28 March 2010
27 March 2010
There are always two sides to every argument
My other friend Bill begs to differ with the first one, and sends this Los Angeles Times article by Hector Tobar along as proof:
The email that popped into my inbox started with an insult and included an attachment full of "facts". After calling me a "crybaby" for writing a sympathetic story about Mexican immigrants, the sender insisted I read a series of statistics on the effects of illegal immigration on Los Angeles and California. Hospitals, law enforcement, and other public services, he said, are being overwhelmed. At first, because of the sender's tone, I ignored the attachment. Then it arrived again, this time forwarded by a friendly reader. He didn't believe the email, he said, but wanted me to know that three friends had sent it to him. And ten of its facts were said to have originated in this newspaper.
I started reading the chain letter, which carried the title "Just One State". It asked me to forward its message to at least two other people. "If this doesn't open your eyes," it declared, "nothing will."
I'm all in favor of having my eyes opened, and then making sure my eyes don't deceive me. So I took the ten "stats" and focused a little light on them. I waded deep into The Times' archive with the help of our librarian Scott Wilson, and made a few phone calls too. What did I find? A stew made up for the most part of meaty exaggerations and spicy conjecture, mixed in with some giblets of truth. Two of the "stats" are the musings of a conservative op-ed writer. Another takes its information from a government "report" that is, in fact, a work of fiction. The last two items on the list are the most accurate, but they reveal more about the prejudices and fears of the people passing the list along than they do about the supposed effect of "illegals".
Here they are, from 1 to 10:1. "40% of all workers in L.A. County are working for cash and not paying taxes... This is because they are predominantly illegal immigrants working without a green card."
The source of this information seems to be a 2005 study by the Economic Roundtable on the informal economy in Los Angeles County. Its findings were reported in The Times and other papers. But the chain-mail's author more than doubled the figures in that study, which estimated that 15% of the county workforce was outside the regulated economy in 2004. Illegal immigrants getting paid in cash, it said, probably made up about 9% of the workforce. A later Economic Roundtable report, by the way, credited immigrants with keeping the local economy from shrinking in the 1990s.
2. "95% of warrants for murder in Los Angeles are for illegal aliens . . . "
We traced this "fact" to a 2004 op-ed in The Times by Heather Mac Donald of the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. Mac Donald said "officers" told her about the warrants. She conceded that there were no such data in official reports but suggested the LAPD "top brass" was hiding the truth.2. "95% of warrants for murder in Los Angeles are for illegal aliens..."
I called the LAPD's press office, which contacted the department's Fugitive Warrant Section. Officers confirmed that the statistics in item No. 2, and No. 3, which follows, don't exist.
3. "75% of people on the most wanted list in Los Angeles are illegal aliens."
We traced this figure to something circulating on the Internet under the name "the 2006 (First Quarter) INS/FBI Statistical Report on Undocumented Immigrants." The "report" contains similar figures for Phoenix, Albuquerque and other cities. But it isn't an actual government document. The INS ceased to exist in 2003, after the Department of Homeland Security was created. There's something really disturbing about a work of fakery meant to tarnish an entire class of people. You wonder what kind of person would pen such a thing.
4. "Over 2/3 of all births in Los Angeles County are to illegal alien Mexicans on Medi-Cal, whose births were paid for by taxpayers."
Once again the "statistic" more than doubles the actual figures. According to a 2006 story in The Times, there were 41,240 Medi-Cal births to "undocumented women" in the county in 2004. They accounted for 27% of all births.
5. "Nearly 35% of all inmates in California detention centers are Mexican nationals here illegally."
This time the author more than triples the actual figure. Authorities project some 19,000 of the 172,000 inmates in the California prison system in the 2009-10 fiscal year will be illegal immigrants. That's equivalent to 11%. A study published last year by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California actually found that U.S.-born men in California are ten times more likely to be incarcerated than foreign-born men. You can take that statistic with as many grains of salt as you wish.
6. Over 300,000 illegal aliens in Los Angeles County are living in garages.
This information apparently comes from a 1987 article in which The Times visited a sampling of properties across the county and looked for unauthorized garage conversions. The story concluded that 200,000 people lived in such dwellings. The story made no effort, however, to determine immigration status. I'd like to point out that just living in an "illegal garage" doesn't make you "an illegal". You might just be a starving artist, or a guy who recently lost his job.
7. "The FBI reports half of all gang members in Los Angeles are most likely illegal aliens from south of the border."
This is another "fact" spun from the 2004 op-ed by Heather Mac Donald, whose article refers to a single Los Angeles gang and the conjecture of an unnamed federal prosecutor.
8. "Nearly 60% of all occupants of HUD properties are illegal."
Annie Kim, a spokeswoman for the Housing Authority of the city of Los Angeles, called this statement "an urban legend." The source of the information may be an Associated Press report from earlier this year. It quoted a government study that found that 0.4% of residents of federally funded public housing are "ineligible noncitizens". Half of those, or about 0.2% of the total, are illegal immigrants.
9. 21 radio stations in L. A. are Spanish speaking.
10. In L. A. County 5.1 million people speak English, 3.9 million speak Spanish.
These facts are close to the actual numbers, though the language figures are deceptive.
An annual census survey asks people if they "speak a language other than English at home". According to the most recent report, 3.7 million county residents speak Spanish. But more than half of those Spanish speakers answered that they also speak English "very well". Only one in ten Spanish speakers said they don't speak any English at all. Obviously, the ability to speak a language other than English, or the desire to listen to Spanish music, doesn't make you an illegal immigrant or a threat to US democracy. It's a slur against Los Angeles, really, to find these items on a list of "problems" caused by illegal immigration.
The authors of the chain email and the phony government report fear what Los Angeles has become: a multilingual, multiethnic city with multicultural tastes.
They search for information to persuade others to be afraid, but the actual numbers don't quite add up to the big monster they think is out there. So they make the numbers bigger. Or they just make them up. And they spread them around until all that fear and anger turns into a big hate. That's what I saw when I let that email open my eyes.
Not as soon as they'd hoped
With the iPad standing as arguably the most anticipated gadget of 2010, Apple appears to have sold through its initial supply of device and is no longer promising April 3rd delivery for new orders placed from this point on. Separately, the company has finally given the iPad Camera Connection Kit a ship date. As of Saturday, the Apple online store indicates that new orders for all three models of the WiFi-only iPad models will ship "by April 12th," putting their arrival in customers' hands roughly two weeks after the April 3rd delivery date promised to early adopters who pre-order the device up until this weekend.
Meanwhile, Apple continues to imply that the first 3G-enabled iPads will ship by "late April".
Over a week ago, people familiar with the iPad's running sales totals told The Wall Street Journal that the company had pre-sold "hundreds of thousands of the device". They added that Apple was on pace to potentially sell more iPads in its first three months than the 1.2 million iPhones it sold in the three months after the touch-screen handset made its debut back in 2007.
The buzz surrounding iPad pre-sales has prompted several prominent Wall Street analysts to raise their price targets on the company, sending its shares to new all-time highs.
For example, Credit Suisse analyst Bill Shope on Friday raised his twelve-month price target to $300 from $275, while also upping his per-share earnings estimates for the company's current quarter to $2.57 per share from $2.27. He also increased his revenue outlook for the quarter to $12.26 billion from $11.45 billion. "We believe Apple is now running well ahead of expectations in all of its key business segments," he wrote in a report to clients. "To put this in perspective, the March quarter typically represents Apple's seasonal nadir, and our estimates would imply the March quarter of 2010 would be the second strongest quarter in company history." Shope now sees Apple selling 1.08 million iPads next quarter, up from his previous estimate of 650,000.
Separately, Apple on Saturday also provided a "late April" ship date for the iPad Camera Connection Kit and began taking pre-orders for the device. It was previously unavailable for purchase for reasons the company did not disclose.
The iPad Camera Connection Kit enables two ways to import photos and videos from a digital camera: using a camera’s USB cable, or directly from an SD card. It supports standard photo formats, including JPEG and RAW.
Just what we needed (not)
NewsmaxWorld.com has an article about the latest 'want to visit Allah in the worst way' guy in the UK:
A British Airways computer expert will face trial on terrorism charges for allegedly offering to become a suicide bomber, a judge ruled on Friday. Rajib Karim, 30, was arrested last month in Newcastle where he was working at a British Airways call centre, and has been charged with preparing terrorism in Britain and abroad.
Ruling at the Old Bailey, Judge David Calvert-Smith remanded Karim in custody until another court hearing in June before a full eight-week trial scheduled for January next year. Karim, detained after allegedly sending money to Yemen, has been charged on three counts under the Terrorism Acts of 2000 and 2006, with offences alleged to have happened between April of 2006 and February of 2010.
