. Barbour noted, next year’s gubernatorial elections are particularly important because governors elected in 2010 will help oversee the redrawing of state and Congressional district lines, based on the results of the 2010 census. That would give them significant impact on the political makeup of Congress and many state houses. And there are reasons for Republicans to be bullish: 19 of the 37 seats that are being contested next year are held by Democrats.

Democrats face tough races in at least seven of those states, though Nick Ayres, the executive director of the Republican Governors Association, said he believed that number would increase. He said nine Democratic governors face electorates as restive as the one confronted by Gov. Jon Corzine of New Jersey, who lost to Mr. Christie.

Beyond that, he said, they would also have to cope with the same problem as R. Creigh Deeds, the Democrat who lost to Mr. McDonnell in Virginia.

“They are going to face Deeds’s problems, where they really have two options going into their re-election: Do they stand with Reid and Pelosi on issues like national health care and appease their base or do they stand with taxpayers in their states unhappy with this plan,” he said.

Still, however tough it may be to be a Democrat these days, it is tougher to be a governor, at the front lines of cutting services and raising taxes. While Republicans kept talking about the 9 or 10 Democratic seats they have in their sights, they were well aware of the fact that just as many Republican gubernatorial seats are equally vulnerable going into next year.

Just a couple of months ago the pundits were dismissing Secretary Clinton as marginalized.

November 20, 2009
Diplomatic Memo
Clinton Seen as Obama’s Key Link to Afghan Leader
By MARK LANDLER

KABUL, Afghanistan — It is far from clear that President Obama can depend on President Hamid Karzai to bring order to this violent country, but it is becoming clear that he will depend on Hillary Rodham Clinton to be his go-between in dealing with the mercurial Afghan leader.

In a visit to Kabul, during which she held a 90-minute, one-on-one session with Mr. Karzai on Wednesday, and in an intense telephone call a few weeks ago in the aftermath of Afghanistan’s election, Secretary of State Clinton has built an unlikely rapport with the Afghan leader, according to administration officials.

It is a new and risky role for Mrs. Clinton — one that thrusts her into the thick of the administration’s most critical international problem, but that also hitches her reputation to a leader who has often proved unreliable. If Mr. Karzai lets down the White House again, Mrs. Clinton, as his principal intermediary with the administration, could find herself damaged along with him.

Mrs. Clinton, who got to know Mr. Karzai in 2005 when she took him to Fort Drum in upstate New York to thank American veterans of the Afghan war, seems to recognize the potential dangers.

“When I came into the administration, I was one of the few people who had a long-term positive relationship with President Karzai,” Mrs. Clinton said in an interview on Thursday, hours after seeing him get sworn in. “I continue to believe he has a tremendous historical opportunity.”

But she quickly added, “That doesn’t mean you make excuses for behavior that you want to see changed; you constantly push back.” In the meeting this week, a senior official said, she bluntly warned Mr. Karzai to crack down on corruption or risk losing American aid.

Her rapport with Mr. Karzai puts her in a distinct minority among senior American officials, some of whom have either clashed with him or, as in the case of Mr. Obama, never developed a relationship with him.

With Mr. Obama planning to announce his decision soon on sending more troops to Afghanistan, Mrs. Clinton has emerged, for better or worse, as the senior official best placed to push Mr. Karzai to help make that policy work. Mr. Karzai appears to appreciate the relationship; he moved up the date of his inauguration to accommodate her schedule, a senior American official said.

As Mr. Karzai begins his new term, Mrs. Clinton has worked to avoid a hectoring tone in her public comments about him. American officials had done too much of that in the past, she said.

Shortly before Mr. Obama took office, Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. stalked out of a meeting with Mr. Karzai. More recently, Mr. Karzai reacted badly when the administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard C. Holbrooke, asked him what he would do if a runoff election became necessary after the initial round of voting in August.

The American ambassador, Karl W. Eikenberry, has a workable relationship with Mr. Karzai, officials said. But the two have also had their ups and downs, and anyway, some American officials say the White House needs an interlocutor at a higher level than an ambassador, or even a special envoy, like Mr. Holbrooke.

President George W. Bush used to conduct regular video conference calls with Mr. Karzai from the White House. When Mr. Obama stopped the practice, officials said, it left Mr. Karzai hurt and bewildered.

“It is critical Obama develops a channel to Karzai where hard messages can go both ways,” said Bruce O. Riedel, who helped the administration formulate its initial Afghan policy. “It is time-consuming, but we can’t hope to succeed without a political channel that works.”

Mrs. Clinton “combines the hard-headed strength, the political clout and the human understanding to do it right,” said Mr. Riedel, who is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Of those qualities, her political bona fides may be the most relevant. When Mr. Karzai was wavering about whether to allow a runoff vote after almost a million of his votes were disqualified, she implored him to acquiesce, arguing that he would emerge with a stronger hand. (In the end, Mr. Karzai’s rival, Abdullah Abdullah, pulled out, making a second round unnecessary.)

In case Mr. Karzai did not get her point, Mrs. Clinton reminded him of her own bitter experience in the 2008 Democratic primaries, losing to Mr. Obama, who later named her the nation’s chief diplomat.

“One of the ways that I talk with President Karzai is in very political terms, because I understand that in politics, you’ve got to make some tough compromises sometimes,” she said.

American officials failed to make allowances for his circumstances in trying to govern an unruly country, she said. “We were trying to hold him to a standard that was not in sync with the historical standard.”

When Mr. Karzai first took office in 2002, she noted, there were one million students in Afghanistan, virtually all boys. Today, there are seven million, 40 percent of them girls. She said Mr. Karzai deserved some credit for that, as well as for other advances during his tenure.

Mrs. Clinton also noted that the United States was hardly a perfect candidate to demand a crackdown on corruption.

Asked about reports in The New York Times that the C.I.A. made payments to a brother of Mr. Karzai, Ahmed Wali Karzai, who is suspected of involvement in the drug trade, Mrs. Clinton did not respond directly, but said, “Every country makes compromises, and it behooves you to be humble about pointing fingers.”

“It also is a reminder that we have to do more to support his campaign against corruption,” she added. “We have to facilitate, not impede, the removal and even prosecution of those who are corrupt.”

With Hamid Karzai around for the foreseeable future, the administration has little choice but to accommodate him. So Mrs. Clinton looked for praiseworthy lines in Mr. Karzai’s inaugural speech. If he delivers, she said, he can expect American support for years to come.

“I would imagine, if things go well, that we would be helping with the education and health systems and agriculture productivity long after the military presence had either diminished or disappeared,” she said.

House Attacks Fed, Treasury

Actually some on House panel, not the House itself, attacked the Fed and the Treasury.

At the Joint Economic Committee, a couple of House Republicans called for the resignation of Mr. Geithner, who, as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, played a major role in last fall's moves to prevent the collapse of the financial system. "The public has lost all confidence in your ability to do the job," said Rep. Kevin Brady, Republican of Texas.

The public? Who the hell is the public? I'm part of the public, and I haven't lost confidence in Secretary Geithner. I have a lot of confidence in him. Whom I don't have confidence in is a Representative who thinks that by grandstanding and demagoguery he can strongarm fiscal policy.

Mr. Geithner, in an unusual public display of pique, fired back. "What I can't take responsibility is for the legacy of crises you've bequeathed this country," he told Mr. Brady.

Exactly. While Geithner is not perfect, by any means, he is dealing with the mess left by the tram of Bush and Greenspan, the most severe economic crisis in three quarters of a century.

Although several Democrats defended Mr. Geithner at the hearing, some liberal Democrats have been complaining that the Obama administration isn't doing enough to combat unemployment. Rep. Peter DeFazio (D., Ore.) called on Mr. Geithner to resign this week, and said in an interview that Mr. Geithner is too close to Wall Street.

Whom would he have? Paulson?

Treasury chief Geithner faced a House Republican who told him, 'The public has lost all confidence in your ability to do the job.' He shot back: 'What I can't take responsibility is for the legacy of crises you've bequeathed this country.'

You go, Timothy.

The House Financial Services Committee voted, 43-26, to approve a measure sponsored by Texas Republican Ron Paul, vociferously opposed by the Fed, that would direct the congressional Government Accountability Office to expand its audits of the Fed to include decisions about interest rates and lending to individual banks. The Fed says the provision threatens its ability to make monetary policy without political interference.

43 plus 26 means there are 69 members in the committee. What in hell could 69 politicians possibly get done? Less than nothing is what.

What did Brazil do right?

From EL Universal.com.mx:

¿QUÉ HIZO BIEN BRASIL? Hace 15 años, Brasil estaba peor que México. Hoy, el país amazónico se ha convertido en la potencia regional, y en una de las economías más prometedoras del planeta | Ver nota

Populist president faces dwindling support

Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa is finding that a weak economy, electricity shortages and a confrontational governing style have undermined support for his government, not three years after taking office in a landslide that highlighted the rise of populist leaders in Latin America.

His governing style might be disliked by the press, and the Journal, but what proof is there that his governing style has undermined popular support?

Polls taken last month show that approval ratings for the 46-year-old socialist have fallen into the mid-40s, well down from the 73% he had soon after taking office in early 2007, pollster Cedatos-Gallup International said Wednesday.

That slide matches the drop in support for leftist allies such as Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and Argentine President Cristina Fernandez. Lower commodities prices have undermined their ability to sustain spending programs, while rising crime and electricity shortages in resource-rich nations underscore the rampant inefficiency of parts of the public sector.

As the patronage ebbs along with the government coffers, the failure of some statist policies is becoming more evident. Meanwhile, a dearth of private-sector investment has meant some of these sputtering economies have little to fall back on. The nationalist rhetoric and attacks on the opposition no longer resonate as strongly as they did when leftist leaders came to power riding a wave of antipathy toward market-oriented economies.

