Monday, May 18, 2009

Y! Alert: The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com

Yahoo! Alerts
My Alerts

The latest from The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com

Conan O'Brien's First "Tonight Show" Guests: Will Ferrell, Pearl Jam Top
LOS ANGELES — Will Ferrell and Pearl Jam will be part of Conan O'Brien's first "Tonight Show." Ferrell joined O'Brien in February for his final "Late Night" show in New York. Now the actor-comedian will help O'Brien kick off his tenure on "Tonight" in Los Angeles. Pearl Jam will be the first band on O'Brien's show, playing songs from an upcoming studio album, NBC said Monday. O'Brien takes over the late-night show on June 1, after Jay Leno wraps up his 17-year run as "Tonight" host on May 29. Leno is moving to a daily prime-time series for NBC in the fall. More on Will Ferrell
 
Mary Ellen Harte and John Harte: Hybridizing Newspapers with the Internet: a New Model Top
The rapid and messy evolution in communications is leaving many worried. People are dropping newspaper subscriptions and flocking to the Internet commons for their "free" news, not realizing that newspapers continue to pay for the production of news. This is resulting in bankruptcy for many, if not most newspapers. What to do? In her testimony at the recent Senate hearings on this subject, Arianna Huffington envisioned a "hybrid future" of nonprofit newspapers and online news services paid for by subscribing entities -- entities in the form of online news sites such as the HuffingtonPost, which already pays news services such as the Associated Press every time they post an article from a news service. In turn, the Huffington Post earns revenue through online advertising. But can this system ultimately generate enough revenue to adequately support all the news generating sources out there? Will the system provide an economically secure livelihood for talented investigative reporters, so that the trade continues to attract an adequate number of them? Meanwhile, "advertising has not moved online as [fast as] eyeballs have," as Ms. Huffington so aptly noted. Therein lies the crux. Until online advertising adequately finances the production of news, how are news services to survive? We propose the creation of a symbiotic relationship between newspapers on the one hand, and the Internet on the other. Here's how it would work. All newspapers online would be free only to those who are currently subscribed to at least one major, local newspaper. When subscribing to a newspaper, the newspaper could collect email addresses of all those belonging to a specific subscribing home address (not more than, say, 6 per address, to prevent fraud) and give all of them a specific password that allows them online access to all newspapers. Newspapers could quickly check a central online registry that verifies them as subscribers. When a subscribing customer clicks on a link to another newspaper's article or website, the newspaper will check the customer's eligibility and then email the customer a direct link. This might not fully protect against unfair sharing, but it will discourage perpetrators who would have to manually forward links from their addresses and risk breaking laws to do so. Newspapers worldwide could form and support an international organization that maintains the registry, and serve as a forum for maintaining reporting standards. By supporting the commons of the newspapers locally, subscribers would be rewarded with access to the global news commons online. Subscribers would receive a paper copy of their local newspaper to assuage advertisers worried about apathy toward internet advertisements. Those who cannot afford a subscription will avail themselves, as they always have, of library subscriptions, both in paper form and on library computers. A similar model can be created for magazines. In this way, all communities will be supporting the basic source of reporting -- the newspapers and news services. Drawbacks of this mechanism? Internetters will not be able to smoothly surf around for news. True, but it will be much cheaper and smoother than the alternative of paying every time you click open an article. Developing an international regulatory organization of newspapers will be no small task, and neither will the development and enforcement of anti-piracy laws. Yes, but if these are the costs of maintaining a global network of gathering and disseminating news, then the price is relatively cheap. More on Newspapers
 
Penelope Cruz Felled By Food Poisoning Top
CANNES, France — Penelope Cruz has had to miss an event at the Cannes Film Festival after suffering food poisoning. Weinstein Co. boss Harvey Weinstein broke the news to reporters Monday at an event to promote her forthcoming musical "Nine." Cruz had been due to appear, but Weinstein said she was ill with "some sort of food poisoning" and was seeing a doctor. Cruz stars in Pedro Almodovar's "Broken Embraces," which is due to have its Cannes premiere on Tuesday. "Nine" is directed by Rob Marshall and also stars Daniel Day-Lewis, Marion Cotillard and Nicole Kidman.
 
School Stimulus Spending Causing Controversy Top
Sunday, May 17, 2009 | A windfall of stimulus dollars might seem like a godsend for San Diego Unified schools right now. But the way that the school district is soliciting plans for the new funds has set off a whirlwind of controversy, even as schools rush to bid for up to $17 million a year. Parents charged with overseeing federal money complain that they were not included in the plans that were hastily drafted by schools last week. Teachers and their union say the superintendent has sidestepped them. The school district refused to share the draft plans with the media on Friday. And some of the brief plans hashed out by schools, obtained from other sources by voiceofsandiego.org, raise a barrage of new questions, from whether schools can mandate that teachers stay in one area to curb turnover to how lengthening the school year would work. Follow Stimulus Spending In Your State More on Stimulus Package
 
Roger Friedman, Fired Fox News Entertainment Columnist, Joins The Hollywood Reporter Top
Veteran entertainment reporter and columnist Roger Friedman is joining The Hollywood Reporter as a senior correspondent.
 
Video Cameras To Be Installed In California Trains To Prevent Accidents Top
LOS ANGELES - Video cameras will be installed in Metrolink train engines by September to improve safety and avoid crashes like the one that killed 25 people in Los Angeles last year. The Metrolink Board of Directors voted Friday to approve a $975,000 contract with Chicago-based Railhead Vision Systems to install video cameras. The move comes eight months after engineer Robert Sanchez was text messaging just before he ran a red light and sent his Metrolink train into an oncoming freight. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa says Metrolink will be the first commuter rail agency in the country to install video cameras that will record all engineer and other staff activity. The cameras will face ahead of the train and inside the cabs for forensic and investigative purposes. More on Moving America
 
Norb Vonnegut: Spaghetti a la Madoff Top
• 1 part promise and 12 percent earnings, year in, year out • 3 vats of baloney • plenty of pork • a yacht named "Bull," and other accouterments of great wealth a la marinara (Italian phrase meaning "sailor-style") • 4 or 5 cups of feeder funds • oodles of noodles, and • a dash of 950 percent returns Directions In a large broker-dealer, mix all ingredients and simmer for thirty years or so. Stir slowly, drink fine red wine, and deliver the tangled plate to Irving Picard when the recipe sours from a bad economy. Let him figure out who eats what. The sauce keeps getting thicker. The criminal investigation into the Madoff affair, according to The Wall Street Journal , now includes three high-profile investors: Picower, Chais, and Shapiro . All I can say: What a mess. Two of the three investors received outrageous returns: 300 percent in one year and 950 percent in another. It's hard to believe they didn't have some knowledge of Madoff's chicanery. One of the investors, however, wired $250 million to Madoff just ten days before the Ponzi scheme collapsed. Talk about bad timing. It's hard to believe he had prior knowledge about Madoff's confession on Thursday, December 11, 2008. And if the investor knew about the scam, as the Federal investigators suspect, what would he say about the $250 million loss: Oops? I'll exercise some self restraint here and say, "It's too early to judge the three investors." The facts need to play out. It's that $250 million wire that gets me. Why turn good money into bad? Plus, there's the whole clawback strategy. The trustee is on a mission to recover funds. He has his agenda, and we're watching a game of hardball between the courts and some extremely wealthy investors. A criminal investigation, it seems to me, will shake free plenty of capital. The trustee is already suing Picower for the return of $5.1 billion. There's nothing like the threat of a criminal investigation to scare investors. Here's the complaint for your reading pleasure . One billion in recovered assets and counting. www.acrimoney.com More on Financial Crisis
 
Chip Conley: What We Measure Matters Top
Can little Bhutan -- with its humanistic development philosophy -- create for a new global currency of well-being? For you skeptics who think innovation only occurs in the developed world, consider Bangladesh's Muhammad Yunus and his microlending approach to financing the aspirations of the poor. Yunus, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, has helped to revolutionize how the financial community and governments view the poor and the Grameen Bank's efforts have led to similar projects in more than 40 countries. Bangladesh, a country that's even poorer than Bhutan, has taught us that business can't sustainably thrive in societies that fail at the bottom of the pyramid. Simon Bolivar, the South American independence leader, said long ago, "The most perfect system of government is that which produces the greatest possible amount of happiness." Bhutan, through its Gross National Happiness (GNH) index, has tapped into that fundamental aspiration that unites us. The Bhutanese have redefined their objective of development and countries around the world are taking notice. In tandem with the growth of the positive psychology movement, there is a new paradigm arising in both global economics and psychology. Recognizing that modern man has been liberated by prosperity but not fulfilled by it, psychologists and economists are seeking new ways to measure the intangibles of public welfare. One wise man once wrote, "Happiness is designed to evaporate." So, how do you measure something that disappears? The U.N. Millennium Summit commissioned the largest international poll ever taken (by the Gallup organization) and found that people value good health and a happy family far more than they do material well-being. The Philippines have modified their approach to measuring subjective well-being such that each individual surveyed identifies which particular domains -- whether it's leisure time or compensation -- are most important to them and then the government is able to tabulate the overall subjective well-being for the country. Given that the U.S. is on the cusp of its 2010 census, wouldn't it be instructive for us to ask more meaningful questions than just the demographic and personal financial data of our citizens? As the CEO of hospitality company that surveys the well-being of our 3,500 employees twice a year, I've learned that asking revealing questions -- beyond the tangible of "are you getting paid enough?" -- helps us better understand how we can address our employees' higher needs. We have been able to create the conditions for our people to feel more engaged and inspired by asking, "Have you been recognized for what you do in the past month?" or "Do you feel that your work positively impacts our customers and how do you know this?" And, we've cut our employee turnover to one-quarter the industry average by rethinking what we're measuring. Our people will never aspire to more than a job if all they focus on is the fact that they clean toilets in a hotel. But when one sees the broader purpose of what they do, they start to realize their work can fulfill in ways they hadn't imagined. And, the positive result of being in a workplace full of happy fellow employees is noticeable to everyone who comes into contact with an organization. Harvard's Nicholas Christakis has shown that happiness -- like the fear and the flu -- can spread from person to person and even affects people peripherally like neighbors and relatives. What if we took Abraham Maslow's ideal of self-actualization and used it as an organizing principle beyond the individual? Most don't realize that in his latter years, Abe Maslow was focused on how to take this individual-focused theory and apply it more collectively to organizations. I've found that using his Hierarchy of Needs theory as a means of understanding the collective higher needs of my company brought me great insight. In essence, Bhutan is doing that as a country as they're focusing more on the intangible higher needs that a tangible metric like GDP misses. What the world needs now is an actualization index that measures something worthwhile, something that helps us move people up both the economic pyramid as well as Maslow's needs pyramid. The world's economic crisis is a symptom of a deeper malaise that threatens our collective well-being and survival, yet using the old measuring tools may not allow us to address the disease beyond its symptoms. Many of our dominant economic theories -- from Smith to Ricardo -- were espoused in the 19th century and were based upon the tangible scarcity in agricultural and industrial societies. While the world's tangible, precious natural resources are certainly scarce, some of our deprivation today is in the intangibles of the cultural, spiritual, and emotional realm. Some of the scarcity is "capability deprivation," those who have talents but lack access to opportunity or "time deprivation," a scarcity that's very familiar in modern society. How do economists evaluate the theory of scarcity when it comes to the intangibles that define the quality of modern life? We've been too pervasively susceptible to confusing ends and means and needs and wants. Is it possible that Gross Domestic Product should just be a subset of a Gross National Happiness index rather than the other way around? As we're exposing so many emperors with no clothes these days, can we now see that GDP is an artifact from a time when it was presumed that if there were more goods in circulation, general welfare would naturally follow? Paraphrasing Viktor Frankl, the world has been pushed by drives, but it is now pulled by meaning. The vast and intricate envy-producing machine called "consumerism" may have overpowered the other "isms" with a "c": communism and capitalism. But a good portion of the world has woken up to the insatiable and insane arms race that comes with "positional consumption," -- buying not to meet a need but to create a relative superiority. Gandhi said it best, "The world has enough to satisfy everyone's needs, but not enough to satisfy one's greed." It is time for the world to reconsider what we measure and how the very act of measurement impacts what matters. Chip Conley is the Founder and CEO of Joie de Vivre Hospitality and the author of PEAK: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo From Maslow. More on Happiness
 
Swat Valley Could Be Worst Refugee Crisis Since Rwanda, UN Warns Top
The human exodus from the war-torn Swat valley in northern Pakistan is turning into the world's most dramatic displacement crisis since the Rwandan genocide of 1994, the UN refugee agency warned. More on United Nations
 
Tom Morris: True Success in Times of Change Top
Is there wisdom for the way forward from where we are right now? How can we get from the mire of our current crises to the sort of sustainable future we all want? From the ancient Chinese and Greek philosophers, across cultures and through to the present day, the wisest people who have ever thought about positive achievement have left us bits and pieces of powerful advice for attaining true success in anything we do. I've put these ideas together into a simple framework of seven universal conditions. Let me lay them out briefly and we'll see what they mean. The 7 Cs of Success For the most deeply satisfying and sustainable forms of success, we need to bring into any challenge, opportunity, endeavor, or relationship: (1) A clear CONCEPTION of what we want, a vivid vision, a goal clearly imagined. (2) A strong CONFIDENCE that we can attain that goal. (3) A focused CONCENTRATION on what it takes to reach the goal. (4) A stubborn CONSISTENCY in pursuing our vision. (5) An emotional COMMITMENT to the importance of what we're doing. (6) A good CHARACTER to guide us and keep us on a proper course. (7) A CAPACITY TO ENJOY the process along the way. There are certainly other concepts often associated with success, but it's my belief that every other one is just a version or application of one of these in specific situations. The 7 Cs give us the most universal, logical, and comprehensive framework for success. We'll take just a moment to look at each. And we start with our need for a goal, or set of goals. (1) A clear CONCEPTION of what we want, a vivid vision, a goal clearly imagined. In any facet of our lives, we need to think through as clearly as possible what we want to accomplish, and what we'd like to see happen. True success starts with an inner vision, however incomplete it might be. The world as we find it is just the raw material for what we can make it. We are meant to be artists with our energies and our lives. And the only way to do that well is to structure our actions around clear goals. (2) A strong CONFIDENCE that we can attain the goal. Inner attitude is a key to outer results. Philosopher William James learned from an array of champions that a proper confidence should be operative in all our lives. In any new enterprise, we need upfront faith in what we're doing. Sometimes we may have to work hard to generate this attitude. But it's worth the work it takes, because it raises our prospects for success. The best confidence arises out of competence and then augments it. It's of course no guarantee of success. But it is among the chief contributors to it. ( 3) A focused CONCENTRATION on what it takes to reach the goal. Big dreams just lead to big disappointments when people don't learn how to chart their way forward. Success at anything challenging comes from planning your path and then putting that plan into action. Gestalt psychologists have taught us that a new mental focus generates new perceptual abilities. Concentrating your thought and energy in a new direction, toward a clear goal, you begin to see things that you might have missed before, and that relate to the goal you've set. This focus allows you to plan and then act, and adjust along the way. Even a flawed plan can start you off and lead you to where you can discover a better one. A focused concentration of thought and action is key. ( 4) A stubborn CONSISTENCY in pursuing our vision. The word 'consistency' comes from two Greek roots - a verb meaning "to stand" and a particle meaning "together." Consistency is all about standing together. Do my actions stand together with my words? Do my reactions and emotions stand together with my deepest beliefs and values? Do the people I work with stand together? This is what consistency is all about. It's a matter of unifying your energy and efforts in a single direction. Inconsistency defuses power. Consistency moves us toward our goals. (5) An emotional COMMITMENT to the importance of what we're doing. Passion is the core of extraordinary success. It's a key to overcoming difficulties, seizing opportunities, and getting other people excited about your projects. Too much goal setting in the modern world has been an exercise of the intellect but not also of the heart. Philosophers appreciate the role of rationality in human life. But we know that it's not just the head, but also the heart, that can guide us on to the tasks right for us, and keep us functioning at our peak. (6) A good CHARACTER to guide us and keep us on a proper course. Character inspires trust. And trust is necessary for people to work together well. Good character is required for great collaboration. In a world in which innovative partnerships and collaborative synergies are increasingly important, the moral foundation for working well together matters more than ever before. And good character does a lot more than just provide for trust. It has an effect on each individual's own freedom and insight. Bad character not only corrupts, it blinds. A person whose perspective has been deeply skewed by selfishness or mendacity cannot understand the world in as perceptive a way as someone whose sensibilities are ethically well formed. Good character makes sustainable success more likely. (7) A CAPACITY TO ENJOY the process along the way. The more you can enjoy the process of what you're doing, the better the results tend to be. It's easier to set creative goals. Confidence will come more naturally. Your concentration can seem effortless. Consistency will not be a battle. The emotional commitment will flow. And issues of character will not be as difficult to manage. A capacity to enjoy the process is intertwined with every other facilitator of success in a great many ways. These conditions of success are all intimately and deeply connected. They constitute a unified framework of tools with which we can work our way toward the most fulfilling forms of achievement in everything we do. They will help us to make our proper mark in the world. They will move us in the direction of sustainable and satisfying attainment. And as a philosopher, I have just one question: Why should we ever settle for anything less?
 