Among the allegations were that he "offered to become a martyr or suicide bomber", and that he offered "the potential opportunity to gain cabin crew access and/or the potential opportunity to gain cabin crew training information and/or cabin crew experience and inside knowledge".
No pleas were entered at Friday's hearing.
Another good one gone
Marlin Firearms, a 140-year-old company which made a gun that was a favorite of Annie Oakley, is closing its Connecticut plant. Workers at the plant in North Haven say they’ve been told all 265 employees will lose their jobs.Rico says he knows a lot of Cowboy Action Shooters will be pissed; they like the Marlin.
Jessica Kallam, a spokeswoman with Madison, North Carolina’s Remington Arms Company, which owns Marlin, said the Connecticut plant will close by June of 2011 and employees would be offered severance and help finding jobs. She said Marlin is relocating its manufacturing operations to an undetermined site. Kallam could not confirm if all employees in Connecticut are losing their jobs. She read a company statement that says Freedom Group, which owns Remington, must reduce its costs to remain competitive. “Although long term prospects of the business look positive, economic factors beyond Freedom Group’s control related to increasing costs and pricing pressures within the firearms industry are impacting the entire Freedom Group of companies,” the statement said.
Remington Arms bought Marlin for nearly $42 million in 2007.
Marlin’s website says John Marlin opened the company in 1870 in New Haven after having worked at the Colt plant in Hartford during the Civil War. The company says its lever action 22 repeater was a favorite gun of Annie Oakley.
Quotes for the day
Courtesy of my father, some good ones:
1. In my many years I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress. John Adams
2. If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed. Mark Twain
3. Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But, then, I repeat myself. Mark Twain
4. I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle. Winston Churchill
5. A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul. George Bernard Shaw
6. A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money. G. Gordon Liddy
7. Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. James Bovard, 1994
8. Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries. Douglas Casey, a classmate of Bill Clinton at Georgetown University
9. Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. P.J. O'Rourke
10. Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else. Frederic Bastiat, French economist (1801-1850)
11. Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it. Ronald Reagan, 1986
12. I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts. Will Rogers
13. If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free. P.J. O'Rourke
14. In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other. Voltaire, 1764
15. Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you. Pericles, 430 BC
16. No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session. Mark Twain, 1866
17. Talk is cheap, except when Congress does it. Anonymous
18. The government is like a baby's alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other. Ronald Reagan
19. The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery. Winston Churchill
20. The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin. Mark Twain
21. The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools. Herbert Spencer, English philosopher (1820-1903)
22. There is no distinctly native American criminal class, save Congress. Mark Twain
23. What this country needs are more unemployed politicians. Edward Langley, artist (1928-1995)
24. A government big enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take everything you have. Thomas Jefferson
25. The biggest difference between Republicans and Democrats is the spelling. Anonymous
26 March 2010
Blonde joke for the day
Courtesy of my friend George, this:
During a recent password audit, it was found that a blonde was using the following password:
MickeyMinniePlutoHueyLouieDeweyDonaldGoofySacramento
When asked why, she said she was told that it had to be at least eight characters long and include at least one capital.Rico says ya gotta admit, she followed the rules...
Cranky about Crank
But it wasn't, alas: over-the-top implausible action, ridiculous drug use, and not nearly enough sex (except for the hilarious-if-ridiculous public-sex scene).
Apparently there's an even-more implausible sequel, Crank: High Voltage, in which Statham somehow survives the fall from the helicopter at the end of Crank and does it all (even more improbably) again...
Rico says he'll pass...
Cheap, but not quite cheap enough
David Pogue has the story in The New York Times about a hot new iPhone app:
For a little one-dollar iPhone app, Line2 sure has the potential to shake up an entire industry. It can save you money. It can make calls where AT&T’s signal is weak, like indoors. It can turn an iPod Touch into a full-blown cellphone. And it can ruin the sleep of cellphone executives everywhere.Rico says it's just a few bucks too expensive, right now, but he'll get it eventually...
Line2 gives your iPhone a second phone number: a second phone line, complete with its own contacts list, voice mail, and so on. The company behind it, Toktumi (get it?), imagines that you’ll distribute the Line2 number to business contacts, and your regular iPhone number to friends and family. Your second line can be an 800 number, if you wish, or you can transfer an existing number.
To that end, Toktumi offers, on its website, a raft of Google Voice-ish features that are intended to help a small businesses look bigger: call screening, Do Not Disturb hours and voice mail messages sent to you as e-mail. You can create an “automated attendant”: “Press 1 for sales,” “Press 2 for accounting,” and so on, that routes incoming calls to other phone numbers. Or, if you’re pretending to be a bigger business than you are, route them all to yourself.
The Line2 app is a carbon copy, a visual clone, of the iPhone’s own phone software. The dialing pad, your iPhone Contacts list, your recent calls list, and visual voice mail all look just like the iPhone’s.
(Let’s pause for a moment here to blink, dumbfounded, at that point. Apple’s rules prohibit App Store programs that look or work too much like the iPhone’s own built-in apps. For example, Apple rejected the Google Voice app because, as Apple explained to the Federal Communications Commission, it works “by replacing the iPhone’s core mobile telephone functionality and Apple user interface with its own user interface for telephone calls.” That is exactly what Line2 does. Oh, well; Mister Jobs works in mysterious ways.) So you have a second line on your iPhone. But that’s not the best part.
Line2 also turns the iPhone into a dual-mode phone. That is, it can make and receive calls either using either the AT&T airwaves as usual, or (this is the best part) over the Internet. Any time you’re in a wireless hot spot, Line2 places its calls over Wi-Fi instead of AT&T’s network. That’s a game-changer. Where, after all, is cellphone reception generally the worst? Right: indoors. In your house or your office building, precisely where you have Wi-Fi. Line2 in Wi-Fi means rock-solid, confident reception indoors. Line2 also runs on the iPod Touch. When you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot, your Touch is now a full-blown cellphone, and you don’t owe AT&T a penny.
But wait, there’s more. Turns out Wi-Fi calls don’t use up any AT&T minutes. You can talk all day long, without ever worrying about going over your monthly allotment of minutes. Wi-Fi calls are free forever. Well, not quite free; Line2 service costs $15 a month (after a 30-day free trial).
But here’s one of those cases where spending more could save you money. If you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot most of the time (at work, for example), that’s an awful lot of calling you can do in Wi-Fi, probably enough to downgrade your AT&T plan to one that gives you fewer minutes. If you’re on the 900-minute or unlimited plan ($90 or $100 a month), for example, you might be able to get away with the 450-minute plan ($70). Even with Line2’s fee, you’re saving $5 or $15 a month.
Line2 also lets you call overseas phone numbers for Skype-like rates: two to five cents a minute to most countries. (A full table of rates is available at toktumi.com.) As a handy globetrotters’ bonus, calls home to numbers in the United States from overseas hot spots are free.
All of these benefits come to you when you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot, because your calls are carried by the Internet instead of by AT&T. Interestingly enough, though, Line2 can also make Internet calls even when you’re not in a hot spot.
It can, at your option, place calls over AT&T’s 3G data network, where it’s available. Every iPhone plan includes unlimited use of this 3G network — it’s how your iPhone sends e-mail and surfs the Web. So once again, Line2 calls don’t use up any of your monthly voice minutes.
Unfortunately, voice connections on the 3G network aren’t as strong and reliable as the voice or Wi-Fi methods. Cellular data networks aren’t made for seamless handoffs from cell tower to tower as you drive, for example; there’s not much need for it if you’re just doing email and Web, so dropped calls are more likely. Fortunately, if you’re on a 3G data-network call and you walk into a hot spot, Line2 switches to the more reliable Wi-Fi network seamlessly, in midcall.
Whenever you do have an Internet connection, either Wi-Fi or a strong 3G area, you’re in for a startling treat. If you and your calling partner are both Line2 subscribers, Line2 kicks you into superhigh audio-quality mode (16-bit mode, as the techies call it). Your calling partners sound as if they’re speaking right into the mike at an FM radio station. It’s almost too clear; you hear the other person’s breathing, lip smacks, clothing rustling and so on. After years of suffering through awful cellphone audio, it’s quite a revelation to hear what you’ve been missing.