All three leaders enjoy considerable influence over the legislative and judicial branches, making it harder to blame the opposition when entitlement programs dry up just as unemployment and inflation are on the rise.

Quite true.

Sy Syms: 1926-2009

Remembrances



For an 'Educated Consumer,' He Discounted Designer Suits

By STEPHEN MILLER

Sy Syms was a pioneer of off-price designer labels whose fame rested on folksy commercials that belied his talents as a merchandiser.

Mr. Syms, who died Nov. 17 at age 83, is remembered by many New York men as the source for their first suits, and by television viewers of both sexes as the star of late-night ads featuring Mr. Syms proclaiming, "An educated consumer is our best customer."

Originally a seller of bargain men's clothing and haberdashery in the Wall Street area, Mr. Syms later opened stores in suburban malls. He offered designer-label clothes at discounts he claimed were 30% to 50% and more off retail prices.

Mr. Syms's monotone gave few clues to his background as a broadcaster. Ultimately, Mr. Syms joined the pantheon of other do-it-yourselfer admen in the New York area, such as Tom Carvel in the ice-cream business and Victor Potamkin, an auto dealer. Mr. Syms was savvy enough to set up his own ad agency to ensure that he got the agency discount when he bought airtime.

"He had the ability to be a merchant, a promoter and a financier all at the same time," says Howard Davidowitz, chairman of Davidowitz & Associates, a retail consulting and investment banking firm. "He is the first guy to offer discount designer suits on a major scale."

Investment bank and retail consultant; interesting combination.

Born Seymour Merinsky in Brooklyn, Mr. Syms was the son of Russian immigrants who started out in the collars and cuffs business. He served in the Army during World War II, studied broadcasting at New York University on the G.I. Bill, and worked as a radio broadcaster for a few years in the late 1940s, calling minor league baseball games.

In 1950, Mr. Syms joined his brother's clothing store, "Merns," near Manhattan's financial district. In 1959, he left to open his own store, called "Sy Merns," and was forced in a legal dispute to use a different name, according to an account provided by the company. He chose "Sy Syms," and opened on Cortlandt Street, near his brother's store and a few blocks from Wall Street.

I remember Merns, vaguely.

"It was his joy to be on the selling floor from 12 noon to 2 o'clock," says Marcy Syms, Sy's daughter and now chief executive of the company. "That's when the traders and bankers and lawyers would come in." Today, salespeople are still called "educators," she says, which follows his habit. "He loved to explain the clothes."
Obituaries

* Notable deaths from the business world and entertainment industry from Tributes.com.

The Cortlandt Street store made headlines when U.S. Steel Corp. wanted to eject Syms to make way for construction of a skyscraper in 1967. With months still remaining on his lease, Mr. Syms refused to budge and told The Wall Street Journal it would take "a minimum of $100,000" to get him to move. He soon moved for a much smaller sum.

Mr. Syms's shop on Cortlandt Street was adjacent to the Hudson Tubes. There, trains ran to New Jersey, where an estimated 90% of his customers lived. In 1971, he opened his largest store ever in Paramus, N.J., and began more aggressively moving into marked-down brand-name suits. He also added women's wear.

To support his expansion plans, Mr. Syms started advertising on the radio, reading the scripts himself. The first television ad came in 1974, and it was Mr. Syms who took credit for the trademark "educated consumer" phrase. It replaced an earlier slogan, "Unbelievable Syms!"

As his business expanded, Mr. Syms cut deals with big European labels such as Armani and Brioni to buy their excess production, and would then sell it at something close to wholesale.

In the early days, Syms clerks would snip the designer label out of the suit before handing it over to customers. Stores were kept Spartan, with black walls and plain racks weighed down with huge amounts of merchandise.

The formula worked, and Syms expanded in the 1970s and went public in 1983. Ms. Syms succeeded her father as CEO in 1998. This year, Ms. Syms led Syms Corp. in the takeover of retailer Filene's Basement. Altogether, Syms now operates 52 stores.

One fan was New York Mayor Edward Koch, who has shopped at Syms since the 1960s. "I just bought two jackets there," Mr. Koch said in an interview. "They're both big bargains."

Hutchison Chases Texas Right

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, above, in August announcing her candidacy to unseat Gov. Rick Perry, who is seen below with Texas Rangers in October.
















Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison may have won the backing of former Vice President Dick Cheney in her race for Texas governor, a key endorsement for a candidate seeking conservative support. But her drive to unseat Republican Gov. Rick Perry remains an uphill battle.

Ms. Hutchison, one of the Lone Star State's most popular politicians, was expected to mount a formidable challenge to Mr. Perry in one of the long-anticipated GOP primary battles of next year's elections. The GOP winner is an overwhelming favorite to be the next governor in this Republican state.

"We Westerners know the difference between a real talker and the real deal," Mr. Cheney said before a small crowd of about 100 Hutchison supporters and journalists Tuesday evening. "Kay Bailey Hutchison is the real deal."

Perry is more conservative than Hutchison; he even alluded to Texas seceding from the Union. But the Senator is an old Washington pal of Cheney.

But Mr. Perry has built a large lead in polls with less than four months to go to the March 2 primary. In part, he has scored points using what's shaping up as a popular strategy for many candidates during this election cycle, with rhetoric portraying Ms. Hutchison as a Washington insider out of touch with down-home Texans. He also has accused her of waffling on a pledge to resign from her Senate seat, which she had initially said she would do in October or November.

"It really does appear that it is slipping away for her," said Calvin Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

The Hutchison campaign hopes the backing of Mr. Cheney, who before being elected vice president was chief executive of Halliburton Co., then based in Dallas, will deepen the shallow conservative backing that has been long viewed as her principal weakness. But supporters of Mr. Perry, who has the backing of conservative groups and such governors as Haley Barbour of Mississippi, have tried to use the Cheney endorsement as evidence Ms. Hutchison is out of touch with Texas voters. "The Washington establishment usually sticks together," Perry campaign spokesman Mark Miner said.

That is almost an insult to Cheney, the right's darling.

Lincoln letter for sale

Abraham Lincoln letter goes up for sale

President's acknowledgement of a meeting with an eight-year-old boy could fetch £36,000

* Ed Pilkington in New York
* guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 18 November 2009 19.37 GMT

President Abraham Lincoln letter

The letter President Abraham Lincoln wrote to a boy in 1861. Photograph: Raab Collection/AP

The lesson of history for any small child is that if you are lucky enough to be presented to the future president of the US, then make sure you have evidence of the encounter before bragging about it to your classmates.

George Patten, aged eight, discovered the bitter truth of that maxim in 1860 after he boasted at school about having met Abraham Lincoln, having been introduced to the then presidential candidate with his journalist father.

The boy's friends thought he had made the story up, and bullied him. To settle the matter, Patten's teacher wrote to the White House asking for clarification about whether there was any truth to the anecdote.

On 19 March 1861, two weeks after his inauguration and despite being preoccupied with forming an administration and the early slide into civil war, Lincoln took the trouble to reply: "To whom it may concern: I did see and talk with George Evans Patten, last May, at Springfield, Illinois. Respectfully, A. Lincoln."

The letter has now been put up for auction by Philadelphia's Raab Collection at an estimated price of $60,000 (£36,000).

Last year another letter written by Lincoln to a group of children sold for $3.4m – a record for a manuscript in the United States.

That was an 1864 reply to a petition made by 195 children who asked him to ensure the freedom of "all the slave children in this country".

In the letter, dated 5 April 1864, he wrote: "Please tell these little people I am very glad their young hearts are so full of just and generous sympathy, and that while I have not the power to grant all they ask, I trust that they will remember that God has, and that, as it seems, He wills to do it."

Guantánamo Won’t Close by January

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington.


To me, AG Holder inspires a lot more confidence that either Gonzalez or Ashcroft.


November 19, 2009
Guantánamo Won’t Close by January, Obama Says
By JACK HEALY

President Obama acknowledged for the first time on Wednesday that his administration would miss a self-imposed deadline to close the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, by mid-January, admitting the difficulties of following through on one of his first pledges as president.

“Guantánamo, we had a specific deadline that was missed,” Mr. Obama said in an interview with NBC News in Beijing during his weeklong trip to Asia. Hours after he spoke, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. defended the administration’s decision to try five suspected terrorists in New York City — a move closely tied to its efforts to close Guantánamo.

On Capitol Hill, Mr. Holder reiterated that prosecutors would seek the death penalty against the men, and rebuffed criticisms that a civilian trial afforded the defendants too much regard, or would jeopardize national security.

“We need not cower in the face of this enemy,” Mr. Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee. “Our institutions are strong. Our infrastructure is sturdy. Our resolve is firm, and our people are ready.

Mr. Obama, in the NBC interview, also stood behind the decision to prosecute Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-avowed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, saying that any anger at the civilian trial would disappear “when he’s convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him.”

“I have complete confidence in the American people and our legal traditions and the prosecutors,” he said.

On Guantánamo, Mr. Obama said that he now hoped to shut down the detention facility sometime next year, but he did not set a new deadline.

“We are on a path and a process where I would anticipate that Guantánamo will be closed next year,” Mr. Obama said in a separate interview with Fox News. “I’m not going to set an exact date because a lot of this is also going to depend on cooperation from Congress.”

The prospects for fully shutting down Guantánamo have been dimming for months as the administration stumbled over a litany of political and logistical tripwires. Gregory B. Craig, the White House counsel who drafted the order to close the facility, announced last week that he was stepping down. During the presidential campaign last year, Mr. Obama railed against the detention complex on an American military base in Cuba, calling it a symbol used by terrorists to recruit new members. Within days of his inauguration, he ordered Guantánamo closed by January.