Josh Orton: Who's The Jack Murtha For Torture Investigations? Top
Originally posted at MyDD.com Sitting in the airport Friday afternoon, I couldn't believe what I saw on CNN: the entire narrative about torture had been yoked by Republicans - and re-directed at Nancy Pelosi. Frankly, it's probably the first big political success Republicans have had since January. Blatantly dishonest, but successful. But nearly lost is the notion that torture is illegal. And lost is the uncomfortable truth: the Bush administration tortured detainees for political cover after the Iraq invasion - no 'ticking time bomb,' no '24' impending attack. The Bush administration tortured because they wanted an Iraq-9/11 connection that didn't exist. But no one's talking about it, or what should be done. And with the White House "looking forward," the opportunity to enforce the rule of law is slipping away. Back in late 2005, opposition to the Iraq war was also floundering. The Senate easily defeated timetable measures . The only resolution with enough support to pass had weak language about how 2006 "should be a period of significant transition to full Iraqi sovereignty." It was Republican-written. Then, on November 17th 2005, Jack Murtha stepped forward . As a former Marine who originally voted for the war's authorization, Murtha's voice cut through the false Washington conventional wisdom that dissent about our sustained occupation came only from the far left. Who's the Jack Murtha for torture investigations? Whose call for a special prosecutor would get the political media's (and the White House's) attention?
 
Mark Blankenship: The hamsters in that Kia Soul commercial: Why are they funny? (VIDEO) Top
Who knew hamsters could be so cocky? Take a look at the thuggish, ruggish rodents in this ad for the Kia Soul: Seriously, this commercial cracks me up. That's partly because I have a thing for cute, anthropomorphic animals, but it's also because I love the absurdity of three hamsters getting gangsta in their Kia. I mean, the genius of :40-:42 alone... with H-Tweezy in the backseat, popping his head from side to side, tapping his paw to the dance beat while a light in the car door flashes in time. Not even RuPaul has this much self-confidence. Don't these hamsters realize they're hamsters? But that's just it, right? This commercial is funny because it's so disproportionate. Hamsters are little animals. We dominate them so completely that we build their worlds for them, shooing them through mazes of plastic tubes and then clapping when they run. Therefore, seeing a hamster behave like a bad-ass is so audacious that it's funny. You have to like a creature that refuses to acknowledge the lowly station we've given it... that instead envisions itself as the king of the hip-hop highway. That brazen, endearing confidence also extends to the hamsters' ride. Because really... a Kia? Is almost like the hamster of cars. Or at the very least, it's not the first thing you picture when someone says "pimpmobile." In this commercial, however, the Kia Soul is presented as the only vehicle in the world that doesn't breed rodent-in-a-wheel conformity. Those hamster wheels we see on the road could be Mercedes, BMWs, Audis, whatever. The point is, they're not Kias, so by this ad's standards, they're lame. Again, you have to admire a car company that refuses to accept the less-than-ferocious image the public imposes on it. That attitude is scrappy. It's cool. So let's say I'm a middle-class American who can't afford a luxury car, but I can afford a Kia Soul that starts at under $14,000. I may realize I'm not driving a champagne vehicle, but this ad encourages me not to care. This ad encourages me to raise my bottle of sparkling white grape juice out of my moonroof and wave it side to side like it's a damn magnum of Cristal. In other words, the ad encourages a perceptual shift in which "little guys" like hamsters, Kias, and the middle class embrace their ability to be awesome. There's a knowing joke in there---you can't take yourself that seriously if you're rolling in Lil' Hammy's whip---but that lightheartedness is just another badge of confidence. If you drive a Kia Soul, the commercial tells us, then you know yourself, love yourself, and get down with yourself. If consumers buy the message, then Kia's sales could explode. Middle class affordability could be hipper than ever. Too bad I don't need a car in New York City and that my building won't let me have pets. Otherwise, I would be hosting the hamster grand prix up in here, featuring some totally souped up Kia Souls. Word. More on Advertising
 
Carter Phipps: My Mind Is Like My Mother Top
I recently finished a ten-day meditation retreat, a deeply enriching experience and one full of all kinds of insights and breakthroughs. But of all the many things that struck me during those powerful days of silence and stillness, one in particular really hit home ... and left me privately chuckling behind my meditative mask. My mind is like my mother. Yes, it's true. But don't get me wrong; I'm not talking about Freud here. I don't mean that my mind is like my "superego," dictating shoulds and shouldn'ts like some disembodied parental authority in my head. No, I'm talking about something a little more mundane and yet more profound. What I mean is that the way my mind relates to the contents of my experience reminds me of the way that my mother relates to the contents of her life. Let me explain. When I was growing up, it was long into my adolescent years before I realized that my mother was an impressive lady. She was a smart, progressive, attractive woman, who loved life deeply and lived it fully. She was trained in the classics, Greek and Latin, taught college, raised five kids, and eventually became a clinical dietitian, pursuing a lifelong passion for understanding food and its impact on the body. And though she hid some of her talents behind a Midwestern veneer of Presbyterian plainness, I was always surprised at how deeply she seemed to understand people -- what made them tick. But it wasn't just that. At some point I remember realizing that my mother seemed to have a theory about everyone. She always had some story about why things were the way they were and more specifically, why people were the way they were. And let me tell you; her theories were deep, well thought out, and had psychological richness and spiritual context. They might touch on science or the latest research in all kinds of areas. And they often had a nutritional component as one casual factor. Were her stories always true? Well, let's just say they always had verve if not verity. Time and age has not diminished my mother's capacity for storytelling. Even today, if I want to know, for example, why my nephews seem to be having such a harrowing time adjusting to the rigors and demands of young adulthood, I could call my brother for an explanation. Being a wise and sympathetic father, he'll no doubt give me a few words about adolescent rebellion, or the painful process of learning how to individuate and live apart from the parents. You know, basic stuff. True? Maybe ... but absolutely boring. Now if I call my mother, it's a whole different story. She'll take me on a journey. She'll explain to me the psychologies involved, include several generations of family for context, use developmental psychology, spiritual seeking, brain development, cultural theory, integral philosophy, and she'll usually throw in a nutritional component -- maybe lack of vitamin D or some such. True? I don't know, but it's damn interesting. So what does all of this have to do with meditation? Well, at some point during the ten days of staring at the machinations of my mental processes, I realized: my mind is just like my mother. It has a story about everything. What do I mean? The miraculous thing about doing essentially nothing for days on end is that you begin to actually see through the spell that the mind casts over the self, and recognize that so much of what goes on in our mental world is truly meaningless. For example, over and over again, I watched as my mind took the exact psycho-emotional state that I was in at any given moment and projected it into the future. It was as if the possibilities that seemed to be real in that state of consciousness -- the hopes, fears, dreams, ideas, etc. that were connected to that particular emotional milieu -- would define my life from here to eternity. My mind would spin a story about the future based almost entirely on how I felt in the present. Sometimes it was an enlightened story, sometimes a mundane story, and sometimes a downright frightening story. But it was just that -- a story. And it lasted about as long as the corresponding emotional state lasted, which varied greatly, but was always, I can confidently say, of finite term. Of course, if somewhere we believe that the story has power over us, then we're trapped. Then there's no way out. And that's one place where real spiritual victories are won -- in the willingness to persevere and do the work of freeing oneself from the shackles of that hall of mirrors, where the stories may be amusing, terrifying, or liberating, but they are not real. Like my mother, the mind is a wonderful storyteller. And believe me, that capacity is an important thing. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. But the moment we assume it's all true, we are caught, trapped in Samsara, condemned to live inside stories not of our own choosing. "The mind is a berry patch," Andrew Cohen, my spiritual teacher, writes in his book Enlightenment Is a Secret . "Stop the habit of compulsively eating every berry that comes into your sight. Take the time and make the effort to see whether or not the berry that you happen to be staring at is sweet, rotten or sour. Never under any circumstances allow yourself to eat a sour or rotten berry. Eat only the sweet ones and have the sense to eat them only when you are hungry." It's timeless wisdom, the kind all mothers can definitely appreciate. Don't eat rotten berries! And remember, berries are not inherently bad. In fact, they're full of antioxidants. We should eat lots of them. At least that's the story my mother tells me. And that one, I believe! Read blog posts by other EnlightenNext magazine editors. To read a FREE digital edition of EnlightenNext magazine, click here. More on Spirituality
 
Senate Guru: MN-Sen: NormDollar.com Approaches $100,000 and Coleman Gets the Message Top
{ First, a cheap plug for my blog Senate Guru . } NormDollar.com , the effort to provide Republicans funding Norm Coleman's endless legal appeals with disincentive from continuing that funding, is about to reach the $100,000 threshold! For those unfamiliar with NormDollar.com , basically, anybody who wants to see Coleman finally admit defeat and allow Minnesota to once again have two U.S. Senators can pledge $1 for every day that Coleman prolongs his legal challenges. To show appreciation for helping progressives raise tens of thousands of dollars that will be used to defeat Republicans in 2010, representatives of the effort caught up with Coleman to personally thank him and to get his signature on the check representing the tens of thousands of dollars that Coleman's own obstinance has raised for progressives. You can help the effort cross the $100,000 mark by visiting NormDollar.com and chipping in. Just one dollar a day to make Norm Coleman go away! More on Al Franken
 
Test entry for poll slideshow Top
 
Tyra Banks: Why I Fired Paulina Porizkova Top
"The current state of the economy has forced shows to make major budget cuts industry wide," says America's Top Model executive producer Ken Mok, in a joint statement with Tyra Banks released Monday. "America's Next Top Model is not immune to these financially challenging times. We've had to make significant cuts in every area of the production and, unfortunately, Paulina was a casualty of these cuts."
 
Bob Dinneen: Time's Grunwald Grinds an Axe Against Biofuels Top
Let's say a journalist hears an exciting new idea propounded by a gifted phrase-maker who happens not to have a professional credential in the field. Let's say that journalist writes a one-sided cover story for his newsmagazine propounding his source's theory. And let's say that a year later he writes a story about public policies on the very issue where he's so heavily invested on one side of the debate. Unfortunately for American journalism -- and for the public debate about renewable fuels -- this isn't a hypothetical question. Just read Michael Grunwald's report, "Stress-Testing Biofuels: How the Game Was Rigged" . Grunwald claims that the Environmental Protection Agency's examination of the impact on global warming of corn ethanol and other biofuels was stacked in favor of these renewables. But his claim that there was a rigged "stress test" doesn't pass the smell test. As with his cover story last year, with the even-handed headline "The Clean Energy Scam" Grunwald's recent article relies on a theory propounded by a source whom he describes as "Princeton scholar Tim Searchinger." As Grunwald writes, the thesis that producing ethanol has "indirect effects on land use: when an acre of land is used to grow fuel instead of food, an extra acre somewhere else is probably going to be converted into farmland to grow food." Moreover, he continues, "that acre may well be an acre of wetland or forest that would otherwise store loads of carbon." While he is indeed housed at Princeton University, Searchinger is an attorney by training, not a scientist, an economist, or an agronomist. So his assessment of the likelihood that the increased production of biofuels in the United States will require the despoiling of forests and wetlands which will deposit carbon in the atmosphere and promote global warming is as worthy of respectful attention as the views of any other attorney with a interest in economics, agriculture, and the environment. As it happens, more than 100 actual scientists and researchers questioned the "indirect land-use change" theory in a letter to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is also addressing this issue. Rejecting the theory that increased ethanol production automatically results in the loss of an equivalent acreage of forests and wetlands, these scientists note that "most primary forest deforestation is currently occurring in places like Brazil, Indonesia and Russia as a direct result of logging, cattle ranching and subsistence farming." In other words, when forests are destroyed in other countries, the causes are immediate and local, not a chain reaction resulting from the production of renewable fuels here in the United States. In addition to this important point, other objections can be raised to the "indirect land-use change" theory: It is based on a supposed model for events that have not yet occurred and, therefore, cannot be modeled -- what would happen if there is a dramatic increase in the production of grin-based biofuels, as well as "cellulosic" biofuels from non-food sources, such as wood chips, grasses, agricultural waste, and even garbage. It ignores the increasing productivity of agriculture, not only in the U.S. but also throughout the world. For instance, it would have taken twice as much land in 1967 as it took in 2007 to harvest the same amount of corn. It omits the fact that some sources of cellulosic biofuels -- for instance, switchgrass -- grow in soil that cannot be used as farmland and still other sources -- such as garbage -- need not be grown at all. And it also overlooks the reality that ethanol production creates agricultural co-products. In fact, one-third of every bushel of grain entering an ethanol biorefinery is returned to the livestock feed market as cattle feed. In fact, Grunwald got it wrong. Far from being "rigged" in favor of biofuels, EPA's examination was rigged against biofuels. While exploring a hypothesis about a hypothetical situation involving biofuels, the examination did not emphasize what is actually known -- the comparative carbon footprints of biofuels and petroleum-based fuels. Compared to gasoline, cornstarch ethanol reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 48-59 percent, and cellulose-based ethanol does even better. Indeed, the EPA examination -- and Grunwald's journalism and Searchinger's thesis even more so -- ignore the actual alternative to biofuels: petroleum products. By exploring the "indirect land-use change" that may be caused by producing biofuels but not the comparable consequences of any other industry, including producing and using petroleum products, these stories and studies offer little illumination for the debates that must be held and the decisions that must be made. More on Green Energy
 
Jon Gruden Joining "Monday Night Football" Top
BRISTOL, Conn. — Former Tampa Bay coach Jon Gruden is replacing Tony Kornheiser on ESPN's Monday Night Football broadcast team. Kornheiser cited a fear of flying in his decision to leave after three years. The network said Monday that Gruden will be in the booth with Mike Tirico and Ron Jaworski when the show starts its 40th season this fall. "If I could handpick a replacement of a football guy, I would cast a net and drag in Jon Gruden," Kornheiser said in a statement released by the network. "He is the two things you most want _ smart and funny _ and has the two things I don't _ good hair and a tan." Gruden led the Bucs to the 2003 Super Bowl title but was fired after this past season after his team lost four straight games to miss the playoffs. He worked as a guest analyst this year with the NFL Network during the draft and scouting combine. "To join Mike and Jaws in the booth and to work alongside this top-notch team is going to be a real thrill," Gruden said. Gruden will make his debut with ESPN with a preseason game on Aug. 13, a Super Bowl rematch between the Arizona Cardinals and Pittsburgh Steelers. Kornheiser will continue to appear on ESPN's "Pardon the Interruption," and is relieved it doesn't require air travel. "My fear of planes is legendary and sadly true," he said. "When I looked at the upcoming schedule it was the perfect storm that would've frequently moved me from the bus to the air." Gruden was an NFL head coach the past 11 seasons, with the Buccaneers (2002-08) and Oakland Raiders (1998-01). He had a 100-85 record, leading his teams to five division titles. His best season came in 2002, when the Buccaneers went 12-4 and then beat the Raiders 48-21 in the Super Bowl. Gruden was 38 at the time and the youngest coach to win a Super Bowl. Gruden began his NFL coaching career in 1990 when San Francisco 49ers offensive coordinator Mike Holmgren hired him as an assistant. When Holmgren was hired to coach the Packers in 1992, Gruden became his wide receivers coach. After three seasons, Gruden went to the Eagles as an offensive coordinator, and in 1998 became coach of the Raiders at 34.
 