Now, this all sounds wonderful, and Line2 generally is wonderful. But there’s room for improvement. First, as you’ve no doubt already concluded, understanding Line2 is complicated. You have three different ways to make calls, each with pros and cons. You miss a certain degree of refinement, too. The dialing pad doesn’t make touch-tone sounds as you tap the keys. There’s no Favorites list within the Line2 app. You can’t get or send text messages on your Line2 line. (The company says it will fix all this soon.) There’s a faint hiss on Line2 calls, as if you’re on a long-distance call in 1970. The company says that it deliberately introduces this “comfort noise” to reassure you that you’re still connected, but it’s unnecessary. And sometimes there’s a voice delay of a half-second or so (of course, you sometimes get that on regular cellphone calls, too).
Finally, a note about incoming calls. If the Line2 app is open at the time, you’re connected via Wi-Fi, if available. If it’s not running, the call comes in through AT&T, so you lose the benefits of Wi-Fi calling. In short, until Apple blesses the iPhone with multitasking software, you have to leave Line2 open whenever you put the phone to sleep. That’s awkward.
Still, Line2 is the first app that can receive incoming calls via either Wi-Fi or cellular voice, so you get the call even if the app isn’t running. That’s one of several advantages that distinguish it from other voice-over-Internet apps like Skype and TruPhone.
Another example: If you’re on a Wi-Fi call using those other programs, and someone calls your regular iPhone number, your first call is unceremoniously disconnected. Line2, on the other hand, offers you the chance to decline the incoming call without losing your Wi-Fi call.
Those rival apps also lack Line2’s call-management features, visual voice mail and conference calling with up to 20 other people. And Line2 is the only app that gives you a choice of call methods for incoming and outgoing calls.
All of this should rattle cell industry executives, because let’s face it: the internet tends to make things free. Cell carriers go through life hoping nobody notices the cellephant in the room: that once everybody starts making free calls over the internet, it’s Game Over for the dollars-for-minutes model. Line2, however, brings us one big step closer to that very future. It’s going to be a wild ride.
Another good one gone
The balcony is closed, this time for good. After nearly three decades, At the Movies, the syndicated television program that introduced many viewers to the film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, as well as to film criticism in all its thorny and contentious glory, will cease production this summer. Disney-ABC Domestic Television, which distributes At the Movies, and ABC Media Productions, which produces it, said in a statement late Wednesday that the current version of the show, which is hosted by Michael Phillips of The Chicago Tribune and A. O. Scott of The New York Times, would broadcast its last original episode the weekend of 14 August.
The demise of At the Movies was a blow to the legions of armchair reviewers it spawned in its many incarnations, some of whom went on to professional careers in criticism. “It’s impossible to overestimate the impact of what Gene and Roger did,” Mr. Scott, the co-chief film critic at The Times, said in a telephone interview. “Any one of us who’s doing this now, on any platform or in any medium, is following them.”
But the program’s cancellation is also a reflection of the rapid changes that the film and television industries have undergone in recent years: the proliferation of print and web outlets that offer movie reviews as much as the declining value of At the Movies in Disney’s syndication portfolio. “From a business perspective,” Disney said in its statement, “it became clear this weekly, half-hour, broadcast syndication series was no longer sustainable.”
At the Movies had its origins in a 1970s-era program, called Opening Soon at a Theater Near You and then Sneak Previews, shown on the Chicago PBS affiliate WTTW. That show paired Mr. Siskel, the buttoned-down film reviewer of The Chicago Tribune, with Mr. Ebert, the irascible critic and crosstown rival at The Chicago Sun-Times. In 1982 they took their powerful thumbs and their often heated arguments on the week’s newest release to At the Movies, a syndicated series produced by Tribune Entertainment.
They left to start another series, Siskel & Ebert & the Movies, in 1986, which went through several host changes and eventually reclaimed the title of At the Movies. For a time the show was disdained by other film reviewers, who felt that its thumbs-up or thumbs-down verdicts reduced movie criticism to a mere yes or no, an argument that seems downright quaint today.
After Mr. Siskel died in 1999, Mr. Ebert shared co-hosting duties with a rotating lineup of critics until his Sun-Times colleague, Richard Roeper, became permanent co-host in 2000. Mr. Ebert took absences beginning in 2006 to be treated for cancer, leading to another round of substitute critics and his eventually ceding his chair to Mr. Phillips of The Tribune.
When Mr. Ebert and Mr. Roeper officially left At the Movies in 2008, they were replaced by Ben Lyons, a television producer and online columnist, and Ben Mankiewicz, a radio and television host, in a flashier, more upbeat version of the show. It was not well received by fans, or by Mr. Ebert, who wrote of the untested Mr. Lyons, “To put him in my seat was a mistake.” The next year Mr. Phillips and Mr. Scott became hosts.
By that time, At the Movies represented an increasingly tiny sliver of Disney’s syndication pie: shown once a week nearly nationwide, for a half-hour, it was not able to generate nearly as much revenue as programs like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire or its powerhouse morning talk show, Live! With Regis and Kelly, which are typically broadcast five days a week.
While the show was still profitable and its ratings improved over the version hosted by the two Bens, according to several people close to the production of the show, Disney found the economic vital signs too discouraging to continue.
In a post late Wednesday on the website of The Sun-Times, Mr. Ebert wrote of At the Movies that it “didn’t fail so much as have its format shot out from beneath it”. Rather than attributing its downfall to any particular hosts, he wrote, “Blame the fact that cable TV and the Internet have fragmented the audience so much that stations are losing market share no matter what they do.”
Mr. Ebert also pointed to the limited influence that reviews can have on certain movies and certain moviegoers, adding: “Theatrical distribution is now dominated by the big-budget, heavily marketed 3-D of the Week. Such films have a success utterly independent of critics.”
Mr. Phillips said in a telephone interview that, although At the Movies faced increased challenges in reaching a wide audience, neither its Chicago-based production staff nor Disney ever pressured him or Mr. Scott to dumb down their on-air discussions. “When they let us on the show,” he said, “they knew they weren’t going to get anything that could fool the Access Hollywood crowd into watching. They were always stressing that we have an arena for film criticism that tells the truth.”
Mr. Scott said that the shuttering of At the Movies did not necessarily reflect a diminished interest in cinema criticism, or a decline in its ability to influence audiences. “It’s always been true that people can go to the movies without reading what critics have to say about the movies,” Mr. Scott said. He added: “Criticism matters to the people who care about it. It’s not that everybody out there in the world needs to hear what we have to say, but some people want to. And there is still, I think, an appetite.”
History for the day
Going after the Pope
From CBS News, a report on the investigation that includes then-Cardinal Ratzinger, now the Pope.
Yet another try
Ginger Thompson and Marc Lacey have an article in The New York Times about yet another attempt at stopping drug trafficking from Mexico:
Responding to a growing sense that Mexico’s military-led fight against drug traffickers is not gaining ground, the United States and Mexico set their counternarcotics strategy on a new course on Tuesday by refocusing their efforts on strengthening civilian law enforcement institutions and rebuilding communities crippled by poverty and crime. The $331 million plan was at the center of a visit to Mexico by several senior Obama administration officials, including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence.
The revised strategy has many elements meant to expand on and improve programs already under way as part of the so-called Mérida Initiative that was started by the Bush administration three years ago, including cooperation among American and Mexican intelligence agencies and American support for training Mexican police officers, judges, prosecutors, and public defenders.
Under the new strategy, officials said, American and Mexican agencies would work together to refocus border enforcement efforts away from building a better wall to creating systems that would allow goods and people to be screened before they reach the crossing points. The plan would also provide support for Mexican programs intended to strengthen communities where socioeconomic hardships force many young people into crime.
The most striking difference between the old strategy and the new one is the shift away from military assistance. More than half of the $1.3 billion spent under Mérida was used to buy aircraft, inspection equipment and information technology for the Mexican military and police. Next year’s foreign aid budget provides for civilian police training, not equipment.
Military-to-military cooperation was expected to continue, officials said, despite reports by human rights groups of an increase in human rights violations by Mexican soldiers. Experts at the Washington Office on Latin America, an organization that advocates for human rights and social justice, said that Pentagon assistance to Mexican counter-narcotics efforts amounted to $78.2 million in 2009 and 2010.
In a news conference, Mrs. Clinton echoed comments she made a year ago, when she acknowledged that it was Mexicans who bore the brunt of drug-related violence, which was driven in large part by American demand. “Yes, we accept our share of the responsibility,” Mrs. Clinton said. “As I said when I first came here a year ago, I think standing right here on this stage, the United States is your partner and your supporter. We know that the demand for drugs drives much of this illicit trade, that guns purchased in the United States are used to facilitate violence here in Mexico. The United States must, and is, doing its part to help you, and us, meet those challenges.”