But his plans to relocate the prison’s 200 remaining inmates to other countries or to other detention centers in the United States have been stymied by opposition from Democrats and Republicans in Congress, as well as residents who live close to prisons that could house terrorists.

Most recently, the administration said it was considering sending terrorism suspects from Guantánamo to a maximum-security state prison in Thomson, Ill., about 150 miles west of Chicago, though some other prisons are also under consideration.

Last week, the Department of Justice decided that five terrorism suspects — including Mr. Mohammed — would be prosecuted in federal court in New York City, rather than face military tribunals.

Mr. Holder said that the prosecutions in a civilian court was an important milestone toward closing the Guantánamo detention center, even as critics like Rudolph W. Giuliani, New York’s former Republican mayor, accused the administration of making the city a target.

When asked what might happen to any of the four defendants who are acquitted, Mr. Holder said: "Failure is not an option. These are cases that have to be won. I don’t expect that we will have a contrary result."

With that, Senator Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, said sarcastically, "It just seemed to me ludicrous, but I’m a farmer, not a lawyer."

Mr. Holder insisted the suspects would be convicted, but that in any case, "that doesn’t mean that person would be released into our country."

Helene Cooper contributed reporting from Seoul, South Korea.

A Superpower Stirs

Interesting analysis of China's emerging role as a world power. Some nice historical touches add to the interest. And then there are three details that jump out:


1. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the U.S. national security adviser under Jimmy Carter, proposed a drastically slimmer G20—a G2, the U.S. and China—to deal with the nuclear threat posed by Iran and North Korea; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; India-Pakistan tensions; climate change.

Interesting, though one wonders how that would go over with the other 18, beginning with Russia.

2. A military parade last month to mark the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China sent a powerful message to China's 1.3 billion people. The intercontinental ballistic missiles that rumbled down Beijing's Avenue of Eternal Peace, and the tanker planes that lumbered overhead, signaled that China not only was at last a strong country, but also could project power beyond its shores.

The CIA's website estimates China's 2008 GDP as $7.992 trillion. It's rated as number 3 in the world. Other numbers are: $7.332 trillion (2007 est.) $6.489 trillion (2006 est.)

Last night on World Focus news I heard a reporter state that China's annual military budget is $75 billion. The CIA website has: Military expenditures: 4.3% of GDP (2006) country comparison to the world: 25. 4.3% of GDP is $ 279,027,000,000.

Now, the US numbers: 4.06% (take a look at that table). GDP:$14.44 trillion (2008 est.) country comparison to the world: 2. (The EU is #1) $14.38 trillion (2007 est.) $14.09 trillion (2006 est.)

3. Some two-and-a-half millennia ago, the Chinese philosopher Laozi wrote: "Governing a large country is like frying a small fish." The advice was aimed at the scholar-officials that ran China—a Mandarin class that became a model of governance for the ancient world. The light touch has never been a hallmark of Communist rule, or of its statecraft. That matters greatly in a world in which influence and legitimacy derive more than ever from the attractiveness of a country's governing ideals.

Really?

Doomsday? not in 2012

NASA said last week that the world was not ending — at least anytime soon. Last year, CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, said the same thing, which I guess is good news for those of us who are habitually jittery. How often do you have a pair of such blue-ribbon scientific establishments assuring us that everything is fine?

On the other hand, it is kind of depressing if you were looking forward to taking a vacation from mortgage payments to finance one last blowout.

Interactive Graphic The Long Count

The announcements by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, in the form of several Web site postings and a video posted on YouTube, were in response to worries that the world will end on Dec. 21, 2012, when a 5,125-year cycle known as the Long Count in the Mayan calendar supposedly comes to a close.

The doomsday buzz reached a high point with the release of the new movie “2012,” directed by Roland Emmerich, who previously inflicted misery on the Earth from aliens and glaciers in “Independence Day” and “The Day After Tomorrow.”

Some people's imagination jis way too vivid.

Hype? Illusion?

The entire business of wine tasting is a lot of nonsense, for me. This article explores the measuring of wines by experts.

They pour, sip and, with passion and snobbery, glorify or doom wines. But studies say the wine-rating system is badly flawed. How the experts fare against a coin toss.

Not always too good, or well.

But what if the successive judgments of the same wine, by the same wine expert, vary so widely that the ratings and medals on which wines base their reputations are merely a powerful illusion? That is the conclusion reached in two recent papers in the Journal of Wine Economics.

And so on. The end finally arrives.

As a consumer, accepting that one taster's tobacco and leather is another's blueberries and currants, that a 91 and a 96 rating are interchangeable, or that a wine winning a gold medal in one competition is likely thrown in the pooper in others presents a challenge. If you ignore the web of medals and ratings, how do you decide where to spend your money?

Leather? Gimme a break.

One answer would be to do more experimenting, and to be more price-sensitive, refusing to pay for medals and ratings points. Another tack is to continue to rely on the medals and ratings, adopting an approach often attributed to physicist Neils Bohr, who was said to have had a horseshoe hanging over his office door for good luck. When asked how a physicist could believe in such things, he said, "I am told it works even if you don't believe in it." Or you could just shrug and embrace the attitude of Julia Child, who, when asked what was her favorite wine, replied "gin."

Amen, Julia.

Belgian Haiku Master

Georges Gobet/AFP/Getty Images - Belgian Prime Minsiter Herman Van Rompuy.




BRUSSELS -- When it chooses its first permanent president this week, the European Union is expected to pass over former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and other heavy hitters in favor of a balding, bespectacled Belgian named Herman Van Rompuy.

The charismatic Mr. Blair walked the international stage long enough to wear grooves in it. Mr. Van Rompuy, Belgium's prime minister for the past 11 months, is a modest functionary known inside his country for writing haikus in his native Flemish. His lack of ostentation is reflected in his poem "Hair":

“Hair blows in the wind
After years there is still wind
Sadly no more hair.”

I know whereof he speaks.

Mr. Van Rompuy is the clear favorite of oddsmakers like Ladbrokes to be chosen president by the leaders of the EU's 27 member nations Thursday. Though the vote could still hold surprises, Mr. Van Rompuy's likely ascendance speaks to the baroque nature of EU politics -- where permanent presidents need not be permanent or presidential, and where the race tends to go not to the strong, but to the Belgians, Danes and Luxembourgers.


From left, Luxemburg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende and former Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga[mdash ]hopefuls for the coming job of EU President.




Mr. Van Rompuy is known as a master of procedural minutiae who can run committee meetings in several languages. But as Belgium's budget director in the 1990s, he also helped the massively indebted country meet the criteria for joining the euro.

After becoming Belgium's prime minister in December, Mr. Van Rompuy has repaired fissures with the country's French-speaking minority and managed a bureaucracy of six parliaments and more than 50 cabinet-level ministers. "If you know how to run Belgium, you can deal with the EU," says Piotr Maciej Kaczynski, an analyst with the Brussels-based Center for European Policy Studies.

Mr. Van Rompuy's particular knack was evident in the haiku he read at a recent news conference with the prime ministers of Spain and Hungary:

“Three waves together,
Rolling into the harbor --
The trio is here.”

Pressure from the left

From left, Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow have plenty to talk about with President Obama in office.



Last night I watch Hannity for about 30 seconds. William Bennett was on; he is professorial, stentorian and as right wing as his host. Hannity asked Bennett his opinion of President Obama, and before giving his guest a chance to asnwer, added his assessment of the President being a "radical socialist" with an ideological agenda. Bennett said that, at first, he had wanted to have right-wing criticism wait and see, but that, now, he sees the President as "worse than feared." So much for restraint from the right.

If President Obama happened to glance at “The Rachel Maddow Show” last Monday, he might have winced. Ms. Maddow pretended to celebrate the passage of a health care overhaul bill in the House, calling it “potentially a huge generational win for the Democratic Party” — but then halted the triumphant music and called it an “electoral defeat.”

The Stupak amendment, she said, was “the biggest restriction on abortion rights in a generation.” Then she wondered aloud about the consequences for Democrats “if they don’t get women or anybody who’s pro-choice to ever vote for them again.” She returned to the subject the next four evenings in a row. This is how it looks to have a television network pressuring President Obama from the left.

And so much for restraint from the left. I' getting tired of watching MSNBC. Olbermann is unwatchable: his screed are hysterical, his sarcasm distasteful, and he is way too angry. Each show he makes fun of Murdoch or O'Reilly, mocking their speech; he is patently absurd. Matthews I can watch, but his proclivity to interrupt people is maddening; still, he is a lefty, smart, and has good guests; Maddow I can hardly watch.

These three and "other progressive hosts on MSNBC ... are using their nightly news-and-views-casts to measure what she calls “the distance between Obama’s rhetoric and his actions.” While they may agree with much of what Mr. Obama says, they have pressed him to keep his campaign promises about health care, civil liberties and other issues.

They fail to take into account that this is not a country run by liberals, nor a country of liberals. They talk ideology, and fail to take pragmatism into account. Obama is now governing. They are not. Only Matthews has any such practical experience, having worked on Capitol Hill (for Tip O'Neill) and the WHite House (as a Carter speechwriter).

President Obama with Charlie Crist, governor of Florida, at a town hall meeting in Fort Myers, Fla., in February.








Gov. Charlie Crist, with his wife, Carole, drew protests at a Republican barbecue this month.






November 16, 2009
Governor Crist Becomes a Right-Wing Target
By KATE ZERNIKE

NEWBERRY, Fla. — In retrospect, even Charlie Crist admits that “the optics” of The Hug are not great.

It was in the glow of a new day in politics last February when Mr. Crist, this state’s popular Republican governor, took the stage with President Obama and declared that Republicans and Democrats had to rise above partisanship in support of an economic stimulus. And Mr. Obama embraced him.

Now, as a season of tea parties and fractious town hall meetings has energized the right wing, that embrace has endangered what once seemed like Mr. Crist’s surefire bid for a Senate seat and put Florida at the center of a debate about the future of the Republican Party.