Sandy Goodman: Stop the Presses: Cheney's Re-emergence Is Finally Explained! Top
I think I have the answer to why Dick Cheney has emerged from all those undisclosed locations he used to hide in as vice president to loudly defend his lawbreaking, precedent-setting promotion of torture: the former vice president is simply nuts. The attacks of September 11, 2001 just did him in, mentally. And he's never been the same since. I came to this view after reading a book review by Jeffrey Record, a professor of strategy at the Air War College. Professor Record reviewed "The Dark Side," Jane Mayer's book on the Bush Administration's torture policy, of which Cheney was the chief proponent. Tom Ricks's blogsite tipped me off to Record's review . Read this excerpt: What made Cheney's influence so perfidious was the combination of his profound panic over the 9/11 attacks (and the mysterious anthrax "attacks" in the following month) and his absolutist view of presidential prerogatives. The attacks apparently unnerved Cheney to the point of his imagining Saddam Hussein to be undeterrable, an al Qaeda collaborator, and brimming with weapons of mass destruction. "I don't know him anymore," said Brent Scowcroft, former National Security Adviser to George H.W. Bush. According to Lawrence Wilkerson, [Secretary of State] Powell's chief of staff, "Cheney was traumatized by 9/11. The poor guy became paranoid." Having underestimated the al Qaeda threat before 9/11, Cheney overcompensated; in the weeks following the attack he travelled with a doctor as well as a duffel bag containing a gas mask and a biochemical survival suit. It's not clear to me how much of the above information Prof. Record got from Mayer's book, and how much from other sources. Nor does he suggest, as I do, that Cheney's post-9/11 paranoia apparently became a permanent part of his personality - a kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome. Added to his panic over the attacks was doubtless his guilty conscience, stemming from his failure to prevent them. After all, Cheney had ignored a briefing by White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke in February 2001 on a plan to deal with al Qaeda. And, although ordered by President Bush three months later to chair a terrorism task force, the vice president had failed even to call a meeting before 9/11. Cheney's promotion of torture--and his rabid public defense of it since leaving office-- seem to me like a continuation of the post-9/11 "overcompensation" Prof. Record writes about. This past week you would think the principal promoter of torture was not Cheney, nor Bush, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The media have leapt upon what it sees as significant changes in her story of what and when she learned about waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation techniques;" as if the then-Democratic minority leader could have done anything about them if, indeed, she knew all about them, which clearly, she didn't. In defending herself, Pelosi accused the CIA of lying, a charge that's been greeted with a combination of horror and incredulity by journalists of almost all stripes. Who, they collectively ask, could ever accuse the CIA of lying? Who indeed? Almost anybody, it seems to me. The new CIA director, Leon Panetta, made what I thought was a half-hearted attempt to defend his agency against Pelosi's charge of deception. "It is not our policy or practice to mislead Congress," he said, citing notes on briefings the CIA had conducted for Pelosi and others in 2002 that indicated "that CIA officers briefed truthfully..." But he left the door wide open for the opposite view, by adding that Congress would have to determine for itself whose memory was most accurate. As for the public, a new poll shows as many people believe Pelosi as believe the CIA. That's strong evidence that in this contest, the CIA starts out with credibility problems. Furthermore, its records show that former Democratic Senator Bob Graham of Florida, then chairman of the Intelligence Committee, was briefed on waterboarding in 2002. But Graham, who has a reputation for integrity and is a stickler for details, says he wasn't. And he says his personal journal shows that he did not attend three briefings the agency said he did. In recent years, the agency's credibility has often proved anything but good. After all, it was former CIA chief, George Tenet, who told President Bush it was a "slam dunk" that Saddam had those non-existent weapons of mass destruction, even though the intelligence community was divided on that question. The same CIA director supplied most of the material for Secretary Powell's disastrous U.N. speech the month before Bush's 2003 invasion of Iraq. Virtually everything Powell said in that speech (made with Tenet sitting just behind him) turned out to be untrue. The CIA lied to a federal judge and the 9/11 Commission in 2003 and 2005 when it said it did not have video recordings of the interrogations of two al Qaeda operatives in its custody. In fact, the agency destroyed those tapes after the judge and the commission asked to see them. And in December 2007, a former CIA operative, John Kiriakou, told ABC News and later other media that al Qaeda member Abu Zubayah had begun to cooperate after being waterboarded "for probably 30, 35 seconds." This was widely reported as an example of the effectiveness of that brand of torture, which Kiriakou told ABC had disrupted "maybe dozens of attacks." But a Justice Department memo declassified last month said Zubayah had been waterboarded "at least 83 times," hardly an indication of instant, or indeed, much if any efficacy. It also turned out that Kiriakou was not even present when Zubayah was waterboarded in a secret prison in Thailand. He had only read about the treatment at CIA headquarters in Virginia. The CIA insisted it had not instigated or encouraged Kiriakou's remarks, and had even considered legal action against him for divulging classified information. I am tempted to repeat the old cliche that if you believe any of that, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you. If the agency ever told him to shut up or else, its warnings were not very effective, since after ABC he gave interviews to the Washington Post, the New York Times, NPR, CBS, NBC, CNN and MSNBC, among others. If the agency really tried and failed to shut Kiriakou up, it would be very unusual, since CIA censorship of other former employes, including former director Tenet himself, Michael Scheuer and Valerie Plame, has been very effective. All complained that the agency unjustifiably cut out parts of their books. Plame even said the CIA forced her to leave out matters that were part of the public record, such as the fact that she was employed by the agency from Nov. 9, 1985, to Jan. 9, 2006, a fact that appeared in the Congressional Record. I could go on and on. But you get the point. At times, the CIA's credibility is not much better than crazy Dick Cheney's. More on Harsh Interrogations
 
Michael Roth: Access to Degrees -- Not Just Honorary Degrees Top
This is the celebratory season for colleges and universities. President Obama has just collected an honorary degree from Notre Dame, where a small band of protesters received more media attention than the thousands who listened respectfully to his careful, nuanced speech. Michelle Obama graced a freshly installed stage at the spanking new University of California at Merced, giving that Central Valley school recognition for its efforts as well as its potential. The Obamas' regard for quality higher education is crystal clear. For the families of both the president and the first lady, access to a strong undergraduate and professional education was a sign of and ticket for cultural and economic success. I am a little older than our first couple, but when I started college my parents also viewed it as a key sign of their own economic achievements and a boost to whatever their son's aspirations turned out to be. My father was a furrier in New York, as was his father. The only thing my dad knew for certain about my future was that it shouldn't include being a furrier. Education at a very selective school (I went to Wesleyan University and then Princeton) would help ensure that. The connection between higher education and social mobility was strengthened in this country after WWII. Expanding access to a college diploma was a national priority. As Andrew Delbanco recently wrote in the New York Review of Books , in the age cohort from 55-64, we lead the world in the percentage of the population with a college degree. But overall, we are now tied for tenth, and this is because younger groups have found it increasingly difficult to afford a four or even a two-year degree. In recent years Federal help has been paying a smaller and smaller percentage of college costs. Delbanco reports that in 1976 Pell Grants paid for 72 percent of costs, while by 2003 they made up only 38 percent. Recent legislation may improve things, but financial barriers have increasingly kept young people from pursuing a degree after high school. Thus even before this economic crisis, higher education, once an important dimension of the dream of social mobility, was increasingly becoming a powerful instrument for reproducing social and economic privilege. The Great Recession in which we find ourselves is making matters worse. Some of the highly selective colleges and universities remain "need blind," meaning that they accept students regardless of the applicant's ability to pay tuition and fees. But few institutions can afford to make this promise. At Wesleyan, where I now work, in order to remain need blind we have had to make cuts in many other administrative functions to compensate for the loss of endowment revenue due to the economic downtown. At public universities student fees have skyrocketed as states reduce their support for higher education even as private donations have become more difficult to come by. Some need blind schools have sought to counteract these trends by actively recruiting students who might not find their own paths to our institutions. Wesleyan recently joined some other selective schools in working with Questbridge, an organization that matches highly qualified low-income students with appropriate universities. These students often receive full scholarships at institutions to which they might not have dared to apply given the high "sticker price" of more than $50k in tuition and fees. But given the economic downturn, not many schools today can afford to pay an organization to find students to whom they can then offer substantial scholarships. Most schools are trying to figure out how they can meet their ongoing financial aid obligations, or how they can fill the seats available with tuition paying students. The best American universities and liberal arts colleges continue to produce specialized research and an approach to general education that inspire admiration (and imitation) around the world. But our system for financing higher education needs to be bolstered, and our commitment to offering an opportunity for continued education to qualified high school graduates re-affirmed. Growth in the American economy, and vitality in American culture, depend on knowledge and innovation -- not just on products and services. Unless access to higher education is improved, that growth and vitality are at risk. I am delighted to see President and Mrs. Obama visit universities and celebrate their graduates. I long to see them inspire legislation that improves access to and the sustainability of institutions like those that have honored them this week.
 
Carla Bruni Attacks Pope Over Condoms Stance Top
France's First Lady said that the Church's teachings had left her feeling "profoundly secular". More on France
 
Bill Chameides: Indiana Governor: Cap and Trade Unfair to Hoosiers. Really? Top
In Friday's Wall Street Journal Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels says "no thanks" to the American Clean Energy and Security Act , the climate bill proposed by Representatives Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Edward Markey (D-MA). Why? Apparently, it's a stand against "imperialism." Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels's Harley-Davidson makes a lot of noise. The governor's making some noise, too, about his dislike of the Waxman-Markey climate bill. But is there anything to his beef? Indiana, the governor suggests, gets no respect. Its "share of national income has been slipping," claims Daniels, even as his state is doing more than its fair share to make America lean and green: "rocket[ing] from nowhere to national leadership in biofuels production," becoming "the No. 1 state in the growth of wind power in 2008," and "embark[ing] on an aggressive energy-conservation program." Now along comes this cap-and-trade bill -- which for Daniels is "imperialism." A plot to "exploit politically weaker colonies," hatched by those evil, "wealthy" blue states -- California, Massachusetts, and New York. We'll call them The Imperialistic 3 . Really? Is Indiana a mere "colony"? And are those rich states strong-arming Indiana with climate change legislation? Or is the good governor exploiting a falsely populist, "us versus them" pose to advance an unstated political agenda? Is Indiana a 'Politically Weaker Colony'? When I think of persecuted "colonies" I think of the battle cry "no taxation without representation." So let's check out Indiana's national delegation. Indiana's per capita Congressional representation is essentially the same as every other state: about 1.5 per million. Like every state in the union Indiana gets two senators. On a per capita basis, that gives Indiana a lot more sway in the Senate than The Imperialistic 3. And when it comes to electing the president, Indiana's per capita electoral college votes exceed those of California, Massachusetts, and New York. So, if Indiana is the colony and The Imperialistic 3 are the imperialists, why does Indiana get more representation? Whose Social Programs? The governor predicts that the proceeds from a cap and trade "will be spent on their [ read The Imperialistic 3's ] social programs while negatively impacting our [ meaning Indiana's ] economy." The subtext to Daniels's argument is that federally funded social programs unfairly benefit The Imperialistic 3's citizens to the detriment of folks from states like Indiana. That is simply not true. The reality is that Indiana receives about $1.07 for each dollar it sends to Washington. The Imperialistic 3? For the same buck, they each receive between $0.80 and $0.85. So it is true: federal largesse does transfer wealth. But the direction of the flow is the opposite of what the governor would have you believe. Dollars flow from The Imperialistic 3 to states like Indiana, not the other way around. So Daniels's argument about cap-and-trade dollars going to social programs that would harm Indiana's economy is specious. What Social Programs? But there's another problem with the governor's arguments. Not all dollars from the Waxman-Markey cap and trade will go to "social programs." During the first two decades the bill directs most allowance dollars toward local power companies and carbon-intensive industries in part to limit the costs of carbon-intensive electricity to consumers in states like Indiana. But even the dollars collected by the federal government from auctioning emissions allowances (initially some 15 percent of the allowances' total value) will not necessarily go to the "social programs" that Daniels opposes. In fact, the Waxman-Markey bill aims to send the dollars collected from allowance auctions to low- and moderate-income families to offset the increased energy costs. (See Waxman and Markey's Proposed Allowance Allocation [pdf] .) Outrageous Increases in Hoosiers' Electricity Bills? But what about the cost of living? One great thing about Indiana, Daniels maintains, is its low cost of living, something The Imperialistic 3 wants to change with a cap and trade that would "more than double electricity bills in Indiana." Wow. That would hurt. But I have to tell you I was surprised to read "more than double," because, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, the discussion draft of the Waxman-Markey bill would mean at most a 15 percent increase in household non-gasoline energy expenditures by 2050, with a total average, yearly household cost of less than $150. (See EPA's analysis [pdf] .) So where did Daniels crunch his numbers from? As best as I can tell, from a study [pdf] assessing the economic impact of the Lieberman-Warner climate bill considered by the Senate in 2008. That assessment of that old bill, by the American Council for Capital Formation (ACCF) and the National Association of Manufacturers (NMA), does project a large increase in electricity costs for Hoosiers. But why would their cost projections be so much larger than EPA's? To find out, we have to dig just a little deeper. It turns out that the ACCF/NMA analysis projects a carbon price between $227 and $271 per ton of carbon dioxide. The current price for emission allowances under the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (America's first mandatory, market-based effort among 10 states to reduce greenhouse gas emissions) is under $4 per ton, and EPA projects costs of about $20 per ton under Waxman-Markey in 2020. So, yeah, force the price of carbon above $200/ton and cap-and-trade costs will skyrocket. But are such high cost projections realistic? I don't think so. It's simple economics. For example, consider coal versus wind power. It's estimated that wind power becomes cheaper than coal at a price point of about $25 per ton. Low-carbon coal power using carbon capture and storage (CCS) becomes economically viable at a cost of about $40 per ton. If carbon prices rise above these price points, the energy system will naturally migrate to the cheaper options and moderate costs. Moreover, the Waxman-Markey bill seeks to limit price spikes by slowly lowering the emissions cap over a number of decades to gradually transition to low-carbon alternatives and by including a variety of cost-containment measures. There's another point to keep in mind. Projections of consumer costs are just that -- projections. Over the past few decades, the actual costs of implementing just about every air-quality regulation on the books have turned out to be significantly less than the projected costs, proving American companies and entrepreneurs far more innovative than the prognosticators gave them credit for. Why should this not be the case with the proposed cap and trade? What About China? Daniels argues that Waxman-Markey is also a recipe for sending Indiana's industries to China while insignificantly cutting global temperatures. It's true that the bill, by itself, is inadequate to address the entire climate change issue. Global participation, including China's, will be required to tackle the problem in toto. But Daniels would stall U.S. action until China acts, which is a convenient recipe for inaction since China won't act until we do. What Daniels fails to point out is the bill's built-in protection against outsourcing: its carbon tariff gives the president power to protect American industries from "low-carbon dumping." Given China's economic dependence on American dollars, imposing a carbon tariff on Chinese products could even have the effect of forcing China to adopt a carbon cap of its own. Why, Governor Daniels? I don't know Governor Daniels, but I suspect he's an intelligent person. A crusade against imperialism in defense of Indiana is not the real reason the governor is against the Waxman-Markey bill. What do you suppose is? Dr. Bill Chameides is the dean of Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He blogs regularly at theGreenGrok.com . More on Climate Change
 
Bradley Burston: Obama, Netanyahu, Two States for Spoiled Brats Top
Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to the Obama White House, the first such meeting since both men came to power, has been widely billed as a key indicator of the Obama administration's intentions in the realm of Mideast policy. "What may be Israel's most intransigent government ever elected," The Economist suggested this week, "is scared stiff that an American administration may squeeze it until its pips squeak." Fevered conjecture over the talks has tended to center on whether and how the prime minister will say aloud five of the world's most anemic magic words: two states for two peoples. At the same time, even some of Netanyahu's more acerbic critics freely if ruefully concede that any Obama drive for a two-state solution has been sandbagged by the inability of the Palestinians to coalesce politically for the sake of that second state. "The snag," continues The Economist in an editorial, "is that the two halves of the Palestinian movement are at daggers' drawn and have fluffed repeated opportunities to reconcile." There is a lesson here for both sides, and it goes beyond what Barack Obama has in mind for them: Over the years, Washington and the world have coddled both Israel and the Palestinians, whose behavior has come to resemble that of spoiled children. Are they not deserving of sympathy? Of course they are. Never since the events of 1948 has the region seen a decade of such consistent violence, an extraordinarily high ratio of civilian casualties, and a universality of despair, as in the Second Intifada (2000-2004), the Second Lebanon War (2006) and the Gaza War (2008-9). As with parents who become more and more indulgent the more clueless they realize they actually are -- and the more out of control their kids get -- Washington and the world have allowed Israel and the Palestinians to run off the rails in whatever direction they happen to see fit at the moment. Why? For the same reason that bad parents spoil their children: They're afraid of them. For generations, both Israelis and Palestinians have been snowing their respective allies, who have been afraid, either electorally or physically, of being perceived as not loving them enough. In the case of Israel, the White House has stood often on the sidelines, politically neutralized, as the Jewish state undertook initiatives, in particular, settlement construction, which have proven painfully costly, morally dubious, and otherwise harmful -- first of all, to Israel itself. As the peace process unraveled in the late 1990s and then-prime minister Netanyahu burned through political capital in visits to Washington, senior Clinton administration Mideast official Aaron David Miller famously recalled that "all of us saw Bibi as a kind of speed bump that would have to be negotiated along the way until a new Israeli prime minister came along who was more serious about peace." In Palestine's case that has yet to arise -- global donors who lavished hundreds of millions of dollars and euros in aid failed to require that the funds be spend on the needs of the needy, and the phantasmagoria of corruption that ensued led directly to the rise of Hamas, the crippling of Fatah, and the collapse of the peace process. As in the case with spoiled children, as Israel and the Palestinians received more and more attention, they focused more completely on themselves, cataloguing, memorizing, publicizing and, frequently, exaggerating, every real and imagined injury, dismissing and ignoring damage and injustice done to the other. Like spoiled children, hardliners on each sides spin a narrative in which the other side "started it," and bears sole responsibility for the entirety of the fighting which no one seems capable of stopping. Like brats, they have no room for another narrative, for someone else's distress, to feel remorse or extend sincere apologies to address wrongs they themselves have committed. Like spoiled children, they have been treated all too often with excesses of sympathy and compensatory, largely unappreciated gifts, rather than the respect and honesty that would better have served them. Like spoiled children, the hardliners demand to be allowed to continue whatever destructive behavior they choose, for the sake of fairness. This behavior, in turn, engenders revulsion on the part of the neighbors (Israeli or Palestinian) who thus become favorably disposed -- or, at least, complicit -- when harsh punishments are heard being meted out in the neighboring household (air strikes, crippling aid embargos, rocket attacks). The result, for Israel, has been an unaddressed clash with its own future, as the number of Arabs living in Israel and the West Bank continues to rise, and Gaza continues to seethe, with no solution remotely in sight. The consequence, for Palestinians, has been the self-immolation of their movement for independent statehood, and, in blaming the occupation for all ills, an acquired, abject incapability to alter for the better a tragic present. Small wonder, then, that this remains the most infuriating peace process in the world. For the present, you don't have far to look to see why the Obama administration may, in the end, decide instead to devote its energies to more promising pursuits. Read the rest of the post here . More on Barack Obama
 