This revised strategy, officials said, would first go into effect in Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez, the largest cities on Mexico’s border with the United States. Ciudad Juárez, a city of 1.7 million, has become a symbol of the Mexican government’s failed attempts to rein in the drug gangs. Around 3,400 people were killed there in the last year, including an American employee at the United States Consulate and her husband, as well as the Mexican husband of another consulate employee.
The public outcry generated by the violence in Ciudad Juárez forced President Felipe Calderón of Mexico to acknowledge that the drug war would not be won with troops alone. American officials defended President Calderón and the Mexican military. President Obama expressed his confidence in Mexico in a telephone call with President Calderón on Monday night.
“We know that in a violent situation like the one created by the drug cartels, it is necessary to work even harder to protect and promote human rights,” Mrs. Clinton said. “And when you deal with people who engage in beheadings, who murder children who won a football game, who are total nonrespecters of life and human rights, you have to work extra hard to maintain human rights, to maintain the rule of law.”
Ms. Napolitano said she had made several trips to the border in recent months to work with Mexican authorities on new law enforcement techniques, including the kind of community policing efforts credited with significantly reducing violent crime in Los Angeles and Chicago.
In the coming months, State Department officials said, the United States and Mexico would open a joint command center in Mexico City.
“We are looking at everything that can work,” Mrs. Clinton said. “Our goal in this intensive consultation is to see what works and pursue it, and to see what doesn’t and improve it.”
25 March 2010
A short movie, not by Rico
From the LawDog Files blog, via the Bayou Renaissance Man (also on Rico's list of blogs) a short film entitled Born of Hope, taken from "two paragraphs in the first appendix of The Lord of the Rings, concerning the parents of Aragorn".
It takes a long time to load, it runs raggedly (even via DSL), but it's pretty. Encourage them.
It takes a long time to load, it runs raggedly (even via DSL), but it's pretty. Encourage them.
Stretching copyright law
Just after dusk on Friday night, Tyrone Yancy was strutting through one of the more uncertain parts of town in a $6,000 custom-made suit. He was concerned about being robbed, but not by the neighborhood teenagers who trotted out in the street to join him. The real potential for theft, as Mr. Yancy sees it, is from the strangers darting around him and his well-appointed colleagues in a hectic orbit: photographers.
Mr. Yancy, 44, is a nursing assistant by profession. His calling, however, is as one of the Mardi Gras Indians— a member of the Yellow Pocahontas tribe, to be exact— the largely working-class black New Orleanians who create and wear ornate, enormous feathered costumes and come out three times a year to show them off. He is also one of a number of Indians who have become fed up with seeing their photographs on calendars, posters, and expensive prints, without getting anything in return.
Knowing that there are few legal protections for a person who is photographed in public, particularly one who stops and poses every few feet, some Mardi Gras Indians have begun filing for copyright protection for their suits, which account for thousands of dollars in glass beads, rhinestones, feathers, and velvet, and hundreds of hours of late-night sewing.
Anyone could still take their pictures, but the Indians, many of whom live at the economic margins, would have some recourse if they saw the pictures being sold, or used in advertising. (News photographs, like the ones illustrating this article, are not at issue.)
“It’s not the old way of doing things, but the old way of doing things was conducive to exploitation,” said Ashlye M. Keaton, a lawyer who represents Indians in her private practice and also works with them through two pro bono legal programs, Sweet Home New Orleans legal services, and the Entertainment Law Legal Assistance Project. The legal grounding of the strategy is debatable, the ability to enforce it even more so. But what may be most tricky of all is pushing the Indians themselves to start thinking about the legal and financial dimensions of something they have always done out of tradition.
Mardi Gras Indians have been around for more than a century, more than two, some say, and are generally thought to have originated as a way to pay homage to the American Indians who harbored runaway slaves and started families with them. The Indians come out and parade in full dress on Mardi Gras; on St. Joseph’s Night on 19 March; and on a Sunday close to St. Joseph’s, a tradition that arose out of the affinity between blacks and Sicilians in the city’s working-class precincts.
The thirty or so Indian tribes are representatives of their neighborhoods and, starting from home turf, they venture out in their shimmering suits to meet other tribes on procession in the streets. Time was, these run-ins would often end with somebody in the hospital, or worse. But over the past few decades, encouraged by the legendary Chief of Chiefs, Tootie Montana, the showdowns became primarily about the suits, and whose suit could out-prettify all the others.
Indian suits, which in the old days were occasionally burned at the end of a season, have become stunningly elaborate and stunningly expensive, costing upwards of $10,000. For many Indians, it is a matter of principle that they make a new suit from scratch each year. The copyright idea has been floating around for a while— several of Mr. Montana’s suits were registered years ago— but Ms. Keaton began pursuing it more vigorously in 2006, when she was approached by John Ellison, a 52-year-old detailer in an auto body shop and a member of the Wild Tchoupitoulas.
Any photograph that focused on a suit protected by a copyright could arguably be considered a derivative work. The sale of such a picture (or its use in tourism ads, for example) would be on the merits of the suit rather than the photograph itself, and if the person selling it did not have permission, he could be sued.
But the idea is not so easy to put into practice. In American copyright law, clothing designs generally cannot be protected because they are more functional than aesthetic. Ms. Keaton argues that the suits, which can weigh well over 100 pounds, should be considered works of sculpture, not outfits.
The Sweet Home organization held a workshop for Indians on the topic last fall, and is pressing them to fill out copyright forms for this year’s suits. But there has not yet been a test case for the legal theory and it is unclear how one would fare.
“The Mardi Gras Indian costumes are pretty wild and not functional in the ordinary sense of the word, so that suggests that they might be copyrightable,” Kal Raustiala, a professor at the law school of the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote in an email message. “That said,” he added, “lots of runway fashion is also way out there and not likely to fit anyone’s ordinary idea of usefulness, yet it doesn’t receive copyright protection.”
Mr. Ellison filled out his copyright registration form on the spot, but later lost it, a testament to the difficulties of changing a culture.
Christopher Porché West, who has been photographing Mardi Gras Indians since 1979, said he had heard these kinds of complaints for years. They are counterproductive, he said, given the relatively small amount of money he and other photographers earn from Indian portraits. “What they really need to do is self-exploit,” he said. If they want to make money from their culture, he said, “they should find a way to commodify it and bring that to the market.”
But words like “commodify” are foreign and even a little distasteful for many in this city, rather like finding tofu sausage in a gumbo. Indians do make a few hundred dollars here and there showing up at parties and concerts, and a few have tried, with disappointing results, to sell last year’s suits on eBay.
“Indian culture was never, ever meant to make any money,” said Howard Miller, Big Chief of the Creole Wild West, the city’s oldest tribe, and president of the Mardi Gras Indian Council. But neither should the culture be exploited by others. “We have a beef,” he said, “with anybody who takes us for granted.”
Doin' the Vatican Rag
Top Vatican officials, including the future Pope Benedict XVI, did not defrock a priest who molested as many as two hundred deaf boys, even though several American bishops repeatedly warned them that failure to act on the matter could embarrass the church, according to church files newly unearthed as part of a lawsuit.
The internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, shows that while church officials tussled over whether the priest should be dismissed, their highest priority was protecting the church from scandal.
The documents emerge as Pope Benedict is facing other accusations that he and direct subordinates often did not alert civilian authorities or discipline priests involved in sexual abuse when he served as an archbishop in Germany and as the Vatican’s chief doctrinal enforcer.
The Wisconsin case involved an American priest, the Reverend Lawrence C. Murphy, who worked at a renowned school for deaf children from 1950 to 1974. But it is only one of thousands of cases forwarded over decades by bishops to the Vatican office called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, led from 1981 to 2005 by Cardinal Ratzinger. It is still the office that decides whether accused priests should be given full canonical trials and defrocked.
In 1996, Cardinal Ratzinger failed to respond to two letters about the case from Rembert G. Weakland, Milwaukee’s archbishop at the time. After eight months, the second in command at the doctrinal office, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, now the Vatican’s secretary of state, instructed the Wisconsin bishops to begin a secret canonical trial that could lead to Father Murphy’s dismissal. But Cardinal Bertone halted the process after Father Murphy personally wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger protesting that he should not be put on trial because he had already repented and was in poor health, and that the case was beyond the church’s own statute of limitations. “I simply want to live out the time that I have left in the dignity of my priesthood,” Father Murphy wrote near the end of his life to Cardinal Ratzinger. “I ask your kind assistance in this matter.” The files contain no response from Cardinal Ratzinger.