Republican pragmatists argue that to take back its majority, the party has to appeal to a broader range of voters, even if it means running candidates who might stray from the party orthodoxy.

Conservatives counter that Republicans have become Democrats’ enablers in bigger deficits and bigger government, and that the way to win is to sharpen the distinctions between the parties.

A raft of conservative groups, commentators and politicians are supporting a primary challenge to Mr. Crist by Marco Rubio, a telegenic former speaker of the Florida House christened a Reaganite’s answer to Mr. Obama by The National Review.

Mr. Crist, who has been endorsed by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, is seen by these conservatives as too moderate — even liberal — in his judicial appointments and his support of policies like cap and trade for emissions that contribute to global warming and restoring voting rights to ex-felons.

“Florida is a hill to die on for conservatives,” said Erick Erickson, editor of the conservative blog RedState.com, which leads a daily drumbeat against Mr. Crist. “This is the clearest example we have of these two competing concepts.”

Similar fights are playing out in primary races in other states. In a California Senate primary that promises to be just as intense as this one, conservatives are championing Chuck DeVore, a state assemblyman, over Carly Fiorina, the former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard whose candidacy has the support of prominent Republican senators and the party’s 2008 presidential nominee, John McCain.

“Some of the Republicans who’ve been around a long time, they’re the big spenders, they’re the big government people,” said Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina, who as chairman of the Senate Conservatives Fund, a political action committee, has become a kingmaker for conservative challengers, and has endorsed Mr. Rubio.

“What’s going to happen, the voters are going to weed out these Republicans who no longer share the core principles that make our country great,” Mr. DeMint said.

It may be a principled debate, but it is not shaping up as a polite one.

As Mr. Crist was introduced at the Ronald Reagan Black Tie and Blue Jeans Barbeque at an open-air rodeo in this Central Florida town this month, hecklers with Rubio bumper stickers on their backs called out, “Go Hug Obama!”

People posting on FreeRepublic.com mock Mr. Crist as Charlie Loafers. “Charlie Crist Delenda Est,” declared a RedState headline: “Charlie Crist must be destroyed.”

Conservative and moderate Republicans take very different lessons from this month’s special Congressional election in upstate New York, in which a third-party conservative challenged the moderate Republican candidate. In the end, a Democrat won the seat in the historically Republican district after the Republican dropped out under pressure from the right and then endorsed the Democrat.

Republicans took it as evidence that candidates from the far right cannot win. But conservatives say their candidate would have prevailed if the establishment had been smart enough to put its money behind him, rather than a Republican they argue was a Democrat in thin disguise.

Before polls closed on Election Day, Mr. Erickson and Mr. DeMint convened a conference call to identify the next conservative battlegrounds, urging thousands of followers to direct the energy and money they had spent in the New York race toward a Rubio victory. The Club for Growth is now backing Mr. Rubio, and produced an anti-Crist ad featuring the hug.

Endorsements from conservative leaders like Mike Huckabee and Dick Armey and glowing coverage from George F. Will and National Review have made Mr. Rubio, 38, the sudden standard bearer for a more conservative Republican Party. In the past few months, he has begun pulling closer to Mr. Crist in polls and fund-raising, collecting nearly $1 million in the last cycle.

Mr. Crist, endlessly tanned, endlessly sunny, is known as a gifted campaigner with savvy for symbolism.

Hoping to emphasize his record as tough on crime when he ran for governor, he had the host of “America’s Most Wanted” deliver his papers to elections officials. He came into office promising to cut property taxes, and promoting consensus on issues like the environment and stem cell research. And if they sometimes say he is trying too hard to please everyone, voters, Democrat as well as Republican, have rewarded him with high ratings.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee backed Mr. Crist as soon as he announced he was running in May, thinking it would save trouble. He is as avid a fund-raiser as he is a campaigner, and helped deliver the state, and effectively the Republican presidential nomination, to Mr. McCain — so the party could save money in Florida to spend elsewhere.

“I think pragmatism is not a bad thing,” said the committee’s chairman, Senator John Cornyn of Texas.

But, hounded by conservative bloggers, Mr. Cornyn announced this month that he did not plan to spend any money in the primary. The committee does not usually spend in primaries; the need for such a statement spoke to the heat of the race, 10 months before primary day.

Mr. Rubio, the son of Cuban exiles and a protégé of former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, is known as an eloquent speaker and is quick with a quip. (“Charlie Crist supported the stimulus, and I’ve got the pictures to prove it.”)

He argues for small government and reduced spending, but mostly, he talks about the need to stop what he calls the Obama agenda. “The bottom line is that if you’re a Republican, the Republican Party should be an alternative, not a facsimile,” he said in an interview. “And I think I offer that.”

He has been trouncing Mr. Crist in party straw polls across Florida. In Palm Beach County, the party held off a censure of Mr. Crist with a 65-65 tie. Sid Dinerstein, the party chairman there, said most of those voting against censure had done so only because they thought it should be used to condemn moral failings, not political ones.

In an interview, Mr. Crist, 53, called himself a “pragmatic Reaganite conservative.” He is against abortion and same-sex marriage, and supports gun rights and the death penalty.

He sees how the hug could make him seem too cozy with Democrats. “I understand the optics,” he said. “I also know where the polls are, still.”

A Quinnipiac University poll late last month showed Mr. Crist beating Mr. Rubio, 50 percent to 35 percent, and the presumed Democratic candidate, Representative Kendrick B. Meek, 51 to 31 percent. The poll also showed Mr. Meek beating Mr. Rubio, 36 to 33 percent.

But Mr. Crist’s lead over Mr. Rubio had shrunk to 15 points from 29 points in August. And Rubio supporters point to an Rasmussen Reports poll in October that showed him doing better than Mr. Crist in a Meek matchup.

In part, Mr. Crist’s troubles are local: the Obama embrace reinforced a sense that the governor shifts with the political winds.

“He hugged Obama when it was convenient, and now he’s trying to distance himself,” said Johanne Artman, 68. “I don’t trust him.”

Ms. Artman was corralling people to collect Rubio literature at the Reagan barbeque. “I’ve never been so excited about anyone as I am about Marco Rubio,” she said. “Everything as a conservative I believe in, he stands for.”

But the complaints about the hug also reflect anger about the stimulus — as Roger Pennington, a 56-year-old pharmacist, called it, “bad money after bad.”

That anger has fueled the broader anti-establishment furor expressed in the tea parties — directed as much at Republicans as Democrats, and especially at those like Mr. Crist who can be associated with Mr. Obama.

“He’ll never be able to get over that photo,” Mr. Pennington said, declining the opportunity to shake hands with Mr. Crist and his new wife, Carole, as they campaigned at the barbeque.

Mr. Crist does not apologize for appearing on stage with Mr. Obama, saying it was the polite thing to do when a president visits your state for the first time. “He’s the president of the United States,” he said. “I campaigned for the other guy. The bona fides on where I was are very clear.”

His supporters argue that the voices that are loudest now are not the voice of the majority.

“The majority of our country is not on either end of the spectrum, but somewhere in the middle,” said Jason Rosenberg, 41, a plastic surgeon in Gainesville.

“I think the governor has crossed party lines well,” he said. And, he said, “I want someone who’s going to win.”

9/11 trials in NYC

Trying 9/11 Suspects in New York

In deciding to hold the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York City, Attorney General Eric Holder is taking a variety of both political and legal risks, and will be forced to navigate difficult issues relating to intelligence and torture. Because many of the detainees were questioned while under duress, and some testimony against them was elicited through torture, the prosecution faces the possibility that some of the evidence will be thrown out. Holder remains confident that the untainted evidence—including a confession from Mohammed himself—is strong enough to ensure a conviction. The trial of Mohammed, the alleged mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, and four other suspects accused of plotting the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon is an important step in Obama's plan of eventually closing the Guantanamo Bay detention center, and the administration is running the extreme political risk that the Justice Department will fail to secure a conviction. "To the extent that there are political consequences," said Holder, "I'll just have to take my lumps."

The right wing has already jumped in with criticisms. It seems risky, but I have high regard for the AG and the President. Nonetheless, they can not lose this one. It seems they have calculated that they will not.

How bad are times?

New York State is in bad financial shape.

Gov. David A. Paterson is imploring the Legislature to finally reckon with the state’s ugly financial reality. But first the governor must reckon with the likes of Senator Carl Kruger. Mr. Kruger, a Brooklyn Democrat who is the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, has amassed a campaign war chest of $2.1 million, in part because of generous contributions from his labor union allies.

Special interest? Defender of the worker?

Despite a deficit of more than $3 billion, Mr. Kruger has threatened to block any significant cuts to health care and education, the biggest spending areas in the budget. He has presented his own budget plan, which has startled even Albany veterans for its reliance on one-time maneuvers and financial gimmickry.

If Albany veterans are surprised, it must be a doozy.

The governor and lawmakers have clashed over spending before. But recent events have created a new urgency and, in the view of Mr. Paterson and budget analysts, a desperate situation. The state has lost 270,000 jobs since the start of the recession. The tax bounty from Wall Street has shrunk.

That bounty is an important part of the city's and state's budgets.

And spending just keeps soaring. New York now spends more than any other state on Medicaid, twice the national average per capita. It also spends the most on school aid, per student, than any other state.

And nobody wants to accept cuts.

In New York over the last decade, the state operating budget has risen an average of 5.8 percent annually, far outpacing the average inflation rate of 2.8 percent. Budget analysts say lawmakers never prepared for the down times.

Chile did, but almost no one else saved the bounty from good times as insurance against lean times. But New York State spending pace was ridiculous, outpacing inflation, more than double that rate.