Art Brodsky: Oh, the Hypocrisy. First Amendment Attorneys Would Destroy the Internet to Save Newspapers Top
It's hard to imagine an American industry as privileged and protected as the newspaper. Right there in the First Amendment to the Constitution, are the words: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..." No other industry is mentioned in the Constitution. The rights of journalists, working in print or electronic media, have been protected down through the years. While ordinary citizens might be liable to be sued for libel, the U.S. Supreme Court in 1964 set a higher standard in Times v. Sullivan so that a newspaper could be sued only if it could be proved the paper knew ahead of time that what it was printing was false. In any other industry, the concept of competitors combining operations might be anathema to rigorous antitrust law (admittedly a stale concept after the past eight years). However, newspapers in the same city were able to execute Joint Operating Agreements (JOA) under the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970. Ironically, the law was passed to protect failing newspapers in an era before the Internet was invented. In many cities, the JOA's, which allowed combinations of non-news operations like administration, ad sales and printing, still didn't work as newspapers continued to fold. Newspapers from Alaska to Virginia (many owned by the E.W. Scripps Co.) folded - without the help of Google and the Internets. In those days, the culprit was the changing nature of society, as afternoon newspapers became a victim not only of a working culture in which factory shifts ended in early afternoon, but in which the growth of suburbs made it almost a physical impossibility to deliver a newspaper in a timely fashion. Freedom of speech and of the press should be protected. That's not the issue here as noted First Amendment attorney (and former reporter) Bruce W. Sanford and his colleague Bruce D. Brown argued in a Washington post column May 16 [note: normally, a link to the story might go here, but we will spare the Post the burden of the additional, easily directed traffic to their site that a link would bring] that not only do newspapers deserve even more special protection, but that the rest of the Internet should be hobbled or damn near destroyed in the process. In addition, the attorneys want to impose the collateral damage of destroying the few remaining protections in copyright law due to the users of material. The sense of entitlement that has characterized the newspaper business for the past 150 years or so is now going too far, conflating the business of journalism with the freedoms due the practice of journalism. The irony is too rich - one of the most lauded First Amendment attorneys in the country, who represents newspaper publishers, is actually advocating policies that fundamentally misunderstand the Internet and would shut down the engine that has brought the greatest freedom of expression to more people than perhaps any medium in history. By proposing a series of radical changes to copyright law and to antitrust law, Sanford and Brown are attempting to divert attention from the circumstances that can be said to have brought on the problems of the newspapers - the industry's reluctance to understand and embrace new technologies, the unfortunate business decisions newspaper owners have made and, perhaps most of all, their failure to adapt advertising value to the online model. It is simply stunning that two such learned attorneys could so completely fail to comprehend the Internet. One waited in vain for them to say how the "series of tubes" was draining away newspapers. (The Sanford-Brown article wasn't the only one in the Post over the weekend that failed to comprehend the realities of the online world. Two features on Web-based TV did not mention that caps on usage that some Internet Service Providers would like to impose - a death sentence for online video.) Their fundamental misperception is that, "The law of the Internet was written for the technology companies seeking to protect their growth in a once-fledgling medium, not for the journalism outlets that are now handicapped trying to survive there. Regulatory reform is needed because the playing field has become so uneven." Actually, the playing field is remarkably level. Sanford and Brown blame provisions in the 1996 Telecommunications Act and the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) for allowing online companies "to prosper from the content they carry with little concern of being held accountable for it." They refer to the "safe harbor" provisions of both laws - laws which, by and large, were written to benefit the largest, best-financed industries around, like the telephone, cable and broadcasting companies in the first instance, and Hollywood in the second. A little common-sense provision hardly balances out the damage the bulk of those laws have done, topics that the attorneys also don't address. The "safe harbor" provision is fundamentally different from the law that protects newspapers. A newspaper is protected because of its place in society. Note that the production of a news story is a hands-on process, with reporters and multiple editors going over the copy. However, the "safe harbor" provisions apply to automated products in which there is no editorial control, much less editing. The process of posting material online is mechanized. There is no way any site with as much material as most sites have can be held liable for content that isn't supervised. Perhaps that explains a lot about the free-flowing nature of the Web, but there it is. Their "reform" of copyright law would basically eliminate the linked-based network that we have today. It is based on the concept that a snippet of information which leads a user elsewhere is fair use. No one is reprinting an entire story. The authors argue, "Taking a portion of a copyrighted work can be protected under the 'fair use' doctrine. But the kind of fair use in news reports, academics and the arts -- republishing a quote to comment on it, for example -- is not what search engines practice when they crawl the Web and ingest everything in their path." When the search engines crawl the Web, they do ingest everything, but that's not what shows up on the user's screen during a search. A search for the Sanford and Brown article, perhaps by Sanford's name, will turn up this: Bruce W. Sanford and Bruce D. Brown - Laws That Could Save ... Journalism doesn't need a bailout, but it could use a "recovery act." [insert Post link here] That's it. For any more information, users click on the link and go to the Post Web site for the full article, plus advertisements. The argument that, "that the taking of entire Web pages by search engines, which is what powers their search functions, is not fair use but infringement," is simply wrong. It doesn't matter what's in the computer. Obviously, a page has to be indexed to be searched. It's what shows up on the screen that counts. And yet, the newspapers don't want to take the simple technical step of keeping their sites from being searched. They want to be paid for the snippets of information that, through links, bring users to the newspaper Web page. It is the ability of one site to link to another that makes the Web the web. Take that away, through "reform" of fair use or by any other means, and the Internet we have today disappears. They also want to give newspaper ownership over facts under the 1918 "hot news" doctrine. So if the Post reports first that the prison at Guantanamo Bay closes, not only does the newspaper get ownership of the fact, but an unrelated web site can't sell an ad around a link to that fact. Unfortunately, the world has changed since 1918, and facts are available from a multitude of sources. A story in a newspaper will be reported on the radio, posted to web sites, Tweeted, Facebooked, whatever else people can do. Newspaper lawyers might have a field day tracking down all the uses of one story. Instead of repealing copyright, eliminating antitrust restrictions and granting ownership over news, as Brown and Sanford recommend, the news industry might be better off trying some new ways of doing business that work within the Internet ecosystem, and not against it. The one party not at the table during the hearings of the Senate Commerce Committee hearing on the Future of Journalism was the advertising sector. Rather than have Arianna Huffington debate the publisher of the Dallas Morning News over the future of their respective products, let the publisher explain why Web ads cost so much less than print ads, and have national advertisers explain why they don't value the Web as highly. After all, if the newspaper content is as valuable as we are led to believe, advertisers should pay to be seen next to it. A full-page ad in a major newspaper might be $35,000 or $40,000. A Web ad might be a tenth of that, depending on how it's displayed online. Another ancillary option if newspapers want to capture some revenue from the online user, they might think of setting up a mechanism along the lines of an ASCAP or BMI in the record business. Online newspaper readers could contribute a certain amount of money to a central collection organization. At the end of each month, funds would be distributed to newspapers based on the amount of clicks each newspaper has received. Newspapers are as much, if not more, the victim of their own incompetence as they are of the nefarious Internet. Debt-ridden deals, stock buy-backs, misplaced investments, failure to diversify - all have contributed to today's state of the industry. It doesn't matter how many new laws that Sanford and Brown propose. It doesn't matter if hypertext links are eliminated. It doesn't matter if search engines are outlawed. The industry has to save itself. More on Newspapers
 
Pinaki Bhattacharya: Crisis Response: Uphold Status Quo Top
When a global crisis went knocking at the doors of India, the people of the country chose to uphold the status quo. The Congress Party's subliminal message of "inclusive (economic) growth" trumped all others in striking a chord with the electorate. And close to 400 million electors who voted in the recently held general election delivered a verdict that was very near to being decisive. The Congress Party-led alliance of parties, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) reached within the striking distance of the majority mark of 272 MPs in a lower house of Parliament of 544 members. They notched up a figure of 262 seats with the Congress Party alone bagging 206 seats on its own. The biggest losers in this battle were the Left parties-led Third Front, which had challenged the bipolarity of Indian politics. Their message of implacable opposition to the neo-liberal policies -- those that are being thrown into the dustbin of history by the West -- of the Congress Party-led coalition and the religious, rightist formulations of the Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People's Party)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) have failed to inspire the voters into supporting their plank. So what is this mandate in favor of? Stability is a key demand of the people that has come across through this electoral exercise. The latter have voted to power a political formation with a reasonably clear mandate, thus ending any possibility of a power vacuum emerging in New Delhi. Now it would expect this government to provide stability in their life and livelihood. This may stymie the hand of the new government, to be led by the economist-politician, Dr. Manmohan Singh, into bringing in any radical change in the policies. Not that the Congresss Party is itching to rock the boat. The 124-year-old party that gained India independence from British rule could never be blamed for any radical experimentation. On the contrary, it was slow to change. When fundamental changes were taking place in India's hierarchical caste order in the Hindi-speaking heartland -- with the inexorable rise of the backward castes becoming a reality -- the Congress Party lost its unassailable position in Indian politics because it failed to provide reflection of that social change in the pecking order of political power. But curiously this election has marked the coming-of-age of the fourth generation of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. Rahul Gandhi is the new scion of the family, and a lot of the credit for winning this election -- particularly the signs of revival of the party's fortunes in difficult places -- is being apportioned to him. He might have the desire to move fast and chart out new paths but the mandate his party has got would not allow him to be too much of an adventurist. Meanwhile, a debate has broken out in the country about whether this poll verdict has a 'national' character. In other words, the question being asked was whether the people voted on national issues or whether they favored local issues. The jury is out on that query. In some cases it would seem that the people voted with national concerns. In others -- especially where a strong regional leader has emerged -- the people have shown a marked propensity to allow local factors to rule the roost. That perspective would not allow the UPA government to take supremacist positions on issues that could flow from their overgrown sense of strength. On the contrary, the imperative of the nature of the mandate would guide them towards doing the routine things in a better fashion. The dramatic changes would have to wait for a development of consensus. The last point of discussion remains on the ideological perspective of this verdict. While in 2004 -- after the six year rule by the BJP-led NDA government -- the dynamic political center had clearly shifted to the left, and this year, the ideological orientation of the people seem to have got stuck in the middle. Afraid of any radical attempts at political or social engineering when the global economic crisis looms large, the electorate has chosen the well trodden middle path. Not the call of dalit (oppressed) consolidation or radical changes in India's engagement with the USA and the West that the Left parties had promised. They wanted 'more of the same' in larger dollops. And they have got it. So, for the next five years the country would be ruled by the same Congress Party-led UPA government that ruled the previous five years. This time the UPA would not have the constraints of having to depend on the Left parties for support to survive in government. This unfettered freedom would make them follow their own policies in full steam. That would acquaint the people with the thrust of the UPA in terms of their beliefs and understanding. It remains to be seen whether the same electors find those palatable. More on India
 
David Fiderer: Rumsfeld's Katrina Antics, Reported By GQ, Reveal How Congressional Investigations Were Whitewashes Top
Talk about running from your record. "The Bush administration is gone and people addicted to attacking it really have to get over that," said George Will . Bush may be gone, but his failures have a cost that accrues with time. And conservatives who aided and abetted Bush's failures haven't gone anywhere. They persist in arguing that the crimes have ended, so the cover-ups should continue. And when new revelations emerge, the Republicans' credibility takes new hits. That's why GQ's reporting on Donald Rumsfeld is damning to Susan Collins, who spearheaded the Senate's sham investigation of the Katrina disaster. The GQ article reveals how Rumsfeld's illegal insubordination contributed to the delayed federal response during Katrina. (The National Response Plan specified that the Defense Secretary was to take direction from DHS Secretary Chertoff, who belatedly ordered additional troops to New Orleans.) "The next day, three days after landfall, word of disorder in New Orleans had reached a fever pitch. According to sources familiar with the conversation, DHS secretary Michael Chertoff called Rumsfeld that morning and said, 'You're going to need several thousand troops.' 'Well, I disagree,' said the SecDef. 'And I'm going to tell the president we don't need any more than the National Guard.' "The problem was that the Guard deployment (which would eventually reach 15,000 troops) had not arrived--at least not in sufficient numbers, and not where it needed to be. And though much of the chaos was being overstated by the media, the very suggestion of a state of anarchy was enough to dissuade other relief workers from entering the city. Having only recently come to grips with the roiling disaster, Bush convened a meeting in the Situation Room on Friday morning. According to several who were present, the president was agitated. Turning to the man seated at his immediate left, Bush barked, 'Rumsfeld, what the hell is going on there? Are you watching what's on television? Is that the United States of America or some Third World nation I'm watching? What the hell are you doing?' "Rumsfeld replied by trotting out the ongoing National Guard deployments and suggesting that sending active-duty troops would create 'unity of command' issues. Visibly impatient, Bush turned away from Rumsfeld and began to direct his inquiries at Lieutenant General Honore on the video screen. 'From then on, it was a Bush-Honore dialogue,' remembers another participant. 'The president cut Rumsfeld to pieces. I just wish it had happened earlier in the week.' "But still the troops hadn't arrived. And by Saturday morning, says Honore, 'we had dispersed all of these people across Louisiana. So we needed more troops to go to distribution centers, feed people, and maintain traffic. That morning Bush convened yet another meeting in the Situation Room. Chertoff was emphatic. "'Mr. President,' he said, 'if we're not going to begin to get these troops, we're not going to be able to get the job done.' "Rumsfeld could see the writing on the wall and had come prepared with a deployment plan in hand. Still, he did not volunteer it. Only when Bush ordered, 'Don, do it,' did he acquiesce and send in the troops--a full five days after landfall. GQ's anecdote was a small part of the information deemed off-limits to the Congressional investigations, which were designed to give the illusion that there had been a full accounting of events before, during and after the hurricane. The White House disclosed almost nothing about the basic flow of information to and from senior White House officials, including Rumsfeld, Chertoff, Chief of Staff Andy Card, or HHS Secretary Michael Levitt. It disclosed no emails, no phone logs, and no list of documents being withheld. Congressional staffers were not allowed to interview key individuals. Before, during and after the hurricane, FEMA's Michael Brown said he had "Innumerable" conversations with Bush, Cheney, Card, Card's deputy, Francis Townsend, and Karl Rove. Yet The White House deemed those conversations off-limits to Congressional scrutiny, and the Republicans in Congress dutifully complied. So, even though she had no idea what went on between Brown and the people he spoke with, Collins, Chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, designated Brown as the party deserving primary culpability. Upon release of her, "plenty-of-blame-to-go-around" report on Katrina (the analog to those "a-few-bad-apples" reports on Abu Ghraib), Collins said: "[T]here were several findings that I found particularly troubling. The first is the blatant insubordination of then FEMA Director Michael Brown. It was clear that he was disengaged from the onset of Katrina. He failed to communicate absolutely vital information about the condition of the levees in New Orleans. Most of all, he allowed his personal feelings, his distaste for being in the Department of Homeland Security, to override his clear obligation to provide effective leadership at a time when lives were at stake." What about Collins' distaste for bucking the party line, which overrode her obligation to provide effective leadership in pursuit of the truth? Do you think anyone care to find out what really went on during Katrina?
 
GM Dealerships Closing: A Mournful Week For America's Car Industry Top
It was a week for mourning the loss of dealers who have peddled Dodges and Jeeps and Pontiacs for generations and who have supported untold numbers of Little League teams and breast cancer walks along the way. There is no way to put a happy face on Chrysler's move to eliminate 789 of its 3,200 dealers or General Motors' plan to eliminate 1,100 dealers.
 