The New York Times obtained the documents, which the church fought to keep secret, from Jeff Anderson and Mike Finnegan, the lawyers for five men who have brought four lawsuits against the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. The documents include letters between bishops and the Vatican, victims’ affidavits, the handwritten notes of an expert on sexual disorders who interviewed Father Murphy, and minutes of a final meeting on the case at the Vatican.
Father Murphy not only was never tried nor disciplined by the church’s own justice system, but also got a pass from the police and prosecutors who ignored reports from his victims, according to the documents and interviews with victims. Three successive archbishops in Wisconsin were told that Father Murphy was sexually abusing children, the documents show, but never reported it to criminal or civil authorities.
Instead of being disciplined, Father Murphy was quietly moved by Archbishop William E. Cousins of Milwaukee to the Diocese of Superior in northern Wisconsin in 1974, where he spent his last 24 years working freely with children in parishes, schools and, as one lawsuit charges, a juvenile detention center. He died in 1998, still a priest.
Even as the pope himself, in a recent letter to Irish Catholics, has emphasized the need to cooperate with civil justice in abuse cases, the correspondence seems to indicate that the Vatican’s insistence on secrecy has often impeded such cooperation. At the same time, the officials’ reluctance to defrock a sex abuser shows that, on a doctrinal level, the Vatican has tended to view the matter in terms of sin and repentance more than crime and punishment.
The Vatican spokesman, the Reverend Federico Lombardi, was shown the documents and was asked to respond to questions about the case. He provided a statement saying that Father Murphy had certainly violated “particularly vulnerable” children and the law, and that it was a “tragic case”. But he pointed out that the Vatican was not forwarded the case until 1996, years after civil authorities had investigated the case and dropped it.
Father Lombardi emphasized that neither the Code of Canon Law nor the Vatican norms issued in 1962, which instruct bishops to conduct canonical investigations and trials in secret, prohibited church officials from reporting child abuse to civil authorities. He did not address why that had never happened in this case.
To many, Father Murphy appeared to be a saint: a hearing man gifted at communicating in American Sign Language and an effective fund-raiser for deaf causes. A priest of the Milwaukee Archdiocese, he started as a teacher at St. John’s School for the Deaf, in St. Francis in 1950. He was promoted to run the school in 1963 even though students had disclosed to church officials in the 1950s that he was a predator.
Victims give similar accounts of Father Murphy’s pulling down their pants and touching them in his office, his car, his mother’s country house, on class excursions and fund-raising trips, and in their dormitory beds at night. Arthur Budzinski said he was first molested when he went to Father Murphy for confession when he was about twelve, in 1960.
“If he was a real mean guy, I would have stayed away,” said Mr. Budzinski, now 61, who worked for years as a journeyman printer. “But he was so friendly, and so nice and understanding. I knew he was wrong, but I couldn’t really believe it.”
Mr. Budzinski and a group of other deaf former students spent more than thirty years trying to raise the alarm, including passing out leaflets outside the Milwaukee cathedral. Mr. Budzinski’s friend Gary Smith said in an interview that Father Murphy molested him fifty or sixty times, starting at age twelve. By the time he graduated from high school at St. John’s, Mr. Smith said, “I was a very, very angry man.”
In 1993, with complaints about Father Murphy landing on his desk, Archbishop Weakland hired a social worker specializing in treating sexual offenders to evaluate him. After four days of interviews, the social worker said that Father Murphy had admitted his acts, had probably molested about 200 boys, and felt no remorse.
However, it was not until 1996 that Archbishop Weakland tried to have Father Murphy defrocked. The reason, he wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger, was to defuse the anger among the deaf and restore their trust in the church. He wrote that since he had become aware that “solicitation in the confessional might be part of the situation,” the case belonged at the doctrinal office.
With no response from Cardinal Ratzinger, Archbishop Weakland wrote a different Vatican office in March of 1997, saying the matter was urgent because a lawyer was preparing to sue, the case could become public and “true scandal in the future seems very possible”.
Recently some bishops have argued that the 1962 norms dictating secret disciplinary procedures have long fallen out of use. But it is clear from these documents that, in 1997, they were still in force. But the effort to dismiss Father Murphy came to a sudden halt after the priest appealed to Cardinal Ratzinger for leniency.
In an interview, Archbishop Weakland said that he recalled a final meeting at the Vatican in May 1998 in which he failed to persuade Cardinal Bertone and other doctrinal officials to grant a canonical trial to defrock Father Murphy. (In 2002, Archbishop Weakland resigned after it became public that he had an affair with a man and used church money to pay him a settlement.) Archbishop Weakland said this week in an interview, “The evidence was so complete, and so extensive that I thought he should be reduced to the lay state, and also that that would bring a certain amount of peace in the deaf community.”
Father Murphy died four months later at age 72 and was buried in his priestly vestments. Archbishop Weakland wrote a last letter to Cardinal Bertone explaining his regret that Father Murphy’s family had disobeyed the archbishop’s instructions that the funeral be small and private, and the coffin kept closed. “In spite of these difficulties,” Archbishop Weakland wrote, “we are still hoping we can avoid undue publicity that would be negative toward the church.”
Rico says that people should be burning Catholic churches in righteous anger over this shit...
Enough is enough, apparently
For the past three years, al-Shabab, one of Africa’s most fearsome militant Islamist groups, have been terrorizing the Somali public, chopping off hands, stoning people to death and banning television, music, and even bras in their quest to turn Somalia into a seventh-century-style Islamic state. At the same time, they have drawn increasingly close to al-Qaeda, deploying suicide bombers, attracting jihadists from around the world and prompting American concerns that they may be spreading into Kenya, Yemen, and beyond.Rico says it's nice of your opponents to dress in "trademark green jumpsuits and red-and-white checkered scarves"; makes it easier to know who to shoot...
But could Somalia finally be reaching a tipping point against al-Shabab?
Not only is Somalia’s transitional government gearing up for a major offensive against al-Shabab, with the American military providing intelligence and logistical support, but Mogadishu’s beleaguered population, sensing a change in the salt-sticky air, is beginning to turn against them.
Women who have been whipped and humiliated by morality police for not veiling their faces are now whispering valuable secrets about al-Shabab’s movements into the ears of government soldiers. Teenage students, outraged that al-Shabab-allied fighters hoisted a black flag in front of their school, recently pelted the fighters with stones. Defectors are leaving al-Shabab in droves, including one thirteen-year-old, who said that he was routinely drugged before being handed a machine gun and shoved into combat.
Since 1991, when Somalia’s central government collapsed, the people here have endured one violent struggle after another which has reduced the capital, Mogadishu, to ruins and this nation to the archetypal failed state. But never before has the Somali public had such a vested interest in who wins as they do in the coming showdown against al-Shabab. “They are like rabid dogs,” said Dahir Mohamed, a shopkeeper, who still has puffy, oddly circular scars on his face from where he says young al-Shabab fighters bit him.
al-Shabab has defied expectations in the past and proved resilient, determined, and formidable. Some Somalia analysts fear that, even if the government dislodges al-Shabab and ends their ability to operate in the open, they can still wreak havoc with suicide bombs and other guerrilla tactics. “They will pull out and leave people behind the lines,” said Mark Bowden, head of United Nations humanitarian operations in Somalia.
But if Somalis, who possess considerable firepower of their own, decisively turn against al-Shabab, and the government provides people with an alternative to rally behind, it could be difficult for the militants to reconstitute themselves, even as a guerrilla army.
The best example of that backlash is already happening in Medina, a neighborhood a few miles from the center of Mogadishu. Just past the airport, it is a place of sandy streets and once beautiful homes now chewed up by gunfire and mold. al-Shabab fighters, in their trademark green jumpsuits and red-and-white checkered scarves, used to control parts of Medina. But in the last year or so the neighborhood, dominated by a single clan, banded together to drive them out. Young men joined the local militia. Old men raised money for guns. Women and girls hauled ice, rice and milk to the front lines and braved gunfire to evacuate the casualties. “We hate al-Shabab,” said one mother, Amina Abdullahi Mohamed. “They misled our youth.”
Medina is now one of Mogadishu’s safest areas and, while still not particularly safe, an unmistakable beat of life has returned.
There has not been a suicide attack for months. The markets are packed, protected by baby-faced militiamen in polo shirts and Kalashnikov rifles over their shoulders. Beat-up old minibuses cruise the streets, and there is even something close to traffic. A tight clan network keeps a watchful eye and last month, a teacher of the Koran recruiting children for al-Shabab was promptly arrested.