Senators have delayed budget negotiations for weeks as Mr. Kruger accused the governor of creating a “doomsday scenario” and vowed not to “succumb to his hysteria.”

No, things aren't bad; the Guv is crying wolf.

It is not clear whether Mr. Paterson has the stomach for a protracted battle over spending. With the help of Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch, he has made progress persuading newspaper editorial boards and Assembly leaders that bold action is needed.

Still, on Thursday, Mr. Paterson seemed to be wavering on his commitment to cuts. That day, one of the state’s most powerful unions, 1199 S.E.I.U. United Healthcare Workers East, drew 2,000 people to Albany for a spirited rally, demanding that Mr. Paterson back off any budget cuts. The S.E.I.U. and its health care industry allies do not shrink from aggressively attacking governors. They unleashed a blistering set of television ads against Mr. Paterson last year, blaming him for hurting the most vulnerable people with his budget reductions.

All well and good, but where is the money to come from?

Help end decades of conflict

After months of dialogue, the Turkish government announced a plan on Friday to help end the quarter-century-long conflict with a Kurdish separatist movement that has cost more than 40,000 lives.

The plan will be debated by Parliament, but the fact that it is being discussed at all is considered to be a landmark. For decades, Kurdish political parties were routinely banned, and the ethnic identity of the Kurds was not openly acknowledged, though they make up almost 15 percent of Turkey’s population.

The government’s plan would allow the Kurdish language to be used in all broadcast media and political campaigns, and restore Kurdish names to cities and towns that have been given Turkish ones. It would also establish a committee to fight discrimination.

This is the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is feared by some as a stealth Islamist.

Such measures, many of which have been required for entry to the European Union, were inconceivable in the early 1980s, when aggressive state policies prohibited use of the Kurdish language and other cultural and political rights for the Kurds. That helped empower the outlawed Kurdish Workers Party, known as the P.K.K., which presented itself as the defender of Kurdish rights.

The group, which has been fighting in the predominantly Kurdish southeast, has lost much of its popular support in recent years because of its violent methods. But it still has 12,000 militants hiding in northern Iraq along the Turkish border.

Turkey’s leading opposition party, the Republican People’s Party, denounces any direct or indirect contact with the P.K.K., though it agrees on cultural rights for Kurds as long as they agree to be identified as Turkish citizens and are educated in Turkish.

Is this a moderate party?

Khakis and Bourbon

Each Sunday, Peyton Alsobrook, a 19-year-old freshman at Auburn University, gets together with his Alpha Tau Omega fraternity brothers to compare notes on the women they take on dates to Saturday football games.

Those who seem bored are eliminated from further consideration, he says, along with any who might talk too much during a close game "because they're from up North or something." As the all-important Alabama game approaches, Mr. Alsobrook says he's narrowed his list of potential dates to four. The winner, he says, will get a coveted ticket to the big game and, beyond that, special treatment that might include candy or even "actual flowers."

As the Southeastern Conference solidifies its place as the most prestigious in college football—it has produced the last three national champions—the profile of its games and the growing scarcity of tickets have taken a toll on some of the most genteel (some might say antiquated) traditions of college football in the deep South. The University of Mississippi has already banned the waving of confederate flags, replaced a mascot that reminds some of a plantation owner and this week told its marching band to stop playing a song that ends with the words "the South will rise again."

Some might, indeed say that waving of confederate flags, replaced a mascot that reminds some of a plantation owner and this week told its marching band to stop playing a song that ends with the words "the South will rise again" is antiquated; I know I do.

Heady ideas about beer

Russell Ackoff died Oct. 29 at the age of 90.

I've highlighted some of the comments I really liked.








* Management - November 11, 2009

Russell Ackoff: 1919-2009
A Management Philosopher With Heady Ideas About Beer
By STEPHEN MILLER

An evangelist of the big picture, Russell Ackoff was a management theorist who helped U.S. corporations by reimagining their challenges as opportunities to restructure.

Mr. Ackoff, who died Oct. 29 at age 90, was an expert in conceptualizing problems. He liked to say they came in three flavors: problems, messes and puzzles, and each needed its own distinctive toolkit.

Mr. Ackoff was one of a small group of management-studies pioneers who changed the way corporations thought about their businesses. Peter Drucker once wrote to Mr. Ackoff that his early work "saved me -- as it saved countless others -- from descending into mindless 'model building' -- the disease that all but destroyed so many of the business schools."

No fan of most business education himself, Mr. Ackoff nevertheless ran a business graduate center at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. There, he trained generations of management graduate students in an unconventional program that he said had "no curriculum, no classes, no examinations, no admission requirements -- only exit requirements."

Acerbic and aphoristic, Mr. Ackoff was fond of sayings such as "All of our social problems arise out of doing the wrong thing righter. The more efficient you are at doing the wrong thing, the wronger you become. It is much better to do the right thing wronger than the wrong thing righter! If you do the right thing wrong and correct it, you get better!"

Mr. Ackoff published such sentiments in a series of books. He also wrote about how to manage in the face of extreme uncertainty, such as the crises presented by the oil shocks and inflation of the 1970s.

Mr. Ackoff implemented his ideas through consulting with hundreds of companies, and later in his career, with governments. He helped General Motors create its OnStar navigation system, and had a three-decade association with Anheuser-Busch in which he helped the St. Louis brewer achieve national dominance.

Working with August Busch III, later Anheuser-Busch's chairman, Mr. Ackoff in the early 1960s helped design an expansion strategy that included building new breweries and warehouses, after potential sites were identified via computer modeling, a highly unusual approach at the time.

Mr. Ackoff also studied Anheuser-Busch's marketing strategy, and came to the conclusion that increasing advertising budgets had little effect on sales. (Neither did the taste of the beer, he found through blind taste tests.)

Yet Busch markets very heavily.

"This was incredibly valuable," says Bill Finnie, a former director of strategic planning for Anheuser-Busch who studied for his Ph.D. under Mr. Ackoff. "It gave Anheuser-Busch the confidence to maintain its marketing budget flat from 1961 to 1976. We quadrupled sales."

According to Mr. Finnie, reduced marketing costs were passed on to the consumer, making Budweiser inexpensive compared with local brands that had dominated the market through the 1950s.

In Mr. Ackoff's more than 30 years working with Anheuser-Busch beginning in 1960, the company's national market share grew to more 40% from 7%.

In return for his insights, Anheuser-Busch sponsored Mr. Ackoff's academic pursuits, including Wharton's Ackoff Center for the Advancement of Systems Approaches.

But Mr. Ackoff grew frustrated with management studies, which he felt were too limited in their focus on private industry rather than looking at organizations in the public sector as well.

At the same time, academic departments objected to qualitative approach that lacked statistical backing, and Mr. Ackoff disappeared from reading lists in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet he remained in demand by corporate clients and increasingly by governments, such as Iran, where in the 1970s he helped design a way of clamping down on cigarette smuggling.

Born in Philadelphia, Mr. Ackoff sometimes credited his undergraduate studies in architecture at the University of Pennsylvania with sparking his interest in holistic systems.

After serving in the Army in the Philippines during World War II, he completed a doctorate in the philosophy of science at Penn in 1947, and in 1951 joined with his Ph.D. supervisor, C. West Churchman, to found one of the first schools of operations research, at the Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland, which later became Case Western Reserve University. In 1964, the Wharton School recruited Mr. Ackoff and a handful of colleagues from Case.

In a field he regarded as littered with charlatans, Mr. Ackoff rejected the term "guru," favoring "teacher," in the belief that he was helping his clients design their own solutions. He delighted in crossing discipline boundaries, and his influence sometimes turned up in unexpected places -- Mr. Ackoff was part of a team that redesigned the White House Communications Agency during the administration of President Bill Clinton.

"He is representative of what I fear is a dying breed -- management scholars willing to tackle big and broad business themes," says Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.

Curbing size of bog firms

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Glass-Steagall Act, passed in 1933, separating commercial and investment banking.

And Bill Clinton signed the bill that repealed the Act.

America's Top College Professor

An interesting article about a contest to determine the "best college professor." Best is, of course, purely subjective. Still, there are some metrics that can be applied: popularity with students, to my mind, a, if not the, most important measure.


The prize itself—sponsored by Baylor University and called the Cherry Teaching Award, after the late alumnus whose donation made it possible—is one of the biggest money awards that an American professor can win ($200,000). And its measure of merit is not scholarly output but classroom performance—that crucial aspect of the teaching mission that is so often overshadowed, these days, by the arcana of specialized research and the mad race for publication and tenure.

$200,000 is nice money. Publish or perish is the real demand placed on faculty by schools.

The Cherry award seeks out college teachers who, according to both students and fellow teachers, are especially good at making clear, forceful, inspiring, knowledge-rich classroom presentations that actually help students to learn. The finalists this year include, in addition to Prof. West, Roger Rosenblatt of Stony Brook University and Edward Burger of Williams College. Each has been asked to deliver a public lecture at Baylor and another lecture on his home campus. The winner—chosen by a panel of Baylor-appointed judges—will have the privilege of spending a semester teaching at Baylor (as well as cashing that hefty award-check).

Baylor is shown to be A top Texas Christian University in a google search. Text in its webpage adds: A Nationally Ranked Christian University, Undergraduate & Graduate Research Colleges Universities Schools in Texas.

A history professor at the University of Arkansas,a math professor at Williams College, and Roger Rosenblatt, whom the article does not identify by discipline but whom a search in Stony Brook's website shows to be in the English department (Creative Writing), are the three professors discussed.

Once I had wanted to be a college professor, and this article made me wistful for the time that never became; but, this being the Wall Street Journal, the writer's tone of rebuke comes through. Nonetheless, a very interesting piece.

Dos presidentes

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador took a pretend oath of office on Nov. 20, 2006.