Disgrasian: Holy Crap: Donald Rumsfeld's Crusade Memos Top
Oh Jesus . Have you seen the cover pages of the top secret Crusade Memos, authored by Donald Rumsfeld in 2003 around the start of the Iraq War, recently published in GQ ? What's shocking is that, according to HuffPo contributor Chris Rodda , the mixing of religion and military policy at the highest levels is nothing new . What's also shocking? These Crusade Memo-cover sheets are about as smart and sophisticated as your typical youth group-messaging. They used to put Scripture like this on t-shirts in my Southern Baptist youth group, to get us kids pumped about spending the first week of summer, the first taste of freedom...quietly studying the Bible while getting murdered by mosquitoes in the woods, teenage hormones on tilt because you were surrounded by beautiful people you wanted to fuck but couldn't because Jesus didn't approve, and the most you could do about it was maybe get felt up in the Prayer Garden at night, but that was only if you were really, really bad and hooked on getting saved and re-saved, which so many kids were because, hey, you had to get high somehow. Yep, this was the sort of fist-pumpy Bible-beater stuff we kids would get brainwashed with during Wednesday night Bible study or before we went to witness to slack-jawed teens at the mall on a Friday night because, because, because... We were responding to a higher calling? Because we had purpose? Because we were chosen and righteous? No. It was because, frankly, we were bored. There were only so many movies you could see at one of the two local movie theaters, only so many frames you could bowl, only so many times you could sit in the Safeway parking lot after closing getting wasted on Bud and wine coolers. Going out and saving the world was a thing to do because there was kinda nothing better in our podunk town. And to think this is the way the Bush administration ran the military and justified invading Iraq. God help us. [ GQ : Onward, Christian Soldiers! (SLIDESHOW) ] [ GQ : And He Shall Be Judged ] [ HuffPo: MRFF's Response to Rumsfeld Crusade Memos: We Told You So! ] More on Iraq
 
Lincoln Mitchell: Marriage Equality and the New Faces of the Republican Party Top
As President Obama prepares to make his first Supreme Court appointment, the religious right appears to be shifting gears away from focusing on abortion rights and turning their attention more to the question of gay marriage. This reflects a broader strategy on the part of the Christian Right to make fighting against marriage equality the top issue on their agenda. While campaigns based upon bigotry and intolerance are always harmful, the timing of this decision by opponents of marriage equality may be good news for those of us who think gays and lesbians should be treated equally by our laws. This may seem a strange thing to claim less than seven months after the passage of Proposition 8 in California, but the political climate in the United States has changed substantially since that election. It not looks as if the passage of Proposition 8 was the last gasp of the reactionary politics of the Bush era, rather than a sign of renewed intolerance in America. Since the November 2008 election, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont and Maine have passed laws supporting gay marriage and it seems reasonably clear that other states will join these states, and Massachusetts, soon. Advances in these states suggest that Proposition 8 was the end of something, not the beginning. More states are making marriage equal for all people not because of an upsurge of passionate supporters of gay marriage, but because of a collapse of the moderate opposition to allowing two men or two women to marry each other. The ground underneath the gay marriage policy debate has shifted leaving opponents in a far weaker position. In this moment of the Obama ascendancy, the center has clearly mvoed somewhat. Perhaps this is a reaction to the disastrous administration of Obama's predecessor, the ongoing economic troubles or a broader shift in perceptions or understandings among the electorate. While there are still pockets of reaction, at least for now, they feel like pockets when only a few short years ago they were the mainstream. The string of electoral defeats for marriage equality has given way to a string of legislative victories for the same issue. The collapse of the moderate opposition to gay marriage is both partially caused by, and increasingly contributes to, the right wing of the Republican Party's increasing, but almost certainly temporary, isolation on the fringes of American politics. While there are, undoubtedly, numerous reasons why this has occurred, one major reason why moderate opposition to gay marriage is weakening is because very few people in the broad American political center want to be associated with Rush Limbaugh, tea parties, intolerance or anachronistically calling the president a socialist for supporting moderate tax increases for the wealthiest Americans. Yet, this is precisely where the religious right finds itself as it seeks to fight against marriage equality-associated with unpopular leaders, devoid of any cohesive solutions and sounding increasingly frustrated and irrational as they yell from the sidelines of political life. The right wing has made it very difficult for opponents of gay marriage to stake out a centrist view where they can articulate a position that is in line with some liberal majority positions, such as support of the economic stimulus and opposition to the war in Iraq, while still opposing gay marriage. Previous election returns, and other evidence, tell us that at one time in the not so distant past there were many voters who, while not consistent right wing Republicans, felt some discomfort with gay marriage. It was these voters who made the difference in passing laws against marriage equality in many states. Today, whatever discomfort these voters may feel about gay marriage is being trumped by the broader discomfort they feel with the far right of the Republican Party. This is a major strategic mistake by opponents of gay marriage; and one which does not seem to be lost on supporters of gay marriage. During this period when the anti-marriage equality movement has been hijacked by the extreme right, supporters of gay marriage are, and should continue to, push through as much marriage equality legislation in as many places as possible. By taking advantage of this political moment, which may just be a brief dynamic arising from the broader political context, lasting damage will be done to the forces of intolerance because as gay marriage is made legal in more states, ordinary Americans will see that the bizarre and offensive fears raised by radical opponents of gay marriage are, of course, nonsense. Families will not collapse; society will not come to a grinding halt; children will not suffer. Instead, reasons for opposing marriage equality will become less, not more, clear as a few more loving couples will be treated equally and our country will come a little closer to meeting the ideals for which we strive. More on Tax Day Tea Parties
 
Chrysler Dealerships Closing, Want Legal Protections Under Bankruptcy Top
May 18 (Bloomberg) -- Chrysler LLC's dealers asked a bankruptcy judge to let them claim legal protections they lost when the automaker filed for Chapter 11. The Chrysler National Dealer Council, in a statement filed May 16, asked U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Arthur Gonzalez in Manhattan to allow dealers to assert the rights that typically protect them under state laws.
 
Hendrie Weisinger: HelpingYour Son or Daughter Select a College? Use The Genius of Their Instinct, Not a College Advisor! Top
Every year the college selection process becomes more prevalent in America, and every year, tens of thousands of students are ready to transfer after their first year on the grounds they made the wrong choice. If you are the parent of a college bound student, before you spend a lot of money on a college advisor, help your college bound student use their shelter-seeking instinct -- the hard-wired tool given to all of us by Mother Nature to help guide us into an environment that promotes our growth so we can thrive -- not simply survive. First, help your college bound student go beyond her SAT scores by getting her to tune in to her emotional nutrients -- the elements that will help her grow. Do this by having frequent conversations centered on her interests, her aspirations. Get him to think about some college logistics -- the size of the school, geographical locations, and most importantly, what he or she wants a school to offer them. Too many parents and their children focus on "what are the best schools I can get into," whereas shelter-seeking instincts say your selection will be better when you focus on seeking schools that can offer you what you need -- special help, financial assistance -- nutrients that might not be available from on the of the best schools you can get into. In other words, the best school a college bound student can get into is not necessarily the right school. Shelter seeking tells you to help your son or daughter pick the right school, not necessarily the best school. Studying brochures and speaking to college advisers and college counselors are useful activities, but to help children maximize shelter-seeking instincts, encourage them to experience, to feel the environments they are thinking of entering for the next four years of their life. More than just walking the campus and going on the morning or afternoon tour, encourage your kids to do more, such as attending a class, visiting a friend who goes to the school and spending the night, or eating meals with other students. You get the idea -- you want to help your son or daughter sense the environment by getting them to see, hear, and feel the college environment he or she is considering and this is best done by spending time in the environment, not just visiting it. Next, interview them about their college visits, your goal being to help them clarify their feelings and thoughts about their experience. Make sure you ask them to compare and contrast the experiences of their visits, and how they felt with and about the other kids, impressions of class difficulty, the college town itself. Use sensory questions: "What did you see that you liked and interested you? " "What did you hear your friends and other students say?" "How did you feel being there?" Answers to these questions help your college-bound child assess whether he or she is making a smart match play. Feeling interested, engaged, and joy are cues your son or daughter is entering an empowering environment. Shelter-seeking for the right college environment is a time consuming process, but it is well worth it since the right environment helps your children grow. I'd like to hear how you help your child find the right school. More on CNN
 
Harry Shearer: Obama to New Orleans: Drop Dead? Top
CLEVELAND--Regular readers know I've been critical of the Obama administration for its do-nothing approach to redeeming the President's promise to redeem the promises Bush made in Jackson Square two weeks after the city was flooded by the failure of the federal levees. Now, it's not just me and my little opinion. Politifact, run by the St. Petersburg Times (a reputable and non-profit newspaper), has made a handy checklist of the President's statements on the city's needs and his promises to help meet those needs, measured against what he's actually proposed and/or done. It's not surprising, at least to me, that the scoreboard contains almost all goose-eggs. Yes, we all know he's got a lot on his plate, yet he managed to find time to sign an executive order last week reorganizing the cleanup of Chesapeake Bay, so not all local needs are going unmet. And the Washington Post reports the stimulus bill, while containing nothing for New Orleans, did make a nice stash available for the contractors who've been taking their time, and making some mistakes, trying to clean up our nuclear weapons sites. The farther we get into this administration, the clearer it becomes that New Orleans is now enjoying its second consecutive federal administration which, far from offering to fix what it broke, far from offering a hand of support, is merely offering one finger. (Hat tip: LSD)
 
Google CEO Eric Schmidt Urges Grads To Turn Off Computers Top
PHILADELPHIA — The chairman and CEO of the world's largest search engine is urging college graduates to turn off their computers and discover the humanity around them. Google's Eric Schmidt spoke at the University of Pennsylvania's commencement ceremony in Philadelphia on Monday. The Class of 2009 is graduating in a tough economic climate, but Schmidt says such downturns can be a time for innovation. He noted that Rice Krispies, Twinkies and beer cans were all products of the Great Depression _ and staples of college life. Schmidt says that while graduates can't plan for innovation or inspiration, they can be ready for it when it happens. More on Eric Schmidt
 
Ralph Gardner Jr.: Inside the Astor Trial: The Babe Witness Top
As soon as prosecutor Elizabeth Lowey asked Naomi Dunn Packard-Koot about her job history before she was hired as Brooke Astor's social secretary in March 2002 the jury could have guessed that the Princeton graduate's testimony was not going to be run-of-the-mill. The lovely, blond Ms. Packard-Koot listed, and I may be leaving out a couple of careers -- firefighter, financial analyst, high school teacher, private tutor, publicist, think tank staffer, actress, and art dealer. On the final day of testimony last week, the assistant district attorney also asked whether Ms. Packard-Koot, 39, had had any brushes with the law. Indeed, she had. While at Princeton, she testified, she and her roommates left prank calls on a girlfriend's answering machine. In Hungarian, no less. The victim -- not getting the joke because she'd been harassed by a male earlier the same day -- concluded there might be a connection between the two incidents and supplied the tape to the police. The cops, in turn, called in a translator, thinking the culprits might be a band of roving gypsies committing crimes in the Princeton area. From the best I can tell, Ms. Packard-Koot avoided arrest, or at least conviction, but her testimony seemed to gloss over the disposition of the case. The prosecutor led her through some of the events of her employment with Mrs. Astor, which lasted until May 2003 when Ms. Packard-Koot was fired by Mrs. Astor's son, Anthony Marshall. That made her the second social secretary in a row to suffer the ax and for the same reason -- their loyalties lay with the charming Brooke Astor rather than with Mr. Marshall, 84, or his wife Charlene, 63. According to the secretary, the Marshalls were trying to curb Mrs. Astor's spending while selling her art by allegedly telling her she was going broke and needed to raise cash if she wanted to keep shopping at Bergdorf's. Mrs. Astor's fortune, at the time, was estimated to be slightly shy of $200 million. Ms. Packard-Koot's predecessor in the job, Birgit Darby, a soft-spoken North Carolinian, testified the previous day that she was fired after she failed to prevent Mrs. Astor from taking her annual winter vacation in Palm Beach. Mr. and Mrs. Marshall, she told the jury, thought the trip to Florida, which included hiring a private jet to ferry her and her beloved dachshunds, Girlsie and Boysie, was too extravagant. Ms. Packard-Koot testified similarly that the Marshalls tried to stop Mrs. Astor from going to Cove End, her beloved Maine estate in the summer of 2002. She wouldn't have any fun, they warned her, because she no longer had friends there, she'd have trouble getting around her house, and she'd be too far away from her doctors. When the helpful Ms. Packard-Koot suggested they get Mrs. Astor one of those stairway chairlifts, she said Anthony Marshall told her it was too expensive and would reduce the value of the property. "I investigated it on my own," she told the jury. "She was talking about how much she loved Maine and I saw her eyes light up. I was able to find a really good deal and somebody who would do it at a really good price." Whether or not the jury eventually decides the allegations against Mr. Marshall are true -- he, along with co-defendant Francis Morrissey, an estate lawyer, are charged with changing Mrs. Astor's will in he and his wife's favor and to the detriment of His mother's favorite charities, when she was suffering from Alzheimer's disease -- one thing is certain: the Marshalls could have done a better job of charming the servants. Ms. Packard-Koot seemed almost too eager to tell the jury everything she knew, heard, or overheard that cast the Marshalls in a negative light. Perhaps her most damning claim was that Mr. Marshall denied her permission to purchase a security gate to prevent his wandering mother from falling down the stairs of her Park Avenue duplex. However, her most colorful anecdote was reserved for the daily vilified Charlene Marshall. Ms. Packard-Koot was prepared to testify that on one occasion during her tenure the Marshalls borrowed some of Mrs. Astor's gold-plated flatware for a dinner party they were throwing. When Mrs. Astor ordered her assistant to call the Marshalls and demand that her then septuagenarian son report to her residence shortly before his guests were scheduled to arrive, Ms. Packard-Koot said that she overheard Mrs. Marshall in the background issue a combination of expletives, referring to her mother-in-law, more appropriate to a Rikers Island cellblock than to the rarefied confines of the Upper East Side. To the palpable disappointment of the media covering the trial, before the social secretary took the witness stand, and with the jury out of the courtroom, Judge A. Kirke Bartley Jr. ruled the testimony inadmissible. Fred Hafetz, Mr. Marshall's attorney, tried to staunch the bleeding by challenging Ms. Packard-Koot's credibility, memory, motives, veracity, and finally her personality and character. First he raised her job history -- "How many jobs have you had?" he sniffed. Then he brought up her brief acting career, apparently mostly in friends' films. "You have a flair for the dramatic," he accused her. "You like to be on stage, don't you?" Mr. Hafetz's relentlessly combative demeanor while cross-examining witnesses has puzzled even fellow lawyers. But by midafternoon of her second day of testimony, Ms. Packard-Koot may have actually have accomplished what the surly lawyer could not have done -- make him seem almost sympathetic. It didn't help that she was chewing gum during most of her testimony. Or that while the lawyer shuffled through his notes, trying to decide what to hit her with next, she grinned serenely at the prosecution lawyers and occasionally at the jury, as if to say this guy should know better than to tangle with a comparative literature major. Judge Bartley could have dismissed the exhausted jury for the weekend after Ms. Packard-Koot finally descended the witness stand. Instead, he called the prosecution's next witness, Catherine Dunn, the Senior Vice President for External Affairs at the New York Public Library, one of Brooke Astor's favorite charities. When Ms. Dunn explained that she'd grown up in South Dakota and attended the University of South Dakota one could almost feel the cleansing winds of the prairie entering the courtroom and rinsing away the lingering tension of Mr. Hafetz's and Ms. Packard-Koot's confrontation.
 
'Appalachian Apocalypse': Obama Permits Mountaintop Removal Mining Top
Just stop and consider this: Across Appalachia, companies are blowing entire mountaintops to smithereens to get at the thin coal seams below. The communities of the region are paying the cost in their health, their culture and their natural heritage.
 