Medina is a picture of Somalia’s past and possibly its looming future. Clan militias carved this country into fiefs in the 1990s, which lasted until 2006, when an Islamist alliance, which included al-Shabab, took over and held most of Somalia relatively peacefully. The Ethiopian military then invaded, sparking an intense guerrilla war, with al-Shabab spearheading the resistance.
But after the Ethiopians pulled out last year and Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, an Islamist cleric, was selected as the transitional government’s president, grass-roots support for al-Shabab began to fade. It has sunk ever since, though al-Shabab and their allies still control more than half of south central Somalia. But, if government troops retake areas in the offensive, they will need the help of clan militias like Medina’s to hold them. A similar arrangement is also in place in parts of central Somalia, where a moderate Islamist militia pushed out al-Shabab last year.
“I’m not saying Somalia’s going to be a modern state,” said one American official “But it won’t be a radical Islamic state either.”
al-Shabab seem to be rapidly ruining any chances of that. Defections, double-crossings and internal strife are increasingly plaguing their movement, according to many Somalis. A few weeks ago, Somali security officials said that an explosion rocked an al-Shabab hide-out, leaving dozens dead. Somali security services said it was one al-Shabab faction trying to wipe out another, evidence of a possible new rift between Somali al-Shabab and the several hundred foreign jihadists who had joined their movement.
al-Shabab also seem short of cash to support their estimated 3,000 hard-core fighters and 2,000 allied gunmen. They recently began taxing aid convoys, causing the United Nations World Food Program to leave several al-Shabab areas in January, but new recruits seem to be another problem. Defectors said al-Shabab have begun plucking children off soccer fields, taking them to secret training camps and brainwashing and drugging them.
al-Shabab seem to be traveling down the same degenerative path of countless other African rebel groups that began with a discernible ideology, but then turned to terrorizing the very people they were supposed to liberate. Public executions and gruesome amputations are ways they hold the population in check. Most Somalis are conservative Muslims, but they chafe under al-Shabab’s austere Salafi version of Islam.
One seventeen-year-old boy remembered the day last June when al-Shabab fighters chained him to a gurney and dragged him in front of a huge crowd. “Ismael Khalif Abdallah,” the fighters said, reading out the boy’s name, “is a thief. He has been robbing people. It’s time to punish him.” For the next ten minutes, the men sawed through Ismael’s wrist bones. Then they cut off his foot. Just recounting the pain and terror makes Ismael’s hairless face break out in sweat. “Now what?” he says, struggling to light a cigarette with his stub of an arm.
Only took 'em sixty-plus years...
Peter Baker and Ellen Barry have an article in The New York Times about the arms race:
The United States and Russia have broken a logjam in arms control negotiations and expect to sign a treaty next month to slash their nuclear arsenals to the lowest levels in half a century, officials in both nations said Wednesday. After months of deadlock and delay, the two sides have agreed to lower the limit on deployed strategic warheads by more than one-quarter and launchers by half, the officials said. The treaty will impose a new inspection regime to replace one that lapsed in December, but will not restrict American plans for missile defense based in Europe.
President Obama and President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia plan to talk Friday to complete the agreement, but officials said they were optimistic that the deal was nearly done. The two sides have begun preparing for a signing ceremony in Prague on 8 April, timing it to mark the anniversary of Mr. Obama’s speech in the Czech capital outlining his vision for eventually ridding the world of nuclear weapons.
The new treaty represents perhaps the most concrete foreign policy achievement for Mr. Obama since he took office fourteen months ago, and the most significant result of his effort to “reset” the troubled relationship with Russia. The administration wants to use it to build momentum for an international nuclear summit meeting in Washington just days after the signing ceremony and a more ambitious round of arms cuts later in his term.
“This gives a boost” to the administration’s efforts to build better ties to Russia, said Steven Pifer, a top State Department official under President George W. Bush who specialized in Russia and arms control issues. “There’s still a ways to go and there are still difficult issues. But the last six months, it seems to be going pretty well and this adds to the positive in the relationship.”
More broadly, the White House hopes the treaty will build on the president’s victory in the fight to overhaul health care, demonstrating progress on both the international and domestic fronts after months of frustration over unmet goals.
The new ten-year pact would replace the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty of 1991, or START, which expired in December, and further extend cuts negotiated in 2002 by Mr. Bush in the Treaty of Moscow. Under the new pact, according to people briefed on it in Washington and Moscow, within seven years each side would have to cut its deployed strategic warheads to 1,550 from the 2,200 now allowed. Each side would cut the total number of launchers to 800 from 1,600 now permitted. The number of nuclear-armed missiles and heavy bombers would be capped at 700 each.
Neither the White House nor the Kremlin formally announced the agreement on Wednesday, pending the final telephone call between the presidents. A Kremlin official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said there was an agreement on the text of the pact, although not all the wording had been given final approval. Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said, “We’re very close.”
Arms control proponents hailed the progress. Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, called it “the first truly post-cold-war nuclear arms reduction treaty.” Richard Burt, a former chief START negotiator who now heads a disarmament advocacy group called Global Zero, said that the two presidents “took a major step toward achieving their goal of global zero”.
The breakthrough ended nearly a year of tumultuous negotiations that dragged on far longer than anticipated. The two sides quarreled over verifying compliance, sharing telemetry and limiting missile defense programs. Mr. Obama restructured Mr. Bush’s plans for an antimissile shield in Europe, but Moscow objected to the new version as well and wanted restrictions. Mr. Obama refused. The two presidents cut through disagreements during a telephone call on 13 March.
The treaty will go for ratification to the legislatures in both countries, and the politics of Senate ratification could be tricky, coming at a polarized moment with a midterm election on the horizon. Republican senators have already expressed concern that Mr. Obama might make unacceptable concessions. Ratification in the Senate requires 67 votes, meaning Mr. Obama would need support from Republicans.
Senators Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Republican leaders, wrote Mr. Obama last week warning him that ratification “is highly unlikely” if the treaty contained any binding linkage between offensive weapons and missile defense, reminding him of his position “that missile defense is simply not on the table.”
Administration officials describing the draft treaty said its preamble recognized the relationship between offensive weapons and missile defense, but that the language was not binding. The treaty establishes a new regime of inspections, but the American monitoring team that was based at the Votkinsk missile production factory until START expired would not be allowed to return on a permanent basis.
Russian analysts said Moscow was happy to have reduced what it saw as the overly intrusive inspection regime mandated by START but disappointed not to have secured restrictions on missile defense. The military was pressuring the Kremlin not to agree to arms reductions without limits on the American missile shield, even though both Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama have described it as aimed at Iran, not Russia. In the end, the Kremlin overruled the military because it wanted a foreign policy achievement. “The military does not have the influence that it did during Soviet times,” said Anton V. Khlopkov, director of the Center for Energy and Security Studies in Moscow. “Back then, the military people, if they didn’t run, they were among those who led the arms control negotiations from the Soviet side. Now, they have less of a role.”
Vladimir Z. Dvorkin, a retired major general and arms control adviser, said Moscow would retain the ability to scrap the new treaty if American missile defenses became a threat. “If, for example, the U.S. unilaterally deploys considerable amounts of missile defense, then Russia has the right to withdraw from the agreement because the spirit of the preamble has been violated,” he said.
Mr. Obama met at the White House on Wednesday with Senators John Kerry of Massachusetts and Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, the senior Democrat and Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to brief them on the negotiations. Mr. Kerry later said he would hold hearings between Easter and Memorial Day on the history of arms control and promised action by year’s end. “I assured the president that we strongly support his efforts and that if the final negotiations and all that follows go smoothly, we will work to ensure that the Senate can act on the treaty this year,” Mr. Kerry said.
Gotta go some time
Steven Myers and Thom Shanker have an article in The New York Times about General Odierno and our departure from Iraq:
In the muddled aftermath of Iraq’s election, the American commander here, Genderal Ray Odierno, landed at Joint Security Station Loyalty on the edge of Baghdad and reviewed the plan to close it. An Iraqi police division has moved its headquarters to the base, once the fortified enclave of Americans alone. The outcome of Iraq’s election and the torturous effort to form a new government remained in doubt, but the withdrawal of American troops in this part of the country— “the thinning” of them, as the general put it— proceeded, seemingly irrevocably.
“How we redeploy, how we turn this over,” General Odierno told the officers who gathered to brief him in a room crowded with flat-panel television screens and wallpapered with maps, “will go a long way to determining how this turns out.”
“This” is the end of the war in Iraq, a conflict that General Odierno has shaped as much as any other American commander. From the 2003 invasion to the capture of Saddam Hussein, from the bloodiest days of sectarian carnage to the counteroffensive known as the Surge, he has served the administration that started the war and now the one whose president campaigned to end it.