Slideshow

Like a lot of countries, Mexico has a federal government. It meets in a number of imposing colonial and modern buildings around the country. But Mexico has another body, the so-called "Legitimate Government," which claims to be running the republic, too. It meets here in the capital every 15 days in a former garage at 64 San Luis Potosí St.

There, on a recent evening, sat Bernardo Bátiz Vázquez, the Legitimate Government's attorney general, shuffling papers on a foldout table. Not far away was Health Secretary Asa Cristina Laurell, a half dozen other ministers, representatives from various Mexican states, and handlers. At the head of the table sat Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

"You may call me the Legitimate President of Mexico," he said in an interview.

Modest, isn't he?

But while the leftist has faded from international headlines, he never really went away in Mexico. He went on to found a parallel executive branch of government that proposes new laws, issues statements, holds elections, officiates during Mexican Independence Day, and even circulates its own form of identification card for Mexicans (some 2.8 million Mexicans carry them, according to a Legitimate Government spokesman).

Some Mexican newspapers have journalists assigned to cover this imaginary government. "I've been doing this for years," says Heliodoro Cárdenas, a reporter from the Mexico City daily El Milenio. Did he volunteer for the beat? "No, I was sent." He adds: "It's difficult to cover, shall we say, Mexico's political ugly duckling."

While Mr. Cárdenas thinks there was a strong likelihood of fraud in 2006, he says Mr. López Obrador understands he's not actually running the republic. "It's a strategy to raise his political profile," he says. If so, it hasn't paid dividends. Support for the leftist hovers at around 16% of the population -- about half what he got in the 2006 election -- according to a June poll in the Mexican daily La Reforma.

Imaginary executive branches of the government have their problems, too. Héctor Vasconcelos, the secretary of international affairs of the Legitimate Government, has had trouble getting any country to recognize his title, despite his many trips abroad, including one to Ecuador to fete the presidential inauguration of leftist Rafael Correa.

If even Correa's government didn't bite, that's sad.

Veterans Day 2009

President Obama places a wreath at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier on Wednesday.

















President Obama extends a hand to James Gordon Meek (left) of the Daily News Washington Bureau.

















Pfc. David H. Sharrett II with his proud father, also named David, at Fort Benning, Ga.














Gravestone of Pfc. David Sharrett at Arlington National Cemetery














My solemn meeting on Veterans Day with President Obama at my friend's resting place in Arlington

by James Gordon Meek
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

Thursday, November 12th 2009, 4:00 AM
ARLINGTON, Va. - He didn't introduce himself. He didn't have to.

President Obama simply stuck out his hand and asked for my name as he stepped toward me amid a bone-chilling drizzle in the Gardens of Stone.

This was Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery. I wasn't there as a reporter, but to visit some friends and family buried there when Obama made an unscheduled stop - a rare presidential walk among what Lincoln called America's "honored dead" - after laying a Veterans Day wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns.

What I got was an unexpected look into the eyes of a man who intertwined his roles as commander in chief and consoler in chief on a solemn day filled with remembrance and respect for sacrifices made - and sacrifices yet to be made.

I'm sure the cynics will assume this wasjust anotherObama photoop.

If they'd been standing in my boots looking him in the eye, they would have surely choked on their bile.

His presence in Section 60 convinced me that he now carries the heavy burden of command.

I had stopped at Arlington to see the resting place of Ken Taylor, Ed Lenard and Dave Sharrett. Ken and Ed survived their service, in World War II and Korea, and died as old men. Dave did not leave Iraq alive. He was 27.

Obama arrived just before noon at the serene Section 60, where many of the dead from Iraq and Afghanistan are buried together - and where many more heroes will undoubtedly be laid to rest before this President leaves office.

It's a section typically bustling with those visiting loved ones. Every time I go there, more and more graves have been dug into the earth.

The President and First Lady Michelle Obama emerged from their armored limousine hatless in the frigid downpour and took a slow stroll into the soggy rows of white marble headstones.

They stopped first at the grave of Medal of Honor recipient Ross McGinnis, an Army private who threw himself on a grenade in Iraq three years ago to save four buddies.

A sad-faced woman reached for Obama's hand and pointed him to a nearby plot.

The face of another woman - who had grimly sat in a folding chair for hours next to a headstone she'd arranged flowers around - suddenly broadened into a smile as she stood to embrace Obama and thank him for paying his respects.

She was so overcome with emotion that a soldier from the Army's Old Guard had to console her afterward.

The President patted backs of adozen other Gold Star relativesand troops visiting buddiesnow in the ground.

He gave hugs. He shook wet, chilly hands. He wanted to know something about each fallen warrior.

He began to slowly trudge back toward the motorcade - and to another White House huddle with his war council, which is advising him whether to send up to 40,000 additional troops into harm's way in Afghanistan.

And then Obama noticed a tall, bearded figure. He probably didn't see the mud-caked combat boots I trudged around Afghanistan in a few years ago.

"What's your name?" a somber President asked as he extended his hand.

"James Meek, sir," I replied, struggling to pull off my wool glove and pull my hood back from my head. "I'm here visiting a friend, Pfc. David H. Sharrett II, who was killed in Iraq last year."

He asked how I knew Dave. I explained that his father, also named David, was my high school English teacher in nearby McLean, Va. My classmates and I knew Dave as a little boy playing at our feet.

"He became a star football player and was one of the toughest soldiers in the 101st Airborne Division," I told Obama.

I didn't tell the commander in chief that Dave was killed by friendly fire. Or that the Army bungled notifying Dave's parents of a probe that concluded his lieutenant tragically mistook him for a terrorist in the dark and shot him. Or that his family had to fight for accountability - which two battlefield commanders promised but stateside generals derailed.

That wouldn't have been appropriate, Dave's deeply grateful father later agreed.

"Well, we appreciate his service very much," Obama told me.

I then told him I'm a reporter for the Daily News - but was just there to visit friends.

"Well, James," he said, looking me in the eye, "just because you're a journalist doesn't mean you can't honor your friends here."

The First Lady smiled and squeezed my hand. I thanked her for coming to Section 60.

Her face opened up into a smile filled with warmth and comfort, a welcome antidote for the weather and sadness around her. She said there was no finer place to be on Veterans Day.

Ironically, I was ready to leave the cemetery an hour earlier, but it went into lockdown because of Obama's visit.

"Sorry for any inconvenience," a terribly polite Secret Service agent whispered in my ear.

As the Obamas ended their pilgrimage through Arlington's hallowed ground, inconvenience was hardly what I felt standing there as the rain pelted my coat, staring at blades of grass around a headstone etched with a name and a date I will never forget.

Lover leaves millions to birds and opera

Collect Picture/The Scotsman Publications - Mona Webster bequeathed $7.5 million to the Metropolitan Opera.







Lover of Birds and Opera Leaves Millions to Both

By DANIEL J. WAKIN
Published: November 10, 2009

Mona Webster, a lighthouse keeper’s daughter who lived in Edinburgh and died in August at 96, had a love of birds, and warblers in particular — of the human kind. She demonstrated that affection by leaving most of her fortune to the Metropolitan Opera and a nature charity in Britain.

English and Scottish newspapers said Ms. Webster had bequeathed the Met $7.5 million. The Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust received a similar amount. While the Met confirmed on Tuesday that Ms. Webster had long promised a big gift on her death, it said it was still waiting to find out the exact amount.

Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, said Ms. Webster had fallen in love with the Met through its Saturday radio broadcasts. She was last at the house for a performance on opening night in 2000. “She said it was the most wonderful night of her life,” he said.

The Met’s fund-raising office had kept in touch with Ms. Webster since then. It sent her books about the birds of Central Park; a volume called “Red-Tails in Love: A Wildlife Drama in Central Park”; and tomes about Met history, which appealed to her love of data, according to Gail Chesler, the Met’s director of planned and special gifts.

“She just thought they were the cat’s meow,” Ms. Chesler said. Ms. Chesler said the Met had also sent LP recordings of its operas because Ms. Webster did not own a CD or DVD player.

Ms. Webster was born on Jan. 13, 1913, on the Isle of Man, where her father kept the Douglas Head lighthouse, her obituaries said. She moved to Orkney in Scotland as a girl and discovered a love for birds. She joined the tax office as a clerk and lived in London during the blitz. She moved to Edinburgh and in 1942 married an investment manager, Ted Webster. He died in 1981. The couple had no children.

After Mr. Webster’s death, Ms. Webster traveled the world on bird-watching expeditions, recording more than 5,500 species. Her other love was opera, especially the Met Saturday afternoon broadcasts, which she heard hours later because of the time difference. “Saturday nights were sacred,” Ms. Chesler said, adding that Ms. Webster recalled a radio broadcast from as far back as 1939.

Ms. Webster died on Aug. 27, and details of her will were made public on Monday, the British reports said. Her fortune amounted to $16.3 million, much of it produced by shrewd investments in the stock market, according to HeraldScotland.com.

Surprisingly, Ms. Webster left only $167,000 to the Royal Opera Trust, which benefits the house in Covent Garden in London, much closer to home. Met officials said Ms. Webster had complained about the Royal Opera.

“She would tell me things that she didn’t like that Covent Garden was doing, and she just loved the Met,” Ms. Chesler said. “It was all over the place — casting, productions, management.”

Elizabeth Bell, a Royal Opera spokeswoman, said in an e-mail message that Ms. Webster last attended a performance there about seven years ago “and is remembered as a very interesting, proud lady and someone who was deeply interested in the music.” She said the Royal Opera was “most grateful for her very generous donation.”

Ms. Webster had attended the Met frequently before 2000, but usually came as part of an opera tour group and thus did not come onto the Met’s radar until 2000, when she made a large gift and was invited to opening night, Ms. Chesler said.

Ms. Chesler said she had been in regular correspondence with Ms. Webster and stopped by to visit while on vacation this summer just four days before she died.