Janet Ritz: Searching for Relevancy in an Obama World Top
I spoke with a friend the other day, one of those rare individuals who'd passed his 87th birthday with a clear perspective on life that went beyond even his years, and heard from him a frustration that has been echoed both by others of his generation and by those who are not yet of age to drink or vote. The question they've been asking is: what happened? What happened to the values for which the WWII generation fought and died? What happened to our principals about saving money and living within our means? What happened to fighting for freedom of religion and thought and tolerance? What happened to personal responsibility and the willingness to sacrifice to meet a shared goal? What happened to the moral centers of those in charge for the last few decades that made them think they could use the earth as their personal or corporate garbage dump, their offshore bank account, their property to pillage? My friend bemoaned the generation that had followed his, as trust-fund babies given every opportunity after a hard-won victory, who did not understand or care about the sacrifices made to provide them with the right to become something more than their fathers. Instead, he complained, they squandered it for short term gain and immediate gratification. I have heard the same from those younger than me. How could so much have been lost so fast? What about us? What will happen to our lives and our children now that our fathers and mothers have spent their inheritance? Who broke America, who broke the world, who is going to fix it? The answer most people in America give, according to the polls, is Barack Obama. There is a lot to be said for his accomplishments in so short a time -- increased national debt notwithstanding (given the enormity of the problems he has inherited) -- but that's not, I suspect, the answer he would give. The president would say and has said that we all have to change to get out of this mess. We have to go forward in a new way. I would say we also have to look backward to those of the WWII generation who acted with such responsibility toward our country and the world and who thought the victory they were leaving to their children would be safe in our hands. Sadly, that wasn't to be the case. I had a strange reaction to President Obama's election (after the cheering stopped). I sat down and asked myself: what now? So much of the last eight years for me and many of my colleagues has had to do with what we were fighting against. The Orwellian tactics of the "Blue Skies Initiative" that supported polluters. The Jungian sense that something horrible was taking place in their preemptive wars (now proven to be prescient) for which we would have to account. Corporations did not help. There, many of the same generation that was leading us into the abyss came to the table as if at a feeding trough set out of a sense of entitlement. Some were cognizant of their impact and tried to do the right thing, some did not care, and others were like Daisy in the Great Gatsby, unaware of their arrogance as they insisted that a cold winter in their backyard meant climate change wasn't real (ugh) and wondered why people losing their jobs through no fault of their own would think they had a right to refinance. After all, weren't they now bad risks? No thought to the fact that the bad risks had been those in the banks who had gambled on credit default swaps or mortgage-back securities set to fail, all of which led them to cut off credit, in some cases, to businesses with customers but with no way to finance their payrolls, who then had to lay off those that the Daisys of the world are now citing as the bad risk. And don't get me started on the second mortgages pushed by banks with assumption of the ability to refinance down the line (can anyone spell: bait and switch?), which the president is now trying to address before the prime rate rises and tens of millions of homeowners find themselves unable to meet their monthly payments when a simple consolidation that was either promised or alluded to at the time, would keep them in their homes. Add that waiting shoe to drop to upcoming credit card defaults and the anticipated (by some) crash of commercial real estate, and you can see that we're not out of the woods or the forest or the trees that we have trained ourselves over time not to see. But what do people like my 87 year old friend, who do know the forest for the trees, and my 17 year old friends still in school and myself and my colleagues who fought so long and hard to achieve a new paradigm see now that the party's over? I've watched the reaction in the blogosphere to some of the more controversial decisions made by our new president. The release of torture memos, the reversal of the same on pictures and military tribunals, the appointment of an environmental lawyer who works for General Electric (which needed a better headline than: Superfund Lawyer Gets Nominated. Anyone care to mention she had served in the DOJ environmental role during the Clinton Administration and we may need to see some vetting before we pass judgment?), the go-ahead for mountain-top removal mining (grrr). I'm not happy about much of that. In fact, I'd venture to say I'm confused, worried and waiting for an explanation that makes sense. But I do not feel the requirement to become both enraged and outraged, whether through the insistence of the 24-hour news cycle or by those in the blogosphere. This is what I mean by my search for relevancy: Eight years of having someone to point at (Bush/Cheney, et al) and say: See! There's the problem (and it was), was an easier proposition than looking in the mirror and asking the question: How am I the problem? That changed for me after I read a remarkable poetry collection by American writer, George Witte, entitled Deniability , which forced me to explore my inner experience of the last eight years. How much had I acknowledged? How much had I denied? How much was in favor of writing the gotcha article that would point out the deficiencies in others' behaviors without any understanding of my own part in the events upon which I was reporting? They are questions that cannot be answered and then forgotten. They must become part of a paradigm shift that is necessary for everyone if were are to survive as the nation and world our grandparents fought to preserve: What am I doing to combat climate change? How have saved instead of spent today? What will happen if I don't spend in a consumer economy? Is my business, my office, my home as green as it could be? How do I fight policy I do not like with a president I like very much? What is my part in this new paradigm? It is easier to find someone to complain about than to contemplate one's own part in the mess in which we find ourselves. The truth is that we were all at the party. Some of us were in the proverbial smoke-filled rooms where torture was sanctioned and they must not be sanctioned for their choice in that. Others were downstairs at the chips and dip table where they used their credit cards to get extra guacamole they could have done without, while either closing their eyes and ears to the screams coming from halfway across the world or protesting against it as they put down plastic for yet more chips and dip. We don't know how to fight against bad policy after the last eight years without demonizing those with which whose policies we disagree. Instead, we post our outrage that the fantasy Obama we have constructed in our minds does not meet up to our shaky version of reality. President Obama, in my opinion, is doing the best he can in what are the most difficult circumstances since President Roosevelt inherited the legacy of Hoover. He is not perfect. He will not always, maybe not even often, come up with policies that please my sense of purity. But I acknowledge that he is the president of us all and that he has been tasked to govern responsibly in a globalized world. I know that means I won't get everything I want right away and I am willing to give him some (not unlimited) time to work it out. Which brings me my path to relevancy in an Obama world. I will be a responsible investigative journalist who reports on policy and shenanigans and all the things that come with the Daisys and the Toms in the Gatsby of our fractured world. I will question policies even from those I support if those policies deserved to be questioned. But I will not look for a way to turn those for whom I've voted into a demonized figures upon whom I can then comfortably focus my unresolved emotional issues of the past eight years (in lieu of my own culpability) instead of doing my part to see that good policy is passed in our shared effort for a better future. This is what my 87 year old friend had expected of his children and what his grandchildren must see happen if they are to have anything to work with from our legacy. The party is over. The bill has come. We have a participatory democracy again thanks to the courage of one man who ran for office despite the danger that represented to him and his family. We must all participate if we want to be relevant in an Obama world. More on this topic at The Environmentalist More on Obama Transition
 
Quinn Presents DOOMSDAY BUDGET Scenario: 14,300 Teachers Laid Off, 650,000 People Lose Health Care Top
CHICAGO (AP) -- Gov. Pat Quinn is trying to build support for a tax increase by painting a stark portrait of what would happen to state services without additional money. Quinn warned Monday that teachers and state troopers would lose their jobs, health care would be cut and college students would lose financial aid. In a speech to the City Club of Chicago, Quinn described the "doomsday" budget that Illinois would face if it had to close an $11.6 billion budget without raising taxes. Quinn has proposed raising the state income tax rate to 4.5 percent, up from 3 percent. He says without that money, 14,300 teachers and half of state police troopers could be laid off. He says 650,000 people would lose health care and 400,000 college students could lose state grants and scholarships. -ASSOCIATED PRESS
 
Ventura And Hasselbeck Debate Waterboarding On The View Top
There is a peculiar aspect to the debate over the use of waterboarding on terrorist detainees. Those who have actually experienced the procedure first hand insist it is ineffective at best and torture at worst. Those who couldn't be more removed from its employment argue that it works in thwarting terrorist attacks. On Monday's taping of The View, former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura -- who was waterboarded as part of his military training -- repeated the mantra he offered last week, calling waterboarding torture and demanding criminal prosecution for those who authorized it. "I would prosecute the people who did it," he said. "I would prosecute the people who ordered it. And they would all go to jail." His opponent in the debate was none other than the conservative Elisabeth Hasselbeck, who insisted that the technique worked in breaking down al Qaeda suspects. The exchange was good-natured and lively, with Ventura asking some leading rhetorical questions before making a few rather provocative political points. "If waterboarding is OK, why don't we let our police do it to suspects so they can learn what they know?" he asked. "If waterboarding is OK, why didn't we waterboard [Timothy] McVeigh and Nichols, the Oklahoma City bombers, to find out if there were more people involved? ... We only seem to waterboard Muslims... Have we waterboarded anyone else? Name me someone else who has been waterboarded." Hasselbeck, for her part, tried to pin the debate on Nancy Pelosi, whom she accused of lying about what and when she knew of the use of enhanced interrogation techniques. "What do you think about Nancy Pelosi in terms of what she's claiming with the CIA lying?" she asked, to begin the segment. "I think what's worse is the fact that it happened," replied Ventura. "If we hadn't waterboarded to begin with, none of this would be a controversy, would it? Torture is torture. If you're going to be a country that follows the rule of law, which we are, torture is illegal." The whole thing is worth a watch, including the part where Hasselbeck asks Ventura if he would favor prosecuting Barack Obama for signing off on the killing of the Somali Pirates who briefly held Americans hostages. "Apples and Oranges," Ventura replied. A special thanks to Media Monitor Jane B. for passing on the clip. WATCH: Get HuffPost Politics On Facebook and Twitter! More on The View
 
Oksana Grigorieva Definitely Pregnant With Mel Gibson's Baby: TMZ Top
We've learned Mel Gibson's girlfriend, Oksana Grigorieva, is pregnant with his child. Our sources say Gibson has already told his estranged wife, Robyn, and their children about the news. We're told Oksana is in her second trimester. More on Celebrity Kids
 
Dr. Johnny C. Benjamin: Steroids are Just the Tip of the Iceberg in Professional Sports Top
With the recent outing of Manny Ramirez and the ongoing, seemingly never ending controversy regarding steroids and other performance enhancing drugs (PED) in baseball, little attention has been focused on a much larger problem in professional sports -- abuse of prescription pain medication. The overuse and abuse of narcotic pain medication in professional sports, especially contact sports, is enormous. The use of performance enhancing drugs is minuscule and almost meaningless in comparison. If, for a period of time, Major League Baseball utilized a 'don't ask and don't tell' approach to PED/steroid use, the NFL must be in complete denial. Professional football is so damaging to the human body that it is nearly impossible for a regular player to avoid the occasional use of narcotic pain relievers. There are two unarguable constants in the NFL: 1. some part of your body is nearly always seriously hurting and 2. there is always someone eager to take your place in the line up. It is a well-known mantra in the NFL that a player can't make the team from the training room (nursing an injury instead of producing on the field). Players quickly learn that a cortisone shot will make it feel better in a few days. A percocet or vicodin will make if feel better right now. It is also commonly said that the letters NFL stands for 'not-for-long' if a player cannot consistently suit up and produce on the field for whatever reason. After an average 3-year NFL career, daily pain medication is a way of life for many, if not most players. Players with average length careers (about 3 years) are often the marginal players whom are routinely relegated to the most dangerous duties, special teams. Veteran players with significantly longer tours of duty amass injuries due to length of service on the field of play. Their career will one day end but the pain commonly does not. Year after year of daily physical abuse leads to substance overuse which in turn can often lead to abuse and dependence. The narcotic habit that developed during a player's active career often continues far into retirement. The NFL season may last from early September till early February but prescription narcotic use has no off-season. The NFL season and careers end but chronic pain and narcotic dependence know no such boundaries. If the NFL disputes my assertions as to the magnitude of the crisis, they should simply walk into any NFL locker room and demand every player to anonymously provide a urine sample. The goal is not to assess individual blame but to gauge the level of prescription narcotic pain reliever use in general. Oh yeah, that can't happen because it would violate the collective bargaining agreement which governs the interaction between the teams and the players. It's just the latest version of a failed don't ask and don't tell policy. The teams definitely don't want to know and the players certainly are not interested in telling. But who will pick up the pieces when it all inevitably comes crumbling down? Don't be naive. This is not just an NFL or MLB problem. There is plenty of dirty urine to go around.
 
Jazz Hands On Flickr! (SLIDESHOW) Top
Jazz hands entered the popular imagination when "Bring It On" made them a mainstay of teen comedies in 2000. Who could forget the villainous choreographer yelling at Kirsten Dunst to splay her fingers further with more energy to properly convey the cheerleading spirit? Well, jazz hands are making a comeback, this time on Flickr and everyone from your neighbor's snow man to your egg beater are doing them. LOOK: See more here! More on Photo Galleries
 
Dave Johnson: They Distributed Loss Reserves As Bonuses, So We Pay The Losses As Bailouts Top
I'm starting to get it, about how these bailouts work. In the 90s and 2000s Wall Street made billions and billions of "profits" and the people working there made millions and hundreds of millions each, placing bets with "credit default swaps." The upside was all in the sale of these -- the downside happens if mortgages and loans go bad. So the money from selling these credit default swaps was supposed to be set aside as reserves to cover potentinal losses, but was instead handed out as profits and bonuses. So when the mortgages and loans did go bad, instead of those people paying up from the billions the companies made and the hundreds of million that individuals made, instead you and I taxpayers are paying off on these bets. They get to keep the money that they called "profits" back then, even though they were not profits, but were supposed to be set aside to cover the losses that might happen later. When the losses did happen later, we pay it off for them and they keep the private jets, mansions and yachts. And the reason this is happening is because the Wall Street types put some of the money into paying off people in Washington, and "lobbying" and into right-wing think tanks, etc. The people with the power to make us pay off those losses are being paid or otherwise influenced by the money that was called "profits" in previous years, but which really should have been used to cover these losses. Is that about right? Who is our economy for, anyway?
 
Steve Fleischli: An Easy, Green Choice for Los Angeles City Attorney Top
If the City of Los Angeles is ever going to become one of the nation's greenest cities, the city's top lawyer must be a big part of leading the charge to clean up our rivers and coastline, fight environmental injustice and demand environmental accountability from polluters. As a City Councilmember, Jack Weiss has a record overall on the environment that is excellent based on any measure. Moreover, in contrast to his opponent's career focus on defending those accused of environmental crimes, this record is even more notable. That's why environmental attorneys in Los Angeles like David Beckman and I support Jack Weiss. We know from nearly a decade of personal experience that Jack was willing to go up against the City bureaucracy to change its environmental policies even when there was no upside for him and his labors were largely invisible to the press and the public. This willingness to support the environment without glory - to do the hard work in the trenches - is the truest test of a candidate's environmental bona fides. Jack passes this test with flying colors. Jack Weiss was the first member of the Los Angeles City Council to support settlement of the landmark sewage litigation in Santa Monica Baykeeper v. City of Los Angeles . Mr. Weiss spoke up when it was not popular and when many others on the council leveled harsh criticism against the environmental community. Mr. Weiss's stalwart efforts eventually helped the parties reach a settlement agreement in what the U.S. Department of Justice calls "one of the largest sewage cases in U.S. history." The city's efforts under the settlement have resulted in a 71% reduction in sewage spills. Councilmember Weiss also led the City Council's efforts to resolve disputes about cleaning up the Los Angeles River and Ballona Creek as well as strengthening the Los Angeles Municipal Stormwater permit. Were it not for the efforts of Jack Weiss, the City of Los Angeles might still be fighting cleanup and wasting millions in taxpayer dollars doing so. Since then, Mr. Weiss's record of strong environmental protection has continued. He has served as the founding chair of the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Commission and is the current President of the Santa Monica Bay Watershed Council. He also has crafted a strong environmental plan and won the endorsement of prominent environmentalists such as Ed Begley Jr., Senator Barbara Boxer and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Meanwhile, Carmen Trutanich has not worked on the side of the environment for over 20 years. As lawyers ourselves, we would never suggest that a lawyer is an environmental criminal because he decides to spend the majority of his professional efforts defending those accused of environmental offenses. Defense attorneys play an important role in the judicial system. But Mr. Trutanich seeks a political post where the public is entitled to, and should, consider a wider range of factors. In the real world, a person's work and the law practice he labored to build fairly provides insight into his orientation and experience. Perhaps there are those that could spend twenty years defending those accused of environmental crimes and then switch sides without missing a beat. But that does not appear to be the case with Mr. Trutanich. The way Mr. Trutanich's law practice and the actions of some of his clients have bled into his own personal perspectives are made clear in his campaign literature. One need look no further than Mr. Trutanich's website for confirmation of the lax attitude toward enforcement he would be likely to take if elected. That website prominently promises that when it comes to environmental enforcement Mr. Trutanich is interested in "compliance" and not "fees." This is Orwellian code language we frequently see in environmental circles. Translated it means that if you get caught polluting, Mr. Trutanich won't punish you, he will just make you clean up your act. In reality, this posture serves as the largest disincentive to compliance imaginable because it creates no incentive to protect the environment in the first place, since if you don't and get caught you will suffer no penalty. Mr. Trutanich's website is where he informs the public of his views; it is unfiltered; has nothing to do with his clients; it is Mr. Trutanich speaking for himself. Contradicting his own website, Mr. Trutanich continues to claim he'll be tough on polluters if elected. As a defense attorney, however, Mr. Trutanich has shown otherwise, not only defending some of the area's worst violators, but going so far as to assert that the City of Los Angeles does not have legal standing to pursue polluters in court. Whether that absurd claim reflects his own personal view or not, where Mr. Trutanich does pursue environmental enforcement, it certainly will be an interesting legal dance for him to explain his new cases when confronted with the very same defenses he raised only months earlier as a private attorney. In an election, your record matters. Whatever the ultimate meaning of Mr. Trutanich's lifetime of environmental defense work, his record certainly pales compared to Mr. Weiss' on the environment. Given a choice between a pro-environment sure thing and someone who can point to nothing in the last two decades of his life remotely comparable, the choice in our view is an easy one for anyone who cares about the environment in Los Angeles. David S. Beckman, a senior environmental attorney in Los Angeles, co-authored this post. More on Green Living
 