As the senior American officer in Iraq since the fall of 2008, he has struggled against popular anger and apathy at home and fought internally for Iraq’s share of matériel increasingly flowing to Afghanistan. Ultimately, he is laboring to salvage the legacy of a deeply unpopular war. “People have to get past why we came here,” he said in an interview after his briefings, referring to the bitterly disputed reasons for invading Iraq seven years ago this month. “You have to stay away from that argument and understand we’re here,” he went on. “We have an opportunity. It could be better not only for the United States, but for overall stability in the Middle East. And we should take advantage of that.”
Results from an election considered crucial to Iraq’s democratic evolution suggest a potentially explosive split in power, but General Odierno said he would meet President Obama’s deadline to reduce the number of American troops in Iraq to 50,000, from 98,000 today, by the end of August. Among those expected to leave Iraq then is the general himself.
As the officer who must carry out Mr. Obama’s order to “responsibly withdraw from Iraq”, General Odierno plays a role that is changing over time: from a commander who ran military operations across the country to one who now must give way to local security forces, even as he exerts influence behind the scenes. In the months ahead, the general said, he anticipates that he will focus less on combat missions and more on trying to build Iraq’s still feeble security, political, and economic institutions. That, he said, will require a sustained effort extending beyond the troop withdrawal.
During a visit to Washington before the election, the general said he was advocating the establishment of an Office of Military Cooperation within the American Embassy in Baghdad to sustain the relationship after the 31 December 2011 deadline for withdrawing all American troops. He expressed doubts that the Iraqi government would request the presence of American ground forces after the deadline, although the bilateral treaty leaves open the possibility. “We have to stay committed to this past 2011,” he said. “I believe the administration knows that. I believe that they have to do that in order to see this through to the end. It’s important to recognize that just because US soldiers leave, Iraq is not finished.”
Or, as Colonel David M. Miller, commander of the 10th Mountain Division’s Second Brigade, told the general as he described plans to keep financing water and greenhouse projects on Baghdad’s outskirts even after his troops pulled back to a more remote base in the desert: “We’re not just cutting and running.”
General Odierno has now been in Iraq for 45 of the 84 months of the war, a period of his career that parallels the uneven narrative of the conflict, for better and worse. His tactics as commander of the Fourth Infantry Division in Salahuddin in the months after the invasion in 2003, which were criticized as overly aggressive, created a public impression of him as a heavy-handed, even brutish, leader. Thomas E. Ricks, the military writer who has waged what amounts to an argument of years with the commander, stridently criticized General Odierno’s first tour in Iraq for what he said were ogre-like tactics and bitingly called him “Shreko” in an online column last month.
Many people dispute such characterizations, portraying him as a skilled commander who helped devise and then carried out the counterinsurgency strategy that, with the increase in soldiers that President George W. Bush announced in January of 2007, helped stem the sectarian violence. The senior commander at the time, General David H. Petraeus, received most of the public attention, but officers and analysts say that General Odierno made the strategy a success.
“Petraeus fought the war ‘up,’ but Odierno fought it ‘down,’ since he was responsible for implementing the new counterinsurgency strategy, which he did very, very well,” said John A. Nagl, an Iraq veteran who now is president of the Center for a New American Security, a nonpartisan policy institute in Washington. He said General Odierno’s contributions remained “underappreciated.”
General Odierno navigated the transition from the Bush administration to the Obama administration far better than his counterpart in Afghanistan, General David D. McKiernan, who was forced into retirement in May of 2009 because President Obama and the Pentagon leadership felt he had not done enough to reverse the drift in a war long overshadowed by Iraq. The Obama administration’s focus on Afghanistan has created tensions behind the scenes as General Odierno has lobbied to keep as many troops and weapons as possible, while still reducing the force here to meet Mr. Obama’s planned withdrawal.
In secret video-teleconferences at the Pentagon, he has animatedly resisted the transfer of too many intelligence drone aircraft, essential for surveying the battlefield and defending American and Iraqi forces when necessary.
“His argument is: ‘I still have a job today. I still have this geography to cover. I have to manage the risk,’” a senior Department of Defense official said, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to discuss the classified strategy sessions. “He’s like a pit bull on a poodle. He’s just not going to let go.”
In two recent interviews, though, General Odierno acknowledged that he was preparing for a day when the Iraq campaign, and his role in it, ended. Asked if the war in Iraq was effectively over, he replied with some hesitation, then at length. “War is a very different concept,” he said. “This is a, I call it more of an operation, not a war. We won’t know if we were successful, as I said the other day, for three, five or even ten years. And successful will be what the government of Iraq does with what we’ve given them, and how we continue to support them and the relationship that we develop with them post-2011.”
By the time he leaves, he will have spent more than four years in Iraq, like tens of thousands of soldiers, at great personal cost. In 2004, his son, Lieutenant Anthony Odierno, lost an arm when a grenade slammed into his Humvee while he was on a patrol in Baghdad. Family members do not discuss it publicly, although the experience no doubt deepened their commitment to wounded soldiers. The general’s wife, Linda, put the family’s golden retriever, Tootsie, through a special program to be trained as a “therapy dog”, and they regularly visit troops at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
General Odierno’s remarks to soldiers at the base here suggested that each casualty affected him deeply. In a recent meeting with the Second Brigade’s commanders, General Odierno brought up an accident the day before that had killed two soldiers. Their armored vehicle rolled over, possibly as a result of reckless driving. “It’s a waste,” he told the officers. He later pinned Purple Hearts on two soldiers wounded when a rocket-propelled grenade struck their guard post. “Even when you are a general,” he told dozens of soldiers attending the medal ceremony, “this business is very personal.”
Sarah's show
Discovery Communications is expected to announce that it has won the Sarah Palin tourney. The cabler had been a front-runner to land the untitled Alaska-themed series, to be produced by Mark Burnett Productions, along with A&E. Earlier today, word emerged, however, that A&E was likely no longer in the running, leaving Discovery as the presumptive winner. Discovery execs were unavailable for comment all day, as many were in Chicago prepping for a mini-upfront presentation. Palin wasn't expected to make an appearance there, but she could be in attendance when Discovery conducts its official upfront in New York on 8 April.
The show is believed to have fetched more than $1 million an episode, a hefty pricetag for a freshman unscripted cable skein.
But this, of course, is not just your average unscripted cable skein. The controversial Palin is seen as a mega-draw, both among her rabid fans as well as curiosity seekers who might tune in to see how the former Alaska governor presents herself.
Sarah Palin's Alaska will center on interesting characters, traditions, and attractions in the 49th state, with the ex-VP candidate as a guide. Burnett and Palin pitched the show to all four major networks but, given the travelogue nature of the series, cable expressed more interest in the project.
Discovery ultimately made the most sense, as the channel's hit Deadliest Catch is also shot in Palin Country. And Palin also happened to make a brief appearance on Discovery's 2008 doc Toughest Race on Earth: Iditarod, shot before she became a household name.
Palin may have also been concerned over being lumped in with some of A&E's stars such as Gene Simmons or Dog the Bounty Hunter. On the flip side, as A&E focuses on interesting characters and their lives, a travelogue hosted by Palin might have been a strange fit. (The show probably would have also run on AETN's History and/or Lifetime, where it would have made more sense.)
At Discovery, it's still unclear whether the Palin show will pop up on multiple networks, including Oprah Winfrey's OWN. Winfrey, of course, recently conducted a much-talked-about chat with Palin on her daytime gabber.
More on flash mobs
It started innocently enough seven years ago as an act of performance art where people linked through social-networking Web sites and text messaging suddenly gathered on the streets for impromptu pillow fights in New York, group disco routines in London, and even a huge snowball fight in Washington.Rico says he finally got a good photo of the mob; see any white faces? Well, it is a predominantly black city, after all...
But these so-called flash mobs have taken a more aggressive and raucous turn here as hundreds of teenagers have been converging downtown for a ritual that is part bullying, part running of the bulls: sprinting down the block, the teenagers sometimes pause to brawl with one another, assault pedestrians or vandalize property.
On Wednesday, the police here said that they had had enough. They announced plans to step up enforcement of a curfew already on the books, and to tighten it if there is another incident. They added that they planned to hold parents legally responsible for their children’s actions. They are also considering making free transit passes for students invalid after 4 p.m., instead of 7 p.m., to limit teenagers’ ability to ride downtown.
“This is bad decision-making by a small group of young people who are doing silly but dangerous stuff,” Mayor Michael A. Nutter said in an interview Wednesday. “We intend to do something about it immediately.”