“We talked about everything,” she said, describing Ms. Webster as mentally sharp to the end. “During that last visit she was also telling us about her investments. She had been telling me all along that the Met would be taken care of after she passed. She said that in every conversation. We knew it was going to be substantial. We assumed it would be a seven-figure gift, but we had no idea of the actual amount, and the truth is, we still don’t.”

The only less-than-cheery thought, Ms. Chesler said, was that the Met would have to pay taxes on the gift in Britain. “That’s 40 percent,” she said.

Dreams

Mind
A Dream Interpretation: Tuneups for the Brain

By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: November 9, 2009

It’s snowing heavily, and everyone in the backyard is in a swimsuit, at some kind of party: Mom, Dad, the high school principal, there’s even an ex-girlfriend. And is that Elvis, over by the piñata?

Uh-oh.

Dreams are so rich and have such an authentic feeling that scientists have long assumed they must have a crucial psychological purpose. To Freud, dreaming provided a playground for the unconscious mind; to Jung, it was a stage where the psyche’s archetypes acted out primal themes. Newer theories hold that dreams help the brain to consolidate emotional memories or to work though current problems, like divorce and work frustrations.

Yet what if the primary purpose of dreaming isn’t psychological at all?

In a paper published last month in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and longtime sleep researcher at Harvard, argues that the main function of rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM, when most dreaming occurs, is physiological. The brain is warming its circuits, anticipating the sights and sounds and emotions of waking.

“It helps explain a lot of things, like why people forget so many dreams,” Dr. Hobson said in an interview. “It’s like jogging; the body doesn’t remember every step, but it knows it has exercised. It has been tuned up. It’s the same idea here: dreams are tuning the mind for conscious awareness.”

Drawing on work of his own and others, Dr. Hobson argues that dreaming is a parallel state of consciousness that is continually running but normally suppressed during waking. The idea is a prominent example of how neuroscience is altering assumptions about everyday (or every-night) brain functions.

“Most people who have studied dreams start out with some predetermined psychological ideas and try to make dreaming fit those,” said Dr. Mark Mahowald, a neurologist who is director of the sleep disorders program at Hennepin County Medical Center, in Minneapolis. “What I like about this new paper is that he doesn’t make any assumptions about what dreaming is doing.”

The paper has already stirred controversy and discussion among Freudians, therapists and other researchers, including neuroscientists. Dr. Rodolfo Llinás, a neurologist and physiologist at New York University, called Dr. Hobson’s reasoning impressive but said it was not the only physiological interpretation of dreams.

“I argue that dreaming is not a parallel state but that it is consciousness itself, in the absence of input from the senses,” said Dr. Llinás, who makes the case in the book “I of the Vortex: From Neurons to Self” (M.I.T., 2001). Once people are awake, he argued, their brain essentially revises its dream images to match what it sees, hears and feels — the dreams are “corrected” by the senses.

These novel ideas about dreaming are based partly on basic findings about REM sleep. In evolutionary terms, REM appears to be a recent development; it is detectable in humans and other warm-blooded mammals and birds. And studies suggest that REM makes its appearance very early in life — in the third trimester for humans, well before a developing child has experience or imagery to fill out a dream.

In studies, scientists have found evidence that REM activity helps the brain build neural connections, particularly in its visual areas. The developing fetus may be “seeing” something, in terms of brain activity, long before the eyes ever open — the developing brain drawing on innate, biological models of space and time, like an internal virtual-reality machine. Full-on dreams, in the usual sense of the word, come much later. Their content, in this view, is a kind of crude test run for what the coming day may hold.

None of this is to say that dreams are devoid of meaning. Anyone who can remember a vivid dream knows that at times the strange nighttime scenes reflect real hopes and anxieties: the young teacher who finds himself naked at the lectern; the new mother in front of an empty crib, frantic in her imagined loss.

But people can read almost anything into the dreams that they remember, and they do exactly that. In a recent study of more than 1,000 people, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Harvard found strong biases in the interpretations of dreams. For instance, the participants tended to attach more significance to a negative dream if it was about someone they disliked, and more to a positive dream if it was about a friend.

In fact, research suggests that only about 20 percent of dreams contain people or places that the dreamer has encountered. Most images appear to be unique to a single dream.

Scientists know this because some people have the ability to watch their own dreams as observers, without waking up. This state of consciousness, called lucid dreaming, is itself something a mystery — and a staple of New Age and ancient mystics. But it is a real phenomenon, one in which Dr. Hobson finds strong support for his argument for dreams as a physiological warm-up before waking.

In dozens of studies, researchers have brought people into the laboratory and trained them to dream lucidly. They do this with a variety of techniques, including auto-suggestion as head meets pillow (“I will be aware when I dream; I will observe”) and teaching telltale signs of dreaming (the light switches don’t work; levitation is possible; it is often impossible to scream).

Lucid dreaming occurs during a mixed state of consciousness, sleep researchers say — a heavy dose of REM with a sprinkling of waking awareness. “This is just one kind of mixed state, but there are whole variety of them,” Dr. Mahowald said. Sleepwalking and night terrors, he said, represent mixtures of muscle activation and non-REM sleep. Attacks of narcolepsy reflect an infringement of REM on normal daytime alertness.

In study published in September in the journal Sleep, Ursula Voss of J. W. Goethe-University in Frankfurt led a team that analyzed brain waves during REM sleep, waking and lucid dreaming. It found that lucid dreaming had elements of REM and of waking — most notably in the frontal areas of the brain, which are quiet during normal dreaming. Dr. Hobson was a co-author on the paper.

“You are seeing this split brain in action,” he said. “This tells me that there are these two systems, and that in fact they can be running at the same time.”

Researchers have a way to go before they can confirm or fill out this working hypothesis. But the payoffs could extend beyond a deeper understanding of the sleeping brain. People who struggle with schizophrenia suffer delusions of unknown origin. Dr. Hobson suggests that these flights of imagination may be related to an abnormal activation of a dreaming consciousness. “Let the dreamer awake, and you will see psychosis,” Jung said.

For everyone else, the idea of dreams as a kind of sound check for the brain may bring some comfort, as well. That ominous dream of people gathered on the lawn for some strange party? Probably meaningless.

No reason to scream, even if it were possible.

Amid Rising Violence, Mexicans Fight Back

A soldier guards policemen from the town of García who were detained after the shooting of the police chief on Wednesday
View Interactive


in the northern town of García, near the industrial hub of Monterrey in Nuevo León state, the town's new police chief, retired Brig. Gen. Juan Arturo Esparza, was gunned down in an attack by some 30 assailants believed to be working for a drug cartel. Five of his bodyguards also died.

Mr. Esparza was responding to a call for help from García's mayor, who told the police chief that five vehicles with heavily armed men had just sprayed his house with bullets. Mr. Esparza had just taken over as police chief on Oct. 31. He is one of scores of military men taking over policing duties across Mexico because of police corruption. On Thursday, Mexican soldiers entered the town and held some 60 policemen for questioning about the killings, stripping the police of their weapons.


Mexico's war on drugs took a grim twist this week, as a prominent mayor said he had created an undercover group of operatives to "clean up" criminal elements -- even if it had to act outside the law. Underscoring why the mayor may have felt compelled to take such steps, the new police chief in a neighboring town, a retired brigadier general, was shot and killed Wednesday, four days after taking up his post.





Mauricio Fernández, mayor of San Pedro Garza García, said this week he had created a special group to 'clean up' criminal elements in the municipality


"We're tired of sitting around on our hands and waiting for daddy or mommy Calderón to come to fix our fights. We in San Pedro took the decision to grab the bull by the horns," Mr. Fernández said in a radio interview. "Even acting outside the limits of my role as mayor, I will end the kidnappings, extortions and drug trafficking. We are going to do this by whatever means, fair or foul."

Asked if his new squad would operate outside the law, Mr. Fernández said: "In some ways, that's right. What the criminals want is that they can break every law, but that we have to respect every law. Well, I don't get that."

The comments ignited a firestorm. Analysts say that as local and federal officials in Mexico struggle to fight the cartels, they could be tempted to follow in the footsteps of Colombia, where paramilitary gangs and death squads killed thousands of suspected leftists, criminals, and drug traffickers in the late 1990s and early part of this decade.

"This is where we've come in our war on drugs," says Leo Zuckerman, a political analyst in Mexico City. "A mayor justifies, brags, and celebrates that he has carried out justice by his own hands, outside the judicial institutions. This is bad news for those of us who believe that a civilized society is one where criminals get due process."

Interior Minister Fernando Gómez Mont on Thursday criticized the statements by Mr. Fernández, who previously served as a federal senator in Mr. Calderon's conservative PAN party. "The Mexican state, in its different levels, can't act above or beyond the law. Whoever does so is ... a lawbreaker, and we can't accept using criminals to resolve the problem of crime." The Mexican attorney general's office, which could investigate the killings of the four men, said it had no comment.

Ida alcanza categoría 2 frente a costa de Cancún

El Meteorológico Nacional informa que el ciclón mantiene su desplazamiento hacia la península de Yucatán, ubicándose 80 kilómetros al este de Cancún

We're to land in Cancún in three weeks.


El huracán Ida alcanzó la categoría 2 en la escala Saffir-Simpson por su paso del Caribe al Golfo de México y mantiene su desplazamiento hacia el noroeste, con dirección a la península de Yucatán.

El Servicio Meteorológico Nacional, informó en su último reporte a las 10:00 horas que el meteoro se encuentra 80 kilómetros al este de Cancún, quintana Roo y a 75 al este de Isla Mujeres con un desplazamiento de 17 kilómetros por hora y vientos sostenidos de hasta 150 km/h.

Ráfagas de viento azotaban las palmeras, y los pescadores retiraban sus botes del agua mientras la lluvia y las olas caían sobre Cancún y el vecino Puerto Juárez.