Patti Blagojevich Expected To Take Husband's Place On Reality Show "I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here" Top
Rod can't do it, but Patti will. All signs point to Patti Blagojevich starring this summer in the reality show "I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here." More on Rod Blagojevich
 
Boxers, Briefs...Or Thongs? Men's Underwear Choices Grow By The Bunch Top
As my husband learned while shopping last week, men's underwear these days is a whole new fashion segment. Men's undies come in a variety of silhouettes (such as boxer, brief, or trunk), rises (such as low, mid or high), fit options (such as relaxed or slim), colors and patterns. The fabrics include not only the traditional woven or knit cotton but also Lycra, Spandex and various "microfiber" synthetics. More on Fashion
 
Ed Kilgore: Barack Obama and the Fear of God Top
It's understandable that progressive listeners heard different things in President Obama's remarkable commencement address yesterday at Notre Dame. Martha Burk heard a disturbing mushiness and evasion on abortion rights. James Fallows heard an "eloquence of thought" that transcended the "pretiness" of more famous orators. E.J. Dionne heard Obama strengthen "moderate and liberal forces inside the [Catholic] church itself." But as a Christian progressive, I heard Obama directly challenge religious fundamentalism of every sort by associating the fear of God with "doubt" and "humility," and offering that as a "common ground" for debates within and beyond the ranks of the faithful. After decades of listening to conservative Christian politicians--echoed by some progressives as well--speak of their faith as an absolute assurance of absolute positions on public policies ranging from abortion to war, these lines at Notre Dame were incredibly refreshing: [T]he ultimate irony of faith is that it necessarily admits doubt. It is the belief in things not seen. It is beyond our capacity as human beings to know with certainty what God has planned for us or what He asks of us, and those of us who believe must trust that His wisdom is greater than our own. This doubt should not push us away from our faith. But it should humble us. It should temper our passions, and cause us to be wary of self-righteousness. It should compel us to remain open, and curious, and eager to continue the moral and spiritual debate that began for so many of you within the walls of Notre Dame. Fundamentalism, particularly in its political application, is typically based on the redefinition of "humility" as a rejection of civility and mutual respect as an act of obedience to God, whose revelation of His will, through scripture, teaching or tradition, is so clear that only selfishness and rebellion could explain the persistence of doubt. This inversion of the "fear of God" as requiring aggressive and repressive self-righteousness has been responsible for endless scandals of faith over the centuries, quite often in conjunction with the divinization of culturally conservative causes from slavery to nationalism to patriarchy. By insisting on the spiritual validity--indeed, necessity--of doubt, Obama is repudiating on religious grounds the very idea that appeals to Revelation should have presumptive value in political debates. As he forthrightly says, those who truly fear God have particular reason to confine their arguments to the "common ground" of reason where all believers, along with unbelievers, can speak: [W]ithin our vast democracy, this doubt should remind us to persuade through reason, through an appeal whenever we can to universal rather than parochial principles, and most of all through an abiding example of good works, charity, kindness, and service that moves hearts and minds. For if there is one law that we can be most certain of, it is the law that binds people of all faiths and no faith together. It is no coincidence that it exists in Christianity and Judaism; in Islam and Hinduism; in Buddhism and humanism. It is, of course, the Golden Rule - the call to treat one another as we wish to be treated. The call to love. To serve. To do what we can to make a difference in the lives of those with whom we share the same brief moment on this Earth. It's safe to say that many progressives cringe whenever Barack Obama talks about "common ground" with anti-abortionists, theocrats, or in general, with Republicans, because they view it as an offer to compromise or even betray their rights and values. But in the religious context, what he was talking about at Notre Dame is a "common ground" that is inherently secular, empirically based, and respectful of individual rights in a way that is antithetical to the thinking of the Christian Right. Viewed from this perspective, it's no contradiction at all that the President spoke of "common ground" on abortion even as he directly acknowleged that pro-choice and pro-life views can't be compromised: I do not suggest that the debate surrounding abortion can or should go away. No matter how much we may want to fudge it - indeed, while we know that the views of most Americans on the subject are complex and even contradictory - the fact is that at some level, the views of the two camps are irreconcilable. This strikes me as a pretty plain admonition to those of his own "religious advisers" who talk of achieving some sort of "compromise" on abortion rights that will make the issue--or indeed, the "cultural wars"--simply "go away." Now it's true that Obama's pledge to respect and not vilify those who are on the other side of the barricades on abortion remains offensive to those abortion rights advocates who for good reason resent any "debate"--particularly among men--about what should be regarded as fundamental reproductive rights. And such "debate" really is phony (as has been brilliantly explained by Linda Hirshman ) if it is conducted on the "common ground" that abortion is evil, and that women who seek them are either perpetrators or victims of a tragedy if not a crime. But I don't hear Obama saying that, and moreover, abortion rights in this country will never be safe if they depend on the presumption that discussion of the subject is a priori illegitimate. In the end, as Obama himself suggests, what unites secular liberalism with non-fundamentalist religious beliefs is the conviction that we live in a world governed by universal laws that cannot be reliably deduced in many particulars. That is why mutual respect, including respect for individual rights, and a commitment to pluralism and rational discourse, are so critical to both traditions, and why many of us subscribe to both. If religious fundamentalists or cultural conservatives generally choose to reject that "common ground," as many will, then they are willfully abandoning any path to the achievement of their own objectives that does not depend on raw power and repression. And large majorities of Americans--including many God-fearing Americans--will reject them in turn. More on Religion
 
Jacob Heilbrunn: The GOP Needs Its Own "Secret Speech" Repudiating the Cheney Era Top
This is a big week for the GOP. Two events suggest that it isn't detached from reality. It's oblivious to it. The first event takes place on Wednesday, when the Republican National Committee, as today's Washington Times reports, will hold a special meeting at National Harbor in Maryland to decide whether or not to endorse a resolution demanding that the Democratic Party call itself the "Democrat Socialist Party." RNC chairman Michael S. Steele is resisting the resolution even as he uses the term socialist to describe the Obama administration's fiscal policies. Oh, to be a fly on the wall when the Solons of the GOP debate the fine points of economic theory to decide whether or not President Obama really qualifies as a socialist intent on imposing communist-style collectivism upon America. Will they feverishly be consulting their Hegel, Lasalle, and Kautsky as they lash each other into a frenzy of indignation over the nature of true socialist doctrine? No doubt Obama will be quaking in fear over the fate of this resolution. The second event is former vice-president Dick Cheney's speech on national security at the American Enterprise Institute on Thursday. Cheney and his daughter have become something of a traveling road show, trying to freak out the country but revealing only their own freakishness as they assail Obama. Like good Marxists, Cheney and his daughter Liz have been insisting that Obama is, at a minimum, an "objective," to use an old Leninist term, supporter of terrorists because he is repudiating many of the policies, if that's the appropriate term, instituted by the Bush administration to combat terrorism. As Dimitri Simes, who actually lived under communism in Russia before emigrating to America, acidly points out in the National Interest (which he publishes and where I'm a senior editor), "Former Soviet leader and KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov would be proud of Liz Cheney's charge that President Obama's initial willingness to release pictures of U.S. military prisoner abuses amounted to 'siding with terrorists.' After all, Andropov and his prosecutors always argued that Soviet dissidents who exposed human rights violations were guilty of treason. But Ms. Cheney goes even further than Andropov and his associates, who at least pretended that the dissidents were distorting the facts. Liz Cheney makes no such claim, nor any allegation that the pictures were fabricated. Yet despite this she asserts that exposing actual wrongdoing is sufficient to accuse someone of not simply providing comfort to America's enemies or aiding their propaganda efforts but siding with the mass murderers." It will be interesting to see how Dick Cheney attempts to top this at AEI on Thursday--and how the GOP responds to his hallucinatory statements. I believe a vital index of the GOP's return to rationality will be when it begins not only to emancipate itself from this madman, but also to denounce him. What the party needs instead of a meeting denouncing Obama as a socialist is the Republican version of Nikita Khruschev's courageous secret speech before a stunned communist elite in 1956 that decried Stalinism. Who is the Republican that will have the courage to break with the deadly past of Cheneyism?
 
Karin Badt: Cannes Favorite: Jacques Audiard's "The Prophet" Top
So far, Jacques Audiard's Le Prophet is the favorite at Cannes. The violent story of a young poor defenseless thug who ends up in jail for a minor crime, only to become -- through the brutality of prison life -- a hardened murderer; its appeal lies, above all, in its lack of morality. "Your film has no message," I said to Jacques Audiard after the screening, as he faced me on a terrace overlooking the bright Cannes bay. "It is refreshingly free." "Of course it has no message," quipped Audiard, a wiry fast-talking dynamic Frenchman, while he unpeeled a pill from a packet and jumped up to ask for a glass of water. "It is cinema. Cinema like Cronenberg's A History of Violence . I couldn't get into Scarface , for example, because Al Pacino was so clearly a villain. In my film, I wanted to make a nice guy just like you and me, who also kills. So you can identify with him. Keep away from black and white moralizing." He added that no, this film has nothing to do with his vision of society. "It's fiction," he said, pointing at his head. "It comes from nowhere." Inspired nonetheless from a "moral" situation (Audiard had screened a film to prisoners in France and shocked by the conditions, decided his next film would be in a prison), the film still manages to avoid sentimentality or commentary. The thug, played by a young unknown actor, quickly learns he can survive prison-life only by becoming the right-hand hit-man of his fellow prisoner, a Corsican mafia boss. What follows are two and a half hours of tense violence: throat-slashing, beating, and (while on prison-leave) car shoot-outs, all without one moment of reflection. The tempo is intense. I had met Audiard before, for his The Beat My Heart Skipped , and while watching this new film, I could not help perceiving the man's jumpy nervous energy -- this live pulse -- behind the camera: the main reason the film is so successful. "How do you accomplish that?" I asked. "The transposition of your energy on film?" Audiard told me at first that he had no idea, but then commented that his forte might lie in directing the actors. He hated all aspects of shooting (his pleasure lying in scriptwriting), except when it came to pushing the actors to unleash their energy on the set, pushing them together and watching them charge off "like a train heavy with freight." "Then it is wow ," he said. The famous French actor -- Niels Arestrup -- playing the Corsican boss, agreed that directing actors is Audiard's remarkable talent. "I have been acting for forty years," the white-haired man said, staring steadily with his blue eyes. "And I have rarely come across a director like Audiard who understands the art of acting. He knows how to tell us, 'that is terrible; make it better. Go further!" Audiard also gave him the metaphor of a "lion playing with his food" when he directed him on how to act with the new boy in prison. Niels added, with chagrin, that he now took little pleasure in cinema, because "there are few Audiards." I personally also enjoyed the sets: the strange atmosphere of the prison -- the cooped up cells, the heavy steel doors. Indeed, it turns out that the prison itself was just a set, constructed for the occasion. Quentin Tarrantino, in the audience at the premiere, also loved the film. "We observed him in his chair," said the actor Tahar Rahim who played the thug. "He was exclaiming, moving his hands, and enjoying the film like a child!" The only off-putting aspect of the film (aside from an extra half-hour of gangster violence that, in my opinion, could have been cut) is the title: "Le prophet" in French means simply "he who could tell the future." It need not have any of the spiritual nuance (i.e. Jesus or Mohammed) of the English homonym. It is a confusing slippage of translation (and the title in English will surely be different), as the film clearly has no spiritual subtext. "Yes, the prophet is just a prophet!" laughed Audiard. "As for Jesus or Mohammed, I don't 'eat that kind of bread.'" "And your ghost?" In the film, a kind-hearted victim of the young man's violence comes back a ghost in the boy's dreams -- a Banquo without Banquo's significance. "He is so clearly not a conscience." "Of course not. He is a ghost! In the English tradition. A ghost is just a ghost, a common presence, banal. As banal, in fact, as a prophet." Audiard trailed off in laughter and jumped up for his next interview. More on France
 
Rob Fishman: Desperate Housewives Top
Sky Masterson : "You have wished yourself a Scarsdale Galahad, the breakfast-eating, Brooks Brothers type." Sarah Brown : "Yes! And I shall meet him when the time is right." --- "I'll Know," Guys and Dolls Boy those were the days. On April 19, a Scarsdale mother was arrested after becoming so exasperated with her bickering daughters (aged 10 and 12) that she ordered them from her car and drove off. A week later, another Scarsdale woman was charged with smuggling $12 million in gold in the lining of her purse from the jewelry manufacturer where she had worked for 28 years. Earlier in the month, police accused a Scarsdale dentist of defrauding a life insurance company of over $15,000. Then last week, a former Bear Stearns employee--also a Scarsdalian--sued for a $2 million bonus after his wife reportedly traded down their Mercedes SUV for a Honda. I grew up in Scarsdale, in a stucco house across the street from where the Hollywood writer Aaron Sorkin grew up (neighborhood legend said Sorkin once broke into the elementary school and left a cryptic note in the typewriter, "Aaron Sorkin was here"). As can be expected, there was some truth to the stereotype of Scarsdale--its place in the pantheon of suburban decadence was all but assured when hundreds of inebriated high schoolers flooded the Homecoming Dance in 2002, prompting some parents to send their drivers to collect the young sots--but aside from the occasional bacchanal, and a sex scandal here or there, it was a wholesome upbringing. Scarsdale, a town of some 17,000, has always traded on its education system--and hence, its values. By 1925, over 70 percent of denizens occupied the upper-middle class, and so "demanded private school results from the public school system," according to one village history. That much is unchanged; in the wake of the Homecoming debacle, a New York Times reporter called Scarsdale a "bastion of high incomes and test scores." Added a senior at the high school, "We are supposed to be Scarsdale, the rich people, the good people, the studious." The newspapers had choice words for Madlyn Primoff, the "drive-away mom"--and none so superlative. As the Times pointed out, Primoff's pedigree--"Scarsdale, Park Avenue, Columbia Law School"--worked against her and her family, with the New York Post reporting that Primoff was "busted after tossing her bratty 10- and 12-year-old daughters out of her car" on the way home to the family's "$2 million spread in Scarsdale." What frightened so many Scarsdalians (and I suspect others across the country) was the familiarity, if not the outcome, of the situation; that every parent has teetered on the edge, and just barely made it back on the road with kids in tow. And what of the upsurge in thievery, these crimes that make Teri Hatcher and co.'s seem petty by comparison? Dr. Joanne Baker, for one, is denying all charges . Said attorney George Rosenbaum of his dentist client: "We will fight tooth and nail to prove her innocence." Teresa Tambunting, the jeweler, took the opposite tack. After she caught wind of the investigation, Tambunting arrived at her former employer's with a suitcase carrying 66 pounds of gold. A subsequent investigation of her home yielded another 447 pounds. Then there's Gary Reback, notable mostly among the malefactors of suburbia for lacking a criminal record. Reback earned a $4 million bonus in 2007, the highest in all of his years of collecting a $250,000 base salary. Unsatisfied with the terms of his dismissal, Reback filed suit against Bear Stearns and J.P. Morgan Chase, which purchased Bear in a fire sale last year, requesting $1.1 million in severance pay, and another $2 million in bonuses. Attorney Jonathan Sack, speaking on behalf of Reback, was hardly the first to accuse an investment bank this year of "shocking, bad faith behavior." Of course the upside is that children of privilege will more willingly flee a Honda than a Benz. Perhaps moral decay has seeped outward from the metropolis. Populist anger certainly has, its schadenfreude falling indiscriminately across the greater New York area, particularly on those enclaves of privilege where bonus money seems to reside. Or maybe Scarsdale was always a sordid place, its faults and fragilities only illuminated by the recession. As the Times said of Primoff , "If she had been a clerk who left her kids at a Costco in Fargo, N.D., what happened in Fargo would have stayed in Fargo." Yet I suspect in desperate times, these worst of times, people from Fargo to Farmington to Folsom resort to desperate measures. The Scarsdale I remember is impregnable snow forts, bike rides to the Kensico Dam, fireflies fading into the gloaming, and an impromptu gathering on the school playground after 9/11. Sure, Galahad was a bastard child, but after all, he found the Holy Grail. More on Bear Stearns
 