Flash mobs are not unique to Philadelphia, but they have been more frequent here than elsewhere. Others that resulted in arrests and injuries have been reported over the past year in Boston, South Orange, New Jersey, and Brooklyn.
Philadelphia officials added that they had also begun getting help from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to monitor social-media networks. And television and radio stations are helping to recruit hip-hop artists to make public service announcements imploring teenagers to end the practice.
In the past year, at least four of the flash mobs have broken out in the city, including one on Saturday in which roving teenagers broke into fights, several onlookers were injured, and at least three people were arrested.
“It was like a tsunami of kids,” said Seth Kaufman, 20, a pizza deliveryman at Olympia II Pizza & Restaurant on South Street. He lifted his shirt to show gashes along his back and arm. He also had bruises on his forehead he said were from kicks and punches he suffered while trying to keep a rowdy crowd from entering the shop, where a fight was already under way. “By the time you could hear them yelling, they were flooding the streets and the stores and the sidewalks,” Mr. Kaufman said.
The ad hoc gangs have scared many pedestrians off the streets. City residents are also starting to complain about the number of unsupervised children, and child advocates are asking if there are enough activities to keep young people busy after school. “We definitely need more jobs for kids, we need more summer jobs for kids, we need more after-school programming, and we need more parent support,” said Shelly Yanoff, executive director of Public Citizens for Children and Youth, a children’s advocacy group in Philadelphia. Ms. Yanoff added that libraries and after-school programs had been reduced and a program for youth offenders had been cut sharply. On Friday, officials said, two preteenagers assaulted a woman as part of a violent game called Catch and Wreck, in which children pick out people who appear homeless and then beat them and take any money they have.
The police, who say these assaults are unrelated to flash mobs, arrested an 11-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl in the attack. The police said they also planned to charge the boy in an attack on a 73-year-old man who was beaten and robbed in the same area on 13 March.
The flash mobs have raised questions about race and class. Most of the teenagers who have taken part in them are black and from poor neighborhoods. Most of the areas hit have been predominantly white business districts. In the flash mob on Saturday, groups of teenagers were chanting “black boys” and “burn the city”, bystanders said.
In a 16 February melee, 150 teenagers spilled out of the Gallery shopping mall east of City Hall during rush hour and rampaged through Macy’s, knocking down customers and damaging displays.
The police arrested fifteen of the teenagers and, according to one report, some had not been allowed to call their parents six hours after they were detained.
Clay Yeager, a juvenile justice consultant and former director of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention in Pennsylvania, said he believed the flash mobs were partly a result of a decline in state money for youth violence prevention programs. Financing for the programs has dropped 93 percent to $1.2 million in this year’s budget compared with $16 million in 2002. City financing for such programs has dropped to $1.9 million in the past three years compared with $4.1 million from 1999 through 2002, a 53 percent drop.
Mayor Nutter, who is black, rejected the notion that race or the city cut in services was a factor. “I don’t think people should be finding excuses for inappropriate behavior,” Mr. Nutter said. “There is no racial component to stupid behavior, and parents should not be looking to the government to provide entertainment for their children.”
Violent crime in Philadelphia has dropped 12 percent and homicides have fallen 23 percent since 2008.
Bill Wasik, a senior editor at Harper’s who is credited with introducing the notion of a flash mob in 2003, said he was surprised by the new focus of some of the gatherings. Mr. Wasik said the mobs started as a kind of playful social experiment meant to encourage spontaneity and big gatherings to temporarily take over commercial and public areas simply to show that they could. “It’s terrible that these Philly mobs have turned violent,” he said.
Will wonders never cease?
At the small liberal arts college in Goshen, Indiana, known for its pacifist Mennonite traditions, sporting events have never begun with the same pregame routine as almost everywhere else: cheering hoopla for the home team, complete with a ritual salute to the flag and the playing of the national anthem. Usually, the Goshen College Maple Leafs just huddle and head out to play.Rico says that one of his maternal grandmother's favorite phrases was Land O' Goshen; it's from the Bible, not the college...
But a baseball double-header on Tuesday broke with generations of tradition as the school made peace with The Star-Spangled Banner, playing it over the public-address system.
The players, standing alertly, turned their eyes to the flag, and most of the spectators cheered in the bleachers. Then, in another twist, the announcer said, “Let us pray.” Almost everyone joined in and recited the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi, beginning with the words, “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.”
Then they played ball.
The new pregame program is an effort to come to terms with reality: almost half the student population is non-Mennonite, and patriotic fervor is running high here in northern Indiana and across the country.
But, for many Mennonite students and other pacifists on campus, the change is a heart-wrenching disappointment, as they hold to the church’s traditional belief that the words to the anthem— Francis Scott Key’s paean to the Battle of Baltimore in the War of 1812— glorify war and exalt a kind of nationalism that they say has been so problematic throughout the world’s violent history. They say they want their only allegiance to be to God, not a flag.
As a compromise, the college administration chose an instrumental version of the anthem, thus omitting all mention of rockets and bombs bursting in air, though people may sing if they want. Even that was too much, some students said. About a dozen protesters among the one hundred or so spectators remained seated in the bleachers during the anthem. In keeping with pacifist habits, they did not yell or carry signs. “We want our silence to be the power,” said Josh Miller, 22, a junior from Harrisonburg, Virginia, who is a Mennonite. “It’s a challenging time to try to live Christ’s peace.”
In contrast, Taylor TenHarmsel, 20, and Sean Doering, 21, who are Christian but not Mennonites, painted “USA” in red, white, and blue across their bare chests along with stripes, and whooped it up at the end of the song. They said they were relieved to be able to show their spirit. “I respect some of the beliefs people have here, but I think the freedom of the flag is what allows us to be here,” Mr. TenHarmsel said. “People fought to give us the freedoms we have, and that should be respected.”
The plain-living Mennonites are Christians who descended from the same sixteenth-century Anabaptist group as the Amish, although they are typically more worldly, having evolved over the centuries into conservative and more progressive communities. Goshen College, with about 1,000 students, would fall into the increasingly liberal category, much to the chagrin of students like Mr. Miller. “What does it mean to be Mennonite in 21st-century America?” he said. “It’s about integrating and not recognizing the value of being a separate and unique church.”
But James E. Brenneman, the college president, said he could not disagree more, calling the decision “a whole new kind of peace movement”. “I am committed to retaining the best of what it means to be a Mennonite college, while opening the doors wider to all who share our core values,” he said.
Goshen’s board of directors and college administrators had debated the merits of this change in policy for years. There was precedent: Mennonite colleges in Kansas, Ohio, and other states played an instrumental version of the anthem. The Goshen News called the decision “a gesture worth embracing”.
Still, some wondered if the move, to be reviewed in a year, was not prompted more by pressure from outside groups and critics, particularly a conservative talk-radio host who singled Goshen out for ridicule three years ago, prompting a flurry of angry calls and email messages to the college. There was also the issue of a declining Mennonite student population and the need to recruit beyond members of the peace church.
Paul Hershberger, class of 1958, said he remembered a student body that was nearly homogeneous in religion makeup. He stood for the anthem on Tuesday, with his friend Stan King, class of 1961. “I feel okay about it,” Mr. King said. “At first I didn’t particularly like it, but then I listened to the other side. I feel there was not much lost.”
As for the Maple Leafs on the field, they lost their first game to the Sierra Heights Saints, but rebounded to win the second game. Joel King, a player, said, “We seemed a little nervous in the first two innings with the added distraction.”
Swooning over Steve
Rico says it turns out (no great surprise) that there's a blog about Apple called 9to5Mac, and Seth Weintraub has a post about the latest Steve Jobs emails:
Not content with answering tech questions from Americans, Steve Jobs this week answered a question from all the way over in Sweden. The question was a good one, and one we've had on our minds as well:
I'll keep it short. I'm Jezper from Sweden, a long time Apple fan, currently about to replace the very last computer at home with a brand spanking new iMac i7. I'm also awaiting the release of the iPad. However, I have one question:Jobs' answer?
Will the wifi-only version somehow support tethering thru my iPhone?
Two devices, based on the same OS, with already built-in technology to share one data plan, suggests a secondary contract could possibly be redundant.
From the look of your keynote, where the iPad sits well between my MacBook Pro and my iPhone, I was hoping the three of them could interact as seamlessly as possible.
All the best, Jezper Söderlund[a famous DJ in his own right]
No.
Sent from my iPhone
(We've got the header information to help prove that this one was legit. Oh, and yes, Jobs is still rocking that 3.1.2 iPhone.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