Los hoteleros y pescadores a lo largo de la costa caribeña mexicana, incluyendo el balneario de Cancún, retiraron sus embarcaciones del agua en anticipación a las lluvias y el viento a medida que se aproxima Ida.

Las autoridades dijeron que lo peor de la tormenta seguramente llegará a Cancún hacia el mediodía. Aconsejaron a los residentes que permanezcan dentro de sus alojamientos y que no saque la basura a la calle.

''Ahorita esta muy, muy tranquilo'', dijo el director de la Defensa Civil Rubén Arévalo Gutiérrez. ''Pero nos van a tocar lluvias y ráfagas de viento''

La Dirección de Protección Civil en Yucatán habilitó desde las primeras horas de hoy, 95 albergues distribuidos en igual número de municipios, incluyendo Mérida.

Algunas familias decidieron abandonar sus viviendas en lo que concluye el temporal y ante el riesgo de que el huracán Ida, afecte también parte de la franja costera de Yucatán.

Graphic Juveniles Serving Life

November 8, 2009
Weighing Life in Prison for Youths Who Didn’t Kill
By ADAM LIPTAK

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — There are just over 100 people in the world serving sentences of life without the possibility of parole for crimes they committed as juveniles in which no one was killed. All are in the United States. And 77 of them are here in Florida.

On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear appeals from two such juvenile offenders: Joe Sullivan, who raped a woman when he was 13, and Terrance Graham, who committed armed burglary at 16. They claim that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment forbids sentencing them to die in prison for crimes other than homicide.

Outside the context of the death penalty, the Supreme Court has generally allowed states to decide for themselves what punishments fit what crimes. But the court barred the execution of juvenile offenders in 2005 by a vote of 5 to 4, saying that people under 18 are immature, irresponsible, susceptible to peer pressure and often capable of change.

A ruling extending that reasoning beyond capital cases “could be the Brown v. Board of Education of juvenile law,” said Paolo G. Annino, the director of the Children’s Advocacy Clinic at Florida State University’s law school. Judges, legislators and prosecutors in Florida agree that the state takes an exceptionally tough line on juvenile crime.

But they are deeply divided about when sentences of life without the possibility of release are warranted.

“Sometimes a 15-year-old has a tremendous appreciation for right and wrong,” said State Representative William D. Snyder, a Republican who is chairman of the House’s Criminal and Civil Justice Policy Council. “I think it would be wrong for the Supreme Court to say that it was patently illegal or improper to send a youthful offender to life without parole. At a certain point, juveniles cross the line, and they have to be treated as adults and punished as adults.”

A retired Florida appeals court judge, John R. Blue, did not see it that way. “To lock them up forever seems a little barbaric to me,” Judge Blue said. “You ought to leave them some hope.”

Several factors in combination — some legal, some historical, some cultural — help account for the disproportionate number of juvenile lifers in Florida.

The state’s attorney general, Bill McCollum, explained the roots of the state’s approach in the first paragraph of his brief in Mr. Graham’s case.

“By the 1990s, violent juvenile crime rates had reached unprecedented high levels throughout the nation,” Mr. McCollum wrote. “Florida’s problem was particularly dire, compromising the safety of residents, visitors and international tourists, and threatening the state’s bedrock tourism industry.” Nine foreign tourists were killed over 11 months in 1992 and 1993, one by a 14-year-old.

Mr. Snyder, the state legislator, put it this way: “Instead of the Sunshine State, it was the Gun-shine State.”

In response, the state moved more juveniles into adult courts, increased sentences and eliminated parole for capital crimes.

Thomas K. Petersen, a semi-retired judge in Miami who spent a decade hearing cases in juvenile court, said that the state’s reaction was out of proportion and that it has lately failed to take account of changed circumstances.

“Back in the 1990s, there were dire predictions about teenage super-predators, particularly in Florida,” Judge Petersen said. “Florida, probably more than other places because of that rash of crimes, overreacted. It was a hysterical reaction.”

“People still go around saying things have never been worse,” he added. “But violent juvenile crime has gone down even as the juvenile population has grown.”

The state’s brief in Mr. Graham’s case said juvenile crime fell 30 percent in the decade ended in 2004. It attributed the drop to its tough approach.

Shay Bilchik, who served as a state prosecutor in Miami from 1977 to 1993 and is now the director of the Center for Juvenile Justice Reform at Georgetown, said the state took a wrong turn. “We were pretty aggressive in those years in transferring kids into criminal court,” he said.

He said later research convinced him that his office’s approach was much too aggressive and had not served to deter crime. “My biggest regret,” he said, “is that during the time I was in the prosecutor’s office, we were under the false impression that we were insuring greater public safety when we were not.”

Mr. Sullivan, 34, had committed a string of crimes by the time he was charged with raping a 72-year-old woman after a burglary in 1989 in Pensacola. Mr. Graham, 22, was sentenced to a year in jail and three years’ probation for a 2003 robbery of a Jacksonville restaurant, during which an accomplice beat the manager with a steel bar. Mr. Graham was sentenced to life in 2005 for violating probation by committing a home invasion robbery when he was 17.

Concern about tourism continues to drive crime policy in the state, said Kathleen M. Heide, a professor of criminology at the University of South Florida. “We’re at the more extreme level,” she said, “because our economy is so tied up with people coming here on vacation and feeling safe. And older people want to live out their retirements here and be safe.”

Florida is one of eight states with juvenile offenders serving life sentences without the possibility of parole for nonhomicide crimes, according to a report prepared by Professor Annino and two colleagues at Florida State. Louisiana has 17 such prisoners; California, Delaware, Iowa, Mississippi, Nebraska and South Carolina have the rest.

The number of such sentences in Florida was greater in the decade that ended in 2008 than in the decade before. The state sentenced nine juvenile offenders for nonhomicide crimes to life without parole in 2005 alone. “We’re just so far out from everyone else,” Professor Annino said.

Mr. Snyder said finding the right balance in addressing juvenile crime was difficult but should be left to the states. “People do things at 16 and 17 that they wouldn’t do at 37, but they spend a lifetime paying for it,” he said. “But we have to create an environment where our children are safe and our elderly are safe.”

Who is a Jew?

David Lightman with his daughter, who was denied admission to the Jews' Free School because her mother's conversion was not recognized. But a court ruling has voided the admissions policy.





LONDON — The questions before the judges in Courtroom No. 1 of Britain’s Supreme Court were as ancient and as complex as Judaism itself. Who is a Jew? And who gets to decide?

A judge?

The case began when a 12-year-old boy, an observant Jew whose father is Jewish and whose mother is a Jewish convert, applied to the school, JFS. Founded in 1732 as the Jews’ Free School, it is a centerpiece of North London’s Jewish community. It has around 1,900 students, but it gets far more applicants than it accepts.

Britain has nearly 7,000 publicly financed religious schools, representing Judaism as well as the Church of England, Catholicism and Islam, among others. Under a 2006 law, the schools can in busy years give preference to applicants within their own faiths, using criteria laid down by a designated religious authority.

Publicly financed schools; imagine that happening in the US?

By many standards, the JFS applicant, identified in court papers as “M,” is Jewish. But not in the eyes of the school, which defines Judaism under the Orthodox definition set out by Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth. Because M’s mother converted in a progressive, not an Orthodox, synagogue, the school said, she was not a Jew — nor was her son. It turned down his application. That would have been the end of it. But M’s family sued, saying that the school had discriminated against him. They lost, but the ruling was overturned by the Court of Appeal this summer.

In an explosive decision, the court concluded that basing school admissions on a classic test of Judaism — whether one’s mother is Jewish — was by definition discriminatory. Whether the rationale was “benign or malignant, theological or supremacist,” the court wrote, “makes it no less and no more unlawful.”

The case rested on whether the school’s test of Jewishness was based on religion, which would be legal, or on race or ethnicity, which would not. The court ruled that it was an ethnic test because it concerned the status of M’s mother rather than whether M considered himself Jewish and practiced Judaism.

Interesting distinction.

The case’s importance was driven home by the sheer number of lawyers in the courtroom last week, representing not just M’s family and the school, but also the British government, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, the United Synagogue, the British Humanist Association and the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

Lot of lawyers.

The case has stirred up long-simmering resentments among the leaders of different Jewish denominations, who, for starters, disagree vehemently on the definition of Jewishness. They also disagree on the issue of whether an Orthodox leader is entitled to speak for the entire community.

No one does. Jews have no Pope.

“Whatever happens in this case, there must be some resolution sorted out between different denominations,” Mr. Benjamin said in an interview. “That the community has failed to grasp this has had the very unfortunate result of having a judgment foisted on it by a civil court.”

Exactly.

Orthodox Jews, of course, sympathize with the school, saying that observance is no test of Jewishness, and that all that matters is whether one’s mother is Jewish. So little does observance matter, in fact, that “having a ham sandwich on the afternoon of Yom Kippur doesn’t make you less Jewish,” Rabbi Yitzchak Schochet, chairman of the Rabbinical Council of the United Synagogue, said recently.

Really? So what is the sense of, or use for, rules of orthodoxy? Why bother, if your mother is Jewish?

“How dare they question our beliefs and our Jewishness?” David Lightman, an observant Jewish father whose daughter was also denied a place at the school because it did not recognize her mother’s conversion, told reporters recently. “I find it offensive and very upsetting.”

Rabbi Danny Rich, chief executive of Liberal Judaism here, said the lower court’s ruling, if upheld, would help make Judaism more inclusive.

“JFS is a state-funded school where my grandfather taught, and it’s selecting applicants on the basis of religious politics,” he said in an interview. “The Orthodox definition of Jewish excludes 40 percent of the Jewish community in this country.”

The Commodore and The Sage