Alan M. Webber: The Real Stress Test: What Does Leadership Look Like? Top
The eyes of the punditocracy are fixed on the banks and their performance under the Obama Administration's stress tests--and whether the tests to determine the banks' financial stability were tough enough. Meanwhile, the real story is, as usual, hiding in plain sight. We're watching America learn a new definition of leadership, one that, interestingly, finally gets us past the test of toughness. For as long as I can remember, Americans have adopted a one-size fits all definition of leadership. Whether in politics or business, we wanted leaders who were tough enough to make the hard decisions. Sure, as vice-president, Dick Cheney was a glowering, mean SOB--but he was our glowering, mean SOB! His scowl was enough to keep the terrorists at bay. On Wall Street, Jimmy Cayne, Bear Stearns ex-CEO, and his ilk were famous--or notorious--for lacking any visible sign of weakness . . . or humanity. Leaders, real leaders, we thought, not only never let the other side see them sweat; they never admit a mistake, never acknowledge any doubt, and never, never apologize. Because, as George W. Bush famously demonstrated when asked the question during one of the presidential debates, real leaders never make a mistake. All of this ancient lore of leadership explains why, during his election-year vetting, Barack Obama was constantly put under the leadership microscope. Tellingly, the question the press sought to answer for the voters wasn't whether Obama would make a good leader; it was whether he was tough enough to make a good leader. That definition of leadership having already been established, all that remained was to measure Candidate Obama against it. The first 100+ days of the Obama Administration have seen the same media fixation on toughness--toughness with the Iranians, toughness with Wall Street, toughness with the automakers, toughness with the North Koreans, toughness with the Republicans. But while the old-style evaluators keep their eyes fixed firmly on toughness gold standard, something else, something much more important, is going on with the public. We're looking at a president with real leadership qualities--and giving Obama very high marks. Why? Because the real change we can believe in starts with a new definition of leadership--what I call Rule #41: If you want to be a real leader, first get real about leadership. And real leadership isn't about toughness. Real leadership starts with how real leaders are. They're both confident and modest. Just watching Obama at a press conference or a town hall meeting, you get the clear sense of a man who knows how good he is--and also knows he has to check his ego at the door. He's comfortable in his own skin, which makes it easier for us to trust him. And he comes across as a good listener, the kind of leader who wants people around him to speak up and offer their best advice. He's also a great example of the next criterion for the new kind of leadership: Real leaders focus on attracting and growing talent. The headline writers keep attacking Tim Geithner and Larry Summers for their connections to Wall Street and the past. But nobody can attack them--or most of Obama's top-level picks--for lacking talent. There are no horse association hacks running key federal agencies in the Obama Administration. In fact, this is an administration that not only does make mistakes, but also owns up to them, and quickly. That's now former White House Military Office director Louis Caldera, exiting promptly after the New York Air Force One fly-over fiasco. How do real leaders act? They don't pretend to have all the answers--but they do ask plenty of questions. They don't try to make all the decisions--but they do focus on making sense. They let their talented team contribute, and after laying out a template of their agenda, they give their people room to fill in the details. They state their values clearly and articulate their metrics for keeping score. Most of all, they clearly explain how they see the world so other people can see the world that way, too. It's called talking sense to the American people--and the more Obama does it, the worse the Republicans look. Finally, real leaders leave a legacy. Unlike the tough titans of Wall Street and the tougher water-boarders of Washington, real leaders leave behind organizations with sound values and sustainable operations. They cultivate their organization's capabilities and nurture its talents. And when they do leave, they leave behind more people who are real leaders. When it comes to leadership that delivers, there's no doubt that America will make it through the recession, and no doubt that we'll make it through the threats of terrorists. But what's really exciting is that we're starting to show that we'll make it through the brain-dead definition of leadership that is the toughest threat we face. And we'll emerge on the other side with a smart, new way to think about the kind of people we want at the top of our government and our companies. That's change we can all believe in. More on The Recession
 
Mike Lux: Rep. Steve King's Anti-Progressive Rant Top
In case you missed it, Media Matters posted some great video of Congressman Steve King, the far right Republican from my old home state of Iowa, going ballistic on the House floor after Congressman Keith Ellison's special order on "Why I am a Progressive." Late last week, I wrote about this special order because it had special resonance with me. Rep. Ellison contacted me to let me know that he had read my new book, The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be cover-to-cover and wanted to use some of my ideas and research for a special order on the House floor as part of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) presentation. I was honored, and as I wrote about last week , I thought Keith's presentation was dead-on. I know a lot about history and in my book I detail some of the extreme conservative debates and arguments that have been taking place on the House floor over many years. But now, in the age of video and YouTube, and with great groups like Media Matters keeping a watchful eye on C-SPAN, we're able to view for ourselves what these radical views of American conservative ideals look like. To conservatives like King, today and throughout American history, progressive ideas have always been derided as socialism. It's what conservatives said about ending slavery, child labor laws, food safety, environmental legislation, Social Security, minimum wage, and virtually every other advance in American history. So watch Rep. King's video below, it's definitely a keeper. You'll be able to show your grandkids when right-wingers 50 years from now are screaming about how the latest progressive proposals are socialism.
 
Criticism Of CIA Has Bipartisan Roots Top
Sensing blood, Republican officials have turned the friction between Nancy Pelosi and the Central Intelligence Agency into significant political hay. This weekend alone, several prominent GOPers took to the airwaves to insist that the Speaker had, in the words of RNC Chairman Michael Steele, "stepped in it big time" by insisting that she had not been briefed on the use of waterboarding in the fall of 2002. The key message is standard Republican fare: while Pelosi is attacking the CIA, the GOP is defending those who work to keep our nation safe. "I think it's a tragedy that we are seeing this massive attack on our intelligence community," Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri said in an interview on NBC's Today show. "Lying to the Congress of the United States is a crime," said House Minority Leader John Boehner on CNN's State of the Union. "And if the speaker is accusing the CIA and other intelligence officials of lying or misleading the Congress, then she should come forward with evidence and turn that over to the Justice Department so they can be prosecuted. And if that's not the case, I think she ought to apologize to our intelligence professionals around the world." One would be forgiven for assuming that the CIA, in the eyes of Republicans, was sacrosanct. Thus, it is important to note that leveling political criticism at the intelligence agency is not exactly uncommon, from members of either political party. Indeed, even the man who currently heads the CIA -- Leon Panetta -- sat on the 9/11 Commission, whose report deeply faulted the work of the agency . Panetta was part of an investigative panel tasked with uncovering the failures that preceded those terrorist attacks. But plenty of Republicans before, during and after the 9/11 Commission released its findings weren't concerned offending the work and integrity of U.S. intelligence professionals. Senate Intelligence Chairman Pat Roberts told the Washington Post in October 2003 that "the executive was ill-served by the intelligence community," adding: "I worry about the credibility of the intelligence community." In another interview, Roberts accused the CIA of "egregious intelligence failure[s]," saying that the agency would have to earn back the trust of the political community. "Not having your actions second-guessed is something that is earned," he said. Roberts was not alone. As pointed out by the site FireDogLake, some of the voices ribbing Pelosi now were publicly airing their doubts of the intelligence community's credibility just a few years ago. That includes Boehner, who, on December 9, 2007, told CNN that he did not have confidence that the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, which described the threat over the country's nuclear ambitions to be overblown. "Either I don't have confidence in what they told me several months ago or I don't have confidence in what they're telling me today," he replied. And as picked up by Glen Thrush at Politico , the Ohio Republican also was critical of the CIA for the intelligence gaffes it suffered before the invasion of Iraq. Nine month earlier, on NBC's Meet the Press Boehner said: "It's clear to all of us, Democrats and Republicans, that we have flawed intelligence. The CIA have bad intelligence, the Pentagon had bad intelligence and, for that matter, all of our allies around the world had the same bad intelligence." Boehner spokesman Michael Steel shot back, saying, "There is a world of difference between asking questions about analysis of complex - and often contradictory - information, and flat-out accusing our nation's intelligence professionals of deliberately deceiving Congress. Don't equate reasoned debate with accusations of lying." All of which is not to diminish the divide that presented itself between Pelosi and the CIA last week. But it is worthwhile noting that the agency has been a whipping post for Republicans in the past. Praise and support of it are not, after all, a litmus test of one's patriotism. Get HuffPost Politics On Facebook and Twitter!
 
Irene Rubaum-Keller: Why Are We Americans So Fat? (Part Three) Top
"Show me a man who's eating dessert, and I'll show you a man who's not drinking enough." W.C. Fields Maybe W.C. knew it long ago, that alcohol and sugar activate the same reward pathways in the brain. If you have ever known an alcoholic who stopped drinking, they often turn to sugar instead. The question is, "Is sugar addictive?" In this multi-part series on why Americans are so fat, we are now moving into the idea that there is such a thing as a food addiction. In this blog I am going to be talking about the work of Dr. Bart Hoebel who is a researcher and professor at Princeton University. Dr. Hoebel has discovered some fascinating things by studying rats. What he did was see if he could get rats addicted to sugar. He took rats and got them pretty hungry. These rats were hungry to the equivalent of having fasted all night and then skipped breakfast. He then gave them a sugar water solution to drink and regular rat chow to eat. He measured how much they consumed. The first day the rats consumed a fair amount of sugar water and some chow. The next day, more sugar water and less chow. The following day even more sugar water and less chow. This went on until the rats were essentially binging on sugar, and this binging behavior got worse as they went on. When looking at their brains on sugar, the reward pathways were stimulated just as they would be with drugs of abuse, only less so. Sugar affected the brain just as cocaine, heroin, meth, pot and/or alcohol would. When the rats had had enough, their brains released acetylcholine, which isn't that pleasant, and caused them to stop eating. By using a chemical to block the reward pathway, these rats experienced withdrawal. Teeth chattering, anxiety, etc. They were showing the classic signs of addiction in that they were craving the sugar, they required more to get the desired feeling (tolerance) and they experienced withdrawal when deprived of the substance. The rats did not gain weight on the sugar binges as they adjusted the amount of rat chow they consumed to compensate for the calories. They remained normal weighted. When Dr. Hoebel substituted sweetened water made with high fructose corn syrup, the rats began to gain weight. (More on the dangers of high fructose corn syrup coming up.) Dr. Hoebel then put the rats back on regular rat chow, didn't give them the sugar and didn't allow them to become hungry for 21 days. The experiment was then repeated by getting them hungry and giving them the sugar water. The sugar binge, after a 21 day abstinence, was as bad as the worst binge they had had previously. These rats had effectively learned to binge on sugar. I asked Dr. Hoebel if they had tried to wait longer than 21 days to see if these rats would eventually normalize. He said it was a good question but no they hadn't because rats don't live that long and you would end up with some very old rats. In an additional experiment, Dr. Hoebel was able to do the same thing with the rats while also inducing a purging state. He did this by inserting a tube to purge the rat after he binged on sugar. He then was able to look at the brain and could see that the reward pathways in the brain were stimulated. When the rats didn't purge, the acetylcholine was released that would essentially bring them down and they would stop eating. In the purging rats, there was only the high, or dopamine, and no acetylcholine. As a psychotherapist, working with bulimics, this has helped tremendously in understanding why binging and purging is so addictive. Bulimics get all of the high with none of the down. Very seductive indeed. Not only do bulimics get the dopamine high, they also avoid the inevitable weight gain their high calorie binges would produce if they didn't purge. More on the addictive properties of food and what we can do about it coming up. Stay tuned. For more information about Dr. Hoebel's work, please visit http://weblamp.princeton.edu/~psych/psychology/research/hoebel/index.php . If you'd like to participate in the research for Irene's new book about the process of weight loss, please visit http://www.eatingdisordertherapist.com/ and take the survey. More on Food
 
Bill Mann: HuffPost TV Review: Fox's "Glee" Rides "Idol's" Coattails, Then Leaves Until Fall Top
What's the next-best thing to following the Super Bowl telecast? A. Following the climactic episode of "American Idol, " known in the TV industry as the Nielsen "Death Star." So Fox must be pretty high on "Glee," which gets a one-night audition Tuesday night at 9 after the "Idol" -atry ends. "Glee," which has elements of "Idol," "High School Musical," "Waiting For Guffman" and "Mr. Holland's Opus," among others, is intermittently funny and often entertaining. Many in its expected huge audience Tuesday will be disappointed to learn this one-shot deal won't be back until fall. It's a comedy...it's a musical...but at least it's NOT "Cop Rock." "Glee" comes from producer Ryan Murphy ("FX's Nip/Tuck," WB's cynical "Popular") and is a send-up of high-school cliques and the clichéd "Hey, kids...let's put on a show!" genre. "Glee's" pilot Tuesday is more than a bit frenetic, but it's also often well-written and sharp, with lines like this all-too-true one: "Fame is the most important thing in our culture now." That's uttered by talented but preternaturally ambitious chanteuse Rachel (Lea Michele), McKinley High's aspiring diva who's more than a bit reminiscent of Reese Witherspoon's ruthless character in "Election." Will (Matthew Morrison) is the well-meaning teacher who's trying to revive the MHS glee club and mold the usual group of misfits into a singin'/dancin' unit. My favorite here is McKinley High's swarthy, bean-counting principal (played by Iqbal Theba), a guy with one hand glued to a calculator. He wants to rent the school gym instead to AA ("They'll pay $10 a head'). Will convinces him to let him use the place for two months. Deal - but only if Will will oversee detention in return. Jane Lynch, who plays the school's Marine D.I.-like cheerleader uber-coach Sue Sylvester, is another big plus. "Glee" has more hooks than a bait shop, and there'll be plenty of fish on the line after this first catchy episode. Then it goes away for four months. At a reported $3 million an episode to produce, "Glee" better put some smiles on Fox execs' faces next fall. More on American Idol
 
Carla Bruni-Sarkozy Strolls Through Paris In Disguise Top
Ms Bruni, 41, said her life as the third wife of President Nicolas Sarkozy sometimes made 'normal' behaviour quite impossible, leading her to take these extraordinary measures. In a magazine interview to be published tomorrow she says: 'When I go out shopping I disguise myself by putting on glasses and I change my voice.' Those who have heard it say the 'new' voice of the model-turned-singer is 'funny and quite different to anything you normally hear'.
 
Geithner Trumpets Gains In Stock Market To Newsweek Top
In a live interview with editor Newsweek editor John Meacham at the National Press Club, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on Monday denied that his department is sputtering in its lead role in the economic recovery and pointed to gains in the stock market as proof of the effectiveness of his policies. "I think we're doing quite well in terms of speed and quality of policy," Geithner said. "Things that normally take years we're doing very very quickly." The Washington Post reported on Monday that key decisions are going unmade at the department, partly because many positions remain vacant, leaving management "dominated by a small band of Geithner's counselors who coordinate rescue initiatives but lack formal authority to make decisions." In response, Geithner pointed to progress on nominations. "The Senate is moving to confirm some very impressive people." One of the very impressive people is Neal Wolin, whose nomination to Geithner's side is moving through the Senate. Wolin, before heading up the lobby shop at Hartford Financial Services Group, helped write the deregulation bill partially credited with causing the economy's current collapse. Meacham asked Geither if the economy has "bottomed out." "Things have clearly stabilized. The pace of decline slowed quite a lot," Geithner said. But he made an effort not to sound too optimistic. "Unemployment's going to keep increasing for a while... It's not going to feel better for a long time for millions of Americans." On compensation, Geithner said he earned under $200,000: "My salary is a generous salary appropriate for a public servant." The Treasury Secretary said he did not think it would be appropriate for the government to cap executive compensation. Asked if the administration has been too soft on Wall Street, Geithner dodged, opting to trumpet progress in the credit markets and in the stock market. "Look at how markets responded to the stress tests," he said. "Greater disclosure brought reassurance and confidence." Other administration officials have previously downplayed swings in the stock market as an indicator of policy effectiveness. "We can't gauge our success on the basis of one day of fluctuations in the stock market," Axelrod said on Fox News Sunday in February. "We're in this for the long term and we're going to try and solve this problem for the long term." Meacham did not ask about the growing chorus of lawmakers and economists concerned that the Treasury is acting in bad faith with its plans to recycle repaid bailout dollars for further bailouts . Instead, Meacham closed with a nice softy, asking Geithner how he felt about being named one of "Barack's Beauties" by People magazine. Geithner laughed. "It doesn't feel good." Get HuffPost Politics On Facebook and Twitter! More on Timothy Geithner
 

CREATE MORE ALERTS:

Auctions - Find out when new auctions are posted

Horoscopes - Receive your daily horoscope

Music - Get the newest Album Releases, Playlists and more

News - Only the news you want, delivered!

Stocks - Stay connected to the market with price quotes and more

Weather - Get today's weather conditions




You received this email because you subscribed to Yahoo! Alerts. Use this link to unsubscribe from this alert. To change your communications preferences for other Yahoo! business lines, please visit your Marketing Preferences. To learn more about Yahoo!'s use of personal information, including the use of web beacons in HTML-based email, please read our Privacy Policy. Yahoo! is located at 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94089.
Posted by at

1 comment:

  1. UnknownJanuary 31, 2014 at 10:36 PM

    Hi,

    Its great that you write about how to Cure addiction naturally and I get more info about it on http://awaremed.com/addictioneducation, You can check it also. I am very happy to get information which I want from your blog.

    Thanks
    http://awaremed.com/addictioneducation

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